Feminist Intersectionality: Centering the Margins in 21st-Century Medieval Studies 303122115X, 9783031221156

Table of contents :
Contents
Feminist intersectionality: Centering the margins in 21st- century medieval studies
References
References
Antisemitism and female power in the medieval city
Abstract
Acknowledgements
References
Alisaundre Becket: Thomas Becket's resilient, Muslim, Arab mother in the South English Legendary
Abstract
References
‘Albyon, thorn at thorn o was an Ile’: Feminist materiality and nature in the Albina narrative
Abstract
Nature’s agency in Albion
Queer nature in Albion
Nature, giants, and nonhuman cultivation
Acknowledgements
References
By the skin of its teeth: Walrus ivory, the artisan, and other bodies
Abstract
A meeting in the flesh
Porosity
Skin on skin
Giving flesh
Fleshing out
Acknowledgements
References
‘Woful womman, confortlees’: Failed maternity and maternal grief as feminist issues
Abstract
Introduction: Mary, the Crucifixion, and the poetics of maternal grief
The silencing of maternal grief
Pregnancy failure as maternal failure
Antithesis and the Crucifixion, grieving mothers’ version
The social control of grief
Margery Kempe, Planctus reader and re–interpreter
The spatial control of grief
Conclusion: Tears as power
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements
References
Disability and consent in medieval law
Abstract
References
Accessing the medieval: Disability and distance in Anna Gurney’s search for St Edmund
Abstract
Acknowledgements
References
New feminisms and the unthinkable
References

Citation preview

Feminist Intersectionality Centering the Margins in 21st-Century Medieval Studies Edited by

s a m a n t h a se a l n icol e nol a n si dh u

Feminist Intersectionality

Samantha Seal • Nicole Nolan Sidhu Editors

Feminist Intersectionality Centering the Margins in 21st-Century Medieval Studies

Previously published in postmedieval Volume 10, issue 3, September 2019

Editors Samantha Seal English Department, Hamilton-Smith Hall University of New Hampshire Durham, NC, USA

Nicole Nolan Sidhu Fairport, NY, USA

Spinoff from journal: “postmedieval” Volume 10, issue 3, September 2019 ISBN 978-3-031-22115-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

Feminist intersectionality: Centering the margins in 21st- century medieval studies ............................... 1 Samantha Katz Seal and Nicole Nolan Sidhu: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2019, 2019: 10: 272–278 (1, Nov 2019) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-019-00134-y Antisemitism and female power in the medieval city ................................................................................... 9 Kathy Lavezzo: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2019, 2019: 10: 279–292 (1, Nov 2019) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-019-00137-9 Alisaundre Becket: Thomas Becket’s resilient, Muslim, Arab mother in the South English Legendary ................................................................................................................... 23 Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2019, 2019: 10: 293–303 (1, Nov 2019) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-019-00132-0 ‘Albyon, þat þo was an Ile’: Feminist materiality and nature in the Albina narrative ........................... 35 Heather Blatt: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2019, 2019: 10: 304–315 (1, Nov 2019) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-019-00139-7 By the skin of its teeth: Walrus ivory, the artisan, and other bodies ........................................................ 47 Emma Le Pouésard: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2019, 2019: 10: 316–325 (1, Nov 2019) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-019-00135-x ‘Woful womman, confortlees’: Failed maternity and maternal grief as feminist issues ......................... 57 Mary Beth Long: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2019, 2019: 10: 326–343 (1, Nov 2019) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-019-00138-8 Disability and consent in medieval law ........................................................................................................ 75 Eliza Buhrer: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2019, 2019: 10: 344–356 (1, Nov 2019) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-019-00136-w Accessing the medieval: Disability and distance in Anna Gurney’s search for St Edmund ................... 89 Helen Brookman: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2019, 2019: 10: 357–375 (1, Nov 2019) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-019-00133-z New feminisms and the unthinkable .......................................................................................................... 109 Michelle M. Sauer: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2019, 2019: 10: 376–387 (1, Nov 2019) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-019-00140-0

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Editor’s Introduction

Feminist intersectionality: Centering the margins in 21stcentury medieval studies

Samantha Katz Seala and Nicole Nolan Sidhub a

Department of English, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, USA. Independent Scholar, Fairport, NY, USA.

b

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019) 10, 272–278. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-019-00134-y

In a 2016 blog post entitled ‘Antifeminism, Whiteness, and Medieval Studies,’ Dorothy Kim modified Falvia Dzodan’s oft-repeated phrase that ‘my feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit’ for Kim’s own scholarly field, noting that medievalists should approach their work thinking, ‘my medieval studies will be intersectional or it will be bullshit’ (Kim, 2016). The response to Kim’s words (and to her subsequent 2017 post on medieval studies and white nationalism) was intense and violent. Academics dismissed Kim’s ideas; a tenured female academic criticized the untenured Kim in a blog post, tagging a journalist with connections to the alt-right, who subsequently wrote a piece about Kim illustrated with a drawing of a white woman holding a spiked club. Intersectionality may be an essential paradigm for medieval studies, but it is one to which the field – majority white and still dominated by white men – has reacted with disproportionate hostility. Or, perhaps, this antagonism has been rather an acknowledgement of the fundamental power that an intersectional medieval studies wields against the ingrained hierarchies of established medievalisms.

Chapter 1 was originally published as Seal, S. K. & Sidhu, N. N. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019) 10: 272–278. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-019-00134-y.

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Medievalist feminism has a spotty record of aligning its passions for gender equality with antiracist, anti-elitist critique. The feminism that has been a force in medieval studies since the 1980s has been primarily a white, elite feminism, with little hitherto invested in examining or reconfiguring medieval studies’ domination by the white and the wealthy. Medievalist feminism has likewise maintained a somewhat tense relationship with other forms of critical analysis, particularly those that have emerged over the succeeding decades. The move to the study of gender and sexuality rather than the study of ‘women’ as one half of a binary was the hard-fought battle of the 1990s, following the revolutionary work of scholars like Judith Butler and, in medieval studies, Karma Lochrie. And yet, as Madeline Caviness noted in her 2010 survey of the state of medievalist feminism, the turn away from gender essentialism was eagerly reinterpreted as a sign of feminism’s flagging energy by ‘the most prominent male pundits who dominate cultural theory by constructing its historiography’ (Caviness, 2010, 30). In these pundits’ eyes, each new articulation of a politically-charged, justice-centered literary criticism was not so much a new ‘turn’ for the field as it was evidence of one micro-interest group taking their ‘turn’ in the disciplinary limelight. The effect was not deemed developmental but sequential: one trendy tempest after another. That is certainly how many elite medievalists have treated these critiques. In the distribution of conference panels and journal space, they have sought to contain politically-charged scholarship to one narrow niche, employing a ‘replacement model’ of analysis, where feminism would be replaced by queer study, to be superseded in its turn by race or postcolonial studies. The space thus allotted never changes; the entrenched powers of privilege maintain most of the field and ignore the visions of those who are not privileged, heterosexual, male, and white, doling out only a sliver of the academic pie to the burgeoning intellectual movements associated with social justice that nevertheless, in spite of this contempt, continue to grow in popularity, particularly among the young. A compelling recent example of the ‘replacement model’ mentality in action can be found in the 2018 rejection, by the organizers of the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, of four out of five panels sponsored or co-sponsored by the Medievalists of Color. These included panels entitled ‘Globalizing Medieval Pedagogy’; ‘How to be a White Ally in Medieval Studies 101,’ and ‘Translations of Power: Race, Class, and Gender Intersectionality in the Middle Ages’ I and II. By way of contrast, other organizations received all or nearly all of their requested sessions. These included Cistercian Studies, which proposed seven sessions and was allotted six; the Early Book Society which proposed six and was allotted six; De Re Militari which proposed five and was allotted five, as well as several other organizations with similarlysuccessful rates of panel acceptance (Joy and van Gerven Oei, 2018). While conference organizers cited ‘fairness’ and a desire to strike ‘a balance between respecting tradition and encouraging innovation,’ their actions rested upon un-

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interrogated notions of several concepts crucial to their argument. As Seeta Chaganti has pointed out, the concept of ‘fairness’ is based on the notion, inaccurate in this case, that we are dealing with ‘a neutral situation where all voices have always received equal privilege and protection’ (Chaganti, 2018). ICMS decisions regarding the conference, Chaganti noted, ‘were made without critical thought to what a space of real academic and intellectual freedom would look like,’ ignoring the fact that ‘[s]uch a space would acknowledge the necessity of actively seeking out and dismantling those structures by which ‘‘tradition’’ […] camouflages white supremacy’s particular forms of repression’ (Chaganti, 2018). The desire to ‘balance tradition with innovation,’ Chaganti noted, ‘cannot suffice to ensure academic freedom because it does not aggressively interrogate the meanings of either ‘‘tradition’’ or ‘‘innovation’’’ (Chaganti, 2018). These exclusionary practices are an unsustainable pattern for work in our field. We are left in the position of the charity cases in the Hebrew Bible, the widows and orphans who were allowed to glean the grain from the corners of the fields, which farmers were instructed to leave untouched as pe’ah (Lev. 19:9–11). Like those widows and orphans, we are expected to bicker amongst ourselves for what is given in ‘charity’ to the powerless, while those who cling to exclusionary practices of race and gender reap the bounties of a privileged harvest that never ends, its roots sowed by centuries of men planting only for their sons. Let us say, no more gleaning! Enough with the pe’ah! Intersectional feminism claims the whole damn field. It recognizes that the study of race in the Middle Ages, of the colonial practices and heritages of the Middle Ages, of queer sexuality, of the disabled body, of the nonhuman and nonliving, and of so much more, are all inseparable from the study of gender. And it recognizes that there is no field of medieval studies unavailable to these modes of analysis. There is no paleography untouched by race, no Middle English literature unhaunted by the Jew, no legal code removed from female hands. The Middle Ages were a wild and vibrant time, featuring the interweaving of many different cultures, ideas, and beliefs. It is only our analysis that has narrowed and restricted our understanding of this complex and dynamic world. To fail to be intersectional is to fail to be just, but, even more importantly, it is to fail to be accurate. It is an intellectual, as well as an ethical, error. Yet privileged men continue to dominate medieval studies, and now seek even to dominate the fields of intersectional analysis. In a recent blog post, Sierra Lomuto notes that the editors of the Public Medievalist’s series on ‘Race, Racism, and the Middle Ages’ are neither race scholars nor activists, nor even scholars of color with experiential knowledge about racism. Wondering how white scholars without expertise in race could have been tapped to edit a series on race, Lomuto notes that while ‘[i]t seems too simplistic to point to the patriarchal whiteness of Medieval Studies itself for an answer [yet] that is where we can find it: white men have always held the most authority in our field; and

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so, it seems, the field turns to them for leadership even in conversations about race and racism’ (Lomuto, 2019). This is not the vision of justice that we imagine. Men must participate in feminism and in intersectionality, but they must do so not as Men, that vaulted category of authoritative privilege, but as the peers of their marginalized colleagues. It is not enough to let intersectional feminism spread throughout the field if women and POC are kept to the corners. Let those who have been marginalized lead the field; recognize them as the authorities they have always been. Let feminism find its value in feminists. This special issue was born from a desire to represent the Middle Ages more accurately, but also from the necessity of negotiating feminism’s place within medieval studies. When scholars or activists treat women and gender as if they might be divorced from the concerns of class, race, and the environment, when they center the social constructions of the ‘female’ body as if it might be separated from the social constructions of all those other, overlapping bodies in the world, they sever the wholeness of the feminist epistemology and do violence to the feminist vision of the world as it may one day be. And yet, even as we crave a different approach, we wonder what it will look like. How will our different theoretical and ethical commitments come together with our feminisms? The entangled whorls of our ideas must coexist without diminishing their complexity, a knotted skein in testimony of our belief that no form of justice, no form of intellectual truth, can be unknown or antithetical to another. Our special issue offers one vision of how this feminist geography can be undertaken, although its execution remains flawed. We hope that the ‘New Feminisms’ issues of the future, for example, will contain a much larger proportion of work by medievalists of color. Show us your feminist entanglements, we asked our contributors; uncover your knotted skeins. This is an issue about overlaps and twists, about the inseparability of multiple means of critique – ecocriticism and disability studies, art history and race studies, legal history and modern activism – from a feminist perspective. The feminist scholarship in this issue moves in many different directions and examines the medieval past (and its role in the present) from many different angles. What remains consistent throughout is the dedication to reconfiguring medieval studies, a commitment not to be content simply with adding women on as an extra in conventional European patriarchal accounts, or with analyzing gender in history or literature without fundamentally reenvisioning the intellectual foundations upon which those fields of study have been built. The issue begins with Kathy Lavezzo’s study of gender in English antisemitic writings. Disturbingly, as Lavezzo reveals, antisemitic writings allow a kind of gender liberation for Christian women, configuring praiseworthy women who are centered as rational voices on the side of right in a culture that was elsewhere aggressively associating the female with the subhuman, the irrational, and the marginal. The unsettling manner in which racial, ethnic, and religious hatred

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enables a kind of liberation for women of the dominant religion and culture, Lavezzo points out, has analogues in the way that modern American racism honors and enables white women. Likewise concerned with the overlapping pressures of race and gender, Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh examines the strong and willful presence of an Arab woman refusing to conform to white Christian society within a white male authored religious text. Drawing on feminist theory by black feminists and other women of color, Rajabzadeh analyzes the figure of Alisaundre, the Arab mother of Thomas Becket in the South English Legendary, noting how even though Alisaundre converts to Christianity, adopts a Christian name, and moves to England, she resists total assimilation into European Christian culture by retaining a commitment to her native language. In this way, Alisaudre bears witness to a multilingual, multicultural Christianity wherein racial and cultural identity markers are not erased by conversion and represents one of the earliest examples in European literature of racial identity being conceived of as distinct from religious identity. A feminine refusal to submit to the trajectories of patriarchal narrative is also the subject of Heather Blatt’s essay on the story of Albina and her sisters in two narratives of Britain’s founding in The Riming Chronicle and the prose Brut. Although both narratives seem, on the surface, to uphold a patriarchal narrative of domination of women and land, Blatt uses feminist materiality and ecocritical theories to demonstrate how the descriptive detail in both texts suggests an agential quality to the landscape that integrates with its female inhabitants to exert nature’s own agenda in the narrative. Feminist materiality theory and ecocriticism continue to be relevant in Emma Le Poue´sard’s examination of a walrus ivory pyx from the eleventh century. Noting how the carving on the pyx makes reference to its animal origin, while its nature as a vessel recalls the Virgin’s gestation of Christ, Le Poue´sard argues that the pyx becomes a site where boundaries between human and animal, divine and earthly, masculine and feminine, are blurred and interrogated. Mary Beth Long provides a strong critique of the lack of attention that has hitherto been given to the emotional devastation of medieval mothers who experienced reproductive and maternal losses, arguing that these intense and alltoo-common tragedies of motherhood permeate many of the female centered texts of the period, including the Book of Margery Kempe. Likewise, Eliza Buhrer looks at the historical records of medieval women’s lives to note how gender and disability intersected and amplified one another. Her study of the way in which medieval men could exploit false claims of female disability to alienate property from its female holders offers a crucial exemplum of how powerfully the body’s different social manifestations might be layered upon one another, and betrays the limits of one form of social capital (wealth) to liberate women from the limitations of their ‘inferior’ flesh.

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Helen Brookman similarly delves into the complexities of the human body as it spans the crises of flesh, time, and space. Her study of the scholarship of the nineteenth-century medievalist Anna Gurney locates the female person within the intellectual achievements, and contextualizes both of Gurney’s identities (as woman and scholar) within the experience of her disability. Brookman gives us the picture of an intersectional life, and asks us to rise to the challenge of its multiplicities. Finally, Michelle Sauer provides a strong overview of some of the more recent works in medieval feminist studies, drawing our attention back to the state of the field as it is today, and inspiring us to imagine the field as it is in the very process of becoming. As the academic world transforms and universities enforce austerity practices upon vulnerable and contingent faculty, as white nationalism tries publicly to assert its strength and our colleagues find themselves to be the targets of racial hate, we must reassess our strengths and our commitments. Kathryn Maude reminded us in 2014 that women and POC are always in danger of being written out of academic literature, out of the academy, out of the history of our field (Maude, 2014, 256). So this special issue writes about feminism now, about gender and the field of medieval studies at the close of the second decade of the 21st century. At its best, we hope, the issue offers its readers both a moment of reflection and a call to reenergize their commitments, a chance to grapple with the ongoing inequities of an exclusionary past, but also an opportunity to situate ourselves within the work that has already begun.

About the Authors Samantha Katz Seal is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. Her first book, Father Chaucer: Generating Authority in The Canterbury Tales, was published by Oxford University Press in September 2019. She is a 2019–2020 ACLS Fellow, working on her second book, Chaucerian Dynasty, a biography of the Chaucer and de la Pole families (E-mail: [email protected]). Nicole Nolan Sidhu is the author of Indecent Exposure: Gender, Politics, and Obscene Comedy in Middle English Literature (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). She has also written several articles and book chapters on medieval English and French literature and is the co-editor, with Samantha Katz Seal, of the Chaucer Review special issue ‘‘New Chaucerian Feminisms’’ published in July of 2019. She holds a doctorate in English from Rutgers University (E-mail: [email protected]).

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References Caviness, M.H. 2010. Feminism, Gender Studies, and Medieval Studies. Diogenes 225: 30–45. Chaganti, 2018. Statement Regarding ICMS Kalamazoo. Medievalists of Color, 9 July, https://medievalistsofcolor.com/race-in-the-profession/statement-regarding-icmskalamazoo/. Joy, E. and V.W.J. van Gerven Oei. 2019. A Statement of Concern Regarding Programming for the 2019 International Congress on Medieval Studies @Kalamazoo. Punctum Books, 14 July, https://punctumbooks.com/blog/a-statement-of-concern/. Kim, D. 2016. Feminism, Whiteness, and Medieval Studies. In the Medieval Middle, 18 January, http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2016/01/antifeminism-whiteness-andmedieval.html. Kim, D. 2017. Teaching Medieval Studies in a Time of White Supremacy. In the Medieval Middle, 28 August, http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2017/08/teaching-medievalstudies-in-time-of.html, Lomuto, S. 2019. Public Medievalism and the Rigor of Anti-Racist Critique. In the Medieval Middle, 4 April, http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2019/04/publicmedievalism-and-rigor-of-anti.html, Maude, K. 2014. Citation and Marginalisation: The Ethics of Feminism in Medieval Studies. Journal of Gender Studies 23(3): 247–61.

Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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Original Article

Antisemitism and female power in the medieval city

Kathy Lavezzo Department of English, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA.

Abstract The twelfth century was pivotal for the codification of European misogyny. Binaries of the agential, rational, and fully human male and passive, physical, and subhuman female gained ground during this period, adumbrating later ideas of separate spheres. I consider how English antisemitic writings strikingly, if disturbingly, diverge from that trend. In the first written ritual murder libel, Thomas of Monmouth portrays a woman – the mother of the purported martyr William – who takes to the streets of Norwich and effects change in that city. I argue that Thomas’s text merits intersectional attention as an early example of conservatism – indeed, racism – licensing female power, similar to the offensive yoking of the New Woman and racism in the US South and first-wave feminisms. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019) 10, 279–292. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-019-00137-9

Among the many brilliant aspects of Spike Lee’s 2018 Joint, BlacKkKlansman, is its portrayal of racist womanhood through the figure of Klansman wife, Connie Kendrickson. Connie first appears as a perky 1970s homemaker who offers cheese and crackers to the racist men who gather in her Colorado Springs living room. However, Connie is no submissive housewife, but rather a ‘new’ white supremacist woman who yearns to insert herself in Klan activities. Eventually, Connie gets her wish: she is tasked with planting a bomb at black student activist Patrice Dumas’ home. Connie’s mission goes awry, however, thanks to multiple snafus, above all the appearance of black undercover police officer Ron Stallworth, who tackles the resistant Klanswoman to the ground. As

Chapter 2 was originally published as Lavezzo, K. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019) 10: 279–292. https://doi.org/ 10.1057/s41280-019-00137-9.

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Ron vainly tries to get Connie to reveal the location of the bomb, two white officers appear in a squad car. While Ron – dressed in plainclothes – tells the policemen that he is a cop, it is Connie’s words that determine the men’s actions. They place handcuffs on Ron and proceed to beat him, as she repeatedly screams, ‘That [n-word] attacked me; he tried to rape me, arrest him!’ It is in this last-ditch response to her recent setbacks regarding the bomb plot that Connie finally assumes the public role and agency she has sought all along. In alleging rape, Connie finds her voice. With his representation of Connie Kendrickson stridently crying assault, Lee offers a 1970s riff on a long and reprehensible historical pattern associated with not so much the American west but the US South. From the 1880s into the twentieth century, white southern women falsely claimed that they had been sexually assaulted by black men, charges that often prompted the men’s lynching by violent mobs. As historian Crystal Feimster demonstrates, allegations of rape, followed by their participation in lynchings, gave white southern women access to a disturbing version of the New Woman identity. Examples of such moments of female empowerment in a racist milieu include Sara Bush of Atlanta who ‘wielded the power of life and death’ in 1887 over lynching victim Reuben Hudson, and ‘play[ed] an active role in directing the mob’s actions by providing an initial description of Hudson, identifying him before the mob, and insisting that he be hanged’ (Feimster, 2009, 145). As Feimster puts it, ‘white women seized the opportunity to express a new, powerful image of southern womanhood. They articulated their concerns about sexual violence, claimed their right to protection, and exercised their racial and gender power’ (Feimster, 2009, 144). Connie Kendrickson’s actions reflect that effort by women to assert their gendered authority in a racist milieu. Such efforts by women to endow themselves with agency – that is, the power to take action and influence others – in a conservative environment shadowed by prejudice have a long history. In the case of medieval England, a similar blending of female empowerment and bigotry emerges in the context of antisemitic literature. Antisemitism is arguably the earliest form of racist thinking to emerge in the European west, and a phenomenon that interacted with subsequent medieval racisms centered on Muslims and other groups (Akbari, 2009, 112–54). Medieval England holds the dubious distinction of occupying the ‘vanguard’ of medieval European antisemitism (Stacey, 2000). The first European nation to expel forcibly its Jewish residents (in 1290), and enforce legislation demanding that Jews don a badge of infamy (in 1218), England also gave rise, in the twelfth century, to the first recorded ritual murder libel, which alleges that Jews torture and kill young Christian boys in contempt for the crucifixion. The ritual murder libel intersected in complex ways with historical anti-Jewish acts and was one of several antisemitic myths that circulated in England and elsewhere during the middle ages and beyond. Scholarship on gender and English antisemitic writings has revealed such insights as how: both

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Jews and women (as mothers) serve as fraught origin figures for patriarchal Christianity (Lampert-Weissig, 2004); monastic writers deploy a uniquely female kind of memory practice to portray a child’s ‘martyrdom’ by Jews (Bailey, 2015); gender trouble attends images of Jews converting to Christianity (Kruger, 2006); and stereotypes about female malleability inform depictions of the actions of Jewish women who convert (Bradbury, 2017; Kaplan, 2007). In this essay, I explore how antisemitic literature contains striking representations of ordinary women possessed of a public voice and communal power. Such texts present us with a disturbing medieval English literary phenomenon in which animosity toward a minority group licenses depictions of spectacularly emotive and loud movements by women from the dominant group into highly public locations. As my stress on the ‘public’ sphere indicates, space plays a key role in those medieval representations of women gaining agency. To return to Connie Kendrickson, a similar stress on space informs her journey to empowerment. Connie’s shift in identity – from ordinary homemaker to KKK warrior – is closely tied to the different geographical settings she occupies. Apron-clad, she first appears in the confines of her home, where she is permitted to perform no more than domestic chores. When Connie begins to assert herself in the racist program of the organization, her ‘empowerment’ involves getting out of the house and driving her car to various locations in Colorado Springs to perform covert Klan actions, all of which fail. Ultimately, though, Connie comes into her own as a powerful woman by making a spectacle of herself in the street outside of her target’s home. Female ‘uplift’ intertwines with an upending of the ‘separate spheres’ doctrine; not only has Connie moved from the private into the public sphere but she has done so in an attention-getting manner. The medieval texts I examine portray a similar movement by women from the home into the streets. Indeed, as we shall see, those medieval women exceed Connie’s ‘achievement’ in terms of both the public status they gain and their capacity to influence auditors. While Connie’s actions take place in a quiet residential neighborhood before an audience of two white policemen, the women depicted in medieval antisemitic texts move up and down densely populated urban spaces – both streets and common areas in medieval cities – drawing the attention of entire groups of city dwellers. While Connie’s cry of ‘rape’ emerges as unfounded, and it is she who ends up arrested, the women of medieval antisemitic texts communicate ‘information’ that is borne out by the larger mythic narrative in which they appear. While Connie finally is exposed as a criminal, these medieval literary women become law-women of sorts, whose screams and movements correlate with the ‘hue and cry,’ the legal action in which a public outcry is made against a wrong.1

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1 Bardsley discusses how the ‘hue and cry’ empowered and protected late medieval English women (2006, 70–7).

Lavezzo

2 Host desecration libels can also follow the pattern I describe below (Rubin, 1999, 75), although no women appear in the only extant English host desecration libel, the Croxton Play of the Sacrament.

3 In what follows I silently modify Rubin’s translations and cite the original Latin as it appears in Rubin’s transcription (Rubin, 2009).

At least three groups of medieval English antisemitic texts feature such women.2 The earliest narrative is the legend of the Jewish Boy, a myth whose first Latin teller was Gregory of Tours (538–593), and that was told and retold in England and throughout Europe in multiple languages during the entire medieval period (Rubin, 1999, 7–27). The tale of the Jewish Boy involves a Jewish man who, upon learning that his son received the eucharist in a church, throws the boy into a hot oven. When the mother of the child learns what has happened, she runs distraught through the streets of the city where the family lives and brings the crime to the attention of other townspeople, who find that the Virgin Mary has miraculously protected the boy from the flames of the oven. While Jewish, the mother and her child are proto-Christian, insofar as she resists her husband and he is attracted to a church. The tale ends with both mother and son converting, while the father, who maintains his Jewishness in despite of the Marian miracle, is himself thrown into the oven and dies. A second antisemitic tale featuring a mother calling attention to herself in city streets is the legend of the Boy Singer. Like the Jewish Boy, the Boy Singer legend was ‘pan-European in iteration’ and appeared both in Latin and the vernacular (Bale, 2006, 59). In this tale, whose first version dates to the early thirteenth century and whose most famous ‘teller’ is Chaucer’s Prioress, a Jew kills a child for singing the Marian antiphon the Alma Redemptoris Mater. The boy’s mother searches for the boy in the streets of their city, locates the scene of the attack (with the aid of the Virgin Mary, who has miraculously restored the boy’s voice), and draws the crime to the attention of city officials. The third antisemitic text featuring a public woman is the earliest recorded ritual murder libel. Written c. 1154–1174 in England by Benedictine monk Thomas of Monmouth, this text relates the pseudo-hagiography of a Norwich boy named William. According to Thomas, ‘all the communities of the Jews of England’ plot to kill the young man in contempt of Christ’s crucifixion (Thomas, 2014, 62).3 Here again, the mother of the attacked boy draws attention to herself by screaming and running about the streets of the city. While the mother’s actions don’t save young William’s life – he is already dead – they do manage to convince the people of Norwich that the Jews of the town are guilty of the boy’s murder. In order to begin unpacking the discomfiting dynamic whereby antisemitism licenses such extraordinary displays of female agency in public spaces, I focus on Thomas’s account of William of Norwich’s ‘martyrdom,’ hereafter called ‘the Life.’ Thomas’s text occupies a pivotal position with respect to both the Jewish Boy and Boy Singer legends. Generated in the twelfth century, it looks back to and modifies prior Jewish Boy legends dating from as early as Gregory of Tours and as recently as the Marian miracles collections produced in England by bishop of Norwich Herbert de Losinga (d. 1119), William of Malmesbury (c. 1095/6–c. 1143), and others. Moreover, Thomas’s revised account of female agency inaugurates a trend that emerges in subsequent antisemitic legends. That is, while the mother of the Jewish Boy legend is a Jewess who eventually

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converts, the mother in Thomas’s text and later Boy Singer libels is Christian. While it is impossible to draw hard and firm lines of transmission, Thomas, at the very least, was the first to imbue a Christian mother with the kind of agency and public persona allotted the Jewish mother of the Jewish Boy myth; more speculatively, it is possible that Thomas’s innovation, generated some 25 to 30 years before the earliest Boy Singer legend, influenced those texts. Rendering Thomas’s text particularly compelling is its immediacy and precision. While many Jewish Boy and Boy Singer texts are set in anonymous cities or at least in cities located at a considerable remove from their narratological point of origin, the Life purports to relate events that had only recently happened in Thomas’s city. The Life thus urges scrutiny as a text responding to the concerns of a particular place and time. I argue that the representation of William’s mother is an important indicator of how Thomas wrote the Life not only to elevate a dead boy as a Christian martyr but also to respond imaginatively to the city he inhabited. Thomas was part of a Benedictine cathedral priory that bore an ambiguous relationship to Norwich. As monks, the members of the priory clung to a cenobitic ideal based on isolation from lay people of both genders as well as women of any calling. In other words, the very city of Norwich, with its burgeoning lay population (which may have quadrupled in size during the twelfth century), money economy, and potential for all sorts of misrule and conflict, threatened monastic identity. And yet monks like Thomas served Norwich, assisting residents’ needs, promoting their faith and giving them a cathedral in which to worship. Elsewhere I have discussed how Thomas manages his anxieties over Norwich via his depiction of Jews in the city (Lavezzo, 2016, 64–99). Here I would like to examine part of the role women play in Thomas’s effort to grapple with his urban milieu.4 In the remainder of this essay, I’ll first introduce the portions of the Life that feature William’s mother. After describing some of the ways in which we can understand why Thomas saw fit to include such episodes in his text, I’ll analyze how they serve as a means of grappling with the urban concerns of a monk like him. Concerned over the disruptive and disorderly nature of his urban environment, Thomas seeks to understand his city via an equally disruptive and disorderly woman. Ultimately, I consider how the mother presents us with more than a stereotype of female ‘hysteria,’ even as she problematically affirms offensive antisemitic myths. On one hand, for all her alignment with misogynistic thinking, William’s mother offers an exciting image of a woman whose public and authoritative relation to Norwich shapes the city along feminine lines, defying the idea of a masculine public sphere that gained prominence in the twelfth century. But on the other hand, that depiction of public feminine power, like that of Connie in BlacKkKlansman, hinges on the oppression of another oppressed group. Thomas’s text thus urges an intersectional approach to gender in the medieval period.

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4 The mother is not the only fascinating female figure in the life. William’s Aunt Liviva, his female cousin, and an anonymous maid, for example, figure prominently in his ritual murder libel. Like William’s mother, those women identify Jewish misbehavior; unlike the mother, though, the other women act covertly as spies or detectives.

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The episode featuring William’s mother takes place in the first of the seven books that comprise the Life. This initial book contains the ritual murder accusation, while subsequent books aim to establish William’s sanctity by recounting miracles associated with him and his shrine. Thomas titles the fifteenth chapter of the first book ‘De planctu matris’ or ‘On the Mother’s Lament’ and describes how, when rumor of William’s murder reaches his mother Elviva, she faints, then recovers and heads to the city. Upon learning that her son’s corpse was found buried in Thorpe Wood, just outside Norwich, Elviva ‘at once tore at her hair, clasped her hands over and over, and ran as if she had lost her senses, crying and wailing through the streets’ (Thomas, 2014, 30). The distraught mother eventually arrives at the home of her sister, Liviva, where she inquires into the death, only to learn ‘he had been killed in an unusual manner.’ The ensuing depiction of Elviva’s response, while lengthy, merits citation in full: Nevertheless, out of many and credible conjectural arguments she was able to conclude that it was not Christians, but in truth Jews, who had dared to commit the crime in that way. She accepted these speculations with a woman’s credulity; and she at once broke forth publicly with abuse of the Jews in word, noisy clamor and formal accusation. In this way, no doubt, the mother was influenced by the effect of a maternal instinct; here was a woman carried away by a rash and feminine daring. Again, whatever she suspected in her heart she took to be certain, and whatever she imagined she asserted, as if she had seen it with her own eyes; she conducted her roaming through small streets and large, and, compelled by maternal suffering, she accosted everyone with horrible cries and asserted that her son had been seduced by fraud, kidnapped from her by cunning, and killed by the Jews. She turned the minds of all in this matter towards the suspicion of the truth; hence it was cried out also by the voices of all that all the Jews should be destroyed, root and branch, as the constant enemies of the Christian name and cult. (Thomas, 2014, 30) To say that Elviva takes to the streets of Norwich and causes a commotion would be an understatement. William’s mother unabashedly makes a spectacle of herself. Importantly, Thomas closely knits Elviva’s actions to the public spaces of Norwich. She cries ‘per plateas’ [‘through the streets’] as she moves toward her sister’s home and later carries out ‘her roaming through small streets and large’ [‘per uicos et plateas discursu’]. On one hand, this detail is in keeping with the urban conventions of certain antisemitic legends, namely that of the Jewish Boy. Gregory of Tours renders the mother a figure possessed of a distress so complete, so utter as to become one with the anonymous eastern metropolis in which he sets the tale. Upon seeing her child in the furnace, the mother throws her barrette to the ground and with disheveled hair ‘wailed that she was in misery and filled the city with her cries’ (Van Dam, 1988, 29–30, my emphasis).

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Gregory portrays parallel unleashings at the scales of body and city; the mother lets her hair loose as she sends her voice into urban space. At the same time that Thomas’s text cites this antisemitic literary history, it also intersects in charged and fascinating ways with his particular twelfthcentury moment and the constructions of woman and the notions of piety to which it gave rise. To begin with gender, the depiction of Elviva supports how ecclesiastical discourse in the twelfth-century Christian West affirmed the binary of reason-driven, fully human male and a body-based, subhuman female. Traditionally in modern scholarship, twelfth-century Europe has occupied a notorious place in the history of women, thanks to such phenomena as the system of primogeniture, the reforms initiated by Gregory VII (1015–1085), the ‘renaissance’ of classical learning, and the rise of universities. For historians such as Joanne McNamara, such developments led to a massive shift in social ordering in the west, from a millennial-long centering of identity on class difference to a new one based on gender (Bennett, 1997, 74–6). Thomas’s representation of the mother unmistakably supports negative gender stereotypes, particularly ideas regarding woman’s emotional nature. Elviva dramatically performs her distraught state by pulling her hair, emitting ‘horrendis […] clamoribus’ [‘horrible cries’], and clasping her hands. Her reasoning process is handicapped by a ‘muliebri ac temerario […] ausu’ or ‘feminine and reckless daring,’ in which mere suspicion and imagination translate into the certainty of an eye witness. In effect, the mother’s frantic, unruly body indicates a mental disorder within. But there is more to Elviva’s depiction than straightforward negative stereotyping. McNamara’s sweeping claim about millennial shifts in social organization stresses how ideas regarding woman’s inferiority resulted in her exile from both literal spaces and theoretical concepts regarding the public and its institutional management: This woman-free space was inexorably expanded as clerical men monopolized new educational opportunities. The renaissance in classical learning reestablished the theoretical intellectual and moral inferiority of women and enabled men implicitly to absorb all the positive qualities of ‘mankind.’ The result was the ungendered public men who would henceforth be equated with ‘people,’ screened by such anthropomorphized institutions as ‘church’ and ‘crown.’ (McNamara, 1994, 5) For McNamara, the twelfth century inaugurated nothing less than the relegation of woman to the powerless, invisible, silent, and indeed subhuman status upon which later ideas of separate spheres are based. And yet Elviva enacts her emotional performance in a highly public setting, the streets of Norwich. What licenses such public actions? One answer emerges in the role played by highly public, female mourning in other Christian texts produced during this period. One such group of texts is twelfth-century iterations of the Massacre of

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5 I have modified Bevington’s translation.

