I’ve been (re)reading the first chapter of Susan Crane’s Gender in Romance in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. This chapter is entitled ‘Masculinity in Romance’, and I was chasing it on the basis of some footnotes in Gaunt’s Gender and Genre. It lived up to the recommendations of said footnotes by having a nice, simple, clear explanation of the difference between the postmodern/Foucault-ian subject and the Lockean individual, with useful citations for explaining how each of these have and have not been taken to apply to the ‘individual’ in medieval romance. \o/ Definitely going on my mental bibliography for spitting out at sufficiently engaged students!

So that’s all good: the Individual has been conquered!

What’s clunking around in my braaain at the moment is her section on ‘Masculinity as a function of difference’. Let’s enumerate:

Obvious Point: Women are constructed as the opposites of men; masculinity is concieved as ‘not-feminine’, so femininity is used to set the boundaries of acceptable masculine identity and performance. YUP, GOT THAT. APPLICABLE TO MANY SITUATIONS, NOT JUST MEDIEVAL LIT.

Not-so-obvious Point: you can get a ‘counterprocess’ which ‘rehabilitates’ feminine traits and incorporates them back into idealised masculinity.

Whut?

Crane’s examples for this include some from the Canterbury Tales and some historical examples. In particular, she talks about the role of women in inspiring pity and mercy in men who have been figured as aggressive, assertive manlydudes. She argues, along with someone named Jill Mann, that Chaucer is working around or perhaps against strict gender role divisions: that he wants ways for men to take on ‘good’ feminine characteristics in order to have, basically, the best of both worlds.

Crane argues that the universal ideal remains ultimately masculine – a Sensitive Late Middle Ages Guy, perhaps, a chap who has all the best manly traits and can show pity, or be passive in appropriate circumstances,  or not pursue revenge, etc, under the influence of women.* Feminine traits become part of the masculine ideal, but the reverse does not apply: masculine pursuits/traits do not become feminine when women do them. (Eg: ruling, fighting.)

HRRRM

Right. First problem with Crane’s argument is a result of talking about Chaucer. In talking about ‘how Chaucher plays with the genre of romance’ she’s got to reduce ‘romance’ to a discrete entity. For instance: romance polarises genders, Chaucer plays about with gender roles. Romance does X, Chaucer builds on it in this way. The Roman d’Eneas also seems to be her most-frequently cited example, which… doesn’t seem like the greatest choice to me if you want to talk about ‘what Romance does’: the romances of antiquity do quite different things, structurally, thematically and gender-wise, to the Matter of Britain and assorted other romances.

It seems to me that one of the things that ‘romances do’ is exactly what Crane pulls out here: set up binaries and then play with them. Play with ways in which men might become objects of desire – as Yvain is to Lunette-on-behalf-of-Laudine, for example. Play with the intersections of binary systems: does the love/honour binary map neatly onto the homosocial/heterosexual binary? To me, and I’ll grant I’m biased, this is something at which Chrétien seems to be particularly skilled, but one finds it in other romances as well. There’s a whole chapter on this in Constance Brittain Bouchard’s Every Valley Shall Be Exalted, a book which makes me jump up and down and flail incoherently at undergrads. That means it’s good.

Secondly, I’m not sure about the ‘masculine traits don’t become feminine when practiced by women’ thing. Or rather, I think it’s being framed badly, and that there’s a bit of a confusion between ‘feminine’ and ‘acceptable/appropriate for women’. It might not be feminine for women to be politically active, but it was certainly held to be appropriate.  There’s an excellent Kimberly LoPrete article called ‘Gendering Viragos’ on this, and I’ve just rehearsed it all at length in my draft, so I won’t go into it here, but suffice to say: it would be an unusual politically active man in the high middle ages who hadn’t met at least one politically active and powerful woman.

LoPrete’s work does dovetail with Crane’s arguments, to some extent: LoPrete argues that masculine-women, or women doing manly things, did not become non-women in doing so. They merely became exceptional (usually in a good way). So I can see how this works: if only exceptional women possess said capacities, clearly they’re not ‘feminine’. Rightyo.

One thing Crane missed is that at times, historically (and she does use historical examples in her arguments), women-doing-manly-things would do them, or be praised for doing them, while displaying traditional feminine virtues. In a different LoPrete work, on Adela of Blois, you’ll find that that most excellent lady was praised (or arranged to be praised?) as a suitable leader for her husband’s extended family on the basis of her qualities as a loyal wife, a devoted mother, and a chaste widow. Those qualities were framed as signs of strength of character and mind, making her suitable for the extra-ordinary role of woman-doing-manly-things.

That strength of character and mind – enabling a woman to stand her ground and take initiative against men – is in fact what we see Enide develop over the course of Erec et Enide: the courage to stand up for herself and her husband; skills of verbal manipulation; and self-confidence. These skills (which Maureen Fries frames as ‘heroic’ ones, distinct from heroinely feminine traits like beauty, passivity, shyness, etc) are the ones which will make her a suitable wife for a king, and a suitable mother for a king’s heirs.** Those may not be feminine traits but nor are they exclusively masculine: they’re queenly, in this context.

Another thing which bugs me, and which didn’t come up specifically in Crane’s chapter, but to which Crane’s argument lends itself, is the classifying of all iniative-taking and active roles as masculine.  Verbal manipulation, for example, often turns up as a powerful weapon in the hands of women: sometimes, heroes like Erec need women to do their verbal manipulatin’ for them. If you read those traits as masculine, is it a critique of romance heroes that they often lack rhetorical skill? If skill with words is a woman’s power, are some kinds of power therefore feminine? For that matter: is female lust feminine? Ruth Marzo Karrass uses the word ‘hyper-feminine’ to refer to seductive women, like, say, the Lovesome Damsel of the Knight of the Cart. If that’s hyper-femininity, then is it hyper-feminine simply because the woman takes initiative (surely not – consider Blanchefleur, in assorted Perceval romances, who doesn’t seem to be at all evil for sneaking into Perce’s bed to convince him to protect her)?

And what happens when a woman possesses both masculine and feminine traits? If her masculine traits aren’t integrated into her feminine personality, as with manly men who do feminine things, what then?

Ahah. Answer: Constance Brittain Bouchard! I love Every Valley Shall Be Exalted. Can we argue that ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ traits of an ‘extraordinary woman’ co-exist in productive tension, much as Love and Honour in the hero? I think I’d like to argue that. Watch me try to argue that!

