What a World!: Or, an invitation to BABEL along with me at K'zoo 2014

Good news! My proposed session, sponsored by the BABEL working group, has been given the green light for Congress next year. It springs in equal parts out of work on my book and from a lively conversation at Bell's brewery at this year's gathering in sunny Kalamazoo. The fine details: it will be a roundtable, hopefully comprised of seven participants. We're encouraging papers that veer towards the experimental, the playful, even the avant-garde, but given the wideness of the topic, there's plenty of room in which to maneuver and plenty of space for a variety of approaches; multimedia presentations are greatly encouraged.

Title: What a World! (A Roundtable)

Description:

“Oh what a world, what a world! Who would have thought a good little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness?!” So screams the Wicked Witch of the West after Dorothy splashes water on her in the film The Wizard of Oz. The entire film reflects upon matters of perspective and thwarted/exceeded expectations, of not quite believing your eyes or trusting what you see, of creating contexts for experiences you never could have anticipated. The witch melts, in the end, because of her failure to imagine a world in which both she Dorothy could exist. While the gist of this line accords with the final words the Witch speaks in the book version, the phrase “What a World!” (original to the film) encourages meta-commentary. We are called, as viewers and as readers, to wonder along with the witch how this world — and such a vivid one at that — could have been engendered. In this sense, the phrase “What a World!” becomes as much an invitation to engage critically as it becomes a statement of wonder.

The issues inherent in fictionalized worlds, so beautifully encapsulated in this scene from The Wizard of Oz film, have much to offer studies of medieval literature. This session invites papers that consider all aspects of engendered worlds, but is especially invested in exploring how contemporary notions of “worldbuilding” — so often associated with high fantasy and science fiction— as well as Heiddeger’s “worlding” (in all its various theoretical manifestations and adaptations) can be appropriated to discuss the creation of fictive worlds in medieval literature. The session seeks to explore worlds built through varying states of incredulity, wonder, a desire to control and contextualize, or even built out of nostalgia and/or a desire to escape (however briefly) one’s own circumstances — from the translocated Holy Land of the mystery cycle plays, to the worlds encountered through chronicles, histories, and travel narratives, to the landscapes and cultures of Arthurian romance. How might the concept of “worldbuilding” invite fresh considerations and interrogations of medieval literature? How does it simultaneously reflect the desires authors have to create something new even as they (or their texts) admit the impossibilities of such projects? To what extent do engendered worlds allow and invite contemplation upon the many ways in which humans, as readers and receivers of texts, ineffably participate in this process of creation?

Wine in Beowulf: A Guest Post!

I'm thrilled to introduce our first-ever guest post here at In Romaunce, which is also our first post focusing on Old English literature. Sharon Rhodes — a good friend and a current Ph.D. candidate at the University of Rochester — recently gave this fascinating paper at Kalamazoo on the appearances of wine in Beowulf, and I invited her to post it here. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did, and definitely take a look at her wonderful blog!

Win of Wunderfatum: The Significance of Wine in Beowulf
-- Sharon Rhodes, University of Rochester

Illustration by J.R. Skelton, in Stories of
Beowulf (1908)

As in most cultures, alcohol had an important social function in the world represented in Beowulf. Many sources attest to the importance of mead and ale in medieval Germanic culture: perhaps most interesting is the Mead of Poetry in Norse myth but, as Henry Winfred Splitter pointed out, there was also “baptismal beer, [. . .] betrothal and marriage beers, and funeral beer” (Splitter 257).^[1] However, because grapes do not grow well in the north, wine in the medieval north had to be imported and thus it has no place in the mythology most relevant to Beowulf.^[2] Though chemically similar, wine is significantly different from native “eal-” and “medu” as a cultural symbol. For instance, in Aelfric’s Colloquy the schoolboy asserts that he drinks beer and water because “wine is not the drink of children or fools, but of the old and wise.”^[3] While this is not the schema of alcoholic drinks we see in Beowulf, it shows that even in Aelfric’s day, wine was something special, fit only for the old and wise, not the general population.When we refer to a hall as a mead-hall we are specifying a particular sort of hall from a particular culture, region and time in terms of alcohol. Consequently, it is unsurprising that the Beowulf-poet mentions alcoholic beverages with the frequency he does: “medu” (mead) and compounds beginning with “medu” occur 13 times, compounds beginning with “eal-” occur 7 times, and “beor” occurs 3 times. Interestingly, “win,” a non-native alcoholic substance, only occurs 3 times as a word in itself and 5 times within compounds; moreover each mention of wine marks something wrong or about to go wrong within the story. The three instances of “win” occur at important moments of the first part of the poem and within about 300 lines of one another. First, “win of wunderfatum” (wine of wondrous vessels) makes an appearance in the feast following Beowulf’s defeat of Grendel. Second, at the same feast, “the men drank wine” (“druncon win weras"). And third, in the passage that describes Beowulf’s weapons and armor before he descends into Grendel’s mere, we learn that Unferth was “drunk with wine” (“wine druncen”) when he lent his sword, Hrunting, to Beowulf. Similarly, the win-compounds also appear significant: "winsele" and "winreced" -- both of which can be translated as ‘wine-hall’ -- are used by the narrator when referring to a hall that is failing or has failed as a center of civilization.

