Monday, August 15, 2011

Submissions for KZoo 2012 Session I: Monstrous Children

1. Jenna Stook, Mount Royal University and the University of Calgary
Monstrous Unions and Hideous Progeny: A Consideration of the Lump Child in the Auchinleck King of Tars

The Middle English romance The King of Tars features both the motif of the monstrous birth and that of miraculous conversion. In the romance, the unnamed Christian princess marries the Saracen Sultan of Damascus, and later gives birth to a child. The women attending the birth are described as being “wel sori” for the child is decidedly monstrous: it is a formless lump of flesh without human physiology and without “liif.” This paper will begin by unpacking the description of the child as “lifeless.” The nature of the child's monstrosity, I will argue, lies in its lack of an animating force (a presumably Christian soul) and its indeterminacy. The child, a product of an interfaith and interracial marriage, is a hybrid figure who occupies a middle space between human and non-human, Christian and Saracen. The paper will then consider the cause of the child's monstrosity in light of medieval Christian injunctions against intermarriage and interfaith sex. The King of Tars presents the interfaith union and the child it produces as equally monstrous because both expose classificatory boundaries as fragile and both threaten to dissolve the border between self and other. The threat posed by the lump child to boundary order is ultimately contained through his miraculous conversion: the child transforms from a monster into a well-formed boy full of life.
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2. Sarah Alison Miller, Duquesne University
“Twins and Hermaphrodites in Albertus and Pseudo-Albertus”

This paper explores how medieval philosophical and medical texts represent the relationship between the procreation of multiple births, conjoined twins, and hermaphrodites. Although conjoined twins and hermaphrodites fell squarely in the category of monstrosity, late-medieval theories of human generation acknowledged twins to be a species of monster produced by a number of possible factors: an unnatural conception, an imperfect womb, a lack or excess of matter, a failed process of material division, or the influence of a constellation. Albertus Magnus’ De animalibus and Pseudo-Albertus Magnus’ De secretis mulierum grapple with the disparate embryological models inherited from ancient medicine, Arabic gynecology, and medieval astrology in an effort to come to terms with the slippage between normative and monstrous offspring. Ultimately, though tacitly, these texts reveal the troubling combinations and divisions entailed by the creation of a human being. By considering how pleasure, sexual shenanigans, female anatomy, and the cosmos itself impinge upon this process, this paper probes the teratogenic conditions at the origins of all human life.


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3. Lisa LeBlanc, Anna Maria College
Monstrous Births of Non-monstrous Origin

The origins of monsters have long interested scholars . From Grendel’s lineage to the birth of Echidna’s monstrous offspring, fantasy and folklore has attempted to account for the monsters created by human imagination. Not all monstrous children are born to monsters, however. In the Middle Ages, folklore attributed monstrous births to several causes. In some cases, they were attributed to demonic causes, such as Merlin, or to the unrevealed supernatural nature of the mother, such as the legend of Melusine. In other cases, monstrous births were attributed to natural causes, such as intercourse during a woman’s menstrual period, which was believed to cause leprous births, or adultery which led to multiple births, seen as monstrous in ancient and medieval times. Later superstitions moved the cause of monstrosity outside the woman, such as viewing a traumatic event.

How does the knowledge that these “monsters” are of human origin affect how society views them? While in ancient times, the father had the right to accept or reject the child at birth, the Middle Ages did not look as kindly on the abandonment of infants. So what happened to such infants? Furthermore, since these monstrosities were often seen as the result of the sin of the parents, particularly the mother, did the changing view of the causes of monstrosity help to alleviate the “othering” of the parent as either not human or as a significant enough sinner to be punished in this way? This paper will explore the superstitions concerning monstrous births in the human community through records of the superstitions and through their treatment in literary texts to analyze the reaction of the community to the monstrous birth, to see how these ideas changes over time, and to analyze how the authors of such legends use, or even overthrow, these superstitions.