6 Nolan offers an astute reading of the spatial dynamics – especially the liminal positioning – of such sculpture in Chartres, Le Mans, and Toulouse.

the Innocents. The massacre is a key episode in the gospel of Matthew, who describes how Herod, after Christ’s nativity, ordered the killing in Bethlehem, of all male babies under two. Matthew alludes to the mothers of those babies only elliptically, through reference to the ‘great weeping and lamentation’ of Rachel in Jeremiah. But several representations of the incident created during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in England and France expand dramatically on the gospel account by giving the mothers a notably active role. Literary examples include a Latin version of the Ordo Rachelis performed at Fleury around 1250, in which the mothers plainchant the following line before the soldiers poised to murder their children: ‘We pray you, spare the tender lives of our babies’ (Bevington, 2012, 69).5 Visual examples include an illustration in the St. Albans psalter (dated between the 1120s and early 1140s), where the mothers not only speak but take action; as Kathleen Nolan puts it, the women ‘not only attempt to stave off the soldiers’ blows but also, in one instance, attack a soldier by biting him in the leg’ (Nolan, 1996, 103). As Nolan and others discuss, such images speak to medieval notions of parental affection, and more precisely the love of mothers for their children. The distraught actions of the mothers reflect how, in Jan Ziolkowski’s words, ‘theologians, authors, and artists understood that the normal reaction of parents to the death of daughters or sons was the profoundest of grief and that therefore the mothers who suffered through the Massacre of the Innocents were permitted to evidence a violence of grief that would not have been countenanced under other circumstances’ (Ziolkowski, 2010, 96). I would add that such images are extraordinary in terms of not only the ‘violence of grief’ they portray but also their portrayal of grief – and militant actions – in a public space. The images offer fascinating examples of a group of women taking public action, speaking and even engaging in a kind of physical urban warfare in the streets of Bethlehem. Indeed, in certain cases, the public nature of the women’s actions is two-fold. For example, portrayals of the massacre found in monumental sculpture located on the exterior of cathedrals in Chartres and other locations offer a striking instance of not just public and active women, but also public women portrayed in highly public urban locations.6 The mothers in such expanded portrayals of the Massacre of the Innocents are part of a larger gendered and theological context for Thomas’s depiction of the distraught Elviva. That context indeed extends even wider and constitutes what we might call a typological web or network of mothers within Christian discourse. That network encompasses the mothers of the Massacre of the Innocents, who, like the mothers of the Jewish Boy, Boy Singer, and Ritual Murder legends, take action in response to threats to their sons’ wellbeing. It also reaches back to Rachel, whom Matthew cites as a figure for the mothers of the youths slaughtered by Herod and whom Chaucer cites as a figure for the mother of the little schoolboy in the Prioress’s Boy Singer libel (Ziolkowski,

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2010, 93–5). And, most crucially, at the center of this female network is the mother of all mothers in Christianity, the Virgin Mary. As mothers who respond to anti-Christian threats to their male children’s wellbeing, the women of the Innocents episode, Elviva, and other mothers in antisemitic writings figure the Virgin Mary, with their sons serving as types of Christ. The legends of the Jewish Boy and the Boy Singer intensify such links between the mothers they portray and Mary, because they feature Marian miracles. The Marian resonance of the mothers in both antisemitic lore and Innocents depictions reveals how underwriting depictions of public displays of female agency and emotion in high medieval England and elsewhere was more than a sensitivity to fact that, as Ziolkowski puts it, ‘the normal reaction of parents to the death of daughters or sons was the profoundest of grief.’ An ever-expanding high medieval cult of the Virgin in England also authorized those displays. Piety – and specifically a piety routed through the most powerful woman in Christianity – thus licensed imaginative depictions of women enjoying public agency. To return to Thomas’s book, the representation of Elviva may have provided medieval Christian readers with a devotional tool. Insofar as the spectacle of a crying mother speaks to Mary’s grief during Christ’s passion, it may have enabled readers to meditate upon, and indeed strive to suffer with, a suffering Christ who is, as Anthony Bale puts it, ‘subject to ‘Jewish’ violence’ (Bale, 2010, 35).7 In spatial terms, this piety-based reading of Elviva and related depictions of mothers suggests how they perform a kind of urban reterritorialization. Read as types of Mary, the women transform the streets where they wander into latterday versions of the road to Calvary or indeed Calvary itself. As devotional figures, these mothers transport the reader to the sites of the passion. If we shift from the imagined spaces of antisemitic texts to actual English cities, we can point to a similar dynamic at work. Medieval towns were themselves filled with devotional aids – above all, churches – that in many respects were intended to function as virtual Calvarys. English cities like Bury St. Edmunds even followed a grid layout that oriented all urban built environments to the form of a cross, and more precisely the cross on which Christ suffered. Yet affective, passion-based piety – and the constructions of Mary and ‘the Jew’ that attend and inspire such devotion – tells us only part of the story regarding the city as it was conceived in medieval society and culture. The urban reach of English antisemitic texts similarly extends beyond affective devotion to Christ and Mary. For the spectacle depicted in Thomas’s text isn’t just that of a distraught woman but of an unruly Norwich as well. When Elviva moves her body up and down the major and minor thoroughfares of the city, when her voice – its cries and yells and its claims about the murder – travels throughout the town, she publicly re-signifies the city in a feminine register. Elsewhere in Book One of Thomas’s text, the city conforms to the monk’s religious identity: throngs of the faithful gathered in the open spaces of the city for holy week,

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7 Despres (1998) offers a telling account of the mutually constitutive relationship between antisemitic stereotyping and Marian piety in medieval England.

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masses of worshipers gather for William’s funeral mass, and monks lead a solemn procession taking William’s body to the Cathedral Priory. At such moments, Thomas envisions how a high medieval city can be molded and ordered into a harmonious and corporate Christian identity. But Elviva’s actions expose the mutability of a city, its capacity to be reshaped along alternate, disorderly, and feminine lines. This moment exposes how Thomas understood some of his deepest anxieties regarding the urban surroundings of his cathedral priory in a gendered manner. The spectacular eruption of a female body and female voice within the city effectively showcases how cenobitic worries over how the city and the monastic rejection of women could unite. As McNamara and other scholars stress, the twelfth century witnessed the intensification of clerical ideas regarding the threat posed by the emotional, appetitive, and indeed polluting woman. The rise of cities served as an additional threat, as I’ve mentioned, to such monastic values as silence, isolation, discipline, and contemplation. Here Thomas conceives of and imagines urban danger in a distinctly feminine vein. The dangers of the city are one with the dangers of woman. Those urban and gendered anxieties collide, awkwardly, in Thomas’s text with his antisemitism. Just as, if indeed not more, crucial to Elviva’s significance here than her Marian resonances and her disruptive femininity is her anti-Jewish message. Elviva receives only limited knowledge regarding her son’s death, just its ‘insolitus’ [‘strange cause’]. Nevertheless, she concludes – even though, Thomas stresses, multiple other ‘credible’ explanations exist – that ‘it was not Christians but in truth Jews’ who committed the crime. Elviva becomes here, in a sense, a version of the mother of the Jewish Boy, who delivers news to other city inhabitants about her husband’s action. But while the mother in the Jewish Boy has first-hand knowledge of her husband’s murderous act, Elviva draws only on mother love and a compromised feminine intellect. The mother of the Jewish Boy is a bona fide eye witness; in contrast, ‘whatever’ Thomas’s mother ‘imagined she asserted, as if she had seen it with her own eye’ [‘quodque ymaginabatur quasi uisu compertum asserens,’ my emphasis]. At one level, Thomas is misogynistically acknowledging in this episode the flimsy and fantastic nature of the ritual murder libel. His stereotypical depiction of a nearly hysterical woman and his stress on the compromised nature of Elviva’s womanly mind suggest how the idea that Jews killed William is groundless, the stuff of myth, not reality. And yet Elviva’s message is persuasive. With her combination of physical gestures of emotional upheaval, cries of distress, and strident assertions regarding the Jews of Norwich, Elviva proves to be a potent rhetorician, who ‘turned the minds of all in this matter towards the suspicion of the truth; hence it was cried out also by the voices of all that all the Jews should be destroyed, root and branch, as the constant enemies of the Christian name and cult.’ Instead of a woman who is hysterical – who effectively has lost control of her mind – Eliva

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has the power to convince and change other people’s minds. In his important work on Thomas’s text, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen stresses the divided nature of Norwich, where Norman, Anglo-Saxon, and Viking residents uneasily cohabited, and analyzes how the Life transforms division into unity as Christians become one in their hatred of Jews and devotion to William (Cohen, 2004). In this episode, Elviva serves as an emotional, womanly conduit for that project of uniting an otherwise divided city. Elviva’s persuasive powers may comprise part of the monastic discourse regarding urban wives that Sharon Farmer has studied (Farmer, 1986). Farmer demonstrates how, during a time when the rise of urban, market-driven societies created new challenges for clergymen, monks such as English theologian Thomas of Chobham (1160–1230) celebrated wives for their ability to persuade husbands to provide funding for monastic needs. As Farmer points out, this discourse was informed by a monastic association of woman with language and orality, an association whose roots lay in the powers of verbal persuasion exemplified by the first woman, Eve. The scenes of female persuasion described by Chobham and other ecclesiastical writers share with Thomas’s account of Elviva a stress on female verbal skills and rhetorical powers deployed in an urban milieu. But while Chobham and others portray a domestic and private affair between husband and wife, Thomas depicts a highly charged public encounter between a widow and the lay Christian members of a medieval English city. That is, Elviva’s rhetorical power is all the more striking given its impact on multiple persons in a public sphere. The agency enjoyed by Elviva and other mothers portrayed in antisemitic texts sets them apart from analogous mothers of the Massacre of the Innocents. In that tradition, however much an author, illustrator, or sculptor might elaborate upon the women’s defiance of Herod’s henchmen, that artist is confined by Matthew’s account of the children’s slaughter.8 And of course, on a theological level, not only are the women ineffectual but indeed saving the infants or getting upset about them isn’t the point; as Ziolkowski puts it, ‘the faithful were to bear in mind that those who were lost were saved through their very deaths – as well as through the ultimate sacrifice of Christ crucified, who is present implicitly as the provocation and resolution of the Massacre’ (Ziolkowski, 2010, 96). The Christian stress on heavenly salvation denigrates the mothers (and their figural referent, Rachel) as wrongly upset over the very event that will save their children’s souls. Elviva parallels the mothers of the slaughter accounts insofar as she cannot do anything about her child’s death. But unlike those women, Elviva weds her maternal sorrow with maternal vengeance; emotions that initially turn on William’s loss morph into anti-Jewish feeling. The results, indeed, are profound and deeply disturbing: not only does Elviva convince all the city dwellers around her that Jews killed William, she prompts them to advocate a racist idea of Jews – that all Jews possess a certain mentality (the hatred of Christianity) that calls

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8 On the manner in which the mothers in Middle English massacre pageants disrupt through obscene comedy, see Sidhu (2016, 223–8).

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for their destruction. This is, by far, one of the most offensive and upsetting moments in Thomas’s text, a moment that horribly echoes the sentiments that informed the atrocities of Nazi-era Germany. While we have a woman achieving public agency, that feminine voice and power pivots on antisemitism in its most offensive guise. Merging the offensive with the agential, overturning received ideas of woman even as it supports despicable ideas about Jews, Thomas’s image of a distraught woman running through the streets of Norwich and rallying its inhabitants against Jews disturbingly parallels the actions of New Southern Women like Annie McIvaine of Maryland, who in 1900 led, with ‘disheveled hair flying loosely in the driving rain, and with a pistol clutched in her right hand,’ the mass of white southerners who lynched Lewis Harris, the man McIvain claimed tried to rape her (Feimster, 2009, 157). While the crimes, alleged perpetrators, and related female roles differ – in one case the rape of a young white woman by a black man, in the other case the murder of a mother’s son by Jews – the example of Elviva reveals how, at the very least, the imaginative works of the medieval period present early examples of women carving out a new space for themselves in a conservative and oppressive culture. Such examples, one historical, the other imagined, showcase how assertions of female power and agency can themselves be entangled with and even depend upon other forms of oppression. It is important in this regard to recall how, if we shift our attention from the medieval antisemitism and the New South to the history of women’s movements, the first and second waves of feminism were by and large led by white middle class women, many of whom were themselves racist and elitist. The intersectional project of teasing out how assertions of female power have been tied to other forms of oppression demands investigation of what women get by asserting themselves in a conservative milieu, how such ‘feminisms’ benefit a conservative agenda and how feminist women at times conflict with a conservative agenda they otherwise espouse. But the example of the Life doesn’t merit our attention simply because it parallels or looks toward later instances of women merging brands of feminism or female power with racism. For the moment in which the Life emerged was nothing less than pivotal with regard to ideas of ‘woman,’ ‘race,’ and the city. The twelfth century first gave rise to ideas of gender that relegated women to the private sphere and denied them autonomy and power; it witnessed the rise of an unpredecented animosity toward non-Christians, as evinced by crusades against Muslims and anti-Jewish pogroms; and it was a century during which cities burgeoned as never before. In other words, Thomas’s Life, with its portrayal of the urban authority enjoyed by a Jew-hating woman, suggests how, at their very inception, categories of race, gender, and urban space could be morphed and reconfigured in ways that were as disruptive as they were bigoted. The Life shows us how the history of gender in the west, from the start, is one of surprises, nuances, and twists. The moment of the codification of both ‘woman’

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and ‘the Jew’ is never just about fixing categories and delimiting clear identities but is rather always accompanied by surprising shifts and juxtapositions. The medieval period beckons feminist inquiry not simply as an ‘origin’ for sexism and racism but also for its complexity, contradictions, and messiness.

Ac knowledgem ents Many thanks belong to Samantha Seal and Nicole Nolan Sidhu for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this essay. Portions of this essay were presented at the 2018 meeting of the Medieval Association of the Midwest, and I thank my interlocutors there for their helpful feedback.

About the Author Kathy Lavezzo teaches at the University of Iowa. She is the author of Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature and English Community, 1000–1534 (Cornell University Press) and The Accommodated Jew: English Antisemitism from Bede to Milton (Cornell University Press), and editor of Imagining a Medieval English Nation (Minnesota University Press). Her current project is ‘Race in Medieval Europe: Making Whiteness Visible’ (Email: [email protected]).

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Bradbury, C.A. 2017. Picturing Maternal Anxiety in the Jew of Bourges. In Gender, Otherness, and Culture in Medieval and Early Modern Art, ed. C.A. Bradbury and M. Moseley-Christian, 34–66. New York: Palgrave. Cohen, J.J. 2004. The Flow of Blood in Medieval Norwich. Speculum 79: 26–69. Despres, D. 1998. Immaculate Flesh and the Social Body: Mary and the Jews. Jewish History 12(1): 47–69. Farmer, S. 1986. Persuasive Voices: Clerical Images of Medieval Wives. Speculum 61: 517–43. Feimster, C. 2009. Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press. Kaplan, L. 2007. Jessica’s Mother: Medieval Constructions of Jewish Race and Gender in The Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare Quarterly 58(1): 1–30. Kruger, S. 2004. The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press. Lampert-Weissig, L. 2004. Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lavezzo, K. 2016. The Accommodated Jew: English Antisemitism from Bede to Milton. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. McNamara, J. 1994. The Herrenfrage: The Restructuring of the Gender System, 1050–1150. In Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, ed. C. A. Lees, 3–29. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Nolan, K. 1996. ‘Ploratus et Ululatus’: The Mothers in the Massacre of the Innocents at Chartres Cathedral. Studies in Iconography 17: 95–141. Sidhu, N.N. 2016. Indecent Exposure: Gender, Politics, and Obscene Comedy in Middle English Literature. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Stacey, R. 2000. Anti-Semitism and the Medieval English State. In The Medieval State: Essays Presented to James Campbell, ed. J. R. Maddicott and D. M. Palliser, 163–77. London: Hambledon. Rubin, M. 1999. Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Rubin, M. 2009. Transcription of Cambridge University Library Ms. Add. 3037, fols. 1–77r. http://yvc.history.qmul.ac.uk/WN-joined-17-08-09.pdf Thomas of Monmouth. 2014. The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, trans. M. Rubin. New York: Penguin. Van Dam, R., trans. 1988. Gregory of Tours: Glory of the Martyrs. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press. Ziolkowski, J.M. 2010. Laments for Lost Children: Latin Traditions. In Laments for the Lost in Medieval Literature, ed. J. Tolmie and M.J. Toswell, 81–107. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2010.

Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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Original Article

Alisaundre Becket: Thomas Becket’s resilient, Muslim, Arab mother in the South English Legendary

Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh Department of English, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract In the South English Legendary, Thomas Becket’s mother, Alisaundre Becket, is a resilient, non-Christian woman who speaks Arabic. Although Alisaundre Becket eventually converts to Christianity, adopts a Christian name, and lives in England, she never learns English. Drawing on feminist theory by black feminists and women of color, I argue that the characteristic that racializes and marginalizes Alisaundre Becket – her voice, perceived as foreign and strange – also empowers her, and makes it possible for her to resist erasure as a raced woman in an oppressive space. In the process of asserting her will, we witness one of the earliest moments of racial identity perceived, translated, and portrayed as distinct from religious identity in the Middle Ages. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019) 10, 293–303. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-019-00132-0

It is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken. – Audre Lorde Tucked away between the covers of the South English Legendary, framed as a short introduction to the life of Thomas Becket, rests the harrowing story of a nameless, fearless, and determined Muslim woman.1 This daughter of an Amiral

1 I am referring to Bodleian Library MS Laud Miscellaneous 108 as the South English Legendary. All citations are from Carl Horstmann’s 1887 EETS edition and are given by page number followed by line numbers.

Chapter 3 was originally published as Rajabzadeh, S. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019) 10: 293–303. https://doi.org/ 10.1057/s41280-019-00132-0.

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in Jerusalem falls in love with a Christian, English man her father has imprisoned; visits him daily; proposes to him; when he rejects her, she travels to London alone, knowing and speaking only a few English words; wanders the streets calling for the man she loves while the citizens of London turn her distress into a spectacle; conditionally converts to Christianity; demands to have a translator rather than learn English; and then gives birth to and raises the boy who eventually becomes one of England’s most canonical saints, Thomas Becket. Alisaundre Becket is fictional. Thomas Becket’s real mother was Matilda, an Anglo-Norman woman – not a nameless, Arab, Muslim whose life mirrors a character in a chanson de geste, as the late-thirteenth-century South English Legendary (Bodleian Library MS Laud Miscellaneous 108) wants its readers to believe. As the child of Alisaundre Becket, the Thomas Becket of the SEL is not only ‘less Anglo-Norman than he would be otherwise’ (Lankin, 2011, 48), but also less Christian than he would be otherwise. To reconcile Alisaundre Becket’s non-Christian, non-English heritage with Thomas Becket’s sainthood, scholars have looked at the ways in which the SEL narrative ‘eradicate[s]’ the markers that set her apart as ‘differen[t]’ from other citizens of England (Mills, 2010, 220): bishops replace her ‘heuþe[n]’ faith with Christianity; her Muslim name (which we never learn) is replaced with a Christian one; and she restricts herself to a domestic life in England, never returning to Jerusalem. Most readings of Alisaundre Becket have been informed by an underlying assumption that medieval England was racially homogenous for the most part, and as a result, they’ve focused on the differences that the narrative erases rather than the ones it maintains. Readings have overlooked Alisaundre Becket’s ‘willfulness’ (Ahmed, 2017, 66) and how intensely she negotiates and even resists erasure through the use of her voice. Like all other aspects of her identity, her ‘language [was] susceptible to death, erasure’ (Morrison, 1993); citizens and Christian power structures exert social pressure and power on her to forget Arabic and to speak English, marginalizing her because she speaks a language ‘no Man ne couþe’ (108.67), and yet no one is ever able to silence her successfully or force her to speak English. While that voice racializes and marginalizes, it also empowers her. She uses that voice, which Englishmen hear as foreign and incomprehensible, to carry herself from Jerusalem over land and sea to England. She uses her voice to withstand public ridicule and to negotiate her place in English society. She uses that voice to endure the helplessness that accompanies being a raced woman in an oppressive space. Drawing on feminist theory by black feminists and women of color, I follow Alisaundre Becket’s voice and argue that although Alisaundre converts to Christianity, adopts a Christian name, and moves to and lives in England, she does not ‘mov[e] from a place of untranslatability to one of complete

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assimilation’ (Mills, 2011, 384). Instead, she uses that voice ‘to identify [her] marginality as much more than a site of deprivation’ (hooks, 1990, 341). She ‘salvage[s]’ her language ‘by an effort of the will’ (Morrison, 1993), and transforms her domestic life, her ‘marginality […. into] a site of radical possibility, a space of resistance’ (hooks, 1990, 341). In this essay, I put into practice the feminist methodologies I draw on and center Alisaundre Becket’s voice and story. While academically unconventional, I’ve situated Thomas Becket and the South English Legendary on the margins, and I only consider how Alisaundre Becket’s biography serves them near the end of the essay. I believe that we can best understand how patriarchal structures operate when we take the time and space to see and hear women, like Alisaundre Becket, for their own sake, and not in service of anyone or anything else. We meet Alisaundre Becket for the first time in the ‘holie lond’ (106.7) as she is articulating her feminine desires to Gilbert Becket, a Christian Englishman from London held in her father’s prison. After repeatedly visiting Gilbert Becket, she suggests that she will convert to Christianity if Gilbert marries her: ‘Cristinedom ichulle onder-fonge: for þe loue of þe, / And þou a-non aftur-ward: treweliche weddi me’ (33.38–9). But these words stir up neither evangelical, Christian values in Gilbert, nor love. In fact, her direct proposal for marriage and conversion makes Gilbert so ‘ful a-drad’ (107.40) that Alisaundre will betray him, that he somehow figures out how to do something he hasn’t been able to do for two and a half years – escape from prison ‘riȝt þulke dai’ (107.46). In other words, Gilbert does not just reject her agency as the subject of desire but reads her ‘wilfulness [… as] imply[ing] a problem of character’ (Ahmed, 2017, 66). Once she proposes, Gilbert no longer trusts her. And yet, this does not deter Alisaundre, who considers her own desires as more important than Gilbert’s and does something few Muslim princesses in romances do: she ventures into her lover’s homeland, travelling to London to find Gilbert. It is as Alisaundre moves that we realize we only have access to her from the viewpoint of those who possess power in the community she is participating in at any given time. While in the ‘holie lond,’ we inhabit the gaze of Jerusalem’s leadership, which includes Alisaundre, who is the Amiral’s daughter, and we do not register her as foreign or her language as different. Even when Alisaundre repeatedly visits Gilbert Becket, the SEL does not labor over the language she speaks. Her Arabic and her voice are as equally accessible to us as the English the text is written in. In fact, the text not only passes over Alisaundre’s language, it passes over Gilbert’s as well. It isn’t until much later in the narrative, when Alisaundre is in England, that we learn that in the opening scenes we glided over, the man who introduced himself as a ‘cristine Man’ ‘of engelonde’ (107.33) was speaking Arabic fluently.2 The further she moves away from her homeland’s center and the closer she moves towards England, the more she loses power. She becomes increasingly more foreign the more language barriers arise. We realize that she had not been

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2 I deliberately do not refer to Alisaundre as a ‘Saracen,’ since the text does not label her as such. While the specific language she speaks does not affect my argument, for the sake of clarity I’ve described it as Arabic, since this was the language the majority would have spoken in thirteenth-century Jerusalem.

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speaking to Gilbert in English only when she’s at the margins of her homeland, at the port where people, systems, and structures negotiate her foreign language. Because she finds other multilingual travelers, pilgrims, and ‘men þat onderstoden hire langage’ (108.54), she is able to travel into England. When in England, we see her from the viewpoint of Christian, English structures of power. She is no longer the woman who effortlessly moved in and out of prison, conversing with Gilbert. She is a foreigner. The text fixates on her inability to communicate effectively. Her sentences, which were long and full in Jerusalem, become broken, single words; her body, unfamiliar; her affect, strange. heo ne couþe no-þing conteini hire: ne speken no-þe-mo; Ake euere heo axede In hire langage: to londone for-to go. Mid pilegrimes and þoru grace of god: to londone heo cam. And þo heo was þudere i-come: þare ne knev heo no man, Ne heo ne couþe speke ne hire bi-seo: bote ase a best þat a-strayed were. Þare-fore on hire gapede alday: swyþe muche fol[c] þere, boþe Men and wommen: and children suyþe fale – for hire continaunce was wonderful: and hire speche no Man ne couþe þare. (108.60–7) These stanzas, which are at the core of her biography, do not just capture the experience of any marginalized person, but of a marginalized woman of color in particular. They portray her confusion, alienation, estrangement, misplacement, and deep yearning for belonging as an embodied experience – gendered and raced. We can only see Alisaundre through the gaze of the citizens of London, and they notice her body as they hear her voice. It is as they hear her calling out for help and direction in a ‘speche no Man ne couþe þare’ that they notice that ‘hire continaunce [is both] wonderful’ and ‘ase a best þat a-strayed were.’ There is nothing about her that belongs to this community: her language is foreign; her beautiful face eroticizes her, and yet her beast-like body, presence, and affect render her femininity illegible. ‘Feminism is understood as a problem of will: a way of going one’s own way, a way of going the wrong way’ (Ahmed, 2017, 65), and the repeated emphasis on what Alisaundre cannot do in this passage – speak, be understood, navigate – suggests errors in her subjectivity. She misused her agency. She does not belong here. No one will listen to her here. Her difference invites those around her to stare, to gawk, to experience, rather than to try to understand and help. This social pressure – of forcibly transforming her experience into a performance— isolates her. She becomes isolated spatially as she moves in the streets always far enough away from people so that she can continue being on display; she is isolated sexually and racially as she becomes a strange woman, comparable to a beast. Her gendered and raced body, her yearning for Gilbert, for familiarity, transforms her struggle of communication into an embodied struggle of

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placement. It is this isolation, this marginalization, and this yearning that demands Alisaundre to negotiate her sense of self with positions of power around her and it is the way she negotiates her place in Christian, English society in the rest of the biography that makes her such an admirable force. Despite everything that is working against her – the language barrier, her foreignness, the lack of compassion in those surrounding her – as she moves in and out of English space, among English people, she manages it! It’s crucial that we do not discount or undervalue this achievement. She uses the momentum that is operating against her to her advantage by participating in the uproar, calling out for Gilbert so loudly ‘þat bi-fore gilbertes house: þe Noyse was onder-ȝite’ (108.69). The page who accompanied Gilbert to the holy land ‘to þe dore he orn swyþe: þe dune for-to i-seo’ (108.71), recognizes Alisaundre, and informs Gilbert about her arrival. He is now forced to confront Alisaundre and respond to her marriage proposal. But it isn’t until Alisaundre Becket’s conversion that we understand how she can exercise power from the margins without having any ‘domination or control over others’ (hooks, 1984, 87). Alisaundre arrives for baptism the day after six bishops and Gilbert have discussed her situation in her absence: Þat hit was al þoruȝ godes grace: þat heo was so fer i-come, Out of hire owene londe so fer: þat heo þoru miseise ne hadde i-be nome; For heo ne couþe language non: with men for-to speke. (109.110–2) The only explanation the bishops have for how a woman without English could travel ‘so fer […] out of hire owene londe’ is that it is a miracle. They decide that ‘god hathþ i-porueid so’ (110.112) that she become Christian. Their repeated emphasis on the will of God suggests that Alisaundre is a passive agent of God’s work. His divine control mutes Alisaundre’s agency. She has no control. All of this is an effort on behalf of the bishops to tame Alisaundre’s will, to domesticate her feminism by ascribing her ‘obstina[ncy],’ her ‘unyielding nature’ (Ahmed, 2017, 66), her willingness to ‘b[e] out of tune with others’ (Ahmed, 2017, 40) to a predetermined part of God’s plan. Although we expect this rhetoric in a Christian narrative, it becomes oppressive as the bishops use it to characterize Alisaundre as a helpless, nameless wanderer. They do not name her or her homeland. They only discuss her journey in her absence. By denying her the opportunity to speak, they silence her. As an authority on Christian matters, these bishops assume that Alisaundre has no knowledge of the role that God and fate have played in her journey. Alisaundre, they suggest, arrived in spite of who she was – a non-Christian woman speaking a foreign language – not because of it. The day of her baptism, Alisaundre stands before the same six bishops and Gilbert. She is spatially isolated – the only non-Christian in the space; structures of Christian conversion surround her. When the bishops ‘axeden hire wel sone / ȝif heo wolde i-cristned beo: ase lawe was for-to done’ (110.128–9), she uses the

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opportunity to contest their characterization of her and reclaim the will that the bishops and Gilbert have denied her: heo answerede In hire langage: wel sone heom a-ȝen: ȝif gilbert wolde hire weddi: i-cristned heo wolde ben And bote he hire weddi wolde: heo nolde cristinedom a-fongue, heo seide heo wolde raþer tuyrne aȝen: In-to hire owene londe. (110.130–3)

3 I am theorizing Alisaundre Becket’s racialization with Geraldine Heng’s new definition of race from her phenomenal book, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, in mind: ‘a repeating tendency […] to demarcate human beings through differences among humans that are selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental, in order to distribute positions and powers differentially to human groups’ (Heng, 2018, 3).

Her conversion is conditional, she reminds Gilbert and informs the bishops. Only ‘ȝif gilbert wolde hire weddi’ will she convert. She doesn’t have the slightest reservations about returning to her land and forgoing Christian conversion if Gilbert will not marry her. In fact, she prefers it. It is not common for a character in a romance or hagiographical text to present a rejected conversion as potentially positive. This brief speech is Alisaundre’s resistance. Alisaundre reminds those in power and by extension those English citizens who treated her as a spectacle that she has a land she calls her ‘owene,’ and that she can return to it without permission, that she has nothing to be afraid of even though she’s run away. She reminds them that she is an agent, and that she is here by choice. And she pronounces all of this ‘in hire langage,’ transforming this experience that the bishops have designed to be alienating for her into one that alienates the bishops who cannot understand her. As Alisaundre stands in a room in England, not yet converted, speaking Arabic, she reminds everyone that she still has power: the power to isolate, the power to be. When Ailsaundre converts, we expect her to follow suit with other Muslim princesses or knights and fully assimilate upon conversion. While parts of her identity align with Christian, English identity more closely, she remains definitively foreign, because she does not learn English and continues to only know and speak Arabic. Her language weighs on her identity in ways that her faith, home, and name do not, because it is the only part of her identity that is neither changeable nor replaceable. Christianity erased her ‘heathen’ faith; one faith was swapped out for the other. Her Christian name erased her ‘heathen,’ non-English one; one was substituted for the other. And yet, unlike most romances, in this account, language is not substitutable. She continues to know only her heritage language. Gilbert and the knave’s multilingualism prove that multiple languages can occupy one mind and one body. Alisaundre’s language has been the defining characteristic of her difference. So, to suggest that it is not erasable is to suggest that her difference, her otherness, is permanent. Alisaundre Becket’s language, her voice, racializes her.3 The only other identity marker that cannot be erased in this conversion is her gender. Alisaundre’s racial identity intensifies the confinement to which a woman is subject. It is easy to visualize a woman who has always already been on the margins of English, Christian society in a home, isolated from society. And that is where she ends up. Up until this point in the narrative, Alisaundre has been shown outside of the confines of a gendered, feminine domestic space.

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She moves in and out of prison freely, wanders around Jerusalem, the sea, and the streets of London. But with her conversion and her marriage, she moves indoors, into a domestic space where she spends the rest of her biography. We never see her outside again. Her home is not just any domestic space, but becomes a racialized, isolated, domestic space. So, the end of the narrative parallels its beginnings. This time, instead of Gilbert, Alisaundre Becket is isolated in a space. And instead of Alisaundre, Gilbert travels in and out of the space freely. However, unlike the beginning of the narrative, where Alisaundre was unburdened by language, language poses the primary obstacle to Gilbert’s movement. When Gilbert Becket decides to travel to Alisaundre’s homeland, the ‘holie lond,’ for pilgrimage he is overwhelmed with anxiety: ȝwat were of hire to done, laste heo wolde mourny swyþe: ȝwane he were a-gon, And gret deol to hire nime – : for langage ne couþe heo non Þat ani Man couþe onder-stonde: þat heo speke to, bote gilbert oþur [his] knaue. (111.149–53) Although Gilbert expects Alisaundre to oppose his pilgrimage, Alisaundre doesn’t express any concern or complaint. She supports his pilgrimage on one condition: ‘Þat heo moste is knaue with hire habbe: þat hire langage couþe, / And for he scholde hire solas beo: and speke to hire with mouþe’ (111.176–7). Gilbert’s anxiety and Alisaundre’s request regarding her language suggest that she has not ‘implicitly […] acquired the English that eluded her before she was baptized’ (Mills, 2011, 390), that her native language has not been ‘consigned to a hazy non-identity’ (Mills, 2010, 211).4 She can still only communicate and connect with others in ‘hire langage.’ Although Alisaundre Becket’s language intensifies her confinement, it is also her language that makes it possible for her to resist the confinement and isolation that accompanies domestic life as a racialized woman of color on the margins. Rather than submit to English social norms, erase, and forget her language, she insists on maintaining a structure of translation in her domestic space that accommodates her difference. The knave, like Gilbert, not only provides her comfort in her domestic space, ‘hire solas beo,’ but he also makes it possible for her to maintain a connection with the English world beyond her home while maintaining part of her identity. Alisaundre’s home, like other marginal spaces, becomes ‘both [a] sit[e] of repression and […] resistance’ (hooks, 1990, 342). She may be foreign and at a disadvantage, but if anything, she shows us over and over again that she is not a voiceless subaltern, resigned to being helpless, alone, and silent. Unlike stories such as The King of Tars where conversion leads to assimilation and racial reorientation, Alisaundre’s biography in the South English Legendary suggests that conversion to Christianity does not automatically erase, change, or reorient all of one’s identity markers. The identity marker that racializes Alisaundre

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4 Robert Mills has made significant contributions to our understanding of the way difference operates in the SEL. However, I disagree with Mills’ arguments about Alisaundre Becket’s assimilated, Christian identity. Mills concludes his analysis of Alisaundre’s identity with her conversion and overlooks this crucial postconversion moment that depicts how she has held onto her native language and how limited her contact with English society is.