In his article “The Cup as Symbol and Metaphor in Old English Literature,” Hugh Magennis asserts that “[i]n Beowulf [. . .] references to the ‘hroden ealowaege’ (adorned ale-cup 495) and to the ‘win of wunderfatum’ (wine of the wondrous-vessel 1162) are an essential part of the poet’s evocation of the good life in the hall enjoyed by Danes and Geats” (Magennis 517). While ale and mead both seem to be generally associated with the good life in the hall, I question the positive associations of win of wunderfatum. Wunderfatum or “wondrous vessel” appears to be a nonce word with no inherently positive elements. Beyond the basic semantics, however, we must note that the Danes serve and drink this “win of wunderfatum” at a feast celebrating what they believe is a victory over Grendel when we can see that Grendel’s defeat brings the more violent attack of his vengeful mother. The Danes celebrate a false victory and consequently drink in a false sense of security; however sweet this respite may seem, it is short and ends in Hrothgar’s bitter tears and thus the “win of wunderfatum” seems a bitter cup if not a poculum mortis.^[4] Several scholars, such as Carleton Brown and Hugh Magennis, have looked at the motif of the poculum mortis, or cup of death, in Old English literature. Maggenis asserts that, “Beowulf does not exploit the complex of Christian imagery of cups and the serving out of drink, but relies instead on the resources of the secular poetic tradition” (535-36). This reading, however, ignores the Beowulf-poet’s differential treatment of native drinks and wine which is not entirely dissimilar from the double meaning ascribed to wine in the Bible where, Magennis himself points out, it serves two symbolic purposes: it represents both the good in life and the bad (Magennis 518).^[5] In Beowulf, rather than ascribing two meanings to one drink, two types of drink are used, one for each meaning: native and foreign: beer, mead, and ale (native alcoholic beverages) represent the joys of hall-life, while wine represents the darker side of hall-life, whether the negative repercussions of drunkenness (vs. the positive repercussions: poetry) or simply as a marker of things gone or about to go badly.^[8]

The uses and contexts of mead, ale, and beer and compounds containing those words illustrate the particular distinctions the Beowulf-poet draws between wine and native drinks. Beyond the numbers, note that while there are plain benches in Beowulf ("benc" 492, 327, 1013, 1188, 1243) and seats ("setl" 2013, 1786, 1232, 1782, 2019, 1289) and mead-benches (776, 1052, 1067, 2185, 1902) and mead-seats (5), there are never wine-benches or seats. Similarly, there is mead-joy, a word for the path to the mead-hall, a word for the meadow around the mead-hall, and of course, vessels of mead and ale: "medoful," "meodoscenc" and "ealuwaege."^[6] None of these ideas has a counterpart beginning with “win-”.

