Guest Post: Kate Mattacks (University of Worcester)

Brief Outline

Assisted by an AHRC grant, the Victorian Plays Project began in 2003, under the direction of Professor Richard Pearson at the University of Worcester. Its primary aim was to preserve and supply playtexts of popular London productions, the vast majority of which were previously unavailable to scholars and practitioners alike. Over 1400 plays were published as acting editions by T.H. Lacy from 1848 – 1875, constituting a huge and varied resource of material from melodramas, historical plays, comedies, burlesques to the more unusual squibs, sketches and monologues. The project fell into several distinct phases: producing a detailed catalogue of all the plays (2003 – 5), creating a searchable database of selected plays using xml encoding (2006) and generating e-texts of over 380 plays (2006-8).

Making a Crisis out of a Drama

The project faced several challenges in terms of material, editorial practice and methodology. Basic information such as the year of publication was impossible to discern, and discrepancies between the play’s first performance and Lacy’s print version abound. Did Lacy’s Acting Edition of Black E’yd Susan in 1855 indicate a revival of the play or merely his ability to procure the copyright for a new two-act version based on the original of 1829? As a result, the project records both the dates for collective volumes and gives the original performance date on the website.

The huge number of plays printed by Lacy meant that only a quarter could be digitised. How could one play be prioritised over another, particularly given that Lacy’s own selection policy was unclear? His choices reflect a circle of friends that included Mark Lemon, Tom Taylor and John Maddison Morton. Was their popularity in part derived from the availability of a Lacy edition that practitioners could use? These thorny issues aside, Professor Pearson and I endeavoured to choose plays based upon the following criteria: plays that were unavailable elsewhere, plays that responded to a key event/cultural concern, had been mentioned in novels, diaries or letters and therefore were a frame of reference for the Victorians, plays that demonstrated an analysis of visual or theatrical culture. Unusual texts such as monologues, and the few plays written by women were also included. Lacy’s pirate versions of The Jewess and The Corsican Brothers figured high on the list of inclusions.

The most experimental part of the website appears in the form of a searchable database of thirty plays. These were encoded in xml to secure their longevity using TEI.lite and Oxygen software. However, it quickly became apparent that whilst the format was suitable for texts, it did not lend itself to plays. The use of songs, tableaux, extra scenes, shows within scenes, stage directions and allusions required new ways of definition in order for the search engine to find them. Here we worked with the staff at Oxford AHDS, particularly Dr James Cummings, to address the particular needs of Victorian Drama. Multiple definitions of stage directions were needed, as we quickly discovered that exits, gestures and entrances were never simple, and nearly always involved props, directions or emotions. It also became clear that only direct references to famous characters, places, buildings, people, etc. could be highlighted. The complexities of allusion and suggestion designed to avoid the censor’s gaze were unquantifiable in coding terms.

The final phase of the project involved collaboration between Birmingham Library who held the collection, BCU who digitised the plays and an editorial team based at Worcester. The time constraints of encoding plays meant that the pdf format was used for the majority of the plays. BCU produced beautiful photographic images of the plays which ensure the preservation of the collection. However, when these were run through OCR packages to become pdfs, rogue llamas, otters and other animals emerged in the texts. The presence of a small watermark transformed a ‘warm, yet modest flame of passion’ into a ‘warm yet modest llama of passion’. Foxing on the originals gave rise to a number of ‘otters stage left’ (‘Enters stage left’). Whilst exotic and bizarre animals appeared in numerous burlesques, the unusually high incidence of them across the catalogue meant that an editorial team had to scrupulously check every play. All spelling inconsistencies and incorrect punctuation were noted, but if the odd ‘small glass of urine’ has sneaked through, we’d welcome the feedback in order to correct it.

Once these problems were overcome, the site was designed to maximise the potential for each play. The catalogue and list of digitised plays are searchable. There is a facility to search the pdf of a play before downloading it to assess the frequency of a keyword. Thirty of the plays have been fully encoded to enable detailed searches for names, places, people, etc. or these keywords can be accessed. Once downloaded, the plays themselves are searchable through Acrobat.

The Future

Victorian Drama remains a hugely undervalued cultural medium, particularly from the 1830s through to Ibsen and Wilde. The Victorian Plays Project aims to make available texts which were an integral frame of reference for the Victorians. Whilst the playtexts are fixed records which belie the shifting nature of the performance mode, they offer a rare glimpse into the tastes and debates of their day. The speed at which a playwright could capitalise upon public demand meant that a play could be written, licensed and performed within a week. An inspection of Lacy’s catalogue for the year 1851 reveals, as one might expect, a prolonged interest in The Great Exhibition. However, other trends from fashion to facial hair are equally identifiable throughout the List. When read alongside the Lord Chamberlain’s Collection, which is currently being catalogued through the ‘Buried Treasures’ Project at the British Library/Royal Holloway, significant cultural moments can be revealed through the lists of plays on common topics.

The potential for such a resource is almost unlimited. The interdisciplinary nature of many of the plays makes them an ideal locus for wider debates on how theatre helped shape Victorian visual culture. Their use of paintings, adaptations of literary texts, contemporary allusions and records of historical moments allow the texts to be used as another source of primary evidence alongside those more traditionally studied at undergraduate and graduate level. For example, H.T Craven’s Meg’s Diversion (1866) from Volume 73 contains a tableau scene recreating Philip H. Calderon’s painting Broken Vows (1856). Lacy even provides a line drawing of the painting as a frontispiece to emphasis the relationship between art and theatre. These playtexts are not meant to displace the theatrical moment which changed nightly to suit the exigencies of time, technical restrictions, budgets, stage managers, writers, actors and audiences. Rather they are offered as a basis for a long and rewarding journey into the minds of the Victorians.

Recently, the value of the project has extended beyond the scholarly community, with family historians and theatre practitioners all taking the resource in new directions.

Over at The Valve, they’re holding a group summer reading project on George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859). The novel will be discussed in a series of instalments as follows:

 June 17 - Book 1 Chapters 1-5

June 24 - Book I Chapters 6-11

July 1 - Book I Chapters 12-16

July 8 - Book II (Chapters 17-21)

July 15 - Book III (Chapters 22-26)

July 22 - Book IV (Chapters 27-35)

July 29 - Book V (Chapters 36-48 )

August 5 - Book VI and Epilogue

August 12 - General Discussion

Rohan Maitzen introduces the event here and the first post is here. I look forward to listening in to the ensuing conversations!

Guest Post: Nicole Leapley (Saint Anselm College)

The 43rd International Congress on Medieval Studies offered, as usual, thought-provoking papers in a variety of fields - it is this diversity that makes Kalamazoo such a stimulating conference. My principle reason for attending is to hear about recent work in my own area of expertise, but I often find that the most memorable talk of the conference is from a completely different discipline. This year, I found the plenary and panels particularly good. One of the most exciting and frustrating aspects of the congress continues to be its size and multi-track layout. While there is always something going on with 600 or so sessions to choose from, it nevertheless seems to regularly happen that the talks I most want to hear are scheduled at the same time, but in different buildings. While WMU¹s dorm rooms continue to be dubious, coffee is more plentiful and the wireless network easier to access - even the cafeteria food seems to be improving!

Saturday morning’s plenary, entitled “Are Bestiaries Really Psalters, and Vice Versa?” was given by Christopher de Hamel (Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge) who laid out his argument simply: Bestiaries were made and illustrated as companion volumes to Psalters and were structured and used similarly. The book was not a guide for identification, but a religious book used in monasteries.

De Hamel reminded the audience of the characteristics of the medieval Psalter—a volume of the Old Testament psalms. Millions knew it by heart. Every week monks would get through all 150 psalms. Individual Psalters were not numbered or rubricated. The psalms were read for three layers of meaning: the literal, the moral or tropological (how to behave today), and the prophetical or typological (how the psalm points to the future New Testament).

Bestiaries flourished from 1120-1300. The majority of the 80 or so manuscripts are in England. Christopher de Hamel emphasized that a bestiary is structured like the Psalter, opening with identical images of creation. The length of chapters and their order is also similar. While the Psalter contains 150 psalms, a bestiary covers from 100 to 150 animals. The animals correspond to a psalm (as the lion corresponds to Psalm 1). The bestiary, or “The Book of the Nature of Animals and their Significance” sometimes opens with the story of the creation of the world. The bestiary analyses animal habits to show how humans can learn a lesson that will bring them closer to salvation. For example, the lion bears dead cubs and on the third day the father breathes on them, bringing them to life. This is an allegory of the resurrection. The Panther, like Christ, is beautiful, and his enemy is the dragon. He eats then sleeps for three days. Upon awakening he roars and his sweet breath pleases all (except, of course, the dragon). The phoenix’s behavior similarly points to Christ while the bee is a model for the good monk. De Hamel shows that like biblical commentary, the bestiary shows that animal behavior has many layers and can be interpreted in the same three-fold manner. Observing animals and decoding their behavior is thus a pious act. The seeking of meaning is itself devotion. The same reflection and attention to detail is involved. Why had God chosen to use this word here? was of equal value as Why did God make lions live on mountaintops?

In other words, animals, like the psalms, were to be analyzed and decoded. De Hamel’s talk addressed some of our most basic questions about Psalters. For example, why did the bestiary contain mythical animals? If all animals were made in order to present a message, then you can’t exclude any—even the rare or mythical ones. Unicorns are mentioned nine times in the bible. If there was the slightest chance that an animal was part of God’s creation, it was unthinkable to leave it out. There was, of course, no concept of evolution. Hugh of St. Victor said the animals were like a book written by God. They were non-verbal, pre-literate, pre-Moses scriptures. The “Book of Creation” was not written in words, but with animals, while the “Book of Redemption” was the Bible. Both were equally valid.

