Postcolonial Moves: Medieval through Modern

Postcolonial Moves Medieval Through Modern

Edited by Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle R. Warren

Postcolonial Moves

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Postcolonial Moves: Medieval Through Modern

Edited by Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle R.Warren

POSTCOLONIAL MOVES

© Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle R. Warren, 2003 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published 2003 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–40396–073–9 hardback Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Postcolonial moves: medieval through modern/edited by Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle R. Warren. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–40396–073–9 1. Imperialism in literature. 2. Literature, Middle ages—History and criticism. 3. Imperialism. 4. Postcolonialism. I. Ingham, Patricia Clare, 1958– II. Warren, Michelle R. 1967– PN56.I465 P67 2003 809⬘.93358—dc21

2002028752

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: March, 2003 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

vii

Notes on Contributors

ix

Introduction: Postcolonial Modernity and the Rest of History Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle R.Warren

1

Part One:

Around Disciplines

Chapter One

Post-Philology Michelle R.Warren

19

Chapter Two

Contrapuntal Histories Patricia Clare Ingham

47

Chapter Three

Imperium Studies:Theorizing Early Modern Expansion Barbara Fuchs Part Two:

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

71

In Place

Tales of the Ancients: Colonial Werewolves and the Mapping of Postcolonial Ireland Catherine E. Karkov

93

The Romance of MiscegeNation: Negotiating Identities in La Fille du comte de Pontieu Sharon Kinoshita

111

vi Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Contents Spirituality and Colonial Governmentality: The Jesuit Spiritual Exercises in Europe and Abroad J. Michelle Molina The Question of Occidentalism in Early Modern Morocco Nabil I. Matar Part Three:

133

153

Through Time

Chapter Eight

History and Legend:The Exile and the Turk David Lawton

Chapter Nine

The Ghost of Leo Africanus from the English to the Irish Renaissance Bernadette Andrea

195

Postcolonial Courtiers: Performing French Classicism from Versailles to Nouvelle-France Jean-Vincent Blanchard

217

Chapter Ten

173

Chapter Eleven Antipodean Idylls: An Early Australian Translation of Tennyson’s Medievalism Louise D’Arcens

237

Index

257

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This volume began in a series of long-distance conversations between the editors out of which the conference “Postcolonial Moves” emerged. Hosted by the University of Miami in February, 2000, “Postcolonial Moves” brought together scholars from diverse fields who were engaged in thinking through what it might mean to speak and write pre- and early modern histories in postcolonial terms.We would like to thank all the conference participants for their contributions to it and to our thinking on the topic. Special thanks to Gauri Viswanathan, who proved an intellectually energizing and gracious keynote speaker. Our gratitude from that time also goes to: Rebecca Biron, Kathleen Davis, Gylla Lucky, and Robert M. Stein for their support, insights, and good counsel. The collection Postcolonial Moves: Medieval Through Modern was inspired by that conference and includes a number of papers initially delivered there. Anne Dickson and Nicole Batchelor proved able and patient editorial assistants; a Faculty Research Grant from Lehigh University supported their work. At Palgrave Press, Kristi Long offered wisdom and unflagging support, and each came at crucial times. Our greatest debt goes, of course, to our contributors, both those who attended the initial conference and those who joined us subsequently. We have learned much from their critical acuity, benefited from their wealth of knowledge, and been the glad beneficiaries of their patience and good humor.

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NOTES

ON

CONTRIBUTORS

Bernadette Andrea is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She has published numerous articles, chapters, and reviews on early modern women writers, imperialism, and postcolonial theory. She is currently completing a book on early modern English women and the Ottoman Empire. Jean-Vincent Blanchard is Assistant Professor of French at Swarthmore College. He has published several articles on French seventeenthcentury rhetoric; his main interests are the relationship between science and religion, and the politics of classical representation. Louise D’Arcens is Lecturer in the English Studies Program at the University of Wollongong, Australia. She is currently engaged in a project on the development of medieval studies in Australia, and has published articles in this area. She has also published work on medieval women writers. Barbara Fuchs is Associate Professor of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Mimesis and Empire:The New World, Islam and European Identities (Cambridge University Press, 2001; honorable mention, MLA Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies) and Passing for Spain: Cervantes and the Fictions of Identity (University of Illinois Press, 2003). Patricia Clare Ingham is Associate Professor of English and Director of Women and Gender Studies at Lehigh University. She is the author of Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001).

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Notes on Contributors

Catherine E. Karkov is Professor of Art History at Miami University (Oxford, OH). She is the author of Text and Picture in Anglo-Saxon England: Narrative Strategies in the Junius 11 Manuscript (Cambridge University Press, 2001), and is currently working on a book on AngloSaxon ruler portraits. Sharon Kinoshita teaches World Literature & Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The present essay is part of her book-in-progress on representations of cultural contact in Medieval French Literature. David Lawton is Professor and Chair of the Department of English at Washington University in St. Louis. He has taught in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. His most recent book, Blasphemy, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. Nabil I. Matar is Professor and Head of the Humanities and Communication Department at the Florida Institute of Technology. His recent publications include Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (Cambridge University Press, 1998), Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (Columbia University Press, 1999), and In the Lands of the Christians:Arab Travel Writing in the Seventeenth Century (Routledge, 2002). J. Michelle Molina is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation, Visions of God, Visions of Empire: Jesuit Spirituality and Colonial Governmentality, investigates the Society of Jesus in New Spain. Michelle R. Warren is Associate Professor of French and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Miami (Coral Gables, FL). She is the author of History on the Edge: Excalibur and the Borders of Britain, 1100–1300 (University of Minnesota Press, 2000), and is currently studying the formation of the French colonial epic.

Introduction: Postcolonial Modernity and the Rest of History Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle R.Warren

Postcolonial studies have often based their critiques of colonialism on critiques of modernity. As a result, they tend to limit their purview to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Postcolonial Moves challenges these conventional limits by questioning prevailing assumptions about periodization. We take inspiration in our own critique of modernity’s role in postcolonial studies from R. Radhakrishan’s “Postmodernism and the Rest of the World.” For Radhakrishan, postmodern studies disavow their links to the modern in order to avoid grappling with the enduring effects of colonial histories.1 Similarly, postcolonial studies claim distance from premodern histories so as to deny the relevance of premodern dynamics of conquest and settlement to subsequent expansionist projects. Indeed, postcolonial critics question the very existence of colonialism in the absence of modernity. We argue here for a reconceptualization of colonial temporality such that postcolonial studies can enter into new kinds of historical dialogue. Engaging postcolonial studies outside its initial domains, Postcolonial Moves necessarily raises colonial modernity as a problem. Medievalists in particular have long noted “modernity” to be a loaded term, defined by and through its medieval opposite. Medievalists and scholars of premodern cultures, in general, thus share with their postcolonial colleagues a rich awareness of the complicated sophistication of so-called primitive peoples. And together we must wonder whether the West’s claims to a colonizing “modernity” for global empire constitutes a disavowal of the apparent social disorders, putatively superstitious religiosity, and so-called primitive desires that continue to circulate throughout the “modern”

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West. If this is so, then we might hazard the following hypothesis: in believing themselves to be “modernizing” archaic spaces and peoples abroad through colonial rule, colonizers enact, over and over again, their own ability to move from “medieval” to “modern,” from “primitive” to “civilized.”Writing in the high modern period, Sigmund Freud has long since taught us about the fragile experience of such “modernity.” Freud explains how anxieties of “primitive” drives and desires remain internal to Western subjects as well as to Western “civilization,” embodied in and through its discontents.2 We might add that the abstract, at times extraordinarily fragile, sense of the West’s own “modernity” is made to seem solid and stable precisely by acts that purport to “modernize” the colony. The West’s sense of its own modernity is thus grounded by and through colonized bodies suffering pain for belief in that abstraction.3 The ideological force of the West’s colonizing claim to be “modern,” and the concomitant claim that its colonizing forces are agents of “modernization,” is furthered (rather than unsettled) by defining colonialism as a “modern problem.” Such temporal limits, to be sure, circumscribe in the interest of historical particularity and definitional clarity. Yet in so doing such assertions imply, if unwittingly, colonial “modernity” as a fact of history rather than an ideology of colonialism. The contributors to Postcolonial Moves thus meet around a common interest in how the modernity of postcolonial studies blocks certain routes to the past, and thus maintains certain nationalist and historicist exclusions. If the contributors to Postcolonial Moves are interested in developing links across various period divisions, they remain equally committed to a sense of historical particularity. Unlike some engagements between early periods and postcolonial cultural studies, this volume seeks to avoid metaphorical uses of postcolonial categories, aspiring instead to display the “historical thicknesses” of disparate scenes of conquest, settlement, annexation, conversion, and cultural conflict. Our focus on the problem of modernity derives directly from the basic tenets of postcolonial criticism. For Homi Bhabha, for example, modernity has defined the terms of national belonging for colonized people. Bhabha therefore aims to challenge modernity “through the establishment of other historical sites, other forms of enunciation”; David Scott likewise suggests the need to interrogate modernity’s colonial activities. The counterpoint to colonial modernity can be the equally problematic notion of precolonial primitivism. Johannes Fabian, for example, demonstrated how modern colonialism turned the “other” in space into the “other” in time, thereby denying “coevalness” among peoples. Following Fabian,Anne McClintock reminds us that colonizers

INTRODUCTION

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routinely imagine colonies as archaic spaces and Dipesh Chakrabarty remarks that historicism “came to non-European peoples in the nineteenth century as somebody’s way of saying ‘not yet’ to somebody else.”4 This same historicism can say “not yet” to premodern cultures. Indeed, the alibi of modernity fuels resistance to postcolonial engagements with the texts and artifacts of earlier times on the part of both postcolonial scholars (who caution against, as Sara Suleri has put it, the “mobility” that has accrued to the category of the “postcolonial”5) and specialists in the early periods (who fear anachronism). Despite these resistances, openings beyond modernity riddle postcolonial studies, even if these are often literally bracketed off as partial disavowals.Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge, for example, note parenthetically that race might have a premodern history: “The decisive role that race has played in all forms of colonial society over the past 500 years (and perhaps before that) cannot be overestimated.”They go on to imply that colonial antiquity does bear upon current literary politics: “The postcolonial (unhyphenated) is a ghost that stalks the parent literary history just as vernacular literatures of Europe in Rome’s former colonies challenged Latin, and Hindi-Urdu literature challenged Sanskrit/Persian.”6 Even Bhabha, who focuses resolutely on modernity, slips toward other times.The recognition that modernity depends on the archaic (on “the construction of culture and the invention of tradition”) implies a need to excavate the complexities of the premodern in order to reckon with the modernity that wrought colonialism, or the colonialism that wrought modernity. Bhabha’s recursive rhetoric and elaboration of a colonial “time-lag” (“the minus in the origin”), moreover, leads toward history, with no endpoint in sight. Indeed, Bhabha is seemingly explicit about the opening of postcolonial studies to earlier periods when he refers to the possibility of “other ‘times’ of cultural meaning (retroactive, prefigurative).” Bhabha ultimately turns this iterative past into the medieval itself: “What [Benedict] Anderson designates as racism’s ‘timelessness,’ its location ‘outside history,’ is in fact that form of time-lag, a mode of repetition and reinscription, that performs the ambivalent historical temporality of modern national cultures—the aporetic coexistence, within the cultural history of the modern imagined community, of both the dynastic, hierarchical, prefigurative ‘medieval’ traditions (the past) and the secular, homogeneous, synchronous crosstime of modernity (the present).” Italicizing modern, Bhabha implies that there are other times for imagining community, times that belong as much to history as Anderson’s nation-state; placing the medieval in scare quotes, he troubles—graphically—Anderson’s progressive history.7

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In the end, Bhabha, like Mishra and Hodge, turns to classical literature, citing W. E. B. Du Bois as his own “prophetic precursor”: “Why should Aeschylus have sung two thousand years before Shakespeare was born?”8 While the rapprochement of the Renaissance to Antiquity (effacing the intervening “Middle Ages”) is hardly revolutionary historicism, Bhabha’s invocation of either undermines the edifice of colonial modernity. Arif Dirlik (one of Bhabha’s staunchest critics) opens a different kind of path beyond the modern by foregrounding the epistemological dynamics of “history.”While resisting a postcoloniality that would claim “the totality of modern history, if not all human history,” Dirlik argues for a “multi-historicalism” that “presupposes the historicity of cultures, and different historical trajectories out of different pasts, that provide[s] ‘outsides’ from which to view contemporary structures of power and the ideologies of history that legitimize them.” Since Dirlik does not explicitly define these “different pasts,” the general concept of “historicity” provides no clear epistemological or teleological limit. Dirlik subsequently identifies “hybridity” as the conceptual chimera that governs what he considers ahistoricism: “[I]f hybridity is a criterion of postcolonialism, then all colonialisms, including pre-modern ones, may be described as ‘postcolonial.’ ”9 While Dirlik’s scare quotes are meant to caution the reader against the authenticity of a premodern “postcolonial,” the recognition of “pre-modern colonialisms” nonetheless poses questions Dirlik does not answer. To what extent is the imagination of a “pre-modern colonialism” that does not include the resistances and recoveries considered postcolonial in tension with a method that “presupposes the historicity of all cultures”? On what grounds are such colonialisms understood to be without the “outsides” from which to view their structures and ideologies of power? Even without “hybridity,” premodern colonialisms raise postcolonial questions. Bhabha and Dirlik do not set out to move the postcolonial beyond modernity, and might deny the validity of this interpretation of their work.Yet other scholars have drawn the nonmodern explicitly into the field, even in some relatively early interventions.10 Recently, Deepika Bahri has critiqued the idea that coloniality is the domain of the “West,” while also contesting its modernity. Calling for a “more comprehensive historical framework that accounts for continuities along with ruptures,” Bahri evokes incidents of colonial expansionism from ancient Eastern cultures and counters directly the idea that the examination of premodern activities weakens the political saliency of postcolonial studies: “In conjuring up ancient history alongside the present, one is asking not for a reduction of disparate geopolitical experiences in one generic

INTRODUCTION

5

framework of human motivation and behavior stripped of historical and material contexts but a sensitivity to their interrelationship as a means of better understanding both in relation to the here and now. Human memory may be short and the list of immediate concerns long, yet one may wonder how those early experiences inform later historical phenomena such as religious fundamentalism and present-day discourse on colonialism and postcolonialism.” Bahri goes on to critique the overdetermining effects of nationalism, effects that occlude the perception of nonnationalist dynamics even within modern independence movements.11 While Bill Ashcroft takes a nearly opposite approach to the relationship between nationalism and history, he similarly transgresses the limits of postcolonialism:Ashcroft considers that when the ninth-century Alfred the Great urged his subjects to speak English, he established an “inclusive imperial dynamic” characteristic of all nationalisms.12 David Chioni Moore extends a similar analogical reasoning to the postcolonial signification of the English language for Chaucer and the Nigerian writer Ngugi wa Thiongo.13 And in suggesting that Western representations of Islam may be more complex than Edward Said implies in Orientalism, Bart Moore-Gilbert undertakes substantive analyses of the French epic La Chanson de Roland and Dante’s Divina commedia.14 These kinds of overt and covert incursions of nonmodernity into postcoloniality seem to have been gradually transforming the field. Recently, Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks has disclaimed limits of all kinds: “Unlike other area studies, postcolonial studies has no identifiable object: it would be impossible to suggest that it pertains to one or the other area of the world or that it is confined to a period, genre, or theme . . .”15 While the admission of geographical diversity may not be surprising, the identification of temporal diversity represents a relatively new orientation.Vilashini Cooppan has observed even more pointedly that the “past” does not reside on the other side of an irrecoverable rupture: “[I]n trying to decipher the murky process of affiliation and contestatory politics that are at once old and new, post-colonial criticism may also come to reconsider its imperative to divide between what is past and what is present, what belongs to it and what can be banished. All of this is by way of saying that disciplinary histories never begin quite where you think they do, and what you leave out of them has a way of returning.”16 “Banishing” the premodern, the antique, the medieval, in other words, can only ensure their presence; so long as this presence remains unexamined, contestatory politics will not have fully identified its targets. A similar understanding of the problematic status of origins in postcolonial studies animates Stephen Slemon’s recognition that

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medieval studies in particular are “well situated to address the political imperatives of postcolonial theory by undermining contemporary discourses of origin, arguing against the transhistoricity of normative liberal discourses of unified subjectivity, and cautioning against myths of purity and wholeness.”17 These openings beyond the modern beckon scholars in at least two directions: to analyze the role of earlier periods within colonialism and postcolonial scholarship, and to extend postcolonial studies to earlier periods. Critics have actually long recognized that both medievalism and humanism can be instrumental in cultures of oppression, while postcolonial writers repeatedly turn to ancient forms to express new kinds of identification.18 And even before postcolonial studies took academic shape, Brian Stock noted the interdependence of colonial universalism and the myth of medieval alterity: “[B]efore the Middle Ages could be abandoned as myth,Westerners had to give up the idea that Europe was the standard against which all other cultures were to be measured.”19 More recently, medievalists working explicitly with postcolonial theories have been analyzing the ways in which “the medieval” may be said to haunt the field.20 As a branch of contemporary scholarship in general, postcolonial studies is implicitly included in Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero’s argument that the premodern functions in current historicist practice not only to stabilize the identity of the modern, but also to underwrite historicism per se.21 In other words, to borrow their example, we need not worry overmuch about the differences between the nineteenth century and the present, since medieval historical difference was, apparently, so much greater. Premodern histories thereby permeate many contemporary critical formations, often as the unacknowledged ground upon which those forms are built. The extension of postcolonial studies to premodern periods also has a rapidly developing bibliography. Like modern postcolonial studies, initial focus has concentrated on England, from Maria Tymoczko’s study of English translations of early Irish literature to numerous studies of Shakespeare.22 Indeed, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen claims to focus the essays of The Postcolonial Middle Ages on England precisely because England dominates postcolonial studies in so many ways.23 While England continues to be important to postcolonial studies at large, scholars increasingly emphasize the need to move beyond postcolonial studies’ “Commonwealth” heritage. In their introduction to Postcolonial Theory and Criticism, Laura Chrisman and Benita Parry judge the isolation of Anglophone studies as “inappropriate,” while a recent collection entitled De-colonizing the Middle Ages includes several essays concerned with Spain.24

INTRODUCTION

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The essays collected here address these and other challenges posed by recent critical developments.They consider the methodological, geographical, and historiographical moves required for postcolonial engagements with premodern times, as well as some of the representations of those times in postcolonial discourses. As a group, they propose various answers to questions such as: what are the specific features of “postcolonial” scholarship for the early periods? in what senses do scholars use the apparently anachronistic term? if, as K. Anthony Appiah has put it, “the post- in postcolonial is the post- of the space-clearing gesture,”25 what kinds of spaces might a premodern postcolonial approach clear? how can we attend to the complicated patterns of colonial desire and colonial violence across time? how can we articulate the specificity of national engagements without duplicating the modern nationalisms that helped shape academic disciplines? We hope to unsettle the identification of colonialism with modernity precisely because the history of relations between Europe’s dominant cultures and its linguistic minorities remains, in our view, important to later oppressive habits of postEnlightenment colonialism. How might we understand, for example, nineteenth-century identifications of the Welsh with Native Americans in light of the history of English domination over Wales? and the claim that the Welsh discovered America before Columbus?26 Histories of Europe’s “internal” colonies and histories of overseas expansion can be considerably elaborated by such cross-period engagement. While we have strived to move beyond Anglocentric concerns, numerous places and times are of course not represented: medieval India, Greek and Latin antiquity, early modern Japan, Byzantium, to name just a few. Since no single publication could pretend to encompass the breadth of human histories of conquest, we have tried to present a collection of sufficient diversity to suggest at least some possible comparative conclusions: geographically, it addresses Australia, Canada, England, France, Ireland, Mexico, Morocco, Spain, and Turkey; temporally, it analyzes cultural histories from the eighth to the twentieth century (as defined by the current Western Christian calendar). The essays are grouped around three issues: methodology, sites of colonization, and the recycling of history in colonial contexts. Around Disciplines The essays in this section raise various methodological issues for postcolonial moves beyond the modern. Michelle Warren’s “Post-Philology,” anchored in medieval Romance studies, refers to philological practices

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that entangle themselves with postmodern and postcolonial studies, either implicitly or explicitly.Warren argues that all three concepts share engagements with history, methods for confronting relationships between universals and particulars, and a vexed relationship with nineteenthcentury European colonialisms. The first part of the essay surveys the problems of definition that beset all three terms; the second part turns to philology’s overt encounters with postmodernism since the 1980s; the third to various interactions between philology and postcolonial studies. Throughout, Warren defines post-philology through examples from textual criticism and historical linguistics, arguing for a philology that can deviate from the quest for origins and originality and thereby unsettle the hierarchical structures that legitimize cultural coercion. Post-philology attends to local phenomena, while articulating the ideological investments of nationalist and universalist claims; it brings into focus the colonialist overtones of rhetorics of continuity and purity.Warren’s argument displays the usefulness of technical engagements with language and textuality for materialist and culturalist postcolonial analyses. Patricia Ingham, writing primarily from English studies, offers an assessment of recent uses of categories of “alterity” (both historicist and cultural) within medieval cultural studies. “Contrapuntal Histories” begins with definitions of “alterity” in relation to New Historicism, proposing “contrapuntal” historicism as a more mobile model that replaces “alterity” with “distinction.” Contrapuntal methods accommodate multiple senses of time and place, facilitating assessments of the complex repetitions of colonial instability and oppositional agency. In illustration, the second part of the essay develops a medievalist reading of the tropes of medieval Britain in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, arguing that the problematics of Conrad’s use of the past suggest precisely the pertinence of early scenes of British and Roman conquest to postcolonial readings. If Conrad’s novella is part of the “canon” of postcolonial scholarship on English modernism, Chaucer’s The Man of Law’s Tale occupies a similar position in medieval English studies. The essay’s third section thus turns to this tale’s concern with various spaces and times: Syria, Rome, and Britain—a “distant” land, a metropolitan and imperial center, and an insular space inhabited by England’s own “pagan” peoples. Such multiple histories and geographies involve instrumental intimacies, as well as the particular differences, between “now” and “then,”“home” and “away.” Barbara Fuchs’s “Imperium Studies: Theorizing Early Modern Expansion” begins from Iberian studies, and links expansionism abroad with issues of sovereignty at home. With the notion of imperium studies, Fuchs seeks a critical recognition of the centrality of empire in

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Old World texts that are not explicitly engaged with colonial ventures. Fuchs’s focus on the metropolitan resonates with Radhakrishan’s argument that postcoloniality is partly “a critical perspective on metropolitan goings-on” that must include both colonizer and colonized.27 In this sense, Fuchs extends to the early modern period the efforts of various postcolonial critics to expose the colonial entanglements of canonical European literatures. After developing a transhistorical definition of imperium, Fuchs focuses on Spain and England as imperial rivals, both also engaged in problematic internal consolidations. In the case of Spain, Fuchs identifies the analytic roadblocks raised by both Golden Age studies and Latin American colonial studies, and then goes on to consider two metropolitan examples in light of the conceptual space opened by imperium—Miguel de Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares and the Guerras civiles de Granada by Ginés Pérez de Hita. Lastly, Fuchs turns to the view from England, where the image of Spain served ideological needs both at home and in North America.With these imperium studies that complicate the firm lines between early modern nations, Fuchs suggests that Latin Americanists,Americanists, and early modern scholars of Spain and England can learn much by revisiting each other’s histories. In Place The essays in this section address the concern that the extension of postcolonial studies to new sites weakens historical specificity, promulgating insalubrious analogies and flattening the thickness of history.This concern has been expressed forcefully by Dirlik: “This expansion of the historical scope of the postcolonial succeeds by confounding many different colonialisms and suppressing others. Implicit to it is also a confounding of the present and the past.”28 Countering this kind of dismissal, however, Moore has argued that the enlargement of the postcolonial field does not evacuate its analytic acuity but rather renders it a “universal” like “race, and class, and caste, and age, and gender” whose general usefulness few would deny.29 The essays collected here fall somewhere between these two extremes: they commit to extending the limits of “postcolonial” while simultaneously foregrounding the particularities of individual colonialist dynamics. Catherine Karkov opens the section with an analysis of two medieval representations of a colonized Ireland. In “Tales of the Ancients: Colonial Werewolves and the Mapping of Postcolonial Ireland,” Karkov argues that Gerald of Wales’s Topographia Hibernica (1188) represents Ireland and the Irish as an exotic other for the English, thereby defining the face

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and rhetoric of colonized and colonizer that would characterize the English colonial experience for centuries to come.Analyzing an episode concerning a priest and two werewolves as a metaphor for the conquest of Ireland, Karkov examines how the werewolves first serve Gerald’s colonizing imaginary and then later the interests of Irish resistance. Karkov concludes that the composition of the Irish Acallam na Senórach constitutes a postcolonial move aimed at subverting colonial paradigms and redefining the “pre-” in relation to the “post-” colonial. Karkov’s essay prompts reconsideration of the repercussions of Anglo-Norman conquests, Irish national identity (in medieval and modern times), and the multifarious forms of oppositional agency. In “The Romance of MiscegeNation: Negotiating Identities in ‘La Fille du comte de Pontieu,’ ” Sharon Kinoshita likewise argues for a rethinking of national paradigms. Kinoshita begins with an analysis of how the excision of the Middle Ages from postcolonial discussions contributes to a falsely homogeneous view of history.The essay goes on to identify the Santiago Trail as a nexus of cultural exchange and conflict in the wake of Islamic conquest and Christian consolidation. Imagining the “culture shock” of French and other northern European pilgrims headed for Compostela, Kinoshita explicates the cultural significance of the Santiago Trail in a thirteenth-century French romance riven by rape, miscegenation, slavery, and cultural and religious travesty. As the discipline of feudal society breaks down, the politics of lineage turn out to be shaped by a post-Crusade world where French princes speak Arabic and Saladin appears to be the great-great-grandson of the count of Pontieu. Ultimately, La Fille du comte de Pontieu opens up the space of the medieval Mediterranean to postcolonial moves, inviting a rethinking of a literary history overdetermined by the nationalist claims of the nineteenth-century French state. The next two essays move into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Each works against Michel Foucault’s periodizations of modernity in order to address alternate geographies as sites of history. In “Spirituality and Colonial Governmentality:The Jesuit Spiritual Exercises in Europe and Abroad,” Michelle Molina draws on Foucault’s notions of governmentality and the self to characterize Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises as early modern “technologies of the self.” Elucidating Jesuit practices in Spain and abroad, Molina’s essay contributes to efforts in postcolonial studies to understand the place of religious formations for colonial encounters, while also considering ( like Fuchs) the particular place of Latin America. After discussing Ignatius and the Exercises in their initial context, Molina examines their role in Jesuit evangelization

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practices in European cities and countrysides. She turns next to the ways Jesuits used the Exercises in their colonial missions to India and New Spain.These case studies identify the different uses of the Exercises by clergy, colonizers, and the colonized, and elucidate connections among European colonialism, reform, and governmentality prior to the Enlightenment. Nabil Matar’s exposition of “The Question of Occidentalism and Early Modern Morocco” likewise begins with Foucault, in this case the use of his concept of classical “differentiation” as an explanation for the establishment of polarizing discourses at the foundation of Western modernity. Meanwhile, Matar argues, the Maghrebis of Morocco did not draw a line of structural separation between themselves and the European as Other. Matar proposes three reasons why early modern Maghrebi culture did not occidentalize the European: Islam accorded a place for the “prophet” of Christian culture; the concept of mahaba (love/affection) implicitly incorporated even cultural others into the Maghrebi imaginary; the late arrival of print culture to the Arabicwriting world forestalled the circulation of stereotyping discourses. Foregrounding a cultural response to the West that does not succumb to binary violence, Matar’s essay aims to challenge some of the universalizing claims of European philosophical traditions and to prompt reconsideration of the seeming inevitability of East/West divisions. Through Time Excavating various ways in which historical dynamics have informed more recent colonialist projects, the essays in this section pose the most direct challenges to conventional period epistemologies. They are not, however, about progress, but rather about iteration, refraction, and what Ingham has called the “colonial refrain.”30 “Time” has in fact been one of the most frequent paradigms for extending postcolonial studies beyond its initial domains. Cohen, for example, has explicated the significance of Joan of Arc and Dante in Washington D.C.’s Malcolm X Park; Thomas Cartelli has identified several modern colonial appropriations of Shakespeare; Ashcroft has analyzed David Malouf ’s reappropriation of Ovid.31 Each of the essays collected here likewise demonstrates the temporal permeability of postcolonial modernity. In “History and Legend: the Exile and the Turk,” David Lawton interprets the role of Turkey—then and now—in what Robert Bartlett has called the “Europeanization of Europe,” via Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (a text written in Istanbul at the end of World War II) and its legacies.

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Lawton’s associative history moves from one time to another so as to account for the multiple places that Turkey and “the Turk” occupy in both twentieth-century criticism (in Kathleen Biddick’s postcolonial reading of Said’s admiration for Auerbach and in Stephen Greenblatt’s claim that Auerbach is the precursor for New Historicism) and two Middle English texts (the fifteenth-century Croxton Play of the Sacrament— linked to the Mummers’ folk play featuring a Turkish knight—and the romance The Turk and Gawain).Throughout, Lawton highlights the crucial foundational role of Christ’s body to Christian conceptualizations of “the other.” His essay shares Matar’s interest in rereading “orientalist” histories as it delineates some of the many ways in which Europe constitutes the “east.” The next essay, Bernadette Andrea’s “The Ghost of Leo Africanus from the English to the Irish Renaissance,” substantiates some of Karkov’s claims for the enduring effects of the medieval colonization of Ireland. Accounting for the recycling of Leo Africanus (Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wezzan) within Anglocentric discourses of colonialism and resistance from the sixteenth century onward,Andrea conceptualizes Hasan/Leo as a “cultural amphibian.” She argues that his shifting relationship to conflicting Islamic, Christian,African, and European empires enabled the subsequent appropriation of his life and writings by an increasingly hegemonic Western Christian European discourse of empire. Andrea focuses first on Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness as part of the project of imagining a British Empire when Great Britain was as yet a nation in name only and when the British (and, more specifically, the English) were dismissed as belated imperialists by continental Europeans. Andrea then turns to William Butler Yeats’s essay on Leo Africanus, which articulates an unsettling series of identifications and disavowals between the Irish nationalist poet and his sixteenth-century “interlocutor” through a series of occult encounters. Andrea’s essay thus demonstrates how successive textual appropriations reconfigure the terms of colonial domination. Jean-Vincent Blanchard’s “Postcolonial Courtiers: Performing French Classicism from Versailles to Nouvelle-France” likewise investigates a case of textual appropriation in a colonizer’s (former) colony. Blanchard begins by developing the relation between postcolonial theory and classical conversation as both private and public performance. The analysis of seventeenth-century French courts and salons reveals that terms such as honnêteté and bienséance are predicated to some degree on colonial exoticism. For Blanchard, historical repetitions of bienséance have contributed to its naturalization, and given it force in the field of power relations: republicanism has itself excluded colonized bodies from the

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public sphere. Blanchard traces the reverberations of these exclusions in Québec, where Michel Tremblay’s 1969 La Duchesse de Langeais turns conversation into monologue and the aristocracy into the working class. Ultimately, Blanchard aims to demonstrate the enduring and oppressive effects of French cultural universals. Like Blanchard, Louise D’Arcens considers how social structures shape colonial discourses; like Andrea, she addresses the colonial dynamics of Anglocentrism, in this case by investigating a complex set of relations among Australia, England, and medieval Britain. Centered on John Woolley’s interpretation of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, “Antipodean Idylls: An Early Australian Translation of Tennyson’s Medievalism” explores the dynamics of exile in the context of Australian colonial identity. D’Arcens argues that as Woolley transposes the Arthurian world to the streets of Sydney, he holds up the Idylls as an often unflattering mirror that reflects the aspirations and the anxieties at the heart of colonial life in Sydney. Writing at a time when cultural ambitions and economic imperatives contended to dominate the local scene, Woolley uses the Arthurian framework (especially the figures of Enid, Guenivere, and Elaine) to issue a strong, yet limited, critique of the mercantilism and utilitarianism underpinning the colonial project. D’Arcens’s positioning of Australia within postcolonial studies prompts a general rethinking of the hegemony of both the “Commonwealth” and English medieval studies. Postcolonial Moves attempts to dislodge some of the national geographies and periodizations that generally structure institutional and academic identifications.This is undoubtedly a more ambitious project than any single volume can exhaustively pursue. And of course this volume has its share of limitations: despite our best efforts, for example, literary methods are more widely represented than the methods of any other discipline. Such limitations suggest the continuing challenges of projects that resist the persistent nationalist histories of academic culture. It is nonetheless our hope that such admittedly partial endeavors can make palpable the productive pleasures of intellectual assemblages that move beyond the cultural and institutional (not to mention national) identities that we have been trained to claim. Notes 1. R. Radhakrishan, “Postmodernism and the Rest of the World,” in The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies, ed. Fawzia Afzal-Kahn and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 37–70, at 44.

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2. This could be said of much of the body of Freud’s work, but see especially, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London:W.W. Norton and Company, 1950). On the links between categories of “the primitive” and Freud’s “id,” see Marianna Torgovnik, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 3. On the ways in which the body in pain grounds—makes material—belief in cultural abstractions, see Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (London: Oxford University Press, 1985), 117ff. 4. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 139–70, citation at 254; David Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism After Postcoloniality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 17; Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather (London: Routledge, 1995); Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 8. See also Fredric Jameson, “Modernism and Imperialism,” in Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literatures, ed. Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward Said (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 43–66, especially 51. 5. Sara Suleri, “Women Skin Deep: Feminism and the Post-Colonial Condition,” Critical Inquiry 18, (1992): 756–69, at 759. 6. Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge,“What is Post(-)Colonialism?” Textual Practice, 5 (1991): 399–414, at 408, 412. 7. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London:Verso, 1983), 136. 8. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 123–38, 171–7, 236–56; citations at 172, 245, 247, 178, 250, 255. 9. Arif Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura:Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997), 11, 17, 170. 10. For example Jacqueline Kaye, “Islamic Imperialism and the Creation of Some Ideas of ‘Europe,’ ” in Europe and Its Others, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iversen, and Diana Loxley (Colchester: University of Essex, 1985), 1: 59–71. 11. Deepika Bahri, “Coming to Terms with the ‘Postcolonial,’ ” in Between the Lines: South Asians and Post-Coloniality, ed. Deepika Bahri and Mary Vasudeva (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 137–64, at 140–1. 12. Bill Ashcroft, “The Rhizome of Post-Colonial Discourse,” in Literature and the Contemporary: Fictions and Theories of the Present, ed. Roger Luckhurst and Peter Marks (Essex: Longman, 1999), 111–25, at 114. 13. David Chioni Moore, “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique,” PMLA, 116 (2001): 111–28, at 112–13. 14. Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (London:Verso, 1997), 57–61. 15. Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks,“At the Margins: Part 1,” in The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies, 3–23, at 19. 16. Vilashini Cooppan,“W(h)ither Post-colonial Studies? Towards the Transnational Study of Race and Nation,” in Postcolonial Theory and Criticism, ed. Laura Chrisman and Benita Parry (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), 1–35, at 34–5. 17. Cited in summary in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Introduction: Midcolonial,” in The Postcolonial Middle Ages (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 1–17, at 17: n. 25. 18. For example Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme (Paris: Présence africaine, 1955); The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983);V. Bada, “Cross-Cultural Dialogues with Greek Classics:Walcott’s ‘The Odyssey’ and Soyinka’s ‘The Bacchae of Euripides,’ ” Ariel, 31.3 (2000): 7–28. 19. Brian Stock, “The Middle Ages as Subject and Object: Romantic Attitudes and Academic Medievalism,” New Literary History, 5 (1973–74): 527–47, at 543.

