From Gillian Clark, Women in Late Antiquity: Pagan and Christian Life-styles (Oxford, 1993):

Remaining at home was not recommended for ascetic men (Jerome, letter 125, 11), since their mothers would insist on feeding them properly, and the slave-girls would be a constant temptation.

One conclusion I drew from this year’s Gender and Medieval Studies conference was that I probably need (as a historian) to think about Jews more often than I do at the moment. As may have emerged in both my previous posts, the conference had a number of papers that discussed or touched on Jews and Jewishness, whether from a literary, historical or art history perspective. This was obviously a deliberate choice by the organisers, since two of the four keynote sessions discussed Christian images and ideas of Jews, and it was a very useful one for several reasons.

At one level it gave me insights into gender that had never occurred to me before. This was particularly the case with Sara Lipton’s paper on the ‘visible Jewess’. One of the relatively few things I thought I knew about the history of medieval Christian/Jewish relations was that one key sign that anti-Judaism (religious hostility) had been replaced by anti-Semitism (racial hostility) was the appearance of pictures of Jews with caricatured features (ugly, hooked nose). I remember a talk by Dominique Iogna-Prat at the IHR a number of years ago when he showed us what he thought was the earliest one there was, from the mid-thirteenth century. What hadn’t occurred to me, until I heard Sara Lipton, is that these caricature Jews were all Jewish men. She showed pictures to demonstrate that Jewesses were still showed as ‘normal’ women even when their husbands were shown in this stereotypical way. It was only towards 1400 that female Jews began to be distinctive in artistic depictions and artistic stereotypes both of the beautiful ‘Oriental’ Jewess and the ugly hook-nosed Jewess developed. (She linked this to the ever increasing marginalisation of Judaism in Christian Europe. Initially, Judaism could be seen as a religion maintained by male Jewish intellectuals and Jewish women, seen as potentially more convertible than men, could be pictured as unmarked ‘women’. When Judaism came to be seen as a religion maintained domestically via household practice (particularly after the forced conversion of Jews), the Jewish wife/mother, as the main conduit of this, was now the key symbol of the Other). That insight, that the marking of ethnicity wasn’t consistent across gender, hadn’t occurred to me as forcefully before, although, of course, when I came to read some articles about gender and early medieval grave goods a few days ago, it’s there as well.

Considering Judaism is also very useful for gender studies because it reminds us again of the contingency of medieval Christian ideas of masculinity. It’s all too easy to start seeing medieval masculinity as natural or inevitable: medieval Jewish masculinity challenges ideas that a Christian celibate priesthood was the best method for religious reproduction, the view of some feminists that a married priestly elite would automatically have lead to an enhanced religious role for clerical wives, and the view that elite masculinity must be based on physical strength.

But the conference also reminded me of how often (at least later in the Middle Ages) medieval people had Jews on their minds. Even in countries, like England, which theoretically had no Jews after 1296, the figure of the Jew keeps cropping up in all kinds of texts. Maybe those of us studying the early Middle Ages should be considering whether Jews were thought about as much then (and if not, why not?) There’s a recent book out on the idea of the Jew in Anglo-Saxon England, which I haven't looked at yet, but might be revealing. I think it’s fair to say that Jewish history is (at least in the UK) fairly marginalised within medieval studies. I’m not sure how easy it would be to get its research feeding more into the mainstream, but the conference certainly made me think it would be worth trying to do that.

One of the unusual things in the Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages conference was the number of sessions that it had on masculinity. Gender studies (because it grew out of women’s studies) has tended to focus on women’s history, with masculinity normally tacked on as an extra. This time round, the split was about 50-50 in terms of topics, which I though was helpful. And several of the papers on masculinity (including my own) were edging again around one of the big questions in medieval gender studies: what do we really know about clerical masculinity? When, as Bill Aird discussed, a twelfth-century bishop is described as constantly weeping, does that have the implications for his masculinity that it would have today or do we need to read such texts differently?

I don’t think the conference provided an answer, but it did provide some hints that maybe we’re still looking from the wrong end. Clerical masculinity is still being described in terms of the restrictions imposed on clerics: particularly prohibitions on sex/bearing arms. I did that kind of defining myself in my paper, because it is there in the Carolingian sources: this is how you tell laymen from clerics. Some of the same ideas are there in the Anglo-Saxon sources, as Carol Pasternack’s paper showed. The problem is that this purely negative definition makes clerical masculinity seem, to modern sensibilities, unstable and unachievable. If clerics cannot procreate and fight, how can they be men and how can they endure a life bound by these prohibitions?