The only comparably illustrated book is the Psalter. Why are both always illuminated? Neither has its narrative sequence or numbering marked out, thus the image would orient the reader and help them memorize the point at hand. De Hamel’s talk dealt with another basic question, why were the bestiaries illustrated so strangely? The strangeness of the image helps the reader remember. Pious recollection in itself is an act of devotion. If one memorized the psalms or animal behavior, one could ponder their meaning, even in the absence of the book. In addition to aiding memory, the image also served to analyze non-verbally and in a pre-literate way. It shows how to look at animals and think about what they are doing.

From the mid-third of the 12th century bestiaries began to shrink in size in tandem with Psalters. De Hamel discussed the fact that these books were not only used in monasteries, but also privately. Many of these books were owned by Augustinians who specialized to bringing spirituality to the life of the laity. The two luxury books that successfully crossed the divide were the Psalter and the bestiary.

Eventually, the bestiary became obsolete, but its imagery continued into the 14th century, uniquely in the Psalter. These images represented the last expression of pre-literate glossing and provided a wordless marginal text. De Hamel gives the example of the use of the Crane (which the informed reader would recognize as figuring a sentry) to illustrate psalm 40. Psalm 43, which deals with foolishness, is glossed by an image that looks like a dog gazing into a dish. The modern reader might assume this has nothing to do with the psalm and is just margin doodling. A truly literate medieval reader would be familiar with bestiaries and know something of the tiger’s behavior, specifically that in order to catch a tiger cub, the hunter chases the tiger and her cub, exhausting them, then drops a mirror near the mother tiger, who looks into the mirror and licks it, as she thinks it is her cub. Only then can the hunter can steal the real tiger cub. Foolish tiger.

Session 19
Reading Aloud the French of England (A Workshop)
Organizer: Laurie Postlewate, Barnard College
Presider: Laurie Postlewate
Love and Death in Thomas’s Tristan: The Monologue of Ysolt
Alice M. Colby-Hall, Cornell Univ.
When Truth Hides in the Lie: Marc Confronts Iseult in Béroul’s Tristan
Joan Tasker Grimbert, Catholic Univ. of America
Voices in the Life of Saint Margaret
Tara Foster, Univ. of Missouri-Columbia
Male and Female Voices in the French of England
Thelma Fenster, Fordham Univ., and Robert L. A. Clark, Kansas State Univ.

As it is difficult to summarize a workshop, I will simply say that I would attend such a workshop in the future, especially had I specific questions in hand. All participants agreed that Anglo-Norman must be pronounced and encouraged the audience to go forth boldly to read it aloud. The participants offered two resources as guides:

Short, Ian. Manual of Anglo-Norman. London : Anglo-Norman Text Society, 2007.
Link to A-N Text Society: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/llc/forstudents/fs_fr/fr_interests_as
“Or dient et content et fabloient: Four Centuries of Old French Verse”
Link to Chaucer Society: http://creativeworks.byu.edu/chaucer/ViewItem.aspx?id=ICMS003

Session 277
Late Medieval French Language and Literature I
Sponsor: Fifteenth-Century Studies
Organizer: Steven Millen Taylor, Marquette Univ.
Presider: Steven Millen Taylor
Women Singing and Women’s Song: Feminine Performance and the Pastourelle
Geri L. Smith, United States Military Academy, West Point
Multilingual Late Medieval Manuscript Anthologies containing Works by
Christine de Pizan
Karen L. Fresco, Univ. of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign
Avian Intertextuality: Jean de Condé, Jean Lemaire de Belges, and David Lindsay
William Calin, Univ. of Florida

Geri Smith’s talk, “Women Singing and Women’s Song: Feminine Performance and the Pastourelle”, discussed four early references to Pastourelle in northern France, underlining how these early works approach the role of the often forgotten female character in the traditional Pastourelle couple. Froissart’s text gives voice to the usually silent shepherdess, allowing her to speak. Christine de Pizan’s Dit de la Pastoure sets up the woman’s agency by singing about love and abandonment, and emphasizing the woman’s need to tell the story. In the chanson de toile Smith discusses, a woman sings a man’s song about a singing shepherdess who is alone guarding her sheep. Here, the dual gender of the narrator constructs a jarring play on pastourelle gender conventions.

In “Multilingual Late Medieval Manuscript Anthologies containing works by Christine de Pizan”, Karen Fresco discussed BNF fr 1182, Dresden OC 62, Rodez 57, and BNF fr 25434, noting that normally Christine’s work appear in French manuscripts. The multilingual manuscript thus presents an anomaly. She asked what the languages of these manuscripts can tell us about the culture that created them and the readers that read them. She also examined what holds these anthologies together—is there a thematic coherency? Multilingualism has various meanings and functions depending on the region, period, and purpose of the manuscript. In BNF fr 1182 translation appears to be the organizing principle (Christine’s texts are presented along with a Latin text that she is said to have translated). In others, the codicological structure suggests moral teaching is the unifying principle. In the final two examples, monastic or translatio themes connect seemingly disparate texts.

“Avian Intertextuality: Jean de Condé, Jean Lemaire de Belges, and David Lindsay” is part of a larger project on the French tradition in early literature in Scotland. In his paper, William Calin compared David Lindsay’s Testament and Complaynt of Our Soverane Lordis Papyngo, written in Scots, and the Epitres de l’amant vert by Jean Lemaire de Belges. In both texts the birds die by falling down and are devoured by predators. In both texts we have the theme of the court poet in a precarious position, allegorized as a household pet. In both texts dead parrots speak and write (two!) letters to active rulers. The first falls from a high perch (which shows her overweening ambition) onto a spike. Before dying, she dictates two letters to James V, encouraging him to become a good king and to beware the fickleness of Fortune, in the second, she criticizes the morals of the court. A magpie, kite, and raven (figuring corrupt clergy) offer absolution in exchange for the bird’s goods. The bird instead leaves her possessions to the poor and her heart to the king before her would-be confessors devour her. In the second text Calin analysed, a male bird commits suicide by throwing himself in the maw of a dog. This is a mock courtly text where we have a parrot that acts like a man. He writes two epistles to Margaret of Austria from beyond the grave. In the third text (by Jean de Condé), which chronologically preceded the two already discussed, is also a bird allegory, but here the parrot plays a minor role, as orator rather than letter writer. Like in Lindsay, the narrator denounces ignorant and wicked clergy. Calin pointed out that while Lindsay mentions no French sources, he certainly spent time in France from his childhood and would likely have been familiar with these two storylines.

Session 330
Late Medieval French Language and Literature II
Sponsor: Fifteenth-Century Studies
Organizer: Steven Millen Taylor, Marquette Univ.
Presider: Steven Millen Taylor
Happiness and Christine de Pizan
Josette A. Wisman, American Univ.
Songs Telling Stories: Christine de Pizan’s Cent ballades d’amant et de dame
Daisy Delogu, Univ. of Chicago
Mélusine and the Nagas of Cambodia
Julia A. Nephew, Dominican Univ.

In her talk on “Happiness and Christine de Pizan”, Josette Wisman questioned Christine’s enjoyment of solitude and focused instead on her depression caused by her husband’s death and her subsequent legal and social disempowerment. A discussion on Christine’s vocabulary of happiness and unhappiness followed, during which joie and plaisir were evoked along with mesheur and malheureuse.

Daisy Delogu focused on the interplay of lyric and narrative, noting the lyrico-narrative moments within individual poems as well as the narrative logic of the “livret” as a whole. While the author/compiler inscribes herself within the canzoniere tradition, these ballades do not constitute a first-person outpouring of feeling in song, they are rather recounted and written within a narrative, carefully organized by a controlling author. This allows a sort of moral commentary. Ballade 38 contributes to the narrativity of the work by introducing information about the world before and outside of the canzoniere. Five of the ballades are conversations between the two lovers, which constitute a mise en abyme of the receuil as a whole, pointing to the controlling force of the author. However, both the Lady and author figure operate within the constraint of the discourse of courtly love. Christine’s also tells the story of an author and her patron in the poem’s frame. The work opens with the word “Quoique” (even though), thus setting up the author’s will against that of the patron. Here the influence of Machaut is visible: singing and loving are not interchangeable. However, Machaut wrote in the service of love while Christine inscribes herself in an economy of monetary exchange that allows literary patronage but shows that language can be divorced from feeling. This sets up questions about the reliability of language that recur throughout the work (the médisants whose gossip threatens love, the lovers who doubt one another).

Julia Nephew compared Mélusine and the Nagas of Cambodia and India in her talk. While Mélusine is a fairy who is half-snake, half-woman, the Naga is usually a multi-headed deity and usually male. The female Naga have one head or an even number of heads if multi-headed, while the males have an odd-number of heads. Around these Naga, stories like the Mélusine myth evolved. In one an Indian wife cures her snake husband—it is often the husband that is superhuman while the wife is human. Nephew posits that the Mélusine legend takes its source from these Indian and Cambodian Naga stories.

Photo (L>R): Amy Earhart, Andrew Jewell, Steven Olsen-Smith, and Elizabeth Lorang

Guest Post: Amy Earhart (Texas A&M University):

ALA (the American Literature Association) was held May 22-25 in San Francisco, CA. I attended a number of interesting panels, but want to focus on the two Digital Americanist sponsored panels. For more information on the Digital Americanist group see http://www.digitalamericanists.org. I always enjoy the ALA as it is smaller and more manageable than the MLA. You can catch up with friends and really find out what is going on in your particular area. Plus, who can beat San Francisco for host city? I made my regular trips to Japantown, Chinatown, and the Embarcadero (cheese, noodles, tea and dim sum). And the rare book seller was back at the book exhibit, bringing delightful items to drool over.