~

* I’m intrigued that no connection seems to be made in Crane’s argument – I’m not sure about Jill Mann’s, not having read it – to more modern feminist theories about women being expected to ‘socialise’ men. If the King pardons criminals in the Queens name, that doesn’t actually mean that this Queen herself is merciful and this particular King is a nasty bugger, but it does seem to me that Queens generally are supposed to soften the edges of Kings generally. I wonder if the reason the connection’s not made is that it doesn’t hold up, or that it just… hasn’t been made.

** Citations: Maureen Fries, ‘Female Heroes, Heroines and Counter-Heroes’, and Margarett Jewett Burland, ‘Chrétien’s Enide’.

In lieu of content, proof that I have been exercising my rusty photographic skills:

Malua Bay – South Coast NSW

Kiama – South Coast NSW

Sydney skyline viewed from near the top of the Warren, Marrickville. Also, a forest of pedestrian signs.

The juxtaposition of the anarchist graffiti* against the old RSL wall is… cool, but a little unsettling.

* Not that Occupy Wall St = Anarchy, it’s that the local graffiti artists on this block are both anarchists and Occupy sympathisers. For reasons I cannot really comprehend, they oppose efforts to turn the abandoned RSL into appartment blocks and advocate violence against landlords. Those bits of graffiti are uglier and less intriguingly placed, though.

I’m intrigued. I’m not sure anyone had ever told me to write topic sentences first – but I’m pretty sure that I do, for the most part. Or days on which I do that are days when I write well. Intriguing.  I may print out this list (with credit) and add it to the arsenal of writing-tips with which I berate my students. Thoughts, O former-students-who-read-this?

Happy assorted festivities, O Internets.

ED: and stay safe, New Zealand! As someone on my FB put it: “It must be Christmas time, the natural disasters are starting.”

Happy assorted festivities, O Internets.

I don’t seem to be able to find an illumination of a nine-branched menorah, but here, have a seven-branched one:

The Menorah of Zechariah's Vision - Metropolitan Museum of Art

This piece of gorgeousness is part of an exhibition of medieval Sephardic manuscripts at the Met (Image from TabletMag). It’s 13th century, illuminated in Spain, but as far as I can gather from the article, the illuminator was of French origin. In my untutored opinion, it shows. The background reminds me a bit of the background on this famous illustration to the Conte du Graal (which is from a bit later, I’ll grant you).

Now, since it is Hannukah:

David bar Pesah Mahzor - 14th c. Germany, New York Public Library

What we have here is: the Yotser (blessing) for the Sabbath of Hannunkah, from a 14th c. German MSS held in the New York Public Library. The scribe’s name we know:  David bar Pesah. Probably we know other things about him, but I can’t find them on the internet.

A four-part series on the history of Hebrew manuscripts can be found at the New York Public Library website. In section three, they note:

Decorations appear to have been commonplace in medieval Hebrew manuscripts, and are discussed in rabbinic literature. Rabbi Meir ben Baruch of Rothenburg (1215?-1293), for example, was asked why he did not protest the widespread inclusion of paintings in prayerbooks. He replied that the drawing of images is not forbidden, although he condemned the presence of illustrations because they distract the worshipper. In fact, few images were strictly prohibited. The Talmud and rabbinic responsa forbid the depiction of the four creatures of the merkavah from Ezekiel’s vision. These figures, which are frequently represented in Christian works as attributes of the four Evangelists, do however appear in Hebrew manuscripts. A depiction of the Heavenly Chariot is found, for example, in the Ashkenazic Ambrosian Bible (Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, Ms. B. 32, Inf.), 1236-38, and in Maimonides’ Moreh Nevukhim (Guide to the Perplexed) from Barcelona, 1348 (The Royal Library, Copenhagen, Cod. Hebr. XXXVII).

Not all Hebrew manuscripts contain images, though. I’ve had the great pleasure of being shown MS Nicholson 33 in the USyd Rare Book Library during manuscript tutorials: it’s an Italian Pentateuch, which we can date pretty confidently to c. 1272, because of a note in the back about a member of the family having gone down to the docks and caught the plague at that time. It’s absolutely gorgeous: quite a large manuscript, plenty of blank space (like the folio pictured above). And the text is tightly-packed into carefully shaped… textboxes, I guess, shaped like cups and candelabra and other pretty things. I can’t find an image of anything like that online, but I did find this (at the Met article again; not linked, so you can enlarge the picture):

Micography - geometric patterns made of tiny text

As the Met. article notes, Micography was used in both Hebrew and Islamic art of this period.

Another good example of the cross-cultural valence of manuscript art styles I found on Mandragore (I voluntarily did battle with Mandragore for this blog post. Feel special, internets):

BNF Hébreu 15, 15th c. (via Mandragore)

The gold border here, for starters, is very similar in style to MS University of Sydney RB Add.Ms. 358 , which contains a picture of a Turkey. Incidentally, I incorrectly stated that 358 was from the Spanish Netherlands, which didn’t exist at the time to which it is dated. Neil Boness did tell us that, pointing out the Spanish influence on the border – which is why I bring it up here.* The borders are very alike! Only Hébreu 15 is obviously fancier.

Regarding the red background to the text – I’m not having any luck pulling up images of heavily-decorated medieval Qur’ans, but does anyone else think they’ve seen pictures** of Islamic texts with a similar layout/pattern? Given that the arts of Spain and Portugal were heavily influenced by the Umayyad Caliphate there, I would expect that to show up in Hebrew manuscripts – but maybe 15th century is too late for that kind of thing? Opinions, anyone?

~

* I can’t remember now whether he wanted to date the MS later, because of his feelings about Spain + the Netherlands; or if he was just wrong about the Spanish Netherlands. Interestingly, he didn’t give us this dubious factoid this year. ANYWAY.

** Maybe not pictures – I saw Qur’ans on exhibit in both the BNF and the BL this year… One of them was Sultan Baybar’s Qur’an, which isn’t what I’m thinking of but is very pretty.

This is a topic which concerns me, as you may have noticed.

Imma gonna quote some bits of the Jezebel article at you:

Says David Cozzens, dean of students at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, “There’s the danger that we take too much care and when they hit the real world that same kind of support isn’t there.”
How to support young people while still preparing them for adulthood is a perennial question, whether the youth involved have mental health problems or not. And we should certainly be considering how to extend the kinds of resources that exist in college settings to the so-called “real world” so that people with mental illness can continue to lead fulfilling lives after they graduate. Like many articles on the subject, Petersen’s piece points out that better treatment and support services have made it possible for more people with mental illness to attend college — these same people deserve the chance to participate and excel in the working world as well. But therapists sometimes talk about balancing supportive care with challenging a patient to attain new levels of functioning. Universities need to figure out to what extent they can help students by accommodating their differing needs, and to what extent they need to train them to meet the challenges of adulthood.