But if such a form of masculinity is psychically unsatisfying and impossible to practice, we are left with the question: why then did the church develop it? Clerical forms of masculinity were invented and imposed by church elites on themselves, and these forms have proved open to historical change. So why did churchmen endorse this specific clerical way of life?

One aspect that has been explored is the role of self-control in defining masculinity, and that’s certainly a key aspect in the imposition of clerical celibacy. Senior clerics in the fourth and in the eleventh century, in particular, thought that men could control their lust and be celibate. To conclude that they were simply deluded about male sex drives seems to me patronising; enough of the clergy must have been sufficiently chaste to make the ideal seem feasible. But there are two other aspects of clerical masculinity that I think haven't been investigated enough: the intellectual superiority of the cleric and his role in representing Christ at Mass.

To modern liberal feminist thought, neither education nor priestly function demonstrate masculinity: women can be as educated as men, and if women are not priests in some denominations, that is simply an arbitrary human decision. But in a world where men were believed naturally mentally superior to women and particularly created in the image of God, I suspect both these factors may have contributed considerably to clerical feelings of masculinity. Male clerics alone had access to higher learning and to the role of mediator between God and human: if not all men shared these privileges, that merely showed that those lacking them were less manly.

I think it needs more research to explore these factors: the twelfth century association of ‘clericus’ with ‘litteratus’ (which is not there in the ninth century) is one avenue, as is the language of masculinity associated with (for example) the Investiture Crisis. Ruth Mazo Karras has interesting material on late medieval university students and masculinity, which might be extended. But the conference also suggested another angle that was intriguing, in the comment by several speakers that Jewish men may have been a particular challenge to clerics (and by implication to their masculinity). Their role as learned men outside the ‘system’ was obviously one aspect of this: was their denial of the significance of the Incarnation/Eucharist also particularly a threat to religious specialists? Looking at Christian constructions of Jewish masculinity may offer other ways of reflecting back the image of the clerical male, so often hidden from us by the paradoxical fact that they themselves are writing the texts we read.

I’m just back from the UK Gender and Medieval Studies Group conference (this year on Gender and Difference), which I found excellent. I want to try and discuss aspects of it in a series of posts, but this isn’t going to be a session by session outline. Instead, since there seemed to me to be a lot of themes that connected together across sessions, I wanted to ruminate on some of those.

My first one arose from a very good keynote speech by Stephen Kruger on ‘Medieval Jewish/Christian debate and the question of gender’. In this he was arguing that gender and queer theorists ought not just to stick to the texts where gender or queerness was flamboyantly present (like the Pardoner’s Tale or the case of Eleanor/John Rykener), but instead examine issues of gender in less obviously gendered texts. He took as his example a late eleventh century text: Gilbert Crispin’s ‘Disputation of a Jew and a Christian.’

I think his paper (and other work by him) is so effective mainly because he is a careful scholar. Too often queer theory approaches seem to me to involve careless, if not downright sloppy scholarship. If you’re going to talk about intertexts or alternative responses by readers you need to do the basic spadework of showing how and by whom a text has been received. If you’re going to do queer readings of lines they shouldn’t require the abandonment of grammatical form. If you can’t be bothered about philology or history, why should historians or philologists bother about you?

In contrast Stephen Kruger did seem to make a reasonable case (based on close readings of this and a number of other texts in the genre) that gender, the problems of embodiment and the threat of violence towards Jews all seep into a debate which is being conducted in dispassionate, respectful and abstract terms. In particular, there was the fascinating, if chilling possibility that the very fact that Crispin has the intellectual honesty to write a debate in which the Jew is not finally convinced may have encouraged a belief in his readers that Jews were intransigent/’blind’ intellectual opponents and that violence was the only answer for them.

But it also raised a wider problem that bothers me: when is it justified in reading ‘queer issues’ into texts that do not obviously contain them? In some ways, gender and religion/race are easier categories here. We know that any particular historical society has a gender system, even if we don’t always know what it was. So there is always a gendered cultural background to a text and it is legitimate to attempt to see whether it influences the text. Similarly, at least in the Middle Ages, there can be no insignificant reference to a non-Christian. There is so much cultural baggage about Jews, Saracens, pagans, heretics in the period that such labels must always be presupposed to be significant in a text and to bring external images with them. (Though intriguingly, the Jewess may come nearer to insignificance than the Jew, as Sara Lipton discussed). Equally, the prevalence of racial stereotypes mean that references to ethnicity are always likely to have some wider significance.

