Arthurian Images and Iconography, or, how to mix post-modern theoretical papers with traditional close readings

Getting back on the recapping report – perhaps my favourite session at the IAS was a Monday session entitled Arthurian Images and Iconograpy: Theorizing Lost and Invented Geographies and Monuments in Arthurian Literature. It was an immensely popular session – people sitting on the floor again – and immensely fascinating for the number of different methodologies across the four papers, which the session participants managed to hold together more or less cohesively. My preference was, by far, for Michael Twomey’s close-reading, historically grounded approach, but all four papers were interesting and it was an excellent case study of how seemingly disparate approaches can hang well together and inform one another.

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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!

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

IAS update #2 – Gawain and Guinevere, my two favourite Arthurian peeps

[Note: both these papers, and my recaps of them, deal with encroachment on personal and physical autonomy; the second in particular covered some distressing gendered violence in the narrative structure.]

The first paper I went to at Bristol was on what might just qualify as my favourite subject – the objectification (or, in this case, commodification) of Sir Gawain, in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Warning against the wyles of women - David Sweeten

This paper moved very fast, especially in the middle, so I missed chunks of it, but I really look forward to reading a hard-copy version at some point

David began with this quote:

For were I worth al the wone of wymmen alyue,
And al þe wele of þe worlde were in my honde,
And I schulde chepen and chose to cheue me a lorde
…
Þer schulde no freke upon folde bifore yow be chosen.
[ll. 1269-71,75; Tolkien & Gordon 2nd ed. (ed. by Norman Davies); my quotation, not David Sweeten's.]

Gawain, or Gawain-as-husband, is something which can be purchased with appropriate wealth. David went on to argue that Gawain’s honour is also a commodity to be bargained for: he read the bedroom scenes not as Lady B’s attempt to sleep with Gawain (or purchase sex from him), but an endeavour to get him to accept the girdle. She takes her time setting up the appropriate stakes: first offering a too-high price (sexual favours for his honour) in order to make the lower price, the girdle, more acceptable. The values of the items in question – Gawain’s honour, and the girdle, seem slippery: Lady B. can reduce Gawain’s standing by questioning his identity; and her revelation of the properties of the girdle forces him to re-value the item within the context of the exchange.

As well as this reading, which was fun in its own right, David offered some historical context. He argued that the poem is both rooted in its NW Midlands homeland, and closely tied to London politics of the day. SGGK’s anxiety about women’s commodification of male honour he linked to contemporary anxiety about the position of influence held by Alice Perrers, mistress of Edward III. The nobility of the NW Midlands relied heavily on direct royal patronage: Alice’s strong influence over Edward threatened that relationship.

I really liked this paper. But then, I really like most things which have to do with someone bossing poor Gawain about.*

Next up, I missed the first five minutes or so (but enjoyed the rest of)….

The Queen was in her Parlour: Guinevere and Space – Kristina Hildebrand

This paper was in a session (“Women in Arthurian Literature”), which, perhaps due to its snazzy content and perhaps due to its respected moderator, Bonnie Wheeler, was so jam-packed that people (myself and David Sweeten included) were sprawled on the floor around the edges of the room.

Kristina argued that Guinevere marks out and defines royal space; her presence identifies civilisation in the text. This power is not to be confused with political clout, but it seems to be impossible to rule England without her.

Guinevere is a stable figure at the centre of the court (for the most part), when compared to, say Iseult, who comes and goes from her husband’s court. She has a defined space, her personal chamber: Kristina talked about the stress in the social fabric of Malory’s Arthurian world caused by differing values placed on the queen’s space. To Arthur, he alone should have access to it; Gawain argues that because the queen has a public function as rewarder of knights, her chamber is a public space.

With this framework set up, Kristina talked about Guinevere in Meleagaunt’s castle: her space grows smaller and smaller; she attempts to defend a single room, and in the end she cannot even maintain control over her bed. This is a pretty distressing situation by any measure, but the framework Kristina set up around it, in which Guinevere’s space is not just about her person but her identity as queen, the whole process sent chills up my spine. Not-good chills, except insofar as I admire the careful authorial choices necessary to produce such effects.

Guinevere, then, is under constant threat: she is most safe inside Arthur’s court, but never entirely so. Kristina drew in Igraine, here, who was not safe even within her husband’s court; and then she asked if the convent to which Guinvere retires is a safe personal space at last? There, she has authority, and ought to be able to prevent male encroachments on her territory. However, Lancelot ignores her command and tries to see her. Kristina noted that Guinevere is saved, in the end – by death. Only God can protect her; and even then, only terminally.

I liked this paper! It was Relevant To My Interests, even if it was about Malory. Totally worth scrunching up on the floor for.

