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General Interest Column: A. W. Strouse on, “How To Be Unprofessional”

07 Sunday Jun 2015

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General Interest, graduate student life, professional development

How to be Unprofessional

A.W. Strouse

Plenty of empirical evidence demonstrates that humanist doctoral students are utterly screwed:

  • The mean attrition rate in humanities Ph.D. programs is roughly half.
  • Time-to-degree averages about ten years.
  • There are practically no decent jobs for humanities doctorates.

And anecdotal evidence confirms, too, that many graduate students feel tormented by their advisers, tortured by poverty-level stipends, and generally just stressed the hell out.

So, what should we do?

Personally, I see this doomsday scenario as a radical opportunity. In such a dire situation, it would be irrational for me to simply conform to the norms of professionalization in the hopes of winning a tenure-track position. Therefore, I feel liberated. If I have nothing to lose, then I can to take big risks, go for broke, and enjoy my studies.

As I recently argued (in a special issue of Pedagogy [1] dedicated to issues in graduate education) I want to create a more “unprofessional” kind of “professionalism.” I’m not talking about skimping on footnotes, sleeping with undergraduates, or staging “occupations.” I’m talking about making a conscious decision to take pleasure in my studies and to resist, in whatever ways possible, the forces that often make graduate school unpleasant. My theoretical explication of “unprofessionalism” can be found in the article; here are some practical policies:

  • Don’t complain to or commiserate with other graduate students. It’s boring, unproductive, and self-indulgent.
  • Write only one course paper per semester. During my last three semesters of coursework, I would arrange my schedule so that I only had to write a full research paper for one of my courses. I would audit some of my classes. And for the full-credit courses, I would write a historiography paper (usually to compliment the full paper); or I would create a translation, an edition, etc. This made my life much less stressful, and it made my papers much stronger.
  • Read widely. I’m currently reading Paul Vitz’s biography of Freud. Freud has nothing whatsoever to do with my dissertation, but I’m completely fascinated by Vitz’s thesis that Freud was an unconscious Catholic.
  • Get out of the library. I usually work from home. But when I’m reading at the library I always make sure to take a long walk to my favorite bakery, where I eat a big cookie. Life is too short!
  • Get out of academia. Go to the theater, go to a roller coaster park. Tutor, garden, volunteer. Don’t wait until summer break—do these things during the most stressful part of the semester.
  • Grade papers with a timer. Any highly literate person should be able to read and grade an undergraduate’s six-page paper in five minutes. When I grade my students’ essays, I set a five-minute timer for each paper. Often I go over the time limit, but it’s pretty exhilarating to race against the clock.
  • It’s OK to cancel office hours sometimes. Occasionally I hold my office hours in Central Park, or I cancel them altogether and walk up to the Metropolitan Museum. (I love to look at those pious portraits of Low Land burghers[2], whose neurotic work ethic and propensity for self-flagellation still inspires so many of us.)
  • Your students will respect you more if, just once during the semester, you use a four-letter word.
  • Don’t ask permission. A few semesters ago I decided to teach Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde in a required, freshman composition class. I knew that my supervisor would tell me it was a terrible idea to teach Middle English in an introductory course, so I never mentioned it to anybody until after the fact. The course was, of course, an overwhelming success, because students love to be challenged.
  • Ask for opportunities. In my experience, most of the people working in the university are kindhearted, bright individuals who recognize the struggles that graduate students face, and they’re more than willing to help—but they often don’t know how to help. But almost every time that I have asked for an opportunity, it has been afforded me. All you have to do is: figure out who to ask, figure out how to ask, and then ask.
  • See the big picture. Graduate students are in such bad shape for a reason: the folks who dictate national economic policy believe strongly in privatized, individualist entrepreneurship. We are impoverished, because (in theory) such material pressures will force us to compete, innovate, and create—in ways that benefit society at large. That ideology may or may not be flawed. But, for now, it’s all we’ve got to work with. And, to some extent, it is working. On the micro-economic level (i.e., in terms of my own quality of life) being a graduate student kind of sucks sometimes. But, on the macro-economic level, the system produces quality researchers and teachers for what is arguably the world’s best university system.

