A Pilgrimage to Williamsburg . . .

Taken when I was much better at refilling the feeder . . . 

I am currently sitting on my lovely porch, catching meaningful looks from the local hummingbirds. Their feeder desperately needs a refill, and I think they’re doing reconnaissance for an impending revolution. I also just narrowly escaped from a lounge of lizards dangling underneath my porch umbrella (apparently a group of lizards is called a “lounge” . . . the things you learn!). It’s been a few weeks since my trip back to Virginia, and I’m thankful for the quiet time I have now to reflect upon everything I experienced while I was away. Each day of my trip was lit up with reunions, lectures, dancing, weddings, and more, and I find myself overwhelmed, in a good sense, with all I experienced.   These events converged with one another in truly surprising and beautiful ways, and I’ll try to capture at least some of that here.

I travelled back to Williamsburg, VA on October 2^nd to attend a variety of events. Monica Potkay, who is in no small part responsible for my love of Chaucer, invited me to lecture for the Medieval and Renaissance Studies department at William and Mary on a topic related to my dissertation, and George Greenia — ever a source of support and encouragement throughout my undergrad and graduate years — invited me to submit a paper to the Annual Symposium for Pilgrimage Studies he was organizing.  For the lecture, I chose one of my favorite topics of late: the representation of Mongols in Middle English Romance. For the conference paper, I decided to revisit my old flame Sir Isumbras, choosing to approach the romance from the angle of redemptive pilgrimage rather than that of crusade. Lecturing at my alma mater was at once comfortable and surreal. I’d presented on this topic once before, and I knew the College very well, but it felt strange to inhabit a new role in this place all the same. I was deeply touched by the number of my professors who attended, and I had at least a few moments where, as I looked out at the students, I realized that I was in exactly their position only a handful of years ago, and that I honestly didn’t feel that differently from how I did back then. Admittedly, I can’t pull the all-nighters I used to (I've tended of late to fall asleep like a cartoon character around 11pm), and I know a lot more stuff than I did back then. I’ve also been through a tremendous amount — experiences both wonderful and tragic — that has certainly impacted how I see and respond to the world and those around me. And yet, as I stood up at the podium waiting to get started on the talk, I realized that what hasn’t changed at all is my enthusiasm for what I do. I had worried at various points throughout my years in graduate school that I was choking what I loved to death (and sometimes I really think I was!), but what hit me in that moment before the talk was that I still felt like a student in a certain sense. I still felt the gravitational pull of all I had left to discover, and that was why I was excited enough to stand up in front of a group of (mostly) strangers and talk about my findings for an hour.  A pleasant feeling, to say the least!

A tremendous amount happened in between this lecture and the conference. My incomparable sister-in-law got hitched to a truly great guy, and we all danced together (many of us in pink dresses and feather boas) late into a gorgeous Fall evening to the dulcet tones of Van Halen, Journey, and The Beatles. My good friend Andrea and I crashed our undergrad advisor’s office hours with Cheese Shop sandwiches (and beer) for a long-overdue reunion, and I also had the great pleasure of reconnecting with a professor who had always encouraged my poetry writing and whose children I’d babysat for a few of my undergrad years. I hadn’t seen them since I graduated, but it felt in many ways as though we were picking up where we left off – barring the fact that the son I babysat as a little one is taller than me now (which, in fairness, isn't that hard to accomplish, hobbit that I am).  I made sure to spend an evening training and having an incredibly meaningful conversation with my Sensei, who has been a constant source of wisdom and support for as long as I've known him. 

I also met up with someone I hadn’t seen since high school but who serendipitously came back in to my life a few months ago; we’re facing a lot of the same challenges at the moment in certain aspects of our lives, and being able to talk with her and find an ally at this particular juncture was such a gift.  Last but certainly not least, the long stay allowed me to spend a lot of quality time with my parents and sister (my brother was still deployed at the time, but I’m happy to report he is now home safe and sound!), and I even made a brief trip down to North Carolina to visit with my grandmother, who I hadn’t been able to see since my grandfather passed away this past summer. 

Each of these wonderful reunions reminded me of how important it is to stay connected with those who matter in my life, and to always take the chance to reconnect with those I’ve accidentally eluded over the years.  The work that brought me back to William and Mary was certainly important, but the combination of work and “play” reminded me of what Eileen Joy asked recently in her post on friendship: "What would it mean to imagine one’s career, one’s writing, as a sort of devotion to another, to a beloved, whether mother, sister, lover, or friend? Or even to a set of friends, those already met and those still unmet, a kind of ceaseless love-as-talking?” In a way, my work on this trip pulled me back to Virginia and allowed all of these wonderful reconnections to occur, and I rather love the idea of imbricated work and friendship. Her challenge — that we don’t necessarily need to separate work and life — really resonated with me on this trip as a result.

The symposium I attended was the first one ever held by the Pilgrimage Institute at the College of William and Mary, and in many ways it aligned with this desire to balance and comingle work with other aspects of ones life.  Attendees and presenters came from a variety of fields and vantage points. Some were academics. Others were dancers. Some were art therapists. Others were documentary directors. Many were pilgrims. This vibrant mixture of passions and careers imbued the symposium with an eclectic energy I’d never quite experienced before at a conference.  The weekend kicked off with a rough-cut screening of “The Camino Documentary” directed and produced by Lydia B. Smith. The documentary focuses on Camino Frances, and follows a diverse array of pilgrims who embark on a pilgrimage for equally varied reasons. Some travel in memory of a loved one who has passed, some for the adventure and the challenge, some to find missing parts of themselves. I was struck, however, by something that a monk said at the outset of the documentary. He talked about how the external journey is important, but that the internal journey one undertakes when on a pilgrimage is of equal if not greater significance. This resonated strongly with what I was preparing to say in my own presentation on virtual pilgrimage, and it was fascinating to see it play out in the lives of the pilgrims on the screen. What truly impressed me, however, was the fact that the documentary didn’t push any particular narrative on the pilgrims.  The ending was cathartic, but it didn’t pretend that every person who journeyed on the Camino was fundamentally altered. The changes, if there were any, were subtle and allowed their privacy, something that I’d imagine can be hard to balance in the making of a documentary film about personal journeys. 

The following day was one largely made up of presentations, and I was especially taken with the student exhibits on display between the major sessions. The undergraduate presenters had attended the Camino abroad trip this past summer and had – as part of the requirements of the program – completed a research project focused on a particular aspect of pilgrimage. Their research interestes were diverse, creative, and deeply insightful, and it was thrilling to see so many intrepid undergraduates working hard on new and exciting projects. I had an especially serendipitous conversation with one of these students, Robin Crigler, who focused his project on aspects of playfulness and ritual on the Camino, which reminded me yet again of the power of conjoined formality and informality (it really seemed to be the running theme of this trip).