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* I feel I ought to specify, since apparently many people assume otherwise, that I do not personally wish to shag Gawain! Boss him about, sure. My feeling on Gawain is that he should be my big brother, and his life would be much better if he had me to tell him how to run it.** And many other people’s lives would be improved because I would be bossing Gawain about, and not them. What, you mean you don’t all have fictional characters you want to adopt? *sidles off*

** I have a feeling the Maiden With Small Sleeves shares my feelings on Gawain, too.

IAS update #1

It seems that I finished off the Leeds posts: but I was not done there, oh no; in fact, the conference which was my primary excuse for being in England in the first place was the International Arthurian Society’s Triennial Congress, at the University of Bristol.

I liked Bristol! I liked the city (I have a worrying fondness for scruffy port towns), I liked the university, and I liked the villages up above the city in which the university is nestled. I enjoyed the company of the IAS’s most excellent members – although, without the benefit of pre-forged internet acquaintances, I found Bristol much harder going than Leeds so far as social anxiety goes.

To add to it, I was on the end of my trip, and the end of my energy supply: two very lovely friends of mine each took me under their wing for a day in Oxford prior to the IAS, but from the time I woke up on Sunday morning I was scrabbling to keep track of where and when and why I was. I missed my train to Didcot, but, fortunately, caught the next one and made my original connection. It wouldn’t have been the end of the world if I hadn’t, of course, but the powers that be had seen fit to reserve my seat Didcot>Temple Meads at a table-seat, and to arrange for me to share it with two excellent individuals whom I had previously met at ANZAMEMS in Dunedin. When we all piled off the train we ran into a scholar from UWA, and sallied forth in the one taxi in search of our respective accommodations.

I then commenced with what turned out to be my policy for the week: not knowing where anything was, or what I was supposed to be doing, and flinging myself upon the tender mercies of Gareth Griffith, and the somewhat more intimidating beneficence of Elizabeth Archibald in search of the answers to these questions. This tactic paid off: I recommend it for the terminally confused!

Monday morning saw me:

- miss breakfast

- select a cafe, which proceeded to be my breakfast-eating, tea-drinking and paper-writing home base for the rest of the week

- getting lost between said cafe and the university

- adopted by a tiny, fuzzy, enthusiastically affectionate black kitty in a steep pedestrian alleyway behind a church. Kitty loved me! Kitty was quite determined that I not be allowed to stand back up after bending down to pet hir, and certain that my job in life was to be nuzzled and purred at and climbed upon.

Accordingly, I wandered into the conference venue in a state of lateness, where I ran smack bang into the aforementioned Gareth Griffin. I posited that lateness to conferences is entirely acceptable when one has been adopted by a wee black kitty, and he concurred.

After that, I went to some papers! And I might even tell you about them when I am not running late for something else!

Leeds Report #7, or, more fun with Middle English

Lest I turn into the inestimable Jon Jarrett and wind up posting recaps six months or more after the conference in question… on with the recaps!

Because I have my priorities straight, I’ve already reported on one paper from session 1314,  ‘English Romance, Nation, and (Obscene) Scribal Innovation’: it had speculations on the sex lives of bishops.

You might be interested to know that the rest of that session was interesting and intriguing, too!

First, Michael Johnston talked about The Circulation of Middle English Romance.

• He began by talking about increase in book production in London in the late 14th century, where, he noted, romance was largely left out of the flourishing literary culture. London manuscripts  exhibit a continuity of format, style, and genre, and they’re just not so fond of romance. This was demonstrated with reference to several Chaucer and Langland MSS.
• A number of romance manuscripts, on the other hand, have strong ties to particular provincial households. Johnston presented several examples of particular traceable manuscripts. Then, drawing on similar data to that which Gareth Griffith was using in his paper, he talked about the general presentation of romance manuscripts, and noted that those which come with fancy script and decoration usually contain more ‘elevated’ genres (typical of London book production) in addition.
• Why is romance not favoured by London book producers and/or buyers? Johnston wants to know; he didn’t have concrete answers for that at this stage, but he noted the need to look at Middle English genres in socio-historical context in order to find such answers.

Next up, Hiroki Okamoto gave a paper entitled Contesting English History: From ‘here’ to ‘ferd’ in Havelock the Dane. I found it a little hard to follow, but I look forward very much to seeing a printed version one day.

• He looked closely at the use of the terms here and ferd, both words for an army. The Havelock-poet never uses the more common noun host, and Hiroki Okamoto argued that here and ferd are loaded terms – that here in both OE and ME is usually used for invading forces, whereas ferd usually connotes Anglo-Saxon royalty.
• Before Gottrich’s speech (an Englishman, who rails against the disorder and general evilness of Danes), the terms here and ferd are used in that pattern, with Danish forces being a here. However, Hiroki Okamoto argued – and I had a little trouble following this, since it’s been a while since I read Havelock and also I have scrappy notes in my conference notebook so bear with me – that Gottrich’s speech is deliberately overblown: that it’s not meant to make the audience hate Danes, but to see Denmark as a disorderly place needing to be put in order by Havelock.
• After that speech, though, something changes: the word ferd becomes more common, and Havelock’s forces – which are invading England! – are a ferd now.
• Hiroki Okamoto is convinced that the poet is deploying these words deliberately; and that the use of loaded terms, especially ferd, with its royal connotations, contributes to a revisionist idea of English identity, and is perhaps closely linked to the Scandinavian cultural presence in Lincolnshire.