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remains consistent over the course of her biography, both before and after her conversion; as a result, the compounded ‘race-religion’ marker (Heng, 2003, 204) that is so common to Middle English narratives doesn’t apply to Alisaundre Becket’s life. In her biography we witness one of the earliest moments of racial identity perceived, translated, and portrayed as distinct from religious identity. Because Alisaundre Becket remains raced even after her conversion, the effects of her conversion are not unilateral. Her conversion changes her faith, her name, and settles her into a new home, but she changes the Christian, English community in London, as well. The chaos she creates while crying for Gilbert disrupts the way the city moves and operates. Her home – raced and multilingual – diversifies the English landscape. With her presence, the citizens can no longer claim that English is a characteristic that Christians in London share. Alisaundre Becket’s biography in the SEL serves as an introduction to Thomas Becket; and as a result, who she is serves to characterize Thomas Becket. In the SEL, Thomas Becket is born and raised in Alisaundre’s raced and multilingual home. While his Christian education exposes him to Latin and his life in England exposes him to English and French, his mother exposes him to Arabic. While Arabic, English, and Latin inhabit the same narrative and are present in relationships – between mother and son, husband and wife, wife and knave – they eventually find a voice in a single person – Thomas Becket. The Thomas Becket of the South English Legendary then is a mixed-raced child, part-Arab, part-English, whose heritage language is Arabic. He is the child of a worldtraveling and multilingual father and a fiercely independent, determined, and resilient mother who was the daughter of an Amiral in the Holy Land, a native speaker of Arabic, and not originally Christian. He is also a great, Christian, English saint. In sum, he is a perfect colonizer. Anne J. Duggan’s research has shown us that Thomas Becket’s sainthood transforms Canterbury, England into one of the busiest pilgrimage sites of Europe. In the decades that follow his martyrdom, pilgrims flock to England, sailing over sea and trekking over land to visit Thomas Becket’s sites, relics, and shrines. His shrine even becomes a stopover on the crusaders’ journey from England to Jerusalem during the Third Crusade. King Richard I, Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury and his soldiers, Bishop Hubert Walter of Salisbury, among others either visited Thomas Becket themselves, took their crusading soldiers to his shrine, or took his banner into Jerusalem (Duggan, 2010, 76). These journeys from England to Jerusalem and from beyond England to England recall Alisaundre’s own journey. She traveled from a central site of Christian pilgrimage to marry an Englishman and then give birth to and raise a child whose body and sainthood transforms England into a central site of Christian pilgrimage. Situating Alisaundre Becket into Thomas Becket’s narrative transforms him into an empowering saint to consult for the colonial project of the Third Crusade. The Thomas Becket of the South English Legendary is a strong ally for

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the crusaders, because his mother’s story makes it possible to imagine the Holy Land as vulnerable for colonization. His ancestry, heritage, and language give him unique access to the holy land. In Thomas Becket, crusaders see the possible outcome of a successful crusade – a colonized Jerusalem where every ‘heathen’ converts to Christianity, where Englishmen move back and forth freely between London and Jerusalem, unburdened by language barriers. Thomas Becket was already a great Christian saint by the time the SEL was written. As a result, readers would only interpret details in his biographies as validating his greatness and worthiness as a saint. Given that, taking a resolute and willful woman and situating her so intimately in his narrative is a genius strategy to further his strength and resilience. Patriarchal power translates what is inappropriate and even shameful in women as worthy and admirable in men by suggesting that men make better use of the same characteristics. The characteristics that Thomas Becket are recognized for as a leader and martyr, that lead to his canonization, are the ones we see in Thomas Becket’s mother – his resistance, his ‘constancy’ that can be mistaken for ‘obstinacy’ (Staunton, 2001, 238), his resilience, his ‘struggl[e] to adapt himself to his changing roles and the different challenges which he faced at every step’ (Staunton, 2001, 2), and more than anything, the courage he displays before and during his death (Staunton, 2001, 202). In a patriarchal society, Alisaundre Becket’s untamed willfulness, which is a defining characteristic at every turn in the narrative, translates into holy steadfastness and determination in Thomas Becket. The South English Legendary suggests that what marginalizes women promotes men: the exceptionalism which causes Alisaundre’s marginalization and isolation translates to an exceptionalism in Thomas Becket that leads to the formation of a widespread cult in his name (Webster and Gelin, 2016). Over the course of her life, Alisaundre Becket uses the voice that racializes her and marks her as different to change her relationship to the spaces and people around her. When her son is born, she uses that voice to ‘al day rede: and wel ofte on him crie / Chaste lijf and clene for-to lede: and for-sake lecherie’ (112.210–1). But as soon as Thomas Becket comes of age, her voice is silenced. Her marginalization is materialized as she fades out from the pages of the biography until we learn about her death (113.217). And even if many in the Middle Ages read her story and knew Thomas Becket as the child of this woman, most readers now forget her role in his life, dismiss or marginalize her story, and execute the act she adamantly resisted over the course of her life – they erase her in their research, their writing, and their pedagogy.5 To write, to teach, to think about the Middle Ages is to create it. What kind of Middle Ages do we create for our students when we introduce them to this world by way of Alisaundre Becket? In her movement, they understand England to be part of an interconnected world. In her body, they see a raced England. In her experience, they learn how power isolates, suppresses, and silences women

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5 While modern scholars relegate Alisaundre Becket to the footnotes, she became a historical and literary sensation in the Victorian period. Charles Dickens discusses her in his A Child’s History of England (Dickens, [1851–53] 1905). Sir Lewis Morris writes a poem titled ‘Gilbert Beckett and the Fair Saracen’ (Morris, n.d.).

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of color and immigrants. In her voice, they hear a multilingual Christian community; they hear her desire for belonging, her strength to resist.

About the Author Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. She has received an MPhil from the University of Oxford. Her dissertation theorizes the racialization of Muslims and Islamophobia in premodern England. She is a founding member of Medievalists of Color and commits her time to making academia and medieval studies a more inclusive and racially conscious space (E-mail: [email protected]).

References Ahmed, S. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dickens, C. [1851–53] 1905. A Child’s History of England. New York: Charles Scribner’s son and London: Chapman & Hall. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/699/699-h/699-h. htm. Duggan, A.J. 2010. Canterbury: The Becket Effect. In Canterbury: A Medieval City, ed. C. Royer-Hemet, 67–91. Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Heng, G. 2003. Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy. New York: Columbia University Press. Heng, G. 2018. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. hooks, b. 1984. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Boston, MA: South End Press. hooks, b. 1990. Marginality as Site of Resistance. In Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, eds. R. Ferguson, M. Gever, T.T. Minh-ha, and C. West, 341– 343. New York: MIT Press. Horstmann, C., ed. 1887. The Early South-English Legendary or Lives of Saints. EETS o.s. 87. London: Tru¨bner and Co. Lankin, A.A. 2011. Shaping the World: The Geographies of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108. PhD Dissertation: University of California, Berkeley. Lorde, A. 1984. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. Morrison, T. 1993. The Bird Is in Your Hands. Nobel Lecture, The Nobel Prize, Stockholm, Sweden. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1993/morrison/ lecture/ Mills, R. 2010. The Early South English Legendary and Difference: Race, Place, Language, and Belief. In The Texts and Contexts of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108: The Shaping of English Vernacular Narrative, eds. K. Bell and J.N. Couch, 197–221.

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Medieval and Renaissance Authors and Texts, Volume: 6. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. Mills, R. 2011. Conversion, Translation and Becket’s ‘heathen’ Mother. In Rethinking the South English Legendaries, eds. H. Blurton and J. Wogan-Browne, 381–402. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Morris, M.L. n.d. Sir Lewis Morris’s Gilbert Beckett and the Fair Saracen. Robbins Library Digital Projects. https://d.lib.rochester.edu/crusades/text/gilbert-beckett-and-the-fairsaracen . Staunton, M., ed. 2001. The Lives of Thomas Becket. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Webster, P. and M.-P. Gelin, eds. 2016. The Cult of St. Thomas Becket in the Plantagenet World c.1170–c.1220. Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press.

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Original Article

‘Albyon, þat þo was an Ile’: Feminist materiality and nature in the Albina narrative

Heather Blatt Department of English, Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA.

Abstract The story of Albina and her sisters conventionally justifies the patriarchal foundation of Britain by presenting it as a conflict between men and women, in which the environment of Britain functions as a reflection and extension of the women. Reevaluating the narrative through feminist materiality and ecocritical studies, however, facilitates a fresh approach to understanding how medieval people perceived nature and human-nature relations. Far from functioning as a reflection of humans, the story showcases the active work of nature that is not subordinate to humans, but works with and alongside them, influencing them in ways that highlight the limits of anthropocentric readings of the narrative and nature’s role in it. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019) 10, 304–315. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-019-00139-7

The motto of the Canaveral National Seashore, on the east coast of central Florida, reads, ‘The way things used to be’ (Rein, 2016). This motto comments on the lack of development of the coast within the park, and presents such undeveloped, unsettled nature as belonging to the past. In doing so, it suggests that the natural history of this part of the United States is one of untrammeled nature, empty of human presence and influence. Such perceptions of natural space in the U. S. today have long historical roots reaching back to medieval literature.

Chapter 4 was originally published as Blatt, H. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019) 10: 304–315. https://doi.org/ 10.1057/s41280-019-00139-7.

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A story that functions as a largely-overlooked but critical node in this history is the tale of Albina and her sisters. Albina’s story appears as a prologue to popular medieval political and secular chronicles of Britain that mythologize the origins of the British people. These histories tell of how Brutus, a descendant of the Trojan Aeneas, came to civilize and rule over the land that would later be named for him, Britain. The prologue to Brutus’s history, drawn from the thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman poem Des Grantz Geantz, tells a yet earlier story of how an uninhabited isle came to be discovered, named, and settled. In the story, a woman, Albina, and her 32 sisters are married, but resist their marriages, and are abused by their husbands. In response, the sisters kill the husbands, and their father exiles his daughters by casting them to sea on a rudderless ship. Eventually they land upon an isle empty of human habitation and name it Albion, after the eldest sister, Albina. She and her sisters make their home upon Albion, flourish as they eat from its abundant flora and fauna, and are eventually succeeded by their offspring, a race of giants who are fathered by the devil. In turn, Brutus, a descendant of the Trojan Aeneas, arrives, defeats the giants in a genocidal sweep, and settles the island with his followers and descendants. In his memory they rename the isle Britain. The story was later included in Holinshed’s Chronicles. Shakespeare may have read it there and evoked it in The Tempest through the figure of Sycorax, exiled to an unnamed island, and her monstrous son Caliban, fathered by a devil (Forest-Hill, 2006, 245–6). The story continued to be related through the eighteenth century (Bernau, 2007, 112), further demonstrating its long cultural purchase. From the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, this story of Albina and her sisters circulated in two versions. One identifies the original home of Albina and her sisters as Greece. The other identifies that home as Syria. The story offers a rhetorical arc that characterizes Albina and her sisters as untamed and chaotic, a characterization that extends to include the isle itself. At the same time, the story also proffers descriptive detail focused on the abundance and fertile presence of nature, and situates the women and their offspring, the giants, as engaging with and even serving the agentive force of the isle’s environment. The narrative’s ideological investment in nature as a place where ‘there be dragons,’ a place in need of the civilizing improvements of patriarchal order (Mills, 1997, 46), necessitates representing the island as empty, awaiting a civilizing hand. That hand does not belong to Albina and her sisters, as the story makes clear, but to Brutus and his successors. Such a patriarchal, anthropocentric viewpoint becomes central to how the Albina myth provides a violent justification for the European male domination of nature (which becomes the white male domination of nature). This domination relies not just upon rejection of the women who originate from the east and come to inhabit the island, it also relies upon rejection of the isle’s environment, and the agency nature demonstrates in its influence on the women and its interactions with the giants.

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Critics routinely follow the narrative’s rhetorical trajectory, but ignore the suggestions of its descriptive detail, seeing in the Albina myth three sets of binary conflicts – conflicts between men and women, nature and civilization, and monster and human – that explain and celebrate the patriarchal foundation of Britain. A common element of these responses to the story emphasizes the emptiness of the island Albina and her sisters encounter. Julia Marvin notes that they ‘have an empty land and not so much as a bow and arrow for hunting’ (Marvin, 2001, 143). Yet such responses to the narrative fundamentally mischaracterize its description of the island: the land is not empty; it is fruitful and filled. The prose Brut acknowledges this environmental richness in describing the island as ‘all wyldernes,’ in which the women find ‘neiþer man ne woman ne child, but wylde bestes of diuers kyndes’ (Anonymous, 1906, 4). The isle burgeons with trees and animals: cornerstones of a diverse ecosystem. This disjointure between what the text details (an island full of nature’s things) and how the story rhetorically frames it (empty of humankind) – and the fact that critics have only recognized the latter meaning in the narrative – demonstrates how the erasure of nature takes place both in the Albina myth and in critics’ practices. Interpretations of the story that describe the island as uninhabited, like Martin’s above, exemplify how easily this erasure of nature can privilege an anthropocentric viewpoint. In this article, I emphasize the other ideas contained in medieval iterations of the Albina narrative by attending to the alternative interpretations suggested in its descriptive detail. In so doing, I examine two iterations of this story, drawn from mid- and late-fourteenth century England. These two iterations represent both the Greek tradition (The Riming Chronicle in the Auchinleck Manuscript, National Library of Scotland Adv MS 19.2.1), and the Syrian (the prose prologue added to the prose Brut in Bodleian MS Douce 323). As Sophia Liu has observed, the story reads differently when engaged from ecocritical perspectives (Liu, 2016, 62). Attending to the ways that the story incorporates nature as a nonhuman character becomes key to recognizing how nature actively contributes to narrative events alongside human and supernatural characters. In this way, the Albina myth highlights a moment when a medieval narrative opens a view onto a gender non-conforming, non-binary imagined past of human/nature relations not suffused by the patriarchal Christian narrative of the white European man’s dominion over the environment. In such moments we can catch glimpses of alternative modes of human relation to nature in ways that expand our understanding of how medieval people understood human-nature relations in their past, and used the past to imagine queer, non-dualistic gender relations. In queering this gendered, ecological history, the Albina narrative also showcases medieval representations of nature’s influence upon humans, influence that opens new ways for conceptualizing medieval theories about nature and nature-human interactions. Ecofeminism is helpful in allowing us to envision these alternative nature-human interactions in their cultural and

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political dimensions. Indeed, ecocritics like Val Plumwood have for more than two decades insisted that ‘feminism must address not only the forms of oppression which afflict humans but also those that afflict nature, [and] illuminate problems in the concept of anthropocentrism’ (Plumwood, 1997, 327). That is, ecofeminists argue that the domination of nature is linked with gender, class, race, and species, and these linkages can interact in ways that oppress all involved. Ecofeminists also point out that nature and culture are not in opposition, but function in cooperation, and that anthropocentrism is a philosophical stance needing critique. Ecofeminism thus helps draw attention to how the Albina story provides a foundational narrative about not simply the British people, but also their colonialist ecopolitics. Indeed, the Albina narrative laid the foundations for English relations with the Americas in ways that shape attitudes towards the environment today.

Nature’s agency in Albion Nature, at the start of events in the Albina myth, encompasses the woods and the trees and the inhabiting plants and beasts that fill the isle. Describing the nature of Albion at the time of the sisters’ arrival upon the isle, The Riming Chronicle explains that, ‘In þat time in all þis land / An acre of land þei ne fond, / Bot wode and wildernisse; / þai no fond tilþe more no lesse’ (Burnley and Wiggins, 2003, l. 323–6). Tilþe here refers to cultivation, whose absence indicates that the island demonstrates no signs of being worked by human hands: implicit in the term, as will be discussed further below in connection with the giants, is the assumption that cultivation functions as an exclusively human practice, one immediately recognizable to humans. Yet, although empty of people in this passage, and uncultivated by humans, the poem’s descriptive detail imagines an isle that provides an environment plentiful in trees, herbs, and wild beasts, reflecting a non-anthropocentric perspective at odds with the narrative’s rhetorical trajectory. As the story unfolds, the prose Brut prologue provides descriptive detail that emphasizes connections among nature and Albina and her sisters. The women directly encounter the environment of the isle as they exhaust the provisions from their ship and begin to live off the land. As the story describes this moment, when their food stores are depleted, ‘þei fedde hem with erbes & frutes in seson of þe yeer, and so þey lyved as þei beste myght’ (Anonymous, 1906, 4). Albina and her sisters consume fruits and herbs according to the season and begin to flourish. This passage asserts a movement from separation from the environment to living within it, and further connects the environment to the bodies of Albina and her sisters. They enter nature, unseparated and unsheltered from it. A review of the prose Brut’s prologue through a lens shaped by both ecofeminism and new materialisms reveals that the women do not dominate the

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landscape. Rather, the landscape – the environment of the isle, its nature – suffuses the women, even to the point of crafting alternative genders and nonbinaristic sexual relations, as I shall discuss in more detail below. The natureinstigated emergence of queered gender and sexual relations on the isle of Albion are part of the history the main Brut narrative rhetorically strives to replace. In this complex relationship between the isle of Albion and Albina and her sisters, we witness not the simple binary of a female, wild foundation replaced by a male, orderly foundation, but a more complex history that depicts an active, acting nature that crafts an alternative environment neither male nor female. The environment represented in the both the prose Brut prologue and The Riming Chronicle possesses a capacity to act and perform agency. Although the fate of the island remains the same, the Albina story in both iterations also gestures to how nature continues to make its presence felt even after the seeming civilization of the isle. The transformative relationship between the environment and the women becomes more explicit when the prose Brut narrative connects the causality of three subsequent developments: the women’s consumption of meat, the increase of their bodies, and the lustful desire they begin to experience. As the Brut narrative puts it, the women ‘tokyn flessh of diuers beestys, and bycomen wondir fatte, and so þei desirid mannes cumpanye and mannys kynde þat hem faylled. And for hete þey woxen wondir coraious of kynde þat hem faylled’ (Anonymous, 1906, 4). When I have taught this text, I explain this moment to my students through the medieval humoral discourse on which the passage relies: the women, consuming hot meat, become hot for men. The heat of the meat shifts the women’s naturally cold humors towards the heat of passion, mirroring their eventual coitus. This striking moment illustrates how humoral theory provides a framework that represents ways medieval people understood the material environment, and natural matter – that is, nature with its herbs and fruits and animals – to influence human bodies. By connecting bodily change to environmental consumption and sexual desire, the prose Brut version of the Albina myth uses the discourse of humoral theory to foreground the material environment and showcase its effects upon human bodies, emotions, and gender. It is because the women inhabit this place, consuming its flora and fauna, that they become inhabited by desire. Stacy Alaimo describes the connections between nature and human substance as creating ‘trans-corporeal’ bodies, which help us recognize how ‘the substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from the environment,’ and acknowledge that the environment itself is not an ‘inert, empty space’ or ‘a resource for human use,’ but is ‘a world of fleshly beings with their own needs, claims, and actions’ (Alaimo, 2010, 4). In a related vein, object-oriented feminism reminds us to take up the thing’s perspective and consider ‘how things are had’: that is, not to evaluate only how humans have access to objects, but also to consider humans like things, and ‘cultivat[e] posthuman solidarities’ (Behar, 2016, 29).

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Ecofeminism and object-oriented feminism thus promote examination of the interactions among Albina and her sisters and nature in ways that prompt identifying interconnections and solidarities among them, and reorient the audience around nature’s perspective, rather than that of humans alone. In these ways, the transcorporeal mingling of nature with Albina and her sisters means that they are no longer a group of sisters led by the anti-heroic, individualized Albina. Instead, Albina and her sisters have been ‘had’ by nature. Possessed by nature, they become part of its material, environmental network, coequal among themselves and acting with and within the environment, rather than sheltering from it in ship and lodges. Consequently, it is clear from the narrative details in the Albina stories that nature, in its impact on the women’s bodies, possesses active force. The wilderness is not merely backdrop, and nature’s matter, its herbs and fruits and wild beasts, are not passively surrendered for consumption. Nor are they simply figurative parallels for the women. Rather, nature permeates the women with its substance, and enmeshes them within its network. Yet if nature possesses agency, what motivates its actions? Towards what ends does the nature of this isle direct itself through and with the transcorporeal bodies of the women it coinhabits? What are, as Alaimo describes, its ‘needs, claims, and actions’? The Riming Chronicle indicates that nature’s agency is directed towards growth, plenty, and reproduction. Abounding with trees, woods, and wilderness, the isle Albion bends its active force towards plenteousness. It burgeons with a specific quality: fecundity. Alaimo’s points help reveal how the Albina myth invites us to see that the women’s sexual desire and reproduction is not a result of their own desire, but of nature’s agency and interaction with its things. In this respect, the story seems to reflect Alaimo’s notion of nature as more than a dwelling place for humans. It is substance: matter that mingles with its residential human matter, shaping their orientations to match its own. In this way, the nature of the isle intimately reorients the women’s identities and relationship to match its own, shaping Albina and her sisters’ expression of their sexuality and driving them towards procreation.

Queer nature in Albion By enmeshing itself with the women, nature acts in both versions of the legend as a conservative force that corrects the queer divergence from conventional gender roles symbolized in the women’s resistance to the marriages arranged for them by their father. In the preceding events of the myth, the sisters have shown themselves resistant to their role as wives. Their resistance originates in dismay at the thought of change, which they perceive as a degradation. The women become angry and rebellious; they refuse to accept their gendered role as women within the medieval institution of marriage. Their refusal means that, by

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resisting their subordinate role as wives, they also refuse the expectations and responsibilities accorded to wives in the Middle Ages, including procreation. The women desire to control their own transformations – as the story makes clear, so too does nature. In the prose Brut prologue, the sisters murder their husbands, thereby further ungendering themselves by shifting themselves into the masculine role in the household. In consequence, by the time of their arrival upon the isle, the sisters’ gender identity has become ambiguous: although assigned female at birth, they have resisted and refused to occupy that identity. These sisters are additionally queered by their material intimacy with the environment that begins to feed them and initiates their subsequent change. This change expresses itself in lust, the first step – from the perspective of nature – towards procreation, bringing forth. Within the framework of medieval gender expectations, which treat women as naturally cold-natured but easily susceptible to overwhelming lusts, nature influences the women in ways that seem to reorient them away from gender ambiguity and towards a bountiful womanhood epitomized in procreation. Nature feminizes the women through its transcorporeal engagement with their bodies. In the prose Brut prologue, the devil’s copulation with the women further emphasizes how nature influences and interacts with the bodies that inhabit it. Describing the arrival of the devil, the prose Brut reads: Whanne the Devyll that perceyued and wente by divers contres, & nome bodyes of þe eyre & likyng natures shad of men, & come into þe land of Albyon and lay by þe wymmen, and schad tho natures vpon hem, & they conceiued, and after þei broughten forth Geauntes. (Anonymous, 1906, 4) The devil decides to copulate with the women and does so using ‘natures shad of men’; that is, the devil takes on shapes defined by air and nature, and ‘sheds those natures’ upon the women. Thus, in the prose Brut, the devil becomes a vehicle for nature, enfolded within its shape, and through this interactive partnership the women conceive. In this respect, the prose Brut reflects ecofeminist notions about the permeability of bodies and the environment. The theories of Karen Barad help illuminate how the Brut version of the Albina myth imagines nature’s agency in ways that diverge from the anthropocentric vision of nature as an allegory of a human-like guiding intelligence, imagining it instead in different, non-human terms. For Barad, intra-action ‘signifies the mutual constitution of entangled agencies’ through which distinct agencies emerge, and notes that agencies ‘are only distinct in relation to their mutual entanglement; they don’t exist as individual elements’ (Barad, 2007, 33). Interpreting the relations among devil, women, and nature using Barad’s conceptual framework, we come to understand nature’s agency as operating through the entanglement of devil, human, vegetation, and beasts. For the Albina myth and its ecofeminist, materially-oriented interpretations, Barad’s

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argument serves as a reminder that the agency of nature is perceived and experienced in the story through its effects on matter: human matter, devilish matter, the matter of plants and beasts of the isle. Focusing on the role of agency in the text at this moment also emphasizes its fluid representations of women and nature’s agency. Intra-acting with the devil’s and nature’s substance, the women ‘bring forth,’ a phrase in the text that signals recognition of the women’s own agency. The prose Brut prologue emphasizes that reproductive agency belongs to all three parties working together: nature, the devil, and the women. Representing the conception in this way does not create a parallel between an allegorical Mother Nature and the human mothers laboring to produce. Nor does it represent a binary coupling of male and female. Instead, the prose Brut represents nature as reconfiguring, inhabiting, and transforming the matter of humans and devil. In spite of the seemingly conventional re-gendering of the women by nature, the Brut’s representation of reproduction actually presents an intriguingly queered collection of nontypically gendered characters: there is agendered, polysexual nature, the devil who presents as a man but is in biblical tradition asexual, and Albina and her gender-shifting sisters. Nature becomes a third sexual partner and a third parent, and as this third parent it facilitates the bringing forth of something new, something neither devil nor human, but wholly novel to the isle’s environment: the giants. The queer assemblage that produces the giants foregrounds a complexity of relations elided by Brutus’ later takeover. The present of the isle of Albion in the story, the past of Britain to its readers, presents a queer history. In both The Riming Chronicle and the prose Brut prologue, references to the women disappear immediately after conception of the giants. From this moment forward the narrative in both texts focuses on the giants. Figuratively, the women become decomposed into the island, reconstituted within the bodies of their offspring, in a final transformation. Decomposing the human gives rise to the posthuman. These relations, in a reading of the story informed by ecofeminism and object-oriented feminism, showcase elements of the texts concealed by anthropocentric readings of the story and interpretations of nature. The disappearance of the women from the narrative has been referred to by critics as erasure, their being ‘replaced by – subsumed within – gross corpora’ (Cohen, 1999, 49). Yet disappearance and erasure are concepts and developments in the story that need further evaluation. Just as critical interpretations of the island as uninhabited prior to the arrival of Albina and her sisters require a perspective that sets aside plants and animals as inhabitants, framing the women’s state by the story’s conclusion as ‘erased’ privileges an anthropocentric narrative and ignores how both texts recognize collective, cooperative identities. This critical practice assumes that identifying human existence relies upon human separation from nature. In contrast, I would suggest another interpretation of the women’s status at the conclusion of the story, which pays close

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attention to how the texts characterize their relationship to nature. Before the women seemingly disappear, they represent and act with the nature of the isle working to its best effect, bent on the act of generation regardless of circumstances. Like the ‘wode and wildernisse’ that surrounds them in the narratives of the prose Brut and The Riming Chronicle, they grow within and flourish in nature. The texts’ characterization of the enmeshment of the women with nature means that they are not erased, but rather sink into and become the nature that has enfolded, infused, and reoriented them. They are not subsumed within the flesh of their children but are wholly ‘intermeshed’ with the isle itself, to use Alaimo’s term (Alaimo, 2010, 2). Rather than seeing absence as a sign of patriarchally-motivated erasure, we can instead (or also) see this disappearance as a non-anthropocentric entanglement of women and isle, and perceive it not as absence, but as a different kind of presence. This counter-interpretation pushes toward a recognition of identity as capacious, multiple, not separable by species, but as speaking with a polyvocal, inseparable voice. When nature speaks at the end of the story, it speaks with a voice that combines trees, wild beasts, women, and giants.

Nature, giants, and nonhuman cultivation The giants can consequently be understood not simply as the children of colonizers, but as offspring of the environmental plenteousness of the isle, as nature’s children. Indeed, the narratives offer a contrasting arc for the giants that distinguishes them from their mothers. In The Riming Chronicle, the arc involving the women moves from focusing on human alterations to the environment as Albina and her sisters build lodges – that is, they modify the landscape for their purposes, producing the tilþe initially absent from the isle – to their orientation towards nature before becoming, finally, part of a natural collective. The arc involving the giants is one in which modification of the landscape never takes place. Instead, says the prose Brut, they ‘dwellyd in Caves and hulles at here wille’ (Anonymous, 1906, 4). The Riming Chronicle adds that ‘In grete hilles þai woned here / & liued bi erbes & bi wilde dere; / Milke & water þai dronk elles’ (Burnley and Wiggins, 2003, l. 379–81). It later states that ‘Schepe þai hadde’ (383), meaning that they also cultivated sheep, using their wool for clothes. In these descriptions, the texts emphasize that the giants do not live apart from nature, but within it. In their choice not to build, but instead to inhabit naturally-provided caves and hillside dwellings, the giants reject the colonizing efforts of their mothers and live entangled within the flora and fauna of their third parent, nature. Their rejection of colonization and European-style modes of cultivation is pronounced enough that, when in The Riming Chronicle Brutus arrives, the isle once again seems to appear as it did

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before the arrival of Albina and her sisters: ‘Al was wode & and wildernisse, / Her was no tilþe, more no lesse’ (Burnley and Wiggins, 2003, 365–6). Yet even as they choose not to modify the landscape, the giants do manipulate nature, an act reflected in their cultivation of sheep and consumption of milk. Relying upon sheep for wool and milk requires, if not outright domestication, then certainly some development of livestock. Nevertheless, the giants’ practices strikingly require no clearing of land for pasturage. Emerging from permeable, transcorporeal bodies full of nature’s substance, the giants, even more than their human mothers, are not separate from, but interact with the natural environmental network of the isle. That is, while critics assessing the Albina myth often note a distinction between nature and culture – an ideological frame that the rhetorical arc of the narrative promotes – the descriptive detail in both the Brut and The Riming Chronicle provides evidence for another framework altogether, a framework in which nature and culture intertwine. Nature is cultured; nature provides the material of culture; nature and the giants work together to enact culture. In restoring and following nature’s plan for the isle, the giants both acknowledge nature’s authority to determine environment, and also subordinate and accommodate themselves to this plan so effectively that the land, despite the giants’ livestock manipulations, still appears to be all ‘wode & wildernisse.’ Recognizing that the giants have cultivated the landscape in ways that both support nature’s design and also accommodate their own needs requires recognizing wilderness as nature’s cultivation. Furthermore, recognizing nature’s work of cultivation requires setting aside the false binary of ‘nature v. culture’ to acknowledge instead that nature can be and can produce culture, here made manifest through the giants’ and nature’s cultivation of the isle. In place of this binary, we might instead recognize that the story presents its readers with natureculture, a neologism developed by Donna Haraway (Haraway, 2003). The concept of natureculture emphasizes the entanglement of nature and culture that is inseparable in ecological relationships. According to the alternative reading suggested in the narratives’ descriptive detail, Brutus’ arrival offers not the triumphal colonization that the legend’s narrative trajectory asserts, but is rather an erasure of the legacy of Albina and her sisters, one that also elides the cultivation practices of the giants and nature, and in consequence oppresses nature itself. The Albina myth and its place in the Brut narrative and The Riming Chronicle reveal that oppression of nature and marginalized communities go hand-in-hand in the dominant medieval narrative of British history that colonists brought to the Americas. The alternative reading provided by the descriptive detail in these two versions of the legend reveals the existence of a different perspective in England from the one most commonly associated with later English colonizers. That Brutus and his compatriots – represented and claimed as heroic, larger-than-life men with the capacity to settle Albion and make it Britain –choose not to notice, or fail to see evidence of natureculture management anticipates how, a couple

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centuries later, Europeans similarly overlooked signs of cultivation and land management when settling North America. In viewing Native Americans as not using the land, and therefore as having no need to claim or own it, Europeans justified the displacement of indigenous peoples in North America (Huggan and Tiffin, 2015, 7–11). In later narratives of conquest, the legacy of Brutus is emphasized, while the alternative perspectives in the prose Brut prologue and The Rimming Chronicle have been silenced. I hope that I have, in privileging the perspective of nature, shown how medieval English writers described an alternative ecological position, even as the rhetorical trajectory of their narratives resisted acknowledging this view of nature and human relationships to nature. Nature’s efforts in the Albina stories do not simply assert the animality of humans; instead, they show how nature contributes to, affects, and even reshapes humans, from their humors to their gender and their relationships to the land. Encountering these perspectives in historical contexts encourages us not only to trace but also to question the long roots of environmental narratives still operative today.

Ac knowledgem ents Thanks are due to Alison Langdon for her responses to an early version of this paper presented at the Sewanee Medieval Colloquium in 2018. My appreciation goes to Wanda Raiford and Martha Schoolman for subsequent comments. Finally, heartfelt gratitude go to the editors of this issue for generous criticism and insightful suggestions.

About the Author Heather Blatt is Associate Professor of English Literature at Florida International University. Her publications include Participatory Reading in LateMedieval England (Manchester University Press, 2018). She is currently working on a study of book-and-body relations in late medieval reading culture (E-mail: [email protected]).

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Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Behar, K. 2016. The Other Woman. In After the ‘Speculative Turn’: Realism, Philosophy, and Feminism, eds. K. Kolozova and E.A. Joy, 27–38. Brooklyn, NY: punctum books. Bernau, A. 2007. Myths of Origin and the Struggle over Nationhood. In Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England, eds. G. McMullan and D. Matthews, 106–18. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Burnley, D. and A. Wiggins, eds. 2003. The Auchinleck Manuscript. Edinburgh, UK: National Library of Scotland. https://auchinleck.nls.uk/mss/smc.html. Cohen, J.J. 1999. Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages. Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press. Forest-Hill, L. 2006. Giants and Enemies of God: The Relationship between Caliban and Prospero from the Perspective of Insular Literary Tradition. In Shakespeare Survey 59, Editing Shakespeare, ed. P. Holland, 239–53. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Haraway, D. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press. Huggan, G. and H. Tiffin. 2015. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Liu, S.Y. 2016. One Island, Two Founding Myths: When Albion Turns into Britain. In Landscape, Seascape, and the Eco-Spatial Imagination, eds. S. C. Estok, I. Wang, and J. White, 41–52. New York: Routledge. Marvin, J. 2001. Albine and Isabelle: Regicidal Queens and the Historical Imagination of the Anglo-Norman Prose Brut Chronicles. In Arthurian Literature XVIII, ed. K. Busby, 143–93. Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer. Mills, C.W. 1997. The Racial Contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Plumwood, V. 1997. Androcentrism and Anthropocentrism: Parallels and Politics. In Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature, ed. K.J. Warren, 327–55. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Rein, L. 2016. As National Park Service confronts sexual harassment, this dysfunctional park is Exhibit A. The Washington Post, 2 July. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ powerpost/wp/2016/07/02/as-national-park-service-confronts-a-sexual-harassment-thisdysfunctional-park-is-exhibit-a/ .

Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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Original Article

By the skin of its teeth: Walrus ivory, the ar tisan, and other bodies

Emma Le Pou´ esard Department of Art History and Archeology, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA.

Abstract This feminist ecocritical study of an eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon walrus ivory pyx uncovers the object as a site where human and nonhuman, divine and earthly, feminine and masculine, and material and represented bodies cohabit and mingle. Using the work of feminists Karen Barad, Nancy Tuana, and Stacy Alaimo, the essay demonstrates how the various entities that make up the object evade clear categorization, blurring binaries. The pyx and the chalice depicted on its side function as containers for the divine body of Christ and as representations of the Virgin’s idealized womb. Complicating neat narratives, the essay presents the pyx as a site of interaction for multitudinous bodies. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019) 10, 316–325. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-019-00135-x

In the Victoria and Albert Museum, an eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon walrus ivory pyx – a round receptacle for the Eucharist – presents a curious narrative [Figure 1]. Beneath a fluted dome, a monk carrying a chalice approaches a vested altar upon which a candlestick is set. To the right, two tonsured monks deep in conversation stand beneath a rounded arch. Next to them, a monk, possibly the same figure seen carrying the chalice earlier, lies prostrate, his hands reaching towards a standing figure that gestures towards him. To the right of the standing figure, behind a knotted curtain and atop an arcaded stool, sits a large

Chapter 5 was originally published as Le Pouésard, E. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019) 10: 316–325. https://doi.org/ 10.1057/s41280-019-00135-x.

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By the skin of its teeth

Figure 1: Box, second quarter of the 11th century, walrus, ivory, probably made in Winchester (museum no. 268-1867). Photograph  The Victoria & Albert Museum, London. http://collections. vam.ac.uk/item/O92588/box-unknown/.

chalice. A pair of hinges in the roll molding above the prostrate monk attest to a missing lid. The scholarship on the pyx has tried to find the literary source of the narrative and secure a probable date of manufacture. The issue in this respect has been whether this object is attributable to the Anglo-Saxon period or to the postconquest Norman era. Earlier literature has tended to argue the latter and place the pyx in the twelfth century on the basis of sculptural and architectural style (Longhurst, 1927; Heslop, 1981; Lasko, 1984). This attribution was rejected by Paul Williamson in favor of an early eleventh-century date, which he argues for on the basis of style, especially in the rendition of the altars, the draperies, and the hanging censer (Williamson, 2010). The question of the narrative remains unresolved. Its subject has been theorized variably as: the theft of a chalice by a monk; a miracle of St. Lawrence, in which he repairs a broken chalice; and a representation of a liturgical drama of the visitatio Sepulchri, the visit of the Three Maries to the sepulcher.1 The pyx presents evidence for each of these theories, but settling the debate is outside the scope of this essay.

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1 See: Longhurst (1927), Goldschmidt (1926), Beckwith (1972), and Heslop (1981).

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Instead, I apply a feminist ecocritical framework to this object to destabilize, de-normalize, and un-fix dichotomies such as male/female, human/animal, and nature/culture. Bodies, human and animal, material and represented, male and female, cohabit and mingle on this pyx: the walrus gives its tusk over to figural depictions of monks; the liturgical vessels (the chalice and the pyx) that contain the Eucharistic wine and wafer stand in for the womb of the Virgin Mary as container for the body of Christ; the altar and the tomb evoke the missing divine body of the Resurrected Christ; the medium of the pyx – ivory – signals feminine flesh, especially that of the Virgin. The entanglements of these various elements demonstrate how the pyx functions as a locus of interaction for bodies that evade categorization. The pyx challenges the rational belief that the world is made of separate entities with determinate boundaries, presenting instead a composition that, in its refusal to adhere to clear boundaries, is remarkably queer. The blurring of the multitudinous entities on the pyx subjugate attempts to tame the material and erase the body of the walrus through the act of carving. The work of the feminist theorist Karen Barad is particularly helpful in thinking through human and nonhuman interactions on the pyx. Barad tackles the ingrained notion of ‘separate entities,’ employing a queer feminist lens to bring to light how material-discursive agencies – entanglements of unfixed, generative matter – give rise to boundaries (Barad, 2006, 20–2; Barad, 2007). Boundaries come about through and in matter, forming what Barad terms an ‘exteriority within,’ by means of which a subject and object arise (Barad, 2006, 21). This is a phenomenology that does not presume an object/subject dichotomy: instead, the Other ‘is irreducibly and materially bound to, threaded through, the ‘‘self’’ – a diffraction/dispersion of identity’ (Barad, 2012, 217). The self becomes a contested space that is constituted by iterations of the ‘Other’ within it. In a similar vein, Nancy Tuana’s ‘viscous porosity’ and Stacy Alaimo’s ‘trans-corporeality’ dismantle binaries to describe the simultaneous willingness and recalcitrance of bodies to mingle and the indeterminacy of boundaries between these bodies (Tuana, 2008; Alaimo, 2010). On the pyx, each seemingly self-containing entity – the monk, the chalice, the ivory – is manifested through and elaborated against the other entities that inhabit the object.

A meeting in the flesh

2 See: Webster (2014), Lund (2014), Bowker (1899, 157–63), and Cammann (1954).

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Few records recount how human and walrus bodies met in the medieval period. In one of them, we read that c. 880, Ohthere, a Norse navigator, visited the court of Alfred the Great of England in Wessex, making gifts of walrus tusks and hides and recounting tales of the ‘whale-horse.’2 The Norwegian chieftain hunted walruses on the White Sea off the northwest coast of Russia and bombastically reported that a party of six men could hunt more than 60 walruses in just two days (Lund, 2014). One can only surmise the carnage of

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walrus hunting expeditions, as few sources relate such events, and none with details regarding the strength of the hunting party or the duration of the hunt. Given that female walruses bear tusks too, we might wonder whether the hunt followed the patterns of seasonal mating of these mammals.3 The females, weakened by a 15-month-long gestation period and anchored at shore for up to two years to rear the newly-born pups, were easy targets for hunters, who were keen for their blubber, hide, and tusks (Berlin, 2013). Despite its buttery appearance, ivory is difficult to carve, requiring sturdy metal tools and several preparatory steps. This difficult carving characterizes the embodied relationship of the artisan with this medium. Little is recorded of medieval ivory carving techniques, although the twelfth-century monk Theophilus, in De Diversis Artibus, summarily describes some of the processes and tools used, including an array of saws, drills, knives, chisels, gouges, gravers, and scorpers (Dandridge, 2011). In order to create a suitable surface for carving, the outer enamel and cementum must be discarded, as they are too brittle to withstand these tools. Only the dentine is adequate for carving because its fine intercellular matrix shears evenly in all directions (Dandridge, 2011; MacPhee, 2011). Complicating the matter, walrus ivory, unlike elephant ivory, features a layer of secondary dentine directly around the pulp cavity that is coarser in texture and more variegated in color than its primary counterpart (Dandridge, 2011; MacPhee 2011). This secondary dentine is also more brittle than primary dentine and thus tends to be avoided by artisans (Dandridge, 2011).4 Once the outer layers have been removed, the dentine is further prepared for carving. Theophilus describes how the ivory ground is first covered in chalk, the design applied in lead and confirmed with an awl, and the dentine finally carved (Theophilus, 1961). The final product is then polished with a lightly abrasive substance such as wood ash and smoothed with walnut oil (Theophilus, 1961). Like the hunt that precedes it, the act of carving is marked by violence that doubles as an act of erasure. The origin of the tooth and the means by which it arrived in the workshop are obscured as the artisan strips the tooth of its protective enamel and cementum layers, divorcing it from its primary defensive function. When the uncarvable outer enamel layer is removed from the tusk, the material traces that index the life of the animal – the notches and scratches from usage and defense – are erased. Erasing and aestheticizing violence are one end of a process to tame and subjugate the animal’s body, rendering it appropriate, desirable, and inoffensive to the beholder. The pyx’s historiated surface was created using an array of tools made of a metal alloy strong enough to pierce through the enamel and cementum to get to the dentine within. The chisels, gouges, and scorpers used to carve the tooth resembled miniature versions of the spears and knives that would have been used to kill, skin, and dismember the walrus. In this anesthetized form, the tusk no longer poses a threat. As will be

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3 I am grateful to Elizabeth Hutchinson for this observation.

4 In cases of exceptional artistry, this secondary dentine is used for added effects: on a Crucified Christ from c. 1300, secondary dentine is exploited to depict Christ’s mottled chest (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2005.274).

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seen below, semantic materiality and symbolism re-inscribe this purified vessel with femininity.

Porosity

5 In the case of chess pieces, this raises the question whether these rather large pieces were actually used to play the game or served a more decorative function.

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This violence is only one facet of the relationship between maker and medium. Another aspect of this relationship has to do with the porosity of the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman entities involved. Stacy Alaimo’s elaboration of trans-corporeality is useful to consider the mingling of these bodies. She writes: ‘the human body is never a rigidly enclosed, protected entity, but is vulnerable to the substances and flows of its environments’ (Alaimo, 2010, 28). Similarly, Nancy Tuana conceptualizes ‘viscous porosity,’ an interactionism that ‘acknowledges both the agency of materiality and the porosity of entities […], the robust porosity between phenomena that destabilizes any effort to finalize a nature/culture divide’ (Tuana, 2008, 191–2). Viscous porosity underlines the unfixity of boundaries and matter’s agential capacity for recalcitrance. It also ‘undermines any effort to make an ontological division into kinds – natural and cultural – where the edges are clean and the interactions at best additive,’ further challenging the assumption of discrete entities (Tuana, 2008, 196). Porosity is a fitting framework for ivory and skin, which readily absorb materials with which they interact. Ivory, being hygroscopic, is particularly susceptible to oils from human skin and thus, materially speaking, always bears traces of its encounters with humans (Cutler, 1985; Dandridge, 2011). Over time, repeated and prolonged exposure to these oils via manipulation transforms its original white translucency into a brittle and opaque yellowness (Sand, 2014). The good condition in which many ivory objects survive – such as, for instance, twelfth-century walrus ivory game pieces in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1988.158 and 1970.324.4) – might indicate that their owners were aware of this susceptibility and took care to limit handling.5 Such restraint was impossible for the artisan, who needed a firm grip on the tusk to subjugate it to his artistic vision. The dentine imbibed these oils, bearing testament to the fusional encounter between maker and medium.

Skin on skin Touching ivory, a material that, in its texture and readiness to absorb heat, feels remarkably like human skin, is uncanny. When they meet, ivory and skin bridge their alterity. Touch between human skin and nonhuman ivory involves a recognition of sameness as much as one of difference, an ‘exteriority within’ (Barad, 2006, 21). The pyx bears witness to this in its inclusion of carved hands,

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which call to mind the carving hand. Stroking, grasping, and gesturing, they echo the actions performed by the artisan and users of the object. These hands, six in total, are splayed like the fins of the walrus, all fingers kept together but the thumb. They gesture towards the tactility of the object, whose elliptical form is made to be nestled in the palm of the hand, cradled by the fingers. The textured surface requires a close eye to travel along its storied forms. The tiny hands beckon, pulling the viewer in. When these represented hands meet a body, this body is not just the represented human body, but the ivory which gives itself to that representation. When the ivory hand on the surface of the dentine touches the ivory ground, or the ivory mantle, or the ivory head, it is as though it is touching itself, ‘touching the stranger within,’ a touch characterized by ‘ambiguity/undecidability/indeterminacy’ (Barad, 2012, 212, and 2015, 401).

Giving flesh The figure of the prostrate monk is punctured by and elaborated against the ‘Other’ that the walrus constitutes, further obscuring the boundary between human and nonhuman. Sprawled on his stomach, his posture recalls that of the walrus. The folds in the monk’s habit resonate with the wrinkled skin of the walrus; the arc of his thumb echoes that of the tusks; the arch of his back the arch between the marine mammal’s hump and head. Carved into this animal surface is a human figure recalling the physicality of the animal whose flesh he inhabits. The walrus-monk aptly illustrates Timothy Morton’s contention that surfaces are a testament to their entanglements with other things (Morton, 2014, 272), where the walrus is a spectral presence that echoes the irreducible, undefinable excess of the ‘thing.’ On the surface of the walrus’s flesh, the human body meets the animal body in a manner that eludes its spectator. Several medieval ivory objects bear representations of the animal from which the tusks were severed, pointing to the medieval artisan’s interest in referencing the animal in the medium. Many an odd-looking elephant inhabits the flesh of elephantine ivory, for instance on an eleventh- or twelfth-century oliphant in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (04.3.177) and on a fragment of a fourteenth-century casket in the Cleveland Museum of Art (1978.39b). It is impossible to know whether the ambiguous me´lange of animal and human in the walrus-monk was intentional, yet this example jumps out in the context of the mingling of entities on the pyx.

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Fleshing out The pyx’s function as a receptacle and the prominent depiction of two eucharistic chalices bring us back to the symbolism of Mary’s womb. In twelfthcentury Europe, ivory came symbolically and materially to represent womanly flesh generally and the Virgin’s womb specifically. A famous example occurs in the Song of Songs, where the Sponsa’s neck is described as ‘a tower of ivory’ (Song of Songs 7.4) (Barker et al., 2011). The Virgin was additionally linked to the material of ivory through her equivalence to the ivory Throne of Solomon. The throne and the Virgin are both ivory seats for wisdom, personified by Solomon in the former case and by Christ in the latter (Gue´rin, 2013). Following the thread of Mary as container, the chalice for the blood of Christ was theologically linked to His mother’s womb, a proto fount for the ‘union between humanity and divinity’ (Thurlkill, 2007, 33). Mary’s body as the container in which God dwells was a conceit repeated on a scale of a wide spectrum: at the monumental end stood the Church and at the diminutive one, liturgical objects such as chalices and pyxides. The material and depicted receptacles are both feminized bodies made to contain the divine, thereby made divine themselves. The symbolic links between the material of this pyx, the Virgin’s womb, and the function of the pyx and the chalice as containers for the Eucharistic wafer and wine are thus multiple and complex. In a manner of speaking, the pyx represents a femininity – divine in this case – that is corporealized and materialized, but that, through its representation in an animal material, is also animalized, and in this way made docile. Ivory becomes a material signifier for divine feminine flesh, which in turn semantically codes its material prison. The ‘exteriority within’ that typifies the relationship between the material and the representations it bears is ambiguous and reciprocal, generative and restrictive. The divinity of Mary as object/woman, as mater/matter, is hinted at in the narrative on the pyx by the respectfully garbed hands of the monk cradling the chalice. His head is lowered onto its rim, perhaps to inhale the odor of sanctity of the eucharistic wine inside. His mortal flesh must not touch the holy object, a striking parallel to the pyx itself, which was likely handled with restraint by ecclesiastics performing liturgical rituals. Like Mary’s womb, the pyx remains inviolate and pure. No matter that the monk and the chalice are of the same ivory flesh, the object is divine and must be treated as such. The garbed hands counter their naked counterparts’ entreaties of the viewer to touch, cruelly reminding him he must not. We encounter the second representation of the chalice once we have gone full circle around the pyx. Akin to a game of hide and seek, the rediscovered chalice is placed as though hidden behind the altar onto which the monk in the first scene is about to place the first chalice. The proximity of both representations of

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this liturgical object to the altar, which symbolizes the empty tomb of the Risen Christ, further ties together these multitudinous bodies, both absent and present, non/human and divine. In this, the pyx recalls Ambrose’s metaphor in De Virginibus likening the bodies of virgins to altars receiving the body of Christ, feminine vessels for divine male flesh in a case of imitatio Mariae (Ambrose, 2010, 1.37–8). The walrus, the chalice, the pyx, and their contents all fall somewhere along the nonhuman spectrum: on the pyx, the walrus is humanized through the flesh it bears in its own and the flesh that carved it while Christ and Mary evoke the human as much as the divine. Neither human nor nonhuman, and not divine, either, these entities evade clear categorization. Despite the pyx’s theological over-coding and its subjugation to meaning and representation, the excessiveness of the matter at hand triumphantly remains. Try as the artisan might to hide the oppression of the walrus’s body with technical proficiency, defiant cracks rupture the smooth historiated surface, and secondary dentine bursts forth from beneath, piercing through its preferred counterpart. ‘Wild matter’ is not wholly tame-able, try as we might (Alaimo, 2010, 43). The pyx allows us to see our flesh through its flesh, and its flesh through our own. From ivory to human flesh and back to animal flesh, we oscillate between these categories. Human and nonhuman blur and separate and blur again. In the end, what is contained and what is container? The feminine body is barely contained by its ivory, the human form hovers on the surface, and the walrus bursts forth, resisting taming and erasure by the skin of its teeth.

Ac knowledgem ents I am grateful to Emogene Schilling Cataldo, Olivia Clemens, Claire Dillon, and Adam Harris Levine for their attentive feedback on earlier versions of this paper.

About the Author Emma Le Poue´sard is a doctoral student in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. Her research focuses primarily on fourteenth-century Parisian ‘secular’ ivories, which she studies through ecocritical, feminist, and new materialist lenses. Her work seeks to destabilize pernicious binaries applied to medieval art, such as sacred/secular and high/low (E-mail: [email protected]).

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References Alaimo, S. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Ambrose. 2010. De Virginibus. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols. Barad, K. 2006. Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. In Belief, Bodies, and Being: Feminist Reflections on Embodiment, ed. D. Orr, et al., 11–36. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Barad, K. 2012. On Touching – The Inhuman that Therefore I am. Differences 23(3): 206–223. Barad, K. 2015. Transmaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings. GLQ: Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 21(2–3): 387–422. Barker, K.L., M.L. Strauss, and R.F. Youngblood. 2011. NIV Study Bible. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House. Beckwith, J. 1972. Ivory Carvings in Early Medieval England. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols. Berlin, J. 2013. The Unexpected Walrus. National Geographic 224(6): 117, 119–26, 128. Bowker, A., ed. 1899. Alfred the Great; containing chapters on his life and times, by Frederick Harrison, an introduction by Sir Walter Besant and a poem by the Poet Laureate. London: A. and C. Black. Cammann, S. 1954. Carvings in Walrus Ivory. University Museum Bulletin 18(3): 3–31. Cutler, A. 1985. The Craft of Ivory: Sources, Techniques, and Uses in the Mediterranean World, AD 1200–1400. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, Research Library and Collection. Dandridge, P. 2011. From Tusk to Treasure: Parts I and II. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2011/the-game-of-kings-medievalivory-chessmen-from-the-isle-of-lewis/exhibition-blog/game-of-kings/blog/from-tusk-totreasure. Goldschmidt, A. 1926. Die Elfenbeinskulpturen aus der romanischen Zeit. Berlin, Germany: Bruno Cassirer. Gue´rin, S. 2013. Meaningful Spectacles: Gothic Ivories Staging the Divine. The Art Bulletin 9: 53–77. Heslop. J.A. 1981. A Walrus Ivory Pyx and the visitatio sepulchri. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 44: 157–60. Lasko, P. 1984. Anglo-Saxon or Norman? Observations on Some Ivory Carvings in the English Romanesque Exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. The Burlington Magazine 126(973): 216–25. Longhurst, M.H. 1927. Catalogue of Carvings in Ivory. London: Board of Education. Lund, N. 2014. Ohthere. In The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon England, 2nd ed., ed. M. Lapidge, et al., 349–50. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons. MacPhee, R.D.E. 2011. The Walrus and its Tusks. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2011/the-game-of-kings-medieval-ivorychessmen-from-the-isle-of-lewis/exhibition-blog/game-of-kings/blog/the-walrus-and-itstusks.

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Morton, T. 2014. The Liminal Space between Things: Epiphany and the Physical. In Material Ecocriticism, ed. S. Iovino and S. Opperman, 269–79. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Sand, A. 2014. Materia Meditandi: Haptic Perception and Some Parisian Ivories of the Virgin and Child, ca. 1300. Different Visions: A Journal of New Perspectives on Medieval Art 4: 1–28. Theophilus. 1961. The Various Arts, trans. C. R. Dodwell. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons. Thurlkill, M.F. 2007. Holy Women, Holy Vessels: Mary and Fatima in Medieval Christianity and Shi’ite Islam. Pakistan Journal of Women’s Studies 14(2): 27–51. Tuana, N. 2008. Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina. In Material Feminisms, ed. S. Alaimo and S. Hekman 188–212. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Webster, L. 2014. Bone and Ivory Carving. In The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of AngloSaxon England, 2nd ed., ed. M. Lapidge, et al., 71–2. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons. Williamson, P. 2010. Medieval Ivory Carvings. Early Christian to Romanesque. London: V&A Publishing.

Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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Original Article

‘Woful womman, confor tlees’: Failed maternity and maternal grief as feminist issues

Mary Beth Long Department of English, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR, USA.

Abstract Reproductive health has long been central to feminist inquiry, but cultural taboos tend to silence full discussion of the topic. This piece considers reproductive loss, broadly defined, as a feminist issue, revisiting prominent literary exemplars of maternity through the narrower lenses of failed maternity and grief. Specifically, it discusses Marian lyrics and Margery Kempe’s Boke not simply as avenues for Christian or Marian meditation but as acknowledgment of the shared cultural experience of reproductive loss and, potentially, as textual responses to the gendering and regulation of public lament for such loss. These texts’ overt recognition of the deep connection between birth and death provides spaces to address failed maternity and maternal grief that our scholarship does not yet recognize. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019) 10, 326–343. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-019-00138-8 1 Hoccleve’s loose translation of Guillaume de Deguilleville’s ‘Le Pe`lerinage de ˆ me’ was l’A completed before 1413 and is extant in ten manuscripts. For a partial manuscript history, see Johnson (2001).

I n t r o d u c t i o n : M a r y, t h e C r u c i f i x i o n , a n d t h e p o e t i c s of maternal grief Thomas Hoccleve’s early fifteenth-century poem ‘Complaint of the Virgin’ verbalizes a keening.1 It depicts, unflinchingly, the frantic mental energies of fresh grief: a mother in the shocked early acknowledgment of her child’s death.

Chapter 6 was originally published as Long, M. B. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019) 10: 326–343. https://doi.org/ 10.1057/s41280-019-00138-8.

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Mary blames Biblical figures for the cruel surprise of the Crucifixion, beginning with her direct address to God himself as ‘fers’ and ‘cruel’: O fadir God, how fers and how cruel, In whom thee list or wilt, canst thow thee make. Whom wilt thow spare, ne wot I neuere a deel, Syn thow thy sone hast to the deeth betake. (1–4)2 How can God be trusted to keep anyone safe if he won’t protect his own sinless, harmless son? Mary indicts others who, in her view, opted not to prepare her for this moment: her parents, the Holy Ghost, Gabriel, Elizabeth, the Samaritan women who praised her womb and teats. Trapped as awkward witness, the reader might be briefly distracted by the potential blasphemy of this bereaved Mary. But as harsh as her words are, they are clearly meant to be read as symptoms of her grief, not her lack of faith. What is radical in this poem is Mary’s occupation of verbal and affective spaces for her mourning, trusting that the reader will accept its necessity. Mary’s case for the reader’s empathy in the first several stanzas relies largely on antithesis, evoking the stark contrasts of her emotional life before and after grief. Built into her borderline-blasphemous accusations is the ruing of her past naı¨vete´ in having trusted her protectors. Similarly, she highlights the distinction between her memory of Christ’s infancy and the pain of the current moment, describing her current condition primarily as abruptly deprived of maternal joy:3 I hadde ioye entiere and also gladnesse Whan thow betook Him me to clothe and wrappe In mannes flessh. I wend, in sothfastnesse, Have had for euere ioye by the lappe. But now hath sorwe caught me with his trappe. My ioye hath made a permutacioun With wepyng and eek lamentacioun. […]

2 All Hoccleve quotations use the line numbers of Hoccleve ([1892, 1925] 1970, 1–8).

3 For further discussion of antithesis in this poem, see Keiser (1985) and Bryan (2002).

Syn my ioye is me rafte, my grace is lorne. […] My blissyng into peyne Retorned is. Of ioye am I bareyne. (8–14; 35; 39–40; emphases mine) Mary’s loss of ‘joye’ is here portrayed as a theft. Joy was rightfully hers, to be expected with the territory of maternity. The rest of the poem delves into the complex wrinkles of maternal grief. Fourteen stanzas in, she justifies her long, public lament: How may myn yen þat beholde al this Restreyne hem for to shewe by weepynge My hertes greef? Moot I nat weepe? O yis. (99–101)

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Long

4 I apply Barbara Rosenwein’s (2006) term loosely here, as it is unclear from the texts whether the mourners engaged with or socialized each other. 5 On tears as a physical manifestation of grief, see Sanders (1998).

6 Line 11 in the lament that appears in Ashmole 61, discussed further below.

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Here, and in the very act of narrating a thirty-five-stanza lamentation, Mary argues for the ability to express sorrow in public discourse, especially the maternal sorrow born of the stripping of hard-won ‘joye.’ Herein, perhaps, lay part of the poem’s appeal for medieval readers. The author rightly assumes that readers need not be persuaded that the loss of a child is devastating. As Katharine Goodland has observed, ‘To medieval audiences it seems to have been impossible to imagine a mother who did not wail her child’s death’ (Goodland, 2005a, 188). In her confidence that the audience shares her indignation, Hoccleve’s Mary identifies and cultivates an emotional community of grieving mothers.4 She focuses on the depth and range rather than the existence of her grief, and as we see here, the need for a means to articulate it. Her tears, long understood theologically as a spiritual gift, become a means of acknowledging and sharing grief and anger with that emotional community. Her tears’ use as social indicators is consistent with modern theories on grief; her tears’ potential to assert or subvert power is clear from textual attempts to silence them in other maternal mourners, as we will see.5 Hoccleve’s poem is among the best known of a body of Marian lyrics in English called planctus Mariae or quis dabet, a genre that emerged in Latin poetry of the thirteenth century and developed in a number of vernacular languages. As we see in the deployment of ‘joye’ above, these poems depend for their power not only on a grasp of established Marian legend but on the reader’s intuitive understanding of the physical and emotional joys that parenting a healthy, unharmed child is supposed to bring. They refer to breastfeeding, to labor, and to the aesthetic appeal of a thriving infant rather than a bloodied adult. Intended as a venue for affective piety, the poems allow readers to achieve imitatio Mariae not only through empathy but through their own experiences of maternal grief. With their emphasis on wholesome, nostalgic images of infancy, the poems speak, especially, to the mother who has lost a child and feels similarly deprived of a promised joy. The memory of such loss was readily available to a great many medieval women and easily imposed on Mary’s lament. The planctus Mariae poems were so susceptible to this off-label use that, by the end of the fifteenth century, they explicitly warned women not to think of their own children: ‘make ye no mone for your chyld.’6 The attempt to manipulate women’s emotions through empathy with Mary’s sorrow seems to have backfired in part because writers underestimated readers’ familiarity with and tendency to focus on their own maternal grief to the perceived exclusion of piety. As a template for readers’ mourning, these poems filled a gap in devotional literature. By legitimizing space for maternal grief, Mary as speaker reveals the tension for those who sought to express maternal sorrow within a culture that was aware of their pain but resisted accommodating it emotionally or spatially. Drawing from one’s memory of maternal affection to join Mary’s emotional community was permitted; drawing from one’s personal experience of grief was

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deemed insufficiently reverent of the Crucifixion. A generous reading of the planctus poems’ attempts to limit readers’ responses in this way suggests an attempt to channel readers’ pain into a more socially manageable form of piety. A more cynical interpretation posits that the poems’ authors wished to minimize maternal readers’ grief or preempt its power. This erasure of a common maternal experience does both medieval and modern readers a disservice, given both cultures’ default of silencing maternal grief. Medieval literature that acknowledges these issues, however problematically, offers a way to open this conversation. Marian lyrics, spiritual autobiographies, and Crucifixion depictions were not simply avenues toward Christian or Marian meditation. They also provided textual recognition of the shared experiences of pregnancy and maternal loss and may be read as textual responses to the gendering and regulation of public lament for such loss. Grieving mothers could read them as a means to project or inscribe their own experiences, and as I will demonstrate in this essay, many of them, including Margery Kempe, did so. These texts’ overt recognition of the deep connection between birth and death provides spaces to address failed maternity and maternal grief that our scholarship does not yet recognize or articulate.

The silencing of maternal grief No one had warned me that with a child comes death. Death slinks into your mind. It circles your growing body, and once your child has left it, death circles him too. – Claudia Dey (2018) In contrast to Hoccleve’s Mary, medieval people understood, thanks largely to horrifying perinatal and child mortality rates, that to give birth was also to create a death, be it imminent or distant, and possibly to hasten one’s own. Here they were ahead of us. We in the modern world are still taken by surprise when an advanced pregnancy isn’t viable, stunned when birth results in infant or maternal mortality. Western cultural taboos tend to obscure that up to one-fifth of clinically recognized pregnancies end in loss and that, in the United States, more than two women die every day in childbirth.7 Similarly, because of personal sorrow, readers’ aversions or disinterest, and, perhaps, our own misreading of literary cues, we tend to shy away from serious discussion of miscarriage, stillbirth, and infant and maternal mortality – all phenomena that were both more common and less stigmatized in the late medieval period than they are now, referenced and depicted, if unnoticed, in multiple literary texts.

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7 These statistics worsen for black women, poor women, and in rural areas. In my home state of Arkansas, black women are three times as likely as white women to die in childbirth; in the state’s poorest counties, this disparity doubles.

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8 Monica Green’s body of work, aimed at both academic humanists and medical professionals, has been foundational in that conversation.

9 Earenfight has written extensively on childless queens and is preparing a relevant database.

10 From Book Seven: Mary ‘tuke him and laide him, firste, in on linen clothe, and sithen in one wolle, and band his bodi, his armes and his legges with one band; and þan shoe band two linen litill clotþis, þat sho broght with hir, about his heued’ (Bridget of Sweden, 1987, 486).

11 The obvious exception is the Prioress’s Tale, whose maternal grief has received ample scholarly attention.

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Medieval mothers could hardly ignore statistical realities: Nicholas Orme estimates child mortality rates at over 40%, not counting stillbirth or perinatal deaths, whose frequency was so high that baptisms were only performed and recorded at least ten days after birth – a practice that both suggests how high infant loss rates were and precludes our having accurate records of failed births (Orme, 2003). Scholars who do address medieval reproductive loss, mostly historians of medicine, focus on its physical causes rather than emotional anguish.8 Katherine French and Theresa Earenfight have acknowledged the difficulty of confirming failed pregnancies with historical evidence such as wills and records of gifts to convents and monasteries.9 Evidence sometimes lies only in an absence of or gap between children. For example, while we know that Christine de Pizan had a child who died young, Margery Kempe’s claim to have borne fourteen children while confirming that only one of them survived to adulthood raises questions only if we think to ask. Hoccleve’s own patron, Joan FitzAlan de Bohun, managed only two live births in nine years; in comparison, Blanche of Lancaster delivered seven babies in the same time frame (three of whom survived to adulthood). These lacunae suggest reproductive losses that remain unconfirmed in the historical record. Despite access to less restrictive evidence, literary scholarship nearly ignores the many acknowledgments of failed pregnancy and child mortality in secular and devotional texts, where they are in relatively plain sight. In romance, Sir Orfeo briefly describes the static bodies of women dead in childbirth, their corpses implying the cause of Heurodis’ long absence. Silence features a father requesting a laundry list of specific good wishes for the healthy delivery of his child, revealing that he knows exactly how risky birth can be. Le Fresne depicts a mother who learns that disappearing an infant is as easy as sending a maid on a walk. In Floris and Blanchefleur, a mother reminds her husband, ‘Of twelve children have we noon / On lyve now but this oon’ (301–2). In Amis and Amiloun, a father plots to harvest his children’s blood as a cure for his friend’s leprosy; their mother reads the loss as a variant on infant mortality. In her Revelations, Bridget of Sweden’s description of Christ’s nativity imagines his swaddling clothes as a funeral shroud.10 Discovery of, and engagement with, dead or resuscitated children are important aspects of hagiography such as the vitae of Mary Magdalene and the Welsh St. Wenefride, and miracle stories such as Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale, with the mothers’ various subsequent actions important to the plots. But the mourning of all these mothers is mundane enough in these texts to be mostly unremarked as such, and thus is often invisible to modern readers.11 Even with its relative awareness of pregnancy-related losses and child mortality, medieval literary England doesn’t quite have the capacity for so much maternal sorrow. For every example of visible parental mourning in medieval literature –

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‘Pearl,’12 the Prioress’s Tale, even Sir Orfeo, whose nuptial grief is complicated by the likelihood that his wife has died in failed childbirth – we see competing models of mothers expected to swallow their grief, rendering it invisible or silent: Patient Griselda whose husband claims to be sending their children to their deaths; Belisaunt in Amis and Amiloun who declares cheerily, ‘God will send more!’ when her husband does the same; the mother in Le Fresne who briefly considers infanticide, then wraps her problematic newborn with precious tokens to ensure her protection. These non-grievers are harder to spot than are mourners, but they can perhaps speak to our peculiar modern situation of a population that barely acknowledges its own rate of pregnancy failure. Considering why their silence is required may help us to understand cultural expectations of maternal loss, and what these non-mourning mothers might demand or disrupt if allowed to articulate grief.

Pregnancy failure as maternal failure It’s a ridiculously dangerous enterprise and doctors let women think it’s routine and then we’re blindsided! – Jen Dunn (2015) If [the mother] has been badly torn in birth and afterward for fear of death does not wish to conceive any more… – The Trotula (Anonymous, 2002, 78) While child and maternal mortality rates have plummeted in the last century, failed pregnancies and infant mortality are still very much with us and offer our closest statistical analogue to medieval maternal grief.13 Despite significant political attention to fetal legal protections, neither maternal nor infant health is a priority in American government policy, and attention to maternal emotional health, such as grief over failed pregnancy, is even more scarce in public discourse.14 Infant mortality rates have declined significantly more slowly in the United States than in peer nations, a statistic that has received less attention than the rise in maternal mortality (Thakrar, et al., 2018; Kassebaum, et al., 2016).15 Even in otherwise promising circumstances, the risk of failed pregnancy is high, particularly for women over age 35 and for black women.16 Pregnancy discrimination – the reluctance or refusal of employers to accommodate pregnant workers’ needs – raises many of these risks, and is often harsher and more common for low-wage workers (Grossman and Thomas, 2009). These are not statistics that are generally welcome in polite conversation, doctors’ exam rooms, or literature classroom discussions, with the correlating assumption that miscarriage and perinatal death are rare, isolated events.