Looking at the situation from a global perspective, I’m grateful that the American taxpayer is willing to fund my quixotic investigations of medieval poetry. I see it as my duty to repay society for its investment by working hard, teaching well, and creating new opportunities. It’s my responsibility to make the most of my time as a graduate student, and sometimes that means challenging preconceived ideas about what it means to be a graduate student.

A.W. Strouse is a poet who studies and teaches medieval literature at the City University of New York. Strouse’s articles have appeared in Romanic Review, Pedagogy, and Names; and Strouse’s recent book of poems, Retractions & Revelations, is available from Jerk Poet[3].

[1] http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pedagogy/toc/ped.15.1.html ↩
[2] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/Hugo_van_der_Goes_007.jpg ↩
[3] http://www.jerkpoet.com ↩

General Interest Column: Lucy Barnhouse on “The Medievalist Abroad: Widening the Conference Circuit”

31 Sunday May 2015

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conferences, General Interest, graduate student life, interdisciplinary medieval studies

The Medievalist Abroad: Widening the Conference Circuit

          Conferences can be bane or blessing or both, depending on factors ranging from one’s teaching schedule to where one’s degree of extroversion. The atmosphere of collegial exchange at a good conference is one I find invigorating, even if it’s usually savored through a haze of over-caffeinated exhaustion. I confess, though, that process of applying for conferences is one I’ve often faced with dread. I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time poring over the annual calls of prestigious conferences, wondering how to fit my current research under the umbrella of a given topic. Time spent doing research in Europe forced me out of these bad habits, through forcing me out of the North American comfort zone of the Kalamazoo-plus circuit. I started searching CFP listings by location and date, or by keywords like “medicine” instead of “medieval.” Exploring these new conferences, I discovered a counterintuitive truth: presenting at conferences where medievalists were in the minority both stimulated my writing process, and resulted in stimulating feedback.

During the past summer conference season, I had my first experiences of attending conferences where I was one of very few medievalists. I found these conferences—on historicizing security, on the history of medicine, and on urban history—helped me hone valuable skills. This process began even before I attended the conferences themselves. Writing abstracts—and papers—helped me think about my topic in new ways. For instance: how might my work on medieval leprosy contribute to a conference on “(In)visibility, (In)security, and Gender in Historical Perspective?” Is “Healthscaping Pre-Modern Cities” the conceptual frame I never realized my fourteenth-century property disputes needed Preparing to speak on how one’s own work relates to such broad topical themes or theoretical frameworks provides a great excuse for delving into secondary literature.

Such research is something that I, at least, find perpetually slipping down my to-do list. Conferences not only imposed a deadline for doing it, but a purpose, in giving me a shared vocabulary with non-medievalist scholars. In my case, presenting research on a late medieval leper hospital to an audience of historians, sociologists, and scientists provided an opportunity for reading up on legal anthropology. It also opened my work to the bracing questions of an audience with no assumptions. Writing for an audience with no background knowledge forced me to sharpen my central ideas, making them clear enough to be concisely expressed. Presenting for an audience primarily made up of non-medievalist scholars means there is no chance for the room to get caught up in fine points of source analysis or historiographical controversies. There are, of course, times when a room full of people ready to talk through a coffee break about the semantics of Old Norse or the fine points of a liturgical procession is just what is wanted and needed. But participating in other conversations proved a salutary exercise.