The numbers, however, are significant too. “Med-” occurs in 9 distinct endocentric compounds (that is, a compound wherein element A denotes a special kind of element B) a total of 15 times in addition to the 2 times that medu itself occurs as a word in its own right. Comparing this to the 3 occurrences of win in Beowulf and the 5 win- based compounds the centrality of the native mead to Hall-life is underscored. Additionally, there are 7 occurrences of compounds beginning with “ealo-” and the 3 instances of "beor": there are ale-benches (1029, 2867), ale-drinkers(1945), ale-sharing (765), ale-cups (2021, 481, 495), beer and beer-halls. These numerous occurrences and myriad endocentric compounds, 25 in all, speak to the centrality of mead and beer but also to their ordinariness.^[7]

Nevertheless, this is not a simple matter of positive and negative implications of course; "meodosetla" certainly does not predict good things for those that Scyld Scefing unseated (5), but this type of raiding was typical of Germanic culture — a misfortune, for sure, but not an unexpected one and one within the bounds of cultural norms. Furthermore, when Grendel overturns the Danes’ mead-benches on the night of his defeat, it is a quotidian part of hostilities within the hall in an otherwise otherworldly battle and creates a sharp contrast with the  initial image of mead-benches (meodosetla) being torn away in the prologue (775). The two perpetrators -- Scyld Scefing and Grendel -- are quite different, or, as more recent arguments have it, perhaps they are not different at all. As with Scyld Scefing’s raids, Grendel’s effect on the mead-benches is symbolic of his effect on the Danes, he has interrupted and obstructed the most basic part of the Danes‘ lives. In overturning their mead-benches Grendel and Scyld Scefing has overturned their social cohesion.

After defeating Grendel’s mother, Beowulf and his retinue traversed the “meodowongas” on their way to Heorot: the very meadow Heorot stands on is specified as a mead-meadow, a fact we can also read as signifying that the hall is once more as it should be, a simple mead-hall in a mead meadow, free of monsters at last. Finally, the smooth functioning of Hygelac’s hall, unperturbed by monsters or betrayal, can be seen partly by the mead-cups: “Mead-cups went / throughout that high-hall, Haereth’s daughter / she loved the people, bore drinking cups / to the hands of illustrious ones”^[8] (1980b-82a). Wine is not mentioned at all during the period of the poem set within Hygelac’s realm, presumably because his reign -- within the poem -- is marked by mead, normal, every day mead just as it is marked primarily by concord, at least within the present of the poem. 

The word “medu” (mead) occurs only twice, but each time the poet uses it as symbolic of what all good Germanic leaders do: in Beowulf’s pre-fight speech and reply to Unferth he says:  “I shall offer to the Geats might and courage in battle soon now. A man may proudly return to mead in the morning light [when] the sun clad in radiance shines from the south” (601b-06).^[9] By saying that the men will go to their mead Beowulf is not only declaring success, he is claiming that his heroic feats will restore Hrothgar’s world to normalcy. Similarly, in the second half of the poem, while chastising them for betraying Beowulf, Wiglaf reminds his fellows that Beowulf gave them mead in the beer-hall (2633-35). Wiglaf is not merely saying that Beowulf was hospitable to them, but that he fulfilled the most basic duties of his contract with them as his warriors and therefore they owe him their loyal service in times of war.^[10] Mead is not merely mead, but is a metonymic place holder for all that a good lord or hero delivers and, conversely, as a symbol of the absence of a good lord or hero.

In contrast, the passages wherein the poet uses “win” do not symbolize normalcy, but instead seem to foreshadow discord. The first occurrence of "win" -- the “win of wunderfatum”^[11]-- precedes both the attack of Grendel’s mother and Wealhtheow’s speech.^[12] We know that Weahltheow is at least a respectable cup-bearer because after Beowulf defends his performance in the swimming contest with Breca she bears the "medoful" to the honored guests, as Maxims I asserts she should (82-92). Because Weahltheow otherwise appears to be a good queen the poet seems to suggest that her advice should be heeded, and thus her opposition to Hrothgar’s ‘adoption’ of Beowulf likely has merit: to her mind it is a rash thing, betraying thoughtlessness of his own sons and nephew in the throws of overwrought gratitude to Beowulf for, presumably, ridding his hall of monsters. Further, though I disagree with J.D. Ogilvy on some points of his reading of Weahltheow, I do agree with him in asserting that Weahltheow’s public opposition of Hrothgar is one of many signs of disfunction in his realm.^[13]  She speaks her piece and though she does so graciously it is counter to the “gamen” that otherwise fills the hall after Beowulf’s victory against Grendel. The first instance of wine underscores the aberrancy of this adoption; Hrothgar should not place Beowulf over his own sons, and he and all of the celebrants are oblivious to the horror yet to come.