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4.Jenny Howe, Tufts University
“sum fendys son”: Demonic Births and Monstrous Mothers in Sir Gowther

The folklore motif of the “Wish Child” appears in many medieval romances and legends. Such stories, in which parents desperate to conceive pray to God and are granted a child, are most often associated with accounts of the life of St. Anne and the Annunciation. But God is not always the benefactor of these prayers; instead, a devil or demon sometimes visits the mother, usually in the guise of her husband, and begets upon her a child wild and fiendish. The late fifteenth-century romance, Sir Gowther, provides a potent example of this type of Wish-Child motif, for Gowther, the product of such a coupling, is so aggressive and violent that he suckles nine wet nurses to death.

This paper will consider how the Wish-Child motif generally and Sir Gowther in particular manifest medieval anxieties surrounding maternity through the depiction of monstrous offspring. I will argue that, in light of medieval theories of the body that read the maternal corpus as a source of contamination and corruption to the child, the Wish-Child story reproduces precarious images of motherhood through the creation of children that are both mortal and divine, natural and unnatural. Turning specifically to Gowther’s unnatural corporeality and the violent acts that posit him as “sum fendys son,” I will show how Sir Gowther ultimately repudiates the maternal body and asks us to consider how monstrous births “monsterize” the women that engender them.


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5. Maria Fields, Henderson State University
“Þerefore is lorn þis litel faunt”: Colliding Xenophobia and Late-Medieval Piety in the Auchinleck King of Tars

In the Auchinleck (National Library of Scotland Advocates’ Manuscript 19.2.1) King of Tars, the poet likens the child of the Christian princess and her Saracen husband to a monster, describing it as “a rond of flesche… wiþouten blod & bon” and having “noiþer nose no eye” (580-82, 584). The monstrous child functions as a symbol of the intersection of xenophobia and late-medieval piety and serves to further differentiate his mother from the Virgin Mary because he exists in opposition to the perfection of the Christ Child. Utilizing a deconstructionist approach, I examine the poem’s opposing symbols, their collision in the formless child, and the resulting societal implications.



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6. Julie Nelson Couch, Texas Tech University
Apocryphal Childhood in the London Thornton Manuscript

In this paper I will consider the function of the Infancy poem and its title, ³The Romance of the childhode of Ihesu Criste that clerkes callys Ypokrephum,² in the context of the London Thornton manuscript. While the story of Jesus¹ childhood is already present in the Cursor Mundi extract Thornton includes as a prequel to the Northern Passion, Thornton returns to the subject of child Jesus, this time presenting him explicitly in an apocryphal time within a romance narrative. In comparing this version to
four other instances of the Middle English Infancy, it is apparent that this poem¹s differences link it to texts in the Thornton manuscript; these differences include: amplifying the role of Mary as one who parents child Jesus, tying child Jesus' outlandish acts to his later Passion, and utilizing more explicitly the narrative structures of romance. This poem seems to introduce, with its emphasis on ³solaunce² and its sheer relish of play, a reading experience different from somber affective meditation, one that is entertaining and didactic, perhaps suggesting a young reader. Strong didactic and typological threads appear to tamp down the wildness of the child Jesus; nevertheless, the wild abandon of the Christ child and even of Mary, who by the end enjoys with great laughter Jesus¹ pranks as much as he does, creates a narrative momentum that allows for a reading that is more fluid than a didactic agenda would suggest. Childhood itself becomes a rhetorical, albeit contained, space that allows for non-orthodox, playful
reading.