My own presentation, which I’m providing at the end of this post, was a standard conference paper, but I decided to be a bit bolder in terms of what I encompassed. I introduced my topic — Sir Isumbras’ use of pilgrimage imagery — by way of Google Earth, Petrarch, and German nuns, and even though I worried initially that the combination made for nothing more than insanity, it somehow all came together. Considering Isumbras from the angle of pilgrimage rather than crusade was hard at first. I kept wanting to talk about its crusading themes because that’s what I knew best. Forcing myself to stick with pilgrimage, however, allowed me to discover a whole array of new possibilities in this text. I had honestly gotten very tired of Sir Isumbras after working on it in both the dissertation and in an article for Chaucer Review. Discovering something new about the romance went a long way towards reigniting my enthusiasm for it, and it helped to reminded me of the value in taking diverse — and seemingly contradictory — approaches when analyzing (dare I say journeying through?) a text.

We drew on "shrinky-dink" paper, and then got to watch our
creations warp and diminish in a toaster-oven. The point was
to experience anxiety over the loss of our creation, only to
realize that it was simply undergoing a transformation. Much
like the experience of pilgrims on a journey . . . 

I decided to attend the session on pilgrimage and art therapy following my own, and was so very glad that I did. It was unlike any session I’d ever participated in before. The presenter, Wanda Sawicki, explained how she uses art therapy and the concept of journeying to work with her patients. She explained that "pilgrims who struggle with integrating transformative experiences from the Way into their daily life can benefit from engaging in creative work through art therapy;" in other words, the virtual can assist and enrich the actual. She invited all of the attendees to participate in an exercise with her to help demonstrate this concept. She asked all of us to meditate on a place we have journeyed to, or even a favorite place where we like to go walking, and think about the colors of that location. She asked us to imagine ourselves in that space and to focus on the colors closest to us and then move further and further out to the horizon, taking in all of the hues we recalled along the way. Afterwards, she invited us to paint our own mandalas with those very colors and images in mind. The point of all of this was to create a virtual journey that recreated the same positive transformations and emotions we experienced in the actual space. Her exercise converged in surprising ways with my own musings on virtual pilgrimage, and it was fascinating to me that centuries — even millennia — after the creation of labyrinths and other modes of virtual travel, we still find value in (and are pulled towards) these kinds of meditative journeys. 

This theme continued into the evening at the dance performance. Each of the dances performed were powerful in their way, but I was especially struck by the concluding act that, like the art therapy workshop, enacted a form of virtual pilgrimage. The dancers journeyed across the stage, acting out their struggles with the landscape and with the limitations of their bodies. They climbed. They stumbled. They pressed on. They carried one another. They eventually made it to Santiago. The choreography captured the arduousness and cathartic nature of such journeys, and also served as a beautiful example of how powerful the visual representation of such journeys can be. It also made me recognize an alternative meaning of the phrase “to feel moved.” It occurred to me that when we say as much, we’re actually suggesting transportation — that meaningful events, moments, performances, etc., actually have the power to inspire powerful virtual journeys of their own.  

The final day involved two diverse and fascinating plenaries — one on the shifting meanings of pilgrim garb and the other on an ‘eco-evangelical’ pilgrimage along the Sao Francisco River — and a concluding round-table meeting about the future of the conference and the Institute. This kind of meeting was new to me as well, and it was an absolute delight to attend. We all volunteered ideas and suggestions for the financial plans of the Institute, and also raised suggestions for future symposiums. By the end of the meeting, it seemed like we had an array of exciting future plans in the works, and I cannot wait to see what the Institute has to offer in the coming months and years. The energy and conviviality of this weekend gathering was infectious, in no small part because of how welcome people were to simultaneously analyze and personalize the experience of pilgrimage. This conference quietly broke down the divides between academic and non-academic modes (for lack of a better set of terms); both became equal and complementary partners in this setting. I think that the topic of this conference — pilgrimage — invited this kind of openness. It is impossible to completely separate the intellectual from the personal when we talk about these kinds of journeys, since the experience of pilgrimage is meant to be deeply subjective. This isn’t to say that all conferences have to be this way, but I certainly hope that this one does, because it allowed for an array of striking convergences to emerge in even the most unlikely of places.

As soon as the meeting wrapped, I dashed over to Mama Steve’s (my family’s favorite place for brunch) for one last get-together before I headed to the airport. While there, I noticed — of all things — a person who looked suspiciously like Santa Claus sitting at the table behind my mother. As I chatted with my parents, I couldn’t help but notice him as he stood up (in a Christmas-themed aloha shirt) and assembled a plate of homemade cookies from the contents of a cooler he’d brought with him. He placed a holiday card for the waitresses next to the platter and then left the restaurant as casually as an aloha-attired Santa possibly could.  The waitresses seemed bemused, and for a few seconds I worried that they were going to turn skeptical and toss the cookies in the trash. To my delight, they did no such thing, but passed the plate around to each other, laughing and enjoying a moment of mirth in an otherwise hectic Sunday. The wonderful absurdity of this scene seemed a fitting way to conclude this trip. A little reminder, perhaps, to take the time to revel in moments of subtle hilarity — to be playful — in the midst of everything else around me. 

I left for California that evening with a truly full heart, and I’ve remained deeply grateful for all of the renewed energy and enthusiasm I’ve been able to bring back with me.  I’ll close for now by offering up my paper, and will look forward to sharing other ideas with you all very soon. Cheers!

Sir Isumbras and the Virtual Pilgrimage

The term virtual is loaded with an array of very modern implications.  Select Google Earth from a smart phone, for instance, and you can find yourself transported to any far corner of the virtual globe, many of which can be viewed in 3-d. Click on Skype, Facetime, or any number of other such programs and you can have virtual face-to-face conversations with friends a half a world away. The desire to bridge vast and uncrossable distances propels us towards the world of the virtual, and I would hazard to guess that each of us can think of at least one occasion (if not dozens) where that ability was deeply comforting. This desire extends quite naturally into the world of pilgrimage, and a wide array of cyberpilgrimages are available to a modern peregrinator. You can find apps that allow pilgrims to virtually participate in pilgrimages to Lourdes, and I even found one that allows you to trace your way through a variety of labyrinths (a virtual pilgrimage twice over). In another example, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops created a Facebook app in 2011 that allowed young people to virtually travel on pilgrimage to World Youth Day, and nearly a thousand students participated in this way. Given that the entire world can be accessed through mobile devices and computers, the development of virtual pilgrimage in the modern world is hardly surprising. What might be surprising, however, is that the medieval world was also one in which this kind of nonstandard journeying was quite popular. 