The second use of "win" directly precedes the attack of Grendel’s mother: “There was the best of feasts / the men drank wine.” ^[14] That the men drank alcohol does not concern the poet; though some Old English religious texts can be read as condemning drinking,^[15] in Beowulf mead, beer and ale are celebrated and their absence mourned. The men drank alcohol every night, including the night preceding Beowulf’s successful fight against Grendel. The poet warns us of the horror to come by specifying that the men drank wine rather than their more conventional mead or ale; an idea further supported by the ominous half-line that follows “Wyrd ne cuthon” ("they did not know fate," 1233). Counter to the belief of the celebrants at this “best of feasts,”^[16]  Grendel’s death does not mean that the danger has passed. Rather, his death has awakened a new horror and a more legitimate one. While Grendel seems not to have had any legitimate reason to attack the Scyldings, Grendel’s mother has a genuine grievance to avenge. Like the wine, this grievance is both familiar and foreign: within Germanic society kin had a right to revenge, or "wergild." However, like Grendel, Grendel’s mother does not belong to this civilization. So, although she has suffered a loss, there is no protocol for dealing with that loss. Just as the men who drank wine at the feast may not have known exactly what to expect from the foreign yet familiar beverage.^[17]

The final use of wine prefaces Beowulf’s descent into Grendel’s mere. Before Beowulf makes his speech and dives, the poet tells us that Unferth lent Beowulf his sword, Hrunting, and also that Unferth did not remember what he’d said before, when he was “wine druncen” (1465-67).^[18] What he spoke before is either untold or is an allusion to Unferth’s challenge to Beowulf upon his arrival in Hrothgar’s court, what many have called a flyting match (Ward Parks). Regardless, the poet’s reference to Unferth’s lapse of memory when drunk with wine helps to defame Unferth who is unwilling to descend into the mere himself and must either have failed to defeat Grendel with Hrunting, or worse, never tried. Moreover, we must bear in mind that despite the sword’s record in previous battles, Hrunting fails in Grendel’s mere: it would not bite into Grendel’s mother (1523).^[19]

Though perhaps less poignantly placed, the compounds meaning “wine-hall” -- "winreced" and "winsele" -- occur at points when halls, both Heorot and other unnamed halls, fail as the epicenters of Germanic society. When Hrothgar orders Heorot built, the poet says that he commands men to build a “medoaern micel” ("a great mead-building," 69). Even in his account of Grendel’s desecration of it, he refers to Heorot as a mead-hall still, (484) a fiction Beowulf politely echoes in his otherwise combative response to Unferth by also referring to Heorot as “thisse meoduhealle” (638). However, the poet/narrator calls Heorot a “winreced” (wine hall) in line 714 when Grendel “Wod under wolcnum,” to Heorot. "Winreced" recurs in line 993, at the celebratory feast that is celebrated too soon and winsele occurs directly before and during Grendel’s attack (695, 771). A hall should be a safe place, but at these points Heorot’s function is undermined and altered and it becomes a gathering of victims for monsters rather than a place of unity and rejoicing. The final occurrence of "winsele" comes in Beowulf’s speech before the fight with the dragon as part of the “Father’s Lament” (2456). Here it comes in the half-line “winsele westne,” deserted wine-hall. A deserted mead-hall is almost an oxymoron, so, just as when Heorot is referred to as a “winreced” by the poet, the “winsele” of the Father’s Lament is not the merry center of a comitatus and so the poet makes the distinction between the failed hall and the successful hall explicit through his diction. Just as things had gone horribly wrong in Hrothgar’s realm, the lamenting father’s loss of both sons through one’s killing of the other is a tragic undermining of normalcy.

Although the Beowulf-poet does not use the poculum motif precisely, he does use beverages to distinguish between the usual and the unusual. Mead, beer, and ale were all highly important to Germanic society, so intrinsic thereto that they specify a variety of other nouns in compounds. These drinks unify society within the hall culture in Beowulf and in the reality of early Germanic society, like the sharing of bread that gives us companion, sharing mead and beer is a foundational social act. Unlike mead, beer, and ale -- all of which are ubiquitous in Beowulf -- wine appears in more specialized instances, surrounding individuals and actions that contrast with expectations for how hall-life should work. Wine marks instances where things are not as they seem and where social expectation is not met. We can thus read wine as a harbinger of the chaos that the anti-social Grendel, the dragon, and Grendel’s mother^[20] both bring and symbolize into the human world of Beowulf.

