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6 - ‘Mobile as Wishes’: Anchoritism, Intersubjectivity, and Disability in the Liber confortatorius
- Edited by Larissa Tracy, Longwood University, Virginia, Geert H. M. Claassens, KU Leuven, Belgium
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- Book:
- Medieval English and Dutch Literatures: the European Context
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 08 October 2022
- Print publication:
- 12 July 2022, pp 103-126
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Summary
GOSCELIN OF ST Bertin's Liber confortatorius (Book of Encouragement) [hereafter the Liber] is the first known work of spiritual guidance for an anchoress to have been composed in England. It is also a deeply personal letter designed to assuage the heartbreak occasioned by Goscelin's loss of his former student Eve, who had left Wilton Abbey (where Goscelin was probably serving as chaplain) c. 1080 to embrace a more reclusive life as an anchoress in Angers. Distraught over Eve's unannounced departure, Goscelin envisions the Liber as a substitute for his physical presence, a textual surrogate that might effectively reconnect two bodies whose former closeness was severed by geographic distance. Although the fact of their separation is bitter to Goscelin, he seeks comfort in the idea that ‘Loquetur etiam edificatius tenax pagina quam fluxa lingua’ [the tenacious page will speak more edifyingly than the fluid tongue] and that ‘alligare et refouere nos poterit intercurrens epistola’ [a letter shuttling back and forth can reconnect us and keep us warm].
The connection with Eve that Goscelin hopes to engender by his self-described peregrina epistola (26) ‘pilgrim letter’ (19) is merely one aspect of the Liber's sustained fascination with chaste human intimacies. Composed in the early 1080s during the first flourishing of Gregorian reforms, Goscelin's letter is filled with images that explore corporeal configurations and the spiritual and intellectual closeness they enable or refuse: conjoined female twins fused from the navel down; a hermit with his limbs stuck in a tree for fifteen years; a ‘double man’ sporting two torsos, four hands and feet, but only one soul; a dead girl whose womb swells with her foster father's unborn child; and the Liber itself, a letter to a lost beloved sealed with both lips and tears. That the Liber displays a strong interest in bodily union and spiritual intermingling is, in many ways, unsurprising. The text took shape during the early years of clerical reform, a religious movement notorious among scholars of women and gender for its increased scrutiny of human bodies and their interactions. Although scholars have amply recognized the Liber's investment in interpersonal relations, they have yet to investigate the extent to which interconnected, immobile, or restricted bodies – figures with physical configurations often categorized under the modern rubric of ‘disability’ – inform Goscelin's efforts to theorize the possibilities and dangers of human intimacy.
5 - Hawk Taming and Humanity in The Fortunes of Men
- Edited by Jacqueline Fay, Rebecca Stephenson, Renée R. Trilling
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- Book:
- Textual Identities in Early Medieval England
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 26 May 2022
- Print publication:
- 11 March 2022, pp 107-132
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To train a hawk you must watch it like a hawk… . Then you gain the ability to predict what it will do next… . Eventually you don't see the hawk's body language at all. You seem to feel what it feels. Notice what it notices. The hawk's apprehension becomes your own… . It was happening now. I had put myself in the hawk's wild mind to tame her, and as the days passed in the darkened room my humanity was burning away.
—H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald (2014)MY EPIGRAPH, taken from Helen Macdonald's prize-winning memoir on hawk taming, captures the central concern of this essay: that close attention to birds and their behavior sheds light on the protean nature of ontological boundaries. As Macdonald immerses herself in the rhythms of hawk life in order to tame the wild goshawk Mabel – a quest propelled by the hope that ditching her humanity will also free her from the grief occasioned by her father's sudden death – she gains insight into the limitations of being human as well as a glimpse of the world through a new ontological lens. At once a biography of the deeply troubled novelist T. H. White, best known for his Arthurian novel The Once and Future King, and an elegy for her father's passing, Macdonald's account of a year spent losing a father and finding a hawk underscores the fine line between the human and the nonhuman animal world, as well as the processes of taming and socialization that serve to maintain or, conversely, to bridge this divide.