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12 Sarah McNamer builds a compelling case for Pearl‘s origins and purpose (McNamer, 2015). 13 Perinatal and infant death is much more common in the U.S. than child death; the mortality risk for children under 1 year is not exceeded statistically until age 55 (NCHS, 2019). 14 For a discussion of this silence in work environments, see Porschitz and Siler (2017). 15 Americans are 3 times likelier to die from childbirth than Canadians and 6 times likelier than Scandinavians. Global numbers depend on wealth, geography, and race.

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16 Black women have higher fetal losses than white or Asian women (Wyatt, et al., 2005; Mukherjee, et al., 2013). In a long-term Danish study, the highest risk factor was maternal age: by age 45, the fetal loss rate was 75% (Andersen, et al., 2000).

17 Barbara Duden (1993) cites archival evidence of this recognition dating from as late as the 18th century.

18 Albert the Great a notable exception, argued that pregnant women’s physical needs justified sex, but he, too, approved only a limited range of positions (Brundage, 1987, 451–53). 19 Sermon CCXXVI is found in Bibliotheque Nationale de France, MS lat. 17509, fol. 136 v b. Printed in Crane (1890, 94). 20 ‘Galen says that women who have narrow vaginas and constricted

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Conversely, it is clear from the material evidence of medieval rituals, amulets, charms, prayers, and images for births that negative outcomes to childbearing were expected in the Middle Ages (Jones and Olsan, 2015; Johnson, 2016; Weston, 1995). Certainly, they were included in the cultural conversation about birth. Because nutritional deficiencies commonly obfuscated signs of early pregnancy, medieval pregnancies often remained unconfirmed until the quickening in the fifth month, when most women would be visually pregnant and could feel fetal movement.17 Early miscarriages could therefore frequently go unnoticed even by the mother, while late-term losses were, then as now, less likely to be private – and, because of environmental factors, more likely to occur. The frequency and visibility of loss led to medical and theological speculation about its causes, though with less room for maternal mourning than might be expected: the pregnant body was a public one, but maternal emotion was expected to remain private. Central to those discussions was the belief that a pregnancy’s success could be controlled by known factors, and that, by extension, failed pregnancy was preventable. Primary among the causes for miscarriage imagined by medieval writers was sex during the pregnancy, which was thought to lead to fetal death or birth defects (Cadden, 1995, 149). Penitentials thus often forbade it (Brundage, 1987, 156). Clerical writers were particularly concerned that certain sexual positions might be harmful to the fetus.18 Jacques de Vitry held a husband’s alcohol-fueled lust to blame for pregnancy loss, preaching against ‘a drunk, returning from the tavern with the stink of wine on his breath to know his pregnant wife, who killed the child in his mother’s womb when she went into labor prematurely’ [‘Audivi de quodam ebrioso, cum rediret de taberna et uxorem cognosceret pregnantem, ex fetido et vinoso hanelitu puerum in ventre matris necavit ita quod mulier abortivum edidit’].19 The medical treatise known as the Trotula offers a range of possible causes for fetal and maternal mortality, including the size of the mother’s pelvic cavity,20 the intensity of her desires,21 her health and behaviors,22 and the quality of her care during labor and delivery.23 Tinctures are recommended to prevent fetal loss and for recovering and reviving a stillborn infant (Anonymous, 2002: 77, 111, 92, and 103). While medical treatises are more thorough and nuanced in their assessment than are religious sources, the burden of sustaining a pregnancy still falls on caregivers and the mother, with the implication that a woman whose pregnancy failed simply wasn’t trying hard enough. Potential maternal grief for such a loss goes unmentioned. Foremost among medieval clerical writers’ concerns about preventing pregnancy loss is not the emotional state of the mother but the status of the fetal soul. ‘Ensoulment,’ or the entry of the soul into the fetal body, was thought to happen at quickening, so that confirmation of pregnancy often coincided with the recognition of the fetus as a potentially Christian soul.24 Jacques de Vitry addresses ensoulment in a sermon anecdote: ‘I have heard of some who obstinately distress their pregnant wives who are about to give birth, because

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they are unwilling to abstain for a short time to spare a woman heavy with child and thus kill the son in the mother’s womb and deprive him of baptism. Cursed be this lust that steals his son’s soul from God’ [‘Audivi de quibusdam qui uxores pregnantes propinquas pertinacia vexant, cum per modicum tempus abstinere non velint, nec parcere gravidis quod puer in utero materno occiditur et baptismo privatur. Maledicta sit ista libido, que animam filii sui aufert deo’].25 The Trotula suggests that the soul’s presence in a fetus helps stabilize it in the womb: ‘when the soul is infused into the child, it adheres a little more firmly and does not slip out so quickly’ (Anonymous, 2002, 79). Failed pregnancy, then, was a spiritual concern of the church, and cause for pious, rather than personal, lament (Duden, 1993, 56–61).26

Antithesis and the Crucifixion, grieving mothers’ version ...ȝef hit wel iboren is ant þuncheð wel forðlich, fearlac of his lure is anan wið him iboren; for nis ha neauer bute care leste hit misfeare aþet owðer of ham twa ear leose oþer. [If {a child} is born healthy and seems to promise well, fear of its loss is born along with it, for she is never without anxiety lest it should come to harm, until one of the two of them first loses the other.] – Letter on Virginity (Millett and Wogan-Browne, 1990, 30–11) These attempts to assign spiritual weight to the health of the pregnancy are out of tune with the grief Mary expresses at Christ’s death and presumably with what in the planctus poems appealed to women grieving maternal loss. In centering her own mourning, Mary deflects the implicit blame of mothers for their children’s deaths; by returning to nursery-phase imagery, she invites readers to recall the brief period in which mothers are trusted authorities on their children’s welfare, and redefines her own identity as mother of an infant rather than mother of an adult. Mary’s ruthless narrative probing of her earliest maternal experience contrasts with the abstract concern with souls that we see elsewhere in medieval writing about infant and child mortality and affirms that maternal grief was normative. Here the Christian fondness for inverting life and death does not hold: death and its implicit heavenly rewards are not cause for rejoicing, but for sorrow. Mary does not recover a Christian world-upside-down lens by the poem’s end: while her tone has softened, she is still angered by the paradox that invites death to the nursery and birth pains to a death scene. Built into the planctus Mariae poems, along with the confirmation that maternal grief merits poetic space, is the recognition that new life brings death. As Rosemary Woolf and Amy Vines have each made clear, that duality is not exclusive to planctus Mariae but is also common to Nativity lyrics, which use

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wombs ought not have sexual relations with men lest they conceive and die’ (Anonymous, 2002, 78). The Trotula also lists possible causes of stillbirth and failed delivery and offers treatment options (79).

21 ‘Note that when a woman is in the beginning of her pregnancy, care ought to be taken that nothing is named in front of her which she is not able to have, because if she sets her mind on it and it is not given to her, this occasions miscarriage’ (77).

22 ‘a woman on account of coughing or diarrhea or dysentery or excessive motion or anger or bloodletting can lose the fetus’ (79). 23 ‘There are some women for whom things go wrong in giving birth, and this is because of the failure of those assisting them’ (93).

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24 The moment of ensoulment rendered willful termination of the pregnancy as murder. There was some legal danger of being suspected of having induced miscarriage, with varying penalties assigned according to the stage of the pregnancy and perceived intent. See Mu¨ller (2012) and Riddle (1992, 109–12); see also Harris–Stoertz (2012, 269–71). 25 Emphasis and translation mine. BN lat. 17509, fol. 136 vb; printed in d’Avray and Tausche (1980, 99). 26 This perspective lingers; the linking of ensoulment to abortion, and disregard of the mother’s emotional state in favor of the fetal soul’s status, have had lasting effects. Even now, treatments available for miscarriage are significantly limited by a state’s laws (or a private hospital’s policies) restricting women’s medical rights.

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similar poetic devices to cultivate engagement from maternal readers. Woolf observes that ‘there is no [Nativity] lyric which does not […] look forward to the Crucifixion’ (Woolf, 1968, 149). Vines sees antithesis as a didactic strategy, arguing that ‘Mary’s shift from lullaby to lament in many of the Nativity lyrics model the emotional shift that is intended to take place within the reader’ (Vines, 2010, 202). But poems meant to teach empathy through affective meditation to those unfamiliar with such loss would instead articulate and reinforce the emotional trauma of readers experiencing maternal grief. The imagery takes on a more visceral, personal meaning for a grieving audience, for whom any portrayal of the Madonna and child bears the pentimento of the pieta`. The fifteenth-century Nativity lyric ‘Dear son, leave thy weeping’ relies on multisensory, almost ekphrastic imagery to evoke the Crucifixion in its depiction of a Madonna-and-child dialogue.27 As Mary sings gently, presumably cuddling Christ in her arms, the infant points to his own body parts ‘that ye may see’ and predicts that men who later see those same limbs pierced with nails will ‘wepe’ just as he does now. Mary’s response draws on stereotypical maternal imagery: ‘A, dere Son, hard is my happe, / To see my child that sokid my pappe, / His hondes, his fete, that I dide wrappe, / Be so naylid, that neuer did amysse’ makes clear the imbalance of her maternal investment. The Mary of this lullaby does not get to relax and enjoy the infant body she is holding, though she clearly feels entitled to since he has enjoyed her ‘pappes.’28 Given the familiar visual appeal of a baby in its mother’s arms, imitatio Mariae would require very little emotional transfer for those experienced in perinatal or filial loss: the poem becomes a venue to process their own experience. It offers language for the unfairness that cheats them of their bodily investment and grants status for biological motherhood. Like the planctus Mariae, it also allows a space for personal grief. To return to ‘Complaint of the Virgin’: we know a fair amount about the personal losses and emotional communities of the patron whom Hoccleve claims for the poem, Joan FitzAlan de Bohun. Countess of Hereford and sister to Archbishop Arundel, Joan was known for her management of massive landholdings in Essex, for her loyalty to the Edwardian court, and for her religious patronage, especially to Walden Abbey. She also experienced multiple forms of maternal loss: at least two of her grandchildren died in infancy or childhood, with one daughter’s first pregnancy ending in stillbirth (Ward, 2001). Additionally, one of Joan’s daughters and one of her granddaughters died in childbed; another granddaughter died while pregnant. Joan outlived her husband, both daughters, and nearly all of her grandchildren, and spent the last several years of her life ‘like Anna in the temple’ (Dugdale, et al., 1817, 134 and 140). It is unclear whether she had experienced reproductive loss, but the nine years between her daughters’ birth dates, in addition to Hoccleve’s connection of her with a poem featuring a deeply grieving mother, are suggestive.

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That grieving women such as Joan used these poems to process their own mourning is also suggested by the way the poems’ content evolves over the course of the fifteenth century. In Hoccleve’s poem, as in the Nativity lyrics, Mary focuses on the physical affection between mother and infant and the implied reciprocity it sets up. Thow in myn armes lay and on my knee Thow sat and haddist many a kus of me. Eek, thee to sowke, on my brestes yaf y Thee norisshyng faire and tendrely. Now thee fro me withdrawith bittir deeth And makith a wrongful disseuerance. (74–9)

27 The poem appears as 152Aa in Greene (1977, 100). 28 As in the lament, she calls out Gabriel here, too, for not warning her (‘Whan Gabryell called me full of grace, / He told me nothyng of this’).

The mother has given ample sacrifice of her own body – ‘many a kus’ and ‘norisshynge faire and tendrely’ from her breasts – so that the child’s physical death is ‘wrongful disseuerance.’ More than once, Mary suggests that it’s the unjustness of this unreturned maternal physical connection that intensifies her pain: A modir þat so soone hir cote taar Or rente, sy men neuere noon or this, For chyld which þat shee of hir body baar To yeue her tete, as my chyld þat heere is (239–42, emphasis mine) It is not only that her memories of Christ’s infancy have been tainted by his gruesome death, but that she as a parous woman is owed some filial recompense for the child’s use and benefit of her body. This equation seems to appeal to women with some experience of early motherhood and related grief. We see a twist on the same concept in another planctus poem, ‘An Appeal to All Mothers,’ in which Mary addresses maternal readers directly, again employing antithesis: Your childur ye dawnse upon your kne With laghyng, kyssyng, and mery chere: Behold my childe, beholde now me, For now liggus ded my dere son, dere. (5–8)29 The poem continues with eleven stanzas of overt comparison between the perceived ideal nursery interactions of readers with their healthy, happy children and Mary’s having only her child’s corpse. Here, Mary criticizes mothers who don’t respond to her harrowing maternal loss: ‘If your childe had lost his life / Ye would wepe at euery mele; / But for my son wepe ye neuer a del’ (67–9). Grieving readers, however, would have no need for this attempt to teach empathy. They could instead simply step into the speaker’s role, chastising other mothers – in Mary’s voice – for not recognizing their plight. Read this way, the poem becomes cathartic rather than accusing.

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29 CUL MS Ff.5.48. Printed in Brown (1939, 13).

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The author seems to have anticipated some readers would, indeed, project themselves into the poem, potentially to the exclusion of the devotion that it is meant to provoke: in the penultimate stanza, mothers are cautioned, ‘Wepe not for yours, but wepe for hit’ (line 75) – that is, weep for Christ rather than your own child. For readers with their own experience of maternal loss, then, these poems attempt to control rather than to provoke their tears. Shared motherhood is suitable for stimulating empathy in the reader, but relevant personal grief is viewed as rivalry.

The social control of grief

30 BL Royal 12.E.1, fols. 193a–94b. Appears as poem 33 in Saupe (1998, 87). 31 British Library MS Harley 2253, fol. 79a.

32 Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 61, f. 106r.

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Other poems in the planctus tradition similarly acknowledge maternal grief but encourage readers to redirect their weeping on behalf of Christ. In one fourteenth-century version of the hymn ‘Stond wel, Moder, under Rode,’ maternal loss is explicitly mentioned (‘Moder, mitarst thi mith leren / Wat pine tholen that childre beren, / Wat sorwe haven that child forgon’ [37–9]),30 but in another manuscript of the same hymn, simply bearing children is the source of sorrow, so that the specific grief of losing an infant or child is effectively erased (‘Moder, nou thou miht wel leren / Whet sorewe haveth that children beren, / Whet sorewe hit is with childe gon’).31 By the late fifteenth century, the ‘Lament of Mary’ articulates the existence of other mothers’ losses but chastises them for indulging their own grief: Than seyd Oure Lady bothe meke and myld To all women: ‘Behold and se, And make ye no mone for your chyld, Of Godys sond if it dede be. For if ye do, ye be not wyse To se my sone as he lyghet here. Now he is dede – lo, were he lyes. For thi sone dyghd my dere son dere. (9–16)32 A few stanzas later, grieving mothers are advised, ‘Woman, now thou canste thi wyte. / Thou seyst thi chyld whether it be seke or dede. / Wepe thou for myn and not for it, / And thou schall have mych to thy mede’ (81–4). It is here that we see the planctus walk a fine line between exploiting the intuitive connection maternal readers might have to natal imagery – which was useful in expanding the reach of these poems – and downplaying their association with readers’ actual perinatal and filial losses, which they may have seen as limiting the poems’ appeal or, more immediately, overshadowing Mary’s sorrow. The emotional communities first recognized and cultivated by Mary now need to be controlled, lest they interfere with the intended effects of the poems. Even as the planctus carves out space for mourning, maternal loss

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permits tears only if they are ascribed to sorrow for Christ. The poems make clear that maternal lamentation should be framed as empathy for Mary or sorrow for Christ rather than personal sorrow.

Margery Kempe, Planctus reader and re–interpreter In Margery Kempe, we have a mother who was both a contemporary of Hoccleve’s and also demonstrably familiar with his poem’s genre; her relevance here is as a close and critical reader of the planctus. Margery famously claims to have borne fourteen children. Modern medicine tells us that the number of miscarriages per woman increases with parity and age (Cohain, et al., 2017, 437). Margery never indicates that fourteen children survived to adulthood or even childhood. And there is a palpable absence of actual (rather than potential, envisioned, or metaphorical) babies and children in the Boke: other than those who joke in passing about her clothing (chapter 50), the only children present are those who prompt her tears in the streets of Rome (chapter 35) or witness them in England (chapter 83). By the end of the Boke, Margery has survived her husband and son; demographic probability suggests that the pilgrim Margery has survived reproductive loss, as well. It is unclear whether Margery’s attempt at imitatio Mariae includes the denial of one’s personal grief that the planctus recommends. But the odds are high, given what modern medicine tells us about the odds of miscarriage and historical evidence of child mortality, that she did have some experience of failed pregnancy or other maternal loss. Margery’s recounting of the crucifixion makes clear that she has been attentive to the planctus Mariae genre, and her engagement with the form demonstrates the tensions for grieving readers I’ve already suggested. Her aim from the beginning seems to be sharing tears (or perhaps simply the spotlight) with Mary as a legitimized mourner, whether her grief is over Christ’s death or Margery’s own maternal loss. Margery is certainly mindful of the connection between Christ’s birth and death that holds in the planctus. In chapter 6, caring for the newborn Christ, she ‘swathyd hym wyth byttyr teerys of compassyon, havyng mend of the scharp deth that he schuld suffyr for the lofe of synful men’ (33).33 Lest we miss her internalizing of the planctus, Margery describes in chapter 29 how closely she engaged with Mary’s grief: And sythen sche ros up ageyn wyth gret wepyng and sobbyng as thow sche had seyn owyr Lord beriid even befor hir. Than sche thowt sche saw owyr Lady in hir sowle, how sche mornyd and how sche wept hir sonys deth, and than was owyr Ladiis sorwe hir sorwe. (78)

33 All quotations from Margery Kempe’s Boke are provided using page numbers from Staley’s edition (1996).

In phrasing reminiscent of one of the planctus or Nativity poems, Mary tells Margery, ‘yyf thu wylt be partabyl in owyr joye, thu must be partabil in owyr sorwe’ (80). But when Margery does try to partake of that sorrow, both Christ

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and Mary remind her that she’s not his actual mother, implying that only Mary is worthy of public grief. Chapters 79–81 depict Margery as witness to Mary’s lament as she collapses to the ground and begs Christ to let her die first to avoid sorrow (179). Upon seeing the interaction between Mary and Christ that is recounted in several planctus Mariae poems, Margery replicates the same sequence, asking Christ to kill her and claiming to be unable to remain in a world without him: she ‘cryid ful lowde and wept rith sor’ (180). While Margery constantly affirms that she is grieving with Mary (perhaps disregarding her own maternal losses, exactly as the Mary of the planctus lyrics expected), she is still chastised for attempting to share in Mary’s sorrow. In chapter 79, Christ tells her, ‘Be stille, dowtyr, and rest wyth my modyr her and comfort the in hir, for sche that is myn owyn modyr must suffyr this sorwe.’ A few lines later, when Margery remarks, ‘I may not dur it, and yyt am I not hys modyr,’ Mary replies (one imagines tartly), ‘Dowtyr, thu herist wel it wil non otherwise be, and therefor I must nedys suffyr it for my sonys lofe’ (180, emphases mine). Only Christ’s mother has a right to this mourning; only Christ’s body is worth maternal grief. Margery nevertheless feels emboldened to offer advice to the grieving Mary: ‘I prey yow, Lady, cesyth of yowr sorwyng […] for me thynkteth ye han sorwyd anow. And, Lady, I will sorwe for yow, for yowr sorwe is my sorwe’ (184). Not only does Margery minimize the need for Mary’s grief, but she names herself as a sharer in the mourning. Yet this is apparently a step too far. When Margery again urges Mary to end her grieving, Mary argues sharply that, because her son is the best who ever lived, she has more right to sorrow than anyone else: ‘certeyn was ther nevyr woman in erth had so gret cawse to sorwyn as I have, for ther was nevyr woman in this world bar a bettyr childe ne a mekar to hys modyr than my sone was to me’ (186). At this dressing-down, Margery silently withdraws from the conversation: uncharacteristically, she cedes the argument. The rest of the chapter consists of her passively reporting Mary’s interactions with John the Evangelist and Mary Magdalene. The generic parameters of the planctus that require the centering of Mary’s grief have triumphed; Margery’s attempt to reconstruct the planctus as a form in which she can participate coequally with Mary has failed.

The spatial control of grief What remains only implicit in the planctus Mariae poems is fleshed out in Margery’s prose version: regular women are not quite worthy of grieving for Christ, or for their own children, as Mary does. Margery’s version of the planctae confirms the tension that the planctus poems acknowledge in demanding (controlled) affective piety while not granting public space for grieving. Telling Mary to ‘cesyth of [her] sorwyng’ seems ridiculous in the

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context of the rest of the Boke, given that much of the narrative involves Margery seeking acceptance for her own ostentatious weeping. But it also reflects late medieval culture’s resistance to public grieving. In thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italy – not long before Margery traveled there – displays of mourning such as ‘appearing bareheaded, clapping, tearing one’s own hair or clothing and ripping at one’s own face as a sign of grief, became punishable by a fine by law. While weeping was tolerated, public wailing and loud crying was penalised even if lamentations were permitted indoors […] in certain cases even widows could be perceived as too sorrowful’ (Korpiola and Lahtinen, 2015, 4). Public mourning was coded as feminine and excessive. In a letter to his patron Francesco il Vecchio da Carrara, Petrarch argued that women’s displays of grief disturbed peace and order: ‘A coffin is carried out, a crowd of women bursts forth, filling the streets and squares with loud and uncontrolled shrieks […] Order that no woman should set foot outside her house on this account. If weeping is sweet for those in misery, let her weep at home to her heart’s content, and not sadden the public places’ (Petrarch, 1992, 552, my emphasis). These edicts decry women’s public mourning merely as disturbances of the peace or of dignity, but Katharine Goodland has identified how, when deployed as residual practices of ritual lament, that mourning also threatened foundational power structures. Discussing the fifteenth-century Lazarus plays, she notes that ‘inconsolable grief seems to subvert the Christian promise of redemption and eternal life’ (Goodland, 2005b, 72). In a study of the Corpus Christi plays, Goodland compares Mary’s lament to the responses of mothers to the Slaughter of the Innocents: their anger effects justice in various ways, often articulated through echoes of Mary’s words. As she puts it: Their cries reflect upon the joy and pain of childbirth, their efforts to feed and rear their sons, and the appalling waste of all their labors as they witness the horror of evil and the fragility of human life. […] their sorrow testifies to Herod’s cowardice and inhumanity, the injustice of the powerful preying upon the helpless and innocent. Herod’s ultimate fate is conceived in the maternal mourning of Mary and the mothers. (Goodland, 2005a, 177) Here maternal grief is not merely a rival to Mary’s status, but a threat to government stability. It seems a grand accusation for a few tears shed, but the play’s treatment of grieving mothers as a collective makes clear why the Mary of Margery’s Book and of the planctus poems are so eager to shut down the tears of individual mothers. If the mothers of innocents are able to bring down Herod with phrasing parallel to Mary’s, what kind of power might lie in other grieving mothers’ voices? Similarly, in her discussion of the planctus, Sarah McNamer reads women’s lament as protest against war and violence (McNamer, 2009, 151–62). Maternal grief as a latent, fearsome power that can be channeled and directed at targets is more troubling than the idea of pain or grief as merely

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outside the verbal, as Elaine Scarry has described it (Scarry, 1987, 4), or uncontrollable. It also suggests that Mary’s attempts to quell or redirect mothers’ mourning aim to minimize their likelihood of challenging other forms of authority – or the possibility that their grief, like her own, might manifest into anger and blame.

C o n c l u s i o n : Te a r s a s p o w e r In multiple versions of the planctus Mariae, including Margery’s prose rendition, we can discern the potential power of pain. Margery’s temporal distance from childbirth and childrearing as she narrates the crucifixion scene and others in her Boke does not protect her from motherhood’s emotional wounds. Grief is, whatever its source, unpredictable and chronologically untethered. The crucifixion scene with Mary in which tears connote power suggests Margery has an inkling of the importance of her weeping, and the two chapters that follow (82 and 83) are mostly a long justification and defense of her holy tears. She describes them as delicious relief, as providing access to prayer, and as provoked by new mothers’ churching ceremonies and, later, witnessed by children as priests test their authenticity. It is hard not to read these chapters as the response to Mary that she could not give in the moment of accusation. Margery’s insistence on crying in church and out, in the streets and in private conversations, until Mary tells her to stop, is also a refusal to allow her grief (over Christ, or over her personal losses) to be erased or unseen. Her mourning knows no stigma and is in fact frequently affirmed by Christ himself. Mary’s chastisement at the crucifixion only highlights how openly and defiantly Margery has grieved to that point, and how much weeping she and other mothers have left to do. The medieval suppression and silencing of maternal grief in these Marian texts help illustrate the long history behind our own culture’s discomfort with the nuances of perinatal loss and reluctance to engage with related issues of reproductive justice. Yet there is much in this essay’s discussion that fits neatly into modern discourse: the visceral response to maternal loss and the sufferers’ compulsion to express it; the use of antithesis to mark perinatal death as anomaly rather than a norm (still in use in anti-abortion rhetoric); the cultural assumptions and silences that implicitly blame mothers for loss. Above all, the reluctance of medieval theologians and modern policy-makers to recognize women’s emotional investment in their own reproductive issue is of a piece with misinterpretations (or denials) of those women’s bodily and political agency through, among other means of control, the attempted erasure of maternal grief. Acknowledging the residue of maternal grief that Margery, other planctus readers, and modern veterans of failed pregnancy carry might be a step toward restoring that agency and lessening the isolation of loss.

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Ac knowledgem ents I am grateful to Jen Dunn, Lissette Lopez Szwydky Davis, Ann Higgins, and Freddy Dominguez for conversations that impelled me to write about this topic. This essay is for Niccolo.

About the Author Mary Beth Long is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Arkansas. Her primary research interests are in women’s literacies and devotional literature; she has recently published essays on saintly maternity and on Chaucer’s Cecilia as a good wife. She is writing a book about fifteenth-century literary depictions of Marian maternity (E-mail: [email protected]).

References Andersen, A.N., et al. 2000. Maternal Age and Fetal Loss: Population Based Register Linkage Study. The British Medical Journal 320: 1708–12. Anonymous. 2002. The Trotula: An English Translation of the Medical Compendium of Women’s Medicine, ed. M.H. Green.. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bridget of Sweden. 1987. The Liber Celestis of St Bridget of Sweden, vol. 1, ed. R. Ellis. EETS 291. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Brown, C., ed., 1939. Religious Lyrics of the Fifteenth Century. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Brundage, J.A. 1987. Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Bryan, J.E. 2002. Hoccleve, the Virgin, and the Politics of Complaint. PMLA 117(5): 1172– 87. Cadden, J. 1995. Meanings of Sex Differences in the Middle Ages. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Cohain, J.S., R.E. Buxbaum, and D. Mankuta. 2017. Spontaneous First Trimester Miscarriage Rates per Woman Among Parous Women with 1 or More Pregnancies of 24 Weeks or More. BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth 17: 437. Crane, T.F., ed. 1890. The Exempla or Illustrative Stories from the Sermones Vulgares of Jacques de Vitry. London: Folklore Society. d’Avray, D.L. and M. Tausche. 1980. Marriage Sermons in Ad Status Collections of the Central Middle Ages. Archives d’histoire doctrinale et litteraire du Moyen Age 47: 71– 119. Dey, C. 2018. Mothers as Makers of Death. Paris Review, 14 August. Duden, B. 1993. Disembodying Women: Perspectives on Pregnancy and the Unborn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Dugdale, W., J. Caley, H. Ellis, and B. Bandinel, eds. 1817–1830. Monasticon Anglicanum, vol. 4. London. Dunn, J. 2015. Private correspondence with the author. French, K. 2016. The Material Culture of Childbirth in Late Medieval London and its Suburbs. Journal of Women’s History 28(2): 126–48. Goodland, K. 2005a. ‘Veniance, Lord, apon thaym fall’: Maternal Mourning, Divine Justice, and Tragedy in the Corpus Christi Plays. Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England 18: 166–92. Goodland, K. 2005b. ‘Vs for to wepe no man may lett’: Accommodating Female Grief in the Medieval English Lazarus Plays. Early Theatre 8.1: 69–94. Greene, R.L., ed. 1977. The Early English Carols, 2nd ed. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Grossman, J.L. and G.L. Thomas. 2009. Making Pregnancy Work: Overcoming the Pregnancy Discrimination Act’s Capacity–Based Model. Yale Journal of Law & Feminism 21: 15–50. Harris–Stoertz, F. 2012. Pregnancy and Childbirth in Twelfth– and Thirteenth–Century French and English Law. Journal of the History of Sexuality 21(2): 263–81. Hoccleve, T. [1892, 1925] 1970. Hoccleve’s Works: The Minor Poems, eds. F.J. Furnivall and I. Gollancz. EETS e. s. 61, 73. London: Oxford University Press. Johnson, J.J. 2001. Thomas Hoccleve and Manuscript Culture. In Nation, Court, and Culture: New Essays on Fifteenth-Century Poetry, ed. H. Cooney, 81–94. Dublin, Ireland: Four Courts. Johnson, R.W. 2016. Divisions of Labor: Gender, Power, and Later Medieval Childbirth, c. 1200–1500. History Compass 14(9): 383–96. Jones, P.M. and L.T. Olsan. 2015. Performative Rituals for Conception and Childbirth in England, 900–1500. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 89(3): 406–33. Kassebaum, N.J., et al. 2016. Global, Regional, and National Levels of Maternal Mortality, 1990–2015. The Lancet 388: 1775–812. Keiser, G.R. 1985. The Middle English Planctus Mariae and the Rhetoric of Pathos. In The Popular Literature of Medieval England, ed. T. J. Heffernan, 167–93. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press. Kempe, M. 1996. The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. L. Staley. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications. Korpiola, M. and A. Lahtinen. 2015. Cultures of Death and Dying in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: An Introduction. Collegium: Studies across Disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences 19: 1–31. McNamer, S. 2009. Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. McNamer, S. 2015. The Literariness of Literature and the History of Emotion. PMLA 130 (5): 1433–42. Millett, B. and J. Wogan–Browne, eds. and trans. 1990. Medieval English Prose for Women: The Katherine Group and Ancrene Wisse. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Mukherjee, S., et al. 2013. Risk of Miscarriage Among Black Women and White Women in a US Prospective Cohort Study. American Journal of Epidemiology 177(11): 1271–8. Mu¨ller, W.P. 2012. The Criminalization of Abortion in the West: Its Origins in Medieval Law. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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[NCHS] National Center for Health Statistics. 2019. Deaths and Death Rates by Age, Sex, Race, and Hispanic Origin: 2016. ProQuest Statistical Abstract of the U.S. 2019 Online Edition. https://statabs.proquest.com/sa/docview.html?table–no=115&acc–no= C70951.2&year=2019&z=E7BD1BA16D9910FB3903AC369F7076BA6C35B2D6 Orme, N. 2003. Danger and Death. In Medieval Children, 93–128. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Petrarch. 1992. Letters of Old Age (Rerum Senilium Libri) I–XVIII, vol. 1, ed. and trans. A. S. Bernardo, S. Levin, and R.A. Bernardo Baltimore, MD, and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Porschitz, E.T., and E.A. Siler. 2017. Miscarriage in the Workplace: an Authoethnography. Gender, Work and Organization 24(6): 565–78. Riddle, J. 1992. Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rosenwein, B. 2006. Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Sanders, C. 1998. Grief: The Mourning After: Dealing with Adult Bereavement, 2nd ed. New York: Wiley. Saupe, K. ed. 1998. Middle English Marian Lyrics. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications. Scarry, E. 1987. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Thakrar, A.P., et al. 2018. Child Mortality in the US and 19 OECD Comparator Nations: A 50-Year Time-Trend Analysis. Health Affairs 37(1): 140–9. Vines, A.N. 2010. Lullaby as Lament: Learning to Mourn in Middle English Nativity Lyrics. In Laments for the Lost in Medieval Literature, 201–23, ed. J. Tolmie and M.J. Toswell. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols. Ward, J.C. 2001. Joan de Bohun, Countess of Hereford, Essex and Northampton, c. 1370– 1419: Family, Land and Social Networks. Essex Archaeology and History 32: 146–53. Weston, L.M.C. 1995. Women’s Medicine, Women’s Magic: The Old English Metrical Childbirth Charm. Modern Philology 92(3): 279–93. Woolf, R. 1968. English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Wyatt, P.R., T. Owolabi, C. Meier, and T. Huang. 2005. Age-Specific Risk of Fetal Loss Observed in a Second Trimester Serum Screening Population. American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 192(1): 240–6.

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Original Article

Disability and consent in medieval law

Eliza Buhrer Division of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO, USA.

Abstract This essay highlights the ways that legal fictions about the extent to which disability limits agency have historically been used to prevent women from exercising many of the rights of legal adulthood, particularly those related to marriage and property. In the late thirteenth century, English law began to limit the activities of people with cognitive and sensory disabilities, on the grounds that they lacked the understanding necessary to consent. These laws ostensibly existed to protect people who could not protect themselves. However, using the records of late medieval lawsuits, I show that as women inherited land at unprecedented rates during the fourteenth century, men fraudulently alleged that women were disabled in order to gain control of their property. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019) 10, 344–356. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-019-00136-w 1 Land held of the king-in-chief was held directly from the king rather than another lord. A knight’s fee was the amount of land required to sustain one knight, and a tenant-in-chief’s duties to the Crown were determined by the number of knight’s fees they held.

On 2 February 1313, the King’s Chancellor sent a writ to John Abel, the escheator of Trent, ordering him to discover the names of ‘evildoers’ who had forcibly entered the lands of Roger de Caroun, a deceased tenant in chief of the king, and were now detaining his daughter (Lyte, 1912b, 161). A week later, Abel sent a writ back to Chancery describing the abuse of a powerless young woman by powerful men. Sibyl was heir to her father Roger’s estate, which consisted of a manor in Sherington and surrounding lands, held of the king-inchief by service of two knight’s fees (Lyte, 1916a, 37).1 Yet, since she was only one year old when he died, shortly before All Saints Day in 1300, the manor was

Chapter 7 was originally published as Buhrer, E. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019) 10: 344–356. https://doi.org/ 10.1057/s41280-019-00136-w.