The first panel was titled “Discoveries through Digitzation”. It featured the following papers:

Chair: Andrew Jewell, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
1. “Discovering the Text through Experimental Digital Humanities Infrastructure,” Amy Earhart, Texas A&M University
2. “Digitizing the Sealts ‘Check-List of Books Owned and Borrowed’: New Insights on Melville’s Reading and Collecting,” Steven Olsen-Smith, Boise State University
3. “Digital Scholarship and Graduate Studies in American Literature,” Elizabeth Lorang, University of Nebraska, Lincoln

My disclaimer—the first paper is my own. I wanted to try out some of my ideas regarding infrastructure—of technology and the academic profession—in the paper. I argued that we are at a transitory moment where we might restructure some of the more static infrastructures that are residual in our digital work. These include versioning, canonicity, challenging traditional forms of scholarship production, particularly graduate education, and technology standards and representation of data. The point that I really wanted to push on was that we have, in many ways, recreated some of the most traditional aspects of our profession and, while these parameters, such as the reproduction of the online edition, are crucial to our future profession, we need also to continue to think of experimental approaches, whether in data representation, graduate education, approaches to canonicity and the way in which we represent the products we are producing.

Steven Olsen-Smith gave a fascinating paper on his Melville’s Marginalia project. While still in development, the Melville project is utilizing Merton M. Sealts’ “Check-List of Books Owned and Borrowed” (1948-50, 1966, and 1988 ) to catalog Melville’s book collection. The project hopes to trace the dispersed collection and to digitize the volumes so that scholars might use Melville’s marginalia. Olsen-Smith spoke extensively on the use of Google books, which has allowed scholars to locate digitized versions of Melville’s former books. He discussed the copy of Sir Thomas Browne’s Works housed at the New York Public Library, a set consulted by Melville that includes marginalia resembling his hand. Apparently Melville scholars are now combing the digitized collection in hopes of locating additional text. I’m pleased to see that Google books’ agnostic approach is beginning to produce important scholarly discoveries.

Elizabeth Lorang, a graduate student at Nebraska who has worked on various digital projects including the Walt Whitman archive, gave a paper that laid out the importance of digital humanities project work to graduate student training. I thought that the crucial point she made was to emphasize the connection of the practical project work to the methodological approaches of the scholar. In particular she mentioned that the work has made her retheorize her understanding of text and textuality, author and publication. It seems clear, as well, that the groups in which she has worked give her a network and sense of community that is not often available to students working within our traditional educational model.

Later that afternoon, the Digital Americanists sponsored a roundtable entitled “The Politics of Digital Scholarship.”

Moderator: Edward Whitley, Lehigh University
Participants:
• Kenneth M. Price, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
• Amanda Gailey, University of Georgia
• Matt Cohen, Duke University
• Laura Mandell, Miami University
• Andrew Jewell, University of Nebraska, Lincoln

Ed Whitley started the discussion by mentioning that while preparing the questions for the panel it became apparent that all of the topics evident in digital humanities are the same topics raised each week by the Chronicle of Higher Education. I thought that was a great way to get the conversation started; at the heart of digital humanities are the same disciplinary concerns.

The roundtable conversations were wide-ranging and dealt with the need to theorize the archive, textuality, publication and promotion, representation of data, and usability testing. Of these issues, the need for theorizing our work is one that seemed to return throughout the discussion. All panelists stressed the importance of examining crucial questions such as how we filter, organize and hierarchize our materials, the purpose of close reading within this new medium, and the unseen aspects of the technologies behind our materials. In addition, there was much discussion from the audience regarding print versus digital publication and the way in which the academic system views such ventures in promotion decisions. It was great to hear the audience discuss these issues as many digital humanists have been writing and speaking about these issues over the last 5 years and it appears that they have been successful in making these questions more visible.

We’re very pleased to announce that ‘Towards a Taxonomy of Transatlantic Romanticism(s)’, a potentially groundbreaking article by Joel Pace, is now FREELY AVAILABLE online for 30 days! To read the article just click on the link below:

‘Towards a Taxonomy of Transatlantic Romanticism(s)‘ by Joel Pace (University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire)

Elizabeth Fay, Romanticism Section Editor for Literature Compass, here introduces the article:

Joel Pace’s “Towards a Taxonomy of Transatlantic Romanticism(s)” achieves the goal that its title suggests will only be some future endpoint. An extraordinarily clear and yet broad-reaching anatomy of the new field of Transatlantic Romanticism, Pace’s pamphlet-length article lays the groundwork necessary for an adequate scholarly understanding of the transatlantic nature of Romanticism itself, while providing students and teachers with the key terms and concepts of Transatlantic Romanticism as a field, as well as a survey of the existing scholarship. Pace highlights the interdisciplinary nature of this emergent field, and directs readers to areas needing future scholarly research.

- Elizabeth Fay (University of Massachusetts Boston)

Do feel free to send us your feedback at LICOeditorial@oxon.blackwellpublishing.com or via the comments features below. And otherwise, happy reading!

Over at History Compass there are two more podcasts now available, the second of which is a joint podcast between History Compass and Religion Compass:

History Compass Podcast #3 -

A discussion between Professor Ron Schechter, retired early modern Europe editor for History Compass, and Dr. Laura Cruz, a History Compass author. Examining Dr Cruz’s published essay, ‘The 80 Years’ Question: The Dutch Revolt in Historical Perspective’, they discuss the field of Dutch history, how it is being affected by new global and transnational histories, the need for further theoretical development in light of the cultural and linguistic turn, and the ways this article could be used in teaching.

Click here to download the podcast: http://www.gabcast.com/casts/1696/episodes/1187707007.mp3 (12.1 MB, 16 minutes 59 seconds).

History Compass / Religion Compass Podcast #4 -

A discussion between Yoav Di-Capua, co-editor of the Middle & Near East section of History Compass, and Tamara Sonn, Editor-in-Chief of Religion Compass and History Compass author. Here they skillfully examine Tamara’s article: Islamic Fundamentalism and Political Islam.

This succinct and engaging podcast explores common misconceptions about political actors from the Muslim world. An important distinction is made between Islamic fundamentalism and political Islam.

Click here to listen to the podcast: http://www.gabcast.com/casts/1696/episodes/1209545328.mp3 (9.7mb, 13 minutes 55 seconds).

**********

Download previous History Compass Podcasts for free at http://www.blackwell-compass.com/home_podpage.

Subscribe to future History Compass Podcasts for free via iTunes or other subscription options available here.

Send us your feedback via the comments feature here or at HICOeditorial@oxon.blackwellpublishing.com.

Image: Kalamazoo, Michigan (Source: Wikipedia)

As Kalamazoo fast approaches, we’re delighted to provide a list of panels below which Literature Compass editors and board members will be involved with this year.

As usual, we hope to have some post-conference coverage of ‘Zoo so do keep an eye on the blog in the days following the conference!

List of Kalamazoo Panels with Literature Compass editors or editorial board members:

Thursday May 8, lunchtime

Session 47
Bernhard Brown & Gold Room
The Political Arthur
Sponsor: Arthurian Literature
Organizer: David F. Johnson, Florida State Univ.
Presider: James P. Carley, York Univ.
Arthurus Rex, Alexander Imperator
Thomas Hahn, Univ. of Rochester
Who Would Write a Letter about Piers Gaveston in the Voice of Morgan le Fay?
Michael W. Twomey, Ithaca College
Arthur and Empire in Early Tudor England: Leland’s Assertio . . . Arturij (1544) and Laboryouse Journey (1549)
Stewart Mottram, Univ. of Aberystwyth

Thursday May 8, 3:30 p.m.

Session 126
Schneider
1140
Chaucer as Translator II: Latin
Sponsor: Chaucer Review
Organizer: David Raybin, Eastern Illinois Univ., and Susanna Fein, Kent State Univ.
Presider: Michael W. Twomey, Ithaca College
Chaucer’s Vernacular Epic of Translation and Creative Instability
Sarah Powrie, St. Thomas More College
Chaucer and Patristic Translation Theory
Sarah Baechle, Univ. of Notre Dame
Chaucer’s Translation of the Vulgate Parallels
L. Kip Wheeler, Carson-Newman College

Thursday May 8, 7:30 p.m.

Session 161
Valley I
Shilling
Lounge
The Influence of the Crusades on Middle English Literature
Sponsor: Rossell Hope Robbins Library, Univ. of Rochester
Organizer: Leila K. Norako, Univ. of Rochester
Presider: Leila K. Norako
Crusade Ideology and Conversionary Fears in The Siege of Milan
Alan S. Ambrisco, Univ. of Akron
Fantasies of Crusading and Conversion in The King of Tars and The Sultan
of Babylon
Kristi C. Castleberry, Univ. of Rochester
Following (in) Their Footsteps: Romance Cartographies of the East
Robert Rouse, Univ. of British Columbia

Session 165
Fetzer
1060
Reading Gower Aloud: An Experimental Workshop with Multilinguality
Organizer: Joyce Coleman, Univ. of Oklahoma
Presider: Joyce Coleman
A workshop with Alison A. Baker, California State Polytechnic Univ.–Pomona;
Mica Dawn Gould, Grambling State Univ.; Alexander L. Kaufman, Auburn
Univ.–Montgomery; James M. Palmer, Prairie View A&M Univ.; Michael W. Twomey, Ithaca College; and R. F. Yeager, Univ. of West Florida.