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20. Kathleen Biddick, “Coming out of Exile: Dante on the Orient Express,” in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, 35–52; Michael Bernard-Donals, “The Manichean Problem in Post-Colonial Criticism: Or, Why the Subaltern Cannot Speak,” in Medievalism and the Academy II: Cultural Studies, ed. David Metzger (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), 41–63; Kathleen Davis, “Time Behind the Veil:The Media, the Middle Ages, and Orientalism Now,” in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, 105–22; Bruce Holsinger,“Medieval Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and the Genealogies of Critique,” Speculum, 77 (2002): 1195–227. 21. Fradenburg and Freccero,“Pleasures of History,” in Premodern Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1996), xvii–xviii. See also David Aers, “A Whisper in the Ear of the Early Modernists,” in Culture and History, 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities, and Writing, ed. David Aers (Detroit:Wayne State University Press, 1992), 177–202. 22. Maria Tymoczko, Translation in a Postcolonial Context: Early Irish Literature in English Translation (Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing, 1999); Post-colonial Shakespeares, ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (London: Routledge, 1998); Imtiaz H. Habib, Shakespeare and Race: Postcolonial Praxis in the Early Modern Period (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2000); Elizabeth Jane Bellamy, “Spenser’s Faeryland and ‘The Curious Genealogy of India,’ ” in Worldmaking Spenser: Explorations in the Early Modern Age, ed. Patrick Cheney and Lauren Silberman (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), 177–92. 23. Cohen, “Introduction: Midcolonial,” 8. 24. Postcolonial Theory and Criticism, vii; Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 30 (2000): 463–518. 25. Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?” Critical Inquiry, 17 (1991): 336–57, at 336. 26. For the standard view on the question of Welsh “discovery” of America, see Richard Deacon, Madoc and the Discovery of America (New York: G. Braziller, 1967). 27. Radhakrishan, “Postmodernism,” 37, 50. 28. Dirlik, Postcolonial Aura, 167. 29. Moore, “Is the Post-,” 118–24. 30. Ingham, “Marking Time: ‘Branwen, Daughter of Llyr’ and the Colonial Refrain,” in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, 173–91, at 185. 31. Cohen, “Introduction: Midcolonial,” 1–6; Thomas Cartelli, Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations (London: Routledge, 1999); Ashcroft, “The Rhizome,” 117–18.

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Around Disciplines

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CHAPTER

ONE

Post-Philology Michelle R.Warren

Philology has been more often irrelevant than controversial within mainstream critical debates.With the expansion of electric technologies and the fragmentation of the nationalist disciplines that first nurtured philology, its demise may seem more certain than ever. Indeed, Roberta Frank has pointed out that some dictionaries boldly declare that the word is no longer in use. Many, it would seem, have taken to heart René Wellek’s advice “to abandon” philology altogether. Frank, however, still wonders about the future and concludes with a question that has interested me since I first faced the prospect of teaching a graduate course in philology (traditionally a technical course for specialists in medieval studies) for students primarily interested in modern literatures: “Does Philology, backward looking to her core, have a future tense?”1 My experiences with “Introduction to Romance Philology” led me to formulate the question in terms specific to current critical debates: can philology reach the next “post” along with the “modern” and the “colonial”? How can a discipline devoted to meta-narratives about language cope with critiques of the unity of both language and subjectivity? And how can a discipline fostered in the midst of nineteenth-century European colonialisms engage critiques of that history and its legacies? In partial answer to these questions, this essay outlines several forms of what I will call post-philology in the hope that philology and contemporary literary and cultural studies remain (or become) vigorous allies. Post-philology does not designate a move beyond or against philology: it refers rather to philological practices that entangle themselves with

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postmodern and postcolonial studies, either implicitly or explicitly. The first part of this essay, then, surveys the problems of definition that beset all three terms. The second part turns to philology’s overt encounters with postmodernism since the 1980s, the third to various interactions between philology and postcolonial studies.The examples I adduce witness the already lively practice of post-philology: by outlining a definition I mean less to call for the creation of something new than to render visible the shared implications of these practices. Definitions Philology, postmodern, and postcolonial are linked first and foremost by their respective identity crises: numerous publications expose definitional controversies. Etymologically, philology designates a potentially infinite range of activities conducted for “the love of language.” Disciplinarily, the range is only slightly less broad, and includes historical linguistics, textual editing, literary analysis, and the study of national cultures.2 In practice, usages that limit philology to a set of technical engagements function in tension with this virtually limitless epistemological potential. Indeed, the Modern Language Association of America’s Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures, which includes chapters on composition, rhetoric, literary theory, language acquisition, feminism, and border studies among others, is classified under a single descriptor: “Philology, Modern—Research.”3 Philology thus mediates between the broadest understanding of text-based knowledge and the most specialized techniques for producing texts. Partly for this reason, it is at once ubiquitous and invisible. From a philological perspective, postmodern seems relatively straightforward: it refers to what comes after modern.4 At a first level, then, postmodern designates a historical period, although there is little agreement about its parameters (when did modern end? did it end in the same way in all cultural fields? can the postmodern also end?).The temporal value of post, however, is weakened by postmodernism’s aesthetic definitions, which refer to artistic representations that disturb linear and hierarchical relations: they are characterized by fragmentation, lack of reference, pastiche, contingency, simulacra (copies without originals), and metafictions. Postmodern aesthetics betray a crisis of representation felt in contrast to modernism’s supposedly confident affirmations of the accessibility of truth—and since these affirmations continue, postmodernism contests the modern but does not actually leave it behind.5 This aesthetic crisis is closely related to a broader cultural crisis, since the critique of

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origins and referentiality implies a dissolution of modernism’s master narratives and thus of established forms of social and political legitimation. Postmodernism calls into question the autonomy and unity of the human subject, as the conditions of knowledge in general are radically de-centered. Postcolonial presents a similarly double relationship to history: it indicates both a break with colonial pasts and an ongoing engagement with their legacies and renewals.And like postmodern, postcolonial refers to both historical and aesthetic conditions. For Arif Dirlik, the term’s reference is threefold: the formerly colonized societies now existing as independent nation-states, the global condition after the modern period of colonialism, and discourses on the preceding two conditions. Laura Chrisman divides the field somewhat differently: the formerly colonized societies now existing as independent nation-states, intellectual and aesthetic products of colonization, and an individually chosen subject position.6 Although other variants on this basic split between geopolitics and representation could surely be added, a fundamental political engagement subtends all connotations of postcolonial, such that its status as an academic field of study in the universities of former imperial powers is itself suspicious. Indeed, for some critics the globalizing aspect of postcolonial discourse renders it a new form of colonialism that overlooks cultural and class differences.7 Even from these superficial sketches, philology, postmodern, and postcolonial appear to share a number of traits as disciplinary practices (besides widespread use by people who freely admit their conceptual inadequacies). Both postmodern and postcolonial, for example, critique totalizing or universalizing gestures: Kwame Anthony Appiah notes that postmodernism rejects “claim[s] to exclusivity,” while Dirlik affirms that postcolonial discourse repudiates master narratives. Both concepts entail what Appiah calls “challenges to earlier legitimating narratives,” maintaining what John Frow calls a “difficult and ambivalent resistance to modernity.”8 For postcolonial studies, this relationship is so difficult that it can receive nearly opposite formulations: for Dipesh Chakrabarty modernism is part of European colonialism, while for Benita Parry and Homi Bhabha colonialism is constitutive of European modernity.9 In either case, the relationship is both historical (in relation to nineteenthand twentieth-century Europe) and aesthetic (in relation to realist representation). This double engagement, as Chrisman points out, “allows, or implies, the interchangeability of material (geographical, political, and economic) with aesthetic and interpretative processes.”10 As a result, both postmodern and postcolonial remain in conflict with themselves,

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divided between significant ideological interventions and solipsistic self-reference. In theoretical terms, postmodern and postcolonial studies share a debt to poststructuralism and the ways in which deconstruction enables a general dismantling of meaning systems. Indeed,Victor Li gives a definition of postcolonial theory that could apply equally to postmodernism: “A central characteristic of postcolonial theory is its exertion of a certain historical vigilance, a wariness of all monocultural discourses and their colonizing imperative. Postcolonial theory’s suspicion of Western narratives of enlightenment and progress is matched equally by its resolve to not be taken in by imagined or invented national allegories of native authenticity. Postcolonial theory’s critical vigilance, moreover, is directed against itself, such that its institutional and geopolitical locations, locutions, and interests are all brought into question.”11 Postmodern theory is equally wary of unifying discourses and the powers they subtend, equally critical of teleologies of progress, and equally engaged in self-reflexive critique. In terms of representational strategies, works identified by either label often share narrative modes (e.g., metafiction and irony) and themes (e.g., marginality). Both, then, reconfigure history—which brings them into dialogue with philology, itself a set of methods for constituting history through language. At first glance, philology seems remote from postmodern and postcolonial studies. Jacques Derrida’s critiques of logocentrism, for example, would seem to sound the death knell of a discipline in love with the logos.12 Yet philology not only continues, it continues to pursue master narratives of legitimation. Rupert Pickens affirms, for example, that “[p]hilological writing embraces a rhetoric not of rupture, but of continuity; it seeks not to destroy, not to subvert, not therefore to renovate.”13 Post-philology takes place somewhere between these two extremes, where the philological fetish for detail makes master narratives difficult. Like the postmodern and the postcolonial, then, philology maintains a difficult relationship with its modernist past. Philology’s potential for conflating historical and aesthetic concerns also links it with postmodern and postcolonial criticisms, for while philology claims to establish objective linguistic facts, the visibility of these facts often depends on their satisfying particular aesthetic assumptions about language and meter. Finally, philology is equally implicated in poststructuralism, in the sense that both turn on the materiality of language. Indeed, Paul de Man suggested that deconstruction is nothing more than a form of philology, “an examination of the structure of language prior to the meaning it produces;” Jonathan Culler has recently sustained this alliance with

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deconstruction. And Peggy Knapp has proposed a “recycled philology” that makes a similar claim: that “mere reading” at the lexical level can disturb critical and historical assumptions.14 This kind of reading makes philology an active participant in the disruption of hegemonic discourses, and thus of power. Indeed, Edward Said has made philology integral to his critique of empire (albeit often as a counter to postmodernism).15 Thus, philological, postmodern, and postcolonial criticisms all share engagements with history, methods for confronting relationships between universals and particulars, and challenges to hegemony.Their disciplinary histories, moreover, are all linked to nineteenth-century European colonialisms, their presents to metropolitan academic institutions. Many other things, of course, distinguish these three terms, including oppositional politics, ludic sensibility, and scientific ambition. If the relationship between philology and postmodernism has been contentious (as I discuss below), that between the postmodern and the postcolonial has been more so.Although the common “post” indicates that both react to antecedents, it alone does not suffice to align these two concepts. For while postmodernism dismantles the binary structures that subtend colonial domination and offers potentially corrosive tools of cultural and political critique, its perceived amorality and ahistoricism have profoundly troubled those attentive to the material demands of resistance and emancipation. Postmodernism’s denials of individual agency and subjectivity, moreover, seem to give license to neo-colonial exploitation, and to evacuate the possibility of intentional resistance. And more than one critic has noted the pernicious irony of a Western philosophical disavowal of the human subject’s effectivity at a time when subjugated peoples were exerting their independence from colonial regimes.16 Despite these and other very real differences, the recent history of critical debates within universities has brought philology, postmodern, and postcolonial together. Since the 1980s, philology and postmodernism have been thrown together explicitly.These debates coincided with the consolidation of postcolonial studies in universities in the United States and the United Kingdom. Philology in the present, then, cannot help but engage the posts that currently shape literary and cultural studies. Postmodern Philology has been under renovation since its origins, as witnessed by the controversies voiced by Plato and other authors of antiquity.17 In the early history of the modern university,“new philology” designated a distinction from classical philology, institutionalized in the founding of the

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journals Neuphilologische Mitteilungen (1899), Neophilologus (1915), and Studia Neophilologica (1928). In this same period, Italian scholars formed their own “new philology.”18 And in the 1950s, the Spaniard José Ortega y Gasset formulated his “Axioms for a New Philology,” likening “old” philology to a gruesome spectacle of dismemberment: “[it] quarters the reality [of language] and retains only one of its members.”19 In the late 1960s, Robert Dyer claimed “new philology” as the union of linguistics and literary analysis; about a decade later, Mary Speer cast her review of new editing guides as philology’s “defense.”20 The “always already” aspect of these repeated declarations of rupture and resistance makes philology and the practices it designates almost ideal targets of postmodern analysis. Indeed, in reformulating “new philology” in 1990, Stephen Nichols claimed postmodernity as its distinguishing feature: “It is . . . manuscript culture that the ‘new’ philology sets out to explore in a postmodern return to the origins of medieval studies.”21 While interest in manuscripts may seem innocuous, even expected, Nichols’s “new philology” sparked bitter reactions from editors who perceived an attack on the basic validity of their intellectual projects.22 Here, however, I am more interested in the seemingly antithetical conjoining of “postmodern” to a “return to origins.” Although the adjective and noun postmodern (and its cognates postmodernism, postmodernist, and the like) are never explicitly defined in the debates about philology, their application has been generally consistent with the semantic field defined by general theoretical discussions. Postmodernism, for example, consistently designates a historical period, which extends from the end of modernism (whenever that was) to the present or to some recent past.23 In this usage, “postmodern philology” means simply the ways in which philology is currently practiced, regardless of the ideology of the practitioner. In similarly objectifying terms, postmodernism is also referred to as a new “climate.”24 This geophysical metaphor locates postmodernism as a presence outside of individual practices: it is not a discourse or a theory, but rather like global warming—something that is happening to us that feels utterly beyond our direct control. The present climate, in fact, seems to impose the term against critics’ will. From its earliest uses in philological discussions, dissatisfaction with the term is one of its most striking aspects. Postmodern is applied “loosely and for convenience sake,” “to follow current custom,” and makes some critics “uncomfortable.”25 (Philology likewise has the power to make critics “uneasy.”)26 In this sense, the postmodern functions as a nondescriptive category, at once inapplicable and obligatory (emptied of

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meaning, it can even serve as the equivalent of modern ). Its usage thus designates a disciplinary crisis in which critics no longer define the terms of their own practice but are instead subjected to external forces of an indeterminate nature. In the absence of a clearly defined disciplinary narrative (the kind of master narrative challenged by postmodernism), the nature of knowledge changes radically. It follows, then, that the nature of what can be known about texts has also changed. This new state of epistemology, characterized by indeterminacy, is called “postmodern.”28 In this sense, postmodernism refers to a necessity to rethink our knowledge of the past; some might even say that it represents a denial of history per se.29 The result of this rethinking is a “methodological questioning,” also described as postmodern.30 One answer to this questioning is a substitution of traditional methodologies with poststructuralism.31 In these instances, philology and postmodern designate two poles of an opposition between technique and theory.Another answer is the substitution of traditional methodologies with historicism. This historicism has two main characteristics. First, it focuses on manuscripts, “the study of medieval artifacts in their historic and cultural materiality.”32 Second, this historicism is called ironic, such that hierarchies are dismantled and binary oppositions become simply “difference.”33 In both cases, postmodernism refers to the antidote to whatever is perceived as inadequate in past or present criticism. Postmodern thus emerges as a brand of either value or illegitimacy depending on critics’ presuppositions. This postmodern “new philology” responded in large part to the practices of philology developed under nineteenth-century modernism, and which were perceived as enduring in the late twentieth century. For modernist philology, as both Nichols and R. Howard Bloch have demonstrated, manuscripts functioned primarily, if not exclusively, as sources for texts—texts needing the clarification offered by modern printing.34 Joseph Bédier could declare, for example, that all surviving works should be published “ne serait-ce que pour s’en débarasser et pour qu’il soit possible à l’avenir d’en faire table rase” (if only so that we can be rid of them and so that it might be possible in the future to make a clean sweep of them).35 Reactions against this philological history were derived in part from the perception that literary criticism in general continued to overlook the relevance of medieval literature. In principle at least, the dismantling of modernist aesthetic values placed medieval texts on equal footing with more recent literature. Even traditional Latinists, for example, imagined that the new criticism of the 1960s could inspire a revival of classical letters and philology.36 Despite this

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potential, however, the modernist rubrics of periodization remained largely untouched (due in part to the influence of Michel Foucault’s Les mots et les choses, The Order of Things), and medievalists came to complain of enduring marginalization within the larger literary field.37 Most important for philology, textuality itself remained modernist, in the sense that editions continued to function as more or less adequate representations of archival artifacts. In contrast to this modernist tradition, 1990s “new philology” is defined as postmodern and focused on manuscripts (Nichols later explicitly excluded editions and print culture in general38). Yet, the underlying principle of this methodology, which privileges “originality,” is far from postmodern.The critique of originality is well developed in aesthetic criticism, most influentially in Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”39 Inspired by Benjamin, Rosalind Krauss has circumscribed originality in explicitly postmodern terms. Krauss argues that the continuation of modernist values in a postmodern world leads critics and artists alike to “[cling] to a culture of originals which has no place among the reproductive mediums.” This nostalgia resembles the privileging of original textual artifacts over the various reproductions made possible by photographic and digital technologies. For Krauss, if modernism is characterized by a “discourse of originality” that implies an unauthentic copy as its condition, then postmodernism is characterized by a “discourse of the copy.”40 Postmodern aesthetics thus imply a dispersal of the originary moment and the displacement of the privilege accorded by modernism to both originality and authenticity. Postmodernism entails a critical revaluing of all cultural artifacts.This revaluing is not a reordering of the hierarchies that have traditionally structured historical understanding but a dismantling of them in favor of heterodoxy or eclecticism (which has in fact been the valence of the several philological analyses that take their inspiration directly from the 1990 “new philology”41). This is not merely the margins returning to haunt the center, but the dispersal of the centripetal metaphor altogether.To the extent, then, that 1990s “new philology” seeks to replace copies with originals, it is more modern than postmodern. The “desire to return to the medieval origins of philology,” “to turn our attention back to the manuscript culture of the Middle Ages,”“to the foundations of medieval expression,” to prescribe the “center of our effort,” bespeaks of a fundamentally modernist perception of history, one that seeks an originary moment distinct from all that precedes or follows.42 This hierarchical valuation of method is particularly problematic for the practice

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of “ironic historicism” because the discipline itself does not become the focus of irony.43 Desire in criticism is perhaps inherent to its practice, but the desire for origins, as Alan Frantzen has shown for Anglo-Saxon studies, is particular to modernist modes of criticism.44 Ultimately, even though philology practiced as a postmodern inquiry informed by historicism pays valuable attention to the historical artifact,45 the privileging of the manuscript, and particularly the illuminated one, as the authentic artifact of medieval culture cannot constitute a postmodern gesture—precisely because postmodernism necessarily disturbs notions of authenticity. A philology consonant with postmodernism, which is to say a postphilology, articulates instead the multifarious mediations of historical desires. Post-philology goes beyond the quest for origins, dispersing the evaluative hierarchy whereby studies of the “original materials”— viewed “from the post-modern orientation of material philology” (as Nichols later renamed the “new philology”)46—are valued more highly than studies addressed to editions.47 In fact, post-philology’s displacement of originality validates the products of earlier philologies as objects of study.This demystification of the artifact, of whatever temporal provenance, enables a historiography from multiple positions.48 For while it is valuable to investigate the ideological stakes of particular editorial products, such as Linde Brocato’s critique of the hidden hermeneutics of P. E. Russell’s Celestina, for post-philology the purpose of such critiques must go elsewhere than to the judgment of “better” editions:49 postphilology entails much more than a critique of positivist aspirations. To the extent that philology means studying manuscripts—in and of themselves and for the purpose of publishing editions—post-philology implies several kinds of practice. It means, for example, reconfiguring the various hierarchies that often govern the interpretation of relationships among texts, images, and other nonlinguistic elements found in manuscripts.50 In the classification of manuscripts for editorial purposes, postphilology extends the process initiated by Bédier’s critique of the practice of establishing “family” relationships with a view to determining the oldest version of a surviving text.51 While Bédier denounced the reconstruction of “originals,” his favoring of a single “best” manuscript effectively turns the medieval manuscript into an analog of the printed book and perpetuates a hierarchical ordering of “best” and “worst.”52 With post-philology, by contrast, young, incomplete, and mangled artifacts become as intriguing as old and lavishly illustrated ones. Even printed and electronic editions become objects of study.53 While new media cannot claim greater “accuracy,”54 neither are they inferior to

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older materials; in post-philology, media of all kinds offer valuable representations of cultural history: the critical challenge is to define the nature of that history. Post-philology also includes various dialogues between textual criticism and postmodernism. On the one hand, this means theoretically inflected textual criticism,55 from Paul Zumthor’s mouvance to Derridean critique génétique.56 As Pickens has pointed out, Zumthor’s theory of textuality is consonant with postmodern aesthetics in the sense that mouvance legitimizes multiple versions of a text and discards the centripetal notion of “variants” to a supposedly secure original.57 Picken’s own edition of Jaufré Rudel’s poetry exemplifies a “[p]ostmodern account of [medieval] experience,” precisely because it refuses to value any version of a poem as original—as more authentic or more close to authorial intention than any other.58 On the other hand, post-philology means submitting postmodernism to textual criticism. Indeed, Linda Hutcheon all but calls for an alliance between philology and postmodernism when she identifies “the textuality of the archive and the inevitable intertextuality of all writing” as key issues for a postmodern “problematics.”59 The archive’s textuality is nothing less than philology’s most traditional domain—and an area of increasingly broad critical interest.60 All of philology’s technical methods are needed to continue the dismantling of modernist narratives; likewise, all of postmodernism’s theoretical powers are needed to dismantle philological scienticity. Each can productively modify the other, keeping each other “problematic.” Linguistic manuals also interpret textual representations. For historical linguistics, then, post-philology grapples with the consequences of the theoretical dissolution of metalanguage: how can one tell the history of language when there is no “language beyond language”?61 If philology is the discipline that expertly produces meta-narratives about language, then post-philology tries to tell linguistic histories without assuming the coherence of language systems and with attention to hybrid rather than normative processes. Suzanne Fleischman argued, for example, that descriptions of Old French are often grammatical fictions that respond to modern concepts of usage rather than to historical data. She points out that Gaston Paris regularized noun cases in editing texts—texts subsequently used as illustrations in historical grammars. In the process, linguists sustained a myth of monoglossia that overlooked the hybrid forms of actual texts.62 In a similar spirit, Roger Wright notes that all synchronic states of a language include both archaic and innovative elements, thereby undermining assumptions of systemic coherence.63 The modernist ideology of coherence is maintained partly through

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metaphors—figures that can become the objects of post-philological study. For example, “contamination,” “lack of unity,” “confusion,” “abnormality,” “suffering,” and the like all cast language itself as a locus of loss and incompletion.64 In contrast, the asterisk (*), used to indicate words that may have existed, or logically should have existed, holds the place of plenitude: it signifies the fantasy of a coherent system.65 It can also be understood as the sign of a “Derridean supplement”: the asterisked word is both outside the known linguistic system and necessary for its completion.66 These kinds of critical perspectives on meta-narrative strategies blur the traditional distinction between “internal” linguistics (i.e., morphology, phonology, and the like) and “external” linguistics (i.e., formal grammars, language policy, and the like). Roger Sell refers to the deconstruction of this binary as “postdisciplinary philology”:67 it can just as easily be called “post-philology.” The crisis of textual representation, of representing texts from the past, is a specifically postmodern crisis, and cannot be resolved by simply rejecting the problematic representations (editions, historical grammars, and the like).They condition the scholarship of everyone involved in text-based studies, and can be integrated into theoretical discourse, philological criticism, and our understanding of past and present. Philology engaged with postmodernism, then, can deviate from the quest for origins and commit to more precarious balancing acts. Postcolonial Post-philology is not limited to aesthetics or the critical recuperation of editions as objects of study. It includes a postcolonial engagement, and for several reasons. First, philology collided with postmodernism in academic contexts (in the United States at least) at about the same time that postcolonial studies became a visible and influential academic discourse: this coincidence suggests that philology and postcolonialism are bound for a similar collision. Second, in cultural criticism if not in all cultures, postcoloniality is intimately bound to postmodernity, whether it is a “child” or “offshoot” as Dirlik posits, or a category that “subsumes” the postmodern:68 a discussion of “posts” that begins with modernism is therefore not complete without colonialism. Indeed, for Walter Mignolo, the difference between the postmodern and the postcolonial is one of location, not kind: “[They] are alternate processes of countering modernity from different colonial legacies and in different national or neocolonial situations.”69 Just as postmodernism moves beyond foundational logics, then, postcolonial studies formulate “post-foundational” histories.70

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Finally, as many critics have noted, philology itself gained force within European universities as a companion to nationalisms71—nationalisms that themselves often vigorously supported European colonial expansionism. In some senses, philology’s postcolonial moment now seems like a nearly predictable consequence of its birth within nineteenth-century colonizing states. Philological engagement with postcolonialism has a less obvious record than postmodernism, but one that nonetheless stretches surprisingly far. In the early 1970s, Brian Stock observed that philology (“scientific study”) and postcoloniality (“the appearance of new nations”) together had shaped medieval studies after World War II.72 Around the same time, anthropologists countering the colonial legacies of their own discipline turned to philology. Clifford Geertz drew first an analogy between reading manuscripts and reading cultures, and then implied that anthropology should trade colonialism for philology: “Cultural analysis is (or should be) guessing at meanings, assessing the guesses, and drawing explanatory conclusions from the better guesses, not discovering the Continent of Meaning and mapping out its bodiless landscape.”73 By 1980, Alton Becker had gone further, claiming philology (“the unified study of language and text”) as essential to “survival in a multilingual world of diminishing resources;” for Becker, philology negotiates a crucial realignment of cultural relations since it means to “give up one’s world and let the other emerge from the text.”74 Philology continues to concern those attendant to contemporary colonial and postcolonial dynamics. Indeed, Mignolo has brought philology within postcolonial studies as yet another “new philology”: “Transnational languaging processes demand a theory and philosophy of human symbolic production predicated on languaging and transnational and transimperial categories, on a new philology, and on a pluritopic hermeneutics that will replace and displace ‘the’ classical tradition in which philology and hermeneutics were housed in the modern period.”75 Despite these and other mutual engagements, metaphors congenial to colonialist ideologies surface in various philological discussions. On the side of “traditional” philology, ideologies of continuity prevail, such that Pickens denies the very possibility of newness: “[T]here could never be a new philology.What would call itself so has already denied philology’s basic principles.”76 By identifying philology itself with the impossibility of rupture, this conception places philology on the side of hegemonic power.This totalizing ambition has pernicious potential in that it promises to repress disruptive differences in the name of coherent metanarratives of linguistic truth. Elsewhere, philological practice is explicitly

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aligned with maneuvers of domination: A. G. Rigg casts himself as heir to Samuel Champlain, a colonial cartographer exploring the record of medieval Latin literature rather than the coast of Canada; James O’Donnell describes the manuscript cataloguer “like a nineteenthcentury explorer back from a remote continent”; Siân Echard refers to manuscripts as “foreign territory” (albeit while exposing the power dynamics that determine “citizenship”).77 Examples of the scholar as explorer could certainly be multiplied: this and similar metaphors, as Bruce Holsinger has also observed, carry unexamined colonialist baggage.78 Critics associated with postmodernist methodologies carry similar baggage. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, for example, aligns philology with violent aggression when he writes of medievalists “armed with philology.”79 And Bloch has drawn an unsettlingly celebratory parallel between contemporary medieval studies and Dante’s imperium: “[T]here has never been a moment more ripe for the teaching of the works of philosophers, historians, and poets who themselves imagined the possibility of what Dante termed the Imperium, the known world unified under one rule. Medievalists should exploit the development of the European community to press upon the university curriculum the universalizing aspects of medieval culture.”80 This passage seems to predict, and approve, the triumph of a world government—the political arm of what economic globalization is currently establishing in many postcolonial regions. Here, however, the power of neo-imperialism is concentrated in Europe. Taking the European as universal, this vision of expansionist medievalism places philology directly in the service of neocolonial capitalism and the political alliances that sustain it. In disciplinary terms, post-philology would instead address the complex relationships among political, linguistic, and literary histories. In relation to European nationalism, post-philology in this sense is well established. A number of studies have identified philology’s national interests in the period of modern colonialism, while others have developed colonial engagements more specifically.81 Joseph Duggan, for example, has argued that nineteenth-century French interest in the Chanson de Roland derived not only from nationalist rivalries with Germany but also from colonialist engagements in Algeria (especially after 1870). Although Bédier’s edition and translation of the epic in the early twentieth century reputedly broke with the spirit of this nationalist tradition, his own formation in a Creole family from Ile de la Réunion makes for complex relationships among medievalism, orientalism, and colonialism.82 The history of medieval studies in Spain is similarly bound to colonial histories, partly because 1898 marks the loss

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of the last American colony at the same time that it defines the generation of modernist scholars whose philological practices remain influential.83 In textual terms, post-philology exposes the ideological engagements of editions and translations. In fact, for David Greetham (as for Mignolo), postcolonial philology will be another form of “new philology,” one that articulates the place of institutions, editors, and texts in relation to national and colonial politics.84 Practices around annotation, for example, establish networks of power over and around textuality. Nichols foregrounds the Roman imperial origins of annotation itself, identifying some of the specifically aggressive implications of both excising manuscript annotation from editions and writing annotations around edited texts.85 Post-philology also includes critical studies of editions of texts about colonization and colonialism. Textual criticism of narratives of European transatlantic expansion is particularly pertinent, given the complexities of the manuscript materials and enduring ideological investments in this history on both sides of the Atlantic. David Henige, for example, has shown the interpretive fallacies that arise from uncritical editions, while Margarita Zamora has analyzed marginal commentaries in order to elucidate sixteenth-century manipulations of the meaning of “discovery.”86 Through postcolonial studies, post-philology thus finds another reason to valorize older editions: they can bear witness to expansionist histories and ideologies of domination. Some nineteenth-century philologists actually envisioned editing and translating as colonial interventions. Jean-Bernard Mary-Lafon, for example, offered his translation of the epic Fierabras as a literal aid to North African colonization: Pourquoi ne montrerait-on pas dans cette épopée chevaleresque la grande figure de Charlemagne aux Arabes d’Afrique, dont le coeur bonderait de joie au récit des grands coups portés par Fierabras, et qui verraient probablement, avec leur foi fataliste, un arrêt prématuré de Dieu et le doigt d’Allah dans la soumission et le baptême du plus brillant de leurs héros? . . . Dans ce fait si étrangement remarquable, du Fierabras de la légende s’agenouillant aux pieds de Charlemaagne et de l’Abd-el-Kader de l’histoire s’agenouillant devant Napoléon, n’y a-t-il pas de quoi frapper des imaginations moins impressionnables que celles des Arabes? . . . Why wouldn’t we show in this chivalric epic the great figure of Charlemagne to the Arabs of Africa, whose hearts would leap with joy at the narrative of the great blows given by Fierabras, and who would probably see, with their fatalist belief, a premature decree of

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God and the finger of Allah in the submission and baptism of the most brilliant of their heros? . . . In this fact, so strangely remarkable, of the Fierabras of legend kneeling down at Charlemagne’s feet and of the Abd-el-Kader of history kneeling before Napoleon, isn’t there enough to strike imaginations less impressionable than those of the Arabs? Mary-Lafon concludes with the hope that his translation be translated into Arabic, “[pour] redire en Orient et en Afrique, sous la tente et sous le kiosque, les gestes héroïques de nos pères” (to repeat in the Orient and in Africa, under the tent and under the kiosk, the heroic feats of our fathers).87 Mary-Lafon’s translation, along with the one he imagines, witness the agency of language in colonial ambition. Indeed, translation studies have well established the multifarious ways that languages shape colonial power and resistance.88 Mary-Lafon’s own resistance to the ideology of French unity, born of partisanship for the enduring autonomy of regional cultures that predate the Frankish invasion of Gaul,89 draws his expansionist rhetoric within an especially complex logic of internal and external colonial legacies. Critics should therefore be wary of the “myth of progress” by which a “good” edition or translation renders its predecessors obsolete.90 This myth fosters potentially damaging colonial amnesia. And since the only published edition of the French verse Fierabras dates from 1860, just a few years after Mary-Lafon’s translation, these pasts may still circulate in various unexamined ways.91 Post-philology, thus, addresses the ideological values of the products of nineteenthcentury philology, even when, or perhaps especially when, they are not “reliable” in current philological terms. In historical linguistics, post-philology means foregrounding the relationships between language change and colonial maneuvers. For the romance languages, Roman imperial history and subsequent European expansionisms shape linguistic histories embedded in coercive bilingualism and diglossic power relations. Nichols, for example, exposes the racial politics that shaped Émile Littré’s history of the romance languages in the 1850s.92 Post-philology can also mean historical linguistics practiced in relatively recent colonial contexts.93 Similarly, critical analyses of the category of “prestige” as an agent for or against language change, combined with theoretical analyses of the subjectivity of multilingual speakers in situations of differential diglossia, can elucidate colonialism’s linguistic incursions.94 How, for example, does a “dominant” language become a dialect?95 Narratives of linguistic history themselves become subjects of critical postcolonial analysis. Monoglossia, for example, is as

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much a product of colonialist and nationalist desire as of modernist positivism. Anthony P. Espósito, for example, deconstructs a myth of monoglossia in Spanish linguistics through analyses of hybrid texts in medieval Catalonia, and in the process decouples language from nation. Likewise, Iris Zavala has shown how early interpreters of Garcilaso turned his text into a monolingual fiction, producing an imperial text in the midst of heteroglossia and heterogeneity. Finally, in the broadest terms, the colonial legacies of the term “Indo-European” call for a questioning of the most basic assumptions about the histories of language, culture, and domination.96 The history of explicit linguistic codification and commentary likewise reveals intensive and varied colonial engagements. The earliest grammars of both Spanish and French, for example, testify to expansionist desires. Antonio Nebrija produced a grammar of Spanish dedicated to Queen Isabel (“arbitrio de todas nuestras cosas,” including language), designed explicitly to serve the interests of empire, and in a small, portable format convenient for travel. Nebrija opens his text with the famous observation that “siempre la lengue fue compañera del imperio” (language has always been the companion of empire).Although this phrase is often cited to imply that language contributes to making an empire, Nebrija’s examples of the history of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin demonstrate rather that language reflects imperial development: it grows to perfection and falls into decadence and then oblivion unless codified. Writing in 1492 just after the conquest of Granada and with the prospect of African expansion, Nebrija envisioned Spain as having reached an imperial pinnacle: with a written grammar, the language would reflect this political and military achievement.97 The text will not only help Spaniards learn Latin more quickly, but will facilitate the necessary spread of Spanish law to newly conquered peoples as well as to all foreigners who have need to communicate with Spain.98 In New Spain, however, where friars were more interested in grammars of Amerindian languages, Nebrija’s Latin grammar was far more influential: the Spanish grammar was not reprinted until 1744, and then not again until 1893, while the Latin grammar has been almost continuously in print since 1481.99 Meanwhile, in the nineteenth century, Nebrija’s grammar formed the basis of Andrés Bello’s nationalist grammar of Latin American Spanish, leading Mignolo to point out a historical irony of real post-philological import: “the grammar that Nebrija had intended to serve the expansion of the Spanish empire in fact served as a tool to help build the nations that arose from the liberation of the Spanish colonization.”100 In contemporary Spain and Latin America, language and postcolonial politics remain intertwined.101

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The first grammar of French, by contrast, is a large and unwieldy book, written not by a “native” speaker but by John Palsgrave,“Angloys, natyf de Londres et gradue de Paris.” Like Nebrija, Palsgrave offers the vernacular language to his royal sovereign (Henry VIII). But whereas Spanish was codified as an object of export, French is imported.And the “foreigners” Palsgrave addresses will gain, not lose, sovereignty by acquiring French: Henry is called “kynge of Englande and of France,” and his wife Mary (“douagere of France”) is Palsgrave’s most important student. Palsgrave, moreover, praises Henry for procuring the French tongue for his subjects, in a sense adding it to his already “ample dominions” in Europe.102 In subsequent colonial efforts in the Americas, French was also not exported: in the seventeenth century, Raymond Breton produced a dictionary and grammar of Caraibe—not to teach French to the inhabitants of Guadeloupe but to teach the indigenous language to missionaries and merchants.103 After the French Revolution, however, internal colonialism proceeded as a primarily linguistic enterprise, with Abbé Grégoire reporting to the new government “Sur la nécessité et les moyens d’anéantir les patois et d’universaliser l’usage de la langue française” (“On the necessity and means of destroying the dialects and universalizing the use of the French language”).104 Current linguistic politics remains a mixture of internal and external colonialism, as France continues to refuse to sign the European “Charte des langues” (which promises support for regional and minority languages) while promoting “La francophonie” worldwide.105 The problematics of textual representation—of representing texts— saturate postcolonial studies just as they do postmodernism.The fact that colonial situations shape textual and linguistic forms, and that such forms sometimes legitimize expansionist ambitions or foster resistance, compels renewed philological attention to these histories. Even the metaphors used to describe these histories, such as “marginality,” bear philological scrutiny. For while Sylvia Söderlind has considered the concept’s relation to typography (and typographical “justification” in relation to power justifications),106 modern typography did not originate textual spatialization or graphical representations of power: manuscript rulings, lettering, scrolls, and the like, all offer visual tropes of boundary assertion—and unlike the printed book, manuscript margins often bear the marks of intervention (i.e., reader commentary, drawings, corrections, and so on). Post-philology, then, can identify with historical precision the dynamics of oppressive and resistant power that traverse language and text systems. Harnessed to political and ideological critique, philology contributes the corrosive effects of its fetish for detail to significant postcolonial moves.