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7. Beth Sutherland, University of Virginia
Born for Monstrous Sanctity: Margaret and Her (Uncontainable) Dragon

This paper examines monstrosity’s role in three Saint Margaret vitae: the Legenda aurea, South English Legendary, and Katherine Group redactions.  Margaret enjoyed immense popularity as the patron of childbirth due to her consumption by a dragon and eruption out of its belly.  Her hagiographers, however, express discomfort with this plot-point.  Laden with miracles, angels, and demons, taking saints’ lives literally would have required herculean feats of credulity.  This specter of dubiety reaches its crisis point when the dragon slithers onstage.  The dragon epitomizes all the vita’s semantic slippage, becoming a site at which the hagiographer can puncture the genre by expressing doubt.  Deployment of the monstrous constitutes a violent but also a liberating move: eruption, but also birth.  Two hagiographers conjure this monstrous spectacle only to disclaim it, exorcising readers’ concerns about their ‘good faith.’  That they protest on theological grounds is perplexing: one could easily redeem the episode as a Jonah analogy.  Jesus claims that wonder-seekers will receive only the ‘sign of Jonah,’ taken as an allusion to the Harrowing of Hell.  The third hagiographer has Margaret mention the Harrowing before being swallowed, and after asking God for a ‘sign’ of her enemy.  He describes the dragon with delectation, recognizing it as a handy phenomenological tool, not a stumbling-block.  Theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar describes hell’s inability to contain divinity.  Sheol takes Jesus in but must immediately eject him.  Hell’s spewing is akin to birth pangs, making Jesus a monstrous birth—issuing forth from what gets represented iconographically as the jaws of a beast.  Erupting out of the dragon’s belly, the saint acts as a typological post-figuration of Christ while foreshadowing her rebirth through martyrdom .  Monstrosity plays an almost biologically essential role in God’s soteriological project, acting as a womb for sanctity.

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8. Stephanie Norris, University of Iowa
“This Can’t Be the Terrible Two’s: Nursing at the Breast of Violence in Sir Gowther”

    The late fourteenth century English tale Sir Gowther, a derivative of the French Robert the Devil, narrates the quest for redemption of a knight whose lust for rapacious violence during his youth bears witness to his demon parentage.  At the age of fifteen, Gowther’s gigantic stature and unbelievable physical strength facilitate the acts of excessive violence he commits against the people of Austria, particularly clergyman, female religious and married couples. However as an infant, before he was old enough to hang parsons on hooks or burn hermits alive, Gowther’s fiendish ancestry is made manifest in a seemingly insatiable appetite.  In fact, the infant Gowther suckles nine wet-nurses to death prior to tearing his own mother’s nipple from her breast when she attempts to nurse him in their stead.  Although shockingly heinous, Ian Mitchell-Smith suggests that such acts of excessive violence are sanctioned by the text and reaffirm the homo-social bond of the court, given that they are enacted within the appropriate context (outside the space of the court) and against the proper target (Saracens and other non-Christians). Advancing this perspective, I argue that the violence displayed by Gowther during his childhood actually betrays a cultural anxiety about the miscegenation of Christians with Jews and Saracens – and the threat to stable identity binaries such mixing poses - not just the legitimization of Gowther’s nobility through properly directed violent acts.  Reading specific instances of violence in Gowther’s youth in light of his fiendish birth and the bizarre circumstances surrounding his conception in conjunction with the volatile socio-religious culture of late medieval England, I contend that Gowther’s adolescent rabblerousing performs an apprehension about the amalgamation of disparate racial and religious identities that the text struggles to quell.
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9. Anna Dow, University of Alberta

In twelfth- and thirteenth-century epic literature the child occupies a liminal status as an empty figure of futurity, divided between death and the potential for heroism. In the Völsunga Saga Sigmund tests King Siggeir’s children for courage, and when they are found wanting he kills them; as neither child is destined to be the hero of the tale it is deemed unnecessary that either should exist. It is Sinfjotli who eventually passes the test, and is therefore permitted to progress into adulthood in order to fulfil his heroic destiny. In a second case, Cú Chulainn’s heroism in the Táin bó Cúailnge is supplemented by the recitation of his childhood deeds. In this instance the child is central to Cú Chulainn’s development, and yet exists only in futurity as a retrospective version of the hero himself. There are two primary points to be addressed here: first, the child’s status as a non-existent and hence monstrous ‘other’ in the literary examples provided; and secondly, the temporal status of the medieval child as a symbol for narrative and heroic potential. Each question also highlights a particular issue for contemporary medieval studies, which is the necessity to differentiate between original and contemporary perceptions of the literature at hand. Interestingly enough, recent work has emerged on the futurity of the child in contemporary society (see Kathryn Bond Stockton’s The Queer Child), and it seems that the dismissal of the child as a symbol of futurity might have deeper roots in our literary history than previously thought.
 