This is a more difficult question, however, for the other main category of queer investigation: the sexual. It doesn’t seem to me at all obvious that there is necessarily sexuality/eroticism behind every text (the way gender is necessarily present). In particular, I am uneasy about the way that homoeroticism often seems to me to be imposed on texts by modern scholars rather than being found in it. (I should say that I also dislike the Freudian tendency to impose heterosexual meaning on every object, but this is now less common). In other words, it does seem to me to be possible to have a text which is indifferent to sexuality in the Middle Ages much more easily than one that is indifferent to religion or gender. I think our culture is much more heavily sexualised than the Middle Ages and that we are danger of reading back our own values into the past.

By this I don’t mean that the Middle Ages was some pre-sexual or even pre-gay past: there are some texts which look clearly homoerotic. But I think that it can be seen as ‘before homosexuality’, a time when there was much less awareness of gay people and very little in the way of a gay subculture (although John Boswell thought one is detectable in the eleventh and twelfth century). In particular, while in modern popular culture people often feel compelled to expend effort in avoiding the threat of ‘gayness’ (particularly school-children), I do not think there was the same need in the medieval world (or the early modern). Moreover, many activities that seem to modern sensibilities clearly fraught with homoeroticism (like men sharing a bed) were obviously unremarkable.

Two papers in a later session seemed to me to provide good examples of how sources might be examined carefully in this way for their sexual content. One was by David Clark, arguing that some of the Anglo-Saxon texts that have been read as referring to male same-sex intercourse may in fact deal with masturbation (though as usual, we are faced with the problem of the penitentials as sources and their sometimes peculiar use of vocabulary). The second paper, by Bronach Kane, looked at how the church courts of York dealt with marriage cases involving impotence. She showed that the assessment of whether a husband was impotent (alleged by a wife seeking a divorce) wasn’t always done by female ‘jurors’ (as has been claimed) and produced examples where both men and women were involved in the process. She quoted quite detailed witness statements where male relatives or friends carried out physical examinations of the husband’s genitals, commenting on his erection and its size.

What impressed me was that Kane did not simply make the obvious assumptions that a) such texts are full of homoeroticism or b) impotence tests were necessarily occasions of ridicule. Instead, as she showed, the statements are couched in a homely language of concern for a friend in trouble, nor do they show a defensiveness about the implications of the procedures involved. Homoeroticism is not obviously being kept at bay here, however much modern scholars may feel it must be lurking somewhere in the situation. If we have to look for the queer in all medieval texts, we all have to accept that in some cases the Middle Ages may actually be queerer than modern imaginations can easily comprehend.

I’ve just been reading Robert Mills’ chapter ‘Can the virgin martyr speak?’, from Anke Bernau, Sarah Salih & Ruth Evans (eds) Medieval Virginities. This considers ideas of agency and objectification in the hagiography of virgin martyrs and whether there is some way of getting beyond debates about whether these accounts reflect patriarchal violence or female empowerment. In order to complicate things yet further (it’s an interesting paper, but fairly theory-dense) he brings in ideas about colonialism: his title is a riff on a paper by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, which discusses a Bengali widow who practices sati (sutee) and sacrifices herself on her husband’s funeral pyre.

I found the combination of the virgin martyr and the sati a provocative comparison, but I had to think about it quite hard to get beyond simply Western Christian prejudices and find a more coherent explanation. As Mills points out, you can’t really get at the agency of either the martyr or the sati: it’s not clear that you can hear them speak through the cultural narratives, or at least you may just end up hearing what you want to hear. He wonders whether you can get further by shifting the focus onto the experience of pain and protest against it, but can’t find this as a key motif in textual and visual representations of virgin martyrdom (he focuses on St Agnes in the twelfth century onwards for this). It’s worth noticing at this point that the period he’s looking at is one where both word and image increasingly encourage affective piety via imagining the torture and crucifixion of Christ. If the virgin martyrs don’t seem pained, therefore, it’s not because the Middle Ages can’t imagine pain.

