Elizabeth Scala | The University of Texas at Austin (original) (raw)

Papers by Elizabeth Scala

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2009

Petrarch’s skull and Ovid’s shells, giants’ teeth and book reviews, the Hereford map and the Helg... more Petrarch’s skull and Ovid’s shells, giants’ teeth and book reviews, the Hereford map and the Helgeland film: these are but some of the artifacts collected here as touchstones for reflection upon the place of historicism in the field of medieval literary studies today. We begin with the acknowledgment that historicism has become the Jamesonian “cultural dominant” of our field, one whose posture “allows for the presence and coexistence of a range of very different, yet subordinate, features.”1 Our volume further assumes that historicism’s dominant status ought to mark it, for all medievalists, as an object (or perhaps an artifact) primed for reexamination and redefinition. Through such a “historicizing of historicism,” this collection aims more broadly to encourage a profession-wide interrogation of contemporary critical practices—where they came from, what they mean for their practitioners, and what future orientations they might assume.

Philological Quarterly, Jun 22, 2006

The Middle English romances have profited from recent attention to a number of features: their po... more The Middle English romances have profited from recent attention to a number of features: their popularity, their social discourse and varied audiences, and, most particularly, their manuscript context in important household anthologies and non-aristocratic collections. Attention to such features reveals that both merchant class readers and the texts they consumed are more self-conscious than their sometimes plain and inconspicuous textual format advertises. In particular, British Library MS Cotton Caligula A.ii's Emare figures its textual status through its centrally important object: a woven cloth depicting a number of famous literary lovers. Functioning as a romance text itself, this cloth offers a story of its own production as well as the value of the Middle English romance text that contains it. As we will see in a materially historicized reading of the texture and textuality of Emare, the manuscript book's merchant class audience may have been more aware of the ways its social status, woven into textiles and reproduced by its texts, is negotiated through its manuscript possessions than has been previously thought. Such self-consciousness argues against the current understanding of Emare and Middle English romances more generally, which have not been considered particularly sophisticated productions. More so than other narratives, even, Emare has suffered from critical neglect, as well as a myopic focus on the cloth. As the poem's central object, the cloth has isolated Emare almost as much as the plot isolates the romance's eponymous heroine, who is set out to sea in a version of the "outcast wife" tale. As the almost exclusive focus of most critical accounts, the cloth has circumscribed Emare's significance and meaning, drawing attention away from the cultural and historical realms at issue in other texts. Recently, Ad Putter has framed the problem with Emare in terms of a kind of generic over-pliability--what amounts to a distinct lack of historical specificity. He admits to "the awkward position of having to say about the text things that might equally be said about countless other[s]" because, in effect, it is not "original, self-conscious, ironical, [or] historically specific." (1) As a result, we tend to read Emare like a folktale, with a very general and generalizing set of cultural assumptions and insights. Preoccupying the handful of studies devoted to the romance, the cloth's lengthy description prefaces the relatively brief narrative in which she is at first exiled for repulsing the incestuous advances of her father and later expelled from her husband's realm (with her newborn son) through the evil machinations of a jealous mother-in-law. With its elaborate, gem-encrusted surface depicting amorous literary figures, the cloth's description provides the longest non-narrative sequence in an otherwise economical story. Because it persists as Emare's possession during her exile and because it is worn in the scenes of return and eventual reunification with husband and father, the cloth has been considered the romance's identifying marker, similar to Orfeo's harp. (2) Among shifting critical concerns in recent years about romance and the cultural work it can accomplish, Emare's cloth (and the cloak into which it is fashioned) has blocked similar interpretations of the poem. (3) One could even say that interpreting the cloth amounts to interpreting the poem itself and possibly the medieval culture that produced and consumed it. Its readings implicitly weave a different narrative out of the cloth to which the romance submits, while at the same time preventing the poem from participating in our larger historical or cultural narratives of the later Middle Ages. The problem with criticism on Emare, however, is not its attention to the cloth bur its reluctance to take its insights about this object further. (4) Indeed, despite Putter's claim that Emare lacks a specific historical context, I will read the material texture of Emare's cloth--its inscription within late medieval manuscript culture. …