I found it refreshing and stimulating to discover how scholars with very different sources are engaging with similar—or different—problems and questions. Topical conferences on medical and urban history proved very educational for me. I spent a lot of time listening… and taking copious notes that I’ve since used in preparing and teaching classes on modern Europe. I also found myself engaging in unexpectedly familiar conversations. It turns out that historians of hospitals in the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth centuries are also dealing with debates over the moral quality of patients, and tensions between private charity and public funding. The ways in which these questions have been debated in the medieval historiography are often tied to broad narratives about the Middle Ages, and finding them outside it felt very liberating.         Conferences sponsored by umbrella organizations can also be especially good opportunities for workshops and networking. The conference of the Society for the Social History of Medicine even included a workshop designed for graduate students and early career researchers (more of this, please, conference organizers everywhere.) At the same conference, panels with papers on pre-modern topics brought the medievalists together in bunches, throwing together thirty or so people from multiple disciplines and career stages with the shared interest of medieval medicine. This proved a shockingly efficient method of facilitating the exchange of contacts and citations with other graduate students, and of getting into conversations with established scholars who might have been mobbed—or at least nervously avoided by me—at an all-medievalist conference.

My summer of interdisciplinary love helped sharpen my own sense of what makes my research distinctive, and what connects it to the questions others are asking. It also built my confidence in presenting that research to non-specialist audiences, an experience I’m glad to have had before going on the job market. All of the steps of the conference process—from brainstorming to reception—proved helpful, in slightly different ways than they are when the expected conference is made up primarily of medievalists. Being forced to approach my own topic from a variety of perspectives was an exercise that made a pleasant change from obsessive tinkering with paragraphs and anxious contemplation of chapters. I’ve since presented for an audience of scientists, humanities scholars, and the interested public, and have more presentations to lay audiences scheduled. I’ve also become something of an evangelist for presenting at conferences not designed by and for medievalists. It provides an opportunity to participate in new conversations, to make new friends… and to communicate to others what’s so great about the Middle Ages, asserting that we belong in these larger conversations too.

Lucy Barnhouse

Lucy Barnhouse is a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department of Fordham University, New York. Her dissertation, “The Hospitals of Mainz: Legal Privileges and Social Functions,” examines the effects of canon law on the development of late medieval hospitals. She spent the academic year 2013-14 in Mainz as a Fulbright Scholar, doing archival research, and has presented the results of this research internationally. Her work focuses on how the legal status of medieval hospitals as religious institutions influenced the place of hospitals, including leper hospitals, in the religious and social networks of late medieval cities.

General Interest Column: Sarah Kathryn Moore on “The Interdisciplinary Advantage: Being a Medievalist in a Small Program”

26 Tuesday May 2015

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General Interest, graduate student life, interdisciplinary medieval studies

The Interdisciplinary Advantage: Being a Medievalist in a Small Program

There is no official medieval studies program at my university. Nor is there any organized certificate program; there isn’t even a university-run group or lecture series. Besides myself, there are three or four other students reading in or writing dissertations on medieval English literature (in a department with well over 100 postgraduates). In other departments, the situation is similar: two or three postgrads each in Romance languages, history, art history, music, religion. I’m not at a small school—my university is the largest in the northwestern US. I’m happy at my institution and I have a wonderful advisor, but I must admit that my first few years in the program were a struggle.

Being one of the only medievalists at a large university can be isolating. Selecting relevant coursework with an eye toward both breadth and depth, acquiring languages, navigating interdisciplinary conferences: these are challenges that my colleagues in, for example, 20th century American literature don’t have to address. I have been reduced, more than once, to figurative hair-tearing and gnashing of teeth when communicating with departmental or university representatives who don’t understand the unique challenges of my sub-field. Cross-disciplinary coursework is not encouraged by my department and language acquisition is seen by my peers in other fields as a year-long requirement to get out of the way rather than as a necessary part of their scholarship. My department’s attitude is similar, and there is no support, financial or otherwise, for school-year or summer language coursework.

As medievalists, the necessity for interdisciplinary coursework is a unique challenge. No matter our field, we must have a working knowledge in history, religion, the arts—and of course we all need multiple foreign languages. Not to mention the fact that “medieval studies” covers 1,000 years and three continents, and we’re expected (by potential employers, and others both within and outside academia) to be familiar with these vast temporal and geographical ranges.