I think there’s a point here that Mills doesn’t develop, which is about the nature of violence in a lot of the virgin martyrs narratives. In the text themselves (whatever may be behind them) the violence offered to the martyrs often becomes cartoon violence. This isn’t in the sense of the exaggeration you get in film and literature, where a bullet to the shoulder or a sword cut in the thigh just makes you stagger round painfully. I mean cartoon violence in the sense of defying natural laws. St Catherine is attached to a spiked wheel to be executed, but this doesn’t work; she’s then beheaded. Agnes is burned but the fires don’t touch her, so they behead her. Celia is unsuccessfully suffocated in her bathroom, then ineffectually beheaded (she lives for several days after). Agatha is racked, has her breasts cut off and then 'rolled naked over live coals mixed with broken potsherds', which seemingly kills her. The violence here is purely arbitrary: it’s not that there’s a move to devise more effective torments until they find the martyr kryptonite. It’s a game being played by God and the virgin, and they could keep it up as long as they choose: it’s only because the prospective martyr has really to actually be a martyr that something is finally allowed to kill her.

All this doesn’t have much to do with actual sati (or even Western culturally sanctioned ideas of self-sacrifice); it’s more like Superman with bullets bouncing off his chest. But the question is then: why are virgin martyrs so popular in this game? The standard answer is that the accounts have elements of torture porn: male writers like dwelling on women being stripped and hurt. But while you can argue there may be pornographic elements in the gaze on the naked female martyr, it doesn’t seem to me you can really talk about torture porn when the woman isn’t in pain. In that sense torture porn needs the ‘No, No, No’ and the scream of the woman as much as ordinary porn needs the ‘Yes, Yes, Yes’.

So why virgins? Then it dawned on me: we’re not talking Superman here, we’re talking Claire Bennet from Heroes. Why, of all the characters, is it her who has the regenerative ability (just like the martyrs)? I don’t think it’s about pornography; I would argue it’s because she makes the most satisfying figure for that ability.

The regenerative ability wouldn’t be so impressive if it was in a hulking guy (Matt Parkman) or even a physically strong adult woman (Niki Sanders); they aren’t imagined as vulnerable to injury in the same way. On the other hand, you don’t want someone too vulnerable: a young child who could regenerate allows the possibilities of horrendous abuse. The cheerleader or the virgin martyr is young and frail enough to seem helpless, but just old enough for full agency (unlike Micah Sanders). Their unnatural resilience is the ultimate improbable reversal of reality, a contemptuous rejection of the normal world.

Does all this tell us anything about the virgin martyrs or simply show my odd tastes in TV? I think it does raise one interesting suggestion about the reception of the martyr legends and particularly their reception by female readers. Can the figure of Claire Bennet really empower a girl watching it? After all, the whole thing is fantasy: if you jump from a high building in real life, you won’t bounce back. But even a fantasy story (perhaps particularly a fantasy story) can produce in the viewer/reader at least a belief in agency (however unrealistic); a belief that they too can make a difference. (That after all, is one of the key messages of Heroes: having powers is no good if you still decide to go back to Japan or India or Odessa, to run from the evil and not be prepared to stand up to it). Did late medieval girls specifically who heard the virgin martyr narratives (at a time when martyrdom was little more probable than gaining superpowers) nevertheless gain something from its very unreality? I think it is at least possible that they did.

As a follow-up to the last post, I came across an intriguing article on the possibilities of Englishness written by someone called Mike Sutton, who is obviously an enthusiast for English folk music, as well as a cultural historian. His argument is essentially that unlike in other countries the English political and cultural/intellectual elite have not supported the indigenous culture of the country. He sees this as due to the precocious development of consumerism of England and argues that a combination of more government support (both for funding indigenous groups and via educational priorities) and a more inclusive attitude by the folk song/dance community (he mentions one English folk-group with contains Rastafarians) might lead to a broad-based revival of English (musical) culture.