Submissions for KZoo 2012 Session II: Eye of the Beholder

Marcus Hensel, University of Oregon
Monsters, a Definition

The last twenty or so years have brought with them a heart-warming rise in scholarly work on medieval monsters, but the precision of language used in our analysis has not kept pace. Monster, as a term, has been stretched far past its denotative limit because the prevailing wisdom holds that categorizing the monstrous imposes, to use David Williams’ words, “fundamentally arbitrary and absolutely impermanent” structures. In this paper, I will respond to each of these issues as I construct a working definition of the monster.

First, I reject the notion that categorizing the monstrous is necessarily arbitrary. By using a Cartesian (coordinate) plane, I propose two axes—morphology and behavior—by which to judge potentially monstrous characters: each axis runs from normal/normative to abnormal/antisocial. These axes, in turn, create quadrants, and the one (-x, -y) created by a combination of antisocial behavior and abnormal morphology is the realm of the “monstrous.”

The second issue, the impermanence of definitions, I embrace. Because “antisocial” and “abnormal” are dynamic labels, I follow Noel Caroll in using a situational application. Are the characters in question welcomed or shunned by dominant social structures depicted in the text? Do they provoke disgust? Fear? Violent responses? Does the author treat them more sensitively than the characters? Looking primarily at textual clues with regard to morphology and behavior avoids transcendent (and therefore reductionist) views that ignore local knowledge. But it still provides a framework for differentiating between Grendel and Grettir, or Merlin and a manticore.


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Eric Morningstar, University of Michigan-Flint
Monsters in Dante's Hell: Cultural Implications and Unorthodox Religion

Writing towards the end of the Medieval Ages, Dante Alighieri’s treatment of monstrosity in the Inferno has many important implications for the text itself and for its author. In the Inferno, Dante includes a variety of monsters, including Charon, Minos, Medusa, Pluto, centaurs, and more. Some monstrous figures like Charon and Minos even function to keep Hell running. The inclusion of monstrous figures in Hell serves to make it a truly terrifying place of punishment for sinners, an important goal for Dante as a writer as he criticized many of the corrupt Florentines responsible for Dante’s own exile. Aside from this artistic and political motive, however, Dante’s inclusion of monsters in Hell has some predictable and other disturbing implications. One may read Dante’s placement of monstrous creatures outside of Christianity as servants in Hell as a way of affirming Christianity’s truth over what Virgil describes as, “…the season of the false and lying gods.” This interpretation is predictable given Dante’s dedication to Catholicism. However, one may also pay attention to the role of functionality in his Hell and raise questions. Much like the gates of Hell, the description of which reads, “…MY MAKER WAS DIVINE AUTHORITY, THE HIGHEST WISDOM, AND PRIMAL LOVE...,” one may also view the monstrous servants, representative of false gods, as functional creations of the Christian god. From this second view, the current paper will explore the cultural implications of Dante’s treatment of God as a creator of false gods and architect of damnation for pre-Christians.

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Jeannie Miller, NYU
Dogs, Devils, and the Rhetoric of Total Audibility.