However, this necessity can also work to our unique advantage: for one thing, we have natural allies outside our primary department. Furthermore, we’re able to neatly sidestep the ever-present academic pitfall of tunnel vision—the necessity of learning broadly as well as deeply is frustrating when not supported by our department and/or university, but it also provides us with chances for vital, informed scholarship. Moreover, it gives us ready-made opportunities for cross-disciplinary conversation and collaboration. And where the individual departments at my university can sometimes seem indifferent toward medieval studies, there are structures in place to support interdisciplinary projects.

When I decided to start a reading group for medievalists at my university, the first people I approached were my professors. I found them hugely supportive—after all, they know as well as I do what it’s like to be at an institution with a small contingent of medievalists. My advisor connected me with a new student I hadn’t met, who was eager to donate her valuable organizational (and grant-writing!) skills and her boundless enthusiasm to the project. Several professors also put me in contact with other postgraduate medievalists I hadn’t met—students who were dissertating and weren’t often on campus, for example—as well as advanced undergraduates with a strong interest in medieval studies. Some of these undergraduates are returning students with a good deal of knowledge and even publications under their belts, and many brought impressive language skills to the table as well. Once I started getting the word out (primarily via departmental email lists) I was also connected, through other students and professors, with local community members loosely affiliated with the university, many of whom had relevant postgraduate degrees and were delighted to be in touch with other medievalists. Within a year, what started as a reading group in the school library grew into an official “Graduate Interest Group” with generous funding from university’s Center for the Humanities, which also provides publicity and meeting space.

At a school with a smaller medieval studies program, one may be afforded the opportunity (or forced) to look outside the home department for support. The support I felt I lacked from my department was more than made up for in the support of other postgrads, professors, and the Center for the Humanities (whose raison d’être is to support interdisciplinary scholarship, making our alliance a win-win situation). As a medievalist in a small program, I’ve discovered that it is possible to get the support I need—financial, curricular and emotional—but I have had to be both creative and proactive in searching for it.

Sarah Kathryn Moore is a graduate student in English literature at the University of Washington in Seattle.

This essay was originally published in a slightly different version at The Venerable Read in August 2011

Alliterative Revival in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Arthurian Epic

14 Tuesday Jan 2014

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books, General Interest, reviews, Tolkien

fall-of-arthurReview by Phoebe C. Linton
s0784177@staffmail.ed.ac.uk
The University of Edinburgh

The Fall of Arthur should be considered a text of interest both to current medievalists interested in the fourteenth-century alliterative revival and those studying the development of Arthurian literature through history, as well as die hard fanatics of Tolkien. It constitutes the most recent posthumous publication by Christopher Tolkien of his father J. R. R. Tolkien’s work, a poem of 954 lines written sometime between 1931-4. The last section is sadly unfinished because Tolkien abandoned The Fall of Arthur for his epic narrative on Middle Earth, The Lord of the Rings; consequently the final sixteen lines are draft material rather than polished prose.

Characteristically, Tolkien’s supreme strength as an author lies in his unfolding of a journey. In the alliterative Fall of Arthur, his characters’ passage through time and over the landscape evokes the spirit of “quest” in every stanza. In his essay explaining the background of The Fall of Arthur, Christopher Tolkien references Edmund Chamber’s evaluation of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, who wrote that “no work of imagination, save the Aeneid, has done more to shape the legend of a people.” I consider it equally true that no work of modern fantasy has done more to shape the British literary imagination as The Lord of the Rings. The seeds of several themes, character prototypes and voices in Tolkien’s greatest work are apparent in The Fall of Arthur, and offer signs of the workings of the author’s imagination as he prepared, unconsciously or otherwise, to begin his magnum opus.