---

^[1] Much as we now and many the world over use alcoholic beverages to toast our good fortune and honor the departed.

^[2] Such as that recorded in the Eddas.

^[3] “win nys drenc cilda ne dysgra ac ealdra and wisra” (Marsden, 10, ll. 67-68)

^[4] Magennis notes that “In the Bible itself the cup metonymically represent the wine which it contains, and it shares the metaphoric associations of this wine. In the Old Testament wine typically denotes the good things rightly enjoyed by men” (518).

^[5] Magennis cites: Judge’s 9:13: quae respondit numquid possum deserere vinum meum quod laetificat Deum et homines et inter ligna cetera commoveri (And it answered them: Can I forsake my wine, that cheereth God and men, and be promoted among the other trees?)

and Ecclesiasticus 31:35: vinum in iucunditate creatum est non in ebrietate ab initio (Wine was created from the beginning to make men joyful, and not to make them drunk.)

^[6] The eucharist symbolizes salvation, but also Christ’s execution. In De Auguriis, Aelfric achieves a similar, though opposite, distinction through different means by using the native English "cuppan" when speaking of the devil’s cup and the Latin loan calic for God’s cup: “Ne mage ge samod drincan ure drihtnes calic / and thaes deofles cuppan to deathe eowre sawle” (Aelfric, “De auguriis” in Lives of Saints: ,217-18) (cited by Magennis 526). Thus, Aelfric divides the symbolism of wine in the Bible and, much like the Beowulf-poet, though the Latinate Aelfric inverts the value of native vs. foreign by using calice, a Latin loanword and the ultimate root of our modern chalice for the good cup and the native cuppa- for the bad. Aelfric seems to privilege Latin learning over Native tradition.

^[7] "medoaern" (mead-hall/building 69),  "medobenc" (mead-bench 776,1052, 1067, 2185), "medodream" (2016), "medoful" (mead-cup 624, 1015), "medoheal" (484, 638), "medostig" (path to the mead hall 924), "meduseld" (mead-hall 3065), "meodosetl" (mead-hall seat 5), "meodowong" (meadow around the mead hall 1643), "meoduscenc" (mead-cup 1980).

^[8] In lines 1052 and 1067, the mead-bench sets the perfectly ordinary scene of hall life as it should be, warriors are seated on them (1052), the scop sings his song along them (1067), and line 2185 mentions the mead-bench as part of the conventional setting of hall-life: the Geats did not expect much good from Beowulf to come to the mead-benc while he led them.

^[9] “Meodoscencum hwearf / geond thaet heahreced Haerethes dohtor, / lufode tha leod lithwaege baer / haethnum to handa”

^[10] “Ic him Geata sceal / eafoth ond ellen ungeara nu / guthe gebeodan. Gaeth eft se the mot / to medo modig siththan morgenleoht / ofer yylda bearn othres dogores / sunne sweglwered suthan scineth”

^[11] The word “medudream” which we can literally translate as “mead joy,” but is also translated as conviviality (student edition) and jollity (dictionary); Beowulf uses this word to describe the people of Hrothgar’s kingdom when recounting his time among the Danes to ????Geatish leader.

When Beowulf dies he is not just leaving “his magum” but the “meduseld” (mead-hall) he had occupied with them (3065).

^[12] “Leoth waes asungen / gleomannes gyd. Gamen eft astah, / beorhtode bencsweg, byrelas sealdon / win of wunderfatum.” (The song was sung, the tale of the minstrel. Delight sprang up again, bench-rejoicing shone, cup-bearers gave wine from the wonder-vessels) (1159b-62a)

^[13] Interestingly, both mothers of the poem work on behalf of their offspring.

^[14] Additionally, like his tears after Aeschere’s death, this decision suggests that Hrothgar is overwhelmed by his emotions.

^[15] “Eode tha to setle. Thaer waes symbla cyst, / druncon win weras.” (1232-33)

^[16] In Juliana drinking and revelry are portrayed as sinful.