Leeds Report #6b, or, more fun with Computational Linguistics!

After Rombert Stapel’s paper, we moved onto two further papers which were perrhaps more ambitious in scope, and concerning which I have less certainty about the method and its application. All presenters talked about using control samples, and talked us through the process by which they deterrmined that Delta could tell the difference between their target author and unrelated samples, but each paper raised some questions for me which might just be revealing my ignorance.

Karina van Danlen-Oskam was attempting to use quantitative computational analysis to distinguish between different scribes of the same text. She talked about some of the difficulties of using computational linguistics for medieval studdies: you need an electronic text – but when you fling your electronic text into Delta, are you identifying the medieval author, the medieval scribe or the modern editor as your unique language user? During the course of her own analysis she also had to control for variant spellings – some manuscripts which looked really whacky turned out to be quite conventional once you controlled for variant spellings in feminine pronouns.

I liked Karina’s idea here – that you could bypass that question if you used computational linguistics to distinguish between different scribes of the same text. In this case, she took 15 MSS of Dutch text, a chronicle of biblical history. She made the transcriptions herself – necessarily short sections, the same sections from each text. She picked sections with interesting women in them partly because that seemed like fun to her, and partly because sections with interesting womein in them occur regularly but infrequently across the whole of biblical history.

What she found was that different samples showed different levels of variance across the whole set of manuscripts- one episode from the New Testament involing the thee Mariaswas wildly different across the boad. What she also found was that while the Judith episodes overall were pretty consistent, one scribe had got seriously inventive and not only changed things but added whole sections, effectively becoming an author for that stretch of the text.

The problem which arises out of this is that… we don’t know what it means. Using her existing data, Karina plans to look at the Esther episodes; she said she thought the scribe might have been inspired by traditions on the Nine Worthies, so if she was going back for more data she’d start with sections which dealt with the nine male Worthies. But without full transcripts of entire manuscripts, it’s not really possible to say how inventive that scribe was or how unique the manuscript.

My other problem here is that while computational linguistics clearly can demonstrate that the scribe of MS I (in Karina’s numbering) was creative in his account of Judith; and the dot plots were nicely illustrative; and it’s exciting to know this fact – you didn’t actually need computational linguistics to do it. All you needed was someone to look at the Judith sections of all fifteen MSS, and it just so happens that a computational linguist got to it first. Given that the scribe had *added entire lines*, I’m sure Karina noticed this when she was transcribing.

Mike Kestemont was using computational linguistics to argue that one Johan the Clerk was the author of a group of twelve poems from Antwerp, usually attributed to the ‘Antwerpschool’ of poems. Now, this is a long stoush – we have one known poem by Johan and one almost-certainly-by Johan poem¹ – and we have about 12 anonymous poems from the same period, and 20th century scholarship was greatly devoted to arguing about whether Johan wrote all of said poems or none of said poems.

Mike’s computational states focused on rhyme words, on the reasonable logic that a poet might change his topic, change his format, but he’s unlikely to change his list of ‘words which rhyme with purple’. And he discovered that all the anonymous poems used substantially the same rhyme words as Johan’s identified works!

Mike was good humoured about this: he knew well that exciting as his multivariate statistics were, he’s unlikely to put an end to the argument anytime soon; but he wanted to put his evidence down on the record for the ‘maximalist’ position.

My quibble with this – he was rigorous about his control sample and so on – is that I’d like to see some other statistical studies done on rhyme-words. While, sure, any two or three or twelve friends are probably not going to use the same stock rhyme words, what about teachers and students? In an oral poetic culture, wouldn’t one of the key things you teach your students be a stock of rhyme words for every occasion? But we don’t have much vernacular poetic evidence where we can identify teacher-student pairs or groups, at least not for the European middle ages. Medieval and early modern Arabic poetry might be able to help here – but I’m not even sure if Arabic poetry is rhymed; and the distinctly different oral cultures might cancel out the usefulness of such data for European medievalists.

I would also be interested – just because I’m interested – to see a stack of computational analysis done on known Latin authors, particularly authors trained in the same place or by the same people. I’d like to know if the statistical difference between the language use of two second-language users trained in the same place is different to the statistical difference between two native speakers, especially since Latin composition has always been such a stylistically specific art. I’d like to know if you could use computational linguistics programs to run grammatical analyses on a Latin text and identify the author’s native language. These are all things that would be interesting to me! But I don’t have either the Latin or the statistical proficiency to do either of these things myself. Latinists and statisticians of the world, hear ye.