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taken into the king’s hand to be safeguarded until she came of age (Lyte, 1913, 15). This meant that the Crown would select a guardian to provide for Sibyl’s care and administer her estate. In exchange, Sibyl’s guardian could keep the profits of the estate until she reached the age of majority, which was 14 for the daughter of a knight if she was married and 16 if she was unmarried. Although the Church held that a valid marriage required the consent of both parties, the Crown also granted guardians the right to sell their ward’s marriage for a fee when they came of age (Loengard, 2011, 121).2 This system, which is known as feudal wardship, existed to ensure that a minor heir’s lands would not be mismanaged, sold, or stolen before they came of age. Under ideal circumstances, the Crown granted heirs’ wardships to people within their families’ social networks, as this maximized the odds that their land would be safeguarded and strengthened bonds between noble families (Waugh, 1988, 8). However, reality often failed to conform to this ideal, and wardships were instead frequently sold to the highest bidder. When Roger Caroun died in 1300, Edward I granted Sibyl’s wardship to Edmund, earl of Cornwall. However, Edmund died the same year, and Sibyl’s wardship then changed hands a number of times (Lyte, 1916a, 37). First, Edmund’s executors sold it to Richard Golde, a farmer on the nearby Tickford priory manor that adjoined Sibyl’s estate. Richard then sold it to his brother Thomas, also a farmer, and, in 1311, Thomas sold it to Roger Pateschulle, the rector of the nearby parish of Bletsoe (Lyte, 1916a, 37 and 1898, 251–2). These developments represented a devastating turn of fortune for the daughter of a knight and speak to the weakness of Sibyl’s position. Postmortem land surveys indicate that the value of the Caroun family’s estate had declined significantly by the time Sibyl’s father died, since he and his father before him had both sold substantial amounts of land to pay off debts (Chibnall, 1965, 59–73). This, coupled with the fact that Sibyl had few living relatives, may explain why her estate ended up in the hands of guardians who were below knightly rank and why no one attempted to forestall this.3 Yet, as bad as these circumstances were, just a month after Roger acquired Sibyl’s wardship, her story took a dramatic turn for the worse. On the Monday after the Ascension, John de Burgo, William de Barton, and several other men ‘forcibly entered the manor, broke door and windows, and took goods to the value of twenty marks’ (Lyte, 1916a, 37). John and William then seized Sibyl and carried her off into Leicester before returning to the manor, which John still occupied with Sibyl at the time of the inquisition, two years after the events described. If this was not enough to demonstrate John Burgo’s wickedness, John

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2 Rules limited the worst impulses of guardians. The daughter of a knight could not be married ‘disparagingly,’ and could marry freely if she paid her guardian the amount for which her marriage could have been sold (Walker, 1982, 123–5).

3 As was the case with many wards, Sibyl’s mother was still alive and held a third of the estate by dower when these events occurred.

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4 The terms ‘deaf and dumb’ and ‘deaf and mute’ [surdus et mutus], while highly offensive today, are used throughout English translations of the records documenting Sibyl’s case. I use them only when quoting these sources. 5 While women could marry at 12, it was atypical for a woman to marry this young in the fourteenth century, when women frequently stayed unmarried into their twenties (Karras, 2011, 1030).

6 Incompetent people could nevertheless inherit property because English law differentiated between possessory and proprietary right.

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Abel noted in his closing that Sibyl was ‘deaf and dumb’ (Lyte, 1916a, 37).4 Sibyl was 12 years old at the time of her alleged abduction, and 14 at the time of Abel’s inquiry. It is surely no coincidence that 12 was the age a woman could marry, and 14 the age a married heiress could inherit. For while left unstated in the report Abel sent to the Crown in 1313, the Crown sent a letter to Abel on 4 February 1314 indicating that at the time of his initial investigation, Sibyl had become Burgo’s wife (Lyte, 1893, 37). Sibyl’s story seems to speak to the vulnerable position of women with disabilities in medieval Europe. For whether Sibyl consented to marrying John Burgo by the standards of medieval law, at the time he broke into the manor, she was 12 years old and living without the protection of family or friends. Moreover, her marriage had already been treated as a commodity when her wardship was repeatedly sold to people with little interest in her well-being.5 Beyond that, if Sibyl was unable to hear and speak, then she could not testify in court about what had happened to her. In this regard her case is not exceptional. Stories like Sibyl’s, in which women with cognitive or sensory disabilities are exploited by unscrupulous people, were not out of the ordinary in the Middle Ages and are still far too common today. The Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey estimates that people with disabilities are more than three times as likely to become victims of sexual assault than people without disabilities, less likely to be believed when they report abuse, and less likely to see their abusers prosecuted even if believed (Harrell, 2017, 3; RAINN, n.d.). With that said, Sibyl’s case might also be used to tell a different story about disability and consent than that told by John Abel. While the circumstances of her life highlight the dangers of being a single woman in medieval Europe, cases like Sibyl’s also illustrate how legal fictions about the extent to which disability limits agency have historically been used to restrict women from exercising many of the rights of legal adulthood, particularly those related to marriage, property, and reproduction. Sibyl’s case is ultimately interesting because of the way her alleged disability was used to contest her ability to consent. For when John Abel claimed that Sibyl was ‘deaf and dumb,’ he was not only emphasizing the extent of John Burgo’s misdeeds, but also making a legal argument about Sibyl’s ability to consent to marriage. A few decades before Sibyl’s alleged abduction, new ideas about the legal status of people with cognitive and sensory disabilities emerged in England, as jurists developed new laws to address the problems that arose when people who supposedly lacked the capacity to manage their own affairs inherited land held directly from the king. Specifically, jurists asserted that the insane, ‘idiots’ [idiota], ‘natural fools’ [fatuus nativitate], people who were mentally incompetent [non compos mentis], and those who were ‘deaf and mute’ [surdus et mutus] lacked the legal capacity to consent, and thus could not make wills, sell or donate land, bring a suit to court, and in most cases marry (Parkin, 2012, 85).6 To protect such people from unscrupulous relatives who

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would squander their wealth, and the predations of opportunists like John Burgo, the Crown appointed guardians to manage their estates and provide for their care according to the same rules that governed the wardships of minor heirs. However, while minors left wardship once they reached the age of majority, people identified as ‘deaf and mute,’ ‘idiots from birth,’ and ‘natural fools’ remained in wardship for the duration of their lives, since these conditions were presumed to be permanent (Bracton, [c. 1220–1230] 1968–77, 2:135 and 4:309).7 These developments marked the first time a European state established systematic rules for providing for people deemed unfit for self-governance, and the laws that emerged in the Middle Ages became the foundation for subsequent laws limiting the rights of people with disabilities within the Anglo-American legal tradition (Walker, 1968). Of course, people who lack the ability to hear or speak are not intellectually disabled, and people with intellectual disabilities are often capable of making decisions for themselves, so the notion that such people are completely incapable of consent was to some extent a legal fiction, devised to bolster the Crown’s claim to their land. Nevertheless, jurists in medieval England held that laws barring people with disabilities from acting as legal adults existed to protect their interests and those of their heirs (Richardson and Sayles, I, ch. 11, a. 10). However, since the Crown could grant wardships to anyone it pleased, the law also created opportunities for individuals to circumvent the rigid rules governing inheritance, wardship, and marriage, if they could convince the courts that someone whose land they sought was legally incompetent because they were disabled. Such claims were rare during the first half of the fourteenth century, when the average person accused of mental incompetency was an elderly man. However, they became increasingly common in lawsuits involving women who held land without male oversight during the latter half of the century, when women inherited land at unprecedented rates following plague, famine, and war.8 It is my contention that in these instances, men co-opted the law to regain control over property that had fallen into the hands of women, when traditional mechanisms of gendered control – such as inheritance laws that favored sons over daughters and social expectations regarding the marriages of wards and widows – failed to adequately contain women’s agency in matters relating to marriage and property.

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7 ‘Idiocy’ was only vaguely defined by medieval jurists. Essentially, an ‘idiot’ was someone who lacked the capacity to manage their own affairs from birth and did not enjoy moments of lucidity.

8 The percentage of estates descending to women increased from less than 20% during the first half of the fourteenth century, to more than 30% in the second half (Payling, 2001, 414; Spring, 1993, 11–2).

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9 Around a third of those accused of mental incompetence at this time were women, but a greater number of inquisitions focused on women. This reflects the fact that cases involving women were more contentious than those involving men, and thus were often appealed and relitigated. 10 English law provided some remedy for this by dictating that a woman’s lord had final say over who she could marry, and wards could not be married ‘disparagingly.’ However, the Church’s view that mutual consent made a marriage valid complicated this, and lords’ interests did not always align with those of families.

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Women were not the only people accused of being legally incompetent on account of disability during the later Middle Ages. However, as the fourteenth century progressed, they were accused at noticeably higher rates than they had been at the beginning of the century, when inquisitions involving men had outnumbered those involving women 4 to 1.9 This did not reflect epidemiology, particularly since women were almost always accused by people who wished to acquire their wardships after they experienced a life event that stood to remove land from their family or guardian’s control. This occurred when a ward reached the age of majority, an heiress was about to marry, a widow wished to remarry, a widow’s right to dower interfered with the plans of her husband’s heir, or simply when land descended to a single woman. Instead, at the heart of these cases was concern about the agency of single women who controlled land without male guardians. Single women were a source of tremendous anxiety for the landholding classes since land that a woman inherited would descend along her husband’s male line rather than her father’s if she had children. Moreover, the practice of selling the marriages of wards, as well as the Church’s assertion that marriage only required mutual consent, limited the ways families could challenge a match they viewed as unsuitable (Menuge, 2001, 83).10 This possibility was so devastating to families that sought to keep their estates intact as they passed between generations, that some historians have suggested that we should view the history of inheritance law as that of the gentry’s attempt to keep land from descending to women (Spring, 1993, 39). Anxiety about heiresses and widows would have increased in the second half of the fourteenth century when war and plague challenged even the best thought-out estate planning strategies. Thus, it is easy to imagine that women were accused of mental incompetency at greater frequency during this period because people who wanted their land recognized that the Crown’s ability to grant the wardships of incompetent individuals to people outside their line of succession presented a solution to these problems. Specifically, it enabled them to contain the risks posed by women’s marriages through contesting their ability to consent. Sibyl’s case reflects these developments. As noted, John Abel’s claim that Sibyl was ‘deaf and dumb’ helped build his case against John Burgo in several ways. First, it enabled him to deny the possibility that Sibyl had gone with Burgo of her own free will, thus heading off a common argument made by defendants accused of raptus. It also helped explain why she presumably had not raised the

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hue and cry, which was a requirement for prosecuting crime in medieval Europe. More importantly though, it cast doubt upon the validity of her marriage to John. At the time of Sibyl’s marriage, the Church forbade mentally incompetent individuals from marrying, and English law prevented ‘idiots from birth’ from marrying for all intents and purposes, since they had the legal status of children (Noonan, 1993: Decretals of Gregory IX, Book 4, Title I, C.24).11 Canon law held that people who lacked the ability to hear and speak could marry if they could ‘declare by signs what they cannot say by words’; however, the presumption that they lacked the capacity to consent in other contexts would have undoubtedly created ambiguity about this in England (Reid, 2004, 49; Noonan, 1993: Decretals of Gregory IX, 4.I.C.23). So too would have the fact that they otherwise had a legal status similar to ‘idiots,’ and were to remain in wardship for the duration of their lives (Bracton, [c. 1220–1230] 1968–77, 2:135 and 4:309). By casting her marriage to John into doubt, the claim that Sibyl was deaf and dumb would have had considerable advantages for Roger Pateschulle, the village rector who held Sibyl’s wardship prior to her alleged abduction. For if Sibyl was legally incompetent because she could neither hear nor speak, Pateschulle would retain a prize even greater than the right to sell her marriage. As the guardian of a disabled person forbidden to marry, he would continue to profit from Sibyl’s wardship even after she reached the age of majority. Such a change in Sibyl’s legal status would have been particularly valuable to Pateschulle in 1313, since Sibyl had just turned 14, the age at which she could take possession of her father’s estate if she married, and Pateschulle would lose the profits that came from her wardship if her marriage to Burgo was deemed legitimate. Even if it was not, Sibyl could have sued Patteschulle for seisin [possession] of her father’s estate when she turned 16, the age that an unmarried heiress could claim her inheritance. Thus, the claim that Sibyl was ‘deaf and dumb’ could potentially resolve the problem of her marriage while allowing Pateschulle to retain control over her estate. This would have substantially altered Pateschulle’s fortunes. Although Sibyl’s estate was modest by the standards of the nobility, through her wardship, Pateschulle had come to control an amount of land that was extravagant for a village rector, and he stood to lose it once she reached the age of majority. The right to sell her marriage would have softened this blow, since anyone who married Sibyl would have had to pay him a fee. This could be rather lucrative. Since marriage was one of the few ways that land changed hands between families in medieval England, the marriages of heiresses were highly desirable. Members of the landed elite sought them to consolidate power, while ‘new men’ used them to access a land market that was otherwise closed to them due to the nobility’s preference for social endogamy (Payling, 2001, 413–29). As a result, guardians often treated the marriages of their female wards as saleable commodities. It must then, have been deeply distressing to Pateschulle that

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11 The courts oversaw inquisitions involving married ‘idiots,’ but their marriages had taken place prior to when they became incapacitated, or the person was identified as an ‘idiot’ due to uncertainty about what legal ‘idiocy’ entailed, as it was still a nascent concept.

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Burgo had married Sibyl without paying for the privilege. Pateschulle had paid the Goldes for Sibyl’s wardship, and it is hard to imagine he would have done so when she was so close to reaching the age of majority if he had not expected to profit from his investment. Thus, losing the revenues of her estate and the right to sell her marriage in one fell swoop would have come as a painful blow. Compounding this, while English law held that a ward could marry someone of their choice if they paid their guardian the amount for which their marriage could have been sold, Sibyl had not paid Pateschulle (Walker, 1982, 123–5). However, once Sibyl was already married, Pateschulle had little recourse unless it could be shown that Sibyl had not consented to marrying John Burgo. Yet, the records documenting Sibyl’s case complicate the story John Abel reported to the Crown. First, Abel did not examine Sibyl in person, since Burgo detained her at the time of his inquisition. Instead, his assessment of her condition likely reflected what Pateschulle had reported to Chancery when he requested that the Crown investigate her abduction, and presumably paid court fees to make this happen. We can only speculate what Abel may have gained from misrepresenting Sibyl’s condition; however, escheators were among the least wealthy of the Crown’s servants, so it was not unheard of for them to allow bribes or personal relationships with those they served to sway their judgement (The escheator, 2018). For instance, in the late fourteenth century, Emma de Beston alleged that her uncle had promised to give part of the profits he would reap from holding her wardship to the escheator charged with examining her, if he identified her as an ‘idiot’ (Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous, 1957, 127). Moreover, while it is hard to discern whether Abel knew the people involved in Sibyl’s case, a record detailing his own run-in with the law decades later offers some clues. In 1341, he, along with Richard Golde (the farmer who sold Sibyl’s wardship to Roger Pateschulle) and Simon Chaumberlayn, Sibyl’s great uncle, were accused of breaking into the estate of John Thorp in the rectory of Flamstead (Lyte, 1902, 107). The nature of the relationship between Abel and his accomplices is unclear, but the fact that they had connections to Sibyl raises considerable questions about his impartiality. Finally, if Able identified Sibyl as deaf and dumb to aid Pateschulle’s effort to retain her wardship, it would not have been the only time he misrepresented an allegedly incompetent individual’s condition. In 1316, the Crown ordered John Walewayn, who had recently succeeded Abel as escheator of Trent, to remove Joan de la Chaumbre from wardship. Abel had taken Joan’s lands into the king’s hands after determining that she was an ‘idiot and madwoman,’ and later delivered them to Walewayn ‘pretending that they were in the king’s hands because of the madness of Joan.’ However, when Walewayn examined Joan in person, he found that she was ‘not an idiot and had not been at any time from her birth’ (Lyte, 1893, 371). The events that transpired after Abel sent his report to Chancery in 1313, however, provide the strongest evidence that he may have lied when he claimed

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that Sibyl was ‘deaf and dumb.’ In the same writ indicating that Sibyl had married John Burgo, the Crown ordered Abel to meddle no further with Sibyl and Burgo’s affairs, and to allow them both to have seisin of her father’s manor since Sibyl had proven her age and the king had accepted Burgo’s fealty (Lyte, 1893, 37). The writ did not mention Abel’s assessment that the marriage had begun with abduction, or Sibyl’s alleged deafness, nor did any subsequent records. It is notable, moreover, that the writ ordered Abel to allow both Burgo and Sibyl to have seisin of the estate, since the law held that ‘those who are naturally deaf and dumb cannot acquire seisin, neither by themselves nor by procurators’ (Bracton, [c. 1220–1230] 1968–77, 4:178). In 1315, Pateschulle again petitioned the Crown to intervene on his behalf, but this time he only complained that Burgo had married Sibyl against his will after breaking into the manor and did not claim that she was ‘deaf and dumb’ (Lyte, 1898, 251–2). The Crown accepted this and ordered Sibyl to pay him one mark. This was the amount that Sibyl’s mother paid the Crown for her own license to remarry a few years later, which suggests that it was a customary token rather than the amount for which Sibyl’s marriage could have been sold, since Sibyl was heir to her father’s estate, while her mother only held a third as dower (Lyte, 1912b, 35). John Burgo died in 1323 before he and Sibyl had children. Sibyl then remarried a man named Richard Linford, who came from a family that ‘had gained knightly rank during the reign of Edward I’ (Chibnall, 1965, 121). No one attempted to prevent their marriage, and Sibyl and Richard had two sons before they both died in 1349 (Chibnall, 1965, 121). Aside from his last-ditch protest against John and Sibyl’s marriage, Roger Pateschulle was never again mentioned in the records of the royal courts. Sibyl’s case ultimately highlights how disability, real or invented, could be used to challenge women’s ability to consent in matters involving marriage and land. Other late medieval inquisitions involving women accused of mental incompetence speak to this as well. For example, in 1378, John Hethe, the escheator of Suffolk, found that Margaret, daughter of Adam Colle of Brandon, was an ‘idiot from birth,’ after she donated 22 acres of pasture to John Waterman and William, the parson of her village church, following the death of her husband John Chapman.12 William claimed that John Chapman had alienated (given or sold) the lands to them 15 years earlier, and Margaret had released her rights to the lands after his death. Hethe’s finding that Margaret was an ‘idiot,’ however, implied that Margaret was not only unable to freely donate the land, but also that her marriage to John Chapman should never have occurred. Her deceased husband was thus recast as a predator who had married an incompetent woman, and William the parson was guilty of financial exploitation (Lyte, 1895, 130 and 252). Once Margaret was reexamined in person in Chancery upon William’s request, however, ‘it seemed to the court that she was not a natural idiot,’ so the land was restored to William (Lyte, 1912c, 151 and 182).

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12 Records stating that Margaret is an ‘idiot’ refer to John as her fiance´. However, the writ overturning this finding refers to him as her husband. It is easy to imagine that this was because if the lands had been Margaret’s through inheritance, John would not have been able to alienate them unless they were married.

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Margaret’s case is fairly representative of mental competency inquisitions involving women during the late fourteenth century. Similar strategies were employed when Joan of Jordan, the daughter and heir of a London fishmonger (who was well-to-do enough to leave her eight tenements) was accused of idiocy three times over a 15-year period. Each of these accusations occurred after she was newly widowed, and Joan’s condition was described differently each time she was accused. When her third husband died in 1397, the Crown found that Joan was an ‘idiot.’ Yet in 1402, her former tenants petitioned parliament, protesting that they had been wrongfully evicted by the person who held her wardship since Joan was not a ‘lifelong idiot’ as claimed. They had, the tenants said, dealt with Joan for years, and others hoping to gain access to her lands had made similar claims before (Stamp, 1927, 159). The Crown ruled against Joan’s tenants, but after she died in 1415, a letter describing her estate claimed she had not been an ‘idiot,’ but had fallen into ‘a sudden frenzy and became a lunatic’ after the death of her last husband (Lyte, 1910b, 306). Likewise, in a convoluted yet transparently fraudulent case, in 1367 the Crown ordered the escheator of Yorkshire to deliver the manors of Sutton upon Derwent, Kernetby, Ilkelay, and Wharram Percy, to Walter, son of Eustacia de Percy, who had died two years prior. The manors had been taken into the king’s hand after Eustacia’s death because the escheator was informed that she had been an ‘idiot from birth.’ Yet the Crown asserted that the lands were rightfully Walter’s because ‘idiocy may not, by the law and custom of the realm be proven and examined after the death of the idiot’ (Lyte, 1910a, 340). Moreover, the Crown had accepted Walter’s homage and fealty for the lands upon Eustacia’s death (Lyte, 1910a, 340). This case contains so many irregularities that it is hard to discern what occurred. However, details of Eustacia’s life told through other court records suggest that the effort to have her declared an idiot after her death was likely the continuation of a powerful family’s longstanding attempts to gain control over her land. Eustacia was related to one of the most powerful families in Northern England, whose prominence dated back to the Norman Conquest. While her father Peter had been only a minor noble, he was a collateral relative of Henry de Percy, a wealthy baron and member of Edward III’s council, who held vast amounts of land in Northumberland and Yorkshire. In addition to the manor of Wharram Percy, which Peter held directly from the Crown, Peter also held several estates from Henry de Percy and other lords, most of which passed to Eustacia upon his death (Farrar and Clay, 2013, 104–12). This may explain Henry de Percy’s later involvement in Eustacia’s affairs. Eustacia was still a minor when Peter died in 1314; however, she gained seisin of his estates in 1327, when she turned 14 and married Walter de Heselarton I (Lyte, 1896, 162). Four years later, their son Walter II was born. When Walter I died of the plague in 1349, a postmortem inquisition found that he held no lands except those that Eustacia had inherited. Yet, upon Walter I’s death, Henry de Percy immediately

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took possession of the manor of Kernetby, and claimed the custody and wardship of Walter II ‘all his life,’ since Walter was only 18 and the age of majority for male heirs was 21 (Lyte, 1916b, 463). Walter does not seem to have tried to claim the lands until Eustacia died in 1365. It is possible that Henry de Percy’s powerful position in Northern England contributed to Walter II’s failure to claim his inheritance when he reached the age of majority. It is likewise plausible that Henry de Percy’s son, also named Henry, was behind the efforts to have Eustacia declared an idiot after her death, since this would help explain why his family had taken possession of lands that Eustacia had rightfully inherited from her father when Walter I died in 1349. (Henry de Percy the elder also died in 1349.) The prospect of having Peter de Percy’s lands descend along the patrilineal line of Walter Heselarton’s family was, after all, exactly what worried noble families when land descended to heiresses like Eustacia. There must have been no love lost between the two families because in 1362 Walter II married Euphemia de Neville, the daughter of a family with whom the Percys had a vicious rivalry. In all of these cases, laws that ostensibly existed to protect those who could not protect themselves were used in attempts to gain control over women’s property. While these stories may seem like barbaric relics of a distant past, laws restricting people with disabilities from exercising the rights of legal adulthood have been used to similarly abusive ends in more recent times. Woven through the history of disability are attempts by states and individuals to limit women’s agency by identifying them as ‘mentally unfit’ when traditional forms of gendered control have failed to contain behavior deemed deviant. For instance, between the 1920s and late 1960s, tens-of-thousands of women in the United States were involuntarily sterilized after physicians determined that they were ‘feebleminded.’ Like many of the people identified as ‘idiots’ in the later Middle Ages, many of these women were not intellectually disabled. Instead, feeblemindedness became a ‘catch-all term for any type of behavior considered inappropriate or threatening,’ particularly sexual impropriety and criminality (Kline, 2014). Exemplifying this, W.E. Fernald, the superintendent of the first public asylum for people with intellectual disabilities in the United States, claimed that ‘Feeble-minded women are almost invariably immoral, and if at large usually become carriers of venereal disease or give birth to children who are as defective as themselves. […] A large proportion of the mothers of illegitimate children […] are feeble-minded’ (Fernald, 1913). As a result, in the first half of the twentieth century thousands of sex workers and unwed mothers were involuntary sterilized by state eugenics programs (Stern, 2005, 1–26 and 226). When advocates of eugenic sterilization were made to defend the practice, they argued that sterilization was in the best interest of the feebleminded. For if they had children, they would never be able to be independent, and their propensity toward promiscuity made the risk of letting them out of the asylum

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13 Illustrating this, despite the fact that people with disabilities are assaulted at such alarming rates, most people with cognitive disabilities are not taught sex ed, because they are assumed to be incapable of both desire and the ability to consent (Sampson, 2006, 280).

too great for the state to bear. If they were sterilized, however, they might ‘become self-supporting with benefits both to themselves and society’ (Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 [1927]). In other words, sterilization would protect them from their worst impulses, and the worst impulses of others. Similar claims were recently made to justify the illegal sterilization of 150 women in California’s prisons between 2006 and 2010 (Johnson, 2014). All of these abuses, medieval and modern, were supported by the belief that people with sensory and cognitive disabilities lack the capacity to make decisions in their own best interest and thus need others to make decisions for them. While this is true in some cases, these historical examples demonstrate that there is a fine line between protecting people from predation and exercising coercive control over them.13 In light of this, it is all the more interesting that when this assumption was first enshrined in the law, the law was quickly used to challenge women’s property rights.

About the Author Eliza Buhrer is a medieval historian and a Teaching Associate Professor at Colorado School of Mines, where she teaches writing, ethics, and history to engineering students. Her publications explore intersections between the histories of law, medicine, and disability in the Middle Ages, and she is writing a book on the cultural history of attention and distraction (E-mail: [email protected]).

References Bracton, H. [c. 1220–1230] 1968-77. De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae, 4 vols., ed. G.E. Woodbine, trans. S.E. Thorne. Harvard Law School Library. http:// amesfoundation.law.harvard.edu/Bracton Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous (Chancery) Preserved in the Public Record Office, 1377–1388, Vol. 4. 1957. London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office. Chibnall, A.C. 1965. Sherington, Fiefs and Fields of a Buckinghamshire Village. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. Fernald, W.E. 1913. The Burden of Feeblemindedness. Journal of Psycho-Asthenics 17(3): 87–111. https://www.disabilitymuseum.org/dhm/lib/detail.html?id=1208&print=1. Harrell, E. 2017. Crime Against Persons with Disabilities, 2009–2015 Statistical Tables. US Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics. https:// www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/capd0915st.pdf. Farrar, W. and C. T. Clay, eds. 2013. Early Yorkshire Charters, Volume 11: The Percy Fee. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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Johnson, C. 2014. Female Inmates Sterilized Illegally, California Audit Confirms. Reveal, 19 June. https://www.revealnews.org/article/female-prison-inmates-sterilizedillegally-california-audit-confirms/ Karras, R. M. 2011. The Regulation of Sexuality in the Late Middle Ages: England and France. Speculum 86(4): 1010–39. Kline, W. 2014. Feeble-mindedness. 535eebe87095aa0000000227

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Loengard, J. 2011. The Common Law for Margery: Separate but not Equal. In Women in Medieval Western Culture, ed. L.E. Mitchell, 117–30. New York: Routledge. Lyte, H.C.M., ed. 1893. Calendar of Close Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office, Edward II. Vol. 2. A.D. 1313–1318. London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office. Lyte, H.C.M., ed. 1895. Calendar of Patent Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office, Richard II, Vol. 2, 1377–1381. London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office. Lyte, H.C.M., ed. 1896. Calendar of Close Rolls Preserved in the Public Records Office, Edward III, A.D. 1327–1330. London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office. Lyte, H.C.M., ed. 1898. Calendar of Patent Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office, Edward II, Vol. 2. A.D. 1313–1317. London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office. Lyte, H.C.M., ed. 1902. Calendar of Close Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office, Edward III. Vol. 6. A.D. 1341–1343. London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office. Lyte, H.C.M., ed. 1910a. Calendar of Close Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office, Edward III. Vol. 8. A.D. 1364–1368. London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office. Lyte, H.C.M., ed. 1910b. Calendar of Patent Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office, Henry V, Vol. 1, A.D. 1413–1416. London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office. Lyte, H.C.M., ed. 1912b. Calendar of Fine Rolls Preserved in the Public Records Office, Vol. 3. Edward II. A.D. 1319–27. London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office. Lyte, H.C.M., ed. 1912c. Calendar of Close Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office, Richard II. Vol. 1. A.D. 1377–1381. London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office. Lyte, H.C.M., ed. 1913. Calendar of Inquisitions Postmortem and Other Analogous Documents Preserved in the Public Record Office. Edward I. Vol. 4. London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office. Lyte, H.C.M., ed. 1916a. Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous (Chancery) preserved in the Public Record Office. Vol. 2. London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office. Lyte, H.C.M., ed. 1916b. Calendar of Inquisitions Postmortem and Other Analogous Documents Preserved in the Public Record Office. Edward III. Vol. 9. London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office. Menuge, N.J. 2001. Medieval English Wardship in Romance and Law. Cambridge UK: D.S. Brewer. Noonan, J.T., trans. and A. Thompson, ed. 1993. Marriage Canons from the Decretum of Gratian and the Decretals, Sext, Clementines, and Extravagantes. http:// legalhistorysources.com/Canon%20Law/MARRIAGELAW.htm Parkin, K. 2012. Tales of Idiots, Signifying Something: Evidence of Process in the Inquisitions Postmortem. In The Fifteenth Century Inquisitions Post-mortem: A Companion, 79–97, ed. M. Hicks. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press. Payling, S.J. 2001. The Economics of Marriage in Late Medieval England: The Marriage of Heiresses. The Economic History Review 54(3): 413–29. RAINN. n.d. Sexual Abuse of People with Disabilities. https://www.rainn.org/articles/ sexual-abuse-people-disabilities.

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Reid, C.J. 2004. Power Over the Body, Equality in the Family; Rights and Domestic Relations in Medieval Canon Law. Cambridge UK: William B Eerdmans Publishing. Richardson, H.G. and G.O. Sayles, eds. 1953. Fleta, Vol. II, Prologue, Books 1 and 2. Selden Society 72. London: Selden Society. Sampson, F. 2006. Beyond Compassion and Sympathy to Respect and Equality: Gendered Disability and Equality Rights Law. In Critical Disability Theory: Essays in Philosophy, Politics, Policy, and Law, eds. D. Pothier and R. Devlin, 267–85. Vancouver and Toronto, Canada: University of British Columbia Press. Spring, E. 1993. Law, Land and Family: Aristocratic Inheritance in England, 1300 to 1800. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Stamp, E.A., ed. 1927. Calendar of Close Rolls Preserved in the Public Records Office, Prepared under the Superintendence of the Deputy Keeper of the Records, Henry IV. Vol. 1. 1396–1399. London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office. Stern, A. 2005. Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America. American Crossroads 17. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. The escheator: A Short Introduction. 2018. Mapping the Medieval Countryside: Properties, Places & People. Inquisitions Post-Mortem. http://www.inquisitionspostmortem.ac.uk/ contexts/the-escheator-a-short-introduction/ Waugh, S. 1988. The Lordship of England: Royal Wardships and Marriages in English Society and Politics, 1217–1327. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Walker, N. 1968. Crime and Insanity in England: Vol. I, The Historical Perspective. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press. Walker, S.S. 1982. Free Consent and Marriage of Feudal Wards in Medieval England. Journal of Medieval History 8: 123–34.

Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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Original Article

Accessing the medieval: Disability and distance in Anna Gurney’s search for St Edmund

Helen Brookman Department of Liberal Arts, King’s College, London, UK.

Abstract What can be achieved by putting scholarly bodies back into disembodied disciplinary histories? Pursuing a feminist historiography of medieval studies, this article seeks to understand how the scholarly practices of pioneering medievalist Anna Gurney (1795–1857) were enacted through her body, the difference of which was doubly marked within her spaces and networks as disabled and female. Considering intersections of geography and class as well as gender and disability, I trace Gurney’s search for the life of St Edmund, mapping how the spatial and temporal distances of the scholarly search are experienced differently by complex and varied scholarly bodies. I show how Gurney’s discursive, practical, and creative strategies for facilitating proximity to the medieval constitute a ‘praxis of access,’ which generates and vivifies a reciprocal relationship with the object of her knowledge. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019) 10, 357–375. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-019-00133-z

Chapter 8 was originally published as Brookman, H. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019) 10: 357–375. https://doi.org/ 10.1057/s41280-019-00133-z.

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Figure 1 Artist and date unknown. Miss Anna Gurney. Photographic print. Norwich: Norfolk Museums Collections, NWHCM: 1892.28.