Medieval feminist forum, Aug 1, 2009

Medieval feminist forum, Sep 1, 2000

meet an undergraduate who has been taught by a student and s/he tells me they feel they have had ... more meet an undergraduate who has been taught by a student and s/he tells me they feel they have had a course with me. That is enough. And the burning issue of 19597 I am still married to the same man, a dedicated scientist and clinician who taught me how to do without sleep. Our two daughters, born while I was in graduate school, survived a working mom. We now exchange books on women. Both did master's programs in public health. One is a risk-assessment specialist working in environmental clean-up projects in California, the other is a pediatrician doing intensive care and public health research in Texas (although she majored in art at Wellesley, and took the survey course with Elizabeth Pastan). On vacation, we read and work-out and travel together. Between us all (with two sons-in-law) we can manage in Arabic, French, German, Japanese, Spanish and Russian. Madeline Caviness Tufts llniversity SCANDALOUS ASSUMPTIONS: EDITH RICKERT AND THECHICAGO CHAUCER PROJECT Long before Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons shared the secrets of Hollywood celebrities in their newspaper bylines, gossip appeared as a particularly feminine discourse. Chaucer's Wife of Bath depicts herself, to the outrage of her fifth husband, sitting in the company of her"gossib ... Alisoun" and telling all the secrets, however embarrassing, he entrusted to her (III,529-30).1 But if gossip might be understood from at least the Middle Ages forward as a discourse ofwomen, a discourse in which they actively engage, it can also function more invidiously (as the Wife herself acknowledges throughout her Prologue) as a discourse about women. This connection is particularly evident in the case of the female medievalist whose life and accomplishments I have researched off and on for the past five years, Edith Rickert. The lesser praised partner of the famous "Manly and Rickert" editorial team, she has been the subject of a number of rumors, documented and undocumented, concerning her sexuality. In fact, my interest in Rickert began as a result of just such gossip. I will begin, of course, by sharing it. This conversation occurred sometime around 1992, while I was in graduate school. With some fellow graduate students and a couple of our learned professors, I happened to be discussing the gendered politics of textual editing during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One of these professors intentionally provoked me by declaring that no woman had ever edited a major Middle English author. I will spare us his random theorizing on this

Exemplaria, 1994

... Geraldine Heng describes an "excessive" plotting between women that Morgan's s... more ... Geraldine Heng describes an "excessive" plotting between women that Morgan's story establishes: ... 22 Geraldine Heng, "Feminine Knots and the Other Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," PMLA 93 (1991): 500-514, at 501. Page 9. ...

New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession, Apr 19, 2023

Etudes Epistémè, Apr 1, 2014

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is, among other things, a compendium of genres. Among the pilgrims' va... more Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is, among other things, a compendium of genres. Among the pilgrims' various tales we find many with French sources-romances, fabliaux, moral exempla, penitential materials, and, of course, Breton lais. Telling a version of the story of the damsel's rash promise, the Franklin's Tale is the only one to announce itself specifically as a Breton lai. In her husband's absence, Dorigen promises her love to another man if he can remove all the rocks off the coast of Brittany, an act she believes to be impossible and one that she mentally connects with her husband's safety. While explicit, the Franklin's Tale's relation to the Breton lai remains much less clear than it might seem from the tale's Prologue, where the Franklin foregrounds its genre and the literary history it invokes right from the start: Thise olde gentil Britouns in hir dayes Of diverse aventures maden layes, Rymeyed in hir firste Briton tonge, Whiche layes with hir instrumentz they songe Or elles redden hem for hir plesaunce, And oon of hem have I in remembraunce, Which I shal seyn with good wyl as I kan. 1 Despite the seemingly specific context the Franklin offers, the tale is, in the words of Claire Vial, an 'excellent forgery.' 2 Scholars long ago established that its inheritances run toward Boccaccio's Italian novelle (primarily in Il Filocolo and, more recently, the Decameron). 3 The Franklin's Tale relates to no known 'Breton', Anglo-Norman, or French source. When scholars have considered why the Franklin calls his tale a Breton lai, the results have devolved on the Franklin as a narrator and the performance he 1 All quotations from the Canterbury Tales are taken from The Canterbury Tales, Complete, ed.

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2009

... in Medieval Iberian Literature by Michelle M. Hamilton Paradigms and Methods in Early Medieva... more ... in Medieval Iberian Literature by Michelle M. Hamilton Paradigms and Methods in Early Medieval Studies edited by Celia Chazelle and Felice ... Period edited by Don J. Wyatt Wisdom and Her Lovers in Medieval and Early Modern Hispanic Literature by Emily C. Francomano ...

