the dark ages of medieval studies

7/29/2019 The Dark Ages of Medieval Studies

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becameassociatedwith the proletariat" Perselsexplained.Although heseemedeager o demonstrate hat hepersonallydidn't share hoseuptight middle-class iews,at eastone ofthe academicsn his audience emainedunconvinced hat asecretbourgeoishabitus didnlt lurk underneathhis antino-mian veneer. Excretory?" she whispered o a fellow medievalistsitting next to her."\tr7hydoesn'the ust sayshit?"

nd you thought that the Middle Ages wasall aboutiousting knights and damsels n distress.That'sbecause ou have never attendedthe medievalists'

congress, he annual first-weekend-in-May ritual at \trestern Michigan wherePersels read his wine-bottle theorizingand where t is definitely not your grand-father's Middle Ages.Persels'spaper waspart of a Thursday morning panel titled

"lfaste Studies:Excrement n the MiddleAges" and devoting a full hour and a halfto human effluvia. The other two schol-ars that morning readpapersdealing withexcrement n Icelandicsagas nd the the-ology oflatrines.

$faste studies sa brand new academicdiscipline invented by SusanSigne Mor-rison, a dark-haired,extroverted 49-year-oldprofessorofEnglish at TexasState University's San Marcos campusand mother of two (her husband is also an English pro-fessor)who organized he sessionand admitted with good-humored candor in an email that her new field'sdisgust-provokingsubjectmatter might be a"challenge" o scholarsthinking about specializing n it. Morrisonls own specialtyasa medievalistused o bewomen on pilgrimages,but thenshe got the idea for her latest book, Exctemcnt n thc LateMiddle Ages:Saned Fihh an^dChaucer's ecopoetics,onhcom-ing this September.n heremail sheexplained hat the ideafor the fecal book came o her partly because he noticedthat dung and privies played a role in the works of Chaucer,Dante,and other medievalauthors,and pardy because er

"son was potty-training." And so a new scholarly ndustrywasborn.

The guru of waste studies seemso be David Inglis, asociologistat the University of Aberdeenwho coined thephrase fecalhabitus" and whose2001bookrz4SociabgiralHistory of Exoetory Expnience,argued that avoiding scato-logical topics in polite convenation is a repressive 0festernbourgeoishang-up. nglis's theories it right in with otherconcepts dear to the postmodernist heart of academia-

"discourserttthe "Otherr" matters "transgressiver" "bod-ies" (in the world of postmodernism here are hardly anypeople, ust "bodies"),etc.-so professors f literature, reli-

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giousstudies,and other branchesof the humanitieseagerexpropriated nglis's ideasand applied them in their owendeavors.As one of the panelists,University of OregoEnglish professorManha Bayless,put it with the opacitthat is de rigueur in postmodernist heory "The body is noa neutral site."

The one thing in which waste-studies scholars seenot to be interested s medieval history. The idea isn't smuch how peopledisposedof waste as what they thoughabout it---or if you're a cultural-studies type, what "societythought about t. \7hen an audiencemember at the sessiopointed out that fenilizer, whether its sourcewas human o

bovine, couldn't have been too despiseby the medieval middle classesbecause was a valuable commodity that generatelucrative bourgeois fortunes for the mechants who traded in the stuff, Morrisoncounteredr It was still coqsidered owly.

\7hen the session was over, Morrisoninvited the attendees o a second houand a half of wastestudies. !fe'll be deaing with sewager"she announced cheefirlly.Alas, myown bourgeoishabitus(I'mlace-cunain rish) started o kick in, anddecided neededa breath offresh air, sto speak, so I opted for a different sessio

among the 602 featuredat this year'scongress.Not that thepostmodernistmodusperandiwas ikely to be any differenelsewhere.Down the hall from wastestudies hat morningwas Session : "(Ab)normal Societies:Disability as a Socicultural Concept in Medieval Society."The parenthesebracketing the'Ab" areexamplesof a favoritepostmoderist punctuation strategy,signaling to readers n the knowthat puutively neutral words such as "abnormal" actuallconvey oppressive,often sexist, hidden agendas.My owntake-the-cake ward or thepo-mo parentheticalamong theI,500 paperspresented his yearwent to this double-paretheses oozy,attached o apaper ead n Session 5 , apaneabout animal symbolism n Old French literature: "Becoming (m)Others,Becoming(hu)Men: Engendering Hybridsand Monsters n Tro Medieval Romances."