OK. I will freely admit that I spent too much time in the Brownie Guides and have a compulsive urge to “lend a hand” (within the bounds of what’s appropriate/allowable for my role as tutor). I just plain feel better about myself if, say, when Student Jane Doe emails me asking what she can do about her late work, as well as telling her “apply for Special Consideration”, I slap in a linkspam with links to the extension system and the counselors and the doctors and disability services and the webpage about how to Discontinue Not Fail for medical reasons. Currently I’m wasting time making that list up every time I send it, but one day I’ll remember to save it as a template email, and it won’t cost me anything at all thereafter.

But. Let’s imagine Student Jane Doe.* Student Jane Doe is at university to get an Education. And she has some Problems. Problems aside, it is our job to teach Student Jane Doe various things, including but not limited to:
- how to write coherently and present her thoughts in a logical order
- how to present her thoughts, in a logical order, in a public presentation
- how to research things, critique what she finds, and turn it into coherent information or just plain Knowing Stuff
- how to manage her time and juggle deadlines without going kersplat.

Anyone noticed that item four is not built into many courses? Some, yes. I’ve had classes where you submit a research proposal or draft halfway through semester, have another opportunity to have a draft critiqued later on, and submit a final essay at the end. I’ve been in classes where weekly “journals” on the readings have to be submitted. I’m not sure that either of these are the most effective way of teaching that skill. I know you can take Learning Centre courses on how to not procrastinate all the damn time.** The Learning Centre and the Writing Centre both run short courses on managing essay preparation.

But by and large, the skill of “keeping all the balls in the air without breaking anything or going kersplat” is a skill you really have to learn by practice. Nevertheless, if you get yourself a generalist degree, that’s one of the most useful skills you can walk out saying you have. Yes, I can do this office job which involves writing one long problem paper, helping out with two other people’s jobs, and doing random bits of editing. I have a BA! I can juggle multiple tasks without going kersplat! And avoid using the passive voice while I’m at it!

Teaching students that deadlines are endlessly malleable doesn’t really assist in teaching this particular skill.*** But, on the other hand, asking for help when you need it is also a solid gold skill. Let’s say someone wants to pay Student Jane Doe to write policy documents in the future. That’s awesome for Student Jane Doe. Have we really done her any services if she comes out of university knowing that her superiors are God Kings of Deadlines; that last-minute panic jobs are better than talking realistically to your boss about what you can feasibly achieve; that her superiors are going to care more about immediate deadlines than having a long-term productive employee? This might be true of some employers, but if she’s got ongoing Problems that’s not going to be a good workplace for her, and maybe, just maybe, if she’s used to approaching her Problems like an adult and asking for accommodations when she needs them at uni, she might come out knowing she deserves better in the Real World too.

~

* Who is a mishmash of students I’ve seen, taught, and been, not anyone in particular, btw.
** Skill #1: stop writing your blog at work! Oh, wait…
*** As I think Kath was saying in an earlier comment.

• Academia is difficult to get into, difficult to stay in, and overworks you as long as you’re here
• Also the postgrad scholarships are shitty and the job market is horrifying
• Ergo, the poor sods going into the field had better be damn sure that there’s nothing else they’d rather do.

If you want to do a PhD, you should do one. But! Only under this condition: you treat it like the first job of your career. Think of the PhD like a 4-6 year chunk of time, a discrete part of your life, where you earn a salary, live a real life (of the mind, of course, but also without taking loans to pay for food), and enjoy the full range of adult experiences. Don’t put your life on hold for some future utopia: that ain’t how this works anymore. Treat your PhD like a job: maybe it’s a low paying job, but that’s okay, because you really enjoy it. If you’re not going to enjoy this time, if you’re not going to be satisfied with your life while you do it, then don’t do it holding your nose for the glorious reward of the coming professorship. Because that’s a recipe for misery, all round.

People change jobs a lot over their lifetimes. Consider the PhD as one more job: it’s a great job, so far as it goes, really. You get to follow your interests and your passions. You mostly set your own hours. Your colleagues are great fun, and really smart. You often get to travel. You’ll write a book-length study of your own devising. You’ll get opportunities to interact with the public through teaching. While in this job, you prepare for your next one, the next part of your career: sure, you’ll learn how to be a professor, but you should also hone your other professional skills, too, because you know the PhD doesn’t last forever.

I, of course, am the sod who elected to do two post-grad research degrees instead of just one. And that’s for many reasons, but at least partly because I actually want the skills training, not just the letters after my name.  Even if everything goes pear-shaped on me, which is possible, and I don’t manage to get into an overseas PhD program, there are a whole bunch of skills I’m picking up here. They don’t have a clear label on them telling me “apply for X kind of job”, aside from the teaching skills (and I’m still not attracted to the idea of teaching high school). But they exist, and I can even describe them to you!

I can write well. I could write well when I finished Honours: better (more clearly, more efficiently), apparently, than many employees in the workplace I went into. I can write better still now. That is unlikely to ever go astray. Thesis-writing draws on a whole set of skills which are described in the ‘real’ workforce as ‘project management‘. A project with one staffmember, sure, but a project nonetheless. I had some of those skills at the end of honours: I have more of them now, including the “oh fuck, this really isn’t working, let’s revise objectives/timeframe/something else” skill.

I’ve always been fairly confident at public speaking, but I’m a whole damn lot better at it now than I was at the end of honours. My speaking pace has almost halved, going by the evidence of wordcounts on papers I gave in 2008 versus 2011. Teaching has forced me to clarify my thoughts, and to learn the difference between imparting facts and teaching skills. I can revise documents and clarify other people’s writing (if anything was ever good editing training, marking is).

And so on and so forth. Many of those are skills I already possessed at the end of honours, but I’m better at them now. I have no real plans for what I might do outside of academia, but the last couple of years has also been a good opportunity to figure out what I need in an occupation. It needs to be intellectually challenging, tick. But it also needs a lot of face-to-face human interaction. I knew I was in the wrong job in 2009 when  I found myself wishing I’d stuck to waitressing – but I still find myself thinking wistfully, especially over summer breaks, about retail and hospitality and admin jobs where I was interacting with people all the time. I like to have both fixed routines and a certain amount of discretion over my own work.

Academia, thus far, suits all of those needs pretty well. But I’m not foolish enough to think that it’s the only thing I could ever do. In fact, for me, knowing that I could do other things, if I preferred doing other things; knowing I have actual useful skills both in and outside of academia , is pretty important in terms of keeping me moving forward and preventing me from dissolving into a little ball of performance anxiety. It’s a job. It’s a job I want to do really well in, if I can. But if I can’t, or if it becomes unbearably stressful, there are other things out there; and years spent honing one’s research, writing, teaching skills are unlikely to be a waste, in the grand scheme of things.