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At the turn of a century whose intellectual terrain is littered with aftereffects (postwar, postmodern, postfeminist, postcolonial, postcommunist . . .), it is time to think of post-philology—that is, of a philology informed by the aesthetic order of postmodernity as concerns originality, and the political order of postcoloniality as concerns figures of domination.The postmodern gesture of philology lies in removing the idea of a privileged center from conceptions of critical practice and in analyzing the symptoms of desires for original artifacts—desires that permeate philology, modernist aesthetics, and colonial power relations alike. Post-philology thus addresses manuscripts along with various kinds of copies, translations, and editions: they all have something to offer to cultural criticism when we are imaginative enough to press them with questions they can answer.When also conceived through postcolonial studies, post-philology focuses on the power dynamics that shape these representations. Post-philology thus attends to local phenomena, while articulating the ideological investments of nationalist and universalist claims; it brings into focus the colonialist overtones of rhetoric of continuity and purity. Post-philology does not make philology obsolete, any more than postmodernism actually ended “history” or postcolonialism the oppressive legacies of expansionism. As Hutcheon says of the postmodern, it only exposes the constructedness of history and the textual condition of knowledge107—and thus their provisionality. Like other posts, the post of post-philology disarticulates a particular practice or condition from historical teleologies. It identifies and associates practices from various periods or disciplines through their shared methods, even, or especially, when their overt ideologies conflict: Pickens, for example, usefully observes the similarities between some of the methodologies proposed by Karl Uitti (a “traditional philologist”) and Cerquiglini (a radical “new philologist”).108 Post-philology also narrows the perceived gap between textual materiality and hermeneutics. One of the further values of post-philology lies in the opportunity to reconceive of “expertise” and the “experts” who possess it. The philological production of meaning has depended on expert guarantors of objectively true data—that is, on an authoritative unitary subject.109 Both postmodernism and postcolonial theory destabilize this subject as well as the logos itself as a love-object. The result is what Bill Readings and Bennet Schaber have called “a competence beyond expertise.” They describe the modernist expert as a “foreigner who is at home everywhere” (implying colonial connections), while identifying the

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postmodern historian as “a writer who feels the past as a certain ‘foreignness at home’ . . ., a stranger in the house of modernity.”110 Here, the loss of temporal stability (in postmodern terms) dissolves cultural and geographic unities (in postcolonial terms).The implications of “foreignness at home,” or of what Abdul JanMohamed has called “homelessnessas-home,” disperse the power of expertise among all citizens of the “empire of the Ps” (Culler’s term for the aggressive breadth attributed to philology).111 The deconstruction of the expert as a master of discourses and techniques gives material history (i.e., manuscripts, editions, and the like) the same theoretical force as critical narrative: each can modify the other. This does not mean that just anyone can edit manuscripts or write linguistic histories: technical knowledge is indispensable. It does mean, however, a generalized responsibility to account for the power of technique within literary and cultural analyses. The practice of criticism in all fields often depends on repressed power relations with experts and the products of their expertise. And what is left to the “experts” can easily be objectified as admirable or obsolete, urgent or arcane: in any case, it need not concern the public at large. But if it is easy to dismiss philology, who could work without it? (This is of course not to say that philology precedes interpretation: it can be fundamental without being preliminary.112) Postmodern and postcolonial studies can thus contribute to a philology cognizant of its epistemological and ideological implications, while philology itself can contribute to the theorization of the material conditions of textuality that shape scholarship across the humanities. This “post-philology” can aspire to perform transactional relationships between material culture and cultural studies at large. If philology is the art of reading slowly, as Roman Jacobson is reputed to have repeated,113 then post-philology is reading that can give you a headache: centers constantly shift, parallels meet, origins disperse, politics weighs heavily. And since post-philology remains philology to some degree, its history continues to impose. One of the most influential aspects of that history is Martianus Capella’s fifth-century allegory of the organization of human knowledge, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii (The Marriage of Philology and Mercury). Martianus, it turns out, is an exemplary figure for rethinking the practice of philology in “post” terms. A pagan North African based in Carthage (Afer Carthaginiensis114), Martianus “authored” medieval Christian education, European humanism, and, distantly, the modern liberal arts. His popularity in Carolingian schools was largely promulgated by immigrant scholars from Ireland; today, his humanist legacies remain contested by various post-criticisms.115

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In the marriage allegory, Philology must be transmuted from mortal to immortal before the wedding can take place: she thus ensures historical continuity while embodying the potential for rupture. Her handmaiden Geometry is of particular interest for post-philology, for she is the “Earth measurer” (geo-metria), a “tireless traveler” (“viatrix infatigata”) of masculine bearing (“iure ut credatur mascula”) who describes the entire known world.116 Her description of the world, moreover, follows the legacy of expansionist Rome in making Europe a minor geographical force—quite literally “provincial.”117 Geometry is joined by Arithmetic, Music, and Astronomy to form the quadrivium, and by Grammar, Rhetoric, and Logic who form the trivium. Philology and her maidens thus bring all the raw materials to the union, while Mercury’s role is to interpret them. From this allegory,Western criticism has inherited the metaphors of active, masculine hermeneutics and passive, feminine presentation. Modern criticism, moreover, has often acted as if philology and hermeneutics had long divorced, having nothing to do with each other as each pursued mutually exclusive purposes. Perhaps now we can imagine a transgressive reunion: multiracial and married again (institutions and traditions still delimit critical practices to a degree), Philology sleeps around while Mercury prefers dresses.They are not always happy with each other, but their children are beautiful. Notes In fond memory of Suzanne Fleischman, who encouraged me in the love and labor of philology. My comments on the 1990 “new philology” were first presented at the 1994 meeting of the Modern Language Association: I am grateful to David Hult for the invitation to speak, and to Stephen Nichols and William Paden for their enthusiastic responses.Thanks are also due to my colleagues Jane Connolly and Rebecca Biron for conversations about Spanish, the graduate students of “Introduction to Romance Philology” in Fall 1998, my undergraduate research assistant Angelique Ruhi, and the Honors Program of the University of Miami for sponsoring her research. 1. Roberta Frank, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Philologist,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 96 (1997): 486–513, at 490, 513; René Wellek, Theory of Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949), 29. 2. Erich Auerbach, Introduction aux études de philologie romane (Frankfurt am Main:V. Klostermann, 1949); Evelyn S. Firchow, “Today’s Definition of Philology,” Monatshefte, 63 (1971): 147–56, 242–6; Margaret E. Winters and Geoffrey S. Nathan, “First He Called Her a Philologist and Then She Insulted Him,” in The Joy of Grammar: A Festschrift in Honor of James D. McCawley, ed. Diane Brentari, Gary N. Larson, and Lynn A. MacLeod (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1992), 351–67. 3. Ed. Joseph Gibaldi (New York: Modern Language Association, 1992). 4. Jean-François Lyotard, La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir (Paris: Éditions de minuit, 1979); Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991); Hans Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern:A History (London: Routledge, 1995).

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5. Linda Hutcheon, “A Postmodern Problematics,” in Ethics/Aesthetics: Post-Modern Positions, ed. Robert Merrill (Washington, D.C.: Maisonneuve Press, 1988), 1–10. 6. Dirlik, “Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism,” Critical Inquiry, 20 (1994): 328–50, at 332; Laura Chrisman,“Inventing Post-colonial Theory: Polemical Observations,” Pretexts, 5 (1995): 205–12, at 210. 7. Cf. Chrisman, “Inventing Post-Colonial Theory,” 205–8; Makarand Paranjape, “Theorising Postcolonial Difference: Culture, Nation, Civilization,” Span, 47 (1998): 1–17. 8. Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?” Critical Inquiry, 17 (1991): 336–57, at 342, 353; Dirlik, “Postcolonial Aura,” 334–36; John Frow, “What Was Post-Modernism?” in Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism, ed. Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1990), 139–52, at 139. 9. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts?” Representations, 37 (1992): 1–26, at 23; Benita Parry, “The Postcolonial: Conceptual Category or Chimera?” in The Politics of Postcolonial Criticism, ed. Andrew Gurr, The Yearbook of English Studies, 27 (1997): 3–21, at 17; Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 196, 246. 10. Chrisman, “Inventing Post-Colonial Theory,” 210. 11. Victor Li, “Towards Articulation: Postcolonial Theory and Demotic Resistance,” Ariel, 26 (1995): 167–89, at 171. 12. Mark D. Johnston, “Philology in the Epoch of the Cogito,” Criticism 25, (1983): 109–22. 13. Rupert T. Pickens, “The Future of Old French Studies in America: The ‘Old’ Philology and the Crisis of the ‘New,’ ” in The Future of the Middle Ages: Medieval Literature in the 1990s, ed.William D. Paden (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994), 53–86, at 73. 14. Paul De Man, “Return to Philology,” in Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 21–6, at 24; Jonathan Culler, “Anti-Foundational Philology,” Comparative Literature Studies, 27 (1990): 49–52; Peggy Knapp, “Recycling Philology,” ADE Bulletin, 106 (1993): 13–16. David Greetham, however, rightfully criticizes both De Man and Culler for treating philology as pre-hermeneutic:“The Resistance to Philology,” in The Margins of the Text, ed. D. C. Greetham (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 9–24. 15. Edward Said, “Islam, Philology and French Culture: Renan and Massignon,” in The World, the Text, and the Critic (London: Faber, 1984), 268–90; Tim Brennan, “Places of Mind, Occupied Lands: Edward Said and Philology,” in Edward Said: A Critical Reader, ed. Michael Sprinker (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 74–95, especially 77–81, 91–2. 16. Simon During,“Postmodernism or Postcolonialism?” Landfall, 39 (1985): 366–80; Helen Tiffin, “Post-Colonialism, Post-Modernism and the Rehabilitation of Post-Colonial History,” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 23 (1988): 169–81; Arun P. Mukherjee, “Whose PostColonialism and Whose Postmodernism?” World Literature Written in English, 30.2 (1990): 1–9; Ella Shohat, “Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial,’ ” Social Text, 10 (1992): 99–113; Bhabha, Location of Culture, 171–97; E. San Juan, Jr., Beyond Postcolonial Theory (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998); Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 172–214. 17. Lee Patterson sketches this history in “The Return to Philology,” in The Past and Future of Medieval Studies, ed. Tom Van Engen (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 231–44, at 233–4. R. Howard Bloch considers some of the modern vagaries of “renovation” in “New Philology and Old French,” Speculum, 65 (1990): 38–58, at 38–9. 18. Michele Barbi, La nuova filogia e l’edizione dei nostri scrittori da Dante a Manzoni (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1938). 19. José Ortega y Gasset, “The Difficulty of Reading,” trans. Clarence E. Parmenter, Diogenes, 28 (1959): 1–17, at 2, 17. 20. Robert R. Dyer, “The New Philology: An Old Discipline or a New Science?” Computers and the Humanities, 4 (1969): 53–64; Mary B. Speer, “In Defense of Philology:Two New Guides to Textual Criticism,” Romance Philology, 32 (1979): 335–44.

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21. Stephen G. Nichols, “Introduction: Philology in a Manuscript Culture,” Speculum, 65 (1990): 1–10, at 7. 22. Towards a Synthesis? Essays on the New Philology, ed. Keith Busby (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993); Karl Stackmann, “Neue Philologie?” in Modernes Mittelalter: Neue Bilder einer populären Epoche, ed. Joachim Heinzle (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1994), 398–427;Werner Schröder, “Die ‘Neue Philologie’ und das ‘Moderne Mittelalter,’ ” Jenaer Universitätsreden, 1 (1996): 33–50; Alte und neue Philologie, ed. Martin-Dietrich Glessgen and Franz Lebsanft (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1997). 23. Suzanne Fleischman,“Philology, Linguistics, and the Discourse of the Medieval Text,” Speculum, 65 (1990): 19–37, at 19; Lee Patterson, “On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval Studies,” Speculum, 65 (1990): 87–108, at 87; Alan Frantzen, “The Living and the Dead: Responses to Papers on the Politics of Editing Medieval Texts,” in The Politics of Editing Medieval Texts, ed. Roberta Frank (New York: AMS Press, 1993), 159–81, at 164; William D. Paden, “Is there a Middle in this Road? Reflections on the New Philology,” in Towards a Synthesis? 119–30, at 122; “Scholars at a Perilous Ford,” in The Future of the Middle Ages, 3–31, at 8; Pickens, “The Future,” 72; David Hult, Nouvelle philologie ou nouvelle imposture? Manuscript Study in the Postmodern Era (panel title, Modern Language Association, 1994). 24. Fleischman,“Philology,” 19; Gabrielle Spiegel,“History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages,” Speculum, 65 (1990): 59–86, at 59. 25. Stephen G. Nichols, “Editor’s Preface,” Romanic Review, 79 (1988): 1–3, at 1; Fleischman, “Philology,” 19; Paden, “Is there a Middle,” 124. 26. Stephen G. Nichols, “Deeper into History,” L’esprit créateur, 23 (1983): 91–102, at 91; Firchow, “Today’s Definition,” 243. 27. Pickens speaks of Paul Zumthor’s work on textual variance as informed by a “modernist/postmodernist perspective” (“The Future,” 61). 28. Fleischman,“Philology,” 19; Paden,“Reflections on ‘The Past and Future of Medieval Studies,’ ” Romance Philology, 50 (1997): 308–14, at 311; Spiegel, “History,” 59. 29. Keith Busby, “Doin’ Philology While the -isms Strut,” in Towards a Synthesis? 85–95, at 91; Pickens, “The Future,” 72. 30. Nichols, “Editor’s Preface,” 1; also Fleischman, “Philology,” 19. 31. Mary B. Speer, “Editing Old French Texts in the Eighties: Theory and Practice,” Romance Philology, 45 (1991): 7–43, at 16, 19. 32. Nichols, “Introduction: Philology,” 1. 33. Patterson, “On the Margin,” 90. 34. Nichols, “Introduction: Philology,” 1–7; Bloch, “New Philology,” 39–47. 35. Joseph Bédier, “La Société des anciens textes français,” La Revue des deux mondes, 121 (1894): 906–34, at 910. 36. Henry Bardon,“Philologie et Nouvelle Critique,” Revue belge de philologie, 48 (1970): 5–15.This is precisely the outcome of Kathleen Biddick’s imagined postcolonial encounter between the Venerable Bede and a feminist Chicana professor: the professor implies that her students might be willing to learn Latin if sufficiently engaged by the similarities between Bede’s linguistic traumas and their own: “Bede’s Blush: Postcards from Bali, Bombay, Palo Alto,” in The Past and Future of Medieval Studies, 16–44, at 30–4. 37. Patterson at one point poses the “problem” explicitly in terms of the failed promise of a postmodern academy (“The Return,” 242). 38. Stephen G. Nichols, “Philology and Its Discontents,” in The Future of the Middle Ages, 113–41, at 139: n. 14. 39. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), 219–53. 40. Rosalind E. Krauss,“The Originality of the Avant-Garde,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 151–70, citations at 156, 162, 170. 41. Willard J. Rusch, “Philology and the Dynamics of Manuscript Glossing,” in Interdigitations: Essays for Irmengard Rauch, ed. Gerald F. Carr,Wayne Harbert, and Lihua Zhang (New York: Peter

POST-PHILOLOGY 42.

43.

44. 45. 46.

47.

48. 49. 50.

51.

52.

53.

54.

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Lang, 1998), 219–29; Thomas Farrell, “Philological Theory in ‘Sources and Analogues,’ ” Medieval Perspectives, 15.2 (2000): 34–48. Nichols, “Introduction: Philology,” 1, 8; “Editor’s Preface,” 3; Patterson, “On the Margin,” 91–101, 107; Nichols, “Why Material Philology?” Zeitschrift für Deutsche Philologie, 116 supplement (1997): 10–30, at 12–13. Louise Fradenburg has also interpreted the call for a return to origins as a problematic repetition of very old paradigms: “ ‘So That We May Speak of Them’: Enjoying the Middle Ages,” New Literary History, 28 (1997): 205–30, at 218–19, 223–4. Richard R. Glejzer criticizes a similar oversight in the broader program of a “new medievalism” in “The New Medievalism and the (Im)Possibility of the Middle Ages,” in Medievalism and the Academy II, ed. David Metzger (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), 104–19. Alan Frantzen, Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990). Nichols, “Philology,” 137: n. 5. Nichols, “Philology,” 118; “Why,” especially 13, 16–17. See also the variant “materialist philology” in “Introduction,” in The Whole Book: Cultural Perspectives on the Medieval Miscellany, ed. Stephen G. Nichols and Siegfried Wenzel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 1–6, at 1–2. Nichols’s conceptualization seems quite close to Jerome McGann’s “materialist hermeneutics” in The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 15; the term also has a history among Italian philologists, e.g., R. Antonelli, “Interpretazione e critica del testo,” in Letteratura italiana, IV: L’interpretazione, ed. Alberto Asor Rosa (Torino: Giulio Einaudi, 1985), 141–243. Fradenburg similarly laments the message that denies that “those who do not possess philological skills do possess worthy ways of remembering the past, because they are forced to rely on the now-discredited, dead, humanistic ‘text’ instead of on the living exuberance of medieval ‘textuality’ ” (“ ‘So That We May Speak of Them,’ ” 224). I develop the positionality of reading more extensively in “Interpreting Codicology: Re-visions of the ‘Divine Comedy’ in the Codex Altona,” Mosaic 28.4 (1995): 13–37. Linde M. Brocato,“Leading a Whore to Father: Confronting ‘Celestina,’ ” La corónica, 24 (1995): 41–59, at 41. For example Mary B. Speer, “Editing Old French Texts in the Eighties: Theory and Practice,” Romance Philology, 45 (1991): 7–43, at 30–41; Michael Camille, Image on the Edge:The Margins of Medieval Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); Stephen G. Nichols,“Picture, Image, and Subjectivity in Medieval Culture,” Modern Language Notes, 108 (1993): 617–37. Cesare Segre, “La critica testuale,” in Atti: XIV Congresso internazionale di linguistica e filologia romanza, 1974 (Naples: Gaetano Macchiaroli, 1978), 1: 493–9; Germán Orduna, “Hispanic Textual Criticism and the Stemmatic Value of the History of the Text,” in Scholarly Editing: A Guide to Research, ed. D. C. Greetham (New York: Modern Language Association, 1995), 486–503; Mary B. Speer, “Old French Literature,” in Scholarly Editing, 382–416. Nichols, “Introduction: Philology,” 5–7; Lenora D. Wolfgang, “Chrétien’s Lancelot: Love and Philology,” Reading Medieval Studies, 17 (1991): 3–17; David Hult, “Lancelot’s Two Steps: A Problem in Textual Criticism,” Speculum, 61 (1986): 836–58, at 845. Donald H. Reiman, “ ‘Versioning’: The Presentation of Multiple Texts,” in Romantic Texts and Contexts (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987), 167–80; Robert S. Sturges, “Textual Scholarship: Ideologies of Literary Production,” Exemplaria, 3.1 (1991): 109–31, at 126–30; Roy Rosenstein, “Mouvance and the Editor as Scribe: Trascrittore tradittore?” Romanic Review, 80 (1989): 157–71; Ross G. Arthur, “On Editing Sexually Offensive Old French Texts,” in The Politics of Editing Medieval Texts, ed. Roberta Frank (New York: AMS Press, 1993), 19–64, at 63; The Iconic Page in Manuscript, Print, and Digital Culture, ed. George Bornstein and Theresa Tinkle (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998). Bernard Cerquiglini, Éloge de la variante: Histoire critique de la philologie (Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1989), 150–61; Sturges,“Textual Scholarship,” 130; J. David Bolter, Writing Space:The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing (Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum, 1991).

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55. For example Jerome J. McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); John Dagenais, “That Bothersome Residue:Toward a Theory of the Physical Text,” in Vox Intexta: Orality and Textuality in the Middle Ages, ed. A. N. Doane and Carol Braun Pasternack (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 246–59; Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities, ed. George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993); David Greetham, Theories of the Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), especially 10–11, 86–9. 56. Paul Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972); Pourquoi la critique génétique? Méthodes, théories, ed. Pierre-Marc de Biasi, Michel Contat, and Daniel Ferrer (Paris: Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1998). 57. Pickens, “The Future,” 61. 58. The Songs of Jaufré Rudel, ed. Rupert T. Pickens (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1978); Paden, “Is there a Middle,” 124. Speer analyzes other editorial projects with similar aspirations, while also arguing that Picken’s printed text visually maintains an authorial center and thus actually perpetuates modernist editorial values (“Editing,” 9–10, 25–30). 59. Hutcheon, “Postmodern Problematics,” 6. 60. For example “The Status of Evidence,” PMLA, 111.1 (1996). 61. Bill Readings and Bennet Schaber, ed., Postmodernism Across the Ages: Essays for a Postmodernity that Wasn’t Born Yesterday (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1993), 23. 62. Suzanne Fleischman, “Medieval Vernaculars and the Myth of Monoglossia: A Conspiracy of Linguistics and Philology,” in Literary History and the Challenge of Philology, ed. Seth Lerer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 92–104. 63. Roger Wright, “Metalinguistic Change in Medieval Iberia,” in Early Ibero-Romance (Newark, Del.: Juan de la Cuesta, 1994), 31–44. 64. For example Peter Rickard, A History of the French Language (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 186, 188, 190; Ralph Penny, A History of the Spanish Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 216, 218. 65. For example Roger Wright, “The Asterisk in Hispanic Historical Linguistics,” in Early IberoRomance (Newark, Del.: Juan de la Cuesta, 1994), 45–64; Salvatore Claudio Sgroi, “L’asterisco nella linguistica italiana, francese e spagnola,” in Italica et Romanica: Festschrift für Max Pfister (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1997), 3: 441–7; Javier Elvira, “Sobre reconstrucción lingüística: Uso y abuso del asterisco en gramática histórica,” Boletín de la Real Academia Española 79 (1999): 425–43. 66. This observation is inspired by the analyses of Sylvia Söderlind, although she does not discuss the linguistic asterisk per se: “Margins and Metaphors: The Politics of Post-***,” in Liminal Postmodernisms:The Postmodern, the (Post-)Colonial, and the (Post-)Feminist, ed.Theo D’Haen and Hans Bertens (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 35–54. 67. Roger Sell, “Postdisciplinary Philology: Culturally Relativistic Pragmatics,” in English Historical Linguistics 1992, ed. Francisco Fernández, Miguel Fuster, and Juan José Calvo (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1994), 29–36. 68. Dirlik, “The Postcolonial Aura,” 348; The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997), 1; Mishra and Hodge, “What is (Post)Colonialism?” Textual Practice, 5 (1991): 399–414, at 412. 69. Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), xii. 70. Gyan Prakash,“Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 32 (1990): 383–408, at 398. 71. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “ ‘Un souffle d’Allemagne ayant passé’: Friedrich Diez, Gaston Paris, and the Genesis of National Philologies,” Romance Philology, 40 (1986): 1–37; Nichols, “Introduction: Philology,” 1; Fradenburg, “ ‘So That We May Speak of Them,’ ” 219; Pascale

POST-PHILOLOGY 72. 73. 74. 75.

76. 77.

78.

79. 80. 81.

82.

83.

84. 85. 86.

87.

88.

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Hummel, Histoire de l’histoire de la philologie: Étude d’un genre épistémologique et bibliographique (Geneva: Droz, 2000). Brian Stock, “The Middle Ages as Subject and Object: Romantic Attitudes and Academic Medievalism,” New Literary History, 5 (1973–74): 527–47, at 527. Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 3–30, at 10, 20. Alton Becker, “Modern Philology,” Forum Linguisticum, 7 (1982): 27–41, at 27, 34. Walter Mignolo, “Linguistic Maps, Literary Geographies, and Cultural Landscapes: Languages, Languaging, and (Trans)nationalism,” Modern Language Quarterly, 57 (1996): 181–96, at 183; revised in Local Histories, 220. Pickens, “The Future,” 79. A. G. Rigg, A History of Anglo-Latin Literature, 1066–1422 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1; James J. O’Donnell, “Retractations,” in The Whole Book: Cultural Perspectives on the Medieval Miscellany, ed. Stephen G. Nichols and Siegfried Wenzel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 169–73, at 172; Siân Echard,“House Arrest: Modern Archives, Medieval Manuscripts,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 30.2 (2000): 185–210, at 195. Bruce Holsinger, “The Color of Salvation: Desire, Death, and the Second Crusade in Bernard of Clairvaux’s ‘Sermons on the Song of Songs,’ ” in The Tongue of the Fathers: Gender and Ideology in Twelfth-Century Latin, ed. David Townsend and Andrew Taylor (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 156–86, at 156–7. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Introduction: Midcolonial,” The Postcolonial Middle Ages (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 1–17, at 4. R. Howard Bloch,“The Once and Future Middle Ages,” Modern Language Quarterly 54 (1993): 67–76, at 73. For example Gumbrecht,“ ‘Un soufflé d’Allemagne;’ ” Medievalism and the Modernist Temper: On the Discipline of Medieval Studies, ed. R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). Joseph Duggan,“Franco-German Conflict and the History of French Scholarship on the ‘Song of Roland,’ ” in Hermeneutics and Medieval Culture, ed. Patrick J. Gallacher and Helen Damico (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 97–106; Michelle R. Warren, “Au commencement était l’île: The Colonial Formation of Joseph Bédier’s ‘Chanson de Roland,’ ” in Translating Cultures: Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middles Ages, ed. Ananya J. Kabir and Deanne M.Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). For example Dámaso Alonso, “Menéndez Pidal y la generación del 98,” Revista de Letras, 1 (1969): 209–28; Catherine Brown,“The Relics of Menéndez Pidal: Mourning and Melancholia in Hispanomedieval Studies,” La corónica, 24 (1995): 15–41; Peter Linehan, “The Court Historiographer of Francoism?: ‘La leyenda oscura’ of Ramón Menéndez Pidal,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 73 (1996): 437–50. David Greetham, Theories of the Text, 428. Stephen G. Nichols,“On the Sociology of Medieval Manuscript Annotation,” in Annotation and Its Texts, ed. Stephen A. Barney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 43–73. David Henige,“Tractable Texts: Modern Editing and the Columbian Writings,” in Critical Issues in Editing Exploration Texts, ed. Germaine Warkentin (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 1–35; Margarita Zamora, Reading Columbus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Jean-Bernard Mary-Lafon, Fierabras, légende nationale (Paris: Librarie nouvelle, 1857), xiii, xiv. Janine Dakyns mentions Mary-Lafon in relation to the imperial medievalizing of Louis Napoleon in The Middle Ages in French Literature, 1851–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 33. Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London: Routledge, 1992); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Politics of Translation,” in Outside in the Teaching

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89.

90. 91.

92. 93.

94. 95. 96.

97.

98. 99.

100.

101.

102. 103.

104.

Michelle R.Warren Machine (London: Routledge, 1993), 179–200; Ruth Evans, “Translating Past Cultures?” in The Medieval Translator, IV, ed. Roger Ellis and Ruth Evans (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1994), 20–45; Douglas Robinson, Translation and Empire: Postcolonial Theories Explained (Manchester, UK: St. Jerome, 1997); Post-Colonial Translation, ed. Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi (London: Routledge, 1999). On Mary-Lafon’s defense of the Midi, see Michael Glencross, “La littérature française du moyen âge dans la critique littéraire sous la Monarchie de Juillet,” Zeitschrift für französiche Sprache und Literatur, 103 (1993): 244–55, at 252. McClintock, “Angel of Progress;” Arthur, “On editing,” 21, 59. Fierabras, ed.Auguste Kroeber and Gustave Servois (Paris: F.Vieweg, 1860). Editions have been prepared, but not published, by G.A. Knott (Ph.D., University of Cambridge, 1954) and André de Mandach (1981; CH-3065 Habstetten près Berne, Switzerland). Stephen G. Nichols,“Modernism and the Politics of Medieval Studies,” in Medievalism, 25–56, at 34–40. For example “Documenting the Colonial Experience, with Special Regard to Spanish in the American Southwest,” ed. Barbara de Marco and Jerry R. Craddock, Romance Philology, 53 (1999). Penny’s History of the Spanish Language represents a linguistic history rather closer to a postphilological spirit than Rickard’s History of the French Language. Manfred Görlach, “Colonial Lag? The Alleged Conservative Character of American English and Other ‘Colonial’ Varieties,” English World-Wide, 8.1 (1987): 41–60, especially 56. Anthony P. Espósito, “Bilingualism, Philology and the Cultural Nation: The Medieval Monolingual Imaginary,” Catalan Review, 9 (1995): 125–39; Iris M. Zavala,“The Art of Edition as the Techné of Mediation: Garcilaso’s Poetry as Masterplot,” in The Politics of Editing, ed. Jenaro Talens and Nicholas Spadaccini (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 52–73; Veena Naregal, “Language and Power in Pre-Colonial Western India: Textual Hierarchies, Literate Audiences and Colonial Philology,” The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 37 (2000): 259–94. Eugenio Asensio underscores the retrospective qualities of Nebrija’s judgments in “La lengua compañera del imperio: Historia de una idea de Nebrija en España y Portugal,” Revista de filología española, 43 (1960): 399–413, at 406–7. Mignolo, while recognizing that Nebrija could not have had Western expansionism in mind, nonetheless interprets the grammar mainly from the perspective of later centuries (The Darker Side, 41ff.). Antonio de Nebrija, Gramática castellana, ed. Galindo Romeo and Ortiz Muñoz (Madrid: Edición de la Junta del Centenario, 1946), a.ii, a.iiii. Bibliografía Nebrisense: Las obras completas del humanista Antonio de Nebrija desde 1481 hasta nuestros días, ed. Miguel Ángel Esparza Torres and Jans-Josef Niederhee (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1999), especially 302–5; Mignolo, The Darker Side, 49–56. Andrés Bello, Gramática de la lengua castellana: Destinada al uso de los americanos [1847], ed. Ramón Trujillo (Santa Cruz de Tenerife: Instituto Universitario de Lingüística Andrés Bello, 1981); Mignolo, The Darker Side, 67. Kathryn A.Woolard, Double Talk: Bilingualism and the Politics of Ethnicity in Catalonia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989); Spanish in Four Continents: Studies in Language Contact and Bilingualism, ed. Carmen Silva-Corvalan (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1995). John Palsgrave, Lesclarcissement de la langue francoyse, 1530 (Menston: Scolar Press, 1969). Dictionnaire caraibe-francais [1665] (Paris: Karthala, 1999); Grammaire caraibe (Auxerre: Giles Bouquet, 1667). See Doris Garraway, The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming). Augustin Gazier, Lettres à Grégoire sur les patois de France, 1790–1794 (Paris: A. Durand et Pedone-Lanrie, 1880); Michel de Certeau, Dominique Julia and Jacques Revel, Une politique de la langue: La Révolution française et les patois (Paris: Gallimard, 1975).

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105. Audrey Gaquin,“Les langues minoritaires de France et la nouvelle Europe,” The French Review 73, (1999): 94–107; Jean-Louis Calvert, “French Language Policy and Francophonie,” in Language, Legislation and Linguistic Rights, ed. Douglas A. Kibbee (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1998), 310–19. 106. Söderlind, “Margins and Metaphors,” 39. 107. Linda Hutcheon, “Beginning to Theorize Postmodernism,” Textual Practice, 1 (1987): 10–31. 108. Pickens, “Future,” 70–1. 109. Hult, “Lancelot’s Two Steps,” 852–3; Johnston, “Philology.” 110. Readings and Schaber, Postmodernism, 19, 20. 111. Abdul R. JanMohamed, “Wordliness-without-World, Homelessness-as-Home: Toward a Definition of the Specular Border Intellectual,” in Edward Said: A Critical Reader, ed. Michael Sprinker (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 96–120; Culler, “Anti-Foundational Philology,” 49. 112. Jerome McGann develops this useful distinction in “The Monks and the Giants: Textual and Bibliographical Studies and the Interpretation of Literary Works,” in Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 180–99. 113. Calvert Watkins couches his report in mystificatory terms that take philology out of history: “Let me conclude with the definition of philology that my teacher Roman Jakobson gave (who got it from his teacher, who got it from his): ‘Philology is the art of reading slowly’ ” (“What is Philology?” Comparative Literature Studies, 28 [1990]: 21–5, at 25). James McCawley offers a variant memory:“Philology is the art of careful reading” (cited in Winters and Nathan, “First He Called Her a Philologist,” 351). Other reminiscences include: De Man, “Return;” Patterson, “Return,” 236. 114. William Harris Stahl et al., Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971–77), 1: 12. 115. William Harris Stahl, “The Quadrivium of Martianus Capella: Its Place in the Intellectual History of Western Europe,” in Arts libéraux et philosophie au moyen âge (Montreal: Institut d’études médiévales, 1969), 959–67, at 959; Emily Bauman, “Re-dressing Colonial Discourse: Postcolonial Theory and the Humanist Project,” Critical Quarterly, 40.2 (1998): 79–89. 116. “De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii,” in Martianus Capella, ed. James Willis (Leipzig: B. G.Teubner, 1983), 204, 206, 250; Stahl, Martianus, 2: 218, 220, 263. 117. Stahl, Martianus, 1: 131–6.

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CHAPTER TWO

Contrapuntal Histories Patricia Clare Ingham

In the opening pages of Joseph Conrad’s colonialist novella, Heart of Darkness, the notoriously unreliable Marlow raises the ghost of early Britain. In his musings, time converges on images of light and darkness: “we live in the flicker,” Marlow opines, in a moment when “light came out of the river”“a flash of lightening in the clouds.” In this collision of time and darkness, Britain flashes as an ancient island already colonized at its very heart. Marlow’s fantasy of dark and light is also a fantasy of the fragility of his putatively “civilized” present. An ancient, insular precivilized “savagery” beckons as, in the evocative words of Chinua Achebe, “an avenging recrudescence of the mindless frenzy of first beginnings” (252).1 Roman Britain thus haunts Heart of Darkness, suspended throughout the story in the space bounded by two rivers, the Thames and the Congo. Achebe has read the collocation of these two rivers for Conrad’s anxiety about “a lurking hint of kinship, of common ancestry” between Europe and Africa, interpreting the famous epistemological instability of Conrad’s story as itself an effort to disavow threatening commonalties. In Achebe’s reading, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness manages colonialist anxieties of savage sameness by ascribing the difference of Africa to Europe through a story about time. Displacing Britain’s “savage” days to the distant past before Rome, Conrad manages boundaries between a modern Europe as “home” and primitive Africa as “away.” Achebe’s reading has had important consequences for the meaning of the past, and of time itself, in postcolonial cultural studies. Scholars have begun to deconstruct the function of modernity as a colonial legacy; yet the implications of this for a view of medieval cultures has remained less

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clear. In this essay, I am interested in unraveling the methodological problems embedded in what seems to me to be an ideological double bind for premodern scholars. On one hand, efforts to read the colonial histories of premodern Europe can seem to collude with Marlow’s colonialist fantasy of a “savage” early Europe conquered by Rome; on the other hand, a refusal to engage with premodern scenes of conquest risks continuing to obscure the cultural accomplishments of the premodern colonized, thereby promoting an invisibility that Achebe also critiques. Minorities within Europe constitute precisely those peoples whose languages, cultures, and (at times) political positions have been trivialized in standard accounts of Europe’s move into the “modern” era.2 In the pages that follow I offer an account of “contrapuntal histories,” a view of a more mobile historicist method indebted to the work of a number of postcolonial scholars in English and Latin American studies. Borrowing metaphors from musical counterpoint, “contrapuntal histories” depend upon Edward Said’s emphasis upon the “intertwined histories” and “overlapping territories” of colonial rule, and involve what Walter D. Mignolo calls a “pluritopic hermeneutics,” a comparativist study of temporalities and geographies.3 In the first section, I review assumptions about “premodern” alterity from modernity, via the insistence upon history as difference circulating in New Historicism, recirculated by medievalists who emphasize what Catherine Brown calls the “impassable abyss” that separates us from the Middle Ages.4 A “contrapuntal” historicist method, I argue, understands historical difference as distinction rather than alterity, assessing the complex dynamics of “here” and “there,” “then” and “now,” the repetitions of colonial instability and oppositional agency at various moments in time. The second section offers a reading of the tropes of medieval Britain in Conrad’s novella. I move from the assumption of history as difference embedded in Marlow’s medievalism to develop the pertinence of early scenes of British conquest to postcolonial readings of this text. The third section links issues raised by this modern British text with a medieval poem increasingly important to postcolonial approaches in medieval studies, Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale. Here, I emphasize the contrapuntal nature of the tale’s concern with various spaces and times: Syria, Rome, and Britain—a “distant” land, a metropolitan and imperial center, and an insular past inhabited by England’s own “pagan” peoples. I suggest the consequences of a historical method committed both to relations between medievalisms and modernity, and among medieval cultures.