The Chaucer Review, 2010

Well read and often studied, the General Prologue of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales has been ana... more Well read and often studied, the General Prologue of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales has been analyzed less in terms of the pleasure it provides than in terms of history: the medieval act of pilgrimage and the meaning of the social cat-egories to which the pilgrims belong. The effect of such ...

Notes and Queries, Aug 21, 2021

Arthuriana, 2007

The ongoing film, print, and merchandizing phenomenon surrounding J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter... more The ongoing film, print, and merchandizing phenomenon surrounding J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series makes for a timely interrogation of medievalist, and particularly Arthurian, work. While many university scholars lament the dwindling attention and funds given to medievalist projects, the Middle Ages seems very much alive and well in its popular formations. Both youth and adult cultures are obsessed with the Middle Ages, even beyond the indication that we might perceive from the castle-inhabiting, wizarding narratives of Rowling that have made Harry Potter the best-selling series in publishing history. The fanaticism prompted and fueled by the Star Wars franchise and the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, the cult following of Monty Python and the Holy Grail and its recent re-vivication in the Broadway production of Spamalot, also provide obvious signs of the popularity of the Middle Ages in the contemporary imagination. But there are numerous others to be found in television advertising: IBM, the U.S. Marines, Capital One Credit Cards, and Jack-in-the-Box restaurants each use medieval, and specifically Arthurian, ad campaigns. An IBM commercial, in which a patient relays an Arthurian dream of pulling the sword from the stone to a Freudian psychoanalyst may be the most telling in terms of the location of our medievalist fantasies in our dreams of work, functionality, and computer-assisted productivity. For all its vast distance and cultural displacements, the Arthurian fiction fully inhabits our post-Freudian unconscious and reappears in our dreamwork as well as our enjoyments. Most pervasively, and most consistently, the Arthurian dream inhabits our childhood and the enjoyments we produce for our children. Lego, Playmobile, Playskool, and Barbie have elaborately developed medieval world-building products. With Playmobile one can choose a multi-unit, elaborate 'King's Castle,' or a Viking ship, and re-enact Danish raids on the Angles or the Norman conquest. Playmobile's miniature accessories, which include crossbows, longbows, quiver with removable arrows, frothing beer steins, various helmets (some with nose plates), shields, plate armor, and detachable facial hair, enable a wide variety of historical play. (My children use the 'Fairy Tale Castle,' which appears to be a semi-Restoration-cum-Cinderella affair, to represent the French and mock up the Hundred Years' War with the very English King's Castle noted above.) This is but one example. Children's culture is saturated with medieval dolls, toys, books and imaginative costume of all kinds and levels of elaborateness (take especial note of the Magic Cabin catalogue and its array of medieval dolls, dress, and equipment for Waldorf educational play). Perhaps most recently and potentially most importantly, the world of video gaming takes the re-vivication of the Middle Ages to its greatest possibilities. Operating beyond the annual 'Renaissance Faire' that might be close enough to attend or the 'Medieval Feast' theme restaurants at various tourist attractions we might visit, we are able to inhabit medieval worlds to the furthest extent that our digital imaginations can reach through games like Everquest and Final Fantasy. Where such virtual medievalism poses technological anxieties, we can always turn to the back of the latest airline shoppers' magazine to buy a letter opener in the form of Aragorn's reforged sword, Anduril. Should one want a full-sized replica, one need only get on the mailing list (or website) for 'Museum Replicas Limited,' 'a division of the Atlanta Cutlery Corporation.' The array of 'historically accurate, battle-ready swords, daggers, axes and helmets,' as advertised on the cover of catalog #83, allows for a grown-up, real time version of any kind of Playmobile universe (pirates, vikings, etc.) or full participation in the detailed Hollywood visualization of one's favorite medieval book. These adult devices are not very different from children's products. …

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2002

Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 2009

Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Jun 1, 2017

ABSTRACT: Shakespeare’s Cymbeline is one of his most medieval works. Its plot, setting, and thema... more ABSTRACT: Shakespeare’s Cymbeline is one of his most medieval works. Its plot, setting, and thematics refashion Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale, which provided Shakespeare with both raw material and structures of dramatic feeling. To understand the relation of these two texts, we must revise our definition of source, attending instead to the larger array of thought and practice behind literary composition.