This post is brought to you by Highly’s annual self-indulgent foray into Tamora Pierce books.

HOWEVER. Let that not deter us! On the 25th of August, David Scott-McNabb, of the University of Johannesburg, on the topic of The Jokes of a Half-Alien Culture: The Case of Chaucer’s ‘Tale of Sir Thopas’. This paper delivered two things: an intriguing re-reading of the humour  in Sir Thopas, and many provoking thoughts on the nature of reading at several century’s distance.

First: Sir Thopas

Scott-McNabb gave us a concise introduction to the humour of Sir Thopas: for instance, the combination of dissonant elements in conventional description. The description of Thopas’ physical form, for instance, is structured conventionally, but contains the rather unimpressive comparison of the hero’s complexion to ‘pandemayn’ (white bread).

Sir Thopas has been assumed to satirise Flemish knighthood (since Thopas hails from Flanders). One set of readings argues that Thopas is inherently ridiculous, and incapable of doing, wearing, saying or appreciating anything which is not ridiculous.

With this in mind, Scott-McNabb turned to the Lancegay which Thopas bears when setting out. He noted the mixture of convention and dissonance: you expect a knight to set out, but you expect him to be fully armed, not carrying a Lancegay. Because Thopas is read as a bit ridiculous, the Lancegay is usually assumed to be an ineffective, perhaps even effete, sort of weapon.

BUT WAIT, says David Scott-McNabb. What is a Lancegay? First he went around asking weapons curators, and no one has a Lancegay or even a picture of a Lancegay. No dice there.  Next he looked in the literary canon: Lancegays appear in one other source, also from the early 1390s, Gower’s Confessio Amantis, where the God of Love carries a fiery lancegay.

So, what sort of weapon is it? Scott-McNabb gave us a French source, Guillame de Saint André, of the 14th century, who credited the Bretons to be skilled with the use of dardes, gavelots, et lancegaies. All of these were thrown down from the ramparts at the attacking French, so evidently, a lancegaie is a missile weapon. A deadly missile weapon at that – an English record from 1450 says that Isobel Thresham’s husband was murdered by being impaled with a lancegay.

Who owned lancegays? David Scott-McNabb found records of lancegays in the inventories of the armouries of Thomas of Woodstock and the Earl of Arundel, when they were inventoried by  Richard II in 1397. He also found – apparently previously uncited – records of  lancegays in Bolingbroke’s wardrobe accounts for the late 1380s.

Who cares about lancegays? Richard II, Henry VI and Edward IV, Scott-McNabb told us, all tried to prohibit the carrying of lancegays specifically as well as making more general prohibitions on armed men wandering about the countryside. In Richard’s case, the clause in question was issued twice – once in 1983 (7 Richard II 1383 cp. 13) and again in 1397.

These records confirm the French evidence that a lancegay is a missile weapon, but it seems more versatile: a light, short spear, which could be carried by a lightly armed warrior in peacetime, be he on horse or afoot. It seems to be useful for stabbing, thrusting, charging, and throwing. And it’s sufficiently menacing that a king feeling a bit wary doesn’t want people wandering about brandishing them all over the countryside.

A chap with a lancegay, David Scott-McNabb concluded, is not ridiculous, or ‘cute’, as some have called Thopas.

But a lancegay is funny, in the hands of Sir Thopas. Why? It’s that bucking-expectations thing: you expect a knight to be fully armed for jousting, if he’s in a romance (illustrations to medieval texts, as well as literary depictions, shape that expectation). Thopas’ lancegay is funny, not because it’s a a wussy weapon, but because it’s too modern and too realisitic. It’s something one might carry in real!England, but inappropriate for romance!land: Thopas has to go home and fetch a lance as soon as he encounters a stranger in the forest who wants to joust against him.

So what?

I’m going to expand on this in another post, I think. But David Scott-McNabb was using this to demonstrate that, when we go along with what looks funny enough to us, we can easily miss what was intended to be funny about the text.

It was an interesting paper, and the Great Quest To Find Out About Lancegays made for entertaining listening. I also found it a pleasing discrete example of the nifty things you can do with a combination of literary close reading and detailed historical research: I know the student who asks me most often how to do a close reading showed up to hear this paper; I’m hoping it helped them, as well as pleasing me.

What I’m telling myself instead is that this semester, I talked one of my friends-and-former-students into applying for an extension when it was needed. I talked one of my current students through Special Consideration applications which she’d started. I’ve had a couple of honest conversations with undergrads about Ye Olde Mental Health Problemes and academia – some in a teachery capacity and some in the context of less formal relationships built up through extra-curricular CMS activities. I’m starting to get a sense of how much I’m happy to say and in what contexts.²

I think can be pretty happy both with the coping skills demonstrated by some of my students, and with my own behaviour/example/wossname. But. But. I’m still not used to the fact that every semester it seems like I have to watch some kids slip through the cracks.

There’s the ones who come to you at the end of semester in despair because of problems that have been going on all semester, maybe longer, and say “what can I do, I can’t afford to fail anymore courses?” There’s some who turn up to most classes and suddenly stop handing in work. There’s some who have every right to special considerations, alternative assessments, whatever, and just… never asked for them.

It breaks my heart, every time. It’s also a good case study of Professional Boundaries and all that: there is help I must give (according to the institution’s rules and my immediate supervisor’s policys); and there is help I can give, mostly advice, because I am basically a nice person, or perhaps I spent too long in the Brownie Guides and ended up with a compulsive urge to ‘lend a hand’. But there’s also a whole range of stuff clearly outside of my power, like the extension system and so on (we have a faculty-wide policy and system here, which is great for uniform practice, but intimidating to use as a student). And regardless of how much concrete help and practical advice I give, first, the student has to ask for it and then the student has to use it.

I have to get used to the fact that some kids will never ask, and others won’t put into action the advice they get. That might be their own silly fault, or it might be because whatever their problem is, they’re kind of drowning in it and can’t get the logical-thinking thing together to fix it.³ It may not be the student’s fault, and I really wish the university’s support systems were less confusing to find and use, but there’s still nothing I can do about it.

But. When students do talk to me, y’know what I keep seeing? Students with actualfax perfectly legit problems are afraid of talking to their teachers, and of using the support systems available. Because they:
- are ashamed of themselves
- are scared of disappointing their teachers
- think the support systems aren’t for people like them, they’re for people with real problems
- don’t want people to know they have real problems.