^[17] “symbla cyst”

^[18] the sweetness and higher alcohol by volume might well have gotten the better of men accustomed to drinking less alcoholic mead and ale.

^[19] l. 531 beore druncen

^[20]Eccl. 31:39-40: "Wine drunken with excess is bitterness of the soul. The heat of drunkenness is the stumblingblock of the fool, lessening strength and causing wounds." 
Unferth’s drunkenness cannot be blamed for Hrunting’s failure in the mere, but the fact that he was so drunk with wine that he lost memory, further discredits him, underscores his inferiority to Beowulf and foreshadows the imminent failure of Hrunting -- Unferth’s only extension of assistance in this fight and thus an extension of Unferth himself -- against a monster that, just like Grendel, is immune to conventional weapons.

^[21] While the sharing of mead between Hrothgar and Hrothulf is pointed because of the poet’s and readers’ knowledge of Hrothulf’s eventual betrayal of Hrothgar, this is an ironic use of shared mead, but not one completely outside of the norms of Germanic society in the way that Grendel is. Grendel’s mother, more than either of the other monsters, lacks a clear position in the world of Beowulf.

                                                     Works Cited

Beowulf: An Edition. Mitchell, Bruce and Fred C. Robinson eds. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998.

Brown, Carleton. “Poculum Mortis in Old English.” Speculum. 15.4 (1940): 389-99.

Cook, Albert Stanburrough. “Bitter Beer-Drinking.” Modern Language Notes. 40.5 (1925): 285-88.

Glosecki, Stephen O. “Beowulf 769: Grendel’s Ale-Share.” English Language Notes. 25.1 (1987):  1-9.

Kim, Susan M. “‘As I Once Did with Grendel’: Boasting and Nostalgia in Beowulf.” Modern Philology. 103.1 (2005): 4-27.

Magennis, Hugh. “The Cup as Symbol and Metaphor in Old English Literature.” Speculum. 60.3 (1985): 517-36.

Ogilvy, J. D. A.  “Unferth: Foil to Beowulf?” PMLA. 79.4 (1964): 370-75.

Parks, Ward. “The Flyting Speech in Traditional Heroic Narrative.” Neophilologus. 71 (1987): 285-95.

Splitter, Henry Winfred. “The Relations of Germanic Folk Custom and Ritual to Ealuscerwen.” Modern Langugae Notes. 67.4 (1952): 255-58.

Kalamazoo 2013: A Pilgrimage

I wrote most of this from about 36,000 feet above Newfoundland – a fitting starting point, I think, since I was returning to the U.S. from Norway by way of Iceland (after attending a conference on medieval Scandinavian literature, no less).

I had a long a fruitful journey during the month of May, and I’ll try to do some of it justice over the course of a few posts. These posts are a bit delayed because I came back from Norway with a fever and raging laryngitis and have spent the better part of the past week recouping! I’m doing much better now though, and will be loading several posts throughout the next week or so now that I'm capable of lucid thought. This first one will focus on Kalamazoo, which was certainly the busiest Congress I’ve ever attended. I presided twice, organized and participated in a performance session, and presented a paper on Pearl. There were lunches, dinners, and outings aplenty, and it couldn’t have come at a better time.

I’d been feeling severely run down prior to the trip. The lack of full-time work has been stressful, especially since my husband’s start-up had to let him go earlier this year, and there were a series of personal tragedies right around that time that made life painfully confusing and heart-breaking. Whenever tragedy has truck in the past, I’ve looked to my work to feel some sense of purpose or control, but the screeds against graduate school, the humanities, etc., the rise of MOOCS and for-profit institutions (and attitudes), and the at times oppressive amount of uncertainty surrounding my own future really dampened my ability to feel and hold onto a sense of purposefulness. As a result, I came to Kalamazoo feeling more than a little beaten down and adrift. More and more though, I’ve come to see the journey to Congress, and the experience of it, as a sort of pilgrimage. One that comes just at the right time — just as I’m starting to lose my sense of why I do what I do. I am so profoundly glad that I made the journey this time, because it renewed more of my enthusiasm and my sense of purpose than I’d ever hoped to win back in such a short span of time.