What can be achieved by putting bodies back into disembodied disciplinary histories? How can attention to scholarly bodies – especially non-normative ones – facilitate feminist counter-histories of medieval studies? In recent decades, the discipline has sought to uncover and critique the history of its own formation, a project of increasing urgency for present-day medievalists as we seek to redress the oppressions and exclusions of the modern field. Drawing on approaches originated by feminists in philosophy of science, geography, and disability studies, this piece will seek to overturn the unconscious reproduction of the scholar as, in Bonnie Smith’s terms, ‘spiritualized and invisible’ (Smith, 1998, 2). It will follow Elizabeth Grosz’s call to ‘know the knower,’ considering the questions produced by the contemplation of her body within the spaces and institutions of scholarship, and thus critiquing ‘the inability of Western knowledges to conceive their own processes of (material) production, processes that simultaneously rely on and disavow the role of the body’ (Grosz, 1993, 193 and 187). Pursuing a feminist historiography of medieval studies, we can view practices of knowing as

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practices of living, being, and feeling, in order to unpick the politics of medievalist knowledge production in the nineteenth century, and thus to reckon with their inheritances in the present day. My subject is Anna Gurney (1795–1857), who is best remembered for her pioneering Literal Translation of the Saxon Chronicle (1819). She pursued a broad range of intellectual interests across her career – philology, archaeology, natural history – but was known especially for her study of Old English and Old Norse. An activist in the causes of anti-slavery, anti-animal cruelty, and maritime rescue, Gurney was a woman of considerable political and intellectual agency who lived until 1838 with her female partner. Having had polio at ten months old, Gurney used a wheelchair. This article will explore how Anna Gurney enacted her scholarly praxis through her physical body, the difference of which was doubly marked within her spaces and networks as disabled and female. It will consider the intersection of material and social factors, class and geography as well as gender and disability. Particularly, I seek to trace the thrills and frustrations of a single scholarly search for the life of St Edmund. It is recorded in a short correspondence (of which only her half survives, in the Library of the Society of Friends) with Gurney’s brother, the prominent antiquarian, aspiring poet, and Vice-President of the Society of Antiquaries, Hudson Gurney (1775–1864), conducted from her Norfolk cottage in March 1850 as she considered reprinting a comparative edition of her Literal Translation. Her ‘hunting out’ of Edmund’s history represents a mundane but fundamental scholarly practice: the search for a viable textual reference. The specific scholarly practices of nineteenth-century medieval studies survive, via their institutionalization in late-century positivism, as ‘the techniques that many medievalists regard as the mainstay of academic medieval studies today,’ an exclusionary inheritance that Kathleen Biddick urges us to recognize and critique (Biddick, 1998, 2). In the nineteenth century there were particular barriers of access to the required training, networks, and research materials, which were gate-kept – directly and indirectly – on grounds of gender, race, disability, and class. Sustained attention to her quotidian scholarly activity allows me to situate Gurney within her scholarly environment and recreate, immersively, her embodied experience of pursuing scholarship: ‘For feminists, the everyday routines traced by women are never unimportant, because the seemingly banal and trivial events of the everyday are bound into the power structures that limit and confine women’ (Rose, 1993, 17). I follow Gurney down a familiar research rabbit-hole to explore an aspect of her scholarship as a disabled woman – conducting a search at a distance and by proxy – to explore what I call her ‘praxis of access.’ Explicitly developing the feminist understanding that ‘all knowledge is situated [and] that people in marginal social positions enjoy an epistemological privilege that allows them to theorize society differently from those in dominant social locations,’ Tobin Siebers’ foundational work in disability studies theorizes

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a ‘complex embodiment that values disability as a form of human variation’ (Siebers, 2008, 25). Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s field-forming work in feminist disability studies ‘finds disability’s significance in interactions between bodies and their social and material environments,’ conceiving disability as both ‘a vector of socially constructed identity and a form of embodiment’ (GarlandThomson, 2005, 1557–9). Understanding Gurney’s situated knowledge, her ‘sitpoint’ (to take the term that Garland-Thomson uses to challenge the ableist assumptions of standpoint theory, Garland-Thomson, 2002, 21), requires attention to the spaces Gurney inhabited, her everyday practices within them, and the ways her subjectivity was constituted discursively by those around her and in her own self-representations. Thus, I hope to trace – without reinscribing the reductive or essentializing limitations that society imposes on sexed and impaired bodies – how the material and discursive effects of gender and disability inform Gurney’s scholarly process. I position Gurney as a knowing subject, and her body – one that ‘violate[s] the normative standards and expectations of bodily form and function’ – as a site and medium of knowledge (Garland-Thomson, 2005, 1558). As Martha Stoddard Holmes has explored, working around the ‘fictions of affliction’ imposed upon her, a disabled writer can deploy ‘narrative and rhetorical strategies to transform […] her cultural position into a source of power, even if the power is tenuous and provisional’ (Holmes, 2004, 135). Therefore, rather than revealing how the imbricated ideologies of gender and ability impacted on the development of Gurney’s career, my focus is more restorative: to understand the discursive, practical, and creative manoeuvres that constitute her praxis of access. I build on this situated understanding to consider how Gurney’s perspective produces a particular relationship with the Middle Ages (in this case, a ludic fantasy of St Edmund as a revenant collaborator in her research process). This will allow me to measure how the distances governing access to the medieval for gendered and disabled bodies impinge on the relationship between the modern knowing subject and the medieval known object, and how scholarly praxis, working across these distances, can generate and vivify it. *** Gurney was always closely associated with Northrepps Cottage, at Overstrand, near Cromer, in Norfolk, which was her home from 1825 until her death in 1857. She lived there with the woman she called her ‘faithful and beloved Partner’ (A. Gurney, 1857, 315v) Sarah Maria Buxton, until the latter’s death in 1838, after which, ‘although she had frequently intimate friends staying with her she never again had what she used to call another ‘‘partner’’’ (D. Gurney, 1857, 5). In 1833, Anna wrote a poem, ‘Thoughts on our 8 years at the Cottage,’ reflecting on how central their home was to their shared lives – and their selfdefined relationship – as unmarried and childless women: ‘We came, enamoured

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of our barren choice, / We Partners came to work and to rejoice / ‘‘Pleasant the lives’’ to us, & care forgot / We made our Eden of the desert spot’ (Gurney, 1833, 9). The Cottage was also the site of Gurney’s political activism, where she played a hidden role as author of the final report of the Aborigines Select Committee in 1837 (Elbourne, 2003). Together, Gurney and Sarah were known as the ‘Cottage Ladies,’ and, when Sarah died, Anna was invariably ‘Anna Gurney of Northrepps Cottage.’ As Kathryn Gleadle describes, ‘[a]ssociating Gurney with the cottage was a rhetorical device which shifted the potentially disruptive meanings of Gurney’s life to the neutral signifier of a physical location’ (Gleadle, 2009, 244). In her frontispiece to her Literal Translation of the Saxon Chronicle, Gurney – seeking a favourable reception for her ‘limited impression’ (whose publication unfortunately coincided with a ‘much more complete’ version by the Rawlinsonian Professor of Anglo-Saxon) – described herself as ‘a Lady in the Country who only had access to the Printed Texts’ (Gurney, 1819, frontispiece). She emphasizes her sex, her rural location, and her lack of access to manuscripts, positioning herself with rhetorical modesty to soften the impudence of an unknown 23-year-old woman seeking to compete with the Oxford Professor. Although Gurney never published widely, nor held any academic or public position, she continued to engage in scholarly work throughout her life and built private intellectual networks through which she disseminated it (Brookman, 2016, n.p.). She was elected as the first female member of both the British Archaeological Association (1845) and the Philological Society (1847). By the time Gurney began her search for St Edmund in 1850, Northrepps Cottage offered an impressive research environment. The inventory of Gurney’s library made at her death reveals an astounding collection of books and journals, valued at £585.16, including thousands of volumes on diverse subjects from botany to Egyptology, among an extensive collection of philological and antiquarian materials, especially relating to Britain and Scandinavia. It contained both increasingly outdated eighteenth-century works and more cutting-edge scholarship, English and continental (she read Grimm, Bopp, Diefenbach, and Mu¨ller as well as Hickes, Suhm, Lye & Manning, and Turner). As well as amassing an extensive private collection, she was an avid borrower. She was a member of the Norwich public and city libraries and was listed as an annual subscriber to the London Library in the second catalogue, published in 1847. The Library, founded by Thomas Carlyle in 1841, had a subscription fee of ‘six pounds entrance, and two pounds annually’ and gave every member residing more than ten miles away from the General Post Office, London access to an extraordinary postal borrowing service, paying the ‘carriage’ to borrow books – ‘not exceeding fifteen at any time’ – for up to two months (Cochrane, 1847, xii). Anna Gurney thought highly of the London Library, believing it ‘so good a collection [that it must have a volume she sought]’ (Gurney, 1850a, 30 March 1850, 2/14, 2).1 In July 1849, she writes to Hudson to discuss a new

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1 All subsequent letters cited are from the Society of Friends Gurney MSS (Gurney, 1850a) unless otherwise stated.

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book, the Iolo Mansucripts (which had been published in 1848): she notes that he probably had a copy in London, being a subscriber to the Society for the Publication of Ancient Welsh Manuscripts, whereas she borrowed a copy from a ‘Miss Chester’ (17 July 1849, 2/9, 1). By March 1850, she had had her own copy, which she had ‘picked up lately fr[om] a Catalogue for a guinea’ (13 March 1850, 2/11a, 3). Although the British Museum reading room was used increasingly (but not commonly) by women throughout the period, there is no evidence that Gurney used it directly, although she was a friend of the Museum’s Principal Librarian, Sir Henry Ellis, and he offered her assistance in pursuing her enquiries. Regarding her search for Edmund, she noted in a letter, ‘I must someday have a look at his Homily in the B.M.’ (30 March 1850, 2/14c, 1) and considered that the ‘beautiful penmanship’ of the Icelanders would allow her to make notes on the Norse sources ‘easily’; so, at the very least, she casually considered visiting the Museum and consulting manuscript material first-hand. The list of ‘Anna’s MSS’ compiled on her death, which contains the titles of dozens of translations, comparative collations, papers, treatises, notes, and other works, primarily focused on Old English and Old Norse literary, historical, and philological material, includes several ‘M.S.S. copied in the British Museum’ (although not the Life of St Edmund). She also had an extensive fossil collection, said by the paleontologist Richard Owen to be ‘the most instructive in Norfolk’; the novelist Amelia Opie wrote from the Cottage that ‘Anna Gurney abounds in mammoth remains’ (Opie, 1834, 171b). At Northrepps Cottage, Gurney declared herself ‘as well off as I c[oul]d be out of the British Museum’ (13 March 1850, 2/11a, 5). In The Sense of an Interior, Diana Fuss reminds us that writing cannot be extricated from ‘the complex particularities of its spatial and material origins’ (Fuss, 2004, 2). She asks, ‘How does a body move through space? How does the proximity to people and things shape interior life? How do light, color, texture, and temperature structure our ways of knowing?’ She describes realizing, belatedly, that she was writing a book on disability, because ‘distinct corporeal needs and histories structure every subject’s relation to the domestic interior’ (Fuss, 2004, 8). Similarly, my aim now is to reanimate the ‘gestures, spaces, and habits’ in which, as Roger Chartier notes, the practice of reading is always embodied, to understand Gurney’s search for St Edmund as a spatial praxis, informed by her complex embodiment and situated within domestic space (Chartier, 1992, 51). Gurney’s impairment – paralysis of her lower body – and the ‘great and frequent’ pain she experienced in later life informed her movement within her home. As a child, Anna would often sit and move around on the floor (her cousin Catherine Gurney described her in one letter as ‘busy on the floor as usual’ [Hare, 1895, 217]), but as an adult she sat primarily in her wheelchair: another cousin, Daniel Gurney, described how ‘She became very stout, & wheeled herself about in a chair in the house, & out of doors was carried, or dragged in a chair by two menservants’ (D. Gurney, 1857, 3).

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Northrepps Cottage was physically adapted to accommodate her needs, and adjustments made to the banisters on the main staircase can still be ‘viewed’ on a visit the Cottage in its current incarnation as Northrepps Cottage Country Hotel. Contemporary biographical accounts frequently situate Gurney as a learned woman amid her library, drawing on stereotypes of disability to contrast ‘the incapacity of her body’ (while also expressing surprise at its strength and activity) with her ‘mind of every unusual power and energy.’ In an obituary of Gurney, Sarah Austin describes how: When talking on her favourite subject – philology, she would suddenly and rapidly wheel away the chair in which she always sate and moved, to her well-stored bookshelves, take down a book, and return delighted to communicate some new thought or discovery. (Austin, 1857, 639) This gesture appears to give an insight into Gurney’s particular bodily experience of her research environment and the comfortable facility with which she navigated it, manoeuvring nimbly to consult her reference sources without breaking conversation. This was no hermetic cell or quarantined sickroom but a porous space, poised between private and public, through which people and materials came and went. As her easy movement between verbal interlocutor and printed text indicates, her everyday praxis incorporates social interchange as much as quiet contemplation. Yet further attention suggests that, rather than giving insight into Gurney’s perspective, the descriptions of this characteristic gesture, which becomes a stock trope in biographical accounts, represent external constructions that produce reductive narratives of disability. Just as she is closely tied to her Cottage as a way of domesticating her otherwise troubling political agency and sexuality, these accounts associate her closely with the ‘chair in which she always sate and moved’ to control discursively the meanings afforded to her disruptive life and prostheticized body. Austin’s account of Gurney was published in Charlotte Yonge’s Biographies of Good Women (1862), and Yonge wrote her own edifying account of Gurney in her Book of Golden Deeds (1864). In her account of ‘that crippled lady’ with the ‘intellect of the highest order,’ Yonge describes the same wheeling movement, shifting the emphasis to indicate Gurney’s ‘ready perception of the wants and wishes of others’: Not only was her wheeled chair propelled in a moment to her bookshelves when she wanted a volume to illustrate her thought, but the moment she caught a friend’s eye in search of any article at a little distance, her chair was turned in that direction, and the object was presented with infinite grace. (Yonge, 1864, 257–8) Here, the volubility and erudition of Austin’s account is superseded by an image of Gurney as a moral exemplar of selfless altruism and generosity. Yonge’s account is

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an overdetermined blend of what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson identifies as the ‘narrative of catastrophe’ and ‘the sentimental narrative’ of disability, the former presenting disability as a ‘dramatic, exceptional extremity’ that ‘incites courage,’ and the latter seeing ‘people with disabilities as occasions for narcissistic pity or lessons in suffering for those who imagine themselves as nondisabled’ (GarlandThomson, 2005, 1567–8). For travel writer George Borrow, to whom Gurney was a ‘personage […] whom he had always a desire to see,’ the same wheeling gesture preceded the retrieval of an Arabic grammar, which he then tried to ‘decipher’ as she ‘talked to him continuously,’ ‘asking for explanation of some difficult point,’ until he ‘threw down the book and ran out of the room’; his account presents as exaggerated nightmare of garrulous and exacting female authority, the idiosyncrasy of her gesture reinforcing the unnaturalness of her intellectual formidability (Upcher, 1893, 129). For those to whom she became known by reputation in the 1840s and 1850s, her attraction was founded in the intersection of her remarkable female learnedness and her conspicuousness as a wheelchair user. In her cabinet of curiosities, Anna Gurney became a spectacle of curiosity herself. To move beyond these external constructions to gain her authentic selfperspective is difficult – she did not write explicitly about her impairment, nor reflect extensively on her experiences as a scholar – but passing comments in her letters can give us a partial sense of her embodied experience. We can picture her (as in this family sketch) sitting in her wheelchair at her desk, with pen, ink, and blank paper at close reach, surrounded by her well-stocked library.

Figure 2 E. MacInnes. c. 1842. Anna Gurney in her drawing room The Cottage about 1842. From R.H.J. Gurney, 1895. Reproduced with permission of Simon Gurney.

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She is opening a book; sitting back to read a passage; leafing through her papers; scribbling notes. She comes across a letter from her brother and breaks off her studies to respond: ‘How this letter got amongst my papers I do not know ^but^ at least I know it ought not to have got there’ (13 March 1850, 2/11a, 1). The exchange between siblings blurs constantly between personal and scholarly matters. As well as her antiquarian notes and queries on sagas, coins, and etymologies, they record Gurney’s daily experiences and activities: her frustrations at her perceived incapacities; her preoccupations with social gossip and legal matters; and her reflections on her local surroundings, especially the changing Norfolk landscape in an unseasonably cold March. The letters tell us where and how she reads and writes. Gurney’s slender Literal Translation had been printed in 1819, in her words, ‘in a form, which, it is conceived, may render it convenient for reference.’ Gurney has a precise focus on the physical dimensions of her reading material, habitually stating whether the books she mentions are in folio, quarto, octavo, or duodecimo (‘I fear they are only in folio,’ 14 May 1848, 2/6a, 3) and noting their usability and portability (‘The volume divides exactly & ^the parts^ all quite brought within easily usable comparts,’ 28 March 1850, 2/13a; ‘it w[oul]d make too bulky a work,’ 13 March 1850, 2/11a, 2). There are implicit considerations in each description: can they be sent in the post? be read comfortably in a chair? Her only criticism of the London Library was that you could not ‘read at your own comfort & certainly not to other peoples edification, in books that you could not mark’ (14 May 1849, 2/6a, 3). Of course, any reader, especially a bibliographically literate Victorian, attends to such bookish affordances: her friend Sir Francis Palgrave cites Dr Johnson’s statement that ‘Books that you may carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are the most useful after all’ (Palgrave, 1831, vii). But these considerations are magnified for a reader with physical impairments. Dominika Bednarska argues that ‘accommodating disability poses fundamental challenges to [present-day] ideologies of work and notions of what it means to use time and life productively’ (Bednarska, 2009, 166). The same is true for the nineteenth century. ‘I am afraid I shall lose too much time ‘en feuilletant’ with the excuse of hunting for grains of history,’ Gurney writes, ‘however [in] this rheumatic weather, it is comfortable to have a book to turn over without being required to do much’ (Tuesday eve, 19 March 1850, 2/12b, 7) It is striking that she describes spending her time not ‘lost in thought,’ but ‘en feuilletant’ [‘in leafing through’]. The activity – not requiring any strenuous exertion – is a ‘comfort’ for cold and pain. Yet, she experiences guilt for ‘los[ing] time’ in these distractions: I almost despair first from having ^become^ thoroughly convicted & convinced of utter dullness of head & then because of my weakness of hands. In Truth I do find myself very inefficient in every way – still, having

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you to look to for clarifying my attempts I sh[oul]d like to fancy myself employed in this way. (13 March 1850, 2/11a, 6–7) Here we can see how her doubts about her intellectual and physical capabilities interact: ‘dullness of head’ and ‘weakness of hands’ conspiring to make her ‘inefficient.’ Such anxiety is only stemmed by her authorizing appeal to her brother: it is Hudson’s legitimizing oversight in ‘clarifying’ her thoughts that enables her to consider herself ‘employed’ and not just dilettantishly leafing. Commenting on some ‘capital books […] a most valuable present’ that Hudson had sent to her, she states: ‘I only wish I may be able to turn them in any measure to the accounts that you & they deserve but inefficiency seems written on my attempts. However, I find the looking up things very pleasant’ (28 March 1850, 2/13a, 1). Such ambivalence about the status of brain-work as labour was widespread in the industrialized nineteenth century: the scholar reading studiously and the idler reading for pleasure might look identical. The domestic sphere and the workplace were often one and the same for the scholar (as they were for women laborers more broadly). For disabled women, who are more likely to need the comfort of spaces primarily associated with rest and relaxation, the demarcation between the sites of leisure and study is especially blurred. ‘I get so acheful towards even[ing],’ Gurney notes, ‘that I go to bed [early] & then get a comfortable time for reading’ (14 May 1849, 2/6b, 1). The Reverend Edward Hoare was keen to stress in Gurney’s eulogy that she did not conform to idle female stereotypes: ‘What a contrast did she present to the listless, fanciful, and indolent novel reader upon the sofa! How manfully did she grapple with one language after another!’ (Hoare, 1857, 19). The value of academic labour relies upon the individual’s capacity to conceive of themselves as a working scholar, a subject position that was far less accessible to women. Yet while Gurney’s comments indicate genuine ambivalence about her status and success, they also form part of her ongoing rhetorical self-positioning, itself a functional element of her scholarly praxis. *** Through her letters, we can trace how, in early 1850, Gurney became particularly interested in the martyring of St Edmund by the Vikings. Edmund’s death was recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle annal for 870 and, as his cult re-emerged in the tenth century, his Latin passio was written by Abbo of Fleury and then paraphrased in Old English by Ælfric. These saints’ lives tell of Edmund’s gruesome martyring: he was tied to a tree, whipped, and shot with arrows or spears until, like St Sebastian, he resembled a hedgehog with bristles. Edmund’s severed head (hidden in undergrowth by the departing Vikings) was guarded by a wolf, miraculously shouting out ‘Here! here! here!’ until it was found by his searching followers and reunited with his body. Upon later exhumation of his body, his wounds were found to have healed and his head to

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have reattached to his body. St Edmund, representing the ‘Victorian archetype of manly courage,’ was a figure of increasing popular interest and commemoration in the mid-nineteenth century, especially following the publication of Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present in 1843 (inspired partly by the 1840 publication of the Chronicle of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds, which Gurney also read) and the discovery of a ‘Danish arrow-head’ in an ancient oak tree in Hoxne, Suffolk, in 1848 which ‘verified’ its status as the site of Edmund’s martyrdom (Young, 2015, 170). In Past and Present, Abbot Samson dreams of St Edmund’s dead body, around which the Abbey was built: in Carlyle’s work, it is ‘sacred’ and ‘stiff,’ ‘a temple where the Hero-soul once was and now is not.’ Gurney’s own interest in St Edmund reflects a localizing, East Anglian element in her medievalism that also produced her anonymously published translation of ‘A Saxon homily on St. Neot’ (1820) and her article on ‘Norfolk Words’ (1855). On 13 March 1850, Gurney was embarking upon a new scheme to produce a revised edition of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle ‘with notes from the Sagas [which] w[oul]d be a very new thing […] there is piles of Materials for such a scheme, as we talk of’ (13 March 1850, 2/11a, 5). A version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle had been published in 1847 by J. A. Giles, a highly derivative scholar, in which his translation was ‘borrowed’ from Gurney’s 1819 translation. She ponders to Hudson whether Giles’ publication ‘superseded my reprinting mine,’ noting ‘I do not see that it w[oul]d, as it is only in the latter part that it professes to have followed our version’ (13 March 1840, 2/11a, 1). Following a ‘very welcome and valuable letter’ from Hudson, she declares herself ‘quite stirred up’ to ‘prepare for your inspection a specimen of the notes that I c[oul]d furnish.’ She had already ‘generally marked the passages’ and set out her method: ‘the way will be to look thro[ugh] one set of Sagas ^& Annals^ after another for a given period’ (3–4). After receiving his response, she tells him that ‘You have given a motive to hunt up information bearing on Saxon Hist[or]y’ and begins to focus her pursuit (19 March 1850, 2/12a, 2). ‘Neither,’ she writes, ‘in any of the published homilies that I have seen, nor in the Blickling MS do I remember any on the King St Edmund. His history w[oul]d be worth making out & I see in Wanley’s Cat: there are several MSS. of his homily existing – I never knew what was the real story of the arrow head found in the tree under which he was supposed to have been shot’ (2/12b, 5–6). She notes especially that there is ‘One ‘‘Codex’’ containing the homily on St Edmund in the British Museum.’ On 28 March, she is evidently still searching for Edmund: ‘I cannot find any printed homily of the king St Edmund. This is a portion of history I should much like to hunt out’ (3). By 30 March, she is showing signs of exasperation: ‘If the King St Edmund is not to be found in the Acta Sanctorum (& if he is, I do not know that I can get at him, for the copy in the London library I see does not come down to Nov. in which month is his day) I must someday have a look at his Homily in the B. Museum’ (30 March 1850, 2/14c, 1). On 6 April, still with no reference, she resorted to sending Hudson a comic poem, chiding him for his ineffectuality

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(Gurney, 1850b). A month later, Hudson successfully fulfilled her request: ‘You have given me ^an^ excellent reference for ‘the king St. Edmund.’ Thanks’ (Monday 22 April, 2/16c, 1). The letters offer no further information about the reference Hudson sent or any further research she then may have pursued. Her comments reveal her persistence and determination: she speaks of ‘hunting out’ his history and her desire to ‘get at him.’ Unable to locate the reference in her own collection of printed books or via her access to the London Library, she engages in an alternative mode of scholarship: using Hudson as a proxy to search from a distance, in his own vast library and those he visited in London. Throughout the exchange, Gurney’s manoeuvres are first deferentially and obliquely suggestive (‘His history would be worth making out’), and then playfully pleading (‘Pray, Hunt, and Hearken, Brother Dear!’), as she seeks to elicit the information she needs. She positions herself as junior to her brother, flatteringly reliant on his superior expertise (‘I want to know whether you think I have made a bit of a discovery’) (30 March 1850, 2/14a, 4). On other occasions, she is confident and assured, recommending he use the London Library (which lay mere feet away from his home on St. James’ Square) with familiar ease: ‘I never have all my 15 volumes out – & Robert might run over to the corner of the Square (number 12/.) [and] fetch you out a couple of volumes at a time in my name’ (14 May 1849, 2/6a, 4). Similarly, she slips between claiming sole authorship of her Literal Translation (‘whether it supersedes my reprinting mine’) and positioning Hudson as her co-author (‘it professes to have followed our version’). As well as relying on a close-knit local circle of family and friends and her wider networks of scholarly contacts, Gurney could draw on substantial financial resources to pay personal servants, who facilitated her everyday life and her scholarly activity (more than many, ‘people with disabilities[…]live in webs of interdependent relationships,’ Godden and Hsy, 2013, 337). As Daniel Gurney describes, ‘Her fortune which was very ample enabled her to retain around her most faithful & attached attendants.’ She named several of these in her will: ‘my attached and trusty Hannah Roper’; ‘my faithful Sarah Rushmore (whom I commonly call Lucy)’; ‘my valued servant Emily Greenaker’; ‘my valued servant John Spink’, ‘my valued servant Stephen Rogers’ (A. Gurney, 1857, 317v). In managing her scholarly operations, with Gurney in Northrepps Cottage acting as covert director and Hudson in London as her scholarly proxy, she employs an evident skill at being diplomatically, wittily, and effectively directive, which she had developed as a wealthy disabled woman of extraordinary – although carefully negotiated and ambivalently claimed – agency. Through such manoeuvres, she deploys her family network and resources in a notable inversion of the more familiar roles for nineteenth-century women as amanuenses or helpmeets to their husbands, brothers, or fathers. The project of recovering women’s contributions often requires centering such women – whose

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labour is often visible (if at all) only in the acknowledgements rather than on the title page – and revealing how much existing scholarship should rightfully be attributed to them. But, in the nineteenth century, ‘invalidism could be a source of empowerment for female intellectuals’ (Gleadle, 2009, 247); for Gurney, her disability freed her from expectations regarding marriage and children, and afforded her liberty in choosing her intimate relationships; spending her time on scholarly activity; developing and deploying political and intellectual agency; and receiving, rather than solely offering, assistance. Time-geographer Torsten Ha¨gerstrand has described how human movement is governed by ‘capability constraints’ (‘the physical limits to movement’); ‘coupling constraints’ (‘which compel people to come together at certain times and in locations’); and ‘authority constraints’ (‘social rules banning or encouraging certain temporospatial behaviour’) (Rose, 1993, 21–2). As a disabled woman, Gurney encountered capability constraints emerging from her physical impairments; coupling constraints as structured by her familial and social networks and their geographical distribution; and authority constraints stemming from gendered expectations of her as a scholarly woman. The physical constraints she experienced compelled her to rely more fully than others on forms of assistance and collaboration throughout her life; she developed successful enabling strategies which were then easily and naturally extended into her scholarly activity – for example, through a casual and habitual conscription of friends and family as research assistants and copyists – as her interests and intellectual authority developed. The strategies for overcoming capability constraints could be repurposed to tackle authority constraints. Along with her wealth, class, and forceful personality, being a woman who required assistance for everyday living empowered Gurney to be a woman who could request, negotiate, and, in some contexts, command assistance for her scholarly projects, in a mode experienced more commonly by her male counterparts. Having traced the various paths of this specific query, back and forth, in her letters, we can also begin to chart the broader lines of enquiry that constitute the geographies of her medieval studies. Gurney sits at the centre, ‘energetically superintending,’ as she did in her maritime rescue work, when, in the event of shipwreck, she would be carried to the shore to direct operations (‘B.,’ 1857, 1269). The lines of her correspondence networks run between Northrepps Cottage and Hudson at St. James Square; or Henry Ellis at the British Museum; or Sir Francis Palgrave in Yarmouth. We can also visualise the routes taken by the books destined to furnish her drawing room, which travelled to Northrepps Cottage from the London Library via the General Post Office; from friends and local libraries; from learned societies and booksellers’ catalogues. A key axis here is that between rural Norfolk and the centres of learning clustered in the metropolis. The London Library’s generous lending policy reflects just one way that Victorian scholars managed such distances with great facility. Two letters sent to Anna Gurney from Sir Henry Ellis on 19 and 20 December

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1853 (now in the Ellis Papers at the British Library) offer another illuminating example of long-distance intellectual exchange. Ellis begins by thanking Gurney for the ‘beautiful Turkey […] which arrived safe here on Saturday morning’ and consults with her on ‘a point upon which I have long thought of writing to you’ (whether, based on her ‘extensive reading in Northern Literature,’ she could advise on ‘Anglo-Saxon coins found in the Countries of the North’; Ellis, 1853, 280). His second letter notes that his ‘thanks for your splendid Present of the Turkey must have crossed the Letter received this morning, upon its way to North Repps’ (Ellis, 1853, 282). Gurney, having won favour with her classic Norfolk landowner’s Christmas gift, had written to Ellis in the meantime with a query about ‘cuneiform and hieroglyphic learning.’ He advises that to learn of the ‘latest discoveries,’ she should consult the ‘last Numbers of the Asiatic Society’s Transactions,’ which are ‘all of portable size.’ He then notes that the son of the Assistant Secretary of the Asiatic society is a transcriber at the Museum ‘through whom I can obtain anything, or make any further Enquiry you may wish […] my services are at your service.’ The letters show the extent to which this friendship – through which Gurney achieved two of her few publications of later life, letters to Ellis which were printed in the journal of the Society of Antiquaries, Archaeologia – served to facilitate her enquiries (Brookman, 2016). Ellis then shares a new way she may be able to pursue her queries from a distance: ‘I don’t know whether you may be aware that Photography is now successfully applied to copying of Cuneiform Inscriptions […] We have even just set up a Photographic House upon the Roof of the Museum.’ He notes that the technology will serve not just for Assyrian cylinders but ‘for Vases and Antiquities of every kind, or almost for whatever we may apply it to’ (Ellis, 1853, 282). Through the combination of a frequent and fast postal service and innovative applications of new technology, Ellis offers new ways for Gurney as a geographically isolated scholar to gain access to accurate facsimiles of the latest archaeological discoveries. As with contemporary applications of digital technologies in archival research, such advancements can be utilized by any scholar for convenience and speed when research materials lie at a distance but are of increasing benefit the further the user is from the metropolitan centre and have particular potential for increasing accessibility for disabled scholars. The latest issues of learned journals and society transactions; transcriptions of manuscripts; recent editions of sagas and annals; photographs of cutting-edge archaeological finds; and direct lines to key contacts who could pursue enquiries on her behalf: if Gurney had to make her own British Museum at Northrepps Cottage, it was no pale imitation. *** Thus far, I have situated Gurney’s search in the material environment of her home and witnessed her pragmatic deployment of her social and financial

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resources to overcome spatial constraints; the final section of this article considers a more creative aspect of her medievalist practice. In a playful poem (newly discovered in private Gurney family papers), she expands the figure of ‘hunting’ St Edmund (a semantic field that comes naturally to one of country habits), aligning her brother’s task with the original searches for the saint, whose story she clearly knew well. Dated 6 April 1850, the poem was written after she had mentioned Edmund to her brother three times but before she received her reference: In the year seventy, plus eight hundred, Edmund was martyred – Suffolk plunder’d – Well had it been for Edmund’s skin, And for those Danes that did the sin, If the grim Vikings, in the dark, Had shot, like you, beside the mark – For ‘twas the twentieth of November Those Heathens did the saint dismember – His head into the woods they flung, Not thus could silence Edmund’s tongue – Oh, that this member bodiless Again would speak from shelf or press! Not from green leaves, but leaves of vellum, Would lift its voice again, & tell ‘em His whereabouts, with accent clear, Crying, as whilome, ‘Here! Here! Here!’, Pray hunt, and hearken, Brother dear! Yr AG (Gurney, 1850b, 165)2 The scholarly pursuit is initially a violent one, with Hudson, unlike the ‘grim Vikings,’ missing his mark (perhaps by sending her an erroneous reference). She then transposes the unexpected miracle of Edmund’s passion – that the disembodied head of saint is able to speak and announce its location – onto the desired scholarly encounter, urging Hudson to take the part of a loyal follower and find Edmund. The desired object shimmers obliquely throughout the poem: the reference for the Homily is conflated with the text of the Homily, which is conflated with Edmund himself, or, rather, with his head. While his reference lies hidden, Edmund is a ‘member bodiless,’ grotesquely disembodied, whom she desires to announce himself in an audible and tangible physical form. Just as the saint’s corpse is miraculously reunited with his head, Gurney wishes for a restitution, in which the preserved Edmund could be found, located, ‘got at,’ in textual form. Gurney’s fascination with Edmund’s severed head places her medievalist impulse in distinct contrast to the masculine Victorian crisis identified by Kathleen Biddick as the ‘melancholy for work,’ in which the body of the Gothic

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2 My discovery of this previously unknown poem was enabled by the generosity of Simon Gurney and family in digitizing and sharing their privately owned papers.

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peasant – more specifically the ‘hands’ of imagined Gothic handicraft – ‘functions as the metaphor for elite male sorrow over the radical disembodiment attending industrialization’ (Biddick, 1998, 13). These hands are ‘a ground and site of labour,’ as writers such as Ruskin and Morris ‘mourn for the alienated physical labor of the medieval scribal craft, the scribe’s writing hand’ (Biddick, 1998, 43). Despite her frustrations with her physical incapacity and her anxieties about her status as a scholarly worker, it is not quite this same tradition of ‘elite male sorrow’ for the loss of physical labour that Gurney’s fantasy seeks to perform. Her desired revenant is not writing hands but a speaking head, to which she gives sentience and agency. Although Gurney ‘despaired’ at her own ‘weakness of hands,’ she had numerous pragmatic strategies to overcome this obstacle: she could direct, in person and from a distance, other proxy hands to perform her searches. But her struggle to have the space and social permission to think and to speak represented a career-spanning challenge. Invoking the return of Edmund’s head, she ventriloquizes his clear, commanding words and with them his royal and holy authority. Rather than melancholy for work, the poem is a fantasy of voice. Something as minor and quotidian as an elusive reference is here imagined as a living revenant of the medieval past, offering the thrill of a hunt and the healing promise of location and restitution. Gurney captures in hasty doggerel her fantasy of the moment when, after a frustrating process extended over a number of weeks and conducted across a hundred miles, the reference would finally be found. The poem evidently had its desired effect; Hudson then sent her the ‘excellent reference.’ Although it is the scholar who hunts – in Gurney’s case, vicariously through her brother – the process is conceived as one of mutual desire, in which the hunted knowledge expresses its own longing to be found. In Gurney’s curious verse, she establishes a relationship between the modern desiring-to-know subject and the medieval object of knowledge, in which sought objects ‘speak again from shelf or press’ and the scholar must ‘hearken’ to find them. Her revivified Edmund – scarcely resembling Carlyle’s stiff, sacred ‘temple’ – becomes another collaborator in the production of medievalist knowledge. The poem, with its focus on the location and embodiment of the agentic knowledge-object, and the difficulties and mishaps the knowledge search can entail, anticipates later feminist work (especially that of Donna Haraway) by foregrounding specificity, playfulness, and untimely reciprocity, in modes of thought that would be suppressed by the universalizing master-narratives of the emerging positivist discipline. In this intimate, informal context, the medieval past is not ‘bound in rigid alterity,’ but shouts aloud to guide its own recovery (Biddick, 1998, 16). In 1850, Gurney sat on the threshold of specialisation; neither interior nor exterior to what would become the academic discipline of medieval studies. Her work was infused with new discoveries as quickly as the published works could find their way to her

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Cottage, but in this pre-disciplinary moment she was still free of strict dicta of periodization and method, free to move back and forth between scholarly and imaginative modes of knowing the medieval past. Moreover, her jolly poem is not only an idle fantasy but a functional and productive part of her scholarly practice: a research method. The poem is a performative utterance, facilitating her work in the most practical sense. Rather than melancholy, the prevailing mood is grotesque comedy, its levity essential for navigating the sensitivities of nudging her older brother into doing her bidding. Rick Godden describes how disability can be accompanied by a ‘feeling of existing in a different, separate temporality from others’; he advocates for a generative understanding of the untimely, in which disabled scholars can use new media to find ‘new ways for fashioning shared temporalities’ (Godden, 2011, 270 and 276). In a similar manner, using media of 1850, Gurney’s poem serves as a technology of access, one that overcomes the barriers of both physical and temporal distance. *** Anna Gurney’s hunt for St Edmund, conducted from Northrepps Cottage, produces a chart for the various distances of the knowledge search. Mapping these distances allows me to explore how they are produced differently for and experienced differently by complex and varied scholarly bodies within their working environments. Such variations go to the heart of the disciplinary project, prompting us to reconsider the inequitable materialities and geographies of medievalist knowledge production. Gurney’s movements reveal the epistemological distances that each scholarly body must travel on its hunt for knowledge. The various spatial gaps that different bodies experience – between a scholar and her materials; her body and other bodies that assist her labour; hand and book; bed and desk; wheelchair and bookshelf; home and library; region and metropolis – are often left unmeasured. Yet they are each a practical counterpart to (and necessary enabler of) the intellectual journeys a scholar takes to traverse the chronological distances between knowing subject and knowledge object; past and present; medieval and modern. In Gurney’s praxis of access, she utilizes a range of strategies to facilitate proximity to the medieval: some practical, some discursive, some creative. She works across geographical and temporal distance to generate and vivify a reciprocal relationship with the object of her knowledge, and to enable the play and reproduction of the reference. Gurney – the ‘Lady in the Country’ who, in her Literal Translation of 1819, claimed to have merely ‘access to the printed texts’ – was drawn in later life to produce a comparative version (which, if ever realised, does not survive). As a rurally-located woman and as a wheelchairuser, she had an experiential appreciation of the value of making texts accessible for other scholars by eliminating the distances of the knowledge search, placing source in parallel alongside source – ‘convenient for reference’ – in a volume of portable size, which you could buy or borrow, and read, in your own home and at your own comfort.