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1. This was a fun story. In his identified poem, Johan announces that his patron had rejected his previous work because it was too misogynist. Conveniently, we have a remarkably misogynist poem, the Lehenspeigel, dedicated to the same patron, by ‘John, your poor Clerk’. So ten points to Rogier van Leef for turning down misogynist poetry?

Also, fun fact – John the Clerk fromAntwerpturns up in the wardrobe accounts of Edward III– he received payment from the English for spying on the French.

Leeds Report #6, or, I saw multi-variate statistics!

One of the most interesting sessions by far, from my humble perspective, was 1209: Whodunnit? Literary Forensics and Authorship Attribution for the Middle Ages. Three Middle Dutch scholars, all of whom work on questions of authorship and transmission, all spoke on different uses of statistical analysis in looking at textual variants. Before recapping each paper, allow me to talk for a bit about the interesting ideas and issues the session raised.

Firstly: computational linguistics. This method of linguistic analysis rests on the fact that individual speakers of a common language have distinct linguistic markers. These markers are not topic-specific, but show up in really common words (articles, conjunctions, subordinators) and grammatical patterns. Put simply, you can tell the difference between a post by Magistra and a post by me by the fact that Magistra talks about early medieval history and I talk a high medieval sex; but a computational linguist would run our two anonmymised posts through a computer program and discover that I use certain conjunctions far more than she, and she uses some particular grammatical structure a lot more than I do.

Now, I seem to have a lot more faith in computational linguistics than many literary scholars – I think this is because I got taught the basic principles (although by no means how to do it) in first year, thank you Craig Ronalds. I know, for example, that this business about individual language markers has been rigorously tested on modern speakers from different language backgrounds. I know the method has been used to expose cases of police interfering with witness testimony (police members as a group show certain linguistic traits that are not shared by the general population, as a result of their training). I know it’s uses for humanities scholars haven’t been fully explored or tested yet, but I also suspect that a lot of the distrust people have for evidence drawn from computational linguistics is to do with the unfamiliar kind of evidence. Computational linguistics relies on data and statistical analysis and sciencey-kinds of things: I get the feeling that a lot of humanities scholars don’t trust that (it’s repeatable, sure, but you can’t go through your edition and mark it up and SEE the evidence right there). Our discipline trains us to check everything against the text, rather than checking it for thorough and repeatable experimental process: maybe we’re not so willing to trust people who branch out into other kinds of evidence.

With that said, it must also be stated that I don’t know enough about computational linguistics for my bullshit detector to work properly when hear about it. So I have no way of knowing if an individual scholar is doing their computational linguistics Rong. Given that the application of computational linguistics to literary scholarship is a relatively new field, one risk would be that there aren’t enough trained bullshit-detectors around, but that can only change with time and the increasing usefulness of computational techniques.

So what are some of the uses of computational linguistics to medievalists?

Rombert Stapel has been using computational linguistics to determine how much of Hendrick Gerardsz van Vianen (sp?)’s Croniken van der Duytcher Order, a late 15th c. chronicle of the Teutonic Order with specific focus on the area around Utrecht, was written by the said Hendrick. Several segments are easily identified as being from other sources – the prologue claims to be by a 12th century bishop who certainly wasn’t in Acre when he said he was; and the Balliwick chronicle for Utrecht seems separate from the main body of the text.

Traditional philological analysis would look at unusual words, and has been of some use to Rombert Stapel, but in the absence of original source texts it’s hard to tell where emendation has been happening. Instead, he took samples from the privileges written by the said Hendrick in his capacity as secretary to the Lands Commander Johan von Drongen. The samples are not just written at a different time to the Croniken, they’re also in a completely different style – something which would usually override philologically distinct vocabulary features, but doesn’t usually override the grammatical data used in computational linguistics.

The full set samples which he fed into the program (Delta, by someone named Burrows – it’s free, and apparently easy to use) were:

• 2 sets of samples from the Croniken where traditional philological evidence (comparisons to original sources, I believe) shows Hendrick left traces as author.
• The privileges mentioned above
• The Sachenspiegel, known to have been copied by Hendrick
• 2 unrelated texts of the same period and genre – one hagiography and one chronicle.

After testing that Delta could distinguish between the unrelated texts and the Hendrick texts, he then compared the samples to the entire rest of the Croniken, and pulled up several sections clearly not by Hendrick, including the first half of the prologue (but not the second); the Balliwick chronicle; and some formulaic documents- privileges and court pleadings. The rest appears to be either by Hendrick or substantially modified by him.

Rombert then argued that Hendrick’s strong presence across the Croniken suggests that he was both author and compiler at once; noting the existence of other Teutonic Order chronicle texts in this period in theLowlands, he says this points to a strong, self-aware hagiographical tradition in the balliwicks, away from the administrative centre of the Order.

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Note: I’ve probably got the author/scribe’s name spelled wrong, but I’m pretty sure Croniken was on the slides, with a C not a K.