The voluminous encyclopedic works of al-Jahiz (d. 868 AD), “father of Arabic prose,” exhibit a compulsive return to the monstrous, to intercategory beings, and to exceptions broadly speaking.  Eunuchs, cross-breeds, exceptional sexual practices, deformities, speech impediments – the list feels infinite.  This impression of infinity derives from al-Jahiz’s rhetoric of total audibility, through which he performs an unlimited availability of knowledge.  Indeed, one could read the omnipresence of exception in al-Jahiz’s work as the byproduct of a quest to include within the boundaries of knowledge that which was formerly distinguished by its very unknowability.  And yet the same rhetoric of total audibility that drives al-Jahiz to noisily include monsters at every turn also prevents him from silencing the many cultural voices broadcasting that unknowability. 
As al-Jahiz re-theorizes monstrosity within total audibility, what changes and what remains the same of monstrosity’s formal function and cultural significance?  My paper moves toward answering this question using the example of the dog in al-Jahiz’s Book of Animals.  The dog’s impurity was Islam’s shibboleth, and the sociopolitically tinged perspectives on the dog cited in the Book of Animals testify to the epistemological and political effects of the dog’s recategorization as dirty within the various communities of the new Islamic empire.  The total audibility of cultural discourses in this polyphonic text provides a kaleidescopic image of the dog’s exceptionalism.  In the end, al-Jahiz’s “accessible monstrosity,” with its unique sociopolitical valence, boils down to the same core disturbance as the “secret monstrosity” of the other voices cited in the text:  the dog is more human than is proper for an animal.

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Kalamazoo CFPs 2012

With apologies for cross-posting:

CALL FOR PAPERS
MEARCSTAPA Session for the International Medieval Congress at Western Michigan University
Kalamazoo, Michigan
May 10-13, 2012
Session I: “You’re So Juvenile: Monstrous Children in Medieval Culture”

In the medieval tradition, monsters serve as warnings, omens, portents, signs of the threshold between Us and Them, Here and There. Patrolling the borders of what is known and unknown, they signify all that humankind most fears and all that is possible beyond human understanding, good, bad and ugly in nature. As such, monsters inevitably are portrayed as decidedly non-human figures. But what about monstrous children? The presence of children problematizes the traditional Us-Other binary presented by most medieval monsters by normalizing them: children/offspring signify families; families signify communities, and this brings monsters into the realm of humanlike existence. How should we read, see, and interpret such figures, given the traditional view of the monstrous as inhuman? Do monstrous children underscore the difference of monsters, or do they provide a new, more encompassing view of monsters as more like humans than we want to believe? Are the offspring of monsters, themselves, automatically monstrous? What in the case of monstrous offspring raised by humans, or of human offspring raised by monsters? If a monster is baptized, is it then rendered human? Perhaps the standard taxonomy needs to be re-examined in light of the presence of monstrous children.

Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be sent to Asa Simon Mittman (asmittman@csuchico.edu)
Deadline for submissions to this session: September 15.
Any papers not included in this session will be forwarded to the Congress Committee for possible inclusion in the General Sessions.
Note, paper proposals will appear on the Mearcstapa blog: http://medievalmonsters.blogspot.com/

CALL FOR PAPERS
MEARCSTAPA Session for the International Medieval Congress at Western Michigan University
Kalamazoo, Michigan
May 10-13, 2012
Session II : “Eye of the Beholder: Perspectives on the Monstrous”

Monstrosity, like beauty, lies entirely in the eye of the beholder. It is a trait assigned from the outside, which reveals as much about the namer as the named. For this session, we invite papers that explicitly tackle the issue of perspective in designation of the monstrous. Central questions which might be considered include: To what degree are medieval authors and artists reflective about the relative nature of monstrosity; to what degree do they gloss over this problem; and to what degree do they seem not to consider it as such, at all? Who is granted the power to name the monster? How were real groups impacted by external designations of monstrosity? In essence, we wish to examine the issue of cultural relativism as it impacts the construction of monsters in the Middle Ages. This session will be headlined by John Block Friedman, author of the seminal The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought, who will start off the discussion on cultural relativism with a look at the Middle French Secrets de l’Histoire Naturelle.

Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be sent to Asa Simon Mittman (asmittman@csuchico.edu)

Deadline for submissions to this session: September 15.
Any papers not included in this session will be forwarded to the Congress Committee for possible inclusion in the General Sessions.
Note, paper proposals will appear on the Mearcstapa blog: http://medievalmonsters.blogspot.com/