This summer, like last year, I am supervising some summer research. Ursinus College has an incredible program to support summer student research fellowships in every discipline: arts, humanities, sciences, social sciences, you name it. Student projects thus summer range from working in labs with worms of various kinds to writing plays and monologues meant to support sexual assault awareness education to digital exhibitions on elements of the College's history. (Spoiler: the last one is my student, shared with an extraordinary colleague of mine.)
As part of the eight-week program, faculty are invited to give lectures on Wednesday afternoons. These talks are sort of a combination of "how did I get here?" and "what do I do?", where faculty talk about their research lives and the paths that brought them to their work. I was asked to speak this summer, and the talk went over quite well - well enough that I thought perhaps I'd share it here. The script with select images appears below. (Sadly, I have cut my ad libbed jokes as well as images of Beinecke Osborn A.11, which I shared with the group in the context of talking about the edition I'm working on.)
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I want to open up with a question. What comes to mind when I say “medieval”?
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| The first page of results for a Google Image search for "medieval." |
In general, you’re probably thinking of
Western Europe – a knight on a horse.
And probably, the people you’re picturing are white and Christian. This is a pretty common notion of what the
Middle Ages is. As it turns out, it’s
not that simple: the entire world existed for that whole thousand years. Not everyone was white, and not everyone was
Christian, not everyone was a knight, and not everything worth studying was
produced in Western Europe. Being a
medievalist means lots of things: it’s a term that applies to people in a huge
range of fields, studying a huge range of geographical regions over the span of
a thousand or so years. However, inside
that bubble, I look like a pretty old-school English literature kind of medievalist:
most of my work deals with literature written in England during the fourteenth
and fifteen centuries. But what I find
most interesting is how England represented other cultures: how English
literature presents a wide range of religions, races, and languages, and what
those presentations can in turn tell us about England’s sense of itself during
that two hundred-ish year period.
This is a sort of weird, oddly specific
area of study, and in thinking about what I wanted to say today, I tried to
think of way to tell you how I got interested in this weirdly specific stuff
and what exactly it is that I try to do.
In the process, I realized that the key word for my professional
identity is access. So I’m going to
break my comments today into three parts around that theme: first, I’m going to
talk about how other people helped give me access to the world I’m part of now;
second, I’m going to talk about how that idea of access carries over into my
research life; and lastly, I’ll wrap up by talking a little bit about and why I
think we all need to open up our research lives to bigger audiences.
Part 1: How did we get
here?
First: I’m going to narrate you through
some of the important mentoring experiences that got me here, which means I
need to tell you a little bit about my background. I grew up outside of Providence, Rhode Island
in the city of Pawtucket – a place known for dirty water, corrupt politicians,
and the Triple A farm team for the Boston Red Sox. My dad worked three jobs for most of my
childhood while attending college at night.
(He got his bachelor’s degree when I was fourteen.) My mom stayed home with me until I started
kindergarten, when she started working as a teaching assistant in the local
school district. And then there was me,
the child who got so focused on whatever she was reading that she genuinely
didn’t hear her parents, say, calling her for dinner. (This was the cause of some good-natured
disagreements between me and my dad.)
My dad’s parents lived around the corner,
and the first person who taught me about access was my grandmother, Joan. Grandma was one of the first three female
clergy in the Episcopal Church in the state of Rhode Island. In the late 1970s, the church started to
discuss possibly ordaining women, something that began to happen in the early
1980s. My grandmother had spent most of
her adult life working various part-time, so called “pink collar” jobs, raising
three kids while my grandfather worked unpredictable hours as a lineman for the
electric company. But she’d always felt
connected to the church, and she was excited about these new potential
possibilities for women. There was just
one problem – if she was going to become a priest, she needed a college degree
to be able to attend seminary.
So she got one, a couple of classes at a
time at the University of Rhode Island.
And a few years later, she invited her three grown kids over for dinner.
This story predates me, but as my father
tells it, it went a little bit like this: Grandma called all three of her
children over for dinner one Friday night (and when my grandma told you to do
something, you did it.) All five of them
sat down around the table in the dining room of the house they had grown up in,
the first floor of an old two-story tenement home. Once everyone was sitting down and had been
served dinner, my grandmother declared: “Well, I’m going to be living in New
York City for a few years. You kids will
have to look in on your father.” (New
York is home to General Theological Seminary, where she studied with two other
women from Rhode Island, making flashcards for their Greek language class that
she cheerfully threw away as soon as she possibly could.) My grandfather, to his credit, didn’t need
that much looking in on, but he drove four hours every weekend to visit my
grandmother in New York City. They used
to buy bagels and sit on a bench near Times Square to watch the people go by, every
weekend while my grandmother earned her master’s degree and then doctorate in
divinity.