I haven’t had any of my students say as much to me, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if there was a fear that People In Positions Of Power would dismiss/laugh at/be unwilling to help students, especially those with invisible illnesses of the mental-health type. I like and trust my supervisors, but I’ve also seen other faculty members laugh off, or gripe about, students requesting help for mental health problems.

I can’t fix all the problems in the world, but if I could wave a magic wand and make all my students not afraid to talk to me I would be a very happy person. (My second wish, mind you, would be that this not-afraidness come with a sensible concept of the difference between ‘asking for advice on coping with study and personal crises’ and ‘telling me waaaaay too much about your personal problems on the first day of class’; but if I only get one wish, then I’d rather enforce that boundary myself.)

In some parts of the world – not here, so far as I know – there are whole programs set up to train staff and faculty in being aware of the particular problems faced by queer students, and how to help them. Such programs, I am given to understand, also have ways of identifying “this staffmember is not an arseface” for students who need to seek advice. Last year (wow, was it only last year?), in the aftermath of a spate of campus suicides, the internet was awash with advice on how to be a visibly-queer friendly academic.⁴

Have any of you encountered such a program for training academics to deal with students who have legit life and health problems? Is anyone running programs like that? Sometimes I think teachers ought to get basic… pastoral care training, or whatever the term is for the secular equivalent. Or possibly everyone should line up to be administered a dose of the Cluebat, that’d also be nice.

What does one do to make it as safe as possible for students to talk to you when they need to? I mean, I have my personal toolkit – I have and keep office hours and tell the class that I’ll be horribly bored if no one comes to talk to me during that time. I try to remind them a couple of times per semester about a. where the extension system is and b. that really, I promise, they’re entitled to use it. This semester I also added in some personal comments, letting them know that I don’t see the applications or the reasons, and that the course co-ordinator, who makes the decisions, is an understanding and fair person and I ought to know, she’s my supervisor. I specifically mentioned mental health problems as legit reasons for special considerations.

I know that, no matter what I do, I can’t actually make all my students get their shit together. Perhaps I’ll develop a thicker skin with time, or when I’m no longer teaching in my own undergraduate institution. I don’t think I want to lose this concern entirely, though. Even if there’s a limited amount or nothing at all that I can do, I don’t want to turn into the person who doesn’t care.

Advices, O Internets?

~

1. I did make a student cry, but she left the room to do so. Pretty sure that wasn’t because of my unusual meanness, just a matter of straw, meet camel’s back, in the form of midsemester results.
2. Case in point, apparently I’m telling the internet that I’m both not-straight and not-entirely-mentally-well. Interesting. For reference, anyone who deals with me IRL, neither of these are secrets, but nor are they things I go around shouting from rooftops in professional contexts. I have no problem with people knowing but I don’t necessarily want to talk about it.
3. I have seen this student, and I have been this student.
4. A lot of this advice actually upset me a lot, and did not make me feel very comfortable. I strongly resist the idea that anyone is obliged to Come Out, even for the sake of the Yoof of Today. What of teachers who are just figuring this out? Who don’t feel safe themselves in their classrooms or workplaces? When it comes down to it, too, if you expect of me certain behaviours or public declarations in a classroom that you wouldn’t expect of my straight best friend (who’s just as down with queer theory and rights and whatnot as I am), then you have a sexuality-based double standard, and I don’t wanna play. I much preferred Lesboprof’s very concrete, curriculum and policy oriented advice.

M. J. Ailes, in an article entitled ‘The Medieval Male Couple and the Language of Homosociality’, concludes with someone else’s words:

In such matters, we must be careful not to project on to a less erotically preoccupied society the artificially stimulated and commercially exploited eroticism of our own sex-ridden age. (Dom Jean Leclerq, Monks and Love)

I get the concern, although I’m not convinced that the past is any more or less ‘erotically preoccupied’ than the present. Ailes’ article, which I’d been hoping would advance some interesting arguments about the way male friendship was framed, is instead devoted to proving that assorted pairs of men, fictional and otherwise, were ‘just friends’. The article starts with Roland and Charlemagne (employing that oft-seen trick of queer erasure, starting with the far-less-likely-to-be-erotically involved pair and conflating arguments about them with arguments about another possibly-erotic couple) and moves on through various fictional characters to historical, ending up with Ælred of Rievaulx. Some of the arguments I completely support (Richard I/Phillip II, for example), others not so much (Ami et Amile, for instance).

But. But. Your chances of proving that anyone, real or fictional, engaged in a lot of same-sex sex, are pretty slim. Even if you’ve got sodomy trial records, you could probably put up a good argument for the formulaic use of that charge. Assuming some kind of consistency in attraction,⁴ you’d expect roughly 10% of the population to be same-sex attracted (but perhaps not all of those to act on it; it’s also possible that some people engaging in same-sex activity might not really be attracted to same-sex partners, I suppose).

Case in point: the entertainingly detailed passages in the Processus Contra Templarios in which assorted Templars confess to committing assorted sexual acts with assorted other Templars do not prove that:

• The Templars conducted homosexual sex publicly as a form of group bonding, or that
• The Templars were particularly prone to male/male sex, or that
• Any of these particular knights ever engaged in male/male sex.

Rather, the passages in question tell us a lot about the sorts of accusations which people put to and would believe of homosocial groups who were held in suspicion. That’s about all. However, you’d have to be barking mad to try and tell me no Templar knight ever banged another Templar knight. I’m gonna assume that Templars banged other Templars at roughly the same rate as soldiers banged other soldiers, whatever that was. We have an absence of (reliable) evidence for homosexual sex among the Templars, but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Remember when I spun you a facetious story about lady!Chrétien de Troyes? About how I have this bee in my bonnet, and that bee gets rather upset about the fact that, although it’s improbable that a woman wrote any given text, that instance-by-instance assessment leaves us with the weird notion that Anonymous was never a woman? Yeah. Something like that’s going on here.

M.J. Ailes tells us that Hilary the Englishman, Baudri of Bourgeuil, Peter Abelard, Richard I, and Aelred of Rievaulx were not having sex mano-a-mano⁵ nor particularly wanting to. Ailes produces reasonable reasons to assert that the churchmen were all using stock tropes of erotic poetry and ‘passionate friendship’; that Richard I was making a political stance by sharing a bed with Phillip of France; that the sexual sins which Ælred laments could as easily be heterosexual as homosexual sins. The reasons, in my view, hold up better for some of his examples than others.

That’s not what bothers me, so much. It’s that Ailes seems to think by carefully going down the list of “most likely to be queer” historical figures and ticking them all off as “not queer”, one can write the homosexual completely out of the history of homosociality.