Tolkien was steeped in the lore and literature of the Middle Ages, and his familiarity with the spirit, language and style of his sources is evident in the fluency with which he handles Arthurian tragedy in his own unique voice. Much like the alliterative revival of the fourteenth century, which was not a mainstream tradition, Tolkien’s alliterative reimagining in the twentieth century was also not indicative of a revival. However, the genre lends itself to the subject of Arthurian epic due to the rhythm achieved by the dipodic hemistich, which infuses Tolkien’s distinctive imagery with energy. Dipodic hemistich is a verse form which divides each line into two halves (hemistich); in each half there are two feet, or syllables of emphasis (di-podic). These emphases can fall anywhere in each half. In this style and form, alliteration and poetic emphasis work together to form a motivated poetic pulse that drives the narrative forward. Therefore this form and style is particularly suitable to war epics such as the legends of Arthur.

Unlike the most complex and exemplary British Arthurian romance, Le Morte Darthur by Thomas Malory, which follows the whole of Arthur’s life from youth to age, Tolkien’s poem begins in media res during the final days of King Arthur. Readers familiar with the Arthurian myths and romances will recognise that at this point the best known events, such as the adulterous relationship between Lancelot and Guinever, have passed. Tolkien’s personal reimagining of King Arthur is not about how people become who they are, but how they face the consequences of their life choices.

The Fall of Arthur is divided into five cantos. The first follows Arthur in his final decision to seek a last glory in battle. As in Tolkien’s life work The Lord of the Rings, the landscape plays a huge part in the narrative, where events are played out across the “wild marches,” the “houseless hills,” and “veiled forest” rather than in the civilised environment of the medieval court.[1] Many ideas to be found in The Lord of the Rings are begun in this poem; for example Tolkien’s concept of war as a force that is almost above human control, like heaven and hell. War is portrayed almost as a wave of energy triggered by but not wholly because of mortal interference: “Thus Arthur in arms | eastward journeyed, / And war awoke | in the wild regions.”[2] Tolkien’s language allows for two readings, where Arthur can be seen as travelling to find the potential for evil that already exists in the east, as well as purposefully causing strife in order to augment his own glory. Here, Arthur could be the one to awaken war, but it is equally possible that it wakes of its own accord. The solitude of the lonely warrior “waiting watchful | in a world of shadow” who shines with heroism is counterbalanced by the moral ambiguity of such a mission.[3] In The Lord of the Rings different civilisations of men do not fight one another in battle, since they are united in their common goal to rid the earth of Sauron and the orcs. In this poem there is something unsettling about a king whose war efforts abroad are usually depicted in a favorable light, but here wreaks devastation on lands far away with no obvious cause except to enhance his own reputation:

folk fled them [Arthur’s company] | as the face of God,
till earth was empty | and no eyes saw them,
and no ears heard them | in the endless hills,
save bird and beast | baleful haunting
the lonely lands.[4]

In scenes such as this Tolkien was clearly influenced by the early medieval texts he studied and wrote about in his literary criticism: Beowulf and the Norse sagas.

Whilst Arthur is abroad on this mission, Tolkien portrays a traditionally depraved Mordred at home in the second canto, juxtaposed with a less conventional Guinever, who here is pure antithesis to the disloyal Mordred, despite her illicit affair with Lancelot. Although the second canto opens with Mordred, it turns halfway to present Guinever as a heroine acting within a world turned politically dark. She reflects some of Eowyn’s qualities, such as defiance and coldness in face of the heat of anger:

Grey her eyes were | as a glittering sea;
glass-clear and chill | they his glance challenged
proud and pitiless.[5]

In the third canto, Tolkien captures Lancelot’s conflicting passion for Guinever and love of his liege lord, the king. As in the second, Tolkien infuses age-old characters with new psychological depth, encouraging emotional complexity in their love triangle. Tolkien presents their relationship as tarnished; in order to save Guinever, Lancelot has unwittingly killed some of his closest fellows in the midst of their escape, among them Gareth, whom he himself knighted. Tolkien portrays how this guilt alters their perception of one another. In Guinever’s mind, “[s]trange she deemed him / by a sudden sickness | from his self altered.”[6] On the other side of this gulf, Lancelot feels similarly: “Strange he deemed her / from her self altered.”[7] Tolkien’s poetry is particularly emotive at this point, since the change each lover perceives as resting in the other is actually something that has occurred in their own minds and evinces a sophisticated concept of projection.