Introduction: Mobility and contestation -- "We witen nat what thing we preyen heere": d... more Introduction: Mobility and contestation -- "We witen nat what thing we preyen heere": desire, knowledge, and the ruse of satisfaction in The knight's tale -- Misreading like the reeve -- Symptoms of desire in Chaucer's wives and clerks -- Disfigurements of desire in Chaucer's religious tales -- Conclusion: Reading and misreading Chaucer.Item embargoed for five year

Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 2002

This essay takes as its point of departure the recent interest in psychoanalysis in medieval Engl... more This essay takes as its point of departure the recent interest in psychoanalysis in medieval English literary studies. It addresses the vexed relations between psychoanalysis and history, in particular the concerns typically voiced by historicists discontent with what they see as a transhistorical, indeed even ahistorical, methodology. Here I seek to redress these concerns by connecting them with an earlier critical "flirtation" with Freud within historicism, as well as by articulating an unacknowledged continuity between these two critical moments. During this "in-between" period, from the mid-to late 1980s and into the late 1990s, historicism and psychoanalysis were largely treated as mutually exclusive discourses. To think psychoanalytically was precisely not to think historically and, by extension, politically. 1 However, between this initial flirtation and our current romance with psychoanalytically inflected models of thoughtbetween what might be conceived as two different yet conscious engagements with Freudian and post-Freudian theory-also lies, I want to argue, an unconscious yet equally meaningful relationship between historicism and psychoanalysis. In the pages that follow I will disclose the central role psychoanalysis has played within medieval English literary historicism. Rather than positioning psychoanalysis over and against historicism or even simply renegotiating the priority of one over another, I will suggest how these ostensibly oppositional discourses necessarily inform each other. What I will ultimately argue here, more radically, is the necessity of psychoanalysis for historicist work. If psychoanalysis may have once seemed entirely alien to medieval studies, Louise Fradenburg has decisively claimed that "psychoanalysis is simply in medieval studies now, in a variety of acknowledged and unacknowledged ways." 2 Focusing specifically on one of these unacknowledged ways, I, like Fradenburg, will invoke a community of scholars that may not want to recognize itself as such. 3 Because I am concerned

Medieval feminist forum, Dec 1, 2008

New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession

The Review of English Studies, 2015

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2009

Petrarch’s skull and Ovid’s shells, giants’ teeth and book reviews, the Hereford map and the Helg... more Petrarch’s skull and Ovid’s shells, giants’ teeth and book reviews, the Hereford map and the Helgeland film: these are but some of the artifacts collected here as touchstones for reflection upon the place of historicism in the field of medieval literary studies today. We begin with the acknowledgment that historicism has become the Jamesonian “cultural dominant” of our field, one whose posture “allows for the presence and coexistence of a range of very different, yet subordinate, features.”1 Our volume further assumes that historicism’s dominant status ought to mark it, for all medievalists, as an object (or perhaps an artifact) primed for reexamination and redefinition. Through such a “historicizing of historicism,” this collection aims more broadly to encourage a profession-wide interrogation of contemporary critical practices—where they came from, what they mean for their practitioners, and what future orientations they might assume.