            Some of the most striking examples can be found in medieval convents. As Marie-Luise Ehrenschwendtner has explored, the nuns at the convent of St. Katherine’s at Augsburg were, in 1487, “awarded papal privilege by Innocent VIII . . . granting them all the indulgences usually acquired through a pilgrimage to Rome and visits to the seven pilgrim churches . . . To qualify they simply had to recite three Paternosters and three Ave Marias at three different and specified localities within the enclosure;” the nuns of Augsburg would go on, in 1499 to commission Hans Holbein the Elder, Hans Burgkmair the elder, and another unnamed painter to create paintings of the seven pilgrim churches of Rome for their convent (“Virtual Pilgrimages,” 46). Kathryn M. Rudy has also tracked the appeal of virtual pilgrimage in continental (mostly Dutch and German) convents, arguing that since “nuns and religious women had little chance of visiting the Holy Land in the flesh . . . [they] instead invented, developed, and revised existing strategies for virtually visiting Jerusalem and the other holy places” (Virtual Pilgrimage in the Convent, 19). In her work, she examines seventeen texts and an array of images and practices used by enclosed nuns to inspire and actualize their virtual peregrinations. Importantly, Rudy discovered through her work that for many of these women, their pilgrimages were not metaphors but were “practice[s] to exercise as physically as possible and as literally as possible: not just with the imagination, but with the eyes, the hands, and the feet” (19). 

            These nuns frequently made use of actual pilgrimage itineraries and travelogues in their creation of virtual peregrinations, of which Francis Petrarch’s Itinerarium ad Sepulchrum Domini is an example (as an aside, I came across no evidence to suggest that the nuns used Petrarch's Itinerarium specifically, but since it remains one of the more noteworthy examples of virtual pilgrimage, I felt bound to include it here). In 1358, Giovanni Mandelli invited Petrarch on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Fears of either dying or becoming ill at sea caused him to decline the offer, and Petrarch instead composed, over the course of three days, an itinerary for his friend to take with him on his journey. This work is often cited as an example of the widespread phenomenon and practice of virtual pilgrimage to Jerusalem during the later Middle Ages.  As Theodore Cachey observes in his marvelous edition of the Itinerarium, this work  “asserts and celebrates the poet’s capacity for overcoming the alienation of the journey and of space through writing” (20). In fact, by emphasizing the lightness and ease of travel through the writing process, Petrarch elevates virtual travel, advocating for its legitimacy alongside more conventional means of pilgrimage.  As Cachey observes, Petrarch does not criticize pilgrimage or delegitimize it, but he does suggest the potential irrelevance of physical location. As he says at one point,  “In fact, that which makes me happy or miserable is not to be found in any place but in the soul, and knowing that we must die in some place, I do not know where is better” (Itinerarium, Pr. 3). Rather than travelling in the conventional sense, Petrarch decides to go virtual: he announces his plans to “complete a very long journey in a concise style” and frequently emphasizes the ease of his journeying through maps and letters in this work.

These examples demonstrate the widespread appeal and popularity (throughout a variety of cultural settings) of virtual pilgrimage. This form of meditative travel, as scholars such as Suzanne Yeager have observed, were considered as valid as actual peregrinations. Yeager, however, extends the exploration of medieval virtual pilgrimage to vernacular literature as well, and, in complement to her work, I’ve come to realize in my studies of medieval literature that this legitimization of nonstandard travel affected the representation of pilgrimage (martial or otherwise) in late Middle English literature. For the sake of time today, I’ll only discuss a single, representative text – Sir Isumbras – but this romance stands as particularly clear example of virtual pilgrimage in Middle English literature. Through this text, and in complement to the examples above, we see how its depiction of redemptive travel simultaneously validates actual and virtual modes of pilgrimage. Virtual replications of such journeys, in the end, emphasize the significance of the various destinations and highlight the palpable desires to reach them, even if the means are seemingly unconventional. These alternative modes of travel, in the end, reveal and important truth about pilgrimage: that the journey and its potential to activate change, revelation, and redemption in the traveller, is what actually matters. To quote from The Camino Documentary we saw last night, virtual pilgrimage hones in on the fact that such journeys are “not about arriving, [but are instead] about living.”

Isumbras was arguably one of the most popular vernacular romances in Late Medieval England. It has no direct source, but appears inspired by the legend of St. Eustace, so much so that scholars have frequently noted the romance’s occupation of a space in between hagiography and romance. The romance’s hybridity, coupled with its widespread circulation (from Chichester to the Scottish lowlands), and the fact that it survives in both secular and devotional manuscripts, suggests that the romance may well have been read both for entertainment value and for devotional purposes, a theory supported by  Sir Isumbras' mimicry of the devotional model of virtual pilgrimage in its plot and narrative structure.

Since the text is a fairly obscure one, I’ll provide a brief summary. The romance begins with a description of the hero as a generous and benevolent knight. One day while hunting, a divine messenger comes to him with a message that God plans to punish him for his pride. The messenger gives Isumbras a choice: to suffer now as a young man or later in his old age. Isumbras chooses the former and immediately loses all worldly possessions: his horse drops dead, his dogs go mad and run off into the forest, his livestock die, his house burns down (all in a mater of seconds it seems). His wife and three sons survive, but the family finds themselves destitute with hardly the cloths on their backs. Isumbras carves a cross into his shoulder with a knife and announces that he and his family will go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. On the way, two of his sons are abducted (either by beasts or angels depending on the version) and are presumed dead. At the Greek Sea, Isumbras, his wife, and his remaining son are confronted by sea-faring Saracens who are on their way to sack an unnamed kingdom in Christendom. The Sultan abducts Isumbras' wife and makes her his bride, orders Isumbras to be brutally beaten, and leaves him and his remaining son on the shoreline; the wife is sent to Palestine to reside in the Sultan's palace while he and his men continue on their way into Christian territory. Isumbras's remaining son is abducted in turn (again, either by a beast or an angel).

The hero makes his way to a town where he takes up blacksmithing and, after seven years, forges his own armor. He battles as an unknown in support of a Christian kingdom besieged by the aforementioned sultan, and kills scores of Saracens, the Sultan included. The king of the Christian kingdom asks Isumbras for his name, clearly wishing for him to join his retinue. Isumbras refuses to divulge his identity and continues on his pilgrimage. Once he reaches Jerusalem or Bethlehem (manuscript depending), an angel visits him and announces that he has been absolved of his sins. Isumbras soon hears of a beneficent queen (who is, in fact, his wife) and journeys to her castle. They are happily reunited, and Isumbras is swiftly made king, having rightfully inherited the territory through the death of the Sultan and his wife's false marriage to him. Isumbras attempts to convert the inhabitants of his kingdom but they refuse, and a force of roughly thirty thousand Saracens rises up against him. On the day of battle, his wife announces that she will wear armor and die at his side in battle, but, in the nick of time, the three sons arrive on the field (either guided by an angel or riding on the beasts that had abducted them several years prior). The united family lays waste to the entire Saracen army, and Isumbras and his sons go on to conquer other territories.

