Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

On Saracen Enjoyment: Some Fantasies of Race in Late Medieval France and England

Living with the other, with the foreigner, confronts us with the possibility or not of being an other. It is not simply—humanistically—a matter of being able to accept the other, but of being in his place, and this means to imagine and make oneself other for oneself. . . . The word foreshadowed the exile, the possibility or necessity to be foreign and to live in a foreign country, thus heralding the art of living of a modern era, the cosmopolitanism of those who have been flayed.

Hybrids, Monsters, Borderlands: The Bodies of Gerald of Wales

If the European Middle Ages are that intimately alien, medial time that are not quite the lost past and not quite the modern West, something of both and wholly neither, then medieval temporality finds its contemporary analog in what postcolonial theory calls the hybrid. A composite figure derived from biology, botany, and the discourses of race, the hybrid conjoins differences without fully assimilating them. The hybrid is (in Robert Young’s Derridean gloss) “difference and sameness in appar-endy impossible simultaneity.” If the medieval touches the postcolonial exactly at the point of hybridity, this conjunction reveals both a startling consonance and a productive dissonance. Some medieval hybrids could feel quite at home in the high theory of scholars like Homi Bhabha, who identifies in English India phenomena that have immediate analogs in the European Middle Ages. Yet medieval hybridity is, to paraphrase Bhabha, “the same but not quite.” In the medieval occidental imaginary, the category admixture that hybridity represents is almost always conjoined with monstrousness, where monstrum has the doubled sense of “that which warns” (monere) and “that which reveals” (demonstrare).

Blogging the Middle Ages

Conversation, teaching, conferences, snail- and e-mail, journals, and edited collections and monographs are the long established technologies for sharing ideas and work in progress and then disseminating a “final” form for future readers. Each medium marks a significant stage in a project’s gestation. A typical developmental arc for humanities scholarship in the United States might consist of bringing a thesis or discovery into the world via embodied interaction (from chatting to a colleague over coffee to presenting on a panel), with tentative conclusions refined and solidified through the affirmation and skepticism of interlocutors; teaching a single class or a whole course on the subject to try out a thesis and see how well it works; sharing research in a slightly more formal way by requesting comments from friends or from experts not necessarily well known; submitting portions of the project to a peer-reviewed journal and refining the argument in reaction to criticism; and, if all goes well, ultimate publication of the work as an essay, and then perhaps in its fullest form as a monograph. A blog (short for “Web log,” that is, an ongoing record disseminated over the World Wide Web) offers a kind of ceaseless electronic conversation that may work in tandem with or might even take the place of some of these junctures and media.

Time Out of Memory

One cannot love a monument, a work of architecture, an institution as such except in an experience itself precarious in its fragility: it has not always been there, it will not always be there, it is finite. And for this very reason one loves it as mortal, through its birth and its death, through one’s own birth and death, through the ghost or the silhouette of its ruin, one’s own ruin.1

The Werewolf's Indifference

A werewolf is the problem of animal difference expressed in monster’s flesh. This compound creature asks how intermixed with the bestial (-wolf ) the human (were-) might already be. All that is civilized, ennobling, and sacred is lost in fleshly tumult with lupine appetites, impulses, and violence. The werewolf would seem the ideal monster to query the suppression of ‘‘the animal part within us all.’’1 Yet a warning that this monstrous admixture is not so easy to make a universalizing metaphor inheres in the fact that Latin possesses no common noun for the creature. Lycaon might be transformed by an angry god into a wolf, and might (in Ovid’s narration) inhabit briefly an interstitial space where he possesses human and bestial qualities, but at transformation’s end one term replaces another, vir to lupus. When Gervase of Tilbury in the Otia imperialia is describing men who metamorphose under lunar influence, he observes: ‘‘In England we have often seen men change into wolves [homines in lupos mutari] according to the phases of the moon. The Gauls call men of this kind gerulfi, while the English name for them is werewolves, were being the English equivalent of uir.’’2 Gervase must employ French and English words to gloss his Latinate circumlocution.3 As its etymologically admixed nature suggests, the werewolf is a hy-

Green Children from Another World, or the Archipelago in England

This chapter argues that a mysterious episode of green children emerging from the earth in twelfth-century England carries to the text’s surface a historian’s anxiety about the cultural diversity beneath the story of his nation.