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| Rev. Joan McShane performing a baptism (mine). |
My grandmother was an important model to
me for a lot of reasons. She was the
first person in my family to spend any part of her life living anywhere but
Rhode Island (besides military service).
But she also taught me something about grabbing opportunities, even
opportunities that lead you down unconventional paths. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she faced a lot of
resistance, even from close friends, at the idea of a woman priest. People refused to go to her ordination, left
the church when she preached, or refused to take communion from her. (There wasn’t even a title for her when she
was ordained – in the Episcopal tradition, especially in the 1980s, you usually
called clergy “Father so-and-so,” but she sort of had to make her own
rules.) But she understood that she was
opening doors for more women to come after her, as indeed they have. Access sometimes means you have to kick the
door down so you can hold it open for the people behind you.
Now we have to fast forward a few years –
to me, high school aged Kara, looking at colleges. I was seventeen with absolutely no idea what
I wanted to do. (If this doesn’t sound
familiar to some of you, you’re lying.) To
complicate things, while I’m not the first person in my family to have a
college degree – I follow after Grandma Joan and my dad - I was the first
person in my family to go to college in the traditional, post-high-school way. This meant that my family had no idea what we
were doing. Financial aid letters were
terrifying. Leaving the state was
terrifying. Everywhere I applied was no
more than an hour from home. So I wound up at a liberal arts college called College of the Holy Cross. And eventually, after dabbling with history
and political science and even physics for one memorable semester, I settled on
an English major.
But as much as I’d loved books since even
before I learned to read them myself, I immediately encountered a problem with
my English major. You see, in order to
complete it, I had to take two course in literature from before 1800. As far as I was concerned, this amounted to
cruel and unusual punishment – what did stuff that was hundreds of years old
have to do with people now? And why
should I be subjected to it?
Furious, I signed up for a course called
“Arthurian Romance.” (It turned out this was a great choice for a lot of
reasons. One of the things I hadn’t foreseen was that a friend from my work-study
job took that class with me, and now she’s my wife.) I figured that if I had to
read all this crappy old stuff, I could at least take the King Arthur course,
which at least sounded vaguely cool. And
the professor was supposed to be pretty scandalous – she was a feminist, which
was pretty wild for my Jesuit college.
The second person who taught me about
access was Sarah Stanbury. Professor
Stanbury led us through a lot of old literature – I mean a lot, her syllabus was pretty brutal – but she never just answered
our questions. (In fact, she almost
never answered our questions.) We’d ask
her something, and she’d ask more questions.
It was infuriating. And so was
the literature! We read a work called
the Knight of the Cart, by Chretien de Troyes.
(It’s a Lancelot and Guinevere story.)
But it was like nothing I’d ever read before, because the narrator kept
on interjecting, interrupting the story for pages at a time. The story would be moving along – Lancelot goes
off on a quest to find Guinevere, who’s been captured by an enemy prince. And then here comes Chretien with a four page
discourse on knightly honor and the importance of reputation and the shame of
Lancelot sitting in a cart instead of riding a horse. Four pages.
I was not impressed.
But I was getting pretty good at the
college thing, so I went to office hours.
“Why?” I asked Professor Stanbury.
“Why won’t Chretien just shut up and tell the story? Why does he think I care about his long,
boring digressions about love or honor or whatever?”
And she sat back in her chair, looking
thoughtful. “That’s a good question,”
she told me. “It sounds like a paper.”
I was still not impressed. And I didn’t really want to write the paper,
but I had to write a paper for the class anyway. So I started digging, trying to find out what
people thought was going on with medieval narrators.
And then I was hooked. It turned out, I wasn’t the first person with
that question. A lot of people had asked
it, and written about it. Suddenly there
was a conversation going on, and a professor cared what I thought about
it. I took a Chaucer class. And if I was doing that, probably, I thought,
I should take Shakespeare – I was an English major, after all. I decided to do an honors thesis on Chaucer –
mostly so I could keep working with Professor Stanbury - and I realized I
didn’t know enough about Chaucer’s time period to understand everything I
wanted to. So I took history – and art history, and philosophy, and suddenly I accidentally
had a medieval studies minor. Professor
Stanbury taught me about access in a few ways – first off, she gave me access
to a world I hadn’t realized existed.