In my previous work on Isumbras, I looked closely its representation of crusading (which is, at heart, a form of pilgrimage), and argued that the romance provides a streamlined and deliberately idealistic version of successful religious conquest. Significantly, however, the romance emphasizes the journey and the process of Isumbras’ salvation over the establishment of global empire. The romance might end with a vision of military victory, but Isumbras’ ability to win lands and prestige are predicated on his moral redemption — on his pilgrimage. As such, despite the martial flourishes that pull Isumbras into the realm of crusades romances, the text remains one deeply wedded to notions of virtual devotional practice.

While it is true that Isumbras’ journey to the Holy Land gradually takes the form of a crusade, the romance stresses that the martial components of his pilgrimage are born out of necessity. All we are given at the outset of the hero’s journey, for instance, is a clear sense of his need for redemption and his desire to embark on a redemptive journey: 

To his poor children three

Who stood before him naked, he said: 

You shall do as I advise,

To seek God where he lived and died,

Who for us shed his blood.” . . .

With his knife he cut

A cross in his bare shoulder,

In stories as clerkes say.  (Sir Isumbras, 125-29;143-44) 

The carving of the cross into his shoulder evokes (however brutally) the crossing vows of crusader knights, but it remains the only hint of the battles that are to come. And even when they do occur, it is clear that Christians are only being forced to protect themselves. The sultan’s attacks of Christian lands, and the Saracen uprising against Isumbras and his wife, require martial responses. Initially, however, all we are presented with is the hero’s announcement that he and his family must undertake a redemptive journey for the sake of his (and even their) souls. While the battles may remain the more captivating moments of the romance, the bulk of the story details Isumbras’ physical journey from Europe to the Holy Land and his journey from sin to absolution. His ascension to kingship and his martial victories, in other words, are only made possible by his humbling pilgrimage.

The suffering endured by Isumbras and his family on their way to the Holy Land dominates the initial stages of their journey.  Their escalating misfortunes and its eventual dissolution force the hero into complete submission to the will of God. Initially stripped of all worldly possessions, Isumbras eventually finds himself alone after wild beasts (or, in some versions, an angel) abduct his children and a marauding sultan kidnaps his wife. Perceiving all of these moments of abjection as part of God’s will (113-116; 205-6), Isumbras remains faithful to his penitential quest, never despairing or growing angry in the face of his suffering. His losses of status, of material goods, and of his family force him to relinquish any sense of control over his identity. He becomes, as a result, a penitent tabula rasa through which his salvation and his earthy successes as a crusader are assured.

Even when Isumbras charges into his first battle against Saracens, emphasis remains on his need for redemption and for the continuation of his promised journey to Jerusalem. As Elizabeth Fowler has argued, he “reforges his identity” by working as a blacksmith and creating a set of armor, and eventually rides out in support of an unnamed Christian kingdom besieged by the Sultan who had previously abducted his wife ("Lordship and the Saracens," 102). He dominates on the field, killing scores of Saracens and even the Sultan himself. But when presented to the grateful Christian king, he solemnly refuses to give his name. While this refusal to identify himself resonates with the “Fair Unknown” tradition of medieval romance, Isumbras’ insistence on anonymity allows for the foregrounding of his pilgrim journey. Since he will only find redemption through his completed pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and since any form of recognition at this king’s court would imply vainglory and lead to distraction and premature social elevation, the hero has no other choice but to remain nameless and to depart in order to stay faithful to his redemptive journey. He leaves quietly in the guise of a palmer, and, in so doing, reveals an ability to contextualize his successes and failures as results of God’s will rather than his own. He also demonstrates, through the adoption of anonymity, his learned capacity to prefer spiritual devotion and the maintenance of his soul to secular and social ambitions.

As I described earlier, Isumbras’ journey doesn’t end in Jerusalem, but rather in a vague Levantine principality, and also on a note of martial victory and crusade. Nevertheless, it’s important to note that this romance doesn't reveal the beginning or the end point of Isumbras’ journey.  We have no idea where he comes from, and all we can say about where he ends up is that it lies somewhere in the vicinity of the Holy Land. Geographic punctuations like the Greek Sea and Jerusalem do exist, but not even they are stable — as I mentioned earlier, versions of this romance place Isumbras’ redemption in either Jerusalem or Bethlehem. Additionally, Acre (the last Latin kingdom to fall in 1291) is mentioned in the romance, but only in certain versions.  I have previously seen these kinds of slippages as byproducts of the romance’s circulation throughout a lengthy and volatile time period. As Lee Manion has observed, for instance, Acre did not remain as strong a seat of desire as Jerusalem, which may explain why so many later versions of the romance fail to mention it. And while the naming of Jerusalem — at the outset of the romance and as a site of Isumbras’ absolution — certainly participates in the long-standing tradition of its status as Christendom’s ideological nexus, I would offer that Isumbras’ journey, since it does not — cannot — end in the Holy City, points not only to the desires of reclaiming Jerusalem in the late Middle Ages but also to a deprioritization of destination over the journey itself.  The fact that the very geographic locations in Isumbras are negotiable, in other words, align with Petrarch’s observations about location and its limitations.

This romance creates, from start to finish, a streamlined virtual journey from Europe to the Holy Land, from a state of pride and sin to a state of grace and redemption. Audiences of the tale are actively invited, moreover, to insert themselves into the narrative. By refraining from naming the exact location of Isumbras’ home or of his eventual Levantine kingdom, those who encounter the story are given an opportunity to create those locations for themselves. Isumbras and his journey have all the more opportunity to become exemplary for the audience as a result. In a strange way, the romance takes a narrative form that nearly replicates the structure of the meditative labyrinth at Chartres. I’ve wandered along that labyrinth many times, and have always found its replication of faith journeys to be startlingly simple and revelatory: when you enter into it, you immediately come very near to the center. You think that your journey will be an easy one, only to find yourself rapidly swung out to the farthest edge of that center. This process repeats itself over and over again until, at long last, you reach the end of the journey. Unlike a maze, the labyrinth offers up no tricks or false endings.  There is only one, inexorable conclusion to your wandering.  In a similar fashion, while Isumbras’ life — initially so calm and peaceful (even complacent) — is rapidly destabilized, the journey he undertakes inexorably leads him to a state of absolution, a spiritual prosperity mirrored in his ascension to kingship and the reunion of his family. Like a wanderer in the labyrinth, Isumbras is flung to the far edge of his faith, and has to slowly find his way back to his center.  Along the way, he models the process of a penitent pilgrim for audiences of the story, and offers opportunities for reflection on the tensions between the earthly and spiritual priorities.
To return to a point made earlier, the fact that this romance circulated in both secular and devotional manuscripts suggests rather strongly that Isumbras was not only an entertaining story but was one that had actual devotional value. What my brief exploration of Isumbras’ narrative structure hopes to offer, in the end, is a glimpse into how a text long considered a less-than-artful vernacular romance successfully uses the structure of romance and of virtual pilgrimage as a conduit to devotion. By replicating a pilgrim’s journey, and by demonstrating how essential that journey is to a knight’s salvation, the romance invites audiences to virtually trace a similar route and reflect upon the lessons learned therein. Thank you.