"Disability studies" is another hot new field in thehumanitiesthesedays,and as with wastestudies, t has ittle to do with historical or economic facts on thegroundsuch as, say, he manufacture of medieval crutches or howblind peopleeked out an existence n l3th-century PerugiInstead like wastestudies,disabiliry studies s all aboutpresumed attitudes toward the disabled: how medieval folkperhaps ike folks of today,supposedly lassified hosewhowere different from them as disabled.One of the Session5paperswas Tvo Sidesof the SameCoin: Defining the Mentally Ill in Planugenet England," read by Gregory Carrie

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a graduatestudent in history at the University of Alberta.Carrier's conclusion, after a great deal of postmodernistrambling: "The mentally ill were nherently indefinable."

The next three days featured moreof the same: schol-arly papers hat alternated between he incomprehensibleand the vaguely evolting. On Thursday afternoon heardapaperdeliveredon "MenstruatingMale Mystics and theSinof Pride." Then I took myself to "Googling the Grailr" atwhich ElizabethSklar,an English professorat \flayneStateUniversity in Detroit, announced hat she hadtyped"HolyGrail" into Googleand gottennine million hits. Fromthereit was offto "Saint Margaret: GeneralPractitioner,not onlyan OB-GYN." Who knewthat there were medical spe-cialties n the Middle Ages?

A Friday morning ses-sion featureda paper itled'Alisoun's Aging Body: Gaz-ing at the \flife of Bath inChaucer's CanterburyThles."Hmm, Chaucer, omethingsolid and recognizable.Thepaper, however, read byMikee Delony, an Englishprofessorat Abilene Chris-tian University, urned outnot to be about Chauceratall but about a BBC televi-sionproductionafew yearsago hat turned the \flife ofBathinto a modern-dayplastic-surgeryunkie. There turned outto be morepapersat the congress bout he forgettable2001movie,4 Knight'sTale three) han aboutChaucer'sKnight'sTalc one).In one of thosepapers, eliveredwith much helpfrom PowerPointand titled "Knights, Dykes, DamselsandFags: Gender Roles and Normative Pressures n Neome-dieval Filmsr"'Wayne Elliott , a graduatestudent at KentStateUniversity, argued that the film Knight'sTalehad ahomoeroticsubtext becauset starred Heath Ledger.PoorLedger.He made the double careermistakeof (a) playing agay cowboy n BrokebackMounnin and (b) dying before hehad a chance o live it down.

There were numerousother paperswith either "nor-mative" ("heteronormativity" is bad becauset impliesthat heterosexualsare more normal than homosexu-als) or "masculinity" (like femininity,a social construct,not an inherent characteristic)n their tit les, and some-times both, as in t his bilingual tonguetwister:"Nachder Mannesnamen ite?Amazons and Their Challengeto Normative Masculinity in Medieval German Litera-ture." Other buzzwordsamong the medievali stsat Kal-amazoo were "hybridity" (borrowed from "postcolonial"studies), "heterosyncrasies" I never could figure out

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what that meant), and that hardy perennial "patriarchy."Speaking of patriarchy,six femaleprofessorsgathered

on the first full day of the congress or a roundtable discus-sion sponsored y the Society or Medieval Feminist Schol-arship. The topic was a book titled HLstoryMaaers by JudithBennett, a professorof medieval history at USC, whosetheme, udging from the discussion, s that feminists oughtto redouble heir efforts to fight patriarchy.The discussion,however,soon turned into a lament by some of the femi-nist professorshat theyhad troublepersuadingstudentsofeither sex o sign up for their courses. One young womantold me that she wasn'ttaking my course on gender and

experiencebecause, he said,'I don't want to take anotherfeminist classr"' explained\(rendy Marie Hoofnagle, aprofessorof medieval stud-ies at the University of Con-necticut. This complaintwas echoed the next day byAudrey Delong, a literatureprofessorat Long Island'sSuffolk County CommunityCollege,at a sessiondevotedto strategies for sneakingpostmodernist heory intothe headsof reluctant under-graduateswho might rather

be elsewhere. In my students'demographic, hey hear theword'feminist'and they shut downr"saidDelong.