Leeds Report #5, or the one where Highly went to the wrong side of campus

Here are some things that happened to me on Wednesday morning at Leeds.
1. I overslept and missed breakfast.
2. I drank truly abysmal tea in Boddington. Seriously, who thought it was a good idea to have coffee and plain boiling water and hot chocolate all coming out of the same spout on the machine? I ended up with tea that tasted of hot chocolate!
3. I dashed onto the bus to Weetwood, running late.
4. I got to Weetwood and discovered that the session I wanted, ‘Royal, Patron and Civic Saints’, was actually back at Boddington.
5. I scanned the program, saw the words ‘pontificate’ and ‘Innocent’ and dashed off to Session 1127.

Of course, it turned out that Session 1127 was about Innocent II, not my buddy Innocent III. One presenter, Damian Smith, wasn’t present; and I missed enough of Anne J. Duggan’s paper on legal reform that it made very little sense to me.

But I learned interesting things from Dale Kinney’s paper ‘The Artistic Patronage of Pope Innocent II’.

What I liked best about Dale Kinney’s paper was that she said from the outset that she was correcting an assertion she’d made in her own PhD thesis, with which she now disagreed. I like a person who’s happy to argue with themselves in public!

The second thing I liked about this paper was her lovely slides – art historians are good at slides, I have noticed. The third fabulous thing was that she accidentally referred to scholar Herbert Black as ‘Herbert the Black’. More scholars should have fearsome monikers, I feel.

Also, there were some arguments in this paper. Basically, in her PhD thesis, Dale Kinney had asserted that Innocent II was ‘not a building pope’. This, she now realises, rested on a strange assumption that there was such a thing as a ‘building pope’ in the 12th century; and that Innocent II’s well-attested rebuilding projects (described by Cardinal Boso; mostly it was falling rooves. Apparently rooves were falling in on churches all over Rome) had no particular project.

Now, she thinks otherwise. She discussed three facets of Innocent II’s building programs:

• Gifts (possibly re-gifts?) to various churches, including a big shiny silver cross to St Peter’s, which may be a deliberate parallel with a similar gift of Constantine’s. Such gifts seem to point to a high value placed on churches in general and church decoration in particular.
• Technologically demanding rebuilding projects – for example, the Cathedral of St John Lateran had collapsed in the 9th century, been rebuilt in the early 10th, but struck by lightning in 1115, after which it began to collapse again. Innocent II seems to have been the first to attempt a complete reconstruction. Many of these reconstructions involved deviating significantly from the original plan – at St Pauls, for example, Innocent II’s architects halved the span of the columns, with shorter arches and windows placed above, for lack of the technology to replicate the originals. At St Stephanus Rotunda, which had originally had several (2? 3? I’m not sure and didn’t write down) concentric colonnades, they had to fill in the second colonnade in entirely and cut the outer one out entirely, making the whole church dramatically smaller.
• Innocent II was also a great spoliast, removing and re-using a number of features from Roman monuments. This is by no means the lazy option – as Dale Kinney pointed out, much of Rome was actively hostile to the Papacy at the time; dragging great big columns and whatnot across the city is no mean feat.

Perhaps most interesting of all, she told us the story of Innocent II’s own sarcophagus. It was found ‘in media giro’ (in the middle circuit) of the Mausoleum of Hadrian, which was at the time a heavily-used fortress.

First of all, the Mausoleum of Hadrian doesn’t have circuits, so no one’s quite sure what that meant. The passage from the entrance to the two central chambers was a sort of spiral, so it could mean in the middle of that; or perhaps in one of the two central chambers.

Secondly, Innocent II laboured under the delusion that the sarcophagus was Hadrian’s; but Hadrian was cremated and buried in an urn. So it must be someone else’s sarcophagus. But whose?  Everyone else buried there – the last person was a woman named Julia Domina – would also have been cremated. So the sarcophagus must have been *moved in there* from another tomb at some point.

At any rate, Innocent II took it out and got it across Rome, through largely hostile territory – Dale Kinney suggested a route, involving floating the sarcophagus upriver as far as possible. This probably saved it from destruction in an assault on the  Mausoleum. In fact, it ought to have been perfectly safe forever – except the church it was placed in burned down on top of it in the 14th century. Ooops.

This post needs more pictures, but, unlike Dale Kinney, I don’t have access to a lot of educational and illustrative pictures of medieval reconstructions of various Roman churches. I can’t even find a picture of St Stephanus Rotunda.

 

[NB: Dear person who's sending me compliments via google search strings - <3. Dear person who's googling 'stairway fantasy', I got nuffin' for you.]

Leeds Report # 4, or, the one with all the riches in.

Quite a number of lit scholars I know tell me that they don’t go to Leeds because there aren’t enough lit papers to make it worth their while. While I concede Leeds is tilted toward the historical side of things, I actually found that really handy. For one, conferences are good way of picking up on interesting historical discussions – and a medievalist who isn’t interested in history is a very odd medievalist indeed. But more importantly, for me as a noob, the fact that there were fewer lit papers meant you kept seeing the same faces enough times that you eventually got to know some of them.