Session 183
Bernhard
213
New Voices in Anglo-Saxon Studies
Sponsor: International Society of Anglo-Saxonists
Organizer: David F. Johnson, Florida State Univ.
Presider: David F. Johnson
“This mystery is a pledge”: Some Lexical Aspects of Ælfric’s Theology of the
Eucharist
Matthias Ammon, Robinson College, Univ. of Cambridge
A New Approach to Understanding Variation in Beowulf
Karen Bollermann, Arizona State Univ.–Polytechnic Campus
Nominal Compounds, Discourse Structures, and Manuscript Presentations in
the Two Versions of the Old English Boethius
Jonathan Davis-Secord, Univ. of Texas–Arlington
The Sublime Avenger: Divine Vengeance in Anglo-Saxon Literature
Andrew M. Pfrenger, Univ. of Connecticut

Session 147
Valley III
Stinson
Lounge
Ploughing the Field of Cultural Production: Medieval Authorship and Pierre
Bourdieu
Organizer: James Hala, Drew Univ.
Presider: Burt Kimmelman, New Jersey Institute of Technology
Can the Field of Cultural Production Be Enfiefed?
James Hala
Who’s in Charge Here? Gendered Role Reversals and the Division of Authorship
in Alan of Lille’s Plaint of Nature
Amy L. Hume, Univ. of Kansas
Reconstructing the Italian Trecento’s Field of Struggles: A “Rerealization” of
Dante’s Poetry
Glenn A. Steinberg, College of New Jersey
Field of Power, Poetic Dispositions: The Literary Field in Ricardian England
R. James Goldstein, Auburn Univ.
Discussant: Burt Kimmelman

Friday May 9, 10:00 a.m.

Session 194
Valley II
Community
Building
Lounge
Teaching Piers Plowman (A Roundtable)
Sponsor: Yearbook of Langland Studies
Organizer: Emily Steiner, Univ. of Pennsylvania
Presider: Michelle Karnes, Univ. of Missouri–Columbia
A roundtable discussion with Larry Scanlon, Rutgers Univ.; Elizabeth Robertson,
Univ. of Colorado–Boulder; Louise M. Bishop, Clark Honor College, Univ. of
Oregon; Theodore L. Steinberg, SUNY–Fredonia; and Thomas Goodmann,
Univ. of Miami.

Friday May 9, 1:30 p.m.

Session 254
Valley I
106
New Scholarship on Ælfric: A Companion to Ælfric
Organizer: Mary Swan, Univ. of Leeds
Presider: Joyce Hill, Univ. of Leeds
Catechetic Homiletics: Ælfric’s Teaching and Preaching during Lent
Robert K. Upchurch, Univ. of North Texas
Ælfric and the Limits of “Benedictine Reform”
Christopher A. Jones, Ohio State Univ.
Boredom, Brevity, and Last Things: Ælfric’s Style and the Politics of Time
Kathleen M. Davis, Princeton Univ.

Session 280
Schneider
1330
Why Am I Me? On Being Born in the Middle Ages I
Sponsor: Medieval Club of New York
Organizer: Nicola Masciandaro, Brooklyn College, CUNY
Presider: Richard H. Godden, Washington Univ. in St. Louis
The Sorrow of Being in the Cloud of Unknowing
Nicola Masciandaro
Being Silly: On Non Sequitur
Anna Klosowska, Miami Univ. of Ohio
Losing Anthropocentrism: Folcuin’s Horse, Yvain’s Lion, and the Two Trueloves
Karl Steel, Brooklyn College, CUNY
Dying Is an Art, like Everything Else: The Lowly, Unsettled Aesthetics of
Guthlac-Becoming
Eileen A. Joy, Southern Illinois Univ.–Edwardsville

Session 272
Schneider
1140
Anglo-Saxon Studies in Memory of Stephen O. Glosecki I
Sponsor: International Society of Anglo-Saxonists
Organizer: David F. Johnson, Florida State Univ.
Presider: Elaine M. Treharne, Florida State Univ.
Performance and Audience in the Exeter Book Riddles (Animals and Birds)
Jill A. Frederick, Minnesota State Univ.–Moorhead
Making and Breaking a Crux in the Nine Herbs Charm
László Sándor Chardonnens, Radboud Univ. Nijmegen
Works as Words: Beowulf as Memorial Space
Mary K. Ramsey, Southeastern Louisiana Univ.

Friday May 9, 3:30 p.m.

Session 324
Schneider
1140
Anglo-Saxon Studies in Memory of Stephen O. Glosecki II
Sponsor: International Society of Anglo-Saxonists
Organizer: David F. Johnson, Florida State Univ.
Presider: Marijane Osborn, Univ. of California–Davis
Grendel’s Kin: Myths of Man-Eating Giants
John Edward Damon, Univ. of Nebraska–Kearney
Beowulf and the “Grendel” Charters: A Nativist View
John D. Niles, Univ. of Wisconsin–Madison
Totemic Reflexes in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth
Yvette Kisor, Ramapo College

Friday May 9, evening

Valley I 106
Reading Malory’s Morte Darthur Aloud: Man-Woman Dialogue in the Morte Darthur
Organizer: D. Thomas Hanks, Jr., Baylor Univ.
Presider: D. Thomas Hanks, Jr.
A readers’ theater performance with Dorsey Armstrong,
Purdue Univ.; Stephen Atkinson, Park Univ.; Alison A.
Baker, California State Polytechnic Univ.–Pomona; Karen
Cherewatuk, St. Olaf College; Julie Nelson Couch, Texas
Tech Univ.; Miriam Rheingold Fuller, Univ. of Central
Missouri; Melanie M. Gibson, Southern Methodist Univ.;
Mica Dawn Gould, Grambling State Univ.; Emily Huber, Univ. of Rochester; Kimberly Jack, Univ. of California–
Davis; Janet Jesmok, Univ. of Wisconsin–Milwaukee;
Timothy Jordan, Indiana State Univ.; Amy S. Kaufman,
Northeastern Univ., John Leland, Salem International
Univ.; Stephen Maulsby, Catholic Univ. of America; Maud
Burnett McInerney, Haverford College; Sharmila Mukherjee,
Purdue Univ.; Claire Nave, California State Univ.–
Fullerton; Leila K. Norako, Univ. of Rochester; Marlene
Ruby-Canaday, Independent Scholar; Gregory M. Sadlek,
Cleveland State Univ.; Kendra O’Neal Smith, Univ. of California–
Davis; John William Sutton, Univ. of Rochester;
Paul Thomas, Brigham Young Univ.; Michael W. Twomey,
Ithaca College; Karen Williams, Univ. at Albany; and
Joseph S. Wittig, Univ. of North Carolina–Chapel Hill.

Saturday May 10, 1:30 p.m.

Session 406
Valley III
Stinson Lounge
Papers from Dr. Kim’s Seminar: The Other Texts of the Beowulf Manuscript
Organizer: Teresa Hooper, Univ. of Tennessee–Knoxville
Presider: Susan M. Kim, Illinois State Univ.
Decius of Dagnus, Dog-Headed or No: The Many Faces of the Saint Christopher
Story
Eric Jurgens, Northern Illinois Univ.
The Betrayal of Alexander: Self-Fashioning, Hybridity, and Unreliable Narrative
in the Letter of Alexander to Aristotle
Michelle Kustarz, Wayne State Univ.
“And especially that they did not have the head for the body”: Transformation
and Group Dynamics in the Old English Passion of Saint Christopher and
Passion of Saint Edmund
Andrew Grubb, Univ. of Connecticut
Discussant: Eileen A. Joy, Southern Illinois Univ.–Edwardsville

Session 412
Valley II
Garneau
Lounge
Negotiating the Past with Lee Patterson I
Organizer: Candace Barrington, Central Connecticut State Univ.
Presider: Candace Barrington
Gower’s Ovidianism
Maura Nolan, Univ. of California–Berkeley
Chaucerian Ekphrasis: Question the Politics of Epic Vision in the Knight’s Tale
Andrew James Johnston, Freie Univ. Berlin
The Value of Chaucer
Robert J. Meyer-Lee, Goshen College
The Long Middle Ages: Varro and Civic Allegory
Ethan Knapp, Ohio State Univ.

Session 447
Schneider
2145
Textual Cultures/Cultural Texts, 1350–1600
Sponsor: History of Text Technologies (HOTT), Florida State Univ.
Organizer: Richard K. Emmerson, Florida State Univ.
Presider: Elaine M. Treharne, Florida State Univ.
Layout and Meaning in Late Medieval Bibles
Eyal Poleg, Centre for the History of the Book, Edinburgh Univ.
Reading, Textual Transmission, and Incarnational Play: The Libraries of the
English Benedictines of Cambrai and Paris
Nancy Bradley Warren, Florida State Univ./National Humanities Center
The Missing Book: Revising Some Ideas about the French Renaissance
Lori J. Walters, Florida State Univ.

Saturday May 10, 3:30 p.m.

Session 466
Valley II
Garneau
Lounge
Negotiating the Past with Lee Patterson II (A Roundtable Discussion)
Organizer: Candace Barrington, Central Connecticut State Univ.
Presider: Larry Scanlon, Rutgers Univ.
A roundtable discussion with Seeta Chaganti, Univ. of California–Davis; Patricia
DeMarco, Ohio Wesleyan Univ.; Matthew Giancarlo, Univ. of Kentucky; Carroll
Hilles Balot, Univ. of Toronto; Ellie Johnson, Univ. of California–Berkeley; Emma
Lipton, Univ. of Missouri–Columbia; and Jennifer L. Sisk, Yale Univ.

Session 500
Schneider
2145
The Materiality of Text, 1000–1500
Sponsor: Group for the History of Books and Texts, The English Association
Organizer: Elaine M. Treharne, Florida State Univ.
Presider: Jill A. Frederick, Minnesota State Univ.–Moorhead
Living by the Book in Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale
Karrie Fuller, San Diego State Univ.
The Power of the Fixed Text? Competing Functions, the Struggle for Authority,
and the Nature of Textuality in the York Register (British Library MS
Additional 35,290)
Liberty Stanavage, Univ. of California–Santa Barbara

Session 490
Schneider
1235
Cognitive Approaches to Medieval Literature III
Organizer: Ronald J. Ganze, Univ. of South Dakota
Presider: Michael D. C. Drout, Wheaton College
Augustine’s Confessions and the Neurology of Narrative
May 10, 3:30 p.m.
Cognitive Aging and Wisdom in Old English Poetry
Corey J. Zwikstra, Univ. of Notre Dame
Beyond Christian and Pagan: Beowulf and Theological Correctness
Eric Lutrell, Univ. of Oregon
Cognitive Theory, Sensual Performance, and Rhythmic Texts
Jill Stevenson, Marymount Manhattan College

Sunday May 11, 8:30 a.m.