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Definitions From a methodological point of view, New Historicism generally takes a complicated Foucauldian position with regard to definitions of “modernity,” specifically in its interest in replacing “old historicist” assumptions, progressivist definitions of “modernity,” and historical teleologies with more satisfying and local “counterhistories.” To that end the New Historicist anecdote is said to function, as Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt put it, “not, as in the old historicism, [to] epitomize epochal truths, but . . . instead [to] undermine them.”5 The concomitant turn to particularity and specificity has succeeded in destabilizing certain of history’s grands récits; but it has also, and in the opinions of some necessarily, breathed new life into the caricature of the Middle Ages as absolutely other to modernity. This slide from medieval historical difference to medieval alterity has been produced in part by an overemphasis upon one aspect of Foucault’s historiography—specifically his account of the “episteme”—and a concomitant underemphasis upon Foucault’s equally interesting theorizations of genealogy. To be sure Foucault’s episteme remains a part of the anti-teleological impulse of the field. Yet particularly in the United States it may have encumbered period definitions that were already a little too solidly in place to begin with. Thus, and despite the “revolt” of some early twentieth-century medievalists who ascribed the origins of modernity to various medieval centuries,6 the early modern period becomes by the 1990s the originary site for (modern) subjectivity, nationhood, or colonialist marveling.7 The “rupture” between “medieval” and “renaissance” has (at least since Jacob Burkhardt, if not John Leland) long been an overdetermined historical marker, and while the practitioners of the New Historicism are interested in distinguishing their method from earlier historicisms, they do not seem bothered by reasserting a historiographical divide that a number of “old historicists” (Burkhardt among them) would well recognize and even endorse. To be sure, New Historicists continue to emphasize historical distinctions, marking the alternative meanings or cultural specificities of power across time. Such work is nonetheless marked by testimony to the similar problems of power from early modernity to modernity, even as the specific attributes of these problems—their centrality to the culture in question, for instance—change through time. The medieval period, in contrast, is often positioned as the time before, or even as the opposite of modern cultural formulations. Stephen Greenblatt, for example, situates the historical differences between early modern and later

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colonialisms through the metaphor of “invisible bullets.”8 Unlike the explicit and visible military violence through which nineteenth-century imperial power exerted its force, the violence of early modern colonial engagements deployed the invisible, if no less deadly, disruption of contagion and disease. Early modern and modern colonialisms are simultaneously understood as distinct and similar: the problems of violence in the colonial encounter are in ways analogous; the specific modalities and workings of power are different.The medieval, in contrast, becomes the site not of colonial power, but its opposite, multicultural “tolerance.” Indeed, elsewhere Greenblatt reads representations of Islam in The Book of John Mandeville as testimony to a medieval magnanimity about “foreignness” and differences of belief.9 Following Greenblatt’s lead, medieval historian Caroline Walker Bynum argues that medieval “wonder” is entirely non-imperial, a “complex set of ideas and reactions very different from those recently studied by early modernists.”10 Bynum identifies two kinds of “wonder” in medieval texts, distinguishing admiratio (defined as the desire “not to consume or to incorporate”) from the more problematic imitatio, which includes a sense of appropriation pertinent to colonial relations. Bynum argues that such medieval distinctions render the medieval period utterly different from later times and “deeply respectful of the specificity of the world.”11 Of course, one cannot help but note the extent to which, not only in Bynum’s own essay but in the book of John Mandeville itself, admiratio converges with imitatio: Islamic cultures are not only to be admired for their fidelity to their faith, but imitated by the scandalous West. Such imitation is, furthermore, embedded in a larger cultural ambition for a worldwide Christendom. As recent readings of the Book of John Mandeville have argued, the question of Mandeville’s tolerance is a complicated one, no less so because of the mouvance of the manuscript tradition.12 Yet elsewhere medievalists have critiqued New Historicist’s tendency to overestimate the differences between the “pre-” and the “early” modern. David Wallace, for example, notes that their determined emphasis upon particularity obscures important historical relations that obtain across an English “Medieval/Renaissance” divide. Wallace raises the problems of a too particular particularity, one that, as I will characterize it, slides too easily from difference as distinction to difference as alterity. Critiques such as Wallace’s are by now widely applauded.13 Indeed some have argued that the dissection of medieval “alterity” is already well accomplished, since scholars of the “new medievalism” have, in the words of Gabrielle Spiegel, “redirected [their] scholarly energies” in the

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“the adaptive use of critical theory, feminism, gender studies, postcolonialism, even psychoanalysis [as] tools for reading and understanding the past.”14 The problem of “medieval alterity”—the question of how “hardedged” scholars imagine medieval difference to be, or whether they still do at all—has nonetheless produced some of the most impassioned methodological debates in the field.While it is certainly true, as Spiegel reminds us, that positivist confidence in history as science is a thing of the past, the Foucauldian rupture of premodern to modern continues to circulate even among the “new medievalists.” In the paragraph that follows the previous quote, Spiegel uses Foucault’s chronology to caution against the “indiscriminate” use of theory, particularly postcolonial: “A postcolonial society has a historical specificity that is not easily translated into premodern worlds. For this reason, Foucault, for example, resolutely refused to include the Middle Ages within the operations of those technologies of knowledge/power that formed the core of his analysis of modern social and discursive formations.”15 Yet the inheritance of Foucault’s dating of modernity remains precisely at issue when reconsidering both colonial “modernity” and conquest in premodern times (see this volume’s Introduction). Continuing investigations of alterity by medievalists offer, thus, a critique, not of an erstwhile positivist naivèté, but of the persistence of Foucault’s rupture for contemporary criticism. The present disagreement concerns, at least in part, divergent interpretations of Foucault’s medievalism, with some medievalists arguing that his episteme encodes ideological as well as historicist impulses.16 Medieval alterity functions, they argue, as a limit case for difference so as to prohibit certain theoretical turns. In postcolonial terms, this limit claims colonial beginnings in 1492 as much to ensure the relevance of the “early modern” to contemporary postcolonial affairs as in the service of historicist precision.Yet such a chronology also forgets about the intimacies between medieval historical method and postcolonial history, intimacies incisively demonstrated by Bruce Holsinger’s account of the medievalist influences on the Subaltern Studies Group in its “history from below.”17 It therefore remains problematic, as Holsinger argues, to emphasize only differences between postcolonial approaches and medieval histories and texts. Temporal distinctions of the “premodern” to “postcolonial” continue, of course, to obtain. Perhaps paradoxically, such distinctions often circulate in ways that foreclose the very questions of historicity they purport to open. Particularly troubling in this regard is Catherine Brown’s essay “In the Middle,” in which she deploys Johannes Fabian’s anthropological

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decolonization of tropes of time to emphasize the medievalist’s position in the middle of, and thus “coeval” with, medieval texts.Yet in Brown’s essay this has little to do with a history of colonialism. Instead, Brown reads the metaphorical “colonization” of the modern reader by the medieval text. While she reminds us of the complicated, and intimate, transactions between reader and text, she nonetheless emphasizes the (ethical) incommensurability of modern postcolonial concerns to medieval ones.18 Early on she describes the “foreignness” one putatively experiences when reading “a medieval book cold” or teaching one “to cold undergraduates.” She elaborates the abyss that must be crossed: “All those quotations, all that Catholicism, all those arguments and counterarguments; not to mention those old words, weird verb forms, erratic spelling, and all that damn Latin.”19 This description, of course, could as aptly describe the pleasures and pains of reading a host of early modern texts, or an even more fully “modern” poet like Gerard Manley Hopkins, not to mention a score of “postmodern” works. Furthermore, marking the medieval as “foreign” on account of “all that Catholicism” seems somewhat disingenuous considering the long (and colonialist?) history of what we might call Catholic apologetics in medieval studies. Despite Brown’s interest in engaging “medieval” with “postcolonial,” she deploys medieval alterity so as to suggest the inappropriateness of the approach.20 Brown’s emphasis here upon the apparent ethical deadness of medieval studies forestalls questions about medieval ethnicities and premodern scenes of conquest, questions pertinent to debates about medieval “tolerance” for ethnic “others.” We might instead recall that some “medieval cultures” are, in terms of representations of their language, law, and custom, not to mention their relation to our teaching, considerably more “dead” than others, and that this very “deadness” may be itself a matter of some ethical concern.21 Furthermore, if we understand “postcolonial” to refer to “the discourse of oppositionality that colonialism brings into being,”22 there may be quite lively debates still to come about the history and meaning of medieval oppositions. The fascination and enjoyment, not to mention interests, commitments, and classrooms, of scholars situate scholarly work, of whatever historical period, within the “land of the living.” Postcolonial medieval studies thus has a resonance for the world of the living, albeit one distinct from (if not entirely “other” to) that of contemporary postcolonial texts and their readers. What if contemporary readers of early texts, or medievalists, belong, in some way, to a colonized, formerly colonized, or regularly demonized medieval group? Would readers who identify with groups colonized in the Middle Ages exactly share Brown’s desire to be

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metaphorically “colonized” by the middle ages? In The Shock of Medievalism, Kathleen Biddick writes poignantly (if briefly) of her IrishCatholic childhood in ways that resonate evocatively with her postcolonial history of English medievalism; certainly Louise D’Arcens’s work (in the current volume and elsewhere) suggests the cultural power of cross-period identifications for the history of settler colonies; Carolyn Dinshaw describes her familial ties to India in her equally evocative discussion of the “Pale Faces” of her childhood, in the book of Mandeville’s Travels, and as told by Chaucer’s Man of Law.23 My own work on Arthurian Romance and Welsh resistance, consciously or not, emerges in part from a complex set of familial associations, including an Irish American Catholic mother and a (paternal) grandmother with a Welsh patronym. And one hopes, given the recent availability of medieval manuscripts on the worldwide web, that scholars from various parts of the globe will be even more fully invited into the “coeval” spaces of medieval readership.We might, as a result, know more about the variety and diversity of cultures and linguistic minorities during the Middle Ages. And medieval studies would be all the better for it. But I do not move to the tropes of identity politics to authorize (with the unassailable sign of “personal experience”) the engagements of medievalists with postcolonial cultural studies. The increasing use of such stories needs to be theorized in ways that must at present be deferred. My point, at the moment, involves disrupting the assertion that medievalists do not work for or in “the land of the living.” The problem of the medieval archive, and the apparent issue of medieval “deadness,” can contribute to our understanding of the complexities of the colonial encounter. In particular, medieval studies can shed considerable light on the important postcolonial question of a subject’s “complicity” with empire, both because of the problem of textual survival, and because surviving medieval texts that might be called “oppositional” are notoriously complicated. (A fact that might help explain why medieval textual methods were initially of interest to members of the Subaltern Studies Group.) As I have argued elsewhere, oppositional discourses legible in Welsh vaticinative poetry, perhaps because of the problem of the archives, frequently emerge in texts “contaminated” by substantial interlinguistic, cultural, and historical complexity.Yet this fact can nonetheless be taken as a sign “not [of] the absolute absence of resistance so much as the absence of resistance as a ‘pure’ process or event.”24 Medieval studies offer an important place to reread the poignant impurities of resistance as encoding crucial (and from the long view of history somewhat successful) desires for vestiges of cultural survival.

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There may, in other words, be ways of considering distinctions between colonialisms of the twelfth or the twentieth centuries alongside, and in contrapuntal relation with, their similarities. Such an approach shows debts to “contrapuntal” conceptions of time and space as they emerge in the work of postcolonial scholars. Edward Said, borrowing metaphors from classical music, calls for contrapuntal approaches to the “overlapping territories” and “intertwined histories” produced by imperialism. Fernando Coronil offers a contrapuntal history of the consumption of sugar and tobacco, replacing an earlier and static view of triangular trade with an account of the dynamic interrelations within colonial economies. Antonio Benítez-Rojo, indebted to the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, evokes the rhythms of island geographies for a rereading of colonial histories of the Caribbean. And while persistently emphasizing the scene of modernity, Homi Bhabha’s analyses of time elucidate the contrapuntal dynamics of “then” and “now.” Mignolo’s “pluritopic hermeneutics” (building explicitly upon Said and Coronil) likewise engages these dynamics, to define a contrapuntal, comparativist study of temporalities and geographies “in which the comparing subject is part and parcel.”25 The scholar of premodernity can, precisely as “part and parcel” of the analysis, elaborate a “contrapuntal” view of “differences,” remaining sensitive in particular to the ease with which historicist difference can slide into alterity. Although we tend to think of difference via Hegelian modes of opposition, I wish to stress here that “difference” should not necessarily, and cannot most satisfyingly, be understood as diametrical opposition, as absolute otherness. Contrapuntal “difference” demands a kind of conceptual/methodological polyphony, a field in which attention to what Sara Suleri calls the “historical thickness” of the colonial encounter opens up into a variety of “distinct” particulars.26 To be sure colonialisms are not identical with each other. Contrapuntal colonial histories engage the diversities of various historical fields, so as to assess the complicated repetitions and patternings of violence and desire in various colonized spaces without thereby conflating them. The contrapuntal moves I am describing remain indebted to the musical structure of counterpoint, a signifier with a richly medieval etymology. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), counterpoint traces its linguistic genealogy to the medieval Latin contrapunctum and cantus contrapunctus, literally “song or music pointed against.” Linking the term further to medieval technologies of musical notation, the OED definition related to this first usage continues: “the part as accompaniment to a plain-song being indicated by notes, ‘pricks,’ or ‘points,’ set

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against (over or under) the notes or points of the original melody.” The history of the signifier counterpoint thus alludes to medieval techniques of manuscript production: the system of “points” or “pricks” that regularized the line and margins of the book hand. As “counterpoint” they suggest additional histories over or under the dominant strains of premodern historiography. Contrapuntal histories, then, do not seek to solidify an originary European center, but to note distinct histories of opposition related to and yet excluded from standard accounts of European rule. Contrapuntal histories in premodern cultures will engage with the complexities of the “Making of Europe,” especially the extent to which Europe’s history is one of conquest, annexation, disruption, and the devaluation of certain cultures and languages. But contrapuntal histories must also include perspectives outside Europe, interrogating, pace Said, the multiple medieval versions of “The East” while reading the implications of the premodern instabilities of categories such as “saracen” and “pagan” alongside analyses of those metropolitan spaces that would later become the centers of imperial power. In the next two sections of this essay, I offer a contrapuntal case in point: a view of how attention to Conrad’s medievalisms in Heart of Darkness can engage with Chaucer’s “Man of Law’s Tale.” Both texts, we might say, are part of a “canon” of postcolonial work in the respective fields of modernism and medieval studies. Both texts think about colonialism through images of the ancient Roman Empire. And both texts are structured by a tortured, quite possibly utterly unreliable, narrator. Both thus suggest something of the problematics of storytelling (and thus of history writing) for the colonial scene. Before and After: Britain’s Heart of Darkness The previous section implies a fact that Joseph Conrad’s representation of archaic Britain in the Heart of Darkness illustrates: the medieval is already in postcolonial cultural studies. In Conrad’s early moments, the notoriously unreliable Marlow views the shipping lanes along the Thames and reflects upon a time when London was a “monstrous town:” “And this also,” said Marlow suddenly, “has been one of the dark places of the earth.” . . . His remark did not seem at all surprising. It was just like Marlow. It was accepted in silence. No one took the trouble to grunt even, and presently he said very slow: “I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago—the other day . . . Light

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came out of this river since—you say Knights? Yes, but it is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightening in the clouds. We live in the flicker—may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday. Imagine the feelings of a commander of a fine—what d’ye call ’em—trireme in the Mediterranean, ordered suddenly to the north; run overland across the Gauls in a hurry; put in charge of one of these craft the legionaries—a wonderful lot of handy men they must have been too—used to build, apparently by the hundred, in a month or two, if we may believe what we read. Imagine him here—the very end of the world, a sea the colour of lead, a sky the colour of smoke, a kind of ship about as rigid as a concertina—and going up this river with stores, or orders, or what you like. Sandbanks, marches, forests, savages, precious little to eat for a civilised man, nothing but Thames water to drink. No Falernian wine here, no going ashore. . . . They were men enough to face the darkness. And perhaps he was cheered by keeping his eye on the chance of promotion to the fleet at Ravenna, by and by, if he had good friends in Rome and survived the awful climate. Or think of the decent young citizen in a toga—perhaps too much dice, you know—coming out here in the train of some prefect or tax-gatherer, or trader even—to mend his fortunes. Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery. The utter savagery had closed round him—all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men.” In this description, the present is bounded by a dark past both distant and close,“very old times” that are also only “yesterday.”“Civilized” time figures, paradoxically, as both fragile and unstoppable: literally a force of nature, these are immensely powerful electromagnetic currents, momentary energy relays between river and sky. As the suspended moment between past and future savagery, modernity is a violent spark, valuable as much for its brevity as its brilliance. Europe’s early history figures implicitly as a condition itself demanding colonial “civilizing” power and as a prophecy of civilization’s failure.And if Marlow figures the (present) power of colonial rule with the electricity of light and heat, he also imagines the fragility of colonial modernity as a story of future past: a premonition of the return to a savagery once suppressed, or repressed, but only in this “flicker” of time. Yet when Marlow fantasizes about England’s colonial past, his sympathies lie with the putatively “civilizing” Romans. His “wonderful lot

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of handy men,” “men enough to face the darkness,” are Roman Legionaires; his admirable Knights turn out to be none other than “decent citizens in a toga” who “run overland across the Gauls in a hurry” on their way to mending their fortunes.The rhetorical center of the passage, moreover, is the commander of a Roman galley whose feelings Marlow imagines in exquisite detail. In contrast to the ambitions, wine, ships, and cities that comprise the glory that was Rome, Marlow disdains the “swamps,” “woods,” and “inland savages” of a Britain that uncannily doubles the “savagery” of the Congo.This historically specific representation of Roman colonization (accurately attending to the strategic importance of the Thames), simultaneously displays Marlow’s education in Imperial Rome’s view of history while foreshadowing his fascination with what he would have his listeners see as a conflict between an essential “wildness” and “civilization.” Marlow’s medievalism signals his primitivism more generally: the Thames, as Achebe has pointed out, figures as the “primordial relative” of the Congo. Yet if London’s river constitutes “one of the dark places of the earth,” Achebe also notes that it is crucial that this darkness has been overcome, that the Thames,“is now in daylight and at peace.” He writes:“if Europe, advancing in civilization would cast a backward glance periodically at Africa trapped in primordial barbarity, it could say with faith and feeling:There go I but for the grace of God.” Conrad’s story hints at the problematics of Europe’s savage affinity with Africa, yet Achebe argues that in doing so it represses another story of similitude—the story of Africa’s indigenous civilized accomplishments, readily available to Conrad through the well-known indebtedness of high Modernist art to African artists.27 Temporal difference enables an essential and racial opposition, as European history underwrites the solidification of African Otherness. In fact, Marlow’s story of a medieval savagery that persists globally (even if now gone from England), deploys the past as an object lesson in the colonial “ordering” of “savagery.” If the Thames is now in daylight and peace, this is because Roman commanders have whipped a once savage island into civilized shape. Having suffered under the Roman lash, Britain is now well able to wield it. The view espoused by Conrad’s Marlow is, however anxiously, predicated on a notion of history as absolute difference, the hard-edged alterity of past “savagery” to present “civilization.” In contrast to Marlow’s approach, Achebe’s critique can help us see that figuring the past as the opposite of the present enables the production of essential racial and ethnic difference: Marlow’s historicism opposes a premodern monstrous London to a modern London of “peace and light” so as to situate

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African cultures within the savage past. Such a history of difference is deployed at the very moment that Europe (in the face of evidence to the contrary) declares Africa to be “uncivilized.”The opposition of premodern to modern Europe—and the narrative of “progress” it embeds— grounds modern belief in European superiority. Such historical difference obscures in at least two ways: it suppresses the “coeval” nature of Europe’s relation to those regions and peoples deemed to be “primitive” in the modern world; it represses the complex set of cultural differences among and within the medieval period, the particular chauvinisms and condescensions both implied by and repressed in the history of Roman success. By contrast, postcolonial moves in premodern studies can attend to such histories contrapuntally, as in Kathleen Biddick’s analysis of the development of medieval studies in the nineteenth-century Age of Empire and Kathleen Davis’s analysis of the scholarly and popular uses of the “medieval” to signify whatever the modern West wants not to be.28 Insofar as Marlow’s story of Early Britain is told from the point of view of the Roman commander, identifying with the apparent glory that was Rome, it also suppresses the story of the cultural accomplishments of premodern indigenous peoples. Such moves disavow the fact that colonialism disrupts indigenous culture, rule, and custom as it reorders and “civilizes.” Other premodern accounts of the Roman Empire offer an alternative perspective: Tacitus, for example, describes the hospitality and bravery of Germanic peoples in ways that have been read to critique the corruptions of Roman culture of his time.29 By and large, however, Roman rule remains glorified among the historiographers of that empire and subsequent ones; even accounts of Rome’s fall tell heroic narratives of grandeur and loss indebted to Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Postcolonial moves in premodern studies might help in rethinking this historiography, both because it was produced at the height of England’s imperial governmentality and because it offers little in the way of oppositional readings of Rome.30 Marlow’s nostalgia for the commander of the Roman trireme apparently holds only, as he puts it,“if we may believe what we’ve read.” One of Modernism’s most unreliable narrators, Conrad’s Marlow has also been read as problematizing such a view of past and present.31 The overdetermined representations of “civilization” and “wildness” in Conrad’s novella nevertheless produce a strangely heroicized glorification of European weakness.Yet we can at least note that Marlow’s narrative slips and misses gesture toward colonial textuality as itself a problem. Chaucer’s Man of Law is similarly inclined toward narrative

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difficulties, even if the story he tells about Rome, Europe, and Syria seems to proceed with greater contrapuntal interest in diversities. A “Postcolonial” Man of Law: The Difference “Difference” Makes Recent revived interest in the Man of Law’s Tale (hereafter MLT ) has been fueled by postcolonial concerns. Set in sixth-century “Surrye,” or Syria, and featuring Chaucer’s most detailed representation of Islam, the “orientalism” of the MLT has come under new scrutiny, and the tale is becoming increasingly important for postcolonial approaches to Chaucer. The story begins with the marriage of Custance, beautiful daughter of the Roman Emperor. She is offered against her will to the Sultan of Syria who, on her account, converts from Islam to Christianity. More faithful to the culture of her home, however, is Custance’s new mother-in-law, the Sultaness. Infuriated by her son’s conversion and recognizing the cultural threat posed by his command for converts, she conspires to slaughter her son and those who convert with him, and banish Custance. Set adrift alone in a boat, Custance eventually lands on the shores of a still pagan Britain, where her pious example inspires the Northumbrians to convert to Christianity. Falsely accused of murder by a rogue knight, Custance is saved when her accuser is forced to swear his testimony against her upon a book of Christian gospels. This book belonged to the “Britons,” secret Christians whom the Northumbrians harbor in their midst. Eventually Custance marries the Northumbrian King Alla (a Saxon king whose name, as Nicholas Birns points out, may well pun either the Islamic name for the deity, “Allah,” or that of Mohammed’s successor and ruler of Syria, “Ali”),32 and gives birth to a son. Custance’s troubles persist in the jealousy of her now English mother-in-law, Alla’s mother Donegild. Deceiving her son (who is away from home when the baby is born, fighting “foomen” in Scotland), Donegild describes the new baby as a monstrosity, and, like the Sultaness before her, conspires to kill Custance, who once again flees the now dangerous Britain. Alla discovers Donegild’s falsehood, kills his mother, and follows Custance to Rome.The tale ends with a family reunion, a host of deaths, and Custance’s son Maurice recognized as grandson of Rome and future Roman emperor. The MLT apparently contains all the features necessary to think postcolonially: an empire (Roman), an English author (Chaucer) and king (Alla), and a demonized view of Islam (a death dealing Syrian Sultaness).

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For the most part, the resulting readings emphasize the tale’s “orientalism.” Susan Schibanoff argues that the Man of Law crafts a tale that can “deflect attention from [a] potentially explosive class rivalry” depicted in the Canterbury Tales toward an orientalist view of “another world, another time, ultimately with the Other, in order to forge a sense of community—that is, fraternity” among the male Canterbury pilgrims (61).33 While insightfully reading both the function of gender in orientalist historiographies and the tale’s representation of England’s marginality to Europe, Kathleen Davis suggests that here “Europe founds its identity against an Islamic East,” while being “forced to designate a narrow Christian identity for itself precisely because it has encountered the East.”34 And Carolyn Dinshaw, analyzing the tale’s “pale faces” in the context of a complicated consideration of the structure of “difference,” nonetheless argues that the East, “in its interrelations with the Other, and in its proximity to the patriarchal Christian West . . . colors the whole narrative.”35 These postcolonial readings stand in important opposition to earlier accounts of Chaucer’s MLT that read the tale’s representation of cultural similarities between Islam and Christianity, Britain and Syria, as signs of Chaucer’s “tolerance” for religious and cultural “others.”36 Yet as these readings become more explicitly postcolonial, they also emphasize Islamic cultural difference from the Medieval West. More precisely, they suggest that, despite the tale’s blending of difference and similarity, the alterity of Syria to England remains the controlling trope: the fact that what has happened in Syria is repeated in England—that Syria’s past becomes, in other words, a prediction of England’s future—is not read, as it might be, as destabilizing the ascriptions of cultural difference that the Man of Law narrates. And yet, considered in counterpoint to Marlow’s medievalism from Heart of Darkness, the MLT offers a history more recursive than linear.At the level of narrative, the story moves from a failed conversion of Syria to what emerges, given the British Christians that the Northumbrians harbor in their midst, as an insular reconversion. The difference of Northumbrians to British once Custance lands on the island indicates the extent to which conquest is shown here to be in need of continual repetition. But this view of the differences within the “West”—after we have already witnessed differences within Syria— troubles any stable opposition of “East” to “West.” Narrative complexities remain at issue both in representations of the Man of Law and in his tale, and the question of Chaucer’s relation to the narrative is a complex one.

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At its opening, the tale is localized in “Surrye,” a Middle English reference that is usually read unequivocally as “Syria.”Yet “Surrye” would also have resonated with the name of the area of southeastern England. I have already noted the punning slips of Alla/Ali/Allah, and the ways in which the Northumbrian pagans, and Donegild the evil English mother-in-law, double their earlier Syrian counterparts. Custance (the Saxon version of the Roman name) converts pagans in both Syria and Britain. And mothers-in-law in both lands resist and hate her. In these ways the tale itself seems to raise the contrapuntal nature of relations among Syria, Rome, and Britain. Certainly there are contrasts here: Christianity succeeds in the story; Custance bears a son to Alla and not to the Sultan; she is the figure of a Christian saint. But alongside this resolution (remarkable in its brevity) is a series narrative and linguistic resemblances that cannot but emphasize the comparability of Syria and Britain as, among other things, lands each colonized by Rome. Birns, noting many of these complementarities, argues that “Chaucer seems interested in a kind of figurative exchangeability between the two geographic poles of Custance’s wanderings,” offering a “presentation of history that seems to accentuate Islam’s role rather than to repress it.”While praising Schibanoff ’s groundbreaking attention to the tale’s representation of Islam he cautions us that “even hermeneutically empathetic explorations of Islam as the ‘other’ of Christianity run the risk of . . . exaggerating its otherness.” Thinking contrapuntally about the medieval history of relations between “East” and “West” articulates more emphatically how the categorical problem of such terms themselves claim identities that were not necessarily stable ones.37 This contrapuntal interest must be taken seriously for a postcolonial engagement with the MLT. Chaucer’s text alludes precisely to the instabilities of categories of difference—the ease with which difference slips into alterity—not so much to argue for tolerance as to engage with historical and cultural mobilities, and with the insufficiencies of “law” to cope with them.The variety of cultures, and cultural positions, multiply to include Roman Christians, Syrian Christians, Syrian Muslims, Pagan Northumbrians, British Christians, and Alla’s “foomen” in Scotland.38 Such diversities, alongside the Man of Law’s attention to the problems of narratives, forcefully engage the slippages in binary categories (whether Muslim/Christian, Pagan/Christian, or East/West) on both cultural and historic grounds. From one view, the tale marks categorical alterity as the stuff of legend: hagiographic stories of an anachronistic past trade in such slippery terms: as many have pointed out, this is a story of Islam in the

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sixth century, and thus before the death of the Prophet. And while it is true that the MLT finally asserts the successful English (as opposed to Syrian) conversion, we might well wonder, in the context of the persistent similarities of Syria to Britain, about what the Man of Law would call the “improper” stories thereby repressed. The Man of Law in fact raises a number of narrative issues, not unlike Conrad’s Marlow. Inaugurating the second fragment of most manuscripts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, his tale follows upon an introduction in which he strangely misrepresents Chaucer’s corpus on his way to noting the impropriety of telling stories of incest, in particular the story of Canacee (“Of thilke wikke ensample of Canacee, / That loved hir owene brother synfully— / Of swiche cursed stories I sey fy!”).39 His scandalized sentiment itself follows a problematic list of the tales Chaucer has told, after which the Man of Law proceeds to his relatively straightforward hagiographic story, not at all illicit, of the virtuously constant Custance. Analyzing the introduction and its proprieties, Elizabeth Scala crucially characterizes the stakes in such narrative exclusions:“The Man of Law’s Introduction reveals an odd but telling (mis)conception of what Chaucer has ‘told,’ a misconception that problematizes the very nature of ‘telling’ itself, . . . forc[ing] us to reconsider what precisely is narrated and what is left out of that act of narration. . . . If the Man of Law’s abrupt discussion of incest narratives untold by Chaucer foregrounds the kinds of stories being told and where they may be found in Chaucer’s works, it also problematizes any self-evidentiary definition of telling—do we mean, or indeed, know all we say? . . . How is the text always beyond the control of the voice that utters it, indeed out of control itself?”40 Scala’s interest in narrative—both deconstructive and psychoanalytic—can be useful to scholars interested in premodern postcolonial histories. It reminds us, as does much postcolonial work, including Achebe’s reading of Conrad, that the silences, slips, and misses, of texts (including histories) are equally worthy of our attention. And in the context of those destabilizing moments, we might recall that contrapuntal histories trouble categorical ascriptions of alterity: in the case of premodern relations between Islam and Christianity, we should be careful about ignoring the quite substantial textual evidence concerning the West’s awareness of its similarities with Islam. Indeed medieval representations of Saracens frequently double, rather than oppose, representations of Europeans. Sharon Kinoshita describes the Saracens in the Chanson de Roland as “virtually indistinguishable” from the Franks: “Beyond their exotic names and their occasionally frightful attributes, the pagans speak the same language as the

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Christians . . . Each camp as critics note is in fact a mirror image of each other.”41 David Lawton, in an essay included here, cites Raimbaut d’Orange: “Con vauc torban! / Soi serraizis o crestians? / Qals es ma leis? / Non sai” (How perturbed I am! Am I Saracen or Christian? What is my law? I do not know). Lawton details similarly destabilizing multiplicities embedded in the history of Turkey and the image of the “Turk” intervening into scholarly assumptions about the persistence and stability of “orientalism.” Critiquing those assumptions, Lawton eventually reminds us: “notions of difference and exoticism, like discriminations of Orientalism, rely on a rather settled sense of who we are. . . . Two here is Orientalist company; three is a multicultural crowd” (173, 190). As these accounts also suggest, resisting an insistence upon orientalism does not imply replacing it with testimony to medieval “tolerance.”42 Indeed, it implies a need to continue seeking the specificities of cultural and historical meaning that legendary texts may be seeking to avoid. But it does seem to me problematic that readings of the MLT avoid slips in texts and identities in favor of a clear opposition of medieval “West” to medieval “East.” To what extent have such readers felt compelled to overemphasize the “othering” of Islam in the tale because they have had implicitly to argue for the relevance of medieval texts to postcolonial concerns? If medievalists interested in the postcolonial turn are increasingly aware that an emphasis upon the differences between medieval and modern can obscure the differences within the Middle Ages, we may nonetheless be replacing the “absolute historical alterity” of medieval to modern with a notion of an absolute cultural alterity of “East” to “West,” precisely because such alterity resonates with contemporary postcolonial interests and contemporary cultural chauvinisms.To what extent has an emphasis upon medieval differences of “East to West” become a sign both of the relevance of medieval studies to the contemporary world as well as for the political commitments of postcolonial medieval studies? And what more contrapuntal histories, what other accounts of ethnic identity, what other scenes of conquest are obscured by doing so? Such emphases have been in part produced by the need to persuade readers of the pertinence of premodern texts to postcolonial issues.Yet we should not forget that the historicist questions of the categorical differences between “West” and “East,” or the categorical stability of terms like “saracen” or “pagan,” are hardly settled ones. And neither, for that matter, is the difference of Syria to Europe entirely clear: eyewitness chroniclers of the First Crusade, for example, designate certain parts of Syria with the term “Hispania.”43 Contrapuntal postcolonial histories would take such distinctions seriously, without concluding that the

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Middle Ages lies beyond the pale of colonial analysis. This means, on the one hand, more complex genealogies of power that venture beyond the Foucauldian divide, and on the other, resisting the assumption that medieval historical distinctions necessarily signal the opposite of whatever (whether horrifying or tolerant) we find most modern.We should not, then, immediately read medieval representations of Islam as earlier versions of contemporary racisms; neither should we assume that medieval difference from those contemporary racisms necessarily means cultural “tolerance” and “understanding” across difference. While positioned on opposite sides of the question of who (East or West) owned “tolerance” in the Middle Ages, both views share the assumption that ethnically inflected categories like “Syrian,”“Saracen,”“Moor,”“Pagan,” or for that matter “Briton,” “Scots,” and “English” were relatively stable categories in medieval culture.44 Yet, as anyone who has tried to gloss “Saracen” or “Moor” for the undergraduate classroom knows, the linguistic complications and slippages of these categories can be profound. These slippages are themselves worthy of analysis. In the MLT, such differences converge uneasily on questions of law.45 In the text’s early descriptions of the Syrian Sultan’s desire to marry Custance, problems of law emerge as the primary impediment. As the Sultan’s privy council deliberates on how to effect the intercultural union, they “argumenten, casten up and doun; / Many a subtil resoun forthe they leyden”: But finally, as in conclusioun, They kan nat seen in that noon avantage, Ne in noon oother way, save mariage. Thanne sawe they therinne swich difficultee By wey of reson, for to speke al playn, By cause that ther was swich diversitee Bitwene hir bothe lawes, that they sayn, They trowe, that no “Cristen prince wolde fayn Wedden his child under oure lawe sweete That us was taught by mahoun, oure prophete.” (II. ll. 215–24) The description emphasizes the incommensurability of Islamic and Christian law, yet it does not offer a clear view of which law is superior. The language emphasizes instead—with words like “both,” “bitwene,” and “diversitee”—a mutuality of difference. If there is recalcitrance here, it belongs to the Christian prince who, the councilors imagine, will never allow an interfaith match. The tale does not, however, “orientalize” the

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Syrians by having them castigate the inferiority of Christian law; nor does the narrative voice intrude, as he does so frequently elsewhere in this tale, to assert the virtue of Christianity over their view. Even more tellingly, the third person narration shifts rather suddenly to first person at the exact mention of the “lawe sweete” of Islam—again, not to privilege the Christian point of view, but to display the cultural specificity of the Islamic one. In rendering Islamic Law as “oure lawe sweete,” the text displays the narrative, perhaps even cultural, gains that accompany a flexible point of view—a point of view the text would have us see as unavailable in the law. Whether we imagine Chaucer or the Man of Law as this tale’s teller, at this textual moment a fourteenth-century English writer (and eventually all his readers) slide into the linguistic “us” of those who claim Mohammed as their prophet. In subsequent scenes the tale continues to link cultural problems with the law. When the Sultaness devises her plan to stop the mass conversions ordered by her son, she explicitly decries not her son’s interest in Custance, but his willingness to risk apostasy and thus her own salvation: How that my sone in point is for to lete The hooly lawes of our alkaron, Yeven by goddes message makomete. But oon avow to grete God I heete, the lyf shal rather out of my body sterte Or makometes lawe out of myn herte! . . . And afterward in helle to be drawe. (ll. 331–6; 339) To be sure the narrative would have us see the Sultaness as one of the two evil women in the story (the description of Donegild is equally misogynist). And of course, in the end, Christianity will emerge as triumphant in a way that Islam does not. But how could an audience concerned with questions of salvation fail to hear the poignance of the Sultaness’s position? (Such sympathies have indeed been the subject of a number of essays on the tale.) Perhaps the dangers of those sympathies are too great for the narrator to bear; perhaps this is why he will shortly intrude to overdetermine the meaning of the Sultaness’s actions, designating her as the “roote of iniquitee.” While it remains true that women do not fare well in this story, Donegild’s objections to her son’s marriage seem a good deal less high-minded than those of her Syrian counterpart: she objects simply on account of Custance’s foreignness. Pondering Alla’s wedding to Custance, leaves Donegild “ful of tirannye” “hir thoughte a despit that he sholde take / So strange a creature unto his