You can’t. You just can’t. In order for there to be a trope, there has to be an idea that someone might do it. The category of ‘sodomy’ was certainly, at various times, a broad one which included many kinds of sex acts aside from male/male penetrative sex, but it also included male/male penetrative sex. As one of my college friends used to say, of the laws against goat-fucking in Leviticus, if there’s a law against it, someone must have been doing it. Humans are endlessly inventive: they were probably doing it, and any number of other things, up against the barn wall and out the back of the alehouse and in the landries and… you get the idea.

The same goes for formulaic insults, which Ailes touches on, using the falsity of the accusation (Eneas clearly loved Dido, Lanval has a fairy mistress, etc) as if that were evidence that no heroes of medieval romance are ever engaged in homoerotic wossnames. This is silly. If there’s an insult for it, then there must be an agreed-upon-category of ‘people who prefer to fuck other men’.

But that’s not what Ailes is trying to argue. Ailes is not trying to tell us that there was no male/male sex happening in the middle ages. The article doesn’t go very much into the evidence for ideas about or practice of sodomy. It doesn’t really talk about medieval sexuality.

What Ailes wants to prove is not that homosexuality didn’t happen. It’s that none of these people had homosexual sex. It’s that homoeroticism is separate from the canon of medieval literature. It’s that none of the writers we know and respect possibly wanted to bang other dudes.

Whither all the sodomites, then? Does Ailes think no same-sex attracted monks wrote about it? That if they wrote, such writing would disappear from the historical record? I don’t know, and I suspect Ailes doesn’t much care: this article wants to convince me that there’s nothing to see, and, moreover, no point looking.

Besides, if Ælred of Rievaulx’s sexual sins could have been heterosexual as easily as homosexual, why not both? Let’s not limit the poor dead chap’s options, now.

~

1. Although I must say, The Marriage of Likeness has been pretty useful to me in unexpected ways! I have rather ill-formed thoughts on his main argument re: liturgical ceremonies of brotherhood, but the background work in that book is very useful to many pet projects of mine, including the ever-popular Why C.S. Lewis Was Wrong.

2. Incidentally, I read James A. Schultz’ ‘Heterosexuality as a Threat to Medieval Studies’ and some of Karma Lochrie’s Heterosyncracies, and, well, got myself into an existential tangle. From which I think I have extracted myself, now. I found it a bit… annoying, though, that one of them (Schultz, I think) had no trouble criticising ‘queer’ scholars (and it seemed like, if he wasn’t talking about the scholar’s personal sex lives, he certainly saw queer-theorist as an identity category) for ‘needing’ the construct of heterosexuality in order to justify themselves. Which… while I get the point, we all post-date the construct of homo/heterosexuality, it’s not like anyone can come at the idea without a personal bias. Unless certain scholars have transcended notions of sexual identity altogether, personally and professionally, a claim which I haven’t yet seen anyone try to make. I’m not sure – and know nothing of the personal lives of anyone in the field, save Boswell – but it felt in places a bit like “don’t trust the queers, they’re recruiting reading themselves into the past,” a sin of which many heterosexual scholars and scholars of (hetero)sexuality have surely also been guilty.

3. If we’re going to get personal about it, one nice thing about fiction-based queer theory is that because most medieval romances have got a heterosexual plot written pretty clearly into it, you rarely find scholars trying to prove that, say Lancelot and Galehaut are totally doin’ it by proving that Lancelot isn’t into Guinevere. Homo- and hetero-eroticism kind of have to co-exist in most texts, if the former is going to be there at all. Also a nice up-side of the social-constructionist arguments that the homo/heterosexual binary didn’t exist before the 19th century is, or ought to be, that evidence of one doesn’t rule out the other. Ought to be, I tell you.

4. Iffy, I know. It’s not really possible to do multi-century longitudinal studies of attraction patterns in large populations. This is getting well out of my field, too, but my understanding is that research at the moment suggests that sexual identity categories are fairly fluid for individuals over time, but basic attraction patterns are fairly stable (Consider this Utah study, Was It A Phase, a 5-year study of attraction patterns among non-heterosexually-identified women). I’m supposing that the same may apply to humans in general: that ways of conceptualising sexual identity might change a lot, but attraction patterns (homo/hetero/mixed/none) across the population might stay fairly consistent. I’m not sure how anyone could prove it doesn’t, although the reverse is also true.

5. Certainly not together. That would be one interesting party.

What to say about the Wilton Life? Well, as our most august group member informed us all, it is not a patch on Ælfric’s version, or even Bede’s. It’s also not nearly as much fun as the Anglo-Norman Vie Seinte Audree. But, at least to me, that doesn’t make it entirely unremarkable.

I was immediately enamoured of the composer’s dialect: not terribly difficult to read, but sort of charming. The text is early 15th century, apparently composed at Wilton itself. The scribe and/or author has used he interchangably for ‘he’ and ‘she’ – I assume that’s what happens when you haven’t quite abandoned the Old English heo nor yet caught onto this nifty she term – which made it quite an adventure at times to figure out who was talking about what. I like that the editor, Mary Dockray-Miller, didn’t clean that up, although I take issue with some of her translation choices.*

As an example, consider this description of the fate of King Colwolf (Ceowulf), who by þe Danys was put ouȝt and dedde. (Deposed and killed, according to the translation.) I just like that description. Put out and dead-ed. Straight to the point, and rhyming with redde, two lines above.

Something I like about both this Life and the Anglo-Norman Vie is their interest in recounting Anglo-Saxon history, in making sure we know both from what family Ethelreda is descended, and what the political circumstances were like at the time. I confess I can’t remember if Ælfric’s Life does the same, and obviously Bede’s account is embedded in his Historia Ecclesiastica (and I now have a list of other Lives of Audrey which I have yet to read), but bear with me here.

It seems to be a thing, that lives of Ethelreda have to go with a historical and geographical description of England – and the Wilton author certainly doesn’t have the same source as the Anglo-Norman author.  Dockray-Miller tells us that the Wilton author’s geographical and historical information comes from John Treviea’s English translation of Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon, which wasn’t even written at the time that possibly-Marie-de-France composed the Anglo-Norman version; June Hall McCash and Judith Clark Barban tell us that the Anglo-Norman author abbreviated her genealogical information from ‘her source’, which I think but am not quite certain, because their introduction isn’t quite clear, is probably the Liber Eliensis or something like it.

The Anglo-Norman focuses on Audrey’s relatives, with minimal extra political detail, but gives thorough coverage of the religious careers of her female relatives. The Wilton life is fascinated with geography, describing each of the seven kingdom’s of Anglo-Saxon England, where its borders lie, something about its founding, and its political history, before zoning in on East Anglia. Both texts make a link between St Edmund and St Ethelreda, interestingly – the Wilton version privileges him in its overall history of East Anglia before telling us that it was in East Anglia that Ethelreda was born; the Anglo-Norman Vie tells of several co-operative posthumous miracles performed by the two saints.