Session 540
Schneider
1280
What Is the Place of the Present in Medieval Studies? (A Roundtable)
Sponsor: BABEL Working Group
Organizer: Eileen A. Joy, Southern Illinois Univ.–Edwardsville
Presider: Myra J. Seaman, College of Charleston
Hello, I Must Be Going: The Medievalist’s Theme Song (Opening Remarks)
Nancy F. Partner, McGill Univ.
Roundtable: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, George Washington Univ.; Betsy McCormick,
Mount San Antonio College; Andrew Scheil, Univ. of Minnesota–Twin Cities;
Angela Jane Weisl, Seton Hall Univ.; Glenn D. Burger, Queens College and Graduate
Center, CUNY; Steve Guthrie, Agnes Scott College; Karma Lochrie, Indiana Univ.–
Bloomington; and Bruce Holsinger, Univ. of Virginia.

Session 515
Valley II
203
Medieval Border Cultures I: Wales and England
Sponsor: Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Research (MEMO), Swansea
Univ.
Organizer: Helen Fulton, Swansea Univ.
Presider: Daniel Power, Swansea Univ.
“From comlye Conway unto Clyde”: Anglo-Welsh Border Culture in the
Chester Shepherds’ Play
Robert W. Barrett, Jr., Univ. of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign
Borders and Bodies: Spaces of Hybridity in Medieval Chester
Catherine A. M. Clarke, Swansea Univ.
The Welsh Troilus
Simon Meecham-Jones, Univ. of Cambridge/Swansea Univ.

Session 538
Schneider
1220
Using Twelfth-Century English Manuscripts
Sponsor: Production and Use of English Manuscripts 1060 to 1220, Univs. of
Leicester and Leeds
Organizer: Orietta Da Rold, Univ. of Leicester
Presider: Mary Swan, Univ. of Leeds
Translating the Translation: Latin and Vernacular Glossing in Anglo-Saxon
Manuscripts, ca. 1066–1200
Mark Faulkner, St. John’s College, Univ. of Oxford
An Anglo-Saxon Minster in the Margins: Detecting the Influence of Saint
Guthlac’s Minster in Twelfth-Century Hereford
Chris Tuckley, Univ. of Leeds
Dangerous Liaisons: Scribal Connections, 1050–1200
Elaine M. Treharne, Florida State Univ.

Sunday May 11, 10:30 a.m.

Session 588
Schneider
1280
Is There a Theory in the House of Old English Studies? (A Roundtable)
Sponsor: BABEL Working Group and The Heroic Age: A Journal of Early Medieval
Northwestern Europe
Organizer: Eileen A. Joy, Southern Illinois Univ.–Edwardsville, and Larry J.
Swain, Univ. of Illinois–Chicago
Presider: Eileen A. Joy
A roundtable discussion with Kathleen M. Davis, Princeton Univ.; Renée R. Trilling,
Univ. of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign; Kathryn Powell, Univ. of Manchester/
Univ. of Cambridge; Mary Swan, Univ. of Leeds; Mary Dockray-Miller, Lesley Univ.;
Jacqueline Stodnick, Univ. of Texas–Arlington; and Stacy S. Klein, Rutgers Univ.

Session 576
Fetzer
1035
Medieval Border Cultures II: Cultural Frontiers in Britain and France
Sponsor: Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Research (MEMO), Swansea
Univ.
Organizer: Helen Fulton, Swansea Univ.
Presider: Simon Meecham-Jones, Univ. of Cambridge/Swansea Univ.
A Monetary Frontier? Money of Account and Coinage in the Angevin-Capetian
Borderlands
Daniel Power, Swansea Univ.
Trinkets and Charms: The Use and Socio-cultural Significance of Dress Accessories
from Two Border Regions in Britain, ca. 1300–1700
Eleanor Standley, Durham Univ.
Between the Living and the Dead: Late-Onset Anchoritism in the Middle Ages
Liz Herbert McAvoy, Swansea Univ.

Photo: Left>Right - Kelvin Everest, Carlo Bajetta, Stuart Curran and Paul Chirico.

We are very pleased to present the following panel reports from the recent (Trans)National Identities – Reimagining Communities, CISR/NASSR conference, held in Bologna, March 12-15, 2008. Carlo Bajetta provides an overview of the double sesssion he organized on ‘Editing Romantic Texts in a Globalized World’, while Diego Saglia  provides insight into the panel on ‘The Italian Plays of Mary Russell Mitford’. Isabella Imperiali then rounds things off with a detailed look at the panel on ‘Romantic Performances’. As usual, do feel free to use the comments feature below to provide feedback or pose questions!

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Panel Report - Carlo M. Bajetta (Università della Valle d’Aosta)

‘Editing Romantic Texts in a Globalized World’

This double special session intended to explore an area which, curiously, seems to have been neglected by editorial theory. Computer technology has had an impact both on the presentation of literary texts and on the sales of traditional book forms. Consequently a large number non-native speakers of English (who may also have a limited knowledge of British history and culture), access electronic texts via their computer screens or purchase printed editions through on-line bookshops.

Modern editorial thinking related to Romantic texts has been crucial in establishing new principles for scholarly editing: it has prompted a new way of looking at, and reinterpreting, textual criticism. The question which the panel speakers had to answer was: can Romantic editors cope with such a significant change both in medium and potential audience?

[Carlo M. Bajetta’s Powerpoint presentation is available here]

Friday 14th March

Kelvin Everest’s paper (’Shelley’s Adonais: Keats as a Classic’) helped the audience to understand the nature of editing itself, both from a theoretical point of view and from a practical perspective. Everest considered two basic questions of definition. What is the mode of existence of a literary culture, and in particular how should we conceive such a culture when it is historically remote? This (double) question connects with the different problem of the mode of existence of a literary text, and the relevance to that question of editorial activity. Everest took as an example Shelley’s elegy for John Keats, Adonais, which itself addresses these questions. His brilliant examination of this text showed that the efficacy of an edition is linked to one’s ability to defend one’s procedures and that the material presentation of the literary past is, first and foremost, a matter of ethical choice.

Stuart Curran, who has just finished his tasks as general editor of the Pickering & Chatto 14-volume edition of The Works of Charlotte Smith, focused on Smith’s extensive intertextual citation. Faced with the almost hypertextual nature of Smith’s texts, the editorial team decided to use internet resources extensively, but also to look at these resources with due caution and much critical consideration. To quote but an example, transcriptions such as those from Milton’s Paradise Lost included in some well-known (and expensive) on-line repertories turned out to rely on conventions which made text searches quite ineffective. This experience, as Curran explained in his talk (entitled ‘Charlotte Smith and Multiculturalism’), was very valuable; it suggested some radical re-thinking on how we present texts online, and may constitute an example for any Romantic scholar willing to tackle the complex task of source-hunting, and that of how to present readers with a coherent set of notes.

Paul Chirico’s ‘Extending the Community of the Text: Forms of Publication and Readership in the Early Nineteenth Century’ was informed by his experience in collecting an edition of John Clare’s hundreds of ‘fugitive’ publications from 1818 to 1864. Chirico reflected both on these documents and on the practical experience of engaging a broad twenty-first century public with Clare’s poetry through the publications and activities associated with the new cultural centre at his birthplace. As Chirico noted, many writers in the 1820s and 1830s (an era notorious for its poor sales of poetry volumes, yet famous for its widening and diversifying reading public) reached their audiences primarily through the pages of newspapers, journals, annuals, memoirs and anthologies. Chirico brilliantly discussed the interactions between editors and contributors to these diverse publications, their selection criteria, readerships and distribution methods, considering in particular the role of these popular but in many cases ephemeral channels in mapping culture according to (or across) divisions of class, gender and nationality. Individual editors clearly differed in their attitude to the anthologising nature of their publications, some seeking to resist a decontextualising (and depoliticising) aesthetic by fostering a collaborative spirit among contributors. With editors including the ageing radicals William Hone and James Montgomery, and prominent contributors including Shelley, Byron and Landon, these publications occupy diversely nuanced positions in literary history, especially in the neglected period which has tended to fall between accounts of the Romantic and Victorian eras.

Saturday 15th March

To those who know the Romantic Circles website (http://www.rc.umd.edu), hearing Neil Fraistat and Steve Jones’s joint “multimedia” paper, ‘Editing Romantic Texts in a World of Web 2.0′ meant to see the future of one of the earliest (and, probably, one of the best) literary resources on the net. Though it arguably began as a term of commercial hype, “Web 2.0″ has by now become a conventional way to refer to a whole cluster of recent developments in internet technologies – developments that matter to scholars working in digital media, and about which literary and humanities scholars should have a great deal to say. Less a new “version” of the Web than a new emphasis and a new ethos, these developments cluster around XML and what it has made possible: Javascript applications with XML adding up to “Ajax” (e.g., Google Maps), RSS feeds for media subscriptions, including podcasts and video podcasts, basically media extensions via attachments of blogs and vlogs, user-generated and maintained content (think Wikipedia) and metadata tagging (think del.icio.us), and, most of all, a shift towards greater interest in collaborative, social, and modular applications (with “the Web as the platform”). Fraistat and Jones discussed what editors of Romantic texts working in digital media can learn from these new developments, both as practical technologies and as cultural phenomena. The preview snapshots from the new Romantic Circles they showed to the audience proved to what extent the interaction between editorial theory and internet applications can be fruitful.