Bibliography: 

Cachey, Theodore J. Petrarch’s Guide to the Holy Land: Itinerary to the Sepulcher of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002.

Ehrenschwendtner, Marie-Luise. “Virtual Pilgrimages? Encloser and the Practice of Piety at St Katherine’s Convent, Augsburg.” In The Journal of Ecclesiastical History (January 2009): 45-73. 

Fowler, Elizabeth. “The Romance Hypothetical: Lordship and the Saracens in Sir Isumbras.” In The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance, edited by Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert, 97-121. Essex: Pearson Education, 2000.

Manion, Lee. “The Loss of the Holy Land and Sir Isumbras: Literary Contributions to Fourteenth-Century Crusade Discourse.” Speculum 85 (2010): 65-90.

Rudy, Katherine M. Virtual Pilgrimage in the Convent: Imagining Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages. Turnhout: Brepols, 2011.

Yeager, Suzanne. Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

How do you get from A to B if you have no alphabet?

I was recently talking with my wonderful dissertation group, consisting of Kara McShane and Laura Bell, about traveling. Though we are all three writing about different texts (and Laura is writing about nineteenth-century literature, whereas Kara and I do medieval), all of us are dealing with travel in some way. We were thinking the other day about how frequently we answer distance questions with time. "How far is it to your apartment?" "About ten minutes." We very often measure length of distance with how long it will take to traverse it. We measure distance in minutes, in hours, in days. "A day's drive" can mean different things on different days and for different people, but we all understand that it means the limit of how far a person could travel on a given day. All of this got me thinking about the word "journey," which clearly has its origins in the French jour – day. A journey, then, is how far you could get in a day, the pre-modern equivalent of a day's drive. Before speedometers and gps systems and google maps, how would you tell someone how far to travel? How would you orient yourself on a trip? How would you negotiate between spaces?

As a Californian, the most tangible experience I have of day's travel is of learning about the missions that dot the expanse of the state. As a history-loving child in a fairly new state, the missions were exciting to visit when I was growing up because they were some of the oldest buildings around. Through them, I had a tangible connection to the way that cultural and historical change had occurred in my state. I made a model of the San Carlos Borromeo Carmelo Mission in fourth grade for school, and I poured over the history, architecture, landscape of that mission. I was so proud of my model because my dad helped me cut the top layer from cardboard and then paint the wavy part of the board red to create the roof tiles of the building. This was, for me, a crowning achievement of my elementary school career. What I couldn't replicate, however, was the geographical and temporal connection between my mission and the rest of the missions. An isolated model of a mission, or even an isolated visit to one mission, misses the larger network of the 21 missions that run up the Pacific coast. The missions are all a day's horse ride apart, since the Spanish missionaries would ride a full day and then stop to build another one. The distance between these buildings, then, is not one of miles but one of time travelled. Length as time is literally written onto the landscape in California. The Spanish missionaries colonized and converted the Pacific coast one day's ride at a time. By building actual edifices to mark the journeys and by planting European crops around these missions, the colonializing progress up the coast alters the landscape as well as the culture of the region. Missionaries marked their day-long movements with adobe and timber and stone, and each building also served as a locus for the spread of Spanish language and religion and culture and flora and fauna.

The missions are interesting for my thoughts on distance as time because they represent a larger teleology, both of linear progress up the coast and of the colonization and conversion of the locals, and yet each point on the line of missions is of equal importance. It's not about making it to the northernmost or southernmost mission, but rather about the presence of missions along the whole length of the state. It is, to give into the inevitable cliche, about both journey and destination. Perhaps the answer is that there's a larger movement up the coast, but yet each mission also represents its own destination. The line is made up of individual journeys. And though we no longer ride horses to get from one spot to another (or, rather, I never have), we still think of movement across the state or country or world in terms of segments of travel.

They said to make a left at the blue-green wave...

When we answer distance questions with time we collapse time and space. But often such a collapse serves a particularly teleological way of thinking. I answer that it takes ten minutes to reach my apartment because I assume that you plan to go from point A, here, to point B, there. What happens, then, when there is no destination in mind, when we know neither point A nor point B? This, as anyone who knows me might have guessed already, leads me back to the idea of rudderless ships. In the ocean, when the directions one could travel are endless and when no point can be permanently marked as A or B or anything else, how can we conceive of a journey? With no oars, with no sail, with no observable landmarks, distance is unmeasurable. And perhaps, on a journey, unmeasurable distance leads to unmeasurable time. Perhaps this is why, as I have mentioned before, Custance travels for "years and days" in the Man of Law's Tale. We don't get specifics about time (how many years? how many days?) because neither time nor space nor the connection between them is clear on a rudderless voyage. Custance doesn't know how far she travels, how long she's at sea, or where she's heading. Her boat floats in all directions for some amount of time. Fate has a larger plan for her, as the Man of Law makes clear, but fate isn't quantifiable, and thus can't be productively measured in time or space. I guess, if you don't know where you're going, you really have no choice but to focus on the journey.

The Proof is in the Plotting: Stratford, Cymbeline, and Much Ado About Nothing

A photo I snapped of the Avon River
(Yes, this means that Canada
has its own Stratford-upon-Avon)

I recently spent a weekend in Stratford, Ontario for the Shakespeare Festival. Each Fall the University of Rochester English department makes a theater pilgrimage to Stratford led by the indomitable Russell Peck and his equally incredible wife Ruth. The trip is, for me, wrapped up in the changing season, the new school year. As leaves turn and new courses begin, the trip cements old bonds and creates new ones. Returning each year to the same small town to see very different plays helps create for me a sense of both the cyclical and the ever-new. The trip also encapsulates what I love about my program. Not only do I adore a chance to see such wonderful theater, but I treasure the kind of community fostered by the trip. The last night always ends in the Pecks taking everyone out to dessert, and professors, grads, undergrads, family, friends, significant others all crowd around pub tables to discuss the plays and gorge on chocolate and meringue. The connections made across horizontal and vertical lines through the shared experience of theater remind me of what a vibrant community the university can be.

