2005-2006 Mellon Workshop in the Humanities Proposal

Proposal Title:  Medieval Culture and Postmodern Legacies (Continuation)
Budget Request: $5000
Participants:
J. M. Ganim, Professor of English (Contact Person)
Piotr Gorecki, Professor of  History
Conrad Rudolph, Professor of  the History of Art
Andrea Denny-Brown, Assistant Professor of English
Melissa Conway, Director, Special Collections, Rivera Library
Joanna Scott, Graduate Student, English
Ansara Martino, Graduate Student, History
Tony Luu, Graduate Student, English
Catherine Davis, Graduate Student, English
Christa Issler, Graduate Student, History of Art
Mieke Bahme, Graduate Student, History of Art
leona.fisher@email.ucr.edu
"Megan Stein" <mstein@smu.edu> 
Jason.Tondro@email.ucr.edu
"James Howard" <jhowa001@student.ucr.edu> 
"Lamb Wendy" <wendy@slugparade.com>
"Mieke Bahmer" <mieke@mail.eee.org>
"Christa Issler" christa.issler@biola.edu
Wallace Cleaves, Lecturer in English

We propose to continue the highly successful 2004-2005 workshop on the subject of the legacy of the Middle Ages as it has been defined and redefined in the late twentieth and early twenty first century. This legacy may seem to be benign, as for instance, in the widespread popular impact of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.  It may be troublesome or ambiguous, as, for instance, in the use of medieval passion plays in Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ.  But this legacy may also have a unstable political valence, as for instance, the condemnation of Islamic societies as “medieval” in terms of their legal systems and gender restrictions, or the location of the origin of particular forms of patriotism in “medieval” histories, such as the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, which still forms part of the symbolism of division and separatism in the Balkans.  At the same time, many of the discourses that are implicated  (either to defend or to critique ) in this complex reinvention of history have themselves been turned towards the study of the Middle Ages, revealing a  set of synchronic dialogues as well as diachronic developments. That is, in addition to the new importance accorded to the signs and symbols of medieval culture, a culture which almost by definition precedes the modern period, we will also be investigating the degree to which the Middle Ages themselves engage in the production of modernities, both in terms of what French Annales historians call the  longue duree and in terms of the awareness of difference by medieval subjects, experiences and works themselves.  The almost automatic association of the Middle Ages with war, violence and struggle, and the birth of European (read White, Christian) identity, that is, will be disaggregated and analyzed in the workshops we propose.

The Workshop on Medieval Culture and Postmodern Legacies will be of special importance to a number of faculty on campus in addition to the group participants, since there is no formal, or even informal, organization devoted to Medieval Studies at UCR, and only now is there a critical mass of individuals that would create the kind of synergies meant to be encouraged by the Mellon Workshops.  Despite the research activity and productivity of these faculty members, there has been little opportunity, even through the Center for Ideas and Society, to share the impact of each others work.  That situation is now changing, and we hope that the Mellon Workshop can be the cornerstone of that change. For instance, in addition, the workshop participants, chosen because of the relation of their research to the questions raised above,  many other faculty members, have expressed interest and support of this workshop.  One of the ironies of research at UCR is that research in the study of European culture before 1500 has received widespread recognition off campus (Professors Ganim and Rudolph have been recipients of John Simon Guggenheim, Jr. Memorial Fellowships) but almost no support internally.  The success of an external systemwide effort by Professor Gorecki in organizing the UC Medieval History Seminar is a sign of how much interest can be generated by the format we are proposing.
The activities in 2004 have thus far been well received and well attended, and have resulted in the exposure of our graduate students to many of the leading figures in their fields. To have our students be able to carry on extended discussions with the leading historian of the European Middle Ages in the world, and the leading scholar of Old French literature in the world, has been beneficial to both their individual research and to the campus. Moreover, because we have proposed a very different approach than that usually carried on by Medieval Studies programs nationally, which, to borrow terms from urban planning, might be described as “preservationist”, we have been able to attract these leading scholars to campus by investigating the Middle Ages from the point of view of—another urban planning term—“adaptive reuse.”

During the academic year 2005-2006, we determine that a monthly meeting can be arranged nine times, so we propose to schedule eight meetings. The first meeting will be a planning and scheduling session by the group participants and will be held at the end of AY 2004-2005 if funded. Two of the meetings will be panels peopled by the group participants, presenting their research.  Six of the meetings will be lectures and follow-up workshops lead by outside experts, selected because of their international distinction and the intrinsic interest of their research.  We are also proposing some alternate speakers if scheduling problems prevent our initial list from firming up, but we have already contacted many of these speakers to determine initial interest.  The numbering system below is not necessarily meant to fix the order of their visits. We have described their work in some detail as a way of reflecting the interdependence of the research interests of the group participants:

TERRY JONES. Well known as a member and founder of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and actor, producer and director of such well-known films as Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Life of Brian and Monty Python and the Meaning of Life, Mr. Jones is a highly respected scholar of medieval literature, whose reinterpretation of Chaucer’s Knight as a mercenary has achieved wide circulation in the field.  Because of his schedule in the film business, he makes frequent trips to Southern California, and he has indicated to Professor Ganim that he would visit UCR if the schedule allows. His presentation would be on the Ellesmere Manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, featuring an infrared analysis of the portrait of the Knight suggesting that dynastic and inheritance struggles may have resulted in retouchings of the portrait in an attempt to obscure the Knight’s mercenary background.