Timothy Webb’s ‘What About the Thorntons?: Editing Leigh Hunt’s Autobiography’, illustrated a variety of problems which this exceptionally rich book creates for the editor, the annotator and the innocent (or even the not-so-innocent) reader. For many of the latter (whether British, American or ‘foreign’), the Autobiography has defined itself best through a few memorable anecdotes; yet, taken as a whole, it offers a much more complex and shifting presentation of the relations between the writer and those social, cultural and political forces which helped to shape Hunt, but which he, in turn, helped to shape. The editor or annotator, moreover, is faced with elements which contribute to make this a very difficult text to deal with. Among these, certainly, is Hunt’s extremely manipulative and elusive practice: he often omits entirely any mention of people or facts which are generally thought to be crucial, or which may strike the editor as significant. Hunt, for instance, devotes some attention to the atmosphere of the Thornton household but never explains that Godfrey Thornton was, among other things, Governor of the Bank of England, Chairman of Lloyd’s and the owner of a country house who employed John Soane and Humphrey Repton. An editor must regularly ask what the reader (of whatever age or nationality) must be told and what might be taken for granted. What, for example, should he/she be told about the Thorntons without sabotaging Hunt’s narrative of a London childhood? Webb’s fascinating paper concentrated on specific examples which evidenced the necessity to mediate between editorial practice and biographical information. The challenge, as Webb justly remarked, is to make these facts and the complicated genealogy of the text immediately intelligible to every reader while avoiding damage to the reading experience.

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Panel Report - Diego Saglia (University of Parma)

‘The Italian Plays of Mary Russell Mitford’
(Thursday, 13 March, 16.00-17.30)

Although playwright, poet and prose writer Mary Russell Mitford was a major figure of the British literary scene in the 1820s and 30s, she is now one of the forgotten protagonists of British Romanticism. Even the recent surge in the critical recovery of many Romantic-period women writers seems to have passed her by. Her most recent biography dates back to 1949 (Vera Watson, Mary Russell Mitford), her works (apart from the prose sketches of Our Village) are generally unavailable in recent editions, and critical appreciations of her production are still rather thin on the ground. Even if articles on Mitford occasionally appear in scholarly journals and mention is made of her works in essays or monographs, in general this author has not yet received the full attention that would enable her production to be on an equal footing with that of other female authors in contemporary Romantic-period studies. The present panel, the first one (to our knowledge) to have ever been exclusively dedicated to Mitford at a Romantic studies conference, was intended as an occasion to illuminate the depth and complexity of the author’s writings by focusing on her dramatic production and, in keeping with the conference’s wider focus on ‘(trans)national identities’ and ‘reimagining communities’, on her Italianate plays.

Frederick Burwick (UCLA) gave the opening paper concentrating on Mitford’s tragedy Foscari, performed in 1826, and its textual and performative complexities. In particular, Burwick examined the textual-performative strategies by which Mitford creates sets of alternatives in the train of events of the play, thus avoiding inevitability and giving her audience the illusion of ‘varied causality’. Burwick specifically highlighted how, in Foscari, characters’ choices and actions often remain unexplained or unspoken, or are unravelled only later in the play. In this fashion, Mitford capitalizes on the potential of mysteries, unexpressed intentions or enigmatic events, which, together with the many revelations, confessions and failures in communication, greatly enhance the dramatic tension between the characters, as well as making the audience’s work of decodification more difficult, yet also more rewarding.

In the second paper, Diego Saglia (Università di Parma, Italy) focused on Mitford’s most successful and remunerative play, Rienzi (1828), and particularly on its ‘Petrarchan text’. Saglia aimed to show how the references to biographical and historical materials on Petrarch as sources for the plot and to the poet himself in the play-text may help us locate the tragedy (and Mitford’s dramaturgy more generally) within a cosmopolitan cultural intertext. In addition, the author’s appropriation of the Italian poet, whom Romantic-period women writers often invoked and reworked as an authoritative poetic forebear, influences her delineation of Rienzi as a feminized hero who presents himself as the fosterer and carer of a new, indeed explicitly feminized, Roman republic.

Finally, Cecilia Pietropoli (Università di Bologna, Italy) brought her skills as a Medievalist and a Romanticist to bear on her investigation of the sources of Mitford’s Italianate plays. In her paper, she concentrated both on Mitford’s use of well-known historical sources of medieval history such as Gibbon’s Decline and Fall or Froissart’s chronicles, and on her use of less familiar sources, some of which had an intermediate status between the historical and the fictional such as Madame de Genlis’ Pétrarque et Laure or the Abbé de Sade’s Mémoires pour la Vie de François Pétrarque. Thus Pietropoli cast further light on Mitford’s voracious reading habits, her tireless search for reliable historical information, and her creation of solidly documented and skilfully crafted play-texts. In conclusion, the panel aimed to open up new spaces for the discussion of Mitford’s plays, as well as more generally stimulating further interest in her production among the scholarly community; and the first major outcome of this session was the proposal for a book of essays on Mitford edited by Frederick Burwick and currently under consideration with a major scholarly publisher in Britain.

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Panel Report - Isabella Imperiali (Università di Roma La Sapienza)

‘Romantic Performances’
(Friday, 14 March)

All three papers explored ways in which works by Romantic authors were staged in their day and can still be performed in the present. The three speakers are historians of theatre who unusually for Italy combine various expertise as theatre practitioners.

Maggie Rose’s paper, ‘Putting the Shelleys on Stage-Mary Shelley’s Stage Metamorphoses’, discussed the figure of Mary Shelley as she appears in three contemporary plays spanning a period of nearly thirty years. Focusing on Liz Lochhead’s Blood and Ice (1980), Howard Brenton’s Bloody Poetry (1984) and Maggie Rose and Carla Sanguineti’s You in Me\Me in You (2007), (Unpublished manuscript, deposited Siae), Rose explored the complex issues when one decides to dramatise the lives of historical people as opposed to fictional characters, in other words, when one sets out to create “a stage biography”. During the creative process of You in Me\Me in You, after having carried out the usual research into papers, diaries, letters, biographies and critical exegeses, she and her co-author decided on their own line. They wished to explore the complex symbiotic relationship between the couple, whose personal and artistic relationship finished so abruptly in July 1822 when Shelley drowned off the Ligurian coast. The play, directed by Massimo Navone, will be premiered in Lerici in spring 2009. In England talks are underway for a rehearsed reading in Horsham, Shelley’s birthplace.

Isabella Imperiali’s research into British theatre has included work as director on several productions, and this experience has influenced her evaluation of the plays of Joanna Baillie (1762-1851). In her paper, ‘J.Baillie’s in Performance: Scenes from De Monfort’, she stressed how Baillie emerges as a brave and forthright woman prepared to take on not only male critics, reviewers and managers, but also the very tenets of contemporary popular theatre by presenting audiences – from the middle and working classes – with the most hidden aspects of human nature. Although – or perhaps because – Baillie was aware that ‘those who reflect and reason upon what human nature holds out to their observation, are comparatively but few’, as she writes in 1798 in the “Introductory Discourse” to Plays on the Passions, she was determined to exploit the most important theatres of the period to stage the ‘genuine representations of human nature’. The function of theatre was to instruct: ‘the theatre is a school’, she states firmly, but it can only work if the characters on stage are recognised by spectators as ‘real and natural’, and played by equally natural actors. The attentive theatre-goer, then, was offered the ultimate theatrical experience: she or he could observe, at a distance, ‘what men are in the closet’, in their intimate selves, and learn to distinguish ‘the language of the agitated soul’. Audience members would realize that when the passions become ‘tyrannic masters of the soul’, the cause lay not in external circumstances but in ‘our own minds’, where they breed and feed off their own energy. By observing the way passions are shaped and emerge, spectators would ‘foresee’ their own destruction and learn how to protect themselves.

Baillie was thirty-six when she decided to publish her analysis of ‘those great disturbers of the human breast’, her description of the passions in the ‘Introductory Discourse’. Of her three plays published in 1798, John Philip Kemble decided to produce the tragedy De Monfort in April 1800, choosing it as the one most in keeping with his own inclinations and those of his sister Sara Siddons. He was certainly aware of some of its limits, and made a number of changes, as well as considerable cuts during its eight performances, but the basic structure met his criteria for tragedy. Since, as Bertram Joseph (1959) explains, Kemble, the actor, ‘chiefly excelled where one single emotion or trait was to be clearly and strikingly developed’. De Monfort met these requirements perfectly. It examines how Maarqwis De Monfort’s lifelong hatred towards Rezenvelt, a member of the bourgeoisie, increases to the point of madness when the latter buys himself the title of Maarqwis, and ‘comes out’ into society, where he is socially successful.

Baillie’s vision for the theatre, Imperiali argued, was too bold and noble for the time: her attempt to go beyond the world of appearances, to show the boiling matter within each individual, needed smaller, more intimate theatres more congenial to character nuance, a space which could allow the concentration of a ceremony and a form of expression very different from the codified acting of the period. Imperiali suggested how important it is to test Baillie’s theories concretely onstage, in order to demonstrate the unexpected intensity which emerges in small spaces. One of the practical applications of her research has been a reduced stage version, in Italian and in prose, of Baillie’s De Monfort, when she directed two professional actors: Andrea Peghinelli and Francesca Muzio. They interpreted the main characters. The two remaining roles were played by students with acting experience. The performance found the ideal venue in the reading room of Rome 1 University, the neo-Gothic ex-chapel in a neo-Classicist villa. Baillie – Imperiali stated- would have loved the small, cosy room, a quasi-closet in which the word, the central character in all her plays, could prevail. The audience, for the most part composed of specialists of Romantic theatre and students, seemed gripped by the scenes between De Monfort and his sister Jane, the core of the performance. The text was pruned quite a bit, of course, and centred on the complex relationship linking the two protagonists. To our ears Baillie’s lines seem even more artificial than they did at the time, but there’s an undeniable natural rhythm in the speeches of the De Monfort brothers when they are at home, free from social constraint, and able to express their torment and anxiety. Imperiali presented the uncut version of Act II, scene 2, in a digital recording, with English subtitles. The entire production, complete with subtitles, will soon be available.