Philological Quarterly, Jun 22, 2006

The Middle English romances have profited from recent attention to a number of features: their po... more The Middle English romances have profited from recent attention to a number of features: their popularity, their social discourse and varied audiences, and, most particularly, their manuscript context in important household anthologies and non-aristocratic collections. Attention to such features reveals that both merchant class readers and the texts they consumed are more self-conscious than their sometimes plain and inconspicuous textual format advertises. In particular, British Library MS Cotton Caligula A.ii's Emare figures its textual status through its centrally important object: a woven cloth depicting a number of famous literary lovers. Functioning as a romance text itself, this cloth offers a story of its own production as well as the value of the Middle English romance text that contains it. As we will see in a materially historicized reading of the texture and textuality of Emare, the manuscript book's merchant class audience may have been more aware of the ways its social status, woven into textiles and reproduced by its texts, is negotiated through its manuscript possessions than has been previously thought. Such self-consciousness argues against the current understanding of Emare and Middle English romances more generally, which have not been considered particularly sophisticated productions. More so than other narratives, even, Emare has suffered from critical neglect, as well as a myopic focus on the cloth. As the poem's central object, the cloth has isolated Emare almost as much as the plot isolates the romance's eponymous heroine, who is set out to sea in a version of the "outcast wife" tale. As the almost exclusive focus of most critical accounts, the cloth has circumscribed Emare's significance and meaning, drawing attention away from the cultural and historical realms at issue in other texts. Recently, Ad Putter has framed the problem with Emare in terms of a kind of generic over-pliability--what amounts to a distinct lack of historical specificity. He admits to "the awkward position of having to say about the text things that might equally be said about countless other[s]" because, in effect, it is not "original, self-conscious, ironical, [or] historically specific." (1) As a result, we tend to read Emare like a folktale, with a very general and generalizing set of cultural assumptions and insights. Preoccupying the handful of studies devoted to the romance, the cloth's lengthy description prefaces the relatively brief narrative in which she is at first exiled for repulsing the incestuous advances of her father and later expelled from her husband's realm (with her newborn son) through the evil machinations of a jealous mother-in-law. With its elaborate, gem-encrusted surface depicting amorous literary figures, the cloth's description provides the longest non-narrative sequence in an otherwise economical story. Because it persists as Emare's possession during her exile and because it is worn in the scenes of return and eventual reunification with husband and father, the cloth has been considered the romance's identifying marker, similar to Orfeo's harp. (2) Among shifting critical concerns in recent years about romance and the cultural work it can accomplish, Emare's cloth (and the cloak into which it is fashioned) has blocked similar interpretations of the poem. (3) One could even say that interpreting the cloth amounts to interpreting the poem itself and possibly the medieval culture that produced and consumed it. Its readings implicitly weave a different narrative out of the cloth to which the romance submits, while at the same time preventing the poem from participating in our larger historical or cultural narratives of the later Middle Ages. The problem with criticism on Emare, however, is not its attention to the cloth bur its reluctance to take its insights about this object further. (4) Indeed, despite Putter's claim that Emare lacks a specific historical context, I will read the material texture of Emare's cloth--its inscription within late medieval manuscript culture. …

Medieval feminist forum, Aug 1, 2009

Medieval feminist forum, Sep 1, 2000

meet an undergraduate who has been taught by a student and s/he tells me they feel they have had ... more meet an undergraduate who has been taught by a student and s/he tells me they feel they have had a course with me. That is enough. And the burning issue of 19597 I am still married to the same man, a dedicated scientist and clinician who taught me how to do without sleep. Our two daughters, born while I was in graduate school, survived a working mom. We now exchange books on women. Both did master's programs in public health. One is a risk-assessment specialist working in environmental clean-up projects in California, the other is a pediatrician doing intensive care and public health research in Texas (although she majored in art at Wellesley, and took the survey course with Elizabeth Pastan). On vacation, we read and work-out and travel together. Between us all (with two sons-in-law) we can manage in Arabic, French, German, Japanese, Spanish and Russian. Madeline Caviness Tufts llniversity SCANDALOUS ASSUMPTIONS: EDITH RICKERT AND THECHICAGO CHAUCER PROJECT Long before Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons shared the secrets of Hollywood celebrities in their newspaper bylines, gossip appeared as a particularly feminine discourse. Chaucer's Wife of Bath depicts herself, to the outrage of her fifth husband, sitting in the company of her"gossib ... Alisoun" and telling all the secrets, however embarrassing, he entrusted to her (III,529-30).1 But if gossip might be understood from at least the Middle Ages forward as a discourse ofwomen, a discourse in which they actively engage, it can also function more invidiously (as the Wife herself acknowledges throughout her Prologue) as a discourse about women. This connection is particularly evident in the case of the female medievalist whose life and accomplishments I have researched off and on for the past five years, Edith Rickert. The lesser praised partner of the famous "Manly and Rickert" editorial team, she has been the subject of a number of rumors, documented and undocumented, concerning her sexuality. In fact, my interest in Rickert began as a result of just such gossip. I will begin, of course, by sharing it. This conversation occurred sometime around 1992, while I was in graduate school. With some fellow graduate students and a couple of our learned professors, I happened to be discussing the gendered politics of textual editing during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One of these professors intentionally provoked me by declaring that no woman had ever edited a major Middle English author. I will spare us his random theorizing on this

Exemplaria, 1994

... Geraldine Heng describes an "excessive" plotting between women that Morgan's s... more ... Geraldine Heng describes an "excessive" plotting between women that Morgan's story establishes: ... 22 Geraldine Heng, "Feminine Knots and the Other Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," PMLA 93 (1991): 500-514, at 501. Page 9. ...