By and large the geographical descriptions in the Wilton life are straightforward, but can anyone clear this one up for me:

Þe kyndam of Northumbrelondys þe sixste kyndam was,

þe which upon þe Est syde and also upon þe west syde had þe sowthe se.

The kingdom of Northumberland was the sixth kingdom, that which had upon the East side and also upon the West side the south sea.

The south sea. On the east and the west of Northumberland. BECAUSE THAT MAKES SO MUCH SENSE. Anyone happen to be secretly an expert in Middle English geography and want to clear that up for me?

~

* One, replacing the Middle English names for all the characters with their Anglo-Saxon equivalents; two, being apparently unable to distinguish between thyncan and thencan, and thereby rendering many seeming-processes as thinking-processes. I JUST CARE A LOT ABOUT THOSE TWO VERBS, OK.

In other news, I hate it when you set out to argue one thing and send up arguing the exact opposite. For instance: I have a discrete section of my thesis which clearly states that it was supposed to be arguing that Yvain and Gauvain are not engaged in any subtextual shennanigans and I disagree with the person who says they are… and I still disagree with the person who says they are but now I think I have better reasons than him for thinking so. *facepalms*

• Medieval Love - lovely medieval things.
• Medieval – much the same, but with a greater propensity to post manuscript images.
• Old Book Illustrations – mostly 19th/early 20th century engravings, but that category covers matters Arthurian. I dunno about you, but I have a huge soft spot for 19th-century engravings, especially the ones based on pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist art.
• Better Book Titles - what it says on the tin. (On its own domain, but also a tumblr. How confusing.)
• Shit my students write - “Publicising to the intertubes” is beyond my personal boundaries of Stuff To Do With Alarming Or Amusing Things In Essays, but sometimes I wonder if I could induce my students to proof-read better by showing them some of these as a warning.
• Fuck Yeah, History Major Heraldic Beast - there’s an explanation I could give for these memes (an image photoshopped onto a bi-coloured background, meant to typify and mock a particular group of persons), but I shan’t. Point is, this is how (some) history majors vent their frustration and mock themselves. It is amusing, in a repetitive sort of way.

After something like four hours of French testing on subjects that I mostly don’t care about, though, I am not succeeding at focusing on work this afternoon. So here, have some more photos from Ely!

Large nave is large. Not the oldest part of the building – that’s the trancepts – but still, as I understand it, part of the Norman construction project. Look at the lovely lines – tall, yes, but simple and rounded. No fan-vaulting, either. Compare to the – later, showier, French – Gothic finery of St Gatien de Tours. Who’s on Team Norman Architecture? Anyone?

I’m also pretty fond of the colouring on the ceiling – it’s from the 1839 restoration.

This is, I think, the North aisle – although if it’s actually the South, no matter, they look the same. The roof here intrigues me – it’s like they were thinking of fan-vaulting but couldn’t quite be having with this strange new continental idea. The surfaces of the arches are rough, and aside from along the spines it’s hard to see the individual bricks. I’m not sure what’s going on there – perhaps they were plastered over at one point? Note the continued lack of Gothic fripperies on the columns, too.

Fun fact from Wikipedia: the stone to build Ely Cathedral was bought from Peterborough Abbey (which owned quarries) for a price of 8000 eels a year.  That’s what I call putting your local economy to work.

I love love love this style of carving/decoration. Look at it! It’s so… definitive. This is the Prior’s Door, which dates to the 12th c. Enlarge it and look closely at the columns: I’m finding a lot in those floral shapes, the solid curves, and the knotwork on the capitals, that reminds me of earlier Hiberno-Saxon art styles. On the other hand, look up to the top left of the arch. What’s with the break in the curvy leaf pattern to give us that spiky, line-drawn leaf?

Here’s a close up of the lintel. At least I think it’s the lintel. Is that a lintel, folks? OK.  So. Let’s talk about the human figures here. Humanoid figures, rather. That’s God up there, or possibly Jesus, chillin’ in his oddly vulvar-shaped heaven.* He reminds me of this God here (warning, huge file) in MS Junius 11. Vulvar Oval shaped heaven? CHECK. Special Godly version of the Boy Scout salute? Check. Except our God, or possibly Jesus, is carrying a cross, whereas Junius 11′s has a book: and our chappy fills up his whole border. He’s a little bit better proportioned, but not much.  I’m thinking, and correct me, O Art Historians of the internet, if I am making this up, that some Gothic influence is showing through in the proportions of the Angels; in the sheer detail of the clothes and facial features; and in the fact that God, or possibly Jesus, is looking right out at us instead of down at something else in the picture.

Oddly, he’s breaking the bounds of his border. I’m pretty sure I remember my supervisor saying that border-breaking is one thing you’d use to tell if a picture (French) was late 13th or 14th century – as opposed to the twelfth, where people stay within the borders they’re given. Not sure what’s going on here.

Let’s call that a day! I have more pictures of Ely, though, so expect to hear more on this topic soon.

~

* Heaven shaped like a… ok, possibly not so odd then.

Not Actually Camelot - view from Cadbury Hill, facing away from Glastonbury. Taken on an IAS excursion.

Kathleen Coyne Kelly began with “The Eco-Tourist, The Heritage Industry, and Arthurian Legend”. She talked about our desire to seek out the past by actually going there, and noted that what we seek is ‘historical fantasy’, not either the present or past reality of the site.¹ She called it ‘a kind of nostalgic eco-pornography’. Her theoretical grounding was in current work on nostalgia; she talked about sites associated with modern authors as well as a series of places associated with Arthurian legend (a particularly good combination of the two is Merlin’s Cave, a backformation from Tennyson into the Cornish landscape). She discussed current debates about ‘heritage’ tourism – commericalised bogus history?; she noted that often association with a mythical or historical figure results in revitalisation rather than preservation; and that such desire for the past is often linked with a desire to connect with the natural world (but that these ‘natural’ experiences are equally artificial).

This paper raised a whole bunch of interesting ideas for me, but as you can probably tell, I connected better with the concrete parts – the examples of places; the discussion of current debates on heritage management – than the theorising. Also apparently we’re now all post-tourists? I had barely begun to be a tourist!