In his paper Andrea Peghinelli, ‘…Shakespeare as Distilled by the Illegitmate Theatre’, examined an anonymous and still unpublished burlesque, Macbeth Bottled into a Burletta, presented at the Strand Theatre in May 1842, the role of Macbeth played by Henry Hall. This burlesque is of particular interest because it is the first travesty of Shakespeare’s Macbeth to have been performed on the stage of a nineteenth-century illegitimate theatre. By offering a reading of this text and an account of the peculiarities of its staging, Peghinelli illustrated the way the Shakespearean burlesque, as a theatrical phenomenon, used Shakespeare as the means – and not so much as the subject – of its parody. First and foremost the burlesque aimed to parody contemporary actors, productions, and methods of staging. Mimicry, for instance, was a powerful technique which the actors of the minor theatres used to criticize the performance of their famous colleagues, and to exploit their celebrity in order to improve their reputation.

When these productions went so far as to parody the pomposity of the official Shakespearean culture upheld by the more pedantic literary critics and the so-called ‘Bardolators’, parody was exploited as a means to ‘blow life’ into canonical literary forms that had grown rigid.

Peghinelli argued that Macbeth Bottled into a Burletta can be interpreted as a burlesque inspired by Charles Macready’s and/or Charles Kean’s Macbeth, produced respectively at Drury Lane and at the Haymarket in 1842; more generally, he interpreted it as a kind of review of productions over thirty years of nineteenth-century Shakespearean burlesques and travesties. He chose to focus on burlesques of Macbeth because a chronological survey of the various versions of this particular play written or staged for the illegitimate theatres can illustrate the innovative side of the genre.

———-

Carlo M. Bajetta is the author of Literature Compass article, ‘Presenting Romantic Texts: Editorial Theory and Practice‘, Literature Compass 3.4 (2006): 818–839, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00354.x.

[cross-posted at In The Middle]

Figure 1. The Nomadic Museum

[be sure to follow link above to a really intriguing ongoing art project, "Ashes and Snow," by the photographer Gregory Colbert, which involves a traveling, nomadic museum space as well as an online bestiary codex; it's a wonderful "moving" emblem for Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's idea of a restless medieval studies: see below for more on that]

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has shared over at the group medieval studies weblog In The Middle his comments for The BABEL Working Group’s Kalamazoo round-table discussion session, “What Is the Place of the Present in Medieval Studies?” [Sunday, May 11, 8:30 am], and in sympathy with his argument there, I want to share here a portion of an essay I wrote last fall, “Goodbye to All That: The State of My Own Personal Field of Schizoid Anglo-Saxon Studies,” which is forthcoming in The Heroic Age any day now. The essay was partly written in response to a weblog debate last winter between myself, Michael Drout, Tirincula [pseudonym], and Richard Nokes over the supposed “state of the field” of Old English studies, but then it also morphed into a kind of argument I wanted to make for what Jeffrey Cohen has termed restless and mobile forms of scholarly “emplacement,” and for what I call in my essay, following Deleuze and Guattari, “schizoid” and nomadic processes of scholarly desire and scholarly desiring-machines. The entire essay is primarily pitched at certain vexed conversations and critical anxieties that seem to predominate in Old English/Anglo-Saxon studies, but I think the final part of the essay, which I share here, is applicable to medieval studies, and really, any scholarly studies, as a whole.

Goodbye to All That: The State of My Own Personal Field of Schizoid Anglo-Saxon Studies

[what follows are excerpts from conclusion]

Perhaps the best answers to Michael Drout’s and Richard Nokes’s claims that some knowledge is never contingent or situated and that an important move for the self-preservation of Anglo-Saxon studies might be to at least privilege language study first before anything else (with the understanding that language study partakes in something like universal or pragmatic facts or truths), come from three graduate students in medieval studies, Liza Blake (New York University), Mary Kate Hurley (Columbia University), and John Walter (Saint Louis University), two of whom (Blake and Walter) appended comments to my blog post, “My Life Among the Anglo-Saxonists.” Blake referenced Deleuze’s idea that, “when questioning something’s identity,” you should replace “intrinsic essences by active transformations. In this new system, [in the words of Manuel DeLanda, from Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy] ‘figures are classified by their response to events that occur to them’” (qtd. in Joy 2007). Of her own struggles to identify herself as a scholar, Blake wrote further,

If there’s anything I learned in undergrad[uate] and graduate school, as I slowly and awkwardly came to “identify” myself as a scholar of literature, it is that I’m not mastering an area by difference (I do _____ while philosophy does philosophy and linguistics does language), but mastering an ability to sense—and provide for—when a text needs more historical analyses and when it asks for philosophical analyses (insert various “icals” here). In short . . . I would identify myself not by what I do, buy by how the texts I read transform my scholarly work, and transform what it means for me to be (or become—I’ve got a long way to go yet) a scholar. (Qtd. in Joy 2007)

In another comment, Walter reminded us that “the problem with claims that all we need to do is focus on ‘x’ is that X gets its meaning from its relationships to everything that’s not X,” and he indicated that he “liked Walter Ong’s take on what English studies is,” as evidenced by an essay Ong wrote in 1971, “English 2000 A.D.,” where Ong ruminated:

I suspect that at its best English in the future will continue to develop by reaching out and pulling in around itself as many as possible of the other always burgeoning humanistic subjects (including the sciences in their manifold humanistic dimensions). . . . Perhaps the end result will be the emergence of a multidisciplinary field of study, which we can hope will not be invincibly chaotic and which we might be styled anthropology in the deepest sense of this term, with various foci, these for English being around the verbally produced artifact. (Ong 1971, 11)

Finally, in a memorial piece, “In Memoriam: Nicholas Howe,” written for In The Middle, Hurley ruminated on her experience of re-reading Howe’s book Across an Inland Sea: Writing in Place from Buffalo to Berlin, which Hurley believes teaches us “as much about being a medievalist as it does about being a traveler” (Hurley 2006). She explained the ways in which Howe’s book, although it is not ostensibly about Anglo-Saxon England, resonates with the themes that predominated Howe’s work with Old English texts: “the idea and construction of home, and the ways in which the loss of that home inscribes itself in a place, and moreover in writing” (Hurley 2006). And she also pointed out how Howe also directly invokes the ruins of Old English elegy—its enta geweorc [work of giants]—in relation to places such as an abandoned train station in Buffalo, New York or High Street in Columbus, Ohio. Most importantly, Hurley highlighted Howe’s insights in his book regarding the temporal paradoxes of pilgrimage and pilgrimage sites, which in my mind could stand as an apt description of the exemplary (and may I say, beautiful?) way in which Howe approached the study of the Anglo-Saxon world in his scholarship. As Howe himself put it,

[t]he return enacted by pilgrimage need not be—perhaps rarely is—within one’s own experience or life; it is more powerfully a return within commonly shared practices and memories. . . . A pilgrimage site endures in the life of a person paradoxically as a place of transience. You journey there, you are there, and then you leave. . . . But from that pilgrim’s place comes some understanding that it is not transient and fixes it in memory so it can be found again. (Howe 2003, 114)

This idea of traveling to the past via the well-trod paths to ancient sites where, in the face of the “stony reticence” of those sites, “words should fail us” (Howe 2003, 139), and by which traveling there is both permanence but also the continual transience of going and coming back, captures beautifully, for me, an ideal praxis for Anglo-Saxon studies—a praxis, moreover, that would always understand the importance of the return to the present because, as Hurley explained Howe’s thinking regarding his journey to Chartres, “in our time a pilgrimage site exists only as it is made and remade through the desire of each visitor” (Hurley 2006), and Chartres is ultimately a ruin for us, not just in its decayed architecture, but because, in Howe’s own words, we “do not visit it as a place of worship” (Howe 2003, 116). In this sense, situatedness is all, and we will always arrive belatedly to the primary love object of our studies—Anglo-Saxon England—carrying other histories with us that can’t but help inflect our thought and affect, and why would we want to discard them? We do not reach backwards, facing away from the present, through orderly chains of words and significations to understand the past on its own (supposedly logical and rational and coherent) terms, but can only feel our way there through the rubble of what I would call these affective remains of the past, these letters to the future, or, in the words of Edith Wyschogrod, these “gift[s] of the past to a present affected with futurity,” which are inscribed “with the vouloir dire of a people that has been silenced, of the dead others” (Wyschogrod 1998, 248). It is not the so-called “science” of language and manuscript studies, but the art of the affective intelligence that can hope to help us draw close to these dead others, and to consider both their silence and the ruins of their words, while also imagining the possibilities of contact, of reanimation. For after all, as Catherine Brown has written, the Middle Ages “was invented to be a foreign country. The indigenous peoples are dead, and they didn’t even know they were medieval—they thought they were living in modern times. They thought it was now” (Brown 2000, 547).