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make” (II. ll. 696; 699). In stark contrast to the Sultaness’s sympathetically articulated cultural resistance to Custance, Donegild’s seems more perversely, idiosyncratically xenophobic. Furthermore, in England, law emerges not as “sweete,” or even as particularly Christian, so much as liable to a treasonous knight’s skillful manipulation. At what seems the significantly harsher and less cultured Northumbrian court, innocents are protected not by the law so much as from the law, and then only because of God’s superior justice. Situated amid such difficulties of legality, Chaucer’s text suggests that legal definitions are precisely the wrong categories with which to engage ethnicity. Ethnic difference emerges instead as a problem of narration that unsettles legal definitions.The various slips and misses of the story of English history (the secret British Christians oppressed by Northumbrian pagans whose “britoun book, written with evaungiles,” for example, saves Custance from her false accuser) make it possible to read the tragedy of Custance against, rather than through, accounts of cultural difference that insist on clear boundaries between “us” and “them.” Chaucer uses the legend of Custance to tell a story about the legendary status of identifiable ethnic identities (law requires and produces such categorical limits). But Chaucer’s repeated punning, his repetition of the Man of Law’s linguistic slips (not to mention his representation of the problematics of storytelling in the introduction), suggest instead that such categories are multiple, unstable, and liable to shifts across time and space. Barbara Johnson has succinctly analyzed the relation of legal categories to such definitional instabilities. Categorical definitions of difference function to “convert an ambiguous situation into a decideable one . . . by converting a difference within . . . into a difference between:” “A difference between opposing forces presupposes that the entities in conflict be knowable. A difference within one of the entities in question is precisely what problematizes the very idea of an entity in the first place, rendering the ‘legal point of view’ inapplicable.”46 This is precisely the problem raised by the Sultan’s desire for Custance. It is also the problem raised by the insufficiencies of English law before the question of felonious guilt. This reading of Chaucer’s MLT engages with the oppositional stance of postcolonial cultural studies by seeking such moments, and such slippages, in medieval texts and traditions themselves. Such postcolonial work constitutes an oppositional reading able to resist both contemporary tendencies of Orientalism, and “orientalist” assumptions about the medieval. It suggests that medieval instability opens toward an analysis of

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conquest to find ways of testifying to the agency of those who resisted such oppressions. This may mean remembering that some of Europe’s colonized also remain obscured by the logic of the category of “Europe,” such that they no longer seem “different” or ethnically marked to us at all. Such postcolonial work also reminds us that contemporary medievalists deploying postcolonial theories are not the only resisters of medieval scenes of conquest.A contrapuntal history would, in this way, display the debate between “tolerance” and “intolerance” as a debate enacted not only about, but also within, the diversities of medieval cultures. I raise questions of history so as to open more forcefully, rather than to close, engagements between “medieval” and “postcolonial” cultural studies. But I do wish to suggest that the relations among colonialisms and colonial resistance at different historical moments remain an underdeveloped aspect of postcolonial approaches to premodern times, and it is an aspect that needs to be addressed. For while imperial ideology uses progressivist histories in just the ways that postcolonial critics like Achebe describe, there remains plenty of medieval evidence to suggest that the timing of empire, and resistances to it, are neither sequential nor chronological. Notes 1. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1988), 9. Chinua Achebe’s words are taken from his Chancellor’s Lecture at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, February 18, 1975, later published as “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness,’ ” The Massachusetts Review, 18 (1977), 782–94 (amended version in Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 251–62). 2. I have argued elsewhere that modern accounts of nation tend to trivialize the premodern antagonisms and violences on which they nonetheless depend: Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 12–13. 3. Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), xiv. 4. Catherine Brown, “In the Middle,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 30 (2000): 547–74. 5. Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 51. 6. Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1927); Joseph Reese Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970); R.W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953); Gabrielle Spiegel and Paul Freedman,“Medievalisms Old and New: The Rediscovery of Alterity in North American Medieval Studies,” American Historical Review, 103 (1998): 677–704. 7. Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood:The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions:The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

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8. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 9. Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions. 10. Carolyn Walker Bynum, “Wonder,” American Historical Review, 102 (1997): 1–26, at 15. For a response, see my “ ‘In Contrayez Straunge’: Colonial Relations, British Identity and ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,’ ” New Medieval Literatures, 4 (2001): 61–93. 11. Bynum, “Wonder,” 24. 12. Iain Macleod Higgins, “Jerusalem in ‘The Book of John Mandeville,’ ” in Text and Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages, ed. Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 29–53; David Lawton, “The Surveying Subject and the ‘Whole World’ of Belief,” New Medieval Literatures, (2001): 9–37. 13. David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 4–6; Ralph Hanna, “Middle English Manuscripts and the Study of Literature:An Analytical Survey, 4,” New Medieval Literatures, 4 (2001): 243–64, at 248. 14. Gabrielle Spiegel,“Épater Les Médiévistes,” History and Theory, 39 (2000): 243–50, at 244, 249. 15. Ibid., 250. 16. Louise O. Fradenburg, “ ‘Voice Memorial’: Loss and Reparation in Chaucer’s Poetry,” Exemplaria, 2.1 (1990): 169–202; Kathleen Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998). 17. Bruce W. Holsinger,“Medieval Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and the Genealogies of Critique,” Speculum, 77 (2002): 1195–1227. On the medieval as trope, see also Kathleen Davis, “National Writing in the Ninth Century: A Reminder for Postcolonial Thinking About the Nation,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 28 (1998): 611–37. 18. Brown, “In the Middle,” 547. 19. Ibid., 548. 20. For a similar critique, see Holsinger, “Medieval Studies.” 21. See also Wendy Scase,“ ‘Now you see it; now you don’t’: Nation, Identity, and Otherness,” New Medieval Literatures, 4 (2001): 1–8, at 8. 22. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Postcolonial Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1995), 1–4. 23. Carolyn Dinshaw, “Pale Faces: Race, Religion, and Affect in Chaucer’s Texts and Their Readers,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 23 (2001): 19–41. 24. Sovereign Fantasies, 38. On medieval postcolonial studies as a “pure” or “contaminated” method, see my “ ‘In Contrayez Straunge,’ ” especially 63–70, 90–1. 25. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994); Fernando Coronil, The Magical State: Nature, Money and Modernity in Venezuela (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Antonio Benítez Rojo, The Repeating Island:The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996). 26. Sara Suleri,“Woman Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition,” Critical Inquiry, 18 (1992): 756–69, at 759. 27. Achebe quotes Frank Willett’s African Art (New York: Praeger, 1971), 35–6, concerning an African mask given to Maurice Vlaminck in 1905. It would be an important influence upon both Picasso and Matisse. As Willett remarks, “The revolution of twentieth-century art was under way!” (cited in Achebe, “An Image,” 260). 28. Biddick links nineteenth-century historiography of Saxon villages and English rural peasantry with the framers of tenurial policies for Indian village communities. She cites specifically Sir Henry Maine’s Village Communities in the East and West (1871) as “helping [to] produce India as the rural past of England and England as the colony’s constitutional future” (Shock of Medievalism, 64–7, quotation at 65). Davis has noted colonialist uses of “medieval” in modern traditions, like Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities and Diane Sawyer’s 1999 20/20

CONTRAPUNTAL HISTORIES 29.

30.

31. 32.

33.

34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

39. 40. 41.

42.

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report on the Taliban: “National Writing,” 611–37; “Time Behind the Veil,” in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 105–22. Tacitus, On Britain and Germany, trans. H. Mattingly (London: Penguin, 1948). For philological evidence that the indigenous Germanic peoples admired Roman roads and buildings rather more than their laws or other ideals of order, see Charles Barber, The English Language, A Historical Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 98–9. For a postcolonial reading of the importance of the Thames to the Roman project of colonizing Britain, see Warren, History on the Edge: Excalibur and the Border of Britain, 1100–1300 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 25–40. I am not prepared to undertake the case at this point. But the problem of the historiography of Roman rule raises a number of questions concerning premodern colonialism more generally. Rome is usually praised for what is often thought to be a strategic foresightedness in allowing conquered peoples some measure of cultural sovereignty. On recent interest in reinterpreting Gibbon, see Rosamond McKitterick and Roland Quinault, eds., Edward Gibbon and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Peter Cosgrove, Impartial Stranger: History and Intertextuality in Gibbon’s ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999). On this point see also Frances B. Singh, “The Colonialist Bias of Heart of Darkness,” Conradiana, 10 (1978): 41–54. Nicholas Birns, “Christian–Islamic Relations in Dante and Chaucer: Reflections on Recent Criticism,” in Proceedings: Northeast Regional Meeting of the Conference on Christianity and Literature (Weston, MA: Regis College), 19–24, at 22. See for example, Susan Schibanoff, “Worlds Apart: Orientalism, Antifeminism, and Heresy in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale,” Exemplaria, 8.1 (1996): 59–96; Sheila Delaney, The Naked Text: Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Glory Dharmaraj, “Multicultural Subjectivity in Reading Chaucer’s ‘Man of Law’s Tale,’ ” Medieval Feminist Newsletter, 16 (1993): 408. Specifically, Schibanoff leaves unclear what she thinks Chaucer wants us to think about this. Davis, “Time Behind the Veil,” 116. Dinshaw, “Pale Faces,” 30. As in Morton Bloomfield, “Chaucer’s Sense of History,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 51 (1952): 301–13; Roger Ellis, Patterns of Religious Narrative in the Canterbury Tales (Totowa, N. J.: Barnes & Noble, 1986). Birns, “Christian–Islamic,” 22, 23. R. James Goldstein, “ ‘To Scotlond-ward His Foomen For To Seke’: Chaucer, The Scots, and the Man of Law’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review, 33 (1998): 31–42. For details about the book of the Britons that saves Custance, see Andrew Breeze,“The Celtic Gospels in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review, 32 (1998): 335–8. The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), II. ll. 78–80 (further references included in the text). Elizabeth Scala, “Canacee and the Chaucer Canon: Incest and Other Unnarratables,” The Chaucer Review, 30 (1995): 15–39, at 23–4. Sharon Kinoshita,“ ‘Pagans are wrong and Christians are right’: Alterity, Gender, and Nation in the ‘Chanson de Roland,’ ” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 31 (2001): 79–111, at 83. See also Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “On Saracen Enjoyment: Some Fantasies of Race in Late Medieval France and England,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 31 (2001): 113–46. On colonial settlement and intimacy as related to colonial “modernity,” see Warren, “Epilogus historiarum Britanniae,” in History on the Edge, 245–51. The differences between medieval and modern discourses of race and ethnicity have sometimes seemed to imply a greater tolerance or ease about boundaries between peoples. The locus classicus is Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change,

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44.

45. 46.

Patricia Clare Ingham 950–1350 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), yet we should also note that the question of medieval difference on the subject of ethnicity is hardly settled. See also Thomas Hahn, “The Difference the Middle Ages Makes: Color and Race before the Modern World,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 31 (2001): 1–37. Kinoshita, “ ‘Pagans are wrong,’ ” 108: n. 33. The confusion or conflation of Syria and Spain points to complexities of the cultural relations among European centers. On the importance of such issues see Fuchs in this volume. Reading the MLT in the context of a diverse body of medieval discourse on “east” and “west,” Kathryn Lynch suggests that Chaucer’s representation of Islam has more to do with a debate between cultural relativity and fluidity (qualities associated, Lynch argues, with the “East”) versus the legal fundamentalism of the Man of Law himself. Lynch’s reading reverses standard assumptions about which side, “East or West,” might lay claim to “tolerance;” she usefully reminds us that representations of cultural “difference” offer opportunities for admiration as much as for disdain: Kathryn L. Lynch, “Storytelling, Exchange, and Constancy: East and West in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review, 33 (1999): 409–22. Lynch’s objections stem in part from research on representations of the East in the later Middle Ages, a scholarly interest that freshly enlivens her reading of this tale. She reads Chaucer’s representation as “us[ing] cultural difference as a way of talking about larger issues of freedom and constraint in storytelling” rather than “scapegoating an alien religious tradition” (410).While I would object to the assumption here that “freedom and constraint in storytelling” are properly “larger concerns” than issues of cultural difference, Lynch’s work has been exceedingly helpful to me. On the question of the relation between Chaucer’s representations of the “East” and the insular Britons, see Lynch’s “East Meets West in Chaucer’s Squire’s and Franklin’s Tales,” Speculum, 70 (1995): 530–51. On the significance of the Man of Law and the Law of Man governing the tale, see Carolyn Dinshaw’s Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). Barbara Johnson, “Melville’s Fist: The Execution of Billy Budd,” in The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1981), 79–109, at 105–6.

CHAPTER THREE

Imperium Studies:Theorizing Early Modern Expansion Barbara Fuchs

Although a large body of new work on early modern empire and nation formation has emerged in recent years, the field still lacks an effective theoretical vocabulary for this project. When discussing early modern imperialism, the temptation is to turn to postcolonial criticism, yet it clearly behooves critics working on earlier periods both to develop theoretical concepts better suited to our field, and to historicize postcolonial concepts in order to expose the early modern foundations of later imperialist representations. This essay is an attempt to theorize the rich contributions of the past decade while emphasizing the connections among disparate investigations. I propose the category of imperium studies as a way to address the links between metropolitan sovereignty and expansion abroad, and the cultural productions that sustain them both. Imperium studies enables the critical recognition of the centrality of empire in Old World texts that are not explicitly engaged with colonial ventures, and reveals the transatlantic or international dimension of texts previously read within narrow national traditions.This essay provides an overview of the possibilities and suggests how this approach might change our reading of both canonical and non-canonical texts. My focus is on early modern Spain and England—two cases for which the connections between imperial competition, internal consolidation, and external expansion are particularly relevant—but it is my hope that imperium studies can offer broad applications beyond these imperial rivals.

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The term imperium opens many avenues of investigation.The Latin term for “empire,” imperium had, by the sixteenth century, acquired a series of additional meanings.1 For Machiavelli, it meant something very like “sovereignty,” as in the opening of The Prince: “All the states and dominions which have had and have empire over men . . . ” In 1533, when the English Parliament passed for Henry VIII the Act in Restraint of Appeals, proclaiming, “This Realm of England is an Empire,” the term referred primarily to an independent and sovereign state. In the early eighteenth century, it still described the political relations that held together groups of people in a political body, as in this telling definition by Thomas Pownall, Governor of Massachusetts: “This modeling of the people into various orders and subordinations of orders, so that it be capable of receiving and communicating any political motion, and acting under that direction as a whole is one which the Romans called by the peculiar word Imperium, to express which particular group or idea we have no word in English, but by adopting the word Empire. Tis by this system only that a people become a political body; tis the chain, the bonds of union by which vague and independent particles cohere.”2 Despite Pownell’s rhetoric of coercion, there is nothing in this passage that particularly suggests an empire forced upon other peoples: this is control in the domestic realm. At the same time, however, the term never lost its more familiar meaning of a political entity made up of geographically remote states—what Edmund Burke, in describing the British and Spanish empires, termed “extensive and detached empire.”3 As a polysemic term with a rich history, therefore, imperium denotes both internal control of a polity and external expansion beyond that polity’s original boundaries. Both meanings hark back to the Roman model, underscoring early modern Europe’s intellectual reliance on that precursor. As Anthony Pagden has argued: “It was, above all, Rome which provided the ideologues of the colonial systems of Spain, Britain, and France with the language and political models they required, for the Imperium romanum has always had a unique place in the political imagination of western Europe.”4 Rome’s influence was conveyed in part through the powerful Virgilian tradition of translatio imperii studiique, according to which both political power and cultural authority travel from Troy to Rome to the European states that vie for its legacy. The bitter rivalry between emerging early modern nations to portray themselves as the true inheritors of Rome colors both their development as polities and their external

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expansion. Through a wealth of artifacts and representations, the myth of translatio imperii undergirds much of European imperialism and nation formation in the sixteenth century, whether or not the practice of early modern imperium bears much resemblance to the Roman original. What makes the cultural legacy so particularly fascinating is the extent to which it is contested by nations attempting to distinguish themselves from each other even as they claim the same imperial legacy.As Heather James has pointed out: “The Troy legend became a transcultural, transhistorical model onto which poets such as Ariosto and Ronsard might graft indigenous myths of origin. The political authority inscribed in Vergil’s epic and its Trojan myth awaited only transcription into the culture, history, and language of European governments in need of a legitimate history.”6 By recalling these powerful cultural and political legacies, imperium studies grounds what we might recognize as postcolonial insights in a historical and intellectual tradition, all while expanding the purview of studies of colonialism to include the metropolitan European states themselves. While I recognize the dangers of a new coinage—what Ian Baucom has called “the tyranny of the neologism”7—and the ways in which it elides differences for the sake of currency, “imperium studies” seems genuinely enabling. Despite the disciplinary and methodological obstacles to this approach, it offers certain clear advantages. First, by emphasizing its genealogical filiation with a Roman original, imperium studies is located within the appropriate historical framework, avoiding the logical contradiction of postcolonial studies of incipient colonialism.Though clearly influenced by postcolonial theory, its terminology and conceptual framework are firmly grounded in the early modern period. Second, by reconceptualizing its object of study to focus on both colonies and metropole, this approach alerts the critic to the continuities and interdependence between the formation of early modern nations and their imperial aspirations. And by underscoring the connection between internal sovereignty and external expansion, it constantly challenges the inevitability of those nations, thereby correcting our post-facto view of nationhood. Imperium studies reminds us that, as Michael Hechter argues, “any extant nation-state is the survival of an earlier structure which at one time must have been ‘imperial.’ Nation-building in its earliest stages might better be thought of as empire-building.”8 Nation-states coalesce, that is, through overland expansion, annexing adjacent territories and gradually achieving legitimacy. Overseas expansion continues this project, sharpening the distinctions among emerging nations as they

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compete for colonies, but the dynamics of imperial expansion far predate European contact with the New World. From the large-scale expansion of Latin Christendom in the tenth to fourteenth centuries to the sixteenth-century campaigns against the Irish and the Moriscos, the “making of Europe,” to borrow Robert Bartlett’s term, is a story of conquest and colonization. As Bartlett points out, for the period 950–1350, “ ‘internal expansion’—the intensification of settlement and reorganization of society within western and central Europe—was as important as external expansion; and hence the problem of describing and explaining these expansionary movements is not distinct from the problem of describing and explaining the nature of European society itself.”9 In order to address this history of expansion, imperium studies brings some of the central preoccupations of postcolonial theory to the early modern metropole.The differenda of power within a society; the “othering,” racialization, and exploitation of marginalized peoples; the resistance of those peoples to centralized power; the discursive strategies that serve to control and transform territory; the cultural significance of borders and contact zones—all these inquiries potentially reveal as much about European nations-in-the-making as they do about colonized territories. For the metropole is not a uniform locus of political power, even if it might occasionally appear thus from the colonies. Instead, it too is marked by conquests, migrations, cultural transformations, and enduring tensions between center and peripheries. Imperium studies is an effort to write the story of those tensions and the cultural dynamics that characterize them. Although imperium studies is centrally concerned with investigating the metropole, it by no means celebrates it or isolates it from the nonWestern world. Instead, this approach is an effort to reconsider the inevitability or uniformity of European power and identity through a historical investigation, and to underscore the manifold connection between colonies and metropole.Thus imperium studies offers a historically specific method that draws on the powerful insights of postcolonial theory but examines also the Old World phenomena that have typically been ignored by early modern critics of a postcolonial bent, such as the dynamics of Spanish imperium in Naples or Flanders, or the role of the Ottoman empire in the development of European nation-states. How does this approach compare to earlier efforts to expand the narrow temporal purview of postcolonial studies? In discussing the wider applicability of postcolonial approaches, Bill Ashcroft has argued that the appropriate scope of the term “postcolonialism” includes the entire

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period of colonization,“that it does not mean ‘after colonialism’ since it is colonialism’s interlocutor and antagonist from the moment of colonization.”10 But even his broad definition excludes colonial dynamics within the metropole, which in many cases effectively predate external colonization as it is generally understood.To his credit, Ashcroft is interested in the effect of imperial expansion upon the metropole—he considers it “that very process by which a modern Europe is conceived” and “the engine of modernity.”11 Yet although his focus on the emergence of modernity somewhat expands the purview of postcolonial studies, imperium studies can push the inquiry even further: How does Europe itself come to be a metropole? What internal processes of conquest, consolidation, and homogenization—such as those examined by Bartlett— enable the establishment of domestic imperium? How does Old World imperialism facilitate, or complicate, the development of New World empires? And how does Europe negotiate the colonizing threat of Islam even as it expands to the West? As the above questions indicate, to investigate imperium in the metropole is emphatically not to domesticate the study of empire. Instead, imperium studies reveals the fissures in the constitution of metropolitan power and identity, interrogating those processes rather than taking them for granted.This critical approach serves to question the origins of early modern nationhood, and to problematize triumphalist accounts of national history and identity.12 Imperium studies thus reinforces other kinds of inquiries that have gone some distance toward assailing the inevitability of early modern nations. These include queer studies’ reassessment of the gender constructions that underwrite the myth of the nation, and New Historicist investigations that privilege the role of language and the literary in the uncertain enterprise of shaping a viable national identity from disparate elements.13 In a sense, all these projects are involved in deconstructing the history of the nation, much as postcolonial studies has done for a later period. As Etienne Balibar has argued, “The history of nations, beginning with our own, is always already presented to us in the form of a narrative which attributes to these entities the continuity of a subject . . . The illusion is twofold. It consists in believing that the generations which succeed one another over centuries on a reasonably stable territory, under a reasonably univocal designation, have handed down to each other an invariant substance. And it consists in believing that the process of development from which we select aspects retrospectively, so as to see ourselves as the culmination of that process, was the only one possible, that is, it represented a destiny.”14 Imperium studies enables an

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investigation of the cultural and discursive strategies that enable the construction of what Balibar terms an “ideal nation,” challenging received accounts of national teleologies. Beyond the inherent constructedness of the myth of the nation, moreover, there is a specific historical rationale for this line of inquiry: the early modern period is defined in part by the gradual consolidation of European nation-states under increasingly powerful central monarchies. Yet the nation is a far more tentative construct in this period than in its later, reified incarnation in a time of full-fledged modernity. In the sixteenth century, in particular, the seams and awkward joints holding the nation together—the traces of the domestic “imperial” project, in Hechter’s terms—are still vividly showing.A critical project that investigates the significance of those sutures, of imperfectly achieved national unity, could markedly change our sense of the nation’s inevitability.15 Before complicating the category of the nation in its most achieved form, that is, as postcolonial theory does so productively, it behooves us to examine the early and most tentative stages in the construction of the nation. In disciplinary terms, imperium studies can serve as an important corrective to the emphasis on overseas exploration and colonization as the only components of early modern imperialism, productively complicating the general correlation between postcolonial approaches and non-European, or at least non-canonical, cultural objects. In her influential 1991 review essay, “Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse,” which inaugurated a lengthy debate within Latin American Studies, historian Patricia Seed argues that “colonial discourse” (as she terms postcolonial studies) shares its interest in colonial topics with New Historicism, but diverges in its aims: “The new literary historicism is ultimately concerned with canonical literature, while colonial discourse writers (i.e., postcolonial critics) seek to understand the dynamics of the colonial situation.”16 Yet Seed’s distinction implies that canonical literature cannot reveal the dynamics of the colonial situation (a claim that Peter Hulme’s Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, which her own article reviews, itself disproves), or, conversely, that the colonial situation cannot ultimately be assessed through a study of canonical (or, indeed, metropolitan) literature. More importantly, neither approach, as Seed presents them, really considers the dynamics of imperialism in the Old World. Imperium studies transforms the metropolitan focus of New Historicism by insisting on the centrality of imperial issues in the Old World as in the New, underscoring colonial dynamics within the metropole itself and the importance of Old World empires.

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By examining the metropole in this light, moreover, imperium studies is uniquely positioned to address the effect of the New World on the Old. For this approach does not take the metropole as an unchanging, stable source of cultural influence. Instead, it explores Europe’s cultural construction of itself as a geographical and imperial center in different historical situations, examining metropolitan culture for its signs of adaptation and syncretism.This changes the relative importance of the New World and the Old in critical analyses, so that, for example, cultural battles that have always been read as consummately European—such as the sixteenth-century Italian quarrels over the role of the romance marvelous in epic poetry—may be seen to stem in part from the contact with the wondrous realities of the new worlds. The effects of imperial competition on national identity, the influence of New World methods of conversion and education on metropolitan religions, the development of new ethnic and racial categories—these are just some of the questions that imperium studies might effectively address. The Case for Spain One of the central obstacles to developing a nuanced, well-rounded picture of early modern imperium within literary studies has been the relative lack of attention to Spain’s position in the Old World. Spain’s relations with Moors in North Africa and the Mediterranean, with the moriscos or “little Moors” who remain in Spain after the fall of Granada, with its Italian and Dutch possessions, and with its Genoese bankers are all important aspects of Spain’s imperium. In fact, many of the attitudes and policies of the Spaniards in the New World stem from their experience of the “Reconquista”—the protracted Peninsular struggle against Islam—and the subsequent efforts to deal with the moriscos as internal others.17 The myth of the Reconquista touts Spain’s transformation from colonized to colonizer as a triumph of Christianity and of non-Semitic “Goths,” yet the reality of the sixteenth century is a multiethnic and thoroughly Semitic Spain. Only through complicated processes of cultural and political repression can the myth be sustained. These are the processes that imperium studies is uniquely qualified to analyze, by interrogating the dynamics of empire within the Peninsula, in the broader Mediterranean arena, and, indeed, throughout Europe, as well as in the New World. The nation-based nature of most literature programs complicates the critical project that I outline here. Spanish departments, like most foreign literature departments, are organized around the mission of

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preserving the target language, and are thus generally suspicious of comparative projects or those that take them outside the realm of Spanish, although there are some that have made concessions to the linguistic diversity of present-day Spain, offering courses in Catalan and so forth. Much of the research in the areas I am outlining would require work on Arabic, Italian, or Dutch materials in order to address multiple sites of imperium. The problem of monolingual investigations into the history of the nation also affects English early modern studies, of course: in order to produce a full account of “Great Britain,” should we not study documents in Welsh and Irish and Scots Gaelic? As I shall discuss below, the monolingual approach inevitably takes the nation as a given, post facto, granting it a primacy that is anachronistic.18 Is it possible to undertake the kind of “imperium studies” I have outlined here from within the confines of a national literature department? The enterprise would require a reconceptualization of the early modern period as one of precarious and tentative national identity in the making, instead of fully achieved national development. Spanish studies, for example, must go beyond a notion of “transatlantic studies” that focuses on the relationship between an achieved Spain and its overseas possessions—in itself a wholesome corrective to the divide between “Peninsular” and Latin American—to consider, crucially, the Mediterranean as the fraught cultural and political arena in which Spain attempts to fashion itself. The groundwork for a counter-nationalist investigation that emphasizes the hybridity of Spain was actually established in older, hugely influential currents of early modern Spanish studies—in the work of Américo Castro, Francisco Márquez Villanueva, and, more recently, María Rosa Menocal—that have long challenged received accounts of Spanish national identity. Other possibilities for expanding the Europe/Americas dyad include a serious reconsideration of the place of the Philippines and Moluccas, generally addressed only within Southeast Asian Studies or left in disciplinary limbo. Recent studies on the relation between Spain’s internal consolidation and its New World empire, or on the writing of local versus national histories in the sixteenth century, suggest that an investigation of imperium would yield fascinating results. To complicate matters even further, Latin American Studies has a vexed relationship of its own to postcolonial theory. While imperium studies might not affect the debates over contemporary issues, it could solve the apparent anachronism of applying postcolonial theory—which has focused largely on the later English empire—to the earlier Spanish experience, at the same time underscoring the connections between metropolitan and colonial phenomena. Over the last decade, leading

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scholars in Latin American Studies, both within the U.S. academy and in Latin America, have debated the ideological and political advisability of applying postcolonial theory to their object of study as well as its very relevance to the former Spanish colonies.19 The polemic stems from both a mistrust of the metropolitan (in this case, primarily the United States) academy and a conviction that the tools for analyzing Latin America’s position can be found in the works of Latin American scholars. Thus Walter Mignolo argues that the Mexican historian and philosopher Edmundo O’Gorman’s understanding of language as “an instrumental tool for constructing history and inventing realities” where America is concerned long predates Said’s investigation of the discursive construction of the Orient.20 Mignolo’s polemic is an attempt, as he phrases it, to “dislodge or multiply” the center of the locus of enunciation.21 This deconstructive goal is reflected also in his concern to extend any consideration of “colonial discourse” to Amerindian discursive productions, be they oral or picto-ideographic.22 As Bill Ashcroft has pointed out, however, Mignolo’s expansive redefinition of postcolonial discourse to include colonized intellectuals by no means implies a rejection of its theoretical premises.23 A more radical side of the debate considers whether postcolonial theory is at all applicable to the early Spanish–American experience. Certain scholars seem to suggest that only those objects of study that have already been politicized or that today occupy a marginal position (in the world, if not the academy) can exhibit complex strategies of postcolonial discourse, hybridity, and so forth. Alfonso de Toro, for example, makes the distinction between syncretism, as a given condition, and hybridity, as a cultural strategy, by emphasizing what he considers the ahistorical “absurdity” of premodern postcoloniality: El confundir o el querer hacer del estado una estrategia es además una posición a-histórica, ya que si aceptásemos semejante equivalencia entre “sincretismo latinoamericano” ⫽ “postmodernidad/ postcolonialidad” estaríamos diciendo que la postmodernidad y postcolonialidad serían un fenómeno ya dado durante las migraciones de los pueblos europeos en la Edad Media—por ponerlo en forma extrema—y así no sería una categoría específica ni de Latinoamérica ni de la postmodernidad y tampoco de la postcolonialidad. To confuse condition and strategy, or to attempt to turn the former into the latter, is also an ahistorical position, for if we were to accept such an equation between “Latin American syncretism” and

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“postmodernity/postcoloniality,” we would be implying that postmodernity and postcoloniality were already given phenomena during the migrations of European peoples in the Middle Ages— to give an extreme example—and thus [syncretism] would be a category specific to neither Latin America nor postmodernity nor postcoloniality.24 Yet, as Bartlett’s work shows, there is nothing ahistorical or extreme in applying the notion of postcoloniality to medieval migrations. Clearly, the important move is to uncouple the two terms joined by that ambiguous slash: “postmodernity/postcoloniality” is itself not a valid equation.25 If we accept Ashcroft’s argument, the latter may productively be defined far more broadly without incurring a historical fallacy. Some critics nonetheless insist that this kind of expansion makes postcolonialism an ahistorical term. In a provocative piece significantly entitled “Colonialism and Postcolonialism as (Latin) American Mirages,” Jorge Klor de Alva holds that these terms are not useful when considering the nonnative areas of Latin America. Due to the early decimation of native populations and widespread mestizaje, he argues, many communities in the period before independence were “relatively disconnected from the metropole.”26 Klor de Alva moves from this argument about the degree of colonial connections to a much broader dismissal of the terms. Because “the concepts, theories, and methods used to study colonialism in the second half of the twentieth century were inspired or resulted from research into the colonial experiences of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,” he argues, they are essentially inaccurate for studying sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Latin America.27 Yet his own careful analysis of the different kinds of relations in one and the other period suggests that some notion of colonialism, even as a post-facto moniker, is clearly warranted. Imperialism, which Klor de Alva only mentions as another ahistorical term, is a clear possibility. As I have suggested earlier, imperium studies grounds postcolonial preoccupations in the early modern period, historicizing them through a careful consideration of the relevant encounters and intellectual traditions, all the while recognizing that the force of theoretical terms lies precisely in their wider applicability. As Ashcroft argues in response to Klor de Alva’s distinctions: “What is an ‘improper’ use? Does the cultural provenance of theory invalidate such categories as epistemological tools? Indeed, is there any system of analysis which does not have a valid retrospective function?”28 Despite Klor de Alva’s apparent claims for the exceptionalism of the Spanish–American experience,

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moreover, he ends with a call for clearly postcolonial investigations, as he urges critics to take up: “the very real problems of the colonial significance of strategic essentialisms (Spivak 1988, 13–15), identities as effects of power (rather than fixed entities or ‘imagined communities’ bounded by supposed sets of common traits, sentiments, and practices [Anderson 1991]), and the consequences of everyday life relations entangled in webs of power/knowledge ([appropriately, I yield the last word to] Foucault 1979, 1980).”29 The last word goes in part to postcolonial studies, whose relevance Klor de Alva ultimately seems to recognize as transcending the historical specificities of different varieties of colonialism.30 There are few critics whose postcolonial approaches can negotiate the several artificial divides I have described above. Mignolo’s The Darker Side of the Renaissance, which postdates the debate within Latin American Studies, engages in a truly transatlantic consideration of coloniality. Mary Louise Pratt occupies a unique position, given her theoretical contributions and her work on both Africa and Latin America.31 Peter Hulme has actively advocated the inclusion of America in postcolonial studies, arguing that, “it would seem a strange definition of colonialism that would not include within its purview the European settlements in America that began in 1492.”32 Strange, indeed. The kind of work that Hulme advocates is slowly beginning: Sara Castro-Klarén, to take one example, makes a convincing case for the sixteenth-century Peruvian mestizo Inca Garcilaso de la Vega as a postcolonial intellectual avant la lettre, along the lines defined by Homi Bhabha. To make sense of her claim, she adopts Ashcroft’s broad definition, arguing that we must expand the meaning of postcolonial to encompass “the imperial process from the moment of colonization to this day.”33 Imperium studies, I propose, provides a historically specific reformulation that transcends the debate about the appropriate breadth of “postcolonialism” that exercises Ashcroft, Castro-Klarén, and others. The debate on the applicability of postcolonial theory to the former Spanish colonies in Latin America suggests some of the disciplinary rifts that might be mended by a new, historically specific but theoretically broad approach. Yet the disciplinary obstacles to bringing imperium studies to bear on peninsular Spain are, if anything, even larger. At least within Latin American Studies critics largely agree on the importance of studying colonialism. Surely postcolonial concerns have little to do with the “Golden Age” of Spanish culture? And yet the very quotes I place around the term stem from the recent critical reevaluation of this period, which has recognized Spain’s economic exhaustion as it attempted to maintain its European empire, the huge social costs of

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Old World campaigns, and the disastrous effects of the 1609 expulsion of the moriscos. The study of imperium, it turns out, is tremendously relevant to metropolitan artifacts. For while many “Golden Age” texts are concerned more with European empire, or with internal consolidation through the expulsion of racialized others, than with New World issues, they illustrate the contradictions and complications of Spanish imperial ideology, framed within a Mediterranean context as much as a transatlantic one. Imperium studies thus undoes Seed’s distinction between New Historicism and “colonial discourse” by examining the centrality of imperial preoccupations in a wide range of metropolitan texts. Imperium studies can profoundly alter our readings of canonical, metropolitan texts by exposing their engagements with nation and empire. Consider two examples: the “minor” productions of a hyper-canonical writer, Miguel de Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares (1613), and the now largely unremarked Guerras civiles de Granada (Civil Wars of Granada) (1595, 1604) by Ginés Pérez de Hita. Critics have only recently begun to show how the more idealist of Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares, routinely categorized as trite Italianate fables, actually voice pressing contemporary debates about sovereignty and expansion.34 “La española inglesa” (The English Spanish Girl), for example, explores the vexed relation between religious and national identity in a context of imperial competition, to suggest that a politics of dissimulation and tolerance may be preferable to essentialism and exclusion. Cervantes presents the reader with an idealized hero and heroine of indistinct status: Ricaredo embodies an oxymoronic identity as the good English Catholic privateer, while Isabela—in all likelihood, a conversa—remains a faithful Spaniard and Catholic despite her prolonged sojourn in England.The novella also features a tolerant Queen Elizabeth (a second “Isabel”) who accepts and even admires her recusant subjects, as long as they prove their loyalty to England. By thus complicating the lines of religious and national filiation, “La española inglesa” questions the orthodox verities of Spanish ideology in the period, and encourages the reader to reimagine the conceptual borders of a more inclusive Spain.35 Under the cloak of romance, “Las dos doncellas” (The Two Damsels) examines the possible emasculation that results from Spain’s misguided imperial ventures and its indebtedness to Genoese bankers. The novella explores the connection between domestic masculinity and the potency of Spain’s empire, as two cross-dressed damsels search for a truant lover named Marco Antonio Adorno.While his first name links him to Virgil’s Aeneid and the imperial tradition of Rome, his last name identifies him as a member of the Genoese colony in Andalucía, moneylenders to the