He has some interesting views (as well as some useful historical background on the early twentieth century folk revival and the issues of class and gender it raised), but I don’t think he really tackles what seems to me one of the factors that make a mainstream folk revival most difficult: the urban/rural divide. One of the reasons that folk music, morris dancing etc are seen as quaint is that they’re largely about rural life and for that reason don’t have much resonance with city dwellers today. (And those that aren’t about the country are about work in heavy industries which are now almost as obsolete as being a plough-boy.) Where folk traditions have been preserved in urbanised regions (e.g. modern lowland Scotland, New York Irish), it’s largely been because the traditional songs became a vital part of cultural identity at the time of urbanisation (often via nostalgic ruralites who had gone to the city or been forced to it). So Irish emigrants to the US/Canada in the nineteenth century take a living tradition with them, and then embed it so will it have potency even to the Irish-American descendants who will never see Galway Bay. Similarly, the great ‘invention of tradition’ in Scotland, which creates the blueprint for tartan culture comes midway through a period of massive urbanisation of Scotland (1760-1850), so the songs of Burns speak initially to an audience who could often still remember such a culture. In contrast, I don’t think there was much intellectual interest in inventing tradition for a popular audience during the eighteenth and nineteenth century urbanisation of England (with perhaps the exception of Charles Dickens). (My impression is that the Romantic poets, who did create a mythology of rural England, appealed more to the middle classes than the urban poor).

I don’t see where a widespread folk revival will come from now, that is built upon the obsolete images of the lark in the morning and hauling the boats in on the Tyne. If it comes it will need folk singers who can write modern songs, reinterpret the old ones and get widespread media coverage, and I’m not sure whether the fragmentation of the music scene means this is still possible. If someone knows better, who is the new Ewan McColl and what kind of impact has he/she had so far beyond the ‘world music/folk’ charts?

I don’t normally stand in a car-park at midnight and hear 500 people sing about a medieval king. But then, I’m not normally in Scotland on New Year’s Eve, let alone attending the Loch Ness Hogmanay Festival. And as a non-Scot I got another glimpse of just how potent Scottish national traditions are, appealing across class and age barriers. (There were at least three generations present at the event).

A historian finds it easy to point out that most of the traditions on display are relatively recent inventions, not primeval survivals: Walter Scott and the kilt, etc, etc. In fact, a lot of the elements are even more recent than that. There was the surreal sight of someone dressed up as Nessie carrying a quaich (big silver bowl) full of whisky. Now however long the Loch Ness monster has ‘existed’ (some people trace it back to St Columba’s time), the cult of Nessie only really took off in the 1930s, with the new road along Loch Ness making the area far more accessible. It’s the same with the music. Although the festival had a ceilidh band and pipers and were singing ‘For Auld Lang Syne’ at the end (I believe, we’d weakened and gone home before then), some of the other music was much more modern. We had Donald Where's Yer Troosers, which may be described as ‘traditional’ on websites, but I bet was really written in the early twentieth century. And we had Proclaimers songs from the late 1980s. As for the medieval king I mentioned, Flower of Scotland may be about Bannockburn and the defeat there of ‘Proud Edward’s Army’ (Edward II, of course), but the song was actually written in 1967.

But while a historian may point that ‘traditions’ aren’t actually historically based, that doesn’t in one sense really matter: it’s the feeling of national solidarity that’s the point. And part of me found myself envying that common national culture, which England doesn’t possess. (Scotland also increasingly manages the trick of an ethnically inclusive nationalism: it’s hard to say even Drumnadrochit is native-only now, when the local Catholic church has a Polish-speaking assistant chaplain and the pipe band at the festival came from Zurich. And arguably the first stirrings of Scottish nationalism in the thirteenth and fourteenth century started with the unusual basis of a consciousness of a kingdom of Scotland preceding the consciousness of a Scottish ‘people’.)

In contrast, while there are occasions of English nationalism, they’re almost always limited by class and region: there is no meeting point of ‘Two world wars and one world cup’ and the Last Night of the Proms or the Cecil Sharp society and the Beatles. L’s Scottish cousins may have been getting Christmas presents of replica skean dhus to wear, but there’s no ‘English’ costume that she can adopt that won’t be regarded by most English people as vaguely ridiculous. The right wing bigots in our local paper occasionally moan about why the council has no St George’s Day celebrations, but the most inspiration that any celebrations tend to come up with is the combination of a barbecue and a disco.

Could English nationalism develop a broad and genuine appeal across England, without diverging into bigotry? I don’t think it can by top-down decree; it would take a mythmaker of genius, some Walter Scott of the West Midlands, to create a tradition that would have widespread appeal. (The nearest recent figures to do this so far, I would say, have been George Orwell and Billy Bragg and I’d rather not let Mel Gibson loose on the problem, thank you). But as my dissection of ‘traditional Scottish’ elements above shows, you can actually create a tradition surprisingly quickly with inspiring material. Maybe by 2057, L and I will be celebrating together in some positive and inclusive, but very distinctively ‘English’ way; but somehow I doubt it.