New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession, Apr 19, 2023

Etudes Epistémè, Apr 1, 2014

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is, among other things, a compendium of genres. Among the pilgrims' va... more Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is, among other things, a compendium of genres. Among the pilgrims' various tales we find many with French sources-romances, fabliaux, moral exempla, penitential materials, and, of course, Breton lais. Telling a version of the story of the damsel's rash promise, the Franklin's Tale is the only one to announce itself specifically as a Breton lai. In her husband's absence, Dorigen promises her love to another man if he can remove all the rocks off the coast of Brittany, an act she believes to be impossible and one that she mentally connects with her husband's safety. While explicit, the Franklin's Tale's relation to the Breton lai remains much less clear than it might seem from the tale's Prologue, where the Franklin foregrounds its genre and the literary history it invokes right from the start: Thise olde gentil Britouns in hir dayes Of diverse aventures maden layes, Rymeyed in hir firste Briton tonge, Whiche layes with hir instrumentz they songe Or elles redden hem for hir plesaunce, And oon of hem have I in remembraunce, Which I shal seyn with good wyl as I kan. 1 Despite the seemingly specific context the Franklin offers, the tale is, in the words of Claire Vial, an 'excellent forgery.' 2 Scholars long ago established that its inheritances run toward Boccaccio's Italian novelle (primarily in Il Filocolo and, more recently, the Decameron). 3 The Franklin's Tale relates to no known 'Breton', Anglo-Norman, or French source. When scholars have considered why the Franklin calls his tale a Breton lai, the results have devolved on the Franklin as a narrator and the performance he 1 All quotations from the Canterbury Tales are taken from The Canterbury Tales, Complete, ed.

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2009

... in Medieval Iberian Literature by Michelle M. Hamilton Paradigms and Methods in Early Medieva... more ... in Medieval Iberian Literature by Michelle M. Hamilton Paradigms and Methods in Early Medieval Studies edited by Celia Chazelle and Felice ... Period edited by Don J. Wyatt Wisdom and Her Lovers in Medieval and Early Modern Hispanic Literature by Emily C. Francomano ...

The Chaucer Review, 2010

Well read and often studied, the General Prologue of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales has been ana... more Well read and often studied, the General Prologue of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales has been analyzed less in terms of the pleasure it provides than in terms of history: the medieval act of pilgrimage and the meaning of the social cat-egories to which the pilgrims belong. The effect of such ...

Notes and Queries, Aug 21, 2021

Arthuriana, 2007

The ongoing film, print, and merchandizing phenomenon surrounding J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter... more The ongoing film, print, and merchandizing phenomenon surrounding J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series makes for a timely interrogation of medievalist, and particularly Arthurian, work. While many university scholars lament the dwindling attention and funds given to medievalist projects, the Middle Ages seems very much alive and well in its popular formations. Both youth and adult cultures are obsessed with the Middle Ages, even beyond the indication that we might perceive from the castle-inhabiting, wizarding narratives of Rowling that have made Harry Potter the best-selling series in publishing history. The fanaticism prompted and fueled by the Star Wars franchise and the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, the cult following of Monty Python and the Holy Grail and its recent re-vivication in the Broadway production of Spamalot, also provide obvious signs of the popularity of the Middle Ages in the contemporary imagination. But there are numerous others to be found in television advertising: IBM, the U.S. Marines, Capital One Credit Cards, and Jack-in-the-Box restaurants each use medieval, and specifically Arthurian, ad campaigns. An IBM commercial, in which a patient relays an Arthurian dream of pulling the sword from the stone to a Freudian psychoanalyst may be the most telling in terms of the location of our medievalist fantasies in our dreams of work, functionality, and computer-assisted productivity. For all its vast distance and cultural displacements, the Arthurian fiction fully inhabits our post-Freudian unconscious and reappears in our dreamwork as well as our enjoyments. Most pervasively, and most consistently, the Arthurian dream inhabits our childhood and the enjoyments we produce for our children. Lego, Playmobile, Playskool, and Barbie have elaborately developed medieval world-building products. With Playmobile one can choose a multi-unit, elaborate 'King's Castle,' or a Viking ship, and re-enact Danish raids on the Angles or the Norman conquest. Playmobile's miniature accessories, which include crossbows, longbows, quiver with removable arrows, frothing beer steins, various helmets (some with nose plates), shields, plate armor, and detachable facial hair, enable a wide variety of historical play. (My children use the 'Fairy Tale Castle,' which appears to be a semi-Restoration-cum-Cinderella affair, to represent the French and mock up the Hundred Years' War with the very English King's Castle noted above.) This is but one example. Children's culture is saturated with medieval dolls, toys, books and imaginative costume of all kinds and levels of elaborateness (take especial note of the Magic Cabin catalogue and its array of medieval dolls, dress, and equipment for Waldorf educational play). Perhaps most recently and potentially most importantly, the world of video gaming takes the re-vivication of the Middle Ages to its greatest possibilities. Operating beyond the annual 'Renaissance Faire' that might be close enough to attend or the 'Medieval Feast' theme restaurants at various tourist attractions we might visit, we are able to inhabit medieval worlds to the furthest extent that our digital imaginations can reach through games like Everquest and Final Fantasy. Where such virtual medievalism poses technological anxieties, we can always turn to the back of the latest airline shoppers' magazine to buy a letter opener in the form of Aragorn's reforged sword, Anduril. Should one want a full-sized replica, one need only get on the mailing list (or website) for 'Museum Replicas Limited,' 'a division of the Atlanta Cutlery Corporation.' The array of 'historically accurate, battle-ready swords, daggers, axes and helmets,' as advertised on the cover of catalog #83, allows for a grown-up, real time version of any kind of Playmobile universe (pirates, vikings, etc.) or full participation in the detailed Hollywood visualization of one's favorite medieval book. These adult devices are not very different from children's products. …