he InternationalCongresson Medieval Studiesbillsitself as the largestgatheringof medieval specialistsin the country-and it probably s. Becauset is timed

to coincide with the end ofthe schoolyearon most collegecampuses,ncluding WesternMichigan's, some 31000 ro-fessors,graduatestudents,and amateur and professionalexpertson any subiect hat can be looselydefined asmedi-eval("loosely" can and does nclude J.R.R.Tolkien, HarryPotter, Xena the warrior princess,and even The Da VinciCodc) ly or drive to Kalamazoo,often taking along sheavesof their students'papers o gradeduring sparemoments.

There they spend up to four days delivering or listen-ing to someof the 11500 cholarlypaperspresentedat thecongress, oughly one paper for every two attendees,butmostly(becausehe 600-oddsessionseaturing thosepapersare crammed nto only 12 hour-and-a-halfime slots,whichmeans no single personcan hear more than a handful ofthem) socializing, n relationships hat range from thestrictly professionalto-or at least I am told-the unin-hibitedly erotic. The high point of the congress s the Sat-

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urday night dance, a not-to-be-missedspectacleof morethan a thousand medievalists cramming themselves nto aballroom in the llfestern Michigan student center, fuelingthemselveswith rail booze, and dancing the wayyou mightexpect scholars of the Middle Ages to dance. t doesn't helpthat most of the Kalamazoo medievalists ook and dress heway you might expect scholars of the Middle Ages to lookand dress. Some, of course,present themselvesas the pro-fessionals hey are-suits and ties on men,pulled-togetherensembleson women-but they are likely as not to belongto a contingent of visiting Romanians. The best way todescribe he attire of many attendees,which runs heavilyto ethnic textiles, unusualbody ornaments, sweatersof indeterminate age, shoesresembling those favored bymedieval peasants,and unin-tentionally amusing hats, isthe reply I overheard onemedievalist give to a queryby a nonmedievalist shar-ing our airport limo as towhether congress attendeeswore costumes:A lot of themwear costumes,but they don'tknow it."

The overblown size of theevent-who knew that therewere even 3,000 medievalists n the entire world?-illus-trates he law of diminishing returns. tr7hen ,500 cholarlypapersappear on a single agenda, t is reasonable o expectthat a largenumber of them will not represent astingcon-tributions to the store of human knowledge. Persels'swine-bottle paper, although dealing with subiect-matter youwouldnlt want brought up at the dinner table, was actuallyone of the better, n terms of overall learning of the twodozen or sopapen I heard(and his French accent wasexcel-lent). But besides he law of diminishing returns, the con-gressalso illustrates all too faithfully various aspectsof thelaw of supply and demand, one of which is that the totalnumber of medievalistsprobably exceeds he total numberof college undergraduates hese days who have the slight-est interest in learning the smallest thing about the MiddleAges. That dismal fact lies at the core of all other observa-tions to be madeabout the congress.The International Congresson Medieval Studies is theaffordable medieval conference,centrally located in theMidwest (despite its "international" moniker, most attend-eeshail from the United States and Canada), and becauseof its low cost appealing o even the most underpaid andunderemployed of academics n the field. The congressseems o have been designed that way from the beginning.

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WesternMichigan, occupying 1,200hilly acreson the fawestern outskins of Kalamazoo, s one of those statenormaschools hat during the mid-1950sdecided o switch identties overnight from poky teachers'college to populous stateresearch universiry via a massive building campaign entaiing awe-inspiring quantities of cinderblock. Today the student population totals 26rW0, and its enonnous campus idotted with midcentury strucnrres of an architectural stylthat can be described as"nondescript but sturdy."