E. JANE BURNS is the author of Arthurian Fictions: Rereading the Vulgate Cycle and Bodytalk: When Women Speak in Old French Literature and  is L.M. Skifkin Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Curriculum in Women's Studies at the University of North Carolina. Professor  Burns' talk, “Saracen Silk,” would be drawn from her current project, Courtly Love Undressed, which looks at courtly love through the lens of clothing and challenges many of our long held assumptions about the gendered expression of desire, courtly sexual identities, and the very westernness of court culture. The aim of the project is to undress courtly love as we have known it, and to show that courtly clothes forge complex sartorial identities which allow us to rethink the traditional terms of amorous encounter in the Middle Ages.
GERALDINE HENG is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Medieval Studies Program at the University of Texas, Austin. She is the author of Empire of Magic (Columbia University Press), a study of race, empire and gender in the formation of medieval romance, and is presently working on a book entitled  Romancing the Beast: Race, Nation, World in Premodern Time.
CLAIRE SPONSLER is Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa.  Her work centers on medieval literature, with a special interest in performance and cultural studies. IShe has written about medieval drama’s potential for social critique (Drama and Resistance, Minnesota 1997) and about global theater (East of West, Palgrave 2000). A current book, Ritual Imports: Medieval Drama in America, explores the importing of medieval European drama into the US, with chapters on matachines dances, Pinksterfest, mummers, passion plays, saints’ festivals, and academic reenactments, and we would ask her to talk about this new work.
STEPHEN HUMPHRIES is King Abdul Aziz Al Saud Professor of  Islamic Studies and Co-Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Between Memory And Desire: The Middle East In A Troubled Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999) as well as some of the standard works in the field of medieval Islamic history.  Islamic History: A Framework for Inquiry (Princeton, 1991);  The Crisis of the Early Caliphate, Vol. 15 in The History of al-Tabari (SUNY, 1990);  Tradition and Innovation in Late Antiquity (co-edited with F. M. Clover; U. of Wisconsin, 1989); >From Saladin to the Mongols: The Ayyubids of Damascus, 1193-1260 (SUNY, 1977).
ALFRED DAVID. Professor of English at Indiana, David is the author of many books and a noted editor and translator of medieval literature, including the most widely circulated text in North America, The Norton Anthology of English Literature. David helped implement the translation of Beowulf by Seamus Heaney, which has been attacked as “too Irish.” In his workshop, David, himself a refugee from Nazi Germany, will trace the history of racial, ethnic and national identities in Beowulf scholarship since the nineteenth century, exposing the ways it has been artificially purified.
STEPHEN MURRAY, Professor of Art, Columbia University. Educated at Oxford and the Courtauld Institute, Murray is a world-renowned expert on Gothic art and architecture,  particularly involving the integrated understanding of art and architecture within a broader framework of economic and cultural history. At Columbia, he is the director of the Media Center for Art History, Archaeology and Historic Preservation. He is currently engaged in projecting his cathedral studies through the electronic media using a combination of three-dimensional simulation; digital imaging and video and will present a computer-enhanced presentation demonstrating this latest research. 
We have detailed the research interests of our proposed speakers in order to give some sense of the interdependence of their interests and our own research in moving the field forward. Conrad Rudolph’s (Art History) work-in-progress, The Mystic Ark explores the interplay of theology, institutional histories, art and philosophy in Gothic decoration.  Jan Alquist (Art History)  is working with him, specializing in Cluny as a center of many different artistic traditions in the high  Middle Ages.  John Ganim (English) is the author, most recently of, Medievalism and Orientalism, analyzing how the Middle Ages and the East are paired together as objects of study and representation from the 16th-19th centuries. Catherine Davis (English)  is planning a dissertation on loss and mourning in relation to national and personal identities in the Middle Ages; born in Peru, she is a native Spanish speaker, but has studied extensively in Greece and is familiar with Byzantine scholarship on East-West relations.   Piotr Gorecki (History) is an expert in medieval Central European history, and in his study of legal codes and other institutions has studied  national and regional identities within a late feudal context that developed differently than that of Western Europe.  Andrea Denny-Brown (Assistant Professor, English) is an expert on the relation of sartorial display and social distinctions in late medieval Europe, with a special interest in how commodities travel between East and West in terms of fashion. Melissa Conway (Special Collections) is organizing a major  research team to catalogue medieval manuscripts in American libraries. BUDGET BREAKDOWN:  Honoraria: $3000 (average $200 [UC faculty]- $500);   Per Diem for Speakers: $1600; Reception Refreshments: $300; Media Support: $100.