Session 616, the title of which I have forgotten, but which was chaired by Ad Putter, stands out in my mind because it lead to me meeting not only Ad, but also the eminently excellent Gareth Griffith, and one Rebecca Kerry, whose taste in medieval romances turns out to dovetail nicely with my own. As my week in Bristol for the IAS was punctuated by the recurring necessity of flinging myself on the mercy of Gareth in order to find out where I was going and what I was doing, having met him in advance was rather handy. And I had a lovely conversation with Rebecca at the IAS while we waited for something, which is how I know she has fabulous taste in ME romances.

Whatever the title of this session may have been, it dealt mostly with the handling of wealth in Middle English texts.

Rebecca Kerry – Gifts and Loans in A Geste of Robyn hode

This paper was structured around the debated reading of one line, in which Robin makes a loan of what is supposed to be four hundred pounds, but Little John measures out either ‘eight and twenty score’, or ‘eighteen score’, depending on the manuscript. Editors usually amend this reading to ‘eighteen and two score’, but Rebecca argued that ‘eight and twenty score’ is the correct reading.

In her interpretation, the loan is not a loan but a gift – she notes that the knight engages Mary as guarantor, but Mary can hardly be expected to pay back the loan. The subsequent arrival of the cellarer of St Mary’s with 800 pounds, of which Robin’s men soon liberate him, is heralded as Mary’s repayment of the loan, lending a farcical element to the entire deal. And then when the knight returns, Robin doesn’t ask for repayment, but instead gives him more.

She then talked about the difference between a gift exchange economy and a commodity economy (Ad Putter’s terminology). The Abbot of St Mary’s, to whom the knight owes money, clearly operates on a commodity economy, with the aim of amassing profit. Robin, on the other hand, seems to operate on a gift economy, with the aim of amassing debtors. In a commodity economy, once items have been exchanged or debts paid off, the two parties can part ways. Gifts, on the other hand, are rarely exchanged at exact value: gifts increase and proliferate, and cement social obligations between parties.

Rebecca argued that the two economies co-exist in A Gest of Robyn Hode, but the poem overall is more positive toward a gift-exchange economy.

Megan Glass – Feasting in Middle English Romance

Looking specifically at the Auchinlek MS (for reasons of time and convenience), Megan’s paper raised questions about the social values associated with feasting in romance. The 14th century, despite famine, plague and social unrest, was a time of ostentatious feasting amongst the nobility, and she found it striking that feasting is so rarely featured in romances. Evidence from the Auchinlek MS suggests that when feasting is featured, the focus is not on wealth itself – food, decoration and entertainment are given relatively little attention compared to gifts and the guests. While both gifts and guests may be ostentatious and wealthy, the focus is on the feast’s role in creating and maintaining social bonds and cohesion.

Gareth Griffith – Weath, fantasy and reality: MSS of Middle English Romance

Gareth’s interest is in what descriptions of wealth meant to ME romance authors – specifically, whether the audience identified with, or aspired to the level of, the characters who possess wealth. Gareth works on this rather nifty project, and the paper in part came out of his research there.

He started by looking at how much wealth manuscripts themselves display. He had a fabulous graph of manuscript dimensions, which we all looked at, very seriously, until he pointed out that all it told us was that most of the romance manuscripts are more or less book-shaped (that is, around 20x30cm give or take). He found no relationship between size and ostentation. Then he told us about some of the whacky outliers, such as two Bod. MSS which are tall and thin, or Bod. 264, which is really huuuuuge.

As a tentative trend, he found that really fancy manuscripts tended not to have detailed descriptions of wealth. Gareth says it seems like people who can afford fancy things perhaps weren’t so interested in *descriptions* of fancy things, but he noted other factors, such as the high level of description in alliterative poems compared to prose or rhymed text. He also noted that some regional mansucripts seem to be trying to be fancier than they are – he talked about the Lincoln-Thornton MS (i didn’t write down the actual MS number) which has fancy capitals and illustrations despite having scruffy, apparently non-professional script.

There wasn’t a hard-and-fast argument here (or if there was, I didn’t write it down, which is always possible), but Gareth told interesting stories about manuscripts for 20 minutes! This is something I appreciate in a paper.

Internets, meet my travelling companions

1. Macguffin

Macguffin isn’t mine. He came home from Canada with my housemate K, after some weeks being smuggled about amongst her various cousins and evading the efforts of more serious grown-ups to get rid of ‘that green thing’. Macguffin went to New Zealand with us in February, and he leapt upon the opportunity to go to Europe with me:

Here he is in the church at Thorn

And he is rather annoyed that I wouldn’t let him have a pint in the Eagle and Child:

2. Yvain, the Thesis Lion

Yvain does belong to me, and he came to New Zealand too. This is Yvain and MacGuffin and I, about to speak ex ex-cathedra¹:

He also went to Europe, and was present at all my papers, if not visible. He was very comforting to have with me in Paris (fact: fuzzy lions understand both French and English! This is not much use since he doesn’t speak, but it’s comforting to think that he, at least, knew what was being said around us).