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Crown. When the damsels steal gold from their fathers in order to follow Marco Antonio to Spanish Italy, they invoke the domestic crisis that stemmed from the much larger circulation of gold out of Spain in the period. The valiant “Bradamante and Marfisa, or Hippolyta and Penthesilea,” as Cervantes playfully describes the damsels, insist on the priority of domestic commitments over imperial concerns even as they stand in for their absent lover.Yet their profound disruption of the gendered social order within Spain suggests that it may be impossible to reestablish imperium at home, even if Marco Antonio is successfully diverted from his imperial excursion.36 A third novella, “El amante liberal” (The Generous Lover) explores the profound fascination with Islam that undermines Spanish claims to religious and national purity. Set in the Eastern Mediterranean of Sicily and Cyprus, and of the Turkish threat,“El amante liberal” focuses on the far reaches of Spain’s Old World empire. Cervantes here eschews the North African stages more familiar to Spaniards in favor of an Eastern world in which the certainties of Spanish ideology are cast into question. Although it is ostensibly a captivity narrative, the novella in fact records the Europeans’ sheer pleasure in Eastern culture—from the Moorish dress that enhances the heroine’s beauty to the hero’s inexplicable desire to disguise himself as a Turk when he finally returns to Sicily.“El amante liberal” thus showcases the vulnerability of Spanish imperium to its own subjects’ perverse pleasures in the Other.37 Ginés Pérez de Hita’s Guerras civiles de Granada, a wildly popular text when published but now largely neglected, ably addresses the contradictions of imperial ideology. The text effects the rhetorical inclusion of the ostracized moriscos within Spain by harnessing the literary fascination with noble, exotic Moors—what critics have called “Maurophilia”—in order to procure sympathy for the historical victims of an internal struggle.The two disparate volumes of the Guerras civiles cover very different conflicts. The first part, published in 1595, is a romance recreation of internecine conflicts between several factions in Granada, which, Pérez de Hita suggests, led to the fall of the city in 1492. Yet the Moors themselves are presented as highly sympathetic and cultivated figures. The second part, finished in 1597 but only published in 1604, powerfully recasts the 1568 rebellion of the moriscos in the south of Spain as a civil war between Spaniards. Simply by yoking his experiential, first-person account of a violent struggle to the earlier Guerras civiles, Pérez de Hita manages to include the moriscos as fellow Spaniards involved in a civil struggle. Although Part II begins with an account of Moorish violence against Christians, Pérez de Hita retracts his own criticism of the moriscos

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to bemoan “las civiles guerras que se tuvieron, que ansí se pueden llamar; pues fueron Christianos contra Christianos, y todos dentro de una ciudad y un Reyno. . .” (the civil wars that occurred, for so they may be called, because they were Christians against Christians and all within one city and one Kingdom . . .).38 Between one volume and the next, the Moors are transformed from idealized chivalric figures to actual historical enemies, yet the sympathies of Part I haunt Part II, complicating any account of achieved imperium. Approaching texts from the Peninsula such as the ones I have just described from the perspective of imperium studies achieves a double purpose: it highlights the workings of empire in the Old World, while elucidating the context and the ideological stakes of texts that are not explicitly about empire.The subtle tools that imperium studies borrows from postcolonial criticism—with its theoretical mix of Marx, Foucault, and deconstruction—are perhaps most useful, in fact, for approaching texts that do not advertise their investment in colonial ideologies, but instead mask it in literary or historiographical convention. The View from England Imperium studies has rather different implications for the field of English. For better or for worse, English has become an extraordinarily rich wellspring of theoretical approaches for the early modern period. As scholars have long recognized, New Historicism and cultural materialism have profoundly changed and energized early modern studies. These approaches have also led scholars to study England’s overseas “ventures” and, more recently, the dynamics of imperialism within the British Isles. As I will show, an explicit engagement with imperium studies could address some of the blind spots that continue to limit the field, while reinforcing the connections among a range of current investigations. The primary blind spot that concerns me here is the neglect of Spanish influences, in both the political and the literary arenas, as modern critics unwittingly replicate the effects of Elizabethan propaganda. For the Black Legend of old still exerts its power. Largely fostered by England and the Dutch provinces in the late sixteenth century, this powerful ideological construct condemns Spanish violence in the conquest of the New World, and extrapolates from colonial abuses into a wholesale condemnation of Spanish brutality, dogmatism, and obscurantism. Ironically, the propaganda was originally fed by devastating critiques of Spanish colonial violence, such as Bartolomé de las Casas’s Brevísima

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relación de la destrucción de las Indias (Brief History of the Destruction of the Indies), that were part of an internal debate within Spain over the treatment of New World Natives and the moral and ethical challenges of the conquista. What are some of the effects, then, of the persistent Black Legend that has isolated Spain? In the political realm, critics working on early modern England often operate within a peculiarly isolated national framework, generally ignoring the ways in which England’s experience of race, for example, is crucially filtered through Spanish encounters. In the literary realm, critics have privileged more remote connections with Italy, sidestepping the messy dynamics of simultaneous admiration for and vilification of Spanish influences that characterize so many English texts of this period. Yet in order to understand England’s project of achieving national and cultural distinction, it becomes necessary to examine its vexed relations with its greatest rival. As Thomas Scanlan has recently argued, the construction of the “Black Legend” of Spanish cruelty “could also be said to mark the beginnings of the English attempts to fashion a national identity through colonial endeavor.”39 When we consider the ways in which England attempted to model itself on Spain’s great successes while distancing itself from the imperial violence it condemned, the central place of Spain in texts as disparate as Edmund Spenser’s long allegorical romance, The Faerie Queene (1596), Richard Hakluyt’s compendium of travel narratives, The Principal Navigations (1589, 1598–1600), or Ben Jonson’s comedy The Alchemist (1610) becomes clear. These texts all struggle with the effort to establish England’s place while negotiating the often overwhelming influence of Spain.Thus Spenser and Hakluyt, with mixed success, attempt to portray an expansionist England that somehow skirts the pitfalls of colonial violence by contrasting Spanish cruelty and rapacity with English temperance and virtue. Jonson, meanwhile recognizes that the cultural spell operating on his compatriots is not alchemy but the fascination with all things Spanish. So powerful is this longing for Spain, in Jonson’s sendup, that it suffices to dress up as a Spaniard to become irresistible. While Hakluyt is overtly concerned with imperial competition, the other two are far less explicit in their engagement with these matters. By bringing an awareness of Spain into our reading, however, we can more precisely reconstruct their cultural and political contexts, to show how imperial preoccupations pervade a wide range of canonical literary texts.40 The Spanish context is crucial for a whole set of problems that critics have recently begun to explore, such as the way Spain filters England’s experience of Africa, or the connection between racist constructions of

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the Spanish and the Irish. It will also prove central, I believe, to any sustained investigation of the construction of class and identity in the transformations of the Spanish picaresque in England, and of the representation of religious minorities. Imperium studies provides a forum for considering these questions in their historical and ideological contexts, from the appropriate transnational perspective. An explicit engagement with imperium studies could also further develop a variety of recent inquiries into the connections between nation and empire for early modern England. As David Cannadine has recently pointed out, “the history of the British Empire is still all too often written as if it were completely separate and distinct from the history of the British nation.”41 For the early stages of English and British nation-formation, the connections between these histories are crucially important. Richard Helgerson’s influential study of the “forms of nationhood” devotes some space to the question of England’s imperial aspirations in the New World and its competition with Spain.These take central stage in Scanlan’s more recent contribution, in which he argues for the importance of a transatlantic and imperial understanding of British history. The question of Britain, which David Baker, following the historian J. G. A. Pocock, poses so cogently in Between Nations, is another crucial component of this debate: “The engagements between the various island peoples within Britain—English/Welsh, mere Irish/Old English/New English, Scottish/English, and many more— shape a heterogeneous territory—‘Britain’—that exceeds and traverses the boundaries of any one of the nations that make it up.”42 There is still much work to be done in providing a full account of what Baker terms “an extraordinarily complex intercultural site.” The story has been most fully fleshed out for Ireland, which has seen an incredible surge of critical interest, although much of the work has focused on Englishlanguage archives and, indeed, on canonical English authors such as Shakespeare and Spenser.43 Expanding this investigation in broad, multilingual terms, and considering also England’s self-definition in relation to Wales, Scotland, and France may be one of the most exciting contributions of imperium studies to the field of English, especially if the inquiry leads back to the complexities of the Norman Conquest (which made England simultaneously colony and colonizing metropole). Finally, imperium studies is uniquely positioned to address the artificial separation between “British” and “American” in studies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In disciplinary terms, this division is often as stark as that between “Peninsular” and “Latin American” within Spanish studies, even though in English there are generally

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greater methodological similarities on both sides of the Atlantic. These divisions occlude some of the most interesting spaces in which imperial ideology is transformed or translated, betwixt-and-between problems such as the connections between the English experience in Ireland and in the New World, or the ways in which Old World texts such as Aphra Behn’s Ooronoko and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe transcend Englishness.44 The crucial move in developing the study of imperium in the early modern period will be to avoid ghettoization within nation-based disciplines or within that strange and paradoxical hybrid, “early modern postcolonial studies.” Imperium studies offers one way out of this dilemma, both by locating such efforts with historical accuracy and by complicating the firm lines between early modern nations. Imperium studies is not a move to conquer new territories in our own critical expansionism. Instead, it involves interrogating apparent points of origin and artificial beginnings that have gone unchallenged in current critical practice. Ideally, imperium studies will transform the larger body of knowledge that is postcolonial studies by contributing insights that stem from different imperial and colonial junctures. More important than nomenclature and the attendant recognition, however, will be our sustained attention to how a wide variety of early modern texts—and not just the few quickly anointed as the relevant canon—participate in the geographical, political, and social transformations of an imperial age. Notes I would like to thank the participants in “Postcolonial Moves” (University of Miami, February 2000) for their helpful responses to the first version of this essay, and Michelle R. Warren and Patricia Clare Ingham for their invaluable suggestions. 1. I take my discussion of the history of the term from Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c. 1500–c.1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 11–28. 2. Thomas Pownall, Principles of Polity, being the Grounds and Reasons of Civil Empire (London, 1752), 93–4, cited in Pagden. 3. Edmund Burke, Speech of Edmund Burke Esq. on Moving his Resolution for Conciliation with the Colonies [March 22, 1775], 3rd ed. (London, 1775), 35–6, cited in Pagden. 4. Pagden, Lords of all the World, 11. 5. See Marie Tanner, The Last Descendant of Aeneas: The Hapsburgs and the Mythic Image of the Emperor (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1993), and my Mimesis and Empire:The New World, Islam, and European Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 6. Heather James, Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 15. 7. Ian Baucom, “Globalit, Inc.; or, The Cultural Logic of Global Literary Studies,” PMLA 116 (2001): 158–72.

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8. Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism:The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, NJ:Transaction Publishers, 1999), 65. 9. Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change 950–1350 (London: Penguin, 1993), 2–3. 10. Bill Ashcroft, “Modernity’s First-Born: Latin America and Post-Colonial Transformation,” in El debate de la postcolonialidad en Latinoamérica, ed. Alfonso de Toro and Fernando de Toro (Madrid: Iberoamerica, 1999), 14. Ashcroft here repeats the claim for a broad understanding of “postcolonial” first made in The Empire Writes Back:Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (London: Routledge, 1989). Although this claim has proved quite controversial, it seems to me perfectly justified by the texts that emerge in the immediate aftermath of European colonization in the New World. 11. Ashcroft, “Modernity’s First-Born,” 17. 12. Postcolonial critics working on later periods are increasingly recognizing the interconnectedness of nation and empire, and the complexities of metropolitan self-construction. Note, for example, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), a collection edited by Frederick Cooper and Laura Ann Stoler, who argue in their introduction that “Europe was made by its imperial projects, as much as colonial encounters were shaped by conflicts within Europe itself ” (1). The editors argue for “careful interrogation of the relationship of colonial state to metropolitan state and of the making of nation to the making of empire” (4). 13. For queer studies and the nation, see Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). For New Historicist investigations of the nation, see Richard Helgerson’s hugely influential Forms of Nationhood:The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), and, more recently, Timothy Hampton, Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century: Inventing Renaissance France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). 14. Etienne Balibar, “The Nation Form: History and Ideology,” in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class:Ambiguous Identities, trans. Chris Turner (London:Verso, 1991), 86. 15. David Baker’s Between Nations: Shakespeare, Spenser, Marvell, and the Question of Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), is a fascinating investigation of early modern Britain along these lines. 16. Patricia Seed, “Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse,” Latin American Research Review, 26.3 (1991): 181–200, at 199. 17. The early modern historian and colonial official Francisco López de Gómara argued that “The conquest of the Indians began after that of the Moors was completed, so that Spaniards would ever fight the infidels” (Historia general de las Indias [1552], ed. Jorge Gurria Lacroix [Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1979], I, 8, my translation). Pagden suggests that “ideologically the struggle against Islam offered a descriptive language which allowed the generally shabby ventures in America to be vested with a seemingly eschatological significance” (Lords of All the World, 74). See also Antonio Garrido Aranda, Organización de la Iglesia en el Reino de Granada y su proyección en Indias (Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 1979) and Mercedes García Arenal, “Moriscos e indios: Para un estudio comparado de métodos de conquista y evangelización,” Chronica Nova, 20 (1992): 153–75. 18. For a detailed discussion of the problems with writing an English history of Great Britain, see the introduction to Baker, Between Nations. 19. The central texts in the debate on the application of postcolonial theory to Latin America are Patricia Seed’s review article, “Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse;” the “Commentary and Debate” in response to her article (Latin American Research Review, 28.3 [1993]); The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America, ed. John Beverley and José Oviedo, special issue of boundary 2, 20.3 (1993); and El debate de la postcolonialidad en latinoamérica.

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20. Walter D. Mignolo, “Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse: Cultural Critique or Academic Colonialism?” Latin American Research Review, 28.3 (1993): 122. Mignolo discusses O’Gorman’s La idea del descubrimiento de América (1952) and La invención de América (1958). 21. Mignolo, “Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse,” 124. 22. Mignolo, “Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse,” 125. This is part of the larger project that Mignolo takes on in The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy,Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). 23. Ashcroft, “Modernity’s First-Born,” 15. 24. Alfonso de Toro, “La postcolonialidad en Latinoamérica en la era de la globalización. ¿Cambio de paradigma en el pensamiento teórico-cultural latinoamericano?” in El debate de la postcolonialidad en Latinoamérica, 38.The translation is mine. 25. For a consideration of the relation between “postmodern” and “postcolonial” in an African context, see Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial,” Critical Inquiry, 17 (1991): 336–57. 26. Jorge Klor de Alva, “Colonialism and Postcolonialism as (Latin) American Mirages,” Colonial Latin American Review, 1 (1992): 3–23. 27. Klor de Alva, “Colonialism and Postcolonialism,” 15–18. 28. Ashcroft, “Modernity’s First-Born,” 17. For a critique of Klor de Alva’s “American exceptionalism,” see Peter Hulme, “Including America,” Ariel 26, (1995): 117–23. 29. Klor de Alva, “Colonialism and Postcolonialism,” 19. The sources he alludes to in this passage are Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,“Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” in Selected Subaltern Studies, eds. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 2nd ed. (New York:Verso, 1991), and Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979) and Power/Knowledge, trans. Colin Gordon et al. (New York: Pantheon, 1980). 30. Klor de Alva retracts and softens some of his claims in a later version of the same piece: “The Postcolonization of the (Latin) American Experience: A Reconsideration of ‘Colonialism,’ ‘Postcolonialism,’ and ‘Mestizaje,’ ” in After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements, ed. Gyan Prakash (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 241–75. 31. See her Imperial Eyes:Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). 32. Hulme, “Including America,” 118. 33. Sara Castro-Klarén,“Mimicry Revisited: Latin America, Post-colonial Theory and the Location of Knowledge,” in El debate de la postcolonialidad en latinoamérica, 145–6. 34. For example Diana de Armas Wilson, Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 35. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, “La española inglesa,” in Novelas ejemplares, ed. Harry Sieber (Madrid: Cátedra, 1980), 1: 241–83. See Carroll Johnson,“ ‘La española inglesa’ and the Practice of Literary Production,” Viator, 19 (1988): 377–416, and his larger study, Cervantes and the Material World (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000). 36. Cervantes, “Las dos doncellas,” in Novelas ejemplares, 2: 199–237. See my “Empire Unmanned: Gender Trouble and Genoese Gold in Cervantes’s ‘The Two Damsels,’ ” PMLA 116 (2001): 285–99. 37. Cervantes, “El amante liberal,” in Novelas ejemplares, 1.135–88. 38. Ginés Pérez de Hita, Guerras civiles de Granada, ed. Paula Blanchard-Demouge (Madrid: BaillyBaillière, 1913), II.10.The translation is my own. 39. Thomas Scanlan, Colonial Writing and the New World 1583–1671:Allegories of Desire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1 and passim. 40. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas Roche (London: Penguin, 1978); Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations,Voyages,Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (Glasgow:

90 41. 42. 43.

44.

Barbara Fuchs Maclehose and Sons, 1904); Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, ed. Elizabeth Cook (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991). David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (London: Penguin, 2001), xvii. Baker, Between Nations, 13–14. Hechter’s Internal Colonialism is an early effort to analyze the relations between Britain and its “Celtic fringe” from a sociological perspective. See also Baker, Between Nations; Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruit and Salvage Soil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Christopher Highley, Shakespeare, Spenser, and the Crisis in Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). The years since Hulme’s Colonial Encounters have seen the emergence of a prodigious bibliography on these two texts.Two particularly interesting examples of the possibilities of imperium studies are an older study, William C. Spengemann’s “The Earliest American Novel: Aphra Behn’s Ooronoko” (Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 38 [1984]: 384–414), which challenges the reading of Ooronoko as a British text and proposes it as the first American novel, irrespective of the birth of America as a nation, and Diana de Armas Wilson’s “The Novel as Moletta: Cervantes and Defoe,” in her Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World, which argues for the hybrid “hispanicity” of Robinson Crusoe.

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CHAPTER

FOUR

Tales of the Ancients: Colonial Werewolves and the Mapping of Postcolonial Ireland Catherine E. Karkov

In the preface to his Topographia Hibernica, written in 1188 for Henry II (“our western Alexander”), Gerald of Wales claimed that: Sicut enim orientales plage propriis quibusdam et sibi innatis preeminent et precellunt ostentis, sic et occidentales circumferentie suis nature miraculis illustrantur. Quociens quippe tanquam seriis et veris fatigata negociis paululum secedit et excedit, remotis his partibus quasi verecundis et occultis natura ludit excessibus. Just as the countries of the East are remarkable and distinguished for certain prodigies peculiar and native to themselves, so the boundaries of the West are also made remarkable by their own wonders of nature. For sometimes tired, as it were, of the true and the serious [Nature] draws aside and goes away, and in these remote parts indulges herself in these secret and distant freaks.1 Gerald went on to catalog the marvels and miracles of Ireland, a country, like the East, located at the edges of the world.Within Gerald’s lifetime, marginal illustrations were added to the text, and very soon thereafter copies of the Topographia were bound with bestiaries and other manuscripts containing accounts of the marvelous and the monstrous. All these manuscripts were ultimately derived from the works of classical authors—Megasthenes, Ctesias, and Pliny chief amongst them— but while classical and earlier medieval authors described and depicted

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marvels long ago and far away, Gerald’s account was contemporary. Here was eyewitness documentation of prodigies that existed in the here-and-now and right next door—even if right next door did happen to be at the edge of the world—and a narrative that progressed like a topographical survey, laying claim for contemporary England to the land and wonders it described.2 In fact, Gerald ends the dedication by telling Henry that unlike gifts of gold or hunting birds, the Topographia contains things that cannot be lost.3 Gerald’s work had two long-lasting effects: (1) It defined Ireland and the Irish as exotic other for the English, adding to the moral and religious justification for the twelfth-century Conquest;4 (2) It defined the face and rhetoric of colonized and colonizer that would characterize the English colonial experience for centuries to come.5 The text of the Topographia was often combined with that of the Expugnatio (Gerald’s account of the actual Conquest), and the latter illustrated with “portraits” of the men who played a significant role in the Conquest like Dermot MacMurough, Meiler fitzHenry, and Hugh de Lacy.6 The contemporary portraits, along with the naturalism of both Gerald’s historical narrative and the illustrations, serve to guarantee the repeated claims of accuracy embedded in the text.7 One of the most famous of Gerald’s stories is that of the priest and the two werewolves. The tale is typical of the stories collected in the Topographia in that it portrays the Irish as a race that deserves to be conquered,8 but it is unusual in both its wealth of detail and its topographical specificity. There is, moreover, a significant Irish tradition of werewolf tales dating from both the pre- and post-Conquest periods, against which this story must be considered, particularly because Gerald’s specificity of place suggests that he may have been familiar with the tradition. I will argue here that Gerald’s text can be read as a colonial move, and that the Irish Acallam na Senórach (Dialogue [or Tales] of the Ancients, ca. 1200), can be read as a postcolonial response. Both texts survey and describe the landscape, but the Acallam is “post” colonial, not only in the sense that it comes after the Topographia but also in the sense that it argues against the claims to possession of land and time, and even the narrative strategies, of Gerald’s text. The Topographia, especially the werewolf story, progresses by mapping, implying a linear movement forward.The Acallam, by contrast, progresses anecdotally, presenting a landscape alive with history, described in a dialogue whose voices move back and forth across time and space, and look forward to a future that is yet to be resolved. Gerald’s text is systematically organized into three parts, in the manner of a creation narrative: plants and animals, wonders and

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miracles, and the human inhabitants. As Gerald says, he has “collected everything” (collectis igitur . . . cunctis). The Acallam can also be described as divided into three parts, loosely organized around the meeting of the protagonists and two days of storytelling covering a journey into the kingdom of Munster and another to Carnfree, the inauguration site of the kings of Connacht.9 Certainly the author(s) of the Acallam would not have labeled it “postcolonial,” but it is clearly a new and political retelling of precolonial tales in a postcolonial context. In places it lays claim to the British past, but more importantly, the multiple voices of the Acallam seek to “identify, valorize and empower” what Gerald labels the “barbarous, the primitive, the provincial.”10 The Colonial Moment For Caroline Walker Bynum, Gerald’s werewolf tale is an example of disguise and of “fake” or “sympathetic” werewolves as opposed to those born of metamorphosis or metempsychosis.11 While she is correct as to the nature of the werewolves, Bynum’s approach ignores the political content of the episode, which can be read as a metaphor for the Conquest, and the way in which the two werewolves wear their skins is an important part of the metaphor. The story of the werewolves is the first episode in the section on De mirabilibus nostri temporis (The wonders of our own times), and Gerald locates it quite precisely: Circa triennium ante aduentum domini Iohannis in Hyberniam, contigit quendam presbiterum, de partibus Vltonie uersus Mediam itinerantem, in silua quadam coniuncta Medie pernoctasse. Cumque ad igniculum, quem sibi sub arbore quadam frondosa congesserat, uno tantum comitatus puerulo lucubrasset ecce lupus ad eos accedens, qui et statim in huiusmodi uerba prorupit;“Securi estote . . .” Cumque ipsi tanto uehementius consternatis animis obstupuissent, uerba de deo sana subiunxit. Et obtestatus a sacerdote, et quenam creatura esset, que sub bestiali forma humana uerba proadiuratusque per deum omnipotentem, et per fidem trinitatis, ne eis noceret, ferret, catholicum in omnibus prebens responsum tandem tamen subiecit: “De quodam hominum genere sumus Ossiriensium. Vnde, quolibet septennio per imprecationem sancti cuiusdam, Natalis scilicet abbatis, duo, uidelicet masculus et femina, tam a formis quam finibus exulare coguntur. Formam enim humanam prorsus exuentes, induunt lupinam. Completo uero

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septennii spatio, si forte superstites fuerint, aliis duobus ipsorum loco simili conditione subrogatis, ad pristinam redeunt tam patriam quam naturam. Et quidem mihi peregrinationis huius socia non procul hinc grauiter infirmatur. Cui, si placet, iam in extremis agenti, sacerdotale solatium intuitu diuine pietatis indulgeas.” [He then took the priest to his companion] lupam . . . sub specie ferina gemitus et planctus humanos emittentem. Que statim ut ipsum uidit, premittens salutacionem satis humanam, gratias etiam deo retulit, quod in tali articulo tanto eam solatio dignatus esset. Et sic usque ad extremam communionem a sacerdote cuncta rite peracta suscepit: quam et ipsa constanter efflagitans, attencius supplicauit ut uiatici largitione benefitium consummaret . . . [She requested the sacrament] Et ut omnem abstergeret dubietatem, pede quasi pro manu fungens, pellem totam a capite lupe retrahens, usque ad umbilicum replicauit: et statim expressa forma uetule cuiusdam apparuit. Quo uiso, tandem sacerdos obnixe postulantem et deuote suscipientem, terrore tamen magis quam ratione compulsus, communicauit. Et statim pellis a lupo retracta priori forme se coaptauit. About three years before the coming of Lord John into Ireland, it happened that a priest, journeying from Ulster towards Meath, spent the night in a wood on the borders of Meath. He was staying up beside a fire which he had prepared for himself under the leafy branches of a tree and had for company only a little boy, when a wolf came up to them and immediately broke into these words: “Do not be afraid . . . ” They were completely astounded and in great consternation.The wolf then said some things about God that seemed reasonable. The priest called on him and adjured him by the omnipotent God and faith in the Trinity not to harm them and to tell them what kind of creature he was, who, although in the form of a beast could speak human words.The wolf gave a Catholic answer in all things and at length added: “We are natives of Ossory. From there every seven years, because of the imprecation of a certain saint, namely the abbot Natalis,12 two persons, a man and a woman, are compelled to go into exile not only from their territory but also from their bodily shape.They put off the form of man completely and put on the form of wolf. When the seven years are up, and if they have survived, two others take their place in the same way, and the first pair return to their former country and nature. My companion in this pilgrimage is not far from here and is seriously ill. Please give her in her last hour the solace of the priesthood in bringing to her the

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revelation of the divine mercy.” [He then took the priest to his companion] a she-wolf groaning and grieving like a human being, even though her appearance was that of a beast. As soon as she saw him she welcomed him in a human way, and then gave thanks also to God that in her last hour he had granted her such consolation. She then received from the hands of the priest all the last rites duly performed up to the last communion . . . [She requested the sacrament and] to remove all doubt [the he-wolf] pulled all the skin off the she-wolf from the head down to the navel, folding it back with his paw as if it were a hand. And immediately the shape of an old woman, clear to be seen appeared. At that, the priest, more through terror than reason, communicated her as she had earnestly demanded, and she then devoutly received the sacrament. Afterwards the skin which had been removed by the he-wolf resumed its former position.13 Let us look first at the location of the episode. “Three years before the coming of Lord John” reveals that the event occurred in 1182 or 1183, as John visited Ireland, his new lordship, in 1185, spending five months in the country extending English control over certain areas. The fact that the priest is traveling from Ulster to Meath and encounters the wolves in a wood on the borders of Meath reveals that the episode took place in one of the very areas that John was to divide amongst his English companions. Meath and Ulster were under the control of two of the greatest English overlords, Hugh de Lacy and John de Courcy, and between them lay the kingdom of Airgialla, ruled by the Irish Murchad Ua Cerbaill. The story thus takes place in what Gerald portrays as an Irish wilderness between two areas of civilization. Murchad had submitted to both Henry II and John, and his kingdom was stable; however, he was also in alliance with the rebellious Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair, king of Connacht and high king of Ireland,14 whose people are also singled out by Gerald for their particularly barbaric ways and lack of Faith,15 and whose family may have been patrons of the Acallam.As Gerald was writing, John was busy carving up Murchad’s kingdom. In 1185 large portions of Airgialla were granted to Gilbert Pipard and Bertram de Verdon, although Murchad was permitted to keep a portion of his former kingdom.16 The division was formalized in 1189 at Mellifont Abbey (the first Cistercian house in Ireland, founded by Murchad’s father Donnchad).17 The story may be couched in the language of the fabulous, but Gerald’s narrative also maps the process of partition. As the administration of the sacrament serves to bring the she-wolf safely into the

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Christian fold, so the dividing up of Airgialla would bring English civilization to yet another area of untamed Ireland. One of Gerald’s major concerns was church reform, and the fact that it is a priest and the sacrament that testify to the underlying humanity of the werewolves help to symbolize the reform process, as well as to raise questions about the practices of the Irish church.18 Gerald also claimed that in 1185 the bodies of Ireland’s three great national saints, Patrick, Columba, and Brigid, were miraculously discovered buried in Ulster, and were immediately claimed by the English overlord John de Courcy.19 The Irish church thus became the property of the English through the will of the saints. And then there are the werewolves themselves, natives of Ossory (Osraige), an area in the southern Leinster/Munster heartland of early Irish werewolf tales,20 and the kingdom of the early thirteenth-century prince Donnchad Ua Gilla Pátraic “one of the three Irishmen who rose against the foreigners.”21 The fact that every seven years a new couple is fated to put on the form of a wolf indicates that the threat is ongoing— lycanthropy can happen to anyone—and the danger posed by these Irish werewolves has not yet been contained. Just as Gerald’s story was a metaphor for the small-scale conquest of Airgialla, so too it was a metaphor for the larger conquest of Ireland.The miracle, like the Conquest, made fluid the boundaries between worlds and people.The Irish were dangerous, bestial, and a threat to the English colonizers. Fear of infection, for example, runs throughout Gerald’s writings on Ireland, a fear taken up by later English writers, Edmund Spenser chief amongst them.22 But there was also a human face underneath it all: no matter how inhuman they might appear, the Irish had to be redeemable, because redemption was part of the justification for the Conquest. The Irish had to be made to seem simultaneously attractive and repulsive, a duality that characterizes colonial and postcolonial discourse across the centuries,23 and one that the werewolf is particularly suited to convey because it is simultaneously human and monster. Most frightening of all, it is a monster that feeds upon and “infects” its own kind. This is one of the reasons why disguise rather than metamorphosis is so integral to the story. But it should also be noted that in the earliest illustrated manuscripts, the humanity of the creatures described in the text is at odds with their depiction as “naturalistic” wolves. Details vary, and in some illustrations the priest is shown administering the sacrament, in others just talking to the he-wolf, but in all cases the tension between text and picture add to the fabulous nature of the tale (we experience some of the same shock at a talking wolf as the priest), but also to the “scientific” documentation of the Irish as literal beasts recounted in the following chapters.

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It is possible that Gerald’s humane werewolves were influenced by Marie de France’s lai Bisclavret, written between 1167 and 1189. Like Gerald’s tales of the marvelous, Marie’s lai is all about hierarchies of class, power, and authority.24 But Gerald’s story stands apart in its inclusion of a female as well as a male werewolf:25 werewolves in the Celtic, Germanic, and Classical traditions are almost all male, although there are more wolfish women in the Irish tradition than elsewhere.26 In the pseudohistorical tales of early Ireland,27 the sovereignty of Ireland was personified as an old woman often roaming the wilderness until she was tamed by sex with or marriage to the legitimate king,28 so that the old, dying female werewolf can also be understood as a personification of Ireland and her passing from the old to the new order—just as the bodies of Patrick, Columba, and Brigid passed from an Irish to an English church. The Precolonial Setting Similar to the way in which the old woman was traditionally associated with land and sovereignty in the Irish tales, the wolf was traditionally associated with the warrior and the outlaw, figures whose violent activities were highlighted in the Topographia as being typical of the Irish.29 The fían was a band of hunting or fighting men (mostly young and aristocratic)30 living on the fringes between nature and society, and one of the epithet’s for warrior, Fenian or otherwise, was luch-thonn (wolfskin).31 In the pre-Conquest tales, fénnid is a term virtually interchangeable with díberg (outlaw or brigand).32 Men engaged in this sort of warring, hunting, or pillaging activity were said to be oc fáelad (wolfing), to be i conrechtaib; a rechtaib na mac tire (going into wolf shapes), or to be hunting fo bés na mac tire (in the manner of wolves).Their outlaw nature was often visibly marked on the body, especially when they appear in saints’ lives.33 References to fíana go back at least as far as the seventh century, and thus occur in some of the earliest surviving Irish literature.34 Their exploits are preserved primarily in the Finn cycle of tales (fíannaigecht), and in the Dinnshenchas (the “lore of place-names”), but the term does also appear in the Irish annals.35 Kim McCone has suggested that membership in the fían, whether fictional or real, was a socially endorsed rite of passage, and that the fían was a necessary part of the social order. He describes it as:“an independent organization of predominantly landless, unmarried, unsettled, and young men given to hunting, warfare and sexual license in the wilds outside the túath upon which it made claims,

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by agreement or force as the case might be, to sustenance and hospitality and for which it might perform certain elementary police or military services when relations were not strained by hostility. Upon the acquisition of the requisite property, usually by inheritance at the death of the father or other next of kin but not before age twenty, one would normally pass from the fían to full membership in the túath of married property owners.”36 Some men were never able to inherit and settle down and remained outlaws all their lives—the hero Finn being the primary example.37 Fénnidi were a very real presence and a threat within pre-Conquest Irish society, as the campaign waged against them in the clerically authored sources makes clear—one does not devote that much time and effort to a fictional menace—but they were a relatively minor part of the literary tradition.38 Be that as it may, both in their actions and in their conflict with the church the fénnidi in their wolfish guise fit right into Gerald’s portrayal of the Irish as primitive, vicious, barbaric, and uncontrolled fighters—doomed but still dangerous werewolves.39 The Postcolonial Move In the years following the Conquest the werewolf in the form of the fénnid took on a different guise.40 In texts such as the Acallam na Senórach, written in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century,41 we meet a new type of fénnid, one cleansed of his demonic, pagan nature but not his fighting spirit by St. Patrick and the church. In this and other postConquest texts the fénnidi are still warriors, but they are not outlaws; for the most part they are respectable, heroic, often married with families, and they are the sons of kings—they protect the social order from disruption within, and the country of Ireland from attack from outsiders (usually supernatural).42 McCone notes that the texts stress the royal and heroic nature of the warriors, and go to some lengths to distance them from their outlaw past. For example, one etymological definition of díberg, the outlaw with whom the fénnid is associated in the preConquest texts, tells us that the meaning of the word is “ ‘non-be hero,’ for he is not reckoned with heroism like the hero of the fíana, for denial of God and clientship of the Devil is not proper to heroism.”43 The change is without doubt the joint result of the Conquest, and of the twelfth-century church reforms that both led up to and were a part of it.44 The Acallam is an unusual text consisting of a series of Fenian profiles and anecdotes in prose and verse narrated by the old Fenian heroes Caílte (whose people are from the borders of Co. Meath) and Oisín

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(whose name may connect him with the people of Ossory). These two warriors have lived on after the death of all their companions, according to Caílte because of “fírinde inár croidhedhaibh ocus nertt inár lámhaibh, ocus comall inár tengthaibh” (the truth of our hearts, the strength of our arms, and the constancy of our tongues).46 The tales unravel as the two give St. Patrick a tour of their country, and are interspersed with dialogue between Caílte, Patrick, and others. In this text Patrick is alive and well, and certainly not buried in Ulster. For the most part the stories are motivated by questions from Patrick and other characters about the meaning of place-names or topographical features, so that the Fenians and their stories are inextricably bound to the land.47 The Acallam is disjointed and fragmentary with no real beginning or end, progressing sometimes in a cyclical pattern, sometimes in a linear narrative, sometimes as a series of vignettes. It contains odd juxtapositions and overlappings of time: the mythical age of the other-worldly Túatha Dé Danann, the third-century Fenian era that is the subject of the narratives, the fifth-century age of St. Patrick to whom the stories are told, the present time in which the stories are written down, and the future symbolized by both the lack of an ending and the implication in many of the tales that the dead heroes can return—or at least be recycled.48 The story begins with Caílte’s journey from the border of Armagh and Louth to Mainistir Droichit (Mellifont, the abbey founded by Donnchad Ua Cerbaill) near the town of Drogheda, the ancient name for which refers to the repelling of a Roman invasion,49 and Oisín’s journey to the Síd of the Breast of Ceitech near the royal site of Tara: “Oisín co Sídh Ochta Cleitigh . . . ocus téit Caílte roime co hIndber mBic Loingsigh a mBregaibh risi-ráidter Mainistir Droichit Átha isin tan so .i. Bic Loingsech mac Airist itorchair ann .i. mac ríg Rómán táinic do ghabháil Eirenn co rus-báidh tonn tuile ann hé” (Oisín went to the Síd of the Breast of Cleitech . . . Caílte went to the Estuary of Bec the Exile now the site of the monastery of Drogheda [Mellifont]. It had been named after Bec the Exile who died there. He was the son of Airist, King of the Romans. He had come to conquer Ireland but a great wave drowned him at that place).50 The details of the journeys are typical of the way in which power is tied to land and history, as well as the way in which past invasions provide lessons for the present throughout the text. Shortly after their meeting Caílte tells Patrick the “true story” (Adér frit a fírinne) of the Fenian warrior, Artúir, son of Benne of the Britons,51 and his attempt to steal three of Finn’s finest hounds. It is the first “historical tale” in the Acallam.