Next up, Michael Twomey gave a paper entitled “Sir Gawain and the Green World”. You’d think that everything there is to be said about the forest in SGGK has been said, and said, and said again, but in this case, Twomey was arguing that Bertilak’s castle is not an uncivilised outpost in an isolated wilderness. Rather, he argued, the environment is heavily managed – the hunting scenes, in particular, tell us of a local lord who is engaged with and carefully manages the forest parts of his domain. The poem, according to Twomey, is ‘ultimately anthropocentric’ – and Gawain is no more in the wilderness at Hautdesert than is a modern tourist at a heritage-managed site.

Twomey talked in great detail about forest law, which mediated conflict between the king and the nobility over rights to the forest and its produce, particularly game, but also timber and other products. Now, I have apparently taken down a bunch of technical information, like a glossary of terms for forest management, but not the key points of the argument. However, I have a note here saying that the Wirral had been disaforested at the time of the poem’s composition (i.e., it was no longer legally a forest, and thus not subject to forest law). I think Twomey may have argued that Gawain’s passing out of the Wirral and into Bertelak’s domain is passing out of the wilderness and into human domain. He also noted that, if Bertelak holds the land from Morgan le Fay, then either it is her royal forest, or she and Bertelak both are squatting on Arthur’s territory: this ambiguity is never cleared up in the text.

I liked this paper, with its pleasing mix of historicised landscape study (landscapes seem to be the It Thing right now! What gives?) and close-reading. I could see connections to the previous paper, and the overall theme of tourism, but I think to really draw them out you’d need to work with both studies of managed and unmanaged landscapes in ME romance, and something historiographical. If Gawain isn’t in the wilderness after all, why do we all want to think he is? You could tie that back to nostalgia very easily, I think, but Twomey didn’t go far down that road.

On the other hand, he has himself been an SGGK tourist.

View from Caldy Hill to Wales over the River Dee

Third up was Gillian Rudd, with a paper entitled ‘The Wilderness of Wirral in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’. Much has been said about the Wirral and will be said many times over yet, I’m sure: but Gillian herself is a resident of the Wirral! She began with a description from visitwirral.com:

Wirral Peninsula is placed between the River Dee and the River Mersey, overlooking both the Welsh Hills and the spectacular Liverpool skyline. Well connected to the rest of the country, Wirral is the ideal location for those wanting to get away from it all.

And then – after some commentary on nostalgia on which I haven’t got coherent notes – we set off to ‘get away from it all’ with Gawain – into the Wilderness of Wirral. Rudd filled us in on some information which I gather originally came from J.A. Burrow – the Wirral was a well-known refuge for ‘malefactors’. However, its disaforestation in 1376 removed the legal protection for outlaws. Does Gawain know this? Which of those two facts does he know?² Are we, the audience, in Gawain’s mind, or someone else’s? “What is the space,” Rudd asks, “and how can you act in it?”

At this point my notes become a bit incoherent and focus on facts that seemed fun to me: Gillian Rudd thinks that the word “freke” at this point in Middle English is starting to pick up the connotations of “freak” – I’d really love to see that explored further!; she talked about shifting boundaries between the real/unreal, and the possibility that Gawain might be fighting off the terrors of the Wirral in his head rather than reality; she posited that the ‘twist’ is that you think you’re in another world but you’re not.³ The question of why Gawain sees no animals in the forest came up: clearly they live there, but he doesn’t see any. Does he want to believe he’s in an untouched landscape?

Finally, or at least, last among the things I wrote down, Rudd asked us if Gawain could be recast. Is he the hero going into the Otherworld, or the Other entering Bertelak’s court?

Arthur Uther Pendragon celebrating solstice at Stonehenge

The final paper – and by far the most amusing – was Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Schichman, with Arthur Pendragon, Eco-Warrior. There is absolutely no way I could reproduce this paper: so much of it relied on the fabulous photographs, on powerpoint, of Arthur Uther Pendragon, a gentlemen much concerned with ecogological preservation (because the king and the land are one), and strongly opposed to English Heritage, who restrict and market access to sites of national importance, such as Stonehenge. Finke and Shichtman talked about the heritage industry’s dependance on the idea that the past is done and should be preserved, as opposed to Arthur Uther Pendragon’s desire to live the past, and in fact his claim to be the past, living. ‘In Arthur’s view, past and present are mutually constitutive’, I have in my notes.

This paper was well constructed: Shichtman discussed Arthur Pendragon’s life and career, and Finke provided commentary and theory-informed insights. I found it far better than the first paper, in terms of the tight relationship between facts and theory: I felt that here, it wasn’t just that links were being made between fact and theory, but that each illuminated the other indispensably. Of course, by the time we got to this paper I had the benefit of all three previous papers’ touching on the same theoretical concepts, so that helped. Regardless, it was a presentation which sparkled with humour and oddity, but also genuine engagement with Pendragon and his goals, as well as broader social issues.

~

1. Mea Culpa. Interestingly, when in New Zealand I zealously avoided LOTR-related sites, preferring to keep Middle Earth in my head; but evidently I am not content to keep the past in the past!
2. Another question worth asking, which neither Rudd nor Twomey did, is: does the forestation, or disaforestation, of the Wirral even -apply- in Gawain’s ‘verse? I am all down with Arthurian legend being used to work out real social concerns of the contemporary audience, but my gut instinct is that one of the features of the fantasy-past is that resemblances to the present are serve one of two purposes: because you need the similarities there in order to work out whatever it is your anxiety is; or because the -absence- of that feature would force you/ your audience too far out of their comfort zone. I’m not sure that particular legal status of the Wirral at the time of writing fits into either category (although the legal connotations of ‘forest’ certainly could fit one or the other).
3. This point intrigued me, since it’s the polar opposite of my friend and colleague Kylee Nicholls’ argument, which she trotted out in a paper at ANZAMEMS, that Gawain’s problem is that he walks out of the “real” world and into the world you find in romances -about- Gawain, and cannot figure out what on earth he’s supposed to do or be. I lean toward Kylee’s theory, but I’d like to see more of Gillian Rudd’s logic: I expect that the two arguments have much in common in the building-blocks.

Apparently this is tiring me out. Today I had a nap in an armchair in the breakout room, cuddling Simon Gaunt’s Love and Death in Medieval French and Occitan Literature.

Just thought you might like to know that. I can recommend it, as an emergency teddy-bear.

A pair of skeletons still holding hands was found recently in Italy. The man and woman were buried at the same time between the 5th and 6th century.
The skeletal remains of a Roman-era couple reveal the pair has been holding hands for 1,500 years.
Italian archaeologists say the man and woman were buried at the same time between the 5th and 6th century A.D. in central-northern Italy. Wearing a bronze ring, the woman is positioned so she appears to be gazing at her male partner.

Pictures of the said adorable skeletons, and more info, at the Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici dell’Emilia-Romagna.