Fact: we went out to the Tour Eiffel to take a cliché photo of MacGuffin for K’s relatives. Yvain, however, shares my opinion of the Tour Eiffel: it’s ugly and boring and the crowds made me anxious, so we went away quickly.

Also fact: one of the many ways that you can tell Jon Jarrett is a truly excellent individual is that he made not one snide remark when faced with Highly curled up on a couch cuddling a fuzzy orange lion. I was very tired by the time I got to Oxford, O internets.²

Yvain’s main purpose in life, though, is to be small enough to fit in a pocket and durable enough to be beat up on when I don’t like my thesis. Which is a lot of the time.

Yvain also comes to class with me. Initially, I’d thought I might need to employ him to break up some of the vociferous arguments about fairies which characterised my first few weeks in the King Arthur course (a sort of ‘no one not holding the lion gets to speak’ trick), but he ended up just living in the bottom of my bag and getting scruffy. This semester, though, he’s been introduced to the students. I have absolutely no idea what the students who don’t already know me think of this, but I think it totally counts as modelling good academic anxiety-management techniques if you share your stuffed lion with the students who are giving their papers that week. Right?

And honourable mentions go to…
Wulfstan Puppy, whose formerly-white belly is permanently stained with the coffee stains of my honours year.
Augustine Bear, who has somehow become the patron saint of marking.
Isidore of Seville, my BA graduation bear.

~
1. The chair is, or was, a retired bishop’s chair from Christchurch Cathedral, NZ; it was living in the small museum at the base of the tower.
2. Resolution for next time I travel: fewer books, more teddy bears! If nothing else, it’s cheaper to post teddy bears home when you’ve bought too many books.

Leeds update # 3: the one with the elephant

Trufax: every session is better with elephants in it! This was about the sum total of my decision-making process for the 11.15 slot on the Monday of Leeds, and so I turned up to “Gift-Giving I: Gift-giving and the Early Middle Ages”, organised by Jinty Nelson and starring Danuta Shanzer, Paul M. Cobb, and Alice Rio.

Things in this session:

A: Gift Revenge, Legacies and Hand-Me Downs: Danuta Shanzer

I’m afraid I couldn’t do this paper justice if I tried to summarise it. I turned up a squeak late, I had a cold and kept sneezing, and my sudafed hadn’t kicked in yet. My notes didn’t make much sense to me a few hours later, let alone now. Danuta Shanzer’s work was dense, wide-ranging and entirely on things I knew nothing about, which is no discredit to her but didn’t help my fogged-up brain at all.

She began by looking at gift exchange practices in ancient and late antique society, where we have better metadata for what a gift meant. She talked about ‘pathologies’ of gifts, such as the tactless gift and the passive-aggressive gift, drawing evidence from descriptions of certain gift practices from the likes of Seneca and Martial; and compared late antique and early medieval gift dedications such as those between Martial and Furturatus (sp?) and Ruricius and Sedatus. The Ruricius-Sedatus exchange was particularly entertaining: we have a series of letters about the gift of a horse by  one of them to the other, but the descriptions of the horse itself vary wildly – to one, it’s a good horse; to the other, a bad one – and the whole exchange seems to be revising existing formulae/intertexts from other gift letters.

A huge slew of this paper went right over my sneezy little head, which is a pity, since what I have in the way of notes suggests it was very well researched. Probably of more interest to early medievalists than it is to me, though.

ED – this paper and indeed the entire session has been eloquently recapped by Magistra.

B: The Gift of the Elephant: On the Meanings of Abulabas – Paul M. Cobb

This was a fascinating paper. (And my sudafed had kicked in.) Firstly, it had an elephant. Secondly, Paul M. Cobb is an islamicist by trade, rather than a western-oriented medievalist. He took on the story of Charlemagne’s elephant, Abulabas, sent to him by Harun al-Rashid (no Arabic sources corroborate the story, but we have enough reliable Frankish evidence to suggest an elephant was in fact exchanged). Apparently, most scholarship on this episode looks at the exchange on a diplomatic or economic level: it’s usually scholars of Europe, and they’re usually interested in whether the gift represented recognition of Charlemagne’s position as Emperor, and what the exchange says about Europe-Middle East trade at the time.

In this paper, Paul set out to talk about why an elephant? What did elephants mean to Harun al-Rashid and his court, and what did they mean to Charlemagne? According to the sources we have, Charlemagne specifically requested an elephant: why?