And here we begin to hit on what, for me, is the real heart of the matter: the necessity of a scholarly affect of openness with regard to the possible interrelations (or in Walter Benjamin’s terms, the possible constellations) between an Anglo-Saxon text (a verbal, but also a visual, and yes, an archaeological-anthropological artifact) and, frankly, almost anything else that might lie in our path of pilgrimage to the past and back again. And with Blake’s commentary above, especially, we have what I think is the critically important idea that, for all of our training and possible critical biases or leanings, and for all of the ways in which the artifacts of the past are, of course, somehow fixed in both memory and in historical spaces and times, we must allow ourselves to be surprised and led by what we do not know about them—by all the ways in which a text could ask us questions we had not thought to ask ourselves as part of our traditional preparation for sitting down with an Old English poem, or homily, or saint’s legend, or set of law codes, or the like, if only we were willing to suspend certain habituations. As James Earl has asked of Beowulf, “What would Beowulf look like if we could see it ‘without feeling much previous history’? What would it look like stripped of everything we have been taught about it, as if it had just washed up onto our shore and we were reading it for the very first time?” (Earl 2007, 688). This would entail a reconceptualization of our reading practices, pace Paul Zumthor, as, “at least potentially, a dialogue,” in which

two agents confront one another: I am in some way produced by this text, and in the same moment, as a reader, I construct it. A relationship of active solidarity rather than a mirror-effect; solidarity promised rather than given, pleasurably felt at the end of the long preparatory work required by the traversing of two historical distances, going and coming back. (Zumthor 1986, 66)

And I think we have to also give ourselves permission and the time to wander at will, or by accident, through the fields and thickets of other disciplines and realms of thought and places (whether a city or movie theater or genetics lab) that lie off the beaten paths of our disciplinary tradition: how else could Howe have connected an abandoned train station in a contemporary American city to the ruins built by giants in the Anglo-Saxon landscapes of Old English poetry? To say then, as Drout ultimately does, that what Anglo-Saxon studies needs now is a renewed focus on philology, historicism, and manuscript work, in order to resist the “pull” of a literary studies that would be too personal or too political or too much like “the dorm room bull session” (Drout 2007a), strikes me as an impoverished view of what our field should be and do. It is a view that does not seem to understand that the texts of Anglo-Saxon England, “far from being a rigid tablet of fixed rules and monuments bullying us from the past,” in every moment of their reading and interpretation, actually reveal history “as an agonistic process still being made, rather than finished and settled once and for all” (Said 2004, 25). The perspective (whoever is espousing it) that Anglo-Saxon studies should turn away from postmodern literary studies is also myopic as regards the future of the humanities and the part that Anglo-Saxon studies might play (must play) in that. It should give us pause, further, that while many Anglo-Saxonists are still actively resisting and dismissing critical theory, during the symposium of the editorial board of Critical Inquiry convened in 2003 to discuss the future of the journal, critical theory, and the humanities, Teresa de Lauretis argued that “now may be a time for the human sciences to reopen the questions of subjectivity, materiality, discursivity, knowledge, to reflect on the post of posthumanity. It is a time to break the piggy bank of saved conceptual schemata and reinstall uncertainty in all theoretical applications, starting with the primacy of the cultural and its many ‘turns’: linguistic, discursive, performative, therapeutic, ethical, you name it” (de Lauretis 2004, 368). Then again, this could mark the perfect time for the entry of Anglo-Saxon studies as the “pre” of everything (English) into the larger (and pressing) project of considering the “post” of everything (English). This is a project already ongoing in many quarters, and in a system of higher education—the University—that can, at this point, be considered posthistorical.

In his book The University in Ruins, published two years after his untimely death in 1994, Bill Readings argued (convincingly, in my mind) that, partly due to “globalization,” whereby “the rule of the cash nexus” has replaced “the notion of national identity as a determinant in all aspects of social life,” the University (capitalized to indicate its historical status as an idealized institution) has become a “transnational bureaucratic corporation” and “the centrality of the traditional humanistic disciplines to the life of the University is no longer assured” (Readings 1996, 3). Because “the grand narrative of the University, centered on the production of a liberal, reasoning subject, is no longer available to us,” it is “no longer the case that we can conceive the University within the historical horizon of its self-realization” (Readings 1996, 9, 5). Readings prefers the term “posthistorical” over “postmodern” for the contemporary University “in order to insist on the sense that the institution has outlived itself, is now a survivor of the era in which it defined itself in terms of the project of the historical development, affirmation, and inculcation of national culture” (Readings 1996, 6). Ultimately, the University is “a ruined institution, one that lost its historical raison d’etre,” but which nevertheless “opens up a space in which it is possible to think the notion of community otherwise, without recourse to notions of unity, consensus, and communication” (Readings 1996, 19, 20). This is a space, moreover, where the University “becomes one site among others where the question of being-together is raised, raised with an urgency that proceeds from the absence of the institutional forms (such as the nation-state), which have historically served to mask that question” (Readings 1996, 20). Indeed, the University, however “ruined,” must strive, in Readings’ view, toward building a “community that is not made up of subjects but singularities”: this community would not be “organic in that its members do not share an immanent identity to be revealed,” and it would not be “directed toward the production of a universal subject of history, to the cultural realization of an essential human nature” (Readings 1996, 185). Rather, this would be a community “of dissensus that presupposes nothing in common,” and that “would seek to make its heteronomy, its differences, more complex” (Readings 1996, 190). In this scenario, the posthistorical University would be “where thought takes place beside thought, where thinking is a shared process without identity or unity”—this is ultimately “a dissensual process; it belongs to dialogism rather than to dialogue,” and instead of a new interdisciplinary space that would “reunify” the increasingly fragmented disciplines, there would be a “shifting disciplinary structure that holds open the question of whether and how thoughts fit together” (Readings 1996, 192).

Readings’ thinking accords well with Derrida’s in his essay, “The University Without Condition,” where Derrida argued for a “new humanities” and “unconditional university” that would “remain an ultimate place of critical resistance—and more than critical—to all the powers of dogmatic and unjust appropriation” (Derrida 2002, 204). This unconditional university, further, would constitute “the principal right to say everything, even if it be under the heading of fiction and the experimentation of knowledge, and the right to say it publicly, to publish it” (Derrida 2002, 205). Finally, the humanities

would have a privileged place in this unconditional university, because the very principle of unconditionality has an originary and privileged place of presentation, of manifestation, of safekeeping in the Humanities. It has there its space of discussion and reelaboration as well. All this passes as much by way of literature and languages (that is, the sciences called the sciences of man and culture) as by way of the nondiscursive arts, by way of law and philosophy, by way of critique, questioning, and, beyond critical philosophy and questioning, by way of deconstruction—where it is a matter of nothing less than rethinking the concept of man, the figure of humanity in general, and singularly the one presupposed by what we have called, in the university, for the last few centuries, the Humanities. (Derrida 2002, 207)

Here, then, I ask for an Anglo-Saxon studies without conditions—for the right, as an Anglo-Saxonist, “to say everything, even if it be under the heading of fiction and the experimentation of knowledge, and the right to say it publicly, to publish it.” I ask, too, for a shared vision of the University as the site of the “shifting disciplinary structure that holds open the question of whether and how [our] thoughts fit together.”

But it is not enough to say I want these things or to ask for them—after all, Drout himself has said that he has “no interest” in telling Anglo-Saxonists “what they should be interested in” (Drout 2007c). But it is not a question of interest—what I am interested in (the “queerness” and nonlinear dynamics and schizoid “flows” of the Anglo-Latin Guthlac narratives, at present) versus what you might be interested in (the sources of Ælfric’s Lives of Saints or the metrics of Beowulf, perhaps?). It is, rather, a question of collective desire. There must be room, in my mind, within Anglo-Saxon studies, not just for the individual scholar who wishes to take herself into uncharted theoretical territory (to go and come back again as a lone traveler), but for deleuzoguattarian roaming packs and multiplicities to emerge and join with other packs and multiplicities to create desiring-scholarly-machines and critical machines-machines-machines-machines. This would be, in the words of Jeffrey Cohen and Todd Ramlow, a “process formed of alliances with and through [disciplinary] others, a process not collapsible to either side of a self/other binary, a process always in motion, changing (performatively) in multiple contexts” (Cohen and Ramlow 2005/2006). These alliances would be made up of groups of scholar-machines (an Anglo-Saxon studies machine, a queer theory machine, a post-Norman Conquest history machine, a third-wave feminist studies machine, etc.), each of which would function as “a break in the flow, in relation to the machine connected to it,” and everywhere there would be “break-flows out of which desire” would pour forth (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 37). Ours would then be field (or machine) that would have to run on the libidinal economies of the philologist as well as the queer theorist, the codicologist as well as the new historicist, and so on. I want, further, to see working groups formed across the temporal divides that separate Anglo-Saxon studies from the “other” Middle Ages and beyond, in which groups Anglo-Saxonists would take leadership positions (while also practicing anti-hierarchical collaborative work) and the primary impetus for the disparate “joinings” of these groups would be nothing less than a complete re-envisioning of the humanities and its relation to public thought and life.

This would be the only possible route, in my mind, toward the kind of schizoid desiring-revolution that Deleuze and Guttari argued for so passionately in their collaborative work, where desire itself, when it lights out for the territories elsewhere unleashes, in the words of one of their translators, “schizzes-flows—forces that escape coding, scramble the codes, and flee in all directions: orphans (no daddy-mommy-me), atheists (no beliefs), and nomads (no habits, no territories)” (Seem 1983, xxi]. Such a desiring-revolution will be necessary to reinvent the “business as usual,” not just of Anglo-Saxon studies, but also of the transnational bureaucratic corporation called the University which has created a culture of cynicism and despair as regards the fate of the humanities. But I—I do not despair. If it turns out that assembling a pack, or multiplicity, of theoretical rogues within Anglo-Saxon studies is not possible at present, I can always leave this house and carry these studies to other territories and other packs. It has been my feeling for some time now, in any case, that what might be called the University proper—at least in terms of its brick and stone buildings and manicured green spaces and conventional classrooms and libraries and departments rooted in fixed geographies—is no longer adequate to the project of a humanities that could be said to matter somehow, not just now, but in the future. We may need new affectively-constructed spaces, or floating intellectual “cells” or “group houses” or “undergrounds,” that would be global and heterogeneous, always on the move, and perpetually committed to asking the question of what “being-together” means.