My co-blogger Kate flew back from California to make the trip, and it was good to spend quality time with her in pursuit of our favorite hobby -- trying to cram as many plays as possible into one weekend (we saw five plays in three days). I'll focus in this post on the first day, when we saw both Cymbeline and Much Ado About Nothing, because seeing those two together really called my attention to interesting aspects of each play. Though I have seen Much Ado many times and know the play well, I had never before seen Cymbeline, nor have I studied it much or taught it before. I'll admit that, aside from reading it in a youthful effort to read all of Shakespeare, I hadn't given Cymbeline much thought. But this particular production was so engaging that it made me want to take another look at the play. Both of these plays feature a man's misplaced jealousy against an innocent lady, so that connection was immediately clear, but I started to notice other connections as well. Each play has an intriguing focus on misunderstood evidence, on bodies themselves misrepresented and misread. A striking scene from Cymbeline features Imogen weeping over the headless body of her enemy, who had dressed in the clothes of Imogen's husband Posthumus before getting himself killed. We the audience realize that the body doesn't belong to her husband, but she reads the body based upon its clothing, and her grief is terrible to behold. The most startling part of this scene to me was when Imogen dissected the body with her words, saying that she recognized the calves, arms, chest of the corpse as those of her own husband, when in fact all that she recognized was the textile exterior of shirt and breeches. This corporeal misrecognition comes after we have already seen a corporeal misrepresentation of Imogen herself. The scheming Iachimo, unable to seduce the virtuous lady, sneaks into her bedroom and takes note of the features of her chamber and, more disturbingly, of her sleeping body. This production maximized the tension in the scene, having Iachimo literally crawl over the inert body of the unconscious lady like the ghoul from Fuseli's The Nightmare. The violation involved in his actions were readily apparent, and I had a visceral reaction which I thought was exactly the right feeling for such a scene. In many parts, the production played up the comedic potential of the play, and this scene could have been funny or even ridiculous, but I felt they made the right choice by making it instead terribly uncomfortable. So details of Imogen's body related to her husband cause him to think her unchaste, while details of her husband's clothing cause her to think him dead. The evidence in each case seems strong, physical, tangible, and yet in each case it proves false. Compounding such bodily misreadings, when Imogen arrives dressed as a boy, her husband doesn't recognize her. In fact, no one but her servant realizes that it is she in boy's clothing. As his clothing made her believe a strange body to be his, strange clothing made him believe her body was not her own.

The production made even more of this focus on clothing in that it combined various historical eras of costume. Some characters seemed from the 12th century, while others seemed from the 16th or even 17th. When the Roman soldiers arrived, they were dressed as centurions. The Roman costumes complicated matters, since the Italian characters from the play are also from Rome, and therefore Romans, and yet their dress was from a much later period. During the battle scenes at the end, these Italian characters joined the Roman forces and slowly merged into the visual homogeny of the Roman troops. Kate and I wondered if the varying costumes were connected to the fact that the many-stranded plot is itself pieced together from a variety of sources. Part Geoffrey of Monmouth, part Holinhshead, part Boccaccio, Cymbeline partakes of stories from other times and places and combines them all, as Shakespeare tends to do, with Elizabethan England. The costumes may therefore represent the different narrative threads, and the changing and merging costumes at the end might show how all of these threads come together to give the play its satisfying, if someone ridiculous, conclusion. It's to the production's credit that the entire audience was so moved by the ending, which could easily have lapsed into the absurd. I heard delighted sounds and chuckles and sighs all around me at the end, and we all jumped to our feet as soon as the lights dimmed.

The Much Ado that we saw was enjoyable, though not my favorite version of the play. The overall concept of the production didn't always come together for me. There were insertions of singing and dancing which could have been charming, but seemed a little disjointed. But the witty lines and a strong Benedick made it still a fun performance. The physical comedy in the scenes where Benedick and Beatrice overhear their friends discussing them was, I thought, quite effective. I was most interested, however, given my musings on Cymbeline from that afternoon, in the fact that the play didn't feel the need to show us Margaret and Borachio at the window. So many versions of the play include the mis-viewing at the window, and I feel that it actually does make a huge difference whether we as the audience have seen the "evidence" or not. Since the play didn't include that scene, we not only know that the evidence is false, that it's not really Hero at the window, but we are only told of any of it secondhand. The misunderstanding of physical evidence, the misrecognition of Hero's body and voice, exists at an extra remove from us. And yet the misrecognition of the faithful woman occurs firsthand for Claudio, who believes Margaret to be Hero, whereas Posthumus only hears about his wife (and receives her bracelet), but never sees any misconduct with his own eyes.

So much of Much Ado is about the way in which narratives can be used constructively (to bring Benedick and Beatrice together) or destructively (to tear Claudio and Hero apart). I've had wonderful conversations before with Russell Peck and Russ McDonald about the fact that “nothing” may have been pronounced “noting,” a fact which opens up my interpretation of reading and misreading and fiction and truth. The play is so much about listening, overhearing, and reading people and situations. The characters, like the audience, bare the burden of interpretation, and much of the plot hinges on how they choose to interpret. There are many lines in the play about reading evidence or noting something, and Benedict even says that he doesn’t want Beatrice to see his bad rhymes. Even the comic relief with lower class malapropisms make more sense to me in this context of noting, since malapropisms call attention to the importance of effective communication. And let us not forget that it is the malaprop-wielding Dogberry, in all his ridiculous comic presence, that stumbles upon the truth of Don John's deception -- the learned and witty characters can't untangle that knot on their own. It is the character with the least command of language who is able to apprehend the truth in the form of Borachio and Conrade.

The protagonists of Much Ado spend their days creating deceptions, whether simply for fun (the masque, which leads to several cases of mistaken identity), or for redefining the community (the verbal games to bring Benedick and Beatrice together, the near-deadly game to convince Claudio of Hero's betrayal/unchastity). The image of the second wedding, in which Claudio believes the veiled woman he's marrying to be Hero's cousin, brings together the elements of disguise and misunderstanding in the play. Whereas before Claudio assumed a woman was Hero without seeing her face, he now assumes that a woman is not Hero when he can't see her face. In either case, he believes what he is told about the female body before him without actually looking at the evidence for himself. This production gave us a Claudio who seemed perfectly fine with marrying another woman in place of Hero, as if Hero herself really were interchangeable (as the fact that he twice mistakes her for someone else suggests). The multiple ways that evidence is uncovered at the end, both in the confessions from the villains and in the literal unveiling of Hero's face, allow for ultimate clarification even as the play makes us uncomfortably aware of the limitations of evidence to reveal truth.