Engineering science,and business are \Testern Michigan's strong suits, along with Division lA football-notexactlypromising soil for nurturing study of the Middle

Ages. Still, the campushousea Medieval Institute thasponsored the first congresin 1962 and continues to doso to this day, aswell as anInstitute of Cistercian Studies (completewith an impressive rare-books library) thastarted sponsoring theologcal sessions at the congresduring the early 1970s.Thecongress,with its lingeringovertonesof 1960shippie cuture, was designedas a gatheing of the tribes in all thingsmedieval: history literature

theology,philosophy, drama, art, and music. The idea wathat \TesternMichigan's student dormitories, vacated othe summer,would house he participants,and the sessionwould takeplace n the now-vacantclassrooms. or its firstwo decades, he congress emained relatively small and colegial, featuring perhapsa hundred sessions.Then it begato balloon to its presentsize of more than 600.

And why not? After all, the law of supply and demansays hat low prices mean more customers.The \$TesteMichigan dormsstill cost only $35 a night ($28 f you double up with a roommate), there's a free airpon shuttle, youcan eat cheapat the cafeteria(or for nothing ifyou crash thereceptions that serve hors d'oeuvres), and anybody with acredential and entrepreneurial energycan organize a sesion or read a paper. f you don't mind sleepingon a thinmattress n a cinderblock-walled, inoleum-floored,underliand virtually unfurnished 1960s-era orm room that lookslike Cellblock No. 9 and features an erratic heating systemthat alternatelybroils and chills, sharing abathroom withup to three strangers(fecopoeticsalert: cinderblock transmits sound with startling efficiency),and eating Midwesern snrdent-cafeteriaersionsofyour favorite dishes suchas he "Mediterranean"saladconsisting of skewersof coconut shrimp atop a plateauof limp lettuce) while sharing

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your board with still more srrangerswhose mmersion inmedieval arcana s likely to have impaired their table man-ners,the International Congresson Medieval Studies s theacademicconference or you. Oh, and you must also enioytrudging up and down hills to and from sessionswidelyscatteredacross he campus.Should you wish to trek into downtown Kalamazoofor

a changeof sceneor cuisine-forget it, unlessyou'vegot alot of time on your hands for a lot of walking along traffic-clogged highways.Besides, here'snot much to seeor doin this onetimeMidwestern industrial hub on the railroadline between Detroit and Chicago now noticeably dein-dustrialized and depopulated.Kalama-zoo doesn'tquite look like the famouslyrundown Flint, Michigan, of MichaelMoore movies,but gentrification still hasa way to go. A warning to iuicers: Thevast Western Michigan campus,whereyou will be more or lessconfinedas f onthe countyhonor farm ifyou are oo poorto rent wheels, s entirely dry, unlessyoubring your own bottle (which many do)or frequent the cashban briefly open atthe receptionsand the dance.

ot surprisingly, then, the con-gress s generally shunned bythe superstarsof medievalaca-demia: the seniorprofessonand well-known scholarswhooccupy endowed chairs or draw generouscompensationpackagesrom Ivy Leagueand top stateuniversities.Thosefornrnatescholars,whose rips to academicget-togethersarerypically fueled by hefty travel allowances rom their affiu-ent home univenities, tend to prefer the classyget-togeth-ers of the Medieval Academy of America, founded in 1925by the famousHarvard hisrorianCharlesHomer Haskinsand usually holding its annual meetingseach March at big-ciry hotels or on the crunpusesof prestigious collegeswithplenty of nearbycultural and entertainmentamenities.TheMedieval Academy doessponsorsessions t Kalamazoo,andsomebig medieval namesdo showup-this year'scongressfeatureda stellar plenary addresson medieval bestiariesbyChristopherde Hamel, manuscript ibrarian at CambridgeUniversity'sCorpusChristi College,aswell as appearancesby the veteran Chaucerianscholar Derek Pearsallof theUniversity of York,well-known medievalhistoriansBrendaBolton and BarbaraHanawalt, and Seth Lerer, dean of post-modernistmedievalismat Stanford.But mostof theworthieswho come o Kalamazoodo soas "presiders"whosesole ob is to lend the gravitasof theirnames o sessions nd introduce the worker-beescholars