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2002

Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 2009

Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Jun 1, 2017

ABSTRACT: Shakespeare’s Cymbeline is one of his most medieval works. Its plot, setting, and thema... more ABSTRACT: Shakespeare’s Cymbeline is one of his most medieval works. Its plot, setting, and thematics refashion Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale, which provided Shakespeare with both raw material and structures of dramatic feeling. To understand the relation of these two texts, we must revise our definition of source, attending instead to the larger array of thought and practice behind literary composition.

Introduction: Mobility and contestation -- "We witen nat what thing we preyen heere": d... more Introduction: Mobility and contestation -- "We witen nat what thing we preyen heere": desire, knowledge, and the ruse of satisfaction in The knight's tale -- Misreading like the reeve -- Symptoms of desire in Chaucer's wives and clerks -- Disfigurements of desire in Chaucer's religious tales -- Conclusion: Reading and misreading Chaucer.Item embargoed for five year

Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 2002

This essay takes as its point of departure the recent interest in psychoanalysis in medieval Engl... more This essay takes as its point of departure the recent interest in psychoanalysis in medieval English literary studies. It addresses the vexed relations between psychoanalysis and history, in particular the concerns typically voiced by historicists discontent with what they see as a transhistorical, indeed even ahistorical, methodology. Here I seek to redress these concerns by connecting them with an earlier critical "flirtation" with Freud within historicism, as well as by articulating an unacknowledged continuity between these two critical moments. During this "in-between" period, from the mid-to late 1980s and into the late 1990s, historicism and psychoanalysis were largely treated as mutually exclusive discourses. To think psychoanalytically was precisely not to think historically and, by extension, politically. 1 However, between this initial flirtation and our current romance with psychoanalytically inflected models of thoughtbetween what might be conceived as two different yet conscious engagements with Freudian and post-Freudian theory-also lies, I want to argue, an unconscious yet equally meaningful relationship between historicism and psychoanalysis. In the pages that follow I will disclose the central role psychoanalysis has played within medieval English literary historicism. Rather than positioning psychoanalysis over and against historicism or even simply renegotiating the priority of one over another, I will suggest how these ostensibly oppositional discourses necessarily inform each other. What I will ultimately argue here, more radically, is the necessity of psychoanalysis for historicist work. If psychoanalysis may have once seemed entirely alien to medieval studies, Louise Fradenburg has decisively claimed that "psychoanalysis is simply in medieval studies now, in a variety of acknowledged and unacknowledged ways." 2 Focusing specifically on one of these unacknowledged ways, I, like Fradenburg, will invoke a community of scholars that may not want to recognize itself as such. 3 Because I am concerned

Medieval feminist forum, Dec 1, 2008

New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession

The Review of English Studies, 2015