The tragic mood that inflects all the characters is strongest in the fourth canto. It is the most evocative and atmospheric section of the poem, epitomising Tolkien’s skill at complementing each protagonist with the pervasive force of the landscape which propels the narrative:

Wolves were howling | on the wood’s border;
the windy trees | wailed and trembled,
and wandering leaves | wild and homeless
drifted dying | in the deep hollows.[8]

This scene forms the backdrop for Mordred’s stand against Arthur’s forces, and descriptions such as this infuse the poem with a lonely mood that conveys the isolation of each and every character.

The fifth canto returns to Arthur as he travels home to Camelot to face his final reckoning with Mordred and his death. Christopher Tolkien tells us in this edition that his father’s notes demonstrate Tolkien’s intentions to include Avalon, and that he would have written a sequence where Lancelot follows Arthur to the other world. The medieval sources like the alliterative Morte Arthure, which would have been part of the basis of Tolkien’s research, do not describe Avalon at length. It is disappointing that readers can never know Tolkien’s vision for Arthur’s end, how fully he intended to draw out these final scenes, or what emotion he may have portrayed between father and son as they met their deaths together. As Christopher Tolkien laments, this unfinished cycle is “in my view, one of the most grievous of his many abandonments.”[9] Nevertheless, the unfinished nature of this poem gives us insight into ideas that translated into his work on The Lord of the Rings. We can imagine Arthur at his disappearance into Avalon voicing such thoughts as the elves upon their imminent departure; Galadriel speaks for herself as well as for all elves: “I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.”[10] Arthur is a figure of legend, and in one source, Lazamon’s Brut, is described as being raised by elves. Both heroes and elves are immortal, both physically and in spirit. Just as Arthur can only remain himself by escaping death through the immortality of Avalon, at least in the promise of his return, so too do Tolkien’s elves have access to the isles of the Valar.

As a publication, The Fall of Arthur is a beautiful edition, well presented and informative. The poem is accompanied by a foreword, select notes to the cantos, an appendix and three essays by Christopher Tolkien. For anyone interested in the medieval or neomedieval, this poem is worth owning as well as reading, and will make a welcome addition to any library. This haunting work is effective independently as much more than a historical piece. When read aloud, the lines sing to the listener with an almost dreamlike quality, a homage to the poetic form of centuries past from an author who possessed an acute awareness of temporality that fed his ability to create and recreate legend.

Works Cited

Tolkien, J. R. R. The Fall of Arthur. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London: Harper Collins, 2013.
–. The Lord of the Rings. London: Harper Collins, 2007.


[1] J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fall of Arthur, I.2, I.70, I.71, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London: Harper Collins, 2013).↩
[2] Tolkien, Fall, I.39-40.↩
[3] Tolkien, Fall, I.135.↩
[4] Tolkien, Fall, I.63-7.↩
[5] Tolkien, Fall, II.118-20.↩
[6] Tolkien, Fall, III.95-6.↩
[7] Tolkien, Fall, III.106-7 (own emphasis).↩
[8] Tolkien, Fall, IV.1-4.↩
[9] Christopher Tolkien, ‘The Poem in Arthurian Tradition,’ Fall, p. 122.↩
[10] J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, p. 366 (London: Harper Collins, 2007).↩

Divine Penetrations: the “Canterbury and St. Albans” Exhibition at the Getty Center in Los Angeles