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Ac knowledgem ents My thanks especially for the feedback from Dr. Marie Tidal and the participants of the ‘‘Valuing Women with Disabilities’ seminar—many of whom spoke from lived experience as disabled scholars and students—at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities at the University of Oxford in February 2018.

About the Author Helen Brookman is Director of Liberal Arts and Reader in Liberal Arts Education at King’s College London. Her interests lie in medievalism and histories of medieval studies, particularly of women medievalists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and in interdisciplinary education and innovative pedagogies. She is currently Deputy Director of the Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies at King’s (E-mail: [email protected]).

References Austin, S. 1857. Anna Gurney. Literary Gazette, 4 July: 638–9. ‘B.’ 1857. A Pilgrimage to Overstrand, September 24. The Athenaeum 30(1563): 1268–9. Bednarska, D. 2009. Rethinking Access: Why Technology Isn’t the Only Answer. In The Culture of Efficiency: Technology in Everyday Life, ed. S. Kleinman, 158–69. New York: Lang. Biddick, K. 1998. The Shock of Medievalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Brookman, H. 2016. Gurney, Anna (1795–1857), Old English scholar. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. https://www.oxforddnb.com Chartier, R. 1992. Laborers and Voyagers: From the Text to the Reader. diacritics 22(2): 49–61. Cochrane, J.G. 1847. Catalogue of the London Library. 2nd edition. London: M’Gowan and Co. Elbourne, E. 2003. The Sin of the Settler: The 1835–6 Select Committee on Aborigines and Debates over Virtue and Conquest in the Early Nineteenth-Century British White Settler Empire. Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 4: 1–49. Ellis, H. 1853. Letters to Anna Gurney, Anglo-Saxon scholar, British Museum, Dec 19; Dec 20. Add MS 41312, Ellis Papers, ff.280–2. London: British Library. Fuss, D. 2004. The Sense of an Interior: Four Rooms and the Writers that Shaped Them. New York: Routledge. Garland-Thomson, R. 2002. Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory. NWSA Journal 14(3): 1–32. Garland-Thomson, R. 2005. Feminist Disability Studies. Signs 30(2): 1557–87.

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Gleadle, K. 2009. Borderline citizens: women, gender, and political culture in Britain, 1815–1867. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Godden, R. 2011. Getting medieval in real time. postmedieval 2(3): 267–77. Godden, R. and J. Hsy. 2013. Analytical Survey: Encountering Disability in the Middle Ages. New Medieval Literatures 15: 313–39. Grosz, E. 1993. Bodies and Knowledges: Feminism and the Crisis of Reason. In Feminist Epistemologies, eds. L. Alcoff and E. Potter, 187–216. New York: Routledge. Gurney, A. 1819. A Literal Translation of the Saxon Chronicle, by a Lady in the Country. London: Stevenson, Matchett, and Stevenson, for John and Arthur Arch, Cornhill. Gurney, A. 1833. Thoughts on our 8 years at the Cottage. Commonplace book of Anna Gurney and Sarah Buxton, RQG 407, 9. Gurney of Bawdeswell Collection. Norfolk Record Office: Norwich, UK. Gurney, A. 1850a. Correspondence between Anna Gurney and Hudson Gurney. Temp MSS 434, 2/6–2/16. Gurney MSS. London: Library of the Society of Friends. Gurney, A. 1850b. In the year seventy, plus eight hundred. In A Hundred Years at Northrepps Hall, by R.H.J.Gurney (1895), 19–224. Privately owned typescript with MSS interleaved. Northrepps Hall, Overstrand, Norfolk, UK. www.gurney.co.uk/book Gurney, A. 1857. Last Will and Testament of Anna Gurney, Spinster of Northrepps Cottage. 11 July. Records of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, Prob 11/2254. London: The National Archives. Gurney, D. 1857. Account of Anna Gurney by her cousin, with notes. Temp MSS 434 2/23. Gurney MSS. London: Library of the Society of Friends. Gurney, R. H. J. 1895. A Hundred Years at Northrepps Hall. Privately owned typescript with MSS interleaved. Northrepps Hall, Overstrand, Norfolk, UK. www.gurney.co.uk/ book. Hare, A. J. C. 1895. The Gurneys of Earlham. London: George Allen. Hoare, E. 1857. The Coming Night. London: Thomas Hatchard. Holmes. M.S. 2004. Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Opie, A. 1834. Letters to C.S. Edgeworth. MS Eng. lett. c. 741 fol. 171b. Edgeworth Papers. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, UK. Palgrave, F. 1831. History of England: Vol. 1. Anglo-Saxon Period. London: John Murray. Rose, G. 1993. Feminism and geography: the limits of geographical knowledge. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Siebers, T. 2008. Disability theory. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Smith, B.G. 1998. The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Upcher, A.W. 1893. Another Reminiscence of George Borrow. The Athenaeum, 22 July: 129. Yonge, C.M. 1864. The Rescuers. In A Book of Golden Deeds, 430–4. London: Macmillan. Young, F. 2015. St Edmund, King and Martyr in Popular Memory since the Reformation. Folklore 126 (2):159–76.

Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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Book Review Essay

New feminisms and the unthinkable

Michelle M. Sauer Department of English, University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, ND, USA.

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019) 10, 376–387. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-019-00140-0

Victoria Blud The Unspeakable, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval Literature, 1000–1400. Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2017, ix+211pp, $99.00. ISBN: 9781843844686 Caroline Dunn Stolen Women in Medieval England: Rape, Abduction, and Adultery, 1100–1500. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013, xi+261pp, $99.00. ISBN: 9781107017009 Carissa M. Harris Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018. xiii + 285pp, $42.95. ISBN: 9781501730405

Chapter 9 was originally published as Sauer, M. M. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019) 10: 376–387. https://doi.org/ 10.1057/s41280-019-00140-0.

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What does it mean to be unknowable? Unthinkable? These adjectives properly describe what has been done to women throughout history. Yet it is often women themselves who are unknowable and unthinkable – because invisible to the world of men and their social systems. The very idea of ‘unthinkable’ behavior can and does change over time. In 2011, for instance, the hot new movie was Bridesmaids. Everyone was watching it, everyone was loving it, everyone had an opinion. Critics raved about it with phrases like ‘crude but sincere,’ and ‘chick flick meets raunchy comedy,’ and ‘ladies’ bromance.’ Roger Ebert gave it 3‘ stars and wrote, ‘It definitively proves that women are the equal of men in vulgarity, sexual frankness, lust, vulnerability, overdrinking and insecurity’ (Ebert, 2011). These reviews had one thing in common – the sense that the movie, love it or hate it, talked frankly about things that were (supposedly, anyway) hitherto undiscussed by women and showed female behavior not hitherto shown as female behavior, among them poop jokes, meaningless sex, and general raunch. Although I personally don’t really like the movie, at the time I had to admire it for its unflinching portrayal of real women, real life, and real conversations. Just a few years later, 2017 – that is, right when the books under discussion in this essay were being completed or published – brought about even more kinds of ‘real conversations’ among women, as it witnessed the birth of the #MeToo movement. #MeToo is a codified resistance to and awareness of sexual harassment and sexual assault, brought about and supported by social media in particular, although certainly it has transcended those platforms. The actions of concern to #MeToo – sexual harassment, assault, rape – are for many people ‘unthinkable,’ yet they happen all the time, and its actual ubiquity is at least one of the main points that the movement has been laboring to make. Speaking of her book Obscene Pedagogies (one of the three under review in this essay), Carissa Harris notes in an interview, ‘I think that people will be especially drawn to it in the context of the #MeToo movement. I first submitted my book to the press six months before #MeToo started’ (Harris, 2019). Medieval Studies itself has faced similar ‘unthinkable’ moments with the uncovering of the #femfog controversy in 2016, which rocked the foundations of medieval gender studies, as the decades-long antifeminism of a senior colleague was exposed for the world to see.1 Another example is the continued purloining of medieval studies by white supremacists intent on co-opting a global medieval past and on ‘making the medieval world white again,’ crafting for themselves a ‘superior’ world without people of color and with women who are exclusively passive, controlled, and sexually available.2 Reading the three books under discussion for the present essay made me think of such ‘unthinkable’ things because all three of them examine uncomfortable aspects of being a woman, in the Middle Ages and today. If we consider these books to be examples of a new direction in feminism, what we see are ways to mobilize medieval literature for modern feminism, to take for ourselves what has been true in the past: medieval authors as well as real medieval women were involved with just as much ‘raunch’ as

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1 See Sandoval (2016) and Cohen (2016).

2 See Kim (2019).

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women today, including rape, violence, obscenity, and silence, and faced similar questions of unknowable bodies and unthinkable sexualities. Victoria Blud’s The Unspeakable, Gender, and Sexuality in Medieval Literature, 1000-1400 (2017) directly addresses the nature of unspeakability and unthinkability. She asks in her introduction, ‘Who gets to speak, and why, and how?’ (1), which is at a key underlying question of much of feminist criticism. Now, though, with social movements again on the rise, this question becomes more pointed. Blud moves us away from these contemporary thoughts and into the world of medieval bodily reality, which is, significantly, a world from which women could not escape. In fact, Blud herself notes that ‘the medieval focus on the body of the female subject and insistence on its fleshiness’ underlie the majority of medieval thought but also many of the problems we still face today (23). After all, the premise of the #MeToo movement hinges on the constant, unwanted, and oppressive reminders that the female body is often considered public (male) property. This premise is one to which I will return shortly. But the connection between modern unspeakability and Blud’s book is more than simply the focus on the body and its sexualization; it also depends on the idea of silence and silencing. Blud’s book is a valuable resource for feminist scholars, particularly professionals and advanced graduate students. (The complex theoretical positioning and reliance on the ideas of He´le`ne Cixous, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Lacan, might render it less accessible for undergraduates or the casual reader.) Blud pairs texts and time periods across eras and European traditions, smartly honing in on the question of ‘unspeakability’ in each text and tradition, making a unified and cohesive project out of one that could be disparate. She balances canonical works, such as Chaucer and Gower, with less commonly studied works such as Wulf and Eadwacer, with the added effect of demonstrating how pre-Conquest texts are connected to later medieval works, rather than sequestering them from one another. Although Blud uses the term ‘unspeakable’ quite liberally, she also focuses on silence, especially in the earliest chapter on reclusion. Waxing somewhat philosophical, she discusses the idea of locating language and its connection to the physical. She begins this examination by looking specifically at the language of sin – part of the unspeakability of human nature – and its surrounding discourse of confession, both as a religious and a cultural construct. Confession here means more than the sacrament of penance. The first text examined, the Life of Mary of Egypt, establishes that. Mary’s confession is an autobiography, one Blud calls that of a ‘body that speaks’ (27). As a Holy Harlot, Mary is an embodiment of the unthinkable, a woman who at one point openly ‘lust[ed] for sensual pleasures’ (30) before devoting herself to penance and God. Now, years after purging herself and dwelling in silence, she is once again speaking the unspeakable by confessing to Zozimus of Palestine, a monk in the later fifth century best known for this encounter with Mary of Egypt. During his prayerful

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wanderings in the desert, he chanced upon the saint standing naked except for her long hair, whereupon she told him her life’s story. Blud deftly unpacks the tangled gender identities here, with due deference to performative identity and ultimately to ‘the supremacy of speech and orality’ (37), particularly in Mary’s rejoinder to Zozimus instructing him to go back to his community and share what he has learned from her. As with modern feminist movements, Mary insists on visibility and on telling her story, even if it is mediated through a male voice. The second part of this initial chapter moves forward in time to examine the Ancrene Wisse, the well-known thirteenth-century anchoritic rule and a text that seemingly relies on silence. Blud spends a good portion of this section discussing silence as a type of unspeakability, at one point calling anchoritic silence ‘so pervasive it can be analysed as an alternate linguistic code’ (43). But for Blud it’s more than that – the silence of the anchorhold is paired with the unspeakability of the sins that are so clearly articulated in lists upon lists of what not to do. Thus, like Mary of Egypt, Ancrene Wisse serves not only to silence the anchoresses, but also to guide them to confess appropriately and positively, since, as Blud points out, ‘an unspeakable sin, which must be articulated and spoken in confession, only becomes truly unspeakable post-confession’ (58). Blud notes the participation of the body in this practice. The oral fixation (speaking, confessing, silence, gossip, etc.), as she terms it, is just one piece of the puzzle. Bodily penance in the anchorhold, like Mary’s in the desert, is also a way of expressing what cannot and should not be articulated aloud. Chapters 1 and 2 are designed by Blud to be part of a thematic unit on sin and suppression of speech, just as Chapters 3 and 4 work together to address politics and the law. Sub-grouping the seemingly disparate topics and texts makes Blud’s book an excellent example of how far-ranging texts can be brought together for useful analysis, with more than just the ‘feminist’ moniker to connect them. Chapter 2, then, sees us moving from texts focused on bodily penance, silence, and confessional strategies to a different sort of unspeakability: the female subject in connection to sodomy and other vices. Blud writes, ‘this chapter is about unspeakable sin, non-heteronormative sexuality and the non-heteronormative experience and performance of gender’ (63). The chapter takes on transgender issues in particular, which are both timely and trans-historical. In today’s feminism, trans rights are finally becoming more prominent, though non-gender conforming people have been present as long as people have been present in the world. Blud’s discussion is contextualized within the discourse of sodomy. Sodomy has long been the object of linguistic and literary analysis by scholars of pre-modern gender, and Blud doesn’t break new ground per se. However, she deftly connects the idea of the ‘unspeakable’ to the acts that are spoken without words, weaving in the discussion the idea of Nature’s authority being the backdrop for the silencing of unnatural, unspeakable acts. This leads into a nuanced interrogation of Roman de la Rose, Chaucer’s Pardoner, Gower’s Confessio Amantis’ Iphis and Ianthe, and Roman de Silence. With the Pardoner,

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Blud focuses on the ‘slipperiness’ of his speech, which in her analysis constitutes a style of unspeakableness. Even the critical discourse about the Pardoner is slippery. And simmering always under the surface are two concerns – the Pardoner’s gender (or lack of clearly defined gender) and the inherent violence that defines both his tale and his relationship with the Host. Here we can see an intersection with modern feminism, where important movements like #MeToo often fail in regard to transwomen by not making space for their voice, even though they face sexual violence in staggering numbers compared to ciswomen. The Pardoner is also silenced by the Host in a violent homophobic outburst. Similarly, Silence is also re-gendered, though not permanently and not by her choice, and Blud’s analysis examines her voice as it waxes and wanes. The name Silence is easily re-fashioned for both male and female, but as Blud noted in her discussion of Roman de la Rose, ‘Jean’s Genius declares that women by nature (even Nature) cannot keep secrets’ (95). What then does it mean that Silence does? Do her male clothes silence her female lips? The next chapters of Blud’s book focus on politics as demonstrated within literary texts. As before, Blud’s range is wide both in time period and cultural tradition, and the discussion is valuable and fascinating. Chapter 3 pushes the boundary between human and animal, merging a discussion of the Old English Wulf and Eadwacer with that of the Anglo Norman Bisclavret, with a backdrop of gender and exile. Here, ‘the unspeakable, then, points not only to a space between but to a place beyond’ (107). Like the first two chapters, this chapter is concerned with space as well as language – what is acceptable within society, within nature, and within language, and what is not acceptable within such boundaries, what can be spoken about and what cannot. While on first glance these texts may seem an odd choice to address together, Blud links them through a shared focus. These themes come together in the codification of the sentence of exile in English law: caput gerat lupinum, ‘let his be a wolf’s head’ (107), the naming of the status of outlaw for many centuries. Thus, while each work does ostensibly contain a woman and a wolf, Blud argues that each is more directly concerned with exile and ‘unvocalised’ descriptions of the ‘wayward transgressive body’ (107). Transgressive bodies are both women and wolves, as neither is orderly or male. Also uniting the works is the lurking specter of the sovereign and his voice, his orders, his declaration of exile. Exclusion robs the werewolf of a voice; women are always excluded and usually voiceless. This is a lesson we can take from this exploration, as Blud reminds us with her simple declaration about both Gorlagon’s wife and Bisclavret’s wife, both of whom are rendered silent and exiled while the men return to the fold. The chapter’s subtitle, ‘shewolves and textual banishment,’ speaks volumes. Chapter 4 addresses exile of a different sort, the exile that is produced by the removal of speech. Subtitled ‘Glossing Glossectomy,’ this chapter takes on the legend of Philomela as presented by Chaucer and Gower. Beginning with an overview of ‘sins of the tongue,’ especially blasphemy and saints’ tongues, this

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quickly gives way to a connection between tongues and gender. Most importantly, however, the chapter focuses on what is not, what cannot, be spoken since Philomela’s tongue has been cut off. This stands in contrast to the previous chapters where silence is not necessarily a physically enforced unspeakability. Philomela’s literal speechlessness is combatted by a workaround – her art. Sewing becomes her gloss. For Philomela, ‘her performance of unspeakable modes of discourse’ allows her to ‘never stop being heard’ (153). In this exploration, then, Blud’s reading firmly situates itself within the material, the bodily, and with that brings the book full circle. Both intact silences and broken silences have been read entirely within the body. Blud herself identifies two themes in her book in the brief conclusion, the first being ‘the divergence between the apparent fluency of text or speech’ and the ‘description-defying of its subjects,’ and the second, the exploration of how ‘power influences and controls speech’ (175). The unspeakable and its transgressions and performances are at the heart of these themes, and as Blud reminds us, they affect ‘everybody and every body’ (177). Blud’s book invites us to consider transgressions – sins, exile, sodomy, genderbending, and lust – from the query posed of the first page: ‘what do we mean when we speak of the unspeakable?’ (1). Transgression is also at the heart of the books by Caroline Dunn and Carissa M. Harris. Dunn’s Stolen Women in Medieval England: Rape, Abduction, and Adultery, 1100–1500 (2013) predates the other two works under consideration and in many ways pre-dates the contemporary conversations we are now having about the reflexive study of the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, it foreshadows current directions with its reminder in the preface that it ‘documents traumas experienced by medieval victims of sexual assault and marital predation’ (vii), even as it also celebrates women who beat the system, despite the rather bald truth that ‘the voices of the ravished woman remains largely unheard in these records’ (6). These bleak reminders that women have long faced similar problems and have been silenced throughout history provide a grim but necessary backdrop to Dunn’s thorough and complex analysis. Thus, the book is also a study in male control and female agency, as seen through the lenses of various sexual transgressions. It is also an interdisciplinary study, drawing primarily upon historical and legal records, but not ignoring literary context, thus broadening both its appeal and its scope. This book should become a standard of any library, especially for its detailed and comprehensive discussion of the term raptus. Scholars and non-scholars alike should find the book accessible and it offers important background for its central discussions about sex and politics. In essence, each chapter discusses a different facet of this term raptus that denominated most sexual offenses in the period: rape, forced marriage, elopement, adultery, and political kidnappings. The book’s first chapter, on legal definitions, needs be discussed most thoroughly, for it is here that Dunn establishes her study’s groundwork and scrutinizes the term raptus. Importantly, Dunn discusses the conflation of rape

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and abduction in its Classical beginnings. She notes that the overlap between rape and abduction is rooted in Roman law’s prioritizing of the father’s voice – and points out that ‘medieval authors were also occasionally confused by the terminology of raptus and seizure’ (20). She tackles the Statues of Westminster of 1285, the 34th chapter of which redefined and clarified rape in England. Here, Dunn demonstrates that the altered definition was really meant to penalize elopement as punishment for disobeying a paternal directive and ‘property damage.’ To some extent, according to Dunn, medieval people could ‘abduct’ people, but also timbers, crops, and livestock; similarly, virgins and wives could be ‘raped,’ and so, too, could money, investments, and male heirs. Dunn continues by examining the peculiarly English responses to rape instead of ravishment, and vice versa, as well as by unpacking all the meanings buried within raptus and its variations. As she writes, ‘the primary terms of rapuit and raptu remain ambiguous and can mean either rape or abduction (or both), but when paired with abduxit or abduction the terms almost always refer to a woman’s departure, and not to sexual violence against her’ (37). Thus, although the modern impulse is to assume that raptus always means rape or some other form of sexual violence – and it certainly can – it may also indicate theft or abduction. The greater context allows for more nuanced readings of both historical circumstances and literary works. Dunn moves from establishing and delimitating terminology to investigations of each type of sexual transgression, starting with rape, with the general meaning of forced sexual penetration ‘committed by violence’ (55). This overarching definition is compounded by a variety of factors: the diminishment of male property in the form of a virgin (or even a wife), the Galenic two-seed model that saw pregnancy as proof of consensual sex, and class concerns. Dunn does not see pardons and other settlements as necessarily reflecting a patriarchal dismissal of rape concerns; rather, she concentrates on the secondary suits brought by women themselves, and these most often by former virgins. However, Dunn also cautions scholars against over-reliance upon ‘judicial convictions as the ideal recourse,’ dismissing them as anachronistic (81). In other words, our modern sense of justice might not match up with medieval reality, and we have to reconcile that for ourselves. The next three chapters focus on different aspects of marriage and its connection to sexual transgression: abduction and forced marriage, elopement, and adultery. That Dunn separates forced marriage from elopement should give pause to those who assume all incidents of raptus include force. She asserts that ‘bride-theft was not, however, common in the later Middle Ages – nor were attempted kidnappings’ (83). When abductions did occur, wealthy widows were the favored targets for a variety of reasons. Interestingly, then, the status of widowhood, often seen as one of relative (sexual) freedom for medieval women, could also bring with it a different sort of sexual peril. In contrast, while the idea of seduction looms large in literary works and ravishment legislation, many of

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these fears were less firmly grounded, since often what appeared to be abduction was instead a willing elopement. Further muddying the waters is the fact that ‘the commingling of rape, abduction, and seduction under the heading of raptus at first resulted in toleration of elopement’ – meaning that women could marry without the consent of guardians – but eventually it resulted instead in the criminalization of elopement (98). In this criminalization, we see female agency removed where once a small conduit for it existed. Nevertheless, Dunn explores the avenues through which couples may have circumvented the required consent and married anyway, whether clandestinely or defiantly. Such cases were rarely prosecuted – even if the girl were retrieved, her devaluation (loss of virginity) would then be made public. Finally, Dunn turns to adultery. Simple adultery was the realm of the ecclesiastical, and not secular, courts. Increasingly, though, adultery could be prosecuted as ‘wife-theft,’ thereby protecting any inherited property from being transferred to the new husband. Dunn also explores husband-assisted abductions, which she terms ‘self-divorce’ (130). All of these actions further emphasize the ‘merging of sexual and marital misbehavior, abduction, and inheritance’ (131). Dunn’s final chapter returns to the more malicious end of raptus and examines what she calls ‘retaliatory abductions.’ Here, ravishment of women gives men the upper hand – politically, financially, or even morally. Many were entangled with property disputes. Women themselves were also, essentially, property, so using them as pawns to gain or maintain land posed few legal problems. Dunn also analyzes here false ravishment claims, which she asserts were most commonly filed against clerics. Malicious prosecutions dilute the prosecutions of ravishments linked to rape or marriage. While the focus of the book is the troubled history of rape and ravishment, two pervasive themes emerge in tandem – female agency and female (as) property. Of course, these are central concerns in discussions surrounding sexual transgressions today as well. Dunn’s text is, overall, an exceedingly well-researched and invaluable examination of sexual morality in the Middle Ages. In particular, Dunn’s book is a masterclass in detailed research and in weaving together different types of primary sources. Works such as this demonstrate the importance of continuing feminist studies. The topics she covers are vital, no matter the century or the circumstance; voicing the ‘unspeakable’ becomes tantamount to rallying behind lost generations of women. Turning to Carissa M. Harris’s Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain shows us what happens when we continue down such a path. If we start in the middle of Harris’s book, the connection between Dunn’s historical archive and Harris’s literary explorations stands out clearly. In Chapter 3, Harris takes on the pastourelle, rape, consent, and sexual negotiations – all part of raptus and its many forms. Further, as Harris notes, besides encouraging violent masculinity and rape culture, obscenity also served to ‘articulate female desire, to shed light on inequality, and to teach audiences

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3 See Gross (1990).

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about rape’s harms’ (103), thus providing a space for women’s voices and undermining the unspeakability of sexual transgressions – just as Dunn so clearly noted in the introduction to her book. Pastourelle, derived from ‘shepherdess,’ is a French-style medieval lyric with a bucolic setting and fashioned in the style of a dialogue/debate between a pursuing man (a knight or a shepherd) and a pursued woman (the shepherdess). The content varies, but veers towards rape, as Harris explores, and often focuses on the battle of wits between the sexes. The pastourelles ‘use female-voiced obscenity to illuminate how all heterosexual encounters in a rape culture – even encounters that are consensual and pleasurable – are inflected by the ineluctable threat of violence’ (105). This statement is as relevant today as it was during the heyday of the pastourelle. An often unspeakable undercurrent of force accompanies heterosexual sex. Although it was once a radical feminist position, movements like #MeToo have made more explicit the perception that patriarchal power systematically compromises women’s bodily autonomy, thereby placing even willing sexual activity on a spectrum between rape and consent. Harris here plays with that sensibility as she explores the ‘variety of narratives’ about how women face sexual aggression (109). And pastourelles similarly confront rape myths that still stand true today: the survivors are said to have ‘asked for it’ or implicitly consented. Many demonstrate women’s resistance. Some show survival and confrontation. A number of these poems work in parallel with ‘same-sex antirape education in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century conduct texts addressed to young women’ (119). Female community and solidarity serve as rape protection and stand in contrast to a male community that teaches violence and maintains rape culture. Harris’s book is beautifully written and clearly articulated, and perhaps most significantly, it sheds new light on canonical works while making important modern connections, both in tone and style. She regularly includes personal reflections and anecdotes and musings about being a member of the profession at this turbulent time. As a fellow medievalist of color, I appreciate her references to inhabiting a non-white body in connection with studying the traditional white male canon of medieval English literature. These kinds of asides are deftly and brilliantly used to frame careful and thorough manuscript and archive work. These are the intersectional approaches students and scholars should model. An excellent example of this method is found in Chapter 1, where we see how Harris grounds her work in a critique of toxic masculinity as the term is used now. When the term originated in the late 1980s, it was a reaction, at least in part, to second-wave feminism, a reaction headed by the mythopoetic men’s movement. The movement centered on assisting men to ‘reclaim’ true ‘deep masculinity,’ a vision of manhood actually rooted in violence and domination, and to reject the ‘toxic’ picture of (non-violent, non-dominant) masculinity fostered by feminism.3 Now, however, toxic masculinity has become parlance for describing aggressive male behaviors and insisting that

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such behaviors are not natural male positions. Harris explores this version of toxic masculinity in relation to the Canterbury Tales in particular, smartly addressing what is possibly the most canonical text in medieval literary studies and framing her discussion within the larger context of the rape trial of Ched Evans, a footballer who was acquitted despite overwhelming evidence. Harris says, rightfully, that ‘Chaucer uses a group of eight male pilgrims from the mercantile-artisan classes to illuminate the workings of a type of masculinity, which I call ‘‘felawe masculinity,’’ that is centered on men teaching their peers to perpetuate rape culture, much like the brand of masculinity espoused by Evans [and his friends]’ (29). This is an important take on an old text, and the use of our modern language, such as ‘rape culture,’ makes this chapter all the more important to today’s world and today’s feminism. Studies like Harris’s artfully demonstrate how western society has built upon behaviors of the past and layered in the silencing of women and the privileging of male desire. She begins this unpacking by examining closely the term ‘felawe,’ the root of her new terminology. ‘Felawes’ are social men, popular men, peerrelating men. Comradeship and companionship are at the root of this type of masculine posturing, and along with these behaviors are the subtle (and not-sosubtle) ways men teach each other about sexual conduct. Combining the term with ‘jolye’ underscores the supposed lightheartedness that this bawdy talk, this bantering about rape, imparts. Harris moves on to the word ‘swyve’ – which definitely means ‘fuck,’ as it is sometimes glossed, but also can imply force – and shows through manuscript work how ‘swyve’ occurs in all-male contexts (38), thus cementing its position as a tittering taboo, but also an important milestone in teaching masculinity. She turns, of course, to discussions of both the ‘Miller’s Tale’ and the ‘Reeve’s Tale,’ with special attention paid to intoxication and consent – an issue still at the heart of many rape cases today. Perhaps most enlightening here is how Harris clearly shows that the root of the teaching about consent (or lack thereof) is a homosocial endeavor. Rapists become heroes, become teachers, become comrades, though Harris ends the chapter with positive musings on ‘a small, localized challenge’ (66) to the sexual violence of the ‘Reeve’s Tale,’ at once suggesting male opposition to the silencing and violating of women and reminding us that such opposition is still necessary today. Harris continues this exploration of the homosocial community as sexual education by turning to Middle Scots poetry, specifically flytyng. In this rowdy form of poetic battle, the (male) participants ‘harness obscenity’s capacity for same-sex pedagogy to teach one another to eschew contact with women and focus their libidinal energies on writing obscene poetry with other men’ (67). This stands in contrast to Chaucer’s men who encourage one another to fuck as many women as possible, whether or not the women want it. Flytyng, as Harris presents it, is full of ‘virulent misogyny’ (73), ‘portraying women’s bodies as agents of impotence and infection’ (77), with masculinity dependent upon

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Sauer

proving their potency through orality. Sexual activity becomes the unspeakable here, because virility is only spoken. Flytyng poetry is lewd, crude, and violent. And as in her previous chapter, Harris frames this medieval discussion within a modern context – this time in light of the African-American cultural practice of ‘playing the dozens,’ defined by Harris as ‘a competitive pastime in which men trade obscene insults about each other’s female relatives’ (97), and its connection to hip-hop and its misogyny. Again, this framing of the discussion is crucial to understanding both the medieval world and the modern one. The female same-sex community first articulated in her discussion of pastourelles becomes the focus of Harris’s look at medieval women’s discourse about pleasure within songs: ‘singlewomen’s erotic songs depict obscenity as integral to their pedagogies because their speakers use transgressive talk to address their peers and arm them with knowledge’ (152). Transgression, pleasure, and voice all become the foundations of a same-sex female community that shares the pleasurable side (as opposed to the violent side) of sexual encounters. That these songs lay primarily in the realm of unmarried women’s words is particularly fascinating, and they expose and celebrate the increasing liberation young women may have found through financial freedom and urban living. This examination is aptly paired with Harris’s final chapter on songs of wantonness. Where the singlewomen’s songs provided hope, the wanton songs reveal despair – Harris herself, she tells us, cried over one of the manuscripts depicting a debate between rapist and survivor (186). The songs here show women facing the aftermaths of sexual encounters: one deals with psychological breakdown, another deals with pregnancy, all deal with shame. One, ‘I can be wanton and yf I wyll,’ depicts a defiant woman proclaiming her right to be ‘merye’ before being brutally assaulted and goes on to detail the attack and its consequences. These are, as Harris notes, ‘bold claims’ (205), to assert desire in the face of social and physical obstacles. The lyric is her voice, her ‘hue and cry,’ and can be seen as lament and as education in how to be both an erotic subject and a survivor. Harris goes on to other lyrics with an almost frightening repetition of this pattern: women note the power discrepancy between them and men, they struggle with their own voice and desire, and men aim to do them harm. Harris closes with a somewhat bleak but very truthful statement: ‘Nearly five hundred years later, women are still fighting to have reproductive agency without [male] interference […] we still cannot laugh and drink and dance without having that used as justification for the violence perpetrated against us’ (226). Men used and continue to use obscenity to perpetuate rape culture, violence, and sexual dominance; to dehumanize and commodify women and their bodies; to render survivors voiceless and powerless. It is this last point that I would encourage us all to take away from these three books: that new feminisms, like ‘old’ feminisms, continue to place at their center the importance of women’s voices, to listen to how the medieval and modern speak to each other, to render visible the invisible. This is accomplished through

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examinations of woman-centered texts (e.g. singlewomen’s lyrics or the Ancrene Wisse) as well as through re-examinations of canonical works such as those of Chaucer and Gower. Each of these three books does that in some way, and does so by focusing on transgressions of ‘common decency,’ a modern type of unspeakability, to give a more complete view of real women, real life, and real conversations.

About the Author Michelle M. Sauer is Professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of North Dakota (Grand Forks, ND). She specializes in Middle English language and literature, especially women’s devotional literature and monastic texts, and publishes regularly on anchoritism, mysticism, hagiography, queer/gender theory, monasticism, and Church history. Her publications include the books Gender in Medieval Culture (Bloomsbury, 2015) and The Lesbian Premodern (Palgrave, 2011, with Diane Watt and Noreen Giffney), as well as numerous articles and essays (E-mail: [email protected]).

References Cohen, J. J. 2016. On calling out misogyny. In the Medieval Middle, 16 January. http:// www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2016/01/on-calling-out-misogyny.html Ebert, R. 2011. Review of Bridesmaids. Roger Ebert.com, 11 May. https://www.rogerebert. com/reviews/bridesmaids-2011 Harris, C. 2019. Interview with the author: Carissa Harris. Notches Blog, 28 March. http:// notchesblog.com/2019/03/28/obscene-pedagogies-transgressive-talk-and-sexualeducation-in-late-medieval-britain/ Gross, D. 1990. The Gender Rap: ‘Toxic Masculinity’ and Other Male Troubles. The New Republic, January: 11–4. Kim, D. 2019. White Supremacists Have Weaponized an Imaginary Viking Past. It’s Time to Reclaim the Real History. Time, 15 April. http://time.com/5569399/viking-historywhite-nationalists/ Sandoval, G. 2016. ‘Fem Fog’ Fallout: Scholars Wrestle with Honoring a Colleague Tarnished by a Blog Post. Chronicle of Higher Education, 23 June. https://www. chronicle.com/article/Fem-Fog-Fallout-/236891

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