Introduction: Infinite Realms

Medieval Welsh and Irish texts offer stories of realms that exist in strange contiguity to everyday life, domains often entered through a hill or barrow that seem to be of two worlds at once. The Welsh otherworld of Annwn finds its gateway at Gorsedd Arberth, a mound atop which adventurers like Pwyll sit seeking wonders. In the account of Cu Chulainn’s love for Fand, queen of the mysterious and aboriginal Irish people known as the sidhe, the hero enters a parallel universe through a nondescript tumulus. The Wasting Sickness of Cu Chulainn and the Only Jealousy of Emer [Serglige Con Culainn ocus Oenet Emire] describes the uncanny beings inhabiting this domain as differing from contemporary islanders in their customs, elder history, and potency in magic. Cu Chulainn is cured of self-destructive love for his Fairy Queen only through the intervention of an oblivion spell: he must forget the riches of her world to reinhabit his own. Like many Irish and Welsh stories involving hills as portals, the dominant narrative of The Wasting Sickness of Cu Chulainn seems to enfold within it an untold story about the belatedness of a people to the land they possess, figuring the territory’s earlier inhabitants as an inhuman race whose traces are dwindling, whose presence lingers as if at dimming twilight.

In the Borderlands: The Identities of Gerald of Wales

“Attempting to rationalise and homogenise Gerald’s wildly fluctuating allegiances and sympathies,” Julia C. Crick has observed, “would prove a fruitless enterprise.”1 That has not, of course, stopped scholars from trying. Many critics see a movement in the life of the twelfth-century cleric Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis) from early identifications with the francophone English court to a pro-Welsh stance as he lobbied for an independent archbishopric at St. David’s. Later he bitterly rejects both possibilities, embracing the superiority of the French monarchy and retiring to Lincoln.2 In the pages that follow, however, I will emphasize a constant within these alterations: Gerald’s enduring struggle to articulate his hopelessly compound identity. Celibate ecclesiast, multilingual ethnographer, tireless writer and reviser of unprecedented texts, grandson of Welsh royalty, cosmopolitan intellectual, descendant of Norman conquistadors, court chaplain, instrument in the conquest of Ireland, eccentric and irascible multiplier of marvels, Giraldus Cambrensis often did not know exactly who he was.

Acts of Separation: Shaping Communal Bodies

Critical race theory is an interdisciplinary approach to the study of what are (to the medievalist) recent collective identities: African American, Hispanic, white, and so on. Drawing from the analysis of law and culture as well as literature and history, this school of criticism stresses that even though race is typically assumed to be stable, enduring, and biological, in fact the contours and substance of race are subject to constant flux. Even if it is socially constructed rather than a pregiven fact, however, race is too intertwined with embodiment to be discarded or cavalierly dismissed.1 Forces beyond the control of any particular individual circumscribe the limits of collective identities, imbuing them with their relative cultural value and engendering a paradox. Identity, whether personal or collective, is at once solid and—especially over long periods of time—mutable. Race, like gender, is susceptible to change; yet race (like gender) has an undeniable materiality.

The Flow of Blood in Norwich

A few decades after Geoffrey of Monmouth completed his History of the Kings of Britain, another cleric who likewise christened himself Mone-mutensis produced a text similarly obsessed with collective identity, blood, history, community, and monsters. Thomas of Monmouth composed the Vita et passio sancti Willelmi martyris Norwicensis (known in English as the Life and Miracles of St William of Norwich) while attached to the Benedictine priory supporting Norwich cathedral. Whereas Geoffrey dedicated his History to powerful nobles of international renown, Thomas addresses the vita to William Turbe, the bishop of Norwich who had previously been a member of the cathedral’s monastery.1 Whereas Geoffrey’s epochal narrative was preoccupied with nations and empires, Thomas aimed his saint’s life at a local community. The text has been the subject of much penetrating scholarship over the years, most of it attempting to determine whether Thomas was the inventor of the blood libel, the myth that Jews murder Christians for ritualistic purposes.2 Thomas was recording a mythology blossoming around a Norwich boy supposedly sacrificed at Jewish hands, a mythology so potent that it could be deployed a few years after William’s death in northern France and the Rhineland (places intimately connected to Norwich through trade routes) in support of violence against Jews. Anti-Jewish sentiment was certainly an international phenomenon in the Middle Ages. Yet these stories told about the murdered William were also disseminated to achieve more circumscribed ambitions.