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Artúir and his followers steal the hounds and return to their homeland, but are pursued by the fían, and all but Artúir are killed. The warriors return to Ireland with the hounds, two magnificent horses (a stallion and a mare from which all the horses of the fían descend) and Artúir; Artúir places himself in Finn’s service at the Old Plain of the Flocks of Étar (Clontarf). Caílte says:“Doratsamar Artúir linn . co nderna a cura re Finn / cur’ba óglách d’Finn iar soin . cusin laithi luid d’écoibh” (We brought Artúir here to make peace with Finn; He remained Finn’s warrior till the day he died).52 In this tale British theft is met with Fenian vengeance, and the noble British warrior becomes the vassal of the Irish hero.The location of Artúir’s submission, Clontarf, the site of the most famous battle in Irish medieval history, cannot be coincidental. It was here that Brian Bóruma was killed in battle against a Leinster/Viking alliance in 1014. By ca. 1200 the victory had come to be seen as the definitive Irish victory over the Viking invaders. After hearing the story Patrick wonders whether he should be listening to these old Fenian tales, but is reassured by his two guardian angels: “A anum a naeimchléirigh! ar siat, ní mó iná trian a scél innisit na senlaeich út ar dáigh dermait ocus dichuimhne. Ocus scríbhthar letsa i támlorguibh filed ocus i mbriat[h]raibh ollaman, ór budh gairdiugudh do dronguibh ocus do degdáinibh deiridh aimsire éisdecht frisna scéluib sin” (Dear holy cleric, no more than a third of the stories that they used to know do the old warriors tell you, on account of their forgetfulness. Let these be written down by you on the stone tablets of poets and in the sayings of the sages, for it will be entertaining for both the masses and the nobles of later times to listen to these tales).53 Not only are the tales to be written down, they are to be written on tablets of stone, like the commandments, but the implication is also that they are to be written on the land. Moreover, the stories of the Acallam deserve not just to be written down, but to be remembered by the poets and to be listened to, implying that they are not to be collected passively, but to be read aloud and kept alive—and indeed Fenian tales continued to multiply and be collected, down into the twentieth century.54 A number of the individual tales leave open the possibility of renewal and return, as does the lack of an ending—just as the lack of an ending to Gerald’s story left the threat of the werewolf loose in the Irish countryside. The Acallam also contains its own werewolf story. Near the end of his series of adventures Caílte and one of his companions, Cas Corach, son of the chief poet or sage (ollamh) of the Túatha Dé Danann and future chief sage of Ireland, come to the aid of the steward of the King of Ireland who is being plagued by, amongst other things, three female

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werewolves.With his otherworldly knowledge Cas Corach sees that the wolves are supernatural, “Tri hingena airitig do deired na tromdáimi a huaim Cruachan” (the three daughters of Airetech, the last of an oppressive company from the Cave of Crúachu),55 and that it is easier for them to hunt as wolves than as women.The site is associated with the mouth of Hell in Irish tradition, so that these wolves again represent a threat from beyond the country’s natural borders. Cas Corach also knows that the wolves can be approached only by musicians with harps and dulcimers, and he is, of course, the best of the musicians. As Cas Corach plays his dulcimer from the top of a cairn, the wolves approach and lie down to listen, but he cannot attack them, presumably because he cannot stop playing, and asks Caílte for advice. Caílte tells him to explain to the wolves that it would be better for them to listen to music in human form, and he and a troop of men accompany Cas Corach to the cairn the next morning: doriachtadur na coin conice in carnn, ocus ro laigset ara rigthib oc eistecht rissin ceol. Ocus ro bói Cas Corach ic á rad ríu. “Damad dáine sib,” ar se,“ar mbunudh, ro ba ferr duib eistecht in bar ndáinib rissin céol na in bar concaib.” Ocus atcualadur sum sin, ocus ro bensat na cochaill chiarleabra ro bói umoib, uair ro bo maith leo in céol sírrechtach side. Ocus amal ro badur taeb ré táeb ocus uillind re huillind atchonnairc Cailte iat, ocus tuc a chorrmér gaiscid is-suainim na sleighe, co tarrla in tsleg ina seol neme a mullach a hochta issin mnái ba sia uada dib ar ndul trithfa a triur, co rabadur inna ceirte contrata ar in sleig marsin. Amal adubairt Cailte: “Ro marb Cailte cona neim . in triar ingnad anaichnid cor’ thuitset fa lór truaigi . re haithle na haenuaire.” Ocus atracht Cas Corach chucca, ocus ro ben a tri cindu dib. Conid Glenn na conricht ainm in glenna il-leith ituaid do Charnn Bricrenn o sin anall gusaníu. “Is maith in t-engnum dorignis, a Cailti,” ar Cas Corach, “ocus ní hengnum senórach sin aniu, ocus ro bói ba(?) ocus roba maith do t’airfidech beith it farrud. Ocus ca ferr in t-engnum dorigniusa na eng[num] ind airfidig .i. dorignis a mbrégad o rechtaib con í rechtai dáine.” The wolves came up to the cairn and lay in their wolf-shapes to listen to the music. Cas then said to them.“If you really are human it would be better for you to listen to the music in human shape rather than as wolves.”They listened to him and took off the dark,

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long cloaks they had been wearing . . . As they lay there, side by side and elbow by elbow, Caílte eyed them. He put his forefinger of valor in the loop of the spear, and his spear in its poisonous course went through the nipple of the breast of the woman farthest away, having already gone through the other two women, so that all three were strung together on the spear. Caílte recited these lines: “Caílte with his venom killed the wondrous three. They perished, great the sadness, from a single cast.” Cas Corach went over to them and cut off their heads. Thus the valley running north from the Cairn of Bricriu is even now called the Valley of the Wolf-Shapes. “Good was your prowess today, Caílte,” said Cas Corach. “That was not the work of an old man and it was a fine thing for your minstrel to be at hand.” “I did no more than the minstrel,” said Caílte, “you who enticed them out of their wolf-shapes and into human form.”56 In this case the human fénnid is cast against a demonic pack of werewolves, perhaps doubly marked as outsiders because they are women hunters, but this is a debatable point as the Acallam also tells of noble female warriors. The most interesting aspect of the story is the way in which victory is achieved through the cooperation of the old Fenian warrior and the young singer, both in the service of the king.57 Unlike Gerald’s priest, or even St. Patrick, who in a slightly earlier story exiles a group of nine witches, this is a powerful union, capable of destroying the threat entirely. The she-wolves’ heads are cut off, they cannot return, and there is no hint in the text that there are other wolves waiting to take their places. Cas Corach had joined Caílte’s retinue specifically to learn about Fenian lore, and this story provides assurance that he will carry both the victory and the knowledge of the ways of Finn and the fíana into the future. As a reward for his achievements Cas Corach marries Échna, daughter of the king of Connacht. In the “final” episode, St. Patrick presides over the marriage of the King of Connacht to a woman of the Túatha Dé Danann, with the Fenian heroes among the witnesses, in a potent coming together of the legendary, historical, and Christian with what seem to be contemporary Connacht interests.58 It has been suggested that the Acallam represents a problem, that it tries to “reconcile the irreconcilable,” ultimately presenting us with the defeat of the pagan, Fenian tradition, and “the triumph” of the new Christian culture.59 This, however, is to understand the text as representative only of a tension between oral and literary culture. The Patrick

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(the church) of this text revels in the old stories, and repeatedly grants victory and blessing to their tellers,60 and it remains unclear why we should read the relationship between the two cultures as one of conflict rather than synchronicity. It has also been suggested that the stories “betray an anxious preoccupation of the makers of traditional legend: their world of reality and imagination was under attack.”61 But again, it remains unclear exactly where anxiety (as opposed to oppositionality) is to be located in the Acallam.There is a fluidity and lack of resolution to the narrative structure of the Acallam that works against the sense of a permanent new order that the text is seemingly seeking to establish. It is a postcolonial text that puts past and present, old orders and new, into dialogue with each other—just as its title suggests.The world of the Acallam is one that stands outside of, or at the very least complicates, linear narratives of time and history by showing us that different “pasts” alwaysalready exist alongside each other and within the postcolonial present.62 It is impossible to say whether or not Gerald’s story had any direct influence on the composition of the Acallam, but we can say that the voices of the latter are raised against the colonial rhetoric of the former, and that they are therefore in dialogue with each other. Moreover, several of Gerald’s stereotypes (the wild Irish warrior, the werewolf, the barbaric men of Connacht) are shown in the Acallam to be defenders of land, church, and history. Gerald ridiculed Irish king-making and the men of Connacht; the Acallam glorifies the old dynasties, especially that of Connacht. Gerald was critical of the Patrician church’s inability to instill faith in the Irish; the Acallam presents us with a Patrick who both baptizes the pagan heroes and becomes a participant in and recorder of their tales. Gerald was critical of the barbarous Irish, their warrior spirit, and the fact that they lived like and among animals; the Acallam delights in tales of battle and civility alike, and represents its heroes as living in harmony with the natural world. Gerald claims that Ireland has at last been subjugated; the Acallam demonstrates that the old order can return in a new shape. Just as the male werewolf in Gerald’s story folded back the skin of his partner to reveal the dying old woman beneath, so the author(s) of the Acallam na Senórach peeled back the layers of history to reveal the dead heroes awaiting resurrection. Notes 1. J. J. O’Meara, ed., “Giraldus Cambrensis in Topographia Hibernie:Text of the First Recension,” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 52 (1948–50): 113–77, at 119; Gerald of Wales, The History and Topography of Ireland, ed. and trans. J. J. O’Meara (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 31; Giraldi

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6. 7.

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9. 10. 11. 12.

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Cambrensis Opera, ed. J. F. Dimock (London: Longman & Co., 1867), 5: 20–1. See also J.-M. Boivin, L’Irlande au Moyen Âge: Giraud de Bari et la Topographie Hibernica (1188) (Paris: Champion; Geneva: Slatkine, 1993). All translations of the Topographia are O’Meara’s. The literature on mapping and conquest is extensive, but see in particular: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Hybrids, Monsters, Borderlands: The Bodies of Gerald of Wales,” in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 85–104;Alfred Hiatt,“The Cartographic Imagination of Thomas Elmham,” Speculum, 75 (2000): 859–86; Susan Stuart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). “Poteram quidem vt alii aurea forte munuscula, falcones, et accipitres quibus habundat insula, vestre sublimitati destinasse. Sed quia magnanimo principi parui pendenda putaui que de facili preterire possunt et perire, ea pocius curaui celsitudini vestre mitti, que non possunt amitti, illis posteritatem per uos instruere que nulla valeat etas destruere” (O’Meara, “First Recension,” 119). On this aspect of Gerald’s writings see John Gillingham,“Conquering the Barbarians:War and Chivalry in Twelfth-Century Britain and Ireland,” in The English in the Twelfth Century (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2000), 41–68; Cohen, “Hybrids, Monsters, Borderlands.” See also Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 56–7. See, for example, Steven Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonders of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Andrew Hadfield, Spenser’s Irish Experience:Wilde Fruit and Salvage Soyl (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997); Andrew Hadfield and W. Maley, “Irish Representations and English Alternatives,” in Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534–1660, ed. B. Bradshaw, A. Hadfield, and W. Maley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 1–23; R. R. Davies,“ ‘Sweet Civility’ and ‘Barbarous Rudeness,’ ” in The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles 1093–1343 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 113–41. For example Dublin, National Library of Ireland, MS 700. Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 73;Antonia Gransden,“Realistic Observation in Twelfth Century England,” Speculum, 47 (1972): 29–51. For a more theoretical analysis of the illustrations see Rhonda Knight, “Werewolves, Monsters, and Marvels: Representing Cultural Fantasies in Gerald of Wales’s ‘Topographia Hibernica,’ ” Studies in Iconology, 22 (2001): 55–86. Topographia, part III, deals with the ignorance, vice, violence, and lack of religion of the Irish. See also Gerald of Wales, Expugnatio Hibernica (The Conquest of Ireland), ed. and trans. F. X. Martin and A. B. Scott (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1978), 233. A. Dooley and H. Roe, Tales of the Elders of Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), xxiii–xxviii. Alan Lawson and Chris Tiffin, “Conclusion: Reading Difference,” in De-scribing Empire: Post-colonialism and Textuality (London: Routledge, 1994), 230–5, at 230. Carolyn Walker Bynum, “Metamorphosis, or Gerald and the Werewolf,” Speculum, 73 (1998): 987–1013; Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2001). Natal (d. 564) founded the monastery at Kilnamanagh (Kilkenny). His feast day is July 31st. His actions in this episode are in accord with Gerald’s identification of Irish saints as particularly vindictive (Topographia, chap. 83). O’Meara, “First Recension,” 143–4. Later recensions add extensive commentary on the saint’s curse, the he-wolf ’s prophecy of the success of the invasion, and a philosophical/theological debate over the nature of the transformation, none of which changes the essentials of the story (Opera, 101–7). See Brendan Smith, Colonisation and Conquest in Medieval Ireland: The English in Louth, 1170–1330 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 22–7.

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15. O’Meara, Topography, chaps. 56 (“A goat that had intercourse with a woman”) and 103 (“Many in the island have never been baptized, and have not yet heard of the teaching of the Faith”); O’Meara, “First Recension,” 146, 168–9. 16. The grant had the additional advantage of separating the problematic power bases of de Courcy and de Lacy, the strength of which was worrying John. 17. Smith, Colonisation and Conquest, 20. The Acallam opens in Louth, and the hero Caílte’s first journey is to Mellifont. 18. This is apparent in Gerald’s description of the odd customs and terror of the priest in the first recension, but is expanded into a lengthy discussion of the problems of the Irish church in later recensions. 19. Topographia, 165; Opera, 163–4; Topography, 105: “Saint Columba and Saint Brigid were contemporaries of Patrick.Their three bodies were buried in Ulster in the same city, namely Down. They were found there in our times, in the year, that is, that Lord John first came to Ireland, in a cave that had three sections. Patrick was lying in the middle, and the others were lying one on either side. John de Courci, who was in command there, took charge when these three noble treasures were, though divine revelation, found and translated.” 20. Kim McCone, “Werewolves, Cyclopes, Díberga and Fíanna: Juvinile Delinquency in Early Ireland,” Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies, 12 (1986): 1–22, at 2; Joseph Falaky Nagy, The Wisdom of the Outlaw: The Boyhood Deeds of Finn in Gaelic Narrative Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 3.Werewolves in Ireland, particularly in Ossory, appear in the mirabilia of Patrick (p. 62) and in the Book of Ballymote (p. 205). 21. Sean Duffy, Ireland in the Middle Ages (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997), 122; Annála Connacht: The Annals of Connacht AD 1224–1544, ed. A. M. Freeman (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1944), s.a. 1249. 22. Hadfield, Spencer’s Irish Experience. 23. Homi K. Bhabha, “The Other Question:The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse,” Screen, 24.6 (1983): 18–36; “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” October, 28 (1984): 125–33; Patricia Clare Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 109–17. 24. See Harriet Spiegel, “The Male Animal in the Fables of Marie de France,” in Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, ed. Clare A. Lees (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 111–26. See also Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity, 170–3. 25. Leslie Dunton-Downer, “Wolf Man,” in Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler (New York: Garland, 1997), 203–18. 26. On the larger tradition, see M. Kratz, “Fictus Lupus: The Werewolf in Christian Thought,” Classical Folia, 30–1 (1976): 57–80. On female werewolves in Ireland, see J. R. Reinhard and V. E. Hull, “Bran and Sceolang,” Speculum, 11 (1936): 42–58, esp. 53–5. 27. In, for example, Echtra mac Nechach Muigmedón and Cóir Anmann. See also Kim McCone, Pagan Past and Christian Present (Maynooth: An Sagart, 1990), 109; Lisa Bitel, Land of Women: Tales of Sex and Gender from Early Ireland (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 69–70; R. A. Breatnach, “The Lady and the King: A Theme of Irish Literature,” Studies, 42 (1953): 321–36; Pronsias Mac Cana, “Aspects of the Theme of King and Goddess in Irish Literature,” Études Celtiques, 7 (1955–57): 76–104 and 8 (1958): 59–65. 28. In Gerald’s story the pagan personification is laid to rest by the church and Gerald’s learning, but in reality the legendary process was brought about by political marriage—Richard fitzGilbert’s (Strongbow’s) marriage to Aífe, daughter of Dermot MacMurough, or Hugh de Lacy’s marriage to the daughter of the king of Connacht, for example. 29. See also John Gillingham,“Killing and Mutilating Political Enemies in the British Isles from the late Twelfth to the early Fourteenth Century: A Comparative Study,” in Britain and Ireland 900–1300: Insular Responses to Medieval European Change, ed. Brendan Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 114–34, at 116.

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30. The term is derived from the Indo-European *ueina—“to get, to conquer, to acquire (through war or hunting)” (Nagy, Wisdom of the Outlaw, 43). 31. McCone, “Werewolves,” 16; Pagan Past, 213. 32. McCone, “Werewolves;” Pagan Past, 205–19. 33. See Richard Sharpe, “Hiberno-Latin Laicus, Irish Láech, and the Devil’s Men,” Ériu, 38 (1979): 75–92, esp. 82–5; Medieval Irish Saints’ Lives: An Introduction to ‘Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 319; Joseph Falaky Nagy, Conversing with Angels and Ancients (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 296. 34. McCone, “Werewolves,” 2; Kuno Meyer, Fianaigecht (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1910); Pronsias Mac Cana, “The Influence of the Vikings on Celtic Literature,” in Proceedings of the International Congress of Celtic Studies 1959, ed. Brian Ó Cuiv (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1962), 87–93. 35. Seán Mac Airt and Gearíud Mac Niocaill, eds. The Annals of Ulster (to A.D. 1131), Part 1: Text and Translation (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1983), s.a. 847: “Toghal Innsi Locha Muinnremair la Mael Sechnaill for fianlach mar di maccaibh bais Luigne ocus Galeng ro batar oc indriudh na tuath more gentilium” (Mael Sechnaill destroyed the Island of Loch Muinremor, overcoming there a large band of wicked men of Luigni and Gailenga, who had been plundering the territories in the manner of heathens); McCone, “Werewolves,” 5. 36. McCone, “Werewolves,” 13. 37. In several of the tales fían bands are described as plundering in Britain in addition to their “wolfing” in Ireland. See, for example, Togail Bruichne Da Derga or the genealogical tale of Conall Costamail and his daughter Créidne (a ban-féindid [female Fenian]) in Corpus Genealogiarum Hiberniae, ed. M. A. O’Brien (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1962), 1: 154. 38. McCone, “Werewolves,” 6; Pagan Past, 219. 39. See, for example, Topographia, 165–7; Topography, chaps. 98–101. 40. Macgnímartha Finn (The Boyhood Deeds of Finn), ed. and trans. Kuno Meyer, Ériu, 1 (1904): 180–90; Acallam Bec (The Little Colloquy), partial edition, Douglas Hyde, “Am Agallamh Beag,” Lía Fáil, 1 (1924): 79–107; Cath Fionntrágha (The Battle of Ventry), ed. Cecile O’Rahilly (Dublin: Institute for Advanced Studies, 1962). 41. The text survives in four manuscripts: Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud 610 (fifteenth century); Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson B 487 (fifteenth century);The Book of Lismore, Library of the Duke of Devonshire (fifteenth century); Killiney, MS A iv (sixteenth century). Nagy dates the composition of the earliest recension ca. 1200: J. F. Nagy, “Compositional Concerns in the Acallam na Senórach,” in Sages, Saints and Storytellers: Celtic Studies in Honour of Professor James Carney, ed. Donnchadh Ó Corráin, Liam Breatnach, and Kim McCone (Maynooth: An Sagart, 1989), 149–58, at 149. Acallamh na Senórach, ed.Whitley Stokes, in Irische Texte, ed.W. Stokes and E.Windisch, 4th ser., vol. 1 (Leipzig: S. Herzel, 1900); Dooley and Roe, Tales. 42. Nagy, Outlaw, 53. 43. Quoted in McCone, “Werewolves,” 4. 44. See Donnchadh Ó Corráin, “Legend as Critic,” in The Writer as Witness. Literature as Historical Evidence, ed.T. Dunne (Cork: University of Cork Press, 1987), 23–38, especially 36–7. 45. Dooley and Roe, Tales, 224: n. 3:“His name derives from os ‘deer’ . . . the name may also connect him with the Osraige, the important vassal people occupying the border area between Leinster and Munster, roughly corresponding to the extent of the present diocese of Ossory.” 46. Acallamh, ll. 119–20; Dooley and Roe, Tales, 6. 47. Nagy, Angels and Ancients, 318. 48. For example, at one point the aged Caílte receives two horses and a chariot from the King of Leinster, and we are told that “these are the two horses and chariot that Caílte had in later days in Ireland,” although they do not reappear in any of the stories in this text (Dooley and Roe, Tales, 137).

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49. Dooley and Roe, Tales, 225. 50. Acallamh, ll. 50–5; Dooley and Roe, Tales, 4. 51. Dooley and Roe point out that there is no evidence for the knowledge of the British King Arthur in Ireland prior to the fourteenth century, and the use of the name in this text remains both curious and unexplained (Tales, 226: n. 8). 52. Acallamh, ll. 253–4; Dooley and Roe, Tales, 10. 53. Acallamh, ll. 297–302; Dooley and Roe, Tales, 12. 54. Dooley and Roe provide a useful chronology of the later Fenian tales in Tales, xli–xliii; see also Nagy, Outlaw, 77. 55. Acallamh, ll. 7682–3; Dooley and Roe, Tales, 213. 56. Acallamh, ll. 7702–20; Dooley and Roe, Tales, 213–14. 57. A point made by Nagy, Outlaw, 182–3, and also by Dooley and Roe, Tales, xviii. 58. The text is very much concerned with the interests of church and kingdom in Connacht (Dooley and Roe, Tales, xxi, xxix), a place of particular political turmoil in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. According to the Annals of Connacht, s.a. 1247 “the foreigners of Connacht had not experienced for many a long year the like of the war these sons of kings waged against them in this year, for they did not forbear to ravage a single tract or territory” (quoted in Duffy, Ireland, 122.) It is possible that the Acallam was written with the Connacht dynastic struggles of the Ó Conchobair in mind; however, as the date at which the Acallam was begun is so uncertain, it would be risky to attempt to establish precise connections. Ruaidrí Ua Cochobair (d. 1198) or his brother Cathal Crobdearg (d. 1224) would be the most likely patrons of the text on chronological grounds. Both men wished to retain control of the kingdom, though they went about it in very different ways, Ruaidrí fighting the English and clinging to his unreformed ways, his brother attempting to work with the English and supporting the reformed Irish church. 59. Nagy, “Compositional Concerns in the Acallam na Senórach,” at 156. 60. “Adrae buaidh ocus bennacht, a Cháilti” (May victory and blessing be yours, Caílte) is a refrain that runs throughout the Acallam. 61. Ó Corráin, “Legend as Critic,” 36. 62. By this definition the Acallam might be described as what Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has labeled a “midcolonial” text, though I am not convinced that the qualifier “mid,” any more than “post” manages to escape modernity’s commitment to linear time. See Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Midcolonial,” in Postcolonial Middle Ages, 1–17, especially 3–5.

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CHAPTER

FIVE

The Romance of MiscegeNation: Negotiating Identities in La Fille du comte de Pontieu Sharon Kinoshita

It would of course be ludicrous to fault modern critics for denying the “co-evalness” of the middle ages.1 After all, its very name defines this thousand-year chunk of Western history as that which we are not—the time before Modernity.2 Yet this delineation of a Time Before bears an uncanny resemblance to the “othering” process that, since Said, it has become our second nature to recognize, analyze, and criticize. In fact, like “the Orient,” the Middle Ages have long served as a repository of the abject and the exotic against which modernity is constructed. The coincidence is more than structural, for medievalism, like Orientalism and often linked to it, was one of the nineteenth century’s abiding obsessions.3 In recent popular usage,“medieval” is often used as shorthand for everything dark and perverse, as in the famous line from Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.4 Nor does it fare better in academic discourse. Carolyn Dinshaw, for example, notes how Homi Bhabha’s notion of the radical hybridity of postmodern identities is bought “at the cost of the medieval.”5 As capacious a thinker as Sylvia Wynter launches her deconstruction of modernity by pushing off from the static, essentializing view of a “Latin-Christian Europe” characterized by its “orthodox ChristianAristotelian physics” and its “clergy-controlled Scholastic order of knowledge.”6 That Scholasticism should signify all that is fixed, rigid, and homogenous in the European middle ages is ironic given its genealogy, jump-started by Latin Europe’s discovery of Arabic translations of Aristotle and its persistent fascination with commentators like Avicenna and Averroes.7

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In postcolonial criticism, an interesting elision of the medieval occurs in Dennis Porter’s “Orientalism and Its Problems” in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman’s Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory. In this essay, Porter takes Edward Said to task for neglecting heterogeneity and fragmentation in Orientalist writings, for “finding always the same triumphant discourse where several are frequently in conflict,” and for overlooking “how literary texts may in their play establish distance from the ideologies they seem to be reproducing.”8 Porter makes his point through an analysis of T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, showing how even this text, written from a position of privilege and authority, is “cross-hatched with historical, political, socio-economic, and psychological determinations.”9 Only the careful reader, however, will notice the ellipsis marking the place of the paragraphs deleted from Porter’s original essay—nearly five pages on Marco Polo’s Travels. In contrast to readings taking the Travels as the epitome of medieval quaintness, Porter finds “a diverse and fragmented object,” combining “historical reportage” on the Great Khan with a “down to earth interest in natural environment and natural resources, animal life, [and] food production.”10 Given the economics of the anthology form, it would be unfair to indict the editors of Colonial Discourse for the violence done to Porter’s article. And yet there is something synecdochic in this specific elision: an excision of the part (Marco Polo) for the whole (the Middle Ages) that symptomatically reveals the selective blindness of postcolonial studies, at once ignorant and dismissive of the premodern. What is lost with these eleven paragraphs? More, I think, than one more example of the way a supposedly monolithic Orientalism reveals its “heterogeneity and fragmentariness” to the first attentive reader.11 For this Venetian merchant who traveled to distant Cathay and returned to write about it is in fact a less exceptional figure than he is usually taken to be. Transcribed in Old French, the “lingua franca” of the Latin Mediterranean, the Travels gesture toward the “mobile, polyglot and virtually borderless” world hidden from us by our own impoverished conception of the “medieval” that Clifford Geertz has called a multicultural bazaar, where “Arabs, Jews, Iberians, Greeks, Indians, various sorts of Italians and Africans pursued trade and learning, private lives and public fortunes, bumping up against one another and against various sorts of political adventurers, but more or less getting along, or getting by, within broad and general rules for communication, propriety and the conduct of business.”12 In this sense, Marco Polo may be seen as one of “a group of people whose travels and breadth of experience and education seems astonishing even today, on a planet thought to be newly-shrunken.”13

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In this paper, I examine La Fille du comte de Pontieu, a thirteenthcentury text that likewise takes on Mediterranean complexities, unsettling the medieval Europe “of simple paternity and unambiguous truths and meanings” assumed in so much literary historiography.14 A prose romance called the first French “nouvelle,” it tells a strange tale of rape, attempted murder, apostasy, and reconversion.15 After five childless years, the count of Pontieu’s daughter and her husband,Thibaut de Domart set off for Santiago de Compostela to pray for a son. On the road, they are ambushed by brigands who tie up the husband and rape the wife. Once they’ve gone, the lady, instead of freeing her husband, tries to kill him. Back home, her father, upon hearing what happened, seals his daughter in a barrel and casts her into the sea. Rescued by passing merchants who give her to the Saracen sultan of Aumarie, she converts to his faith, marries him, and bears him a son and a daughter. One day, the lady’s father, brother, and former husband are brought to Aumarie as captives.Visiting them in their prison, the sultana, without revealing her identity, ascertains how strongly they regret the way they have treated her. Disclosing who she is, she then engineers their escape by telling the sultan she is pregnant and requires a change of air. Setting off by sea, the sultana, her son, and the three Christians land in Brindisi and make their way to Rome, where the pope receives the lady back into the Christian faith, baptizes her son, and reconfirms her marriage to Thibaut.Together they have two sons, the eventual heirs to Pontieu and Thibaut’s county of St. Pol. Meanwhile, the daughter left behind in Aumarie grows into a great beauty known as “la belle Captive.” Married to a valiant Turk named Malakin of Baudas, she gives birth to a daughter, who in turn becomes the mother of Saladin the Courtly. Place names like Pontieu, St. Pol and Domart situate La Fille in the northeastern borderlands between France and the German Empire.16 Yet like Floire et Blancheflor (which it closely resembles), La Fille uses the Santiago trail as a plot device to transport its titular heroine to medieval Iberia, cast as an imaginary space of circulation and hybridity in which military confrontation gives way to mercantile exchange, and the scandals besetting feudal society are resolved in an out-landish play of conversion and miscegeNation.17 In this ideological remapping, religion is less a fixed identity than a strategic position within the feudal politics of lineage: cast out of feudal society, the count’s daughter is remade as a Saracen queen. Shifting our attention from roots to routes, La Fille articulates a medieval vision of difference that challenges the reassuring simplicity of Roland’s battlefield declaration, “Pagans are wrong and Christians are right.”18

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At the beginning of La Fille lies the road: the pilgrimage trail to Santiago de Compostela, in the northwest corner of the Iberian peninsula.19 The cult of Saint James developed in the early ninth century, when the apostle’s remains were “discovered” by a monk named Pelagius. In the wake of the Christian victory at Clavijo (844), the apostle earned the epithet “Moor killer,” becoming patron saint of the Spanish Reconquest. By the turn of the twelfth century, Santiago had become one of Christendom’s premier pilgrimage sites. Four distinct itineraries developed, converging in the Pyrenees and continuing westward to Compostela. By the 1130s, this camino francés (French road) even had its own guidebook, dispensing travelers’ advice and describing tourist attractions along the way.20 In Iberia, the northerners crossing the Pyrenees in ever-greater numbers encountered a land where the line between self and other could not be mapped cleanly onto the Saracen–Christian divide. In lands recently captured from the Muslims, they would have marveled at the beauties of a highly refined civilization. Perhaps more unsettling was the disconcerting mix of the familiar and the strange: communities of Arabic-speaking Christians living alongside Muslims and Jews, sometimes in conflict but mostly in peaceful accommodation; Christian knights fighting for Muslim kings;21 a Romance-speaking Murcian lord who “dressed, rode, ate, and fought like a westerner;”22 and even a Castilian king who named his son by a Muslim concubine his heir.23 Such transculturation, common in medieval Mediterranean cultures, would have provoked varying degrees of “culture shock” in northerners from Normandy, Anjou, Champagne, Burgundy, and beyond. Even Christian Spain, with its Mozarabic liturgy and Visigothic hand, would have seemed slightly strange to northerners accustomed to the more homogenized culture produced by Charlemagne’s programs of standardization.24 The journey into Spain that opens our tale is born out of a sense of genealogical crisis. The count of Pontieu has given his daughter to Thibaut de Domart, a landless youth (“povres bacelers”). Though the marriage is happy, it is childless: “they lived together five full years, but it didn’t please God to give them an heir, which troubled everyone” (ll. 34–6). This anxiety over their sterility inaugurates a preoccupation with genealogy that pervades the text. One night, Thibaut—perhaps inspired by the miracle of a childless Frenchwoman who produces a son after her husband’s pilgrimage to Compostela—conceives the idea of appealing to “monsengneur saint Jake” (ll. 39–40).25 At first, he intends to go alone; only by means of a rash boon is his wife able to elicit her husband’s permission to accompany him.

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In Floire et Blancheflor, pilgrims en route to Santiago are ambushed by the pagan king Felix of Naples. In La Fille, Thibaut and his wife are attacked by common bandits: eight men “armed like thieves, on big horses, each with a lance in his hand” (ll. 110–1) who epitomize the disorders internal to Latin Christendom.Though unarmed,Thibaut wrests a sword from one of his assailants and kills three of them before being subdued and shackled. Enraged at the death of their comrades and kinsmen, four of the survivors each demand the wife for his own, presumably as a hostage or slave. The fifth, however, proposes something quite different: “ ‘Lords, we have little to gain by keeping her. Rather, let’s take her into the forest and have our will with her [faisons de li nos volentés], then put her back on the road and let her go.’ This is what they did, and brought her back to the road” (ll. 140–4). In Old French, sexual violence against women usually takes highly conventional forms, euphemized as the knight’s “seduction” of the peasant shepherdess (in the lyric pastourelle) or sublimated as ritualized abduction. Here, however, the five surviving knights “have their will” with Thibaut’s wife in his presence.The violation of the count’s daughter is an assault on feudal society, illustrating the fragility of the public order nobles were supposed to maintain and compromising the women through whom they conducted their politics of lineage.A moment later, however, the enormity of the act is left in abeyance when the lady, inexplicably, turns on her husband: And my lord Thibaut saw her and said:“Lady, by God, untie me, for these brambles are hurting me.” The lady saw a sword belonging to one of the slain brigands lying there, picked it up and approached my lord Thibaut, saying: “Lord, I will deliver you.” Then she tried to run him through. He saw the blow coming and braced himself, and jerked around so that his hands and back were on top. And she struck him in such a way that she wounded him on the arms and cut the straps. And feeling his hands freed, he drew them in, broke the bonds, jumped to his feet, and said: “Dame, so please God, you will not kill me today!” And she said, “Surely, lord, that pains me.” And he took the sword from her, put his hand on her shoulder, and led her back by the road they had come on. (ll. 145–59) Without a word of reproach,Thibaut deposits his wife in a nearby abbey and completes the pilgrimage to Santiago alone, collecting her on his return journey. Back in Pontieu, they resume their former life, “except that he didn’t lie in her bed” (l. 180).