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who will actually readpapen, thus being sparedthe drudg-ery of either writing a paper or doing the organizing. (Youwon't find them sleeping n the dorms, either; most bookaccommodationswell off campus,preferablyat the Radis-son Plaza,Kalamazoo's est hotel.) The pecking-order eali-ties of academic ife, evenamong otherworldly medievalists,leavea vastarrny ofpoorly paid overworked lower-echelonprofessorsat not-so-big-nameuniversities and, of course,legions of strappedgtaduatestudents for whom a trip tou/estern Michigan and the dorms of "the Zoor" as they callit, may well be the high point of the academic ear.Many stateschoolsand smaller collegeson right bud-gets pay for at most one or two trips toacademicconferencesper professor peryear,and often at the rate of iust $500oreven$3fi) per conference-hardly enoughto cover air fare-and usually only if therecipient delivers a paper. You scarcelyneed to put two and two together to fig-ure out why this year's congtess featured1,500papersand why so many of them,delivered by graduatestudents afraid toventureoutsidethe postmodernistbox inwhich their theory-laden seminars haveconfined them, or professorswho secmedto have hastily thrown their notestogetherin order to qualifu for a free plane trip,were, o put it kindly, not so hot.

There are oases fexcellence n the po-mo desertat Kalamazoo.Many sessions, specially hosedealingwith medieval heologyand philosophy,which aretypically sponsoredby specialryorganizationssuch as theCistercian nstitute or the Aquinas Society,offeredpapersthat were rigorously researched nd argued. The congressalso features int-rate performancesof medieval drama andmusicaswell asa giant book fair. Still, many scholars,espe-cially historians, eelingchoked by the miasmaof medioc-rity, havestoppedcoming to Kalamazoo.Thus the over-whelming majority of thesessions owadays re n the fieldof literature,especiallyEnglish literature, which is notori-ous for its vulnerability to theoreticalhoo-hahand for thelargenumbersof bottom-feedingassistant rofessors nd at-seagnduate studentsneeded o staffthe requiredfreshmancompositionclasseshat are run out of many universities'English depanments.

Another reality of academic ife draws bodies o Kal-amazoo: rofessionalonelinessn remotesettingswherehardly anyone elseon campuscaresabour the MiddleAges.Over lunch in the cafeteria,Ellen Friedrich, anassociateprofessorof Romance anguagesat ValdostaState University in Georgia, explained the factsof lifefor her: teaching our differenr coursesper semester in

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the Ivy League he norm is two ) mostly way outside ofher specialty,which is medieval French romances nothigh on the list of academicnterests or Valdostaunder-grads),eavingalmostno time for scholarly esearch. orher as for many in her position, the congress nd otheracademic conferencesoffer their only chance to visitwith professionalconfreres."'We'reKalamazoo junkiesr"Friedrich explained.

The difficulties of being a medievalist in an era inwhich few universities require their undergraduatesto learn anything about the Middle Ages (mandatorycourses n the history of \Uflesterncivilization being athing of thepast),and in which undergrads ncreasinglyshun the humanities because hey can't take all the the-ory, accounts or another odd aspectof the Kalamazoocongress:he ever-growingnumber ofsessions hat don'tdeal at all with mattersmedieval but ra ther with mod-ern books, movies, elevision shows,magazineads, andeven video games eaturing either medieval or pseudo-medieval themes. Tolkien, Harry Potter, and "Googlingthe Holy Grail" were only the tip of the iceberg.Therewere countlesspaperspurporting to highlight medievalthemes n D.C. comics, Bram Stoker'sDracula, and theI990s Xena: WarriorPrincesselevision series.One sessionwasentirely devoted o medievalblogs, ncluding apapercomparing the works of GeoffreyChaucerto the blog

"GeoffreyChaucerHath a Blog." The blowout, orperhapsthereductb ad absurdum, f these scholarly endeavorswasSession531 on Sunday morning, "Medieval Masculini-ties on Film." That session eatured our separate apers:yet another examination of A Knight's Thle,an effort toprovethat the 1961movie E/ Cid, starringCharlton Hes-ton, was a pieceof Franco-engineeredropaganda, cin-ematic ook at the story of Tristan and Isolde,and "Medi-eval Masculinity asModern Monstrosityr"a postmodern-ist analysis f Hannibal Lecter.