And she helped me realize that yes, a kid from Pawtucket, Rhode Island,
whose parents delivered newspapers on Sunday morning to put her through
college, had a place in that world, as a thinker and a researcher and a writer.
But more importantly, she showed me that
there was a way to get paid to ask questions, to have conversations about
literature and the past. So I went to
graduate school at the University of Rochester, and that’s where I got my next
lesson in access, from a man named Thomas Hahn.
Tom was my graduate school adviser, the
person who supervised my dissertation research.
And Tom studied literature I hadn’t realized existed. He studied what he once called in a seminar
“the pop culture junk of the Middle Ages”: the stuff that fell outside what
people had for years understood as medieval literature. (To make medieval literature a serious pursuit,
it was essential to make it absolutely no fun, and scholarly attention went to
the “good stuff” – the poetry that was part of what we call the canon, the
things that smart people had deemed beautiful and worthy of study.) Sure, Tom taught Chaucer, but he also studied
Robin Hood ballads, English romance, medieval women’s writing, and crappy poems
that only existed in one copy. Mark
Twain reportedly once said that a classic was a book that everyone wants to
have read, but no one wants to read. Tom
studied the things that people *did* read.
Up until that point, I don’t think I realized that was allowed.
It was a simple but powerful idea for me –
if you really want to understand the culture that produced a particular kind of
literature, you need to understand a range of their cultural products. Imagine what it would be like if you were trying
to understand England in the 1990s by reading nothing but the Harry Potter
books. They’re great books – a rich,
complex world – but they can only give you insight into a tiny part of the whole
picture, and you’d probably come away with some completely ridiculous
misunderstandings about the time period.
Tom’s lesson on access not only brought me into professional academic
study – which he did, and has done with tremendous skill for upwards of
twenty-five doctoral students – but it taught me about the importance of making
that kind of pop culture junk accessible, about opening up the kinds of things
we think are worthy of studying. And
that, essentially, is what guides my research now.
Part 2: So what exactly
do I do here?
I’m part of a larger scholarly movement to
crack open what we mean by “the Middle Ages,” working alongside people in all
kinds of fields. Most of your professors
have a few research projects going on at once, but one of my big ones this
summer is an edition of a Middle English poem from the fifteenth century called
The Destruction of Jerusalem. There are eleven copies of it in the world –
which suggests that probably it was reasonably well-read in the Middle Ages –
but no one’s edited a version of it since 1905.
(In the sixties, some scholars noted that the 1905 edition was really
bad, but no one did anything about it.
This is actually great news, because it’s where my collaborator and I
come in.)
I’m going to actually read you the summary
of the poem I submitted to the press I’m publishing the edition with:
The
Destruction of Jerusalem, alternately titled Titus and Vespasian, consists of
approximately 5100 rhymed lines. Its somewhat winding narrative recounts the
death of Jesus before describing a messenger named Nathan, sent by Pontius Pilate
to Rome. Nathan is blown off course,
however, and lands in Gascony, where the king Vespasian is suffering from
leprosy and a swarm of wasps living in his nose. Nathan’s description of the death and
resurrection of Christ leads Vespasian to send a messenger to Jerusalem, and
Vespasian’s messenger returns to Gascony with Veronica and her vernicle, the
cloth with which she touched Jesus.
After he is miraculously healed through the vernicle’s power, Vespasian
vows to destroy Christ’s murderers, and he and his son Titus set out with an
army for Jerusalem. The rest of the poem
describes the seven year siege of the city, the extreme conditions within
Jerusalem, and the ruthless treatment of the city’s Jewish inhabitants after
the siege ends. The work exists in two major variants: the Short Version
follows the trajectory outlined above, while the Long Version includes two
major digressions, one on the posthumous travels of Pilate’s corpse, which the
earth will not accept after his death, and one on the life of Judas Iscariot,
including his incestuous marriage to his mother and eventual suicide.
I’m not kidding – I sent that paragraph to
the press.
This poem is, from any modern perspective,
weird. It’s inconsistent, graphically
violent, appallingly anti-Semitic, and, to top it all off, it’s pretty mediocre
as far as poetry goes. It’s also a
complete reimaging of actual historical events, the actual siege of Jerusalem
by Roman forces that took place from 66-73 CE, a siege sparked by Jewish
protests of Roman rule. (Titus and
Vespasian were real people: Vespasian was the emperor of Rome from 69-79 CE,
and Titus succeeded him.) So if this
poem is bad poetry *and* bad history, then what possessed me – and my
collaborator, fellow Holy Cross alum Dr. Mark Wright – to do an edition? And what do I even mean by “doing an
edition”?