I would like to teach a class one day with Cymbeline, Much Ado About Nothing, and Othello. (Now that I think of it, I could include some great medieval stuff as well -- rewritten letters and mistaken identities as false evidence in "The Man of Law's Tale" and The Roman de Silence, for example.) In each of these plays, evidence, even strong evidence, proves insufficient. Characters read evidence through the lenses provided for them by other characters with various motives. I think it could be instructive to think about the ways in which we rarely can see evidence objectively. It could be interesting to even talk about objectivity itself and if/when objectivity is desirable. We necessarily bring our own interests and experiences to texts, and I have argued elsewhere that this is not a bad thing. (And, hey, Benedick and Beatrice find happiness because the false rumors of love for one another they overhear match with their own actual desires to be together.) Perhaps the important thing is to be aware of our own subjectivity. To try to examine our influences as well as we can. Characters in these plays hear with their own ears and see with their own eyes (or see with the eyes of others who have some token or proof to back up their stories -- a bracelet, a handkerchief), and yet they are wrong again and again, sometimes with disastrous results. Their fault is in believing themselves to be objective receivers of fact rather than active interpreters. Teaching a class about the reception of evidence itself could call attention to the very processes of close-reading and writing that take place in such a class, could call attention to the fact that I want the students to think for themselves even as I, the instructor, lead discussion and provide context. I may choose the texts, but the students have a responsibility for their own ideas and writing, and I think a discussion of such texts could lead to some fascinating dialogue about the act of interpretation itself.

One foot in the sea and the other on land

What it looks like between coasts when I fly

As I transition from one coast to another, one school year to another, and one season to another, I think a lot about thresholds. I try hard to think of each phase or moment or experience in my life as a thing unto itself instead of a place between. Graduate school, for example, could be a liminal space between college and career, but it seems a shame to think of such an extended period of my life as simply a means to an end (especially in this uncertain market). Sometimes I sit in a coffee shop, reading or writing, and I really reflect on how privileged I am to be able to spend some years of my life learning and thinking and growing as a person and a scholar. How amazing it is to sit in the afternoon sunlight, reading a book and learning even more about the things I love. How incredible it is to work with students and to see them really think about literature and the world around them. Even the struggle to come up with new ideas, the intensity of teaching, the insecurities which come with grad school -- those are a part of my life, a part of all that's good in it and all that makes it worthwhile to me. These years, I must remind myself, are valuable unto themselves.

An overflowing border

As a medievalist, the struggle against the idea of middles is constant. Though the term "Middle Ages" is certainly less pejorative than "Dark Ages," it still gives a sense of a period between the glory of Rome and the Renaissance. A placeholder in history. It seems doubtful to me that people woke up on New Year's Day of 1500 (or 1495 or 1450 or 1350 or 1300 …) and felt suddenly reborn. Even midnight on New Year's, which seems to be a crystal-clear liminal point, shatters when we consider all of the time zones of the world. Watching through a television set in the United States as the ball drops in Australia, I can't help but feel a bit unsettled about our privileging of that particular moment. Nor can I fail to notice when I reach the new year in New York before my friends in California do. And this is not to mention the fact that there are different calendars in the world that have different New Year's, and the fact that even our Gregorian calendar has been used with different New Year's in mind. In the Middle Ages there seem to have been several possible dates, and people in the Early Modern period celebrated on March 25th. How are we to find the point of transition if it keeps moving? And what do we do with a transition period, a middle, that takes up a thousand years? It's interesting that we often think of middle as center, as central. We often see those things on the periphery as less important. Yet in history as in our lives it's easy to see moments or years or centuries as simply between the real thing. Not only does this kind of thinking ignore realities of connection and continuity, but it denies the importance of the individual dots on the timeline.

Fleeting traces of our threshold presence

On my trip home I spent some nice afternoons at the beach, visiting my much-missed Pacific Ocean, and I thought about how hard it often is to pinpoint a precise spot where one time or space ends and another begins. I walked through that tricky line on the shore where dry feet and wet feet are only moments apart, and I examined that strip of sand. What was above water one moment was below it the next, and even the extent to which the water reached was always different. The curved border between dry sand and wet sand (and even wetter sand) shifts constantly, and must be slightly different each day. Indeed, it must change throughout the day as well, and in more subtle ways than just the changing tides. As I rolled up my jeans and moved closer to the water, I noticed that the way the water moves over the sand is new each time, that the ripples of water are ever-changing and that they leave an imprint both of their shape and their substance on the sand behind them. As I tried to discern the line between the realms of ocean and sea, I found that there really is no simple answer. There is no line and there's always a line and there are a million different lines. I spoke in my paper at the recent NCS conference on the Man of Law's Tale about how the realms of land and sea are never as separate as they appear on the map, and it was good to actually look at the space between and in those realms. So often I find myself getting caught up in the theoretical. Of course I am a literature person -- examining texts is what I do. And I'm a medievalist -- thinking about things long ago is my job. But after writing so much about concepts of time and space and the ocean, it's good to get reacquainted with the ocean itself. To get my feet wet again, as it were.

The waves leave behind remnants of sea, land, and air

On my trip I was reading Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us, and was struck by a passage from the preface to the 1961 edition describing how the floor of the deep sea "receives[s] sediments from the margins of the continents" such as "bits of wood and leaves, and … sands containing nuts, twigs, and the bark of trees" (x).The abyssal plains, therefore, include tangible pieces of the coast. And it is also the waters of the world that have carved out valleys and canyons now well above ground. Water has in many ways shaped our landscapes, just as the land provides the floor of our oceans and rivers. Carson explains of the ocean's formation that water wore away the land to create the ocean, while the minerals from these worn-away continents gave the sea its saltiness in "an endless, inexorable process that has never stopped" (7). In other words, the water continually shapes the land, while the land ceaselessly gives the ocean its salty form. Over the long history of the earth, land and sea have merged, shifted, and forged one another. Geological time, it seems, has its own ideas about topographical and temporal boundaries. To try to think of any particular space or time as its own separate entity really only works in a single instant. Even in that instant the lines are fraught, but only in that instant are lines really visible. Boundaries and borders are shifting, fleeting, intersecting. I played with this notion by snapping pictures of the space where ocean meets shore in order to try to capture some of those threshold moments. And even in my photographs, I cannot really tell for sure where water ends and sand begins. Can you?

Where does the sea end and the land begin?

Musings on Trash and Treasure

As I mentioned in my last post, I had an absolutely amazing time at the NCS conference in Portland last month. I was very excited to be a part of the Animate Objects and Ecologies sessions helmed by Allan Mitchell, and I found myself both delighted and deeply relieved that my paper was as well-received as it was.  As always, I was gifted with an array of deeply helpful feedback before and after the actual presentation, and I came away from the experience both inspired and encouraged in my work.