Such presentationsproved to be among the bet-ter attended,and at least some of the individual papers(althoughmaybenot those ead n Session 31)displayedmore iterary depth andpassion han many of the papersdealing with "real" medieval it erature run through thepostmodernistmeat-grinder. "Teaching Tolkien" drewmore than 70 attendees.One of the Da Vinci Codepanelsfeatureda paper hat got my personal ote for best n theentire weekend: Queering he Code:Jesusand Mary orJesus nd John?" a deadpan poofby MadelineCaviness,an art history professorat Tirfts University, arguing thatDan Brown'spotboiler aboutJesus' upposedmarriage oMary Magdalenewas actually part of a Vatican cover-upof the savior'sgay relationship with one of his apostles.Cavinessmanaged o dragout and sendup everyclich6 nthepostmodernistdictionary hat had been nvokedwith

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deadly earnestness lsewhere t the congress:essentiaizing discourser""destabilize the heterosexual mperativer" "the heteronormativityof Jesus."

t's pretty clear that in an era in which undergraduateat many colleges an as readily fulfill their humanitiecore requirementsby selectinga courseon TheLord o

tlw Rings rom the academic smorgasbord as, say, selectina course ot Tlu Cantnbury Thlcs,medievalists make themselves seful on campus and fill their classrooms nd maktheir departmentheadshappy) by teaching he former. Buthere may be something else at work, too, in the obviouenthusiasm with which highly trained experts in arcanspecialtiesdevoured sessionsdevoted to Tolkien and J.KRowling: There they could drop their postmodernistcyncism about"society" and simply drink in the elaboratq omology, spiritual depth, literary beauty,and shared meaning that used o be what scholars ooked or in real medievaliterature, before the cultural-studiespeople got hold of itLarry Caldwell, an English professorat the University oEvansville whose specialty is Anglo-Saxon literature butwho read a thoughtful paper titled "Stern Vision, EarnesEvasion: NeomedievalCatholicism, PeterJackson,and theLimitations of PopularCinemar"wrote to me in an emaaboutJackson's lockbuster movies of the Tolkien trilogy"[W]e are ooking at . . . a sort of universally shared ext thanon-specialists mbracewith as much enjoyment as domembers of the emerging specialistcommunity of formaTolkien scholars."Quite a difference rom the "bourgeoihabitus."

But on to the dance! n medieval imes every story hada moral. The moral of the Saturdaynight danceat the 43rdInternational Medieval Congressn Kalamazoo s that noscholarof the Middle Ages s too old toograceless,oo bulging ofderriEre, oograyofbeard or ponytail, or too tattooeto get up on that parquet loor and gyratespasmodically ovintage Bon Jovi amplified to jet-enginedecibels. 'm toldthat the dancesof today areno match in noise and lascivousnessor those of the mid-1990s,when flocks of leatheclad gays ook to the floor to celebrate heir academiccoming-out in a congress essionon "Queer Iberia." Still, Ispent two hours there nursing a beer and mesmerizedbythe bobbing fauxhawks, he shakingbare flesh(and plentyof it), the hip-hopper in the Blondie T:shirt, the fellow inthe full kilt and sporran who had been wandering throughthe congress s houghin searchofthe set or Brigadoon,thnose-rings, he Birkenstocks, hePashtuncaps, hebare eeof the learnedprofessors f the Middle Ages and their gradstudent acolytes.Maybe it's not a pretty sight, but as theswayingsardine-packed cademics n the dance loor sanalong n unison: "'We'vegot to hold on to what we'vegot."r

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the dark ages of medieval studies

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