H is for Hawk is set partly in Cambridge, the home of Macdonald, and partly in Scotland, the home of her newly acquired goshawk, Mabel. My essay revisits bird life in Britain while taking us back in time to a body of literature similarly fascinated by the boundaries of humanity, yet composed over a millennium before Macdonald set out to soften the edges of both her goshawk and her grief. More specifically, my essay investigates representations of avian life in the ninety-eight-line Old English wisdom poem known variously as The Fortunes of Men, The Fates of Men, and The Fates of Mortals, and preserved in the late tenth-century Exeter Book.
Introduction: Feminism and Early English Studies Now
- Edited by Helene Scheck, Christine E. Kozikowski
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- Book:
- New Readings on Women and Early Medieval English Literature and Culture
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 20 November 2020
- Print publication:
- 31 December 2019, pp 1-20
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IN MAY 2014, a group of Anglo-Saxonists gathered at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, Michigan, for a roundtable to develop plans for a “new” version of Helen Damico and Alexandra Hennessy Olsen's pathbreaking volume, New Readings on Women in Old English Literature, which appeared nearly thirty years ago. Discussions concerning the shape and content of the proposed volume were lively, yet they produced, perhaps unsurprisingly, little consensus. Feminist scholars tend to resist univocal narratives; lack of consensus is thus a proud hallmark of feminist research. The attraction to debate and difference in feminist theory and praxis serves as an acknowledgement of how variables such as age, social status, race, ethnicity, nationality, and sexuality produce profoundly different social and psychological realities for women. Such differences help to explain the necessarily diversified and fractured nature of feminism's aims and goals. The appeal of plurality and dissent also lies in their longstanding role as catalysts for feminist knowledge production, an enterprise that has, historically, thrived on self-critique and on a willingness to think beyond its previously constructed borders. As Elizabeth Weed writes: “The critical advantage of the feminist project has been that when one area of feminism has settled on a truth, another has emerged to disrupt that truth, to keep at bay truths too easily produced by cultural and political formations.”
Perhaps the most damaging of these “too easily produced truths,” and one that feminists during the past half century have sought to disrupt, is the idea of Woman as a unitary group. Women of colour and queer feminists, in particular, have made great strides in exposing the category of Woman as a fantasy of commonality, fabricated through the repression of individual women's lived experiences, as well as a normativizing concept that naturalizes rigid sex-gender systems based on strict polarities and categorical distinctions between men and women. Questions about thoughtful plurality, multiple perspectives, and differences among women figured centrally at the Kalamazoo roundtable in 2014. They also figured centrally in the early Middle Ages.
Contributors
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- By Alberto Albanese, Karine Auré, Selim R. Benbadis, Jose Biller, Matthew Bower, Francisco Cardoso, Kelvin L. Chou, Rima M. Dafer, Praveen Dayalu, Michelle M. Dompenciel, Eissa Ibrahim Al Eissa, Alberto J. Espay, Hubert H. Fernandez, Brent L. Fogel, Steven Frucht, Victor S. C. Fung, Néstor Gálvez-Jiménez, David Grabli, Era Hanspal, Claire Henchcliffe, Nelson Hwynn, Kurt A. Jellinger, Julia Johnson, Danita Jones, Daniel Kantor, Ninith Kartha, Jan Kassubek, Taranum Khan, Samuel Kim, Christine Klein, Neeraj Kumar, Roger Kurlan, Corneliu Luca, Ramon Lugo, Roneil Malkani, Giacomo Della Marca, Marcelo Merello, Henry Moore, Sarkis Morales-Vidal, Santiago Perez-Lloret, Susan Perlman, Elmar H. Pinkhardt, David E. Riley, Emmanuel Roze, Daniel S. Sa, Virgilio D. Salanga, Michael J. Schneck, Susanne A. Schneider, David Shprecher, Carlos Singer, Mark Stacy, Sylvia Stemberger, Pichet Termsarasab, Paul J. Tuite, Marie Vidailhet, Mary Vo, Ruth H. Walker, Gregor K. Wenning, Cindy Zadikoff
- Edited by Néstor Gálvez-Jiménez, Paul Tuite, University of Minnesota
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- Book:
- Uncommon Causes of Movement Disorders
- Published online:
- 05 August 2011
- Print publication:
- 12 May 2011, pp ix-xii
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