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Thibaut’s reluctance to sleep with his wife underscores the paradoxicality of his predicament. They had gone on pilgrimage to pray for a child; but now, any child the lady might bear (miraculous or otherwise) would be tainted by the suspicion of illegitimacy. Curiously, Thibaut reveals his story in small stages, answering the count’s request for “some adventure you saw or heard of ” (ll. 187–8) with a terse account of what had befallen “a knight and a lady” (ll. 194–5) whom he declines to name. Incredulous that the “knight” had returned home with his wife, the count exclaims: “ ‘Thibaut, that knight was of another mind than I, for, by the faith I owe you, I would have hanged her from the branch of a tree by the braids or a briar stem or the leather strap itself.’ ‘Lord,’ says my lord Thibaut, ‘then the affair would not have been as credible as it will be when the lady herself bears witness to it’ ” (ll. 199–205). As it dawns on the count that the “lady” in question is his own daughter, he grimly assures Thibaut that he will be avenged. Completely ignoring the scandal of her rape, her father fixes instead on her attack on her husband: “Angry as he was, he summoned the lady and asked if what my lord Thibaut had said were true. And she asked, ‘What?’ ‘That you tried to kill him.’‘Lord,’ she said,‘yes.’‘Why did you want to do that?’ ‘Lord,’ she said, ‘for such a reason that I’m still sorry I didn’t do it [pour çou q’encore me poise ke jo ne le fis]’ ” (ll. 210–16). Her value in the politics of lineage already doubly compromised by her childlessness and her rape, the lady compounds her liability through her unexplained violence. In her refusal to account for or repent of her action, the lady confirms her rupture with the feudal patriarchal order. Over the protests of both his son and his son-in-law, the count orders his daughter sealed in a barrel and thrown into the sea. Cast out of her homeland, the lady literally floats from feudal Europe into a mercantile Mediterranean of long-distance trade and shared cultural forms. The barrel containing her crosses the path of “a merchant ship coming from Flanders, heading for Saracen lands for profit” (ll. 237–8). Though regular maritime routes between Flanders and the Mediterranean still lay a half century in the future, the curious merchants who retrieve the cask surely evoke the Venetian, Pisan,Amalfitani, and Genoese traders who had frequented Muslim lands since before the millennium.26 Significantly, the merchants who rescue the lady identify themselves by neither “nationality” nor religion, but profession: “The ship continued on until it came to Almería [Aumarie], and when they had reached port, galleys came to meet them and asked them who they were, and they said: ‘We are merchants [Marceant somes]’ They had warrants from those in authority allowing them to go everywhere in safety. They

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took the lady ashore, and asked each other what they should do with her. One said they should sell her there, and another said, ‘If you take my advice, we would make a present of her to the sultan of Almería, which would improve our business’ ” (ll. 254–64, emphases added). Moving in a pragmatic world of commerce and negotiated concessions, these merchants are experienced enough to know the importance of maintaining good relations with the sultan of Almería, and savvy enough to know how to do it. Praised by Muslim geographers as the “Gateway to the East, the Key to Profit, the City in the Land of Silver,” Almería, on the southeastern coast of Spain, was a prosperous seaport linking Muslim Iberia to the Maghreb, Egypt, Syria, and Latin Europe.27 In the twelfth century, its wondrous silks were richly prized in Latin Europe, where they were used for ceremonial clothes and ecclesiastical vestments.28 The trade in brocades and other commodities made Almería so prosperous that, in the words of the Muslim geographer al-Idrîsi, “there were no people richer or more commercial than its inhabitants, nor merchants with more expertise in all types of merchandise” in all al-Andalus.29 In 1147, the Castilians and the Genoese captured the city, holding it for ten years before it was conquered by the Almohads during their lightning sweep across al-Andalus.30 Nevertheless, a decade of Latin rule had solidified Almería’s place in Latin Europe’s imagination. In Chrétien de Troyes’s Cligés (ca. 1180), even a prince accustomed to the wealth of the Arthurian and Byzantine courts takes Almería as the height of splendor and Andalusian silk as the currency in which to measure the inestimable joy he feels in the presence of his sweetheart Fénice:“had he been duke of Almería, of Morocco, or Tudela, he wouldn’t have given a cenele against his present bliss.”31 This is the fabulous world into which the count of Pontieu’s daughter is swept as an anonymous slave. II. Slavery, as Olivia Remie Constable writes, was “a very real part of both Christian and Muslim life in the medieval Mediterranean world,” an important part of “the commercial side of interfaith relations.”32 In al-Andalus, female slaves—used as domestic servants, musicians, dancers, and concubines—were highly prized and often well treated.33 For the daughter of the count of Pontieu, disowned by her father and expelled from her homeland, enslavement sets off an astounding reversal of fortune. Taken by her beauty, the sultan, “ki jovenes hom estoit” (who was a young man) (ll. 265–6),“began to desire and love her, and (through

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a translator) asked her to tell him what lineage she belonged to. She refused to say anything about it. From what he saw in her, he thought she must be noble; he asked whether she were Christian and told her, if she would abandon her faith [sa loi laisier], that he would marry her [il le prenderoit]” (ll. 272–8). Though Andalusian Muslims routinely took Christian wives and concubines without obliging them to convert,34 La Fille imagines the lady’s embrace of the sultan’s faith as a precondition of her marriage. His readiness to take a bride of unknown lineage is cast as the impetuosity of a youth more ruled by desire than reason.35 In contrast, the lady, unmoored from all family connections and knowing what it meant to be raped, quickly and strategically weighs her choices: “Seeing that it would be better to act out of love [par amours] rather than by force [par force], told him she would do it” (ll. 278–9). The lady’s decision to accept the sultan’s suit par amours represents a complex reversal of the epic motif of the Saracen queen, in which a pagan woman’s conversion to Christianity symbolically completes the Frankish conquest of her land.36 This motif, I have suggested, was particularly attractive for representing the Franks’ contact with advanced Mediterranean cultures that had little to gain from conversion.37 They could be seduced only in the imagination, in the figure of the bold princess ready to exchange a royal Saracen husband for a brave Christian count.Thus, when the count’s daughter freely chooses conversion out of a strategic sense of self-interest, she turns the tables on the feudal patriarchy that had discarded her.38 Declining to reveal her lineage she is now rejecting (“nule verité n’en vaut dire”), she reinvents herself as a Saracen queen. In the conventional language of the chanson de geste, the Saracen queen is indistinguishable from any beautiful woman of high station. This absence of racializing markers has sometimes been read as an ethnocentric erasure of racial and cultural difference.39 History, however, suggests an alternate interpretation: in al-Andalus, with its palimpsest of Phoenician, Greek, Roman, Visigothic, Arabic, Berber, Jewish, northern European, and black African populations, physical appearance was a notoriously unreliable sign of religion.The great caliph ’Abd al-Rahman III, for example, had red hair, light skin, and blue eyes, and is reported to have dyed his hair black “to make himself look more like an Arab.”40 In 1215, just three years after the Castilian-Aragonese victory at Las Navas de Tolosa (1212) brought new stretches of al-Andalus under Christian rule, the Fourth Lateran Council mandated that Jews and Saracens living in Christian lands wear distinctive dress, lest “through error Christians have relations with the women of Jews or Saracens, and Jews

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and Saracens with Christian women.” In Iberia, such cases of mistaken religious identity occur well into the fourteenth century attesting to “a general inability to distinguish Muslims from Christians solely by means of appearance.”42 The impulse to correlate religious faith with somatic features, it turns out, reveals more about modern presuppositions than about lived medieval realities. La Fille pushes questions of identity and cultural difference to their limit. In an age when nobles “defined themselves by their families” and religion “meant membership [in] a community much more than adherence to a set of principles or beliefs,” the lady’s willing embrace of the sultan and his faith is a self-canceling act.43 Expelled from her home, she abandons the last vestige of her former identity. Or does she? To become Muslim requires only the enunciation of the profession of the faith; whether the audience of La Fille knew this or not, the absence of any overt ritual marking the lady’s conversion is striking. At the end of La Chanson de Roland, the pagan queen Bramimonde is christened in the waters of Aix and renamed Juliane (ll. 3985–6). The count’s daughter, however, never had a proper name in the first place, and is never given a new one. Instead, her assimilation to her new society is figured by the intertwined facts of her immediate fecundity and her quick mastery of the Saracen tongue:“she had been with him only a short time when she conceived and had a son. She spent time with the people and came to speak and understand Saracen [sarrasinois]. And a little while later she had a daughter.Thus she was with the sultan some two and a half years, and understood Saracen and spoke it very well” (ll. 281–6). Since lineage was the language in which the feudal nobility articulated its legitimacy, negotiated its alliances, and staked its political claims, the birth of two children in such quick succession confirms the “felicity” of the lady’s new marriage.44 In the high middle ages, the link between genealogical continuity and political stability can hardly be overstated: the lack of direct heirs or the accession of women or minors commonly occasioned unrest and confusion.45 Having failed to provide Thibaut de Domart with an heir, the count’s daughter now secures the sultan’s lineage and confirms her place as his queen. Like the Christian knights serving the Muslim kings of al-Andalus, she demonstrates the porousness of the confessional divide even as she figures Christendom’s loss as pagandom’s gain. Nevertheless, casting linguistic fluency as the privileged mark of assimilation opens a space of more radical indeterminacy. In twelfthcentury French literature, the explicit marking of linguistic difference is rare: in La Chanson de Roland, Christians and Saracens require no

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go-betweens to proffer treaties, plot conspiracies, or harangue each other in battle. So La Fille’s insistence on the lady’s quick mastery of “sarrasinois” underscores her cultural assimilation. Unlike conversion, however, bilingualism does not demand that one relinquish the old in order to acquire the new. The confusion this can entail surfaces in a remarkable story from a hisba manual detailing the scams unscrupulous merchants perpetrated on unsuspecting clients.46 In Olivia Remie Constable’s paraphrase: a buyer from out of town arrived in Cordoba and purchased a Christian slave girl whom, he was assured, had been recently acquired from the frontier regions. This was demonstrated by the fact that she only spoke a northern language. Because she had been recently imported, he paid an exorbitant price, after which he bought beautiful clothes for her and prepared to take her home. However, at this point she revealed—in fluent Arabic—that she was actually a free Muslim woman, and threatened to take him before a judge unless he did as she instructed. “If you fear [losing] your money,” she counseled, “take me to Almeria, where you can increase what you originally paid [because] Almeria is a terminus for ships and a center for merchants and travelers.” The implication, here, was that foreign merchants would pay a higher price to buy a slave for export to other regions of the Islamic world. When the duped buyer tried to complain to the original seller, the latter claimed to have left the business. Finding himself trapped, the man heeded his slave’s advice, allowed her to keep her new finery, took her to Almeria, and sold her at a profit—presumably handing over a certain amount of this money to her.47 Besides calling attention to Almería’s importance as a center of the slave trade, this episode undermines the “either/or” binary underpinning conversion. Rather, bilingualism introduces the more unsettling logic of the “both/and”: the lady’s “northern language” marks her as Christian at the same time that her “fluent Arabic” identifies her as Muslim. This ambivalence reminds us that in medieval Iberia, language—like physical appearance—was an unreliable predictor of religion. Four centuries of convivencia had produced a multilingual society in which Latin, Hebrew, vernacular Romance, Berber, and Arabic coexisted. Exemplary here is the complaint of a ninth-century bishop of Córdoba that while few Christians could write passable Latin, many could speak and compose poetry in Arabic “with greater art than the Arabs themselves.”48

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Even more astounding is the way this example inverts the power hierarchy dividing masters and slaves.49 Originally marked as the silent object of exchange, the bilingual woman turns the tables on her owner, threatening him with judicial punishment (Muslims were prohibited from enslaving fellow Muslims), not in order to gain her freedom, but to orchestrate and profit from her own subsequent resale. “Can the subaltern speak?”50 The answer is “yes,” and in two languages to boot: the bilingual woman disrupts binary difference. In La Fille, the sultana’s bilingualism links her past and her present. When fortune brings the lady’s father, husband, and brother to Almería as captives, she trades on her command of her native tongue to secure the sultan’s permission to see him: “Lord, I speak French, and would speak with th[ese] poor m[e]n, if it pleased you” (ll. 350–1).To the captives, however, she presents herself not as their long-lost daughter, wife, and sister, but for all intents and purposes as a Saracen queen: “I am Saracen [Je sui Sarrasine] and know [magical] arts; and I tell you that you have never been closer to a shameful death than you are now, if you don’t tell me the truth; I will know if what you are saying is true: what became of your daughter, who was married to this knight?” (ll. 425–31). Her declaration, “Je sui Sarrasine,” seems part of a carefully crafted performance, playing on the stereotype of the foreign enchantress, the better to intimidate the prisoners. Her father, who has still not recognized her, recounts how his daughter had tried to kill her husband. Still not revealing her identity, she sighs:“Ah! . . . I know why she wanted to kill him . . . for the great shame he had seen her suffer” (ll. 462–5). To the count’s protest that “he never would have treated her any worse on account of it” (ll. 468–70), the sultana dryly replies,“Lord, that’s not what she thought” (ll. 470–1). The enigma of the lady’s earlier behavior is explained by the gendered gap between her anxiety over her rape and her father’s assertion that it would have changed nothing at all. Her dynastic value already compromised by “the delay of the heir she could not produce” (l. 436), the lady had reacted in desperate revolt against women’s devaluation in the feudal politics of lineage. By refashioning herself as sultana, the lady erases the triple scandal of her sterility, her rape, and her attack on Thibaut. Revalorized by her sojourn in al-Andalus, she becomes a proud Saracen queen whose defection would signal Latin Christendom’s superiority over Islam. Unlike Bramimonde or Orable, however, she is seduced neither by Christian love nor by the promise of a warrior’s devotion.What she demands is the prisoner’s heartfelt contrition for the “cruel vengence” (l. 475) they had done her. If you learned the lady had escaped her ordeal and you could

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have news of her, the sultana asks them, what would you say? One after another, father, husband, and brother assure her that nothing in the world could make them happier:“ ‘Lady,’ said the count,‘I would hardly be as happy to be released from this prison and have twice the land I ever had!’‘Lady,’ said my lord Thibaut,‘I would hardly be as happy to have the most beautiful lady in the world and to have the kingdom of France along with her!’ ‘Certainly, lady,’ said the young man, ‘no one could give me or promise me anything that would make me as happy!’ ” (ll. 478–86). At this, the lady breaks down in tears and reveals her identity.Yet even as they rejoice, she enjoins them to secrecy: “When they heard this . . . and began to bow before her, she stopped them and said: ‘I am Saracen [Je sui Sarrasine], and ask you not to show any joy over anything you’ve heard, but simply go on as before and leave everything to me’ ” (ll. 495–8). Strikingly, the lady repeats the words she used at the outset: “Je sui Sarrasine.” Here, however, the line between performance and mimicry seems too close to call. On the one hand, she warns the prisoners not to betray her while promising to use her position to their advantage; on the other, she emphasizes that her present identity is not simply a disguise: whatever else she is or has been, she is now also a Saracen queen. In his memoirs, Usamah ibn Munqidh, lord of Shayzar (Caesaria) in northern Syria, tells the story of a captive Christian his father had sent as a gift to a friend:“The maid suited Shihab-al-Din, and he was pleased with her. He took her to himself and she bore him a boy, whom he called Badran . . . On his father’s death, Badran became the governor of the town and its people, his mother being the real power. She entered into conspiracy with a band of men and let herself down from the castle by a rope. The band took her to Saruj, which belonged at that time to the Franks. There she married a Frankish shoemaker, while her son was the lord of the Castle of Ja’bar.” For Usamah, the woman’s decision to relinquish a position of honor and power to marry a shoemaker exemplifies Frankish intransigence: “The Franks (may Allah’s curse be upon them!) are an accursed race, the members of which do not assimilate except with their own kin.”51 In a way, the course our heroine adopts confirms this perception: though loved by the sultan and the mother of his heir, she uses her influence to engineer an escape for herself and the prisoners. Saying she needs a change of air, she arranges a sea voyage, taking the three along for “company” and “protection.” Unlike Usamah’s lady, however, she takes her Saracen son with her. Cognizant of the loss this represents to her husband, she sends the ship back to Almería, saying:“I’ve taken much from the sultan in taking from him my

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person and his son, and don’t wish to take anything else from him” (ll. 563–5). Despite her flight, however, the lady’s assertion “Je sui Sarrasine” is no mere act; even as their ship nears Brindisi, she remains wary of her Christian kin. Reminding them she is still free to return to Almería, she demands assurances for the safety of her Saracen son: “ ‘Lords,’ she said, ‘consider my son: what will we do with him?’ ‘Lady, may he be welcomed with great profit and honor’ ” (ll. 559–62). Only then does she definitively decide to accompany her companions. They proceed to Rome, where the pope hears their confession and “baptize[s] the child Guillaume. Then, he restore[s] the lady to true Christianity, and confirm[s] her and her husband in true marriage, and impose[s] penance on each one for his or her misdeeds” (ll. 577–81). Though the lady is restored to her religion, family, and rank, this “happy ending” is far from a return to the status quo ante. Where her original marriage had been contracted as a feudal alliance, her remarriage is legitimized not just by clerical but by papal authority.52 Having been cast out of French feudal society, she is now reintegrated into a Christian world where secular practices have given way to ecclesiastical rule. Where the historical Santiago trail sought to incorporate Christian Iberia under Roman rule, in La Fille it serves to discipline an independent and recalcitrant feudal nobility. III. Since genealogy provides medieval narratives with a “logic of lineal relations [that] unifies the events recounted and conditions textual closure,” the birth of two sons to the count’s daughter seems to signal the story’s “happy ending”:53 “Lord Thibaut, by God’s will, had two sons by his wife.The count’s son died and was greatly mourned, and the count of Saint Pol was still alive. Now Lord Thibaut’s children were in expectation of two countships, to which they succeeded in the end” (ll. 598–603). His hypergamic marriage to the count of Pontieu’s daughter, previously compromised by their failure to produce an heir, is now doubly assured: henceforward Thibaut’s descendants will control the important feudal honors of Pontieu and Saint Pol.54 The noble but relatively humble Thibaut de Domart thus realizes the fondest dream of chivalric youth—not by excelling at arms, but by taking back the wife who had previously tried to kill him.55 In the zero-sum game of feudal politics, however,Thibaut succeeds at his stepson’s expense. Taken from his homeland and baptized a Christian,

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William is the old count’s first-born grandson and, by the logic of primogeniture, should succeed to his grandfather’s honor. Yet he is passed over in favor of his younger half-brother of “pure” Christian lineage, receiving as a consolation prize a small Norman barony from a match engineered by his grandfather:56 “The count of Pontieu attended a great feast, where there was a nobleman from Normandy called my lord Raoul de Préaux [Praiax].This Raoul had a very beautiful daughter.The count of Pontieu negotiated his grandson William’s marriage to his daughter, for this Raoul had no other heir [car chis Raous n’avoit plus d’oirs].William married her and became lord of Préaux” (ll. 591–8). This transformation of a potential “William of Pontieu” into “William of Préaux,” is striking since “Guillaume” was the historical count of Pontieu who married (in 1194) Richard the Lionheart’s cast-off fiancée, the French king’s sister Alice.57 (Their daughter Marie was therefore the historical “fille du comte de Pontieu.”58 ) Guillaume de Préaux, in contrast, was a Norman crusader who used his knowledge of Arabic to save King Richard from capture. Ambushed outside Jaffa in 1191, the king would have been captured had the Turks recognized him. But in the mêlée, “one of the king’s companions named William des Préaux shouted out loudly in the Saracen language that he was the melech!— which means king. The Turks believed William, seized him immediately and led him away as a prisoner to their army.”59 In this vertiginous play between history and fiction, La Fille imputes a Saracen past to a crusader remembered for his strategic use of Arabic and his stint as a prisoner of war. In both cases, “Guillaume” figures a mutability that paradoxically confirms a fixed feudal order: the vassal who passes as a king and ends up a captive, the converted Saracen who trades the splendor of Almería for the obscurity of Préaux. If Guillaume’s fate reinscribes Christian–Saracen difference even as it purports to efface it, that of the sultana’s daughter underscores the abiding trauma of gender. Learning of his wife’s flight, the sultan “loved less the daughter who was left; nevertheless, she grew and became very beautiful” (ll. 586–8), becoming known as “the Fair Captive” (la Bele Cetive) (l. 608). When she wins the heart of Malakin of Baghdad, her father is glad to be rid of her: she is married off and, in the tale’s tantalizing epilogue, becomes the maternal grandmother of “Saladin the courtly” (l. 621).60 Making Saladin the count of Pontieu’s great-greatgrandson has been read as an attempt to attenuate the humiliation of the crusaders’ loss of Jerusalem in 1187.61 However, it could also be seen as the sultan’s revenge on Latin Christendom for the loss of his heir; or again, as the vindication of underloved daughters: the price exacted from

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feudal Europe for its homosocial exclusion of women at home and abroad. This indeterminacy reminds us that beneath our tale’s felicitous end lurks a barely concealed history of crisis: the lineages of Pontieu, St. Pol, Almería, and Préaux all fail in the direct male line. Haunted by a series of dynastic disasters—sterility, rape, the death of one son, and the apostasy of another—La Fille hints at how much Philip Augustus benefited from a similar sequence of genealogical misfortunes that befell a beleaguered Franco-Flemish nobility.62 La Fille resolves these internal crises by expelling the problematic woman into Saracen Spain. As sultana of Almería, she is available to reenter Latin Christendom as a Saracen queen who reinvigorates feudal society through her conversion and reconfirms its values through the difference she is willing to leave behind. In his article “La Compromission,” Alexandre Leupin argues that the parodic Pèlerinage de Charlemagne corroded epic discourse from within, toppling Charlemagne’s phallogocentric regime even as the blustery Franks toppled the pillars of the Byzantine king’s magnificent palace. La Fille, I suggest, does something similar to the paradigm of the Saracen princess: inhabiting it from within, pushing it to excess, stripping it of its ideological power. The lines of fracture appear not around the sultana but her son, whose displacement from the Pontieu succession points to a lingering trace of the difference his conversion was meant to efface. If the epic motif of the Saracen queen affirms the assimilationist power of the feudal Christian order, the romance of the Saracen prince leaves as its ideological residue the hapless Guillaume de Préaux, whose historical destiny it is to be mistaken for the crusader king Richard. In this confused historical palimpsest, La Fille imagines an out-landish expedient for restoring genealogical rectitude—one that undermines the feudal politics of lineage even as it saves it. Conclusions It is one thing to uncover (as several recent studies brilliantly do) how decisively medieval studies were shaped by nineteenth-century nationalisms and orientalism, and another to say how this insight could or should inflect our critical practice.63 Kathleen Biddick cautions against the hazy romanticism of casting the European middle ages as a Golden Age of peaceful coexistence, warning that behind scenarios of convivencia lurk repressed histories of trauma and violence.64 Denying these histories, she suggests, circumscribes the middle ages as a site of fantasy and nostalgia, at the price of ignoring the continuities between medieval and

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modern barbarism. Her point is certainly well taken. Nevertheless, there was, I think, something distinctive about the high medieval Mediterranean: between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, multilingual and multiconfessional societies flourished in Fatimid Egypt, Norman Sicily, and the Byzantine Empire as well as the Iberian peninsula. It is true that, from the sack of Jerusalem (1099) to the sack of Constantinople (1204), the long twelfth century was defined by the Crusades. And yet, this was still a time “before European hegemony.”65 As Dennis Porter writes: “in the era before European ascendancy the assumption of European superiority is not automatic even where the form of literary representation involved is that of European subject to Eastern object, of observer to observed.” Even in the late thirteenth century,“it was the European who was in awe of Eastern power and Eastern armies and not vice versa.”66 Thus when Dante places Mohammed in Hell, it is not, as Said would have it, a moment of “Eurocentrism” but mere banal provincialism: an expression of ignorance and fear rather than an assertion of intrinsic European superiority of the kind that becomes imaginable only in the long sixteenth century, with the global expansion of European commercial capitalism.67 Composed in the early thirteenth century, La Fille invites us to recognize and theorize these pre-Eurocentric modalities of difference. To the Roland’s vision of apocalyptic confrontation, it counterposes a narrative of deviance: pilgrimages gone astray, plots that swerve through a mercantile Mediterranean unconstrained by national borders and simple definitions. Its representation of a heterogeneous and contestatory middle ages challenges us to make good on our avowed critical desire to see beyond the binary, to encounter an “Other” whose alterity may reside precisely in its different conception of difference. La Fille’s attribution “of a Christian bloodline to . . . Saladin, and of a Saracen bloodline to the Picard descendants of Raoul de Préaux” cannot be read as unproblematically promoting “a powerful sense of the positive potential of interethnic exchange and cultural diversity.”68 Yet by imagining a case of miscegeNation69 that literally contests the notion of “a medieval Europe of simple paternity and unambiguous truths and meanings,” it exposes the poverty of concepts of history and identity determined by the Procrustean borders of the state, encouraging us to rethink a literary history (anachronistically) overdetermined by nationalist claims, exigencies, and traditions. By delinking the study of medieval texts from the nineteenth-century obsession with nationalism and colonial expansion, we uncover aspects of the premodern that not only unsettle the unreflective construction of modernity over and against an inert medieval

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Other, but also rewrite histories of the Manichaean view of Christian– Muslim relations that, all too dismayingly, continue to resonate into the twenty-first century. Notes I thank Will Crooke and Carla Freccero for their suggestions, and Brian Catlos for his help on medieval Iberia.This project was supported by a grant from the Institute for Humanities Research at the University of California, Santa Cruz. 1. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), Ch. 2. 2. See Alexandre Leupin, “The Middle Ages, the Other,” Diacritics, 13: 3 (1983): 22–31, at 28–9. 3. On the connections among nineteenth-century medievalism, Orientalism, and colonialism, see Elizabeth Siberry, The New Crusaders: Images of the Crusades in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). 4. Carolyn Dinshaw,“Coda: Getting Medieval: Pulp Fiction, Foucault, and the Uses of the Past,” in Getting Medieval (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 183–206, at 189. 5. Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, 16. 6. Sylvia Wynter, “Columbus, the Ocean Blue, and that Fables the Stir the Mind,” in Poetics of the Americas, ed. Bainard Cowan and Jefferson Humphries (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 141–63, at 142, 143, 148. 7. On the under-recognition of the Arabic contribution to medieval European thought, see Peter O’Brien, “Islamic Civilisation’s Role in the Waning of the European Middle Ages,” Medieval History Journal, 2 (1999): 387–404. 8. Porter’s critique is not unique. See, for example, James Clifford on the “oppressive systematicity” of Said’s own writing: “On Orientalism,” in Predicaments of Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 255–76, at 257. 9. Dennis Porter, “Orientalism and Its Problems,” in Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 150–61, at 154. 10. Dennis Porter, “Orientalism and Its Problems,” in The Politics of Theory, ed. Francis Barker et al. (Colchester: University of Essex, 1983), 179–93. 11. Porter, “Orientalism,” in Politics of Theory, 154. 12. Clifford Geertz, “In an Antique Land” (review article), The New Republic, 209.8–9 (August 23, 1993), 38. 13. Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land (New York:Vintage, 1994), 55. Ghosh refers to Jewish merchants in the India trade, whose activities S. D. Goitein has reconstructed from the accidental archive of the Cairo Geniza:“Letters and Documents from the India Trade,” in Studies in Islamic History and Institutions (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1966), 329–50. 14. María Rosa Menocal, “Signs of the Times: Self, Other and History in Aucassin,” in Romanic Review, 80 (1989): 497–511, at 499. 15. The text (from ca. 1220) survives in a single late thirteenth-century manuscript, B.N. fr. 25462. La Fille du Comte de Pontieu: Nouvelle du XIIIe siècle, ed. Clovis Brunel (Paris: Champion, 1926), my translations. 16. The sites mentioned in the text all fall between Rouen and St. Pol. The dialect and some manuscript notations further localize it to the Boulonnais (La Fille, vi, ix). This is the region where vernacular prose first emerges, in historiographical translations commissioned by Franco-Flemish barons united by their resistance to the expansionist French king Philip Augustus (1180–1223). Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose

128 17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22. 23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

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Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). I use “Ponthieu” to refer to the historical county and “Pontieu” for its fictional counterpart. In Floire et Blancheflor, the daughter of a Frenchwoman abducted on the Santiago trail is beloved by the Saracen prince Floire, who marries her and converts to Christianity for her sake.Their daughter is Charlemagne’s mother, Berthe aux Grands Pieds. Le Conte de Floire et Blancheflor, ed. Jean-Luc Leclanche (Paris: Champion, 1983). See my “In the Beginning was the Road: ‘Floire et Blancheflor’ and the Politics of Translatio,” The Medieval Translator, 8 (forthcoming). “Paien unt tort e chrestïens unt dreit.” See La Chanson de Roland, ed. Ian Short (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1990), l. 1015. For a counterreading, see my “ ‘Pagans are wrong and Christians are right’: Gender, Alterity and Nation in the ‘Chanson de Roland,’ ” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 31 (2001): 79–111. I allude here to Joseph Bédier’s famous line “Au commencement était la route,” summarizing his theory on the role the Santiago pilgrimage trail played in Roland’s composition. Bédier, Les Légendes épiques, 3rd ed. (Paris: Champion, 1926), 3: 367. The Pilgrim’s Guide was the fifth part of the five-volume Liber Sancti Jacobi, called the Codex Calixtinus from an apocryphal preface attributed to Calixtus II. The Pilgrim’s Guide to Santiago de Compostela: A Critical Edition, ed. Paula Gerson (London: Harvey Miller, 1998). Most famously, Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, the Castilian noble who served the king of Zaragoza before conquering Valencia for himself. Richard Fletcher, The Quest for El Cid (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Compare Reverter, captured by Muslims in the 1130s, who became an important Almoravid commander in North Africa. Hugh Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal (London: Longman, 1996), 184. Muhammed ibn Mardanish of Murcia and Valencia (Fletcher, Moorish Spain, 121). The widowed daughter-in-law of al-Mutamid of Seville, Zaida became Alfonso VI’s mistress and bore him a son, Sancho, ca. 1093. Alfonso later recognized Sancho (1102) and named him his heir (1107), legitimizing him by marrying Zaida. Sancho Alfónsez died at the battle of Uclés (1108). Bernard F. Reilly, The Kingdom of León-Castilla under King Alfonso VI, 1065–1109 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 234, 240, 324, 338–40, 350, 353. Including the use of the Roman liturgy and the Carolingian miniscule. Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950–1350 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). On the uneven “Europeanization” of medieval Iberia, see Santiago, Saint-Denis, and Saint Peter: The Reception of the Roman Liturgy in León-Castile in 1080, ed. Bernard F. Reilly (New York: Fordham University Press, 1985). Pierre André Sigal, “Les différents types de pèlerinages,” in Santiago de Compostela: 1000 ans de Pèlerinage Européen (Ghent: Centrum voor Kunst en Cultuur, 1985), 97–101, at 98. Pisan merchants were established in Fatimid Egypt by 996—a century before the First Crusade. Marianne Barrucand and Achim Bednorz, Moorish Architecture in Andalusia (Cologne: Taschen, 1992), 124. Cristina Partearroyo,“Almoravid and Almohad Textiles,” in Al-Andalus:The Art of Islamic Spain, ed. Jerrilynn D. Dodds (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992), 105–13. Al-Idrisi composed his “Book of Roger” for Roger II of Sicily (1130–54). Idrîsî, La première géographie de l’Occident, ed. Henri Bresc and Annliese Nef; trans. le chevalier Jaubert, revised by Annliese Nef (Paris: Flammarion, 1999), 282 (my translation from the French). See also Olivia Remie Constable, Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain: The Commercial Realignment of the Iberian Peninsula, 900–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 18–19. The Almohads (Muwahhidun, “those who affirm the unity of God”) were Berber tribesman from the Atlas mountains, adhering to a puritanical Islam preached by a disciple of al-Ghazzali. They challenged the Almoravids for control of Morocco in the 1130s. Almería was a center of Sufi resistance to Almoravid rule. Kennedy, Muslim Spain, 191. Chrétien de Troyes, Cligés, ed. Alexandre Micha (Paris: Champion, 1978), ll. 6248–51 (emphasis added).Tudela, in the Ebro valley, was conquered by Alfonso I of Aragon in 1119.

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32. Olivia Remie Constable, “Muslim Spain and Mediterranean Slavery: the Medieval Slave Trade as an Aspect of Muslim–Christian Relations,” in Christendom and Its Discontents: Exclusion, Persecution, and Rebellion, 1000–1500, ed. Scott L. Waugh and Peter D. Diehl (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 264–84, at 264. 33. Some became prostitutes, but others were treated as virtual family members. William D. Phillips, Jr., Slavery from Roman Times to the Early Transatlantic Trade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 72–3. Male slaves were used as soldiers and administrators, often rising to high office. Kennedy, Muslim Spain, 140. 34. Caliph ’Abd al-Rahman III (912–61), for example, had a Christian grandmother, mother, and daughter-in-law. Fletcher, Moorish Spain, 53, 73. 35. On the ethos of “youth,” see Georges Duby, “Youth in Aristocratic Society” in The Chivalrous Society, trans. Cynthia Postan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 112–22. 36. Sharon Kinoshita,“The Politics of Courtly Love:‘La Prise d’Orange’ and the Conversion of the Saracen Queen,” Romanic Review 86, (1995): 265–87. 37. In contrast to the pagans on Latin Christendom’s northern and eastern frontiers, for whom Christianity represented a complete cultural package. See Bartlett, The Making of Europe. 38. Compare Ibn Jubayr’s account (1183) of how conversion (e.g., of Muslims under Norman Sicilian rule) could be used to escape familial control:“Should a man show anger to his son or his wife, or a woman to her daughter, the one who is the object of displeasure may perversely throw himself into a church, and there be baptised and turn Christian. Then there will be for the father no way of approaching his son, or the mother her daughter.” He adds,“The Muslims of Sicily therefore are most watchful of the management of their family, and their children, in case this should happen.” The Travels of Ibn Jubayr, trans. R. J. C. Broadhurst (London: Jonathan Cape, 1952), 359. 39. Jacqueline de Weever, Sheba’s Daughters (New York: Garland, 1998). 40. Fletcher, Moorish Spain, 53. During the taifa period, it became politically expedient for ruling Berber lineages to claim Arab origins. Guichard, “Social History of Muslim Spain from the Conquest to the End of the Almohad Régime,” in The Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 2: 679–708, at 686. 41. From H. J. Schroeder, Disciplinary Decrees of the General Councils:Texts,Translation and Commentary (St. Louis: B. Herder, 1937), 78–127. 42. The Council of Lleida (1229) reinterpreted the Lateran canons by mandating distinctive dress for Jews but not for Muslims. Brian Catlos,“Four Kidnappings in Thirteenth-Century Aragon: Christian Children as Victims of Christian–Muslim Domination,” Scripta Mediterranea, 19–20 (1998–9): 165–79, at 173–4, n. 29. 43. The quotations come from Constance Brittain Bouchard, Strong of Body, Brave & Noble (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 67; and Robert Bartlett, “Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 31 (2001): 39–56, at 42. 44. My play here on the notion of the “felicitous” speech act refers to J. L. Austin, How to do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962). On the importance of genealogy in the medieval imaginary, see Georges Duby, “The Structure of Kinship and Nobility” in The Chivalrous Society, 134–48. 45. The succession (1189) of Constance, paternal aunt of the childless William II of Sicily, brought Sicily under Hohenstaufen rule (via her marriage to Emperor Henry VI). Her claim was contested by Tancred of Lecce,William’s illegitimate cousin. 46. The manual (describing the proper regulation of weighers, bakers, butchers, perfume sellers, and other merchants) was authored by Al-Saqati, the muhtasib (markets inspector) of Malaga. The muhtasib was a Muslim official charged with maintaining hisba (the words are etymologically related), which in its larger sense designates proper moral behavior. “Hisba,” Encyclopedia of Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1971), 3: 485–9.

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47. Constable, Trade and Traders, 207. 48. Robert Hillenbrand, “ ‘The Ornament of the World’: Medieval Córdoba as a Cultural Centre,” in The Legacy of Muslim Spain, 1: 112–35, at 115.The prestige of Arabic was such that King Pedro I of Aragon (1094–1104) was known to sign himself Bitr b. Shanja (Peter, son of Sancho). Fletcher, Quest, figure 10. 49. In the medieval Islamic world, slaves and former slaves, employed as soliders and administrators, could occasionally wield great power, like the Saqaliba (Slav/slave) kings of eleventh-century al-Andalus. 50. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313. 51. An Arab–Syrian Gentleman and Warrior in the Period of the Crusades, trans. Phillip K. Hitti (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 159–60. 52. On changing regulations governing marriage with non-Christians, see James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 340. 53. Donald Maddox, “Domesticating Diversity: Female Founders in Medieval Genealogical Literature and ‘La Fille du Comte de Pontieu,’ ” in The Court and Cultural Diversity, ed. Evelyn Mullally and John Thompson (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), 97–107, at 100. 54. When La Fille was composed, St. Pol was ruled by Philip Augustus’s cousin and ally, Gaucher of Châtillon. 55. See, for example, Georges Duby, “Youth in Aristocratic Society,” 112–22. 56. A case of foreign-born heirs challenging native ones over succession rights occurred in the thirteenth century when Count Henry II’s daughters by Isabelle of Jerusalem tried to reclaim Champagne from their cousin, Count Thibaut IV. 57. The betrothal took place when Richard and Alice were children.Though Alice was brought up at the Angevin court, Richard steadfastly refused to marry her (occasioning rumors that she had been his father’s mistress). W. L. Warren, Henry II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 109, 611–12. 58. William’s son-in-law Simon of Dammartin was exiled for opposing Philip Augustus at the battle of Bouvines (1214). When William died (1221), Ponthieu went to the king’s cousin, Robert of Dreux: Henri Malo, Un grand feudataire, Renaud de Dammartin, et la coalition de Bouvines: contribution à l’etude du règne de Philippe-Auguste (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1898). Marie, a famous patron of letters, died in 1251, leaving Ponthieu to her daughter Joan. 59. Chronicle of the Third Crusade, trans. Helen J. Nicholson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), Book IV, chapter 28. William was freed a year later in exchange for ten noble Turks (Book VI, chapter 36). 60. Inaugurating the motif Maddox calls the “Europeanization of Saladin” (“Diversity,” 102–3). On changing representations of Saladin, see John Tolan, “Mirror of Chivalry: Salah al-Din in the Medieval European Imagination,” in Images of the Other, ed. David R. Blanks (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1996), 7–38. 61. For a summary and critique of this view, see Bernard Hamilton,“Knowing the Enemy: Western Understanding of Islam at the Time of the Crusades” in Crusaders, Cathars and the Holy Places (Aldershot: Ashgate/Variorum, 1999) 373–87. 62. Particularly the northeast, where La Fille was composed. In 1205 Count Baldwin IX of Flanders, elected “Latin Emperor” of Constantinople the previous year, disappeared at the battle of Adrianople, leaving two infant daughters as his heirs. In Champagne, the premature deaths of brothers Henry II and Thibaut III resulted in a regency during the minority of the latter’s son,Thibaut IV the Posthumous. 63. See Kinoshita, “Pagans are wrong,” 80–1 and 102–4. 64. Kathleen Biddick, “Coming Out of Exile: Dante on the Orient(alism) Express,