For starters, this was a ‘zoo of serendipitous encounters. I’d been so busy (between the end of the semester hustle, visiting family, and prepping for two conferences) that I’d only made contact with just a few of the people I’d hoped to see at this conference. Somehow though, I happened to be at the right places at the right times, because I managed to bump into just about everyone! The conversations may have only lasted a couple of minutes in some cases, but it meant the world to see familiar faces from grad school and past conferences and at least get a brief moment to reconnect.

The serendipity also extended into new meetings as well. Thanks to a chance encounter at one of many dinners out, I received sage advice about approaching publishers about my book project. Inspired, I spent time Saturday and Sunday chatting with publishers and had several encouraging conversations along the way. While there aren’t any guarantees, I’ve got a clear sense now of who to send materials to once I’ve got them completed, and that’s a great place to be (especially after having felt so stagnant for the past couple of months). I also had an absolutely marvelous time at the BABEL meet-up at Bell’s Brewery. I joined the working group in the Fall of last year because I’ve enjoyed following the playful, experimental, but always meaningful work that BABLErs produce. I also joined because I’d been feeling adrift since moving away from my tightknit community at Rochester last year, and joining an energetic cohort like this one seemed like a wise move as I transition into this new and liminal stage of academic life.  My schedule at the Congress had kept me away from the meeting and the sponsored sessions thus far (alas!), and so I felt all the more drawn to the gathering in spite of the late hour (I think I got there around 11:30pm after having gone over my paper which I was presenting the following morning). An array of wonderful exchanges ensued, and a nascent project even emerged by way of a conversation about bears, idiot tourists, and lava. I’ll keep things cryptic for now, but I’ll hopefully be able to post more about said project in the near future. In the meantime, I’m struck with a profound sense of gratitude for all of the people I met and reconnected with at this conference. Their generosity — in their advice, their sharing of ideas, their collaborative spirit — overwhelmed me in the best sense of the word, and I’m deeply grateful for the renewed energy and enthusiasm they helped instill in me in such a short span of time.

The sessions I attended also went a long way towards renewing my enthusiasm. It’s always a delight to be surrounded by people as vibrantly excited as you are about a particular topic, and that enthusiasm really shone in the sessions I was able to attend and in which I had the pleasure of participating. The first one I attended was “Romancing Islam,” and I was deeply impressed with Bonnie Erwin’s masterful connection between the mechanics of othering in Ferumbras and in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing: a connection that hinges on the desire for the familiar Other (in both cases, a Muslim Other by way of convenient branding). I was also very glad to see an Early Modernist on the panel. Dennis Britton spoke on the allegorizing of Islam in the Faerie Queene, and made a compelling case for the influence of contemporary proto-ethnograpic writings on Spenser’s portrayal of the (Islamicized) figures Wrath and Lust. He also convincingly argued that moments of conversion in Book II (where these figures regularly appear) are not only absent but “actively denied.” In this formulation, the Saracens are made to be incompatible in ways strikingly convergent with those seen in medieval romance. His presence on the panel and the inclusion of Spenser alongside medieval texts invited both the speakers and the audience in the Q&A session to get out from under the pressures of periodization and to talk across the (often fictionalized) divide between the Medieval and Early Modern periods. I joked on Twitter earlier in the year about creating an anti-Greenblatt panel for K’zoo called “Interswervist Aesthetics,” but it was lovely to see much of what The Swerve seems to advocate effortlessly elided in the conversations that came out of this session.

The same kind of connectivity seen in this session extended into the one over which I was delighted to preside. The papers knitted together incredibly well, and I was thrilled by how — despite the focus on a the editing of a single manuscript — each paper had something unique to offer to the conversation. Joyce Coleman focused on the images in the manuscript, specifically those attached to Pearl, and persuasively argued that the illustrator sought to draw parallels between the dreamer/narrator of the poem and Narcissus as he appears in illustrations of Roman de la Rose. Kelsey Moskal asked that we try to find a way to avoid “sterilizing the manuscript reading process” by finding ways to acknowledge the subtle but significant markers, details, and ordination found in the manuscript itself as we produce critical editions. Elias Fahssi stressed the power of exploratory reading, and how faithful reproductions of the text assist in that process. Finally Arthur Bahr challenged our uses of punctuation when it comes to a poem like “Patience,” observing that the quatrain marks in the manuscript are important specifically because they are so difficult to interrogate. He argued that the marks, while not being puncti, suggest a certain kind of pause, which seems especially apt in this poem given its stress on the length of time it “takes humans to perform God’s will.” The inclusion of these marks, then, link readers to Jonah, reminding us that “we are bound in time, differing from Jonah only in degree, not in time.” In the end, Bahr offered up the possibility that we needn’t punctuate definitively, especially when it comes to a poem like “Patience” that seems to be playing with the kinds of pauses produced by such marks.