I was especially excited by the energy in the question and answer portion of our session.  It really took the form of a lively conversation, which was pleasantly surprising in no small part because of the early start time and the fact that Thursday was the final day of the conference.  Initially, I had wondered how our papers would speak to one another. Siobhan Bly Calkin was set to present on the holy lance of Antioch, Laura Diener on medieval textiles, and I on Chaucerian images of books.  On the surface, the kinds of objects we planned to examine seemed to have little in common, but as the session progressed it became very clear that we were all speaking along uncannily convergent lines.  Each of us, in our own ways, addressed issues at the heart of the previous session devoted to animate objects.  In particular, we ended up posing and addressing questions similar to one that  Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and others raised the day previously: namely, what happens when objects don't behave the way that we expect or wish them to?

There were an array of wonderful questions and comments made throughout the remainder of our session that morning, but one in particular really got me thinking, and I promised Kristi that I would write a small post on it.  Laura, at one point in our conversation, asked how we humans wish to be remembered through the objects that we leave behind, which made me think immediately of two things: 1. My first job at a small archaeological firm in Williamsburg, Virginia, and 2. A wunderkammer (curiosity cabinet) by Mark Dion at the Tate Modern. 

The first job that I ever had as a young person was at a place called Cultural Resources, Inc. It's a small archaeological firm located in Williamsburg, VA, and I was hired on to wash artifacts as they were brought in from various dig sites around the state. It sounded incredibly glamorous and Indiana Jones-ish at first, but the vast majority of time I washed bags of nails and clay pipe bowls.  I probably washed thousands of nails that summer. Bags upon bags of old, rusted nails. My days were filled with mud and weary iron. Finding a brightly colored pottery shard amidst the sea of nails and pipe bowls was a special occasion. I became deeply familiar with the contours, the shapes, and the smells of those broken things. The vast majority of what I touched in that job, I discovered, came from trash pits accidentally unearthed by contractors and builders around the state. Whenever they dug into such a trash pit, which would have been filled several centuries ago with items too broken for repair, all construction had to stop until an archaeological firm could come in and exhume these items —items that were once worthless but now had the opportunity to speak and, we hoped, say something about where they came from.

Artifacts from a kitchen midden (i.e. trash pit) in Colonial Williamsburg.  The blogger who snapped this image was informed by her guide on a tour of the Ravenscroft dig site that the midden was "the most helpful discovery at an archeological site like this . . . [because it] provide[d] a valuable indication of human settlement at a site."

I do remember a particularly eventful couple of months the summer following where we actually handled a series of slave skeletons as they came to us from Fort A.P. Hill. The soldiers there had been digging foxholes for some sort of drill and accidentally unearthed an unmarked slave cemetery. Enter the crew from Cultural Resources who, much to the consternation of those on base, kept finding skeletons to exhume.  Under normal circumstances, the idea of touching and washing a human skull — let alone a skull with a massive root creeping into its mouth and out of a right eye socket — would probably have horrified me. I was so tired of nails and pipe bowls, however, that the obvious morbidity of the objects I had to handle didn't even occur to me. I was simply thrilled have something different to handle. Even when I had a child's skeleton completely disintegrate in my hands when I gently released it from its wrappings. Even when I had to spend eight hours a day under a constant stream of water, wood kebab stick and a toothbrush in hand, to delicately remove the mud from the top surface of the bones.  The only piece of the bone that is of value and can reveal intricate medical details about the person who it once belonged is that very top layer. Peel that away with the mud, and his or her story is lost. This stint with the skeletons, however, was but a punctuation in my career of artifact washing. The rest of the time was spent opening bags of trash-made-treasure, washing it so that experts could analyze it. 

I found the work simultaneously mundane and fascinating.  To be sure, washing the same genus of artifact over and over again could get a bit dull. But even still, I would often find my mind wandering as I washed these broken pieces, marveling over the fact that we now placed so much value in them when they had been casually discarded centuries before. Looking back, I realize how deeply fortunate I was to have been able to work at this place for my very first job. How many other 15-year-olds get the chance to handle the past in such a way?  

Fast-forward to the summer after my junior year in college.  It had been at least three years since my work at Cultural Resources.  I was over in London, spending some time exploring the city before beginning an abroad program in Bath.  I decided one day to explore the Tate Modern for the first time, and I encountered -- among other fascinating installations -- Mark Dion's "Tate Thames Dig" (1999). It was a huge, double-sided cabinet with an array of small drawers on either side.  Curiosity certainly got the better of me, and I decided to investigate. Upon pulling open a drawer, I nearly laughed out loud. There they were: rusted 17th or 18th century nails, pipe bowls arranged by shape and hue, and pottery shards.  I thought I'd escaped these things -- I'm sure I had dreams of nails and pipes during those summers -- and yet here they were, haunting me all the way over in England. I swung around to the other side and opened a few of the drawers there to see what they contained. One held an array of plastic bottle tops, arranged by color to create a rainbow of detritus. Another was full of doll legs and arms. My initial reading of this installation was that the one side contained 17th and 18th century trash items, and that the other contained modern refuse, forming a kind of commentary on the things that we value or devalue based on age, historical worth, etc. As it turns out, however, the organizational methods for this installation are more discursive. I recently learned that had I opened more of the drawers, I would have found an overlap of time periods.  Dion deliberately kept himself from imposing too strict of an order on the objects that he found along the Thames in order to allow viewers to form their own opinions about the objects he collected.  My encounter with this installation, then, was one of serendipitous selectivity, as the drawers I opened on either side formed discrete divides between the old and the new, artifact and litter, treasure and trash.

And now to fast-forward to the Animate Objects (Part the Second) session at NCS. I brought both of these anecdotes up in response to Laura’s question and proposed – through them –- a related but distinct query: do we, in the end, actually have any control over the objects we leave behind and how they will speak for us in the future? The answer that springs from the anecdotes above seems to be no.  I’m usually not in the business of making broad claims about humanity (because I typically have to convince undergraduate writers to do otherwise), but it seems to me that a great many of us want desperately to be remembered, to live on in the things (animate and inanimate, tangible and intangible) that we leave behind. Achilles, after all, was said to have chosen a brutal death in his youth so that he could enjoy that kind of eternal life.  However, if Achilles existed at all, I doubt he would have anticipated that his name is most often cited today not for his martial feats in the killing fields along the Scamander, but as the name of posterior leg tendon. He is remembered most for what killed him, that small part of flesh covered by the hand of an overly-protective goddess mother. I have little doubt that the Achilles we encounter in The Iliad would have chosen a different legacy for himself if given the opportunity. In like fashion, though we create so many beautiful things on this earth, the majority of what we leave behind, and what we risk being remembered by, is waste. A few hundred years from now, that is what archeologists will be digging up in abundance. To be sure, objects of special beauty and intricacy will have priority as they do today in places like Cultural Resources, but those objects come along so very rarely. More than likely, they will work (as we do today) with the fragmented detritus of an older time and try, as best they can, to riddle meanings out of it all.