07 Tuesday Jan 2014

Posted by hortuluseditors in Exhibitions & Events

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exhibits, General Interest, Getty

Review by Boyda Johnstone, Fordham University

The J. Paul Getty Museum’s current exhibition, “Canterbury and St. Albans: Treasures from Church and Cloister” (until February 2) brings together two of the greatest examples of English art after the Norman Conquest: the St Albans Psalter (ca. 1130), and a section of the Canterbury Cathedral windows (ca. 1178-80). While the pairing of these two works from different times and spaces is unusual, and, in a way, the result of a happy accident,[1]the exhibition does a wonderful job highlighting their artistic correspondences. The Getty Center’s exhibition is a marvelous opportunity to access two stunning twelfth-century objects which are normally either closed to viewers (in the case of the Psalter), or simply out of sight (in the case of the windows).

from http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/getty-voices-designing-canterbury-and-st-albans/
   Digital rendering of the exhibition

The Canterbury Cathedral windows in this exhibition were originally installed after the fire of 1174, but were moved in the eighteenth century to the Great South Window, where they normally hang sixty feet above the ground. Here at the Getty Center they hang easily within viewing distance, providing a rare chance for close scrutiny. They depict the Old Testament ancestors of Christ, linking the genealogy of the Cathedral with the genealogy of God, and the figures don fashionable twelfth-century apparel rather than biblical attire. Visitors have the opportunity to sit on one of the inviting benches and lose themselves in the moving impact of light and glass, or wander down the rows of pages of the Psalter and compare the two striking examples of Romanesque art.[2]

The Psalter is here displayed in “exploded book” format, as each individual bifolio is mounted on lecterns specifically designed for this exhibition.[3] Manuscript evidence such as calendar obits indicates that Geoffrey de Gorham, Abbot of St Albans (1119-1146) most likely presented the book to Christina of Markyate, an anchoress who established a community of women on the border of St. Albans. One of the many highlights of the exhibition is the inserted initial ‘C’ in Psalm 105 that seems to depict Christina of Markyate intervening with Christ, her hand penetrating the visible divide between mundane and divine; similarly, we as viewers penetrate spaces and objects we wouldn’t normally in this exhibit. Also related to Christina is the Alexis Quire, a discrete booklet in the otherwise Latin Psalter that contains the Anglo-Norman Vie de St Alexis. In this Vie, a son leaves his bridal chamber to spend seventeen years as a beggar abroad, and then spends another seventeen years living unknown underneath his parents’ staircase. In this exhibit we encounter the quire’s opening image of Alexis fleeing from his wife in their bridal chamber onto a boat, an act of abandonment which resonates with Christina’s own disavowal of her wedding vows.

The Christina Initial, in Psalm 105

In the course of their inspections, the Getty curators discovered faces of demons in the Passion sequence smudged by distressed viewers, and tiny needle pricks in the eyes of Christ’s tormenters. In medieval culture, seeing enacted the direct contact of touching or ingesting, and these details register the perceived danger that viewers and readers felt in the presence of evil or devilish figures. In the pages of the Psalms themselves we find a number of creative illustrative responses by the Alexis master, including a typological image of the nativity, and weeping figures surrounding a large initial ‘S’ which has become Psalm 137’s river of Babylon.  The exhibition is enhanced with interactive audiovisual materials and an assortment of other timely objects and books—such as the Eadwine Psalter, which contains thirty-three pictures in common with the St Albans Psalter; a codex depicting the Life, Passion & Miracles of Saint Edmund that is illustrated by the Alexis Master; and reliquaries associated with the cult of Thomas à Becket. A digital facsimile of the Psalter on a nearby computer screen translates the Vulgate into modern English with the touch of a finger, and the final room of the exhibit supplies visitors with background materials for the making of stained glass and illuminated manuscripts.