The conversation that sprang from these four papers was wonderfully lively, and we discussed, among other things, the ways in which we might reconcile all of these various needs and emphases when trying to produce accessible critical editions.  More than anything, I think the session really drove home the sacrifices that inevitably get made when trying to prepare these texts for modern readership, and it was gratifying to see so many people engaged in a discussion of how we can serve both the reader and the original text. To that end, I was very happy to hear later on at the conference that Kelsey and Elias will be taking on more active and official roles in the Pearl Poet Society — as contributors to the fantastic Cotton Nero A.x. Project, and in light of their illuminating papers, I can hardly imagine a better team!

I’ll save a discussion of the session in which I presented — “New Perspectives on Pearl” — for my next post (one that will include the actual talk), but all I’ll say for now is that I was tremendously grateful for the experience and for the feedback received both prior to and during the session itself.  I’m starting to experiment with ideas for a later project (once I get this first book off and away. . . god, if it were only so easy!), and I was so glad, as a result, to have this opportunity to present my nascent ideas for that potential work. More on that later though!

The last session I attended was BABEL’S Blunder panel, and what a delight it was! In some respects, the papers couldn’t have been further apart — with topics ranging from blunder in Beowulf, to the cruelty/inanity of blind peer-review evaluations, to the poetics of scribal blunders, to the poetics of our own conference papers/sessions, to the inception of Fumblr — hands down one of the most humanizing academic blogs I’ve yet encountered. I was struck by the beautiful discursiveness of these presentations, by their verve and energy, by their braveness. Those qualities extended into the lively conversation/debate that followed, one that focused for a time on the perils of blind peer-review. Eileen Joy made a particularly innervating statement about the problems with the current review system, problems that were made painfully clear in Maggie Williams and Nancy Thompson's presentation: that reviewers forget all too often that they’re dealing with human beings who have struggled hard to produce the work that they’re tasked with reviewing. If we are in the business of the humanities, she argued, then we need to start treating each other more humanely. This does not, as one person in the crowd worried, mean that we have to pull our punches when we review, or that we – as receivers of criticism – shouldn’t have a thick skin. Rather, as I offered in tandem with others, we owe it to ourselves (if we are really going to pride ourselves in our mastery of language) and to those whose work we review to write both effectively and humanely. Ultimately, I think that double-blind peer review can be essential to fair treatment in the realm of publishing (people are, for instance, presumably less likely to be discriminated against for a variety of unfair reasons), but as so many of the audience members and presenters stressed, it’s often rather easy to tell who is reviewing your work or who authored the piece you are reviewing. As such, the question remains as to how helpful this set-up actually is, especially when it seems to give so many people license to behave rather unhelpfully (not to mention rather poorly) because they can hide behind the mask of anonymity.

No Congress would be complete without a fair share of levity, and so it was all too fitting that I capped everything off by attending the Pseudo-Society with a merry band of friends. The papers were hilarious, and I especially loved the fact that they so freely poked fun at the conventions of the academic conference. It’s always good to be reminded not to take yourself or what you do too seriously, and the pseudo-society’s “talks” did a more than decent job of reminding us of that!

All in all, this was certainly one of the most fruitful and fulfilling conferences I’ve ever had the pleasure to attend, and I’m already looking forward to next year. As I’ve said throughout this post, attending the conference did a tremendous amount to boost my spirits and enthusiasm for what I do. It helped to remind me, in a series of truly profound ways, that I have made good decisions about my career (no matter what the screeds might say), and that while my life might be precarious and under a variety of intense pressures, it’s also full of electric opportunity. And so, in closing, I’d like to say thank you — a thousand times over — to all of the wonderful people at this conference who helped remind me of that.