Paul thinks the elephant was almost certainly an African elephant (not, as the Wiki page I just linked to would have it, an Asian elephant), but that Sassanian attitudes to elephants as a symbol of royalty and power would have dominated the cultural ideas about elephants at Harun’s court. Both Persians and Byzantines used elephants as gifts; there seem to have been rules about elephant gifts. Specifically, they are sent to kings: sent by subordinates to kings, or by kings to one another. Rarely does one ask for an elephant, and, when an elephant is requested – we have one example other than Charlemagne’s request – it seems to be regarded as rude. Display seems to be the primary purpose of elephants in the Islamic caliphate – we have no evidence of their use in battle after the fall of the Persian empire (accordingly, Paul feels that Abulabas was probably not used in combat by Charlemagne, although he seems to have been taken  on campaign), but they were kept by kings and used in parades.

Paul also talked about the use of elephants in Roman and Byzantine gifts, and concluded that Charlemagne probably had access to some of that tradition – evidently, he knew that gifts of elephants were a symbol of power and even royalty. However, he notes an additional feature of the gift of this elephant: his name, Abulabas, clearly derived from the frequently-occurring kunya Abu Abbas (father of Abbas). Paul notes that it’s quite uncommon for animals to be referred to by a kunya, but one other notable elephant was called Abu Abbas. Mahmud, the elephant in surah 105.

Now, the ‘companions of the elephant’ referred to in surah 105 are the Christian king of Yemen and his army. In the birth year of the prophet, 570 AD, also, incidentally, the Year of the Elephant, said king decided he was going to attack Mecca and destroy the Ka’ba. And he took his elephant with him – an elephant he had requested from his overlord in Abyssinia. But his plans went awry! Mahmud, also called Abu Abbas, the elephant, flatly refused to attack Mecca and instead prostrated himself before the walls.

Given that Charlemagne’s elephant appears to have been sent to him with a name, and that name is the quite-rare name associated with an elephant who was known for recognising the sanctity of the Ka’ba and also involved in the defeat of Christian forces… Paul suggested that, while Harun’s gift of Abulabas to Charlemagne clearly signifies recognition of a fellow king, it also carries a sly joke with it. An acknowledgement of a far-off peer, but also a reminder – for those in the know – that there are things worth acknowledging aside from Christian kings.

TL;DR, this was an INTERESTING PAPER WITH AN ELEPHANT IN IT.

C: Voluntary Enslavement: From self-sale to self-gift - Alice Rio

Alice specifically analysed Charles the Bald’s Edict of Pitsres concerning the fate of those who sell themselves into slavery. Now, I haven’t read and don’t even particularly want to read this edict. But Alice made it sound quite interesting! Apparently Charles – or his edict-writers, whoever they were – goes to great lengths, extrapolating weird precedents out of all sorts of places, to paint a remarkably positive picture of not only those who sell themselves into slavery, but also those who buy self-sold slaves. The edict manages to construct such a transaction as a sort of charity, for the protection of the poor.

This flies in the face of the Theodosian code, which flat out forbids self-sale, and, somewhat ironically, punishes the self-vendor with lifetime slavery. Under the Visigothic law (lex. Visi V.4.1o, according to my notes), ‘he who submitted to slavery willingly does not deserve to be free’. Alice noted, however, that the institution of weregild sort of did away with the idea that free men have no price.

She also raised the possibility that Christianity, with its theology of service to God, might improve ideas about slavery; however, she noted that late antique Christian writers saw slavery as an impediment to salvation and were hostile to the sale and purchase of the free. Late antique attitudes, legal and otherwise, did tend to see self-sale as a sign of oppression and place the blame squarely on the buyer. Charles, on the other hand, seems to see the transaction as a favour.

Alice raised some interesting questions here: who’s doing the favour to whom? Is the purchaser making a sort of gift to the purchasee? Not to mention, if the enslaved cannot own property, how is the self-sold slave supposed to benefit from the money? Clearly there was a more complex economy than regular slavery going on here.

She then talked about documents from the Abbey of Farto, in which a chap (possibly named Waldinus, or Uvaldinus, apparently my palaegraphical skills are not up to reading my own handwriting) gave himself, as a slave, to the Abbey of Farto. He expected clothes and shoes, but would have to buy his way out if he wanted to leave. His donation deliberately uses the language of religious service; Alice found, in the Farto documents, a sort of feedback loop between entering the monastery and constructing that as a state of servitude, and entering service to a monastery as an act of devotion.

Alice then cited the Leges Langobardorum (Aistulf 22, p. 204 in the Bluhme edition), which specifies that a man who gives himself to someone else is legally allowed to go free after thirty years. However, it also specifies that the giver must not give himself into slavery out of necessity. She noted a shift in the Italian evidence, both the Lomard law and the Farto documents, in the language used to frame voluntary enslavement: there’s less emphasis on oppression and poverty, and more agency assigned to the voluntary slave.

Finally, Alice noted that the reciprocity underlying all of these documents – ideas of protection for service – far predate the 11th century. These exchanges create new relationships, and reframe the old language of sale into a more malleable sort of agreement between individuals and either other individuals or entities such as an abbey.

NOTE: It has been suggested that what I wrote down as ‘Farto’ might actually be ‘Farfa’. Why yes, I type so much that my handwriting is nigh illegible!