Overall, “Canterbury and St. Albans” dazzles its viewers with the beauty and power of these twelfth-century treasures, and the descriptions, audio guide, and other interactive materials give visitors valuable information about twelfth-century medieval spirituality and ecclesiastical power. This is a must-see for scholars of high-medieval England, and a should-see for everyone else.

For more on the windows, see The Ancestors of Christ Windows at Canterbury Cathedral by Jeffrey Weaver and Madeline H. Caviness. For more on the Psalter, see The St. Albans Psalter: Painting and Prayer in Medieval England by Kristen Collins, Peter Kidd, and Nancy Turner. You can also take a multimedia tour of the exhibition on your smartphone here. 


[1] The windows are on loan from Canterbury Cathedral due to construction, and the book, normally housed in Hildesheim Cathedral, has been sent to the Getty for rebinding and conservation.↩

[2] Curator Robert Checchi describes his vision for the arrangement of lecterns in front of glass: “the visitor can look down at a page, then up at the glass, and make the comparisons that—until this exhibition—have never been possible.” Read more here.↩

[3] Curator Kristen Collins explains the meaning of an “exploded book show” in her blog on the topic, found here.↩

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    • Volume 1.1, 2005
    • Volume 2.1, 2006
    • Volume 3.1, 2007
    • Volume 4.1, 2008
    • Volume 5.1, 2009
    • Volume 6.1, 2010
    • Volume 7.1, 2011
    • Volume 8.1, 2012
    • Volume 9.1, 2013
    • Volume 10.1, 2013
    • Volume 10.2, 2014
    • Volume 11.1, 2014
    • Volume 11.2, 2015
    • Volume 12.1, 2015
    • Volume 12.2, 2016
    • Volume 13.1, 2016
    • Volume 13.2, 2017
    • Volume 14.1, 2017
    • Volume 14.2, 2018
  • General Interest
  • Job Openings
    • Co-Editorship (Junior)
    • Assistant Editorships (4)
  • Digital Publishing Column
  • The Reliquary Triptych, the Arms of Christ, and the Visual Language of the Relic Thesaurus ca. 1160–By Julia Oswald
  • Fortress of the Free Mind: The Contemplative Nature of Personal Liberty in Early Anglo-Saxon Monasticism—by William Tanner Smoot
  • BOOK REVIEW: The Eufemiavisor and Courtly Culture: Time, Texts and Cultural Transfer—Review by Heidi Synnøve Djuve
  • BOOK REVIEW: 
Kungamakten och lagen. En jämförelse mellan Danmark, Norge och Sverige under högmedeltiden (Kingship and Law: A Comparison between Denmark, Norway and Sweden in the High Middle Ages)—Review by Beñat Elortza Larrea
  • IMPERIUM ET CREDO: Frankish-Byzantine Rivalry over Leadership of the Roman-Christian Credo-State in the Ninth Century–By Elijah Wallace
  • Letter from the Editor
  • “Caterpillars of the Commonwealth”: The Material and the Political in Ricardian Nature Allegories–By Allen Fulghum
  • Troilus’s Future: Perspectives on Futurity in Troilus and Criseyde–By Tyler Jones
  • Reform and the Welsh Cistercian Houses: Colonialism and Postcolonialism–By Frank Lacopo
  • “Fully His Entente”: The Allegory of Chaucer’s Pandarus—By Kayla Shea
  • Call For Papers: Fall 2018 Themed Issue
  • Letter from the Editor
  • BOOK REVIEW: 
Walter Map and the Matter of Britain—Review by Thomas Sawyer

Twitter Updates

  • Call for Participants! ICMS 2020 'Graduate Student Publishing: A Roundtable on Publishing for Graduate Students and… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 1 year ago
  • We are now accepting applications for both the Junior Co-Editor position and 4 Assistant Editorships. Applications… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 1 year ago
  • Hortulus: The Online Graduate Journal of Medieval Studies welcomes submissions for Spring 2019 Open Theme issue. Su… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 1 year ago
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