Editions are literally about access. Much though I’d like to, I can’t bring you
all to study the original manuscripts with me, and even if I could, it would
take a lot of practice before you really knew what to do with them. But by examining them ourselves, Dr. Wright
and I can create a version of the text that you can engage with. Let me walk you through the process: we start
with manuscripts. For this project,
seven of them: there’s one at Yale, at the Beinecke Library; three at the
Bodleian Library at Oxford; and three at the British Library in London. There’s also one in New York City, at the
Pierpont Morgan Library, that I am hoping to visit. We transcribe the entire poem, copying every
letter, weird mistake, as best as we can read them. In the process, we make note of damage to the
manuscript, or marginal notes someone has written in, or where there might be
illuminated letters meant to indicate section breaks or make it easier for
someone to find a passage. Then we
compare our transcribed versions to try to find scribal errors in our base
text; and then we very gently do what’s called emending the text, correcting
those scribal mistakes and noting variations in the different transcriptions. Then we create what’s called a reader’s
text. That’s exactly what it sounds
like: it’s a version of the poem that a modern reader can interact with in a
relatively straightforward way. (So, for
example, the letters I and J are often used interchangeably in Middle English,
but this is confusing for a modern reader, so we follow the press’s policy of
modernizing them.)
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| A shelf full of METS texts. |
The final version looks a little like
this. The Middle English Texts Series is a project,
fully funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities for the past twenty
years, that makes hard-to-find texts that scholars want to teach available in
scholarly, inexpensive editions. A team
of staff editors at the University of Rochester helps make the work available
online, which is especially helpful for scholars in other parts of the world,
for whom shipping the books is often cost-prohibitive. (The series has produced over 80 volumes,
with many, many more in progress by editors across the world.) In doing this, I’m opening up access to the
material of the Middle Ages – simply put, people can’t teach The Destruction of Jerusalem right now,
and they will be able to teach it once this version’s published. Transcribing manuscripts is also a way of
opening up access: one of the copies of the poem that I’ll be working with in a
couple of weeks, at the British Library, hasn’t been transcribed before.
But Dr. Wright and I are also opening up –
I hope – our understanding of the Middle Ages.
As weird as this poem is – and it’s pretty weird, which is part of why I
love it – it has very strong connections to a lot of medieval English
literature, especially drama, literature about the Crusades, broader medieval
traditions of anti-Semitism, and other works.
(It even has a shorter “sister text” called The Siege of Jerusalem, which has gotten a lot of attention from
scholars lately, so I think this version of Destruction
of Jerusalem will help us better understand the tradition of this
poem.) But most importantly, reading The Destruction of Jerusalem helps us
understand how medieval people reimagined and reshaped the past through their
literature. Why did they create this
totally fictionalized account of an actual historical event? What does their version tell us about the
values of this poem’s creators? How has
this poem influenced our own perceptions of these historical events? I’ve alluded to the fact that the poem is
appallingly anti-Semitic and quite violent – it pays a lot of attention to acts
of cannibalism, massive piles of smelly corpses, and mass starvation – and I
actually think that those details are important, too. We need to read and engage with works of
literature that make us uncomfortable – not just for the sake of being uncomfortable,
but because they shake up our expectations and help us understand the world
we’re living in now.
Part 3: Medievalists and
the Twenty-First Century!
This idea of reshaping the past is where I
want to end, talking about another interest of mine, medievalism. (Medievalism is basically any reimaging of
the Middle Ages created after the Middle Ages.
So it covers anything from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poetry to Renaissance
Faires to Skyrim to Tolkien.) Outside
the scholarly world, the Middle Ages is everywhere. Medievalists hold the dubious honor of
getting more random e-mails than people specializing in any other period:
nearly every medievalist I know has a story of that time someone e-mailed them (or
in the old days, called) to explain how they were related to King Arthur, knew
the truth about the real Robin Hood, or were otherwise connected to
semi-mythical shenanigans.
Who’s read Chaucer? Who’s seen Game of Thrones? Lord of the Rings? The Netflix Marco Polo series? The new King Arthur movie? The horrible Robin Hood movie from a few
years ago? A lot of our modern cultural
productions rely on particular ideas about the Middle Ages, and those ideas often
don’t include the cultural diversity of the period. One of the other things I do in my scholarly
life is serving on the editorial board of an online, open-access journal called
Medievally Speaking. The journal
provides reviews of medieval-ish things: from books to TV shows to King Arthur
cloth diapers. (Not kidding.) Our goal in doing so is to explore why we’re
still so fascinated with the Middle Ages – to examine the range of ways in
which we repurpose and reconstruct the period and how those reconstructions, in
turn, shape today’s world.
In fact, lately something sinister has
been happening with how we recycle the Middle Ages in modern society. Scholars and critics have noticed since 2001
how the Middle Ages is invoked to talk about Islam, for example, especially how
framing a major world religion as “medieval” has become a way to present it as
simultaneously backward and exotic. But
something new has happened lately – new and troubling – as the Middle Ages is reimagined
as a glorified time of white Christian supremacy. Thus, an idea of the Middle Ages gets
deployed over and over, often accompanied by violence. To give only two recent examples: in late
2016, a mosque in Scotland was defaced with Crusader slogans – “deus vult” and
“Saracen go home.” In the US, the killer
in Portland, Oregon who verbally attacked two women he perceived as Muslim –
and then killed two people who came to their defense, seriously injuring a
third – likewise invoked the medieval. He reportedly shouted “hail Vinland,”
taking his inspiration from the Vinland Sagas, two thirteenth-century Icelandic
texts.
Less violent, but no less fascinating, was
former FBI director James Comey’s invocation of twelfth-century Archbishop of
Canterbury Thomas Becket in his testimony before Congress, when Comey claimed
that Donald Trump thought of him as a “meddlesome priest.” The line invokes a quote from the 1964 movie Becket about the Archbishop’s conflicts
with King Henry II of England, in which Henry asks if no one will rid him of
this meddlesome priest and four knights take him at his word and murder the
archbishop. (The line was a later
invention – that is, not medieval – as Sara Lipton observes.)
The point here is that all of these are
constructions of a Middle Ages that literally doesn’t exist -- it never
existed. Except maybe in movies. But as images, they hold a huge amount of
power. To be clear, this isn’t a new
problem: it’s exactly the same problem that I see in how Destruction of Jerusalem re-imagines the Roman siege of the city,
in fact. But it seems to me that it’s an
especially urgent problem right now – one that I as a scholar have an
obligation and an opportunity to do something about. It’s important to me that I provide access to
the medieval world – to students, yes, but also through projects like
Medievally Speaking, or in my other hat as a blogger – not so much because
facts are important (although they are), but because I believe that we need to
think critically about how we reconstruct the past, especially the medieval
past. I think examining medievalism
tells us more about our own culture – our values, our interests, and our
problems – than it does about the Middle Ages.
And that’s the point. In
understanding what various people imagine the Middle Ages to be, we can better
understand their very real, very contemporary agendas.
Okay, but with one or two exceptions, you
aren’t medievalists. So where does that
leave you? I’m in literature, so I don’t
think I can control how you interpret this talk, but here are some things I
hope you’ll take away to your own scholarly and creative lives:
Don’t be afraid to kick the door
down. (There are opportunities out there
for you. Sometimes things fall into your
lap, and that’s fantastic. Sometimes
they don’t. Kick the door down even when
people don’t understand why you’re doing what you’re doing – and don’t forget
to hold it open for the people behind you.)
Try something you’re certain you’ll
hate. (First off, this is literally what
college is for. But more importantly,
you never know how that class that sounds completely horrible will shape who
you become.)
We can’t always see the ways that our
research might matter when we start out. That’s okay.
(Obviously I didn’t become a medievalist so I could challenge people’s
invocation of crusader slogans in 2017.)
But you should still think seriously about why other people need your
research and how you can get it out into the world. (I was so inspired by your presentations
early in the summer – each of you are doing really important, inspiring,
valuable work. Knowing how and why it’s
important, and thinking about how to tell other people it’s important, will
make you a better researcher – but it will also inspire you in turn to keep
going on the long days.)
At
the risk of ending with a cliché “get out there and save the world,” I have to
admit that I’m an optimist. I believe
that research matters – questions matter.
So I’m grateful to all of you for your work this summer, pursuing
questions that matter to you, and for this opportunity to share some of the
ones that matter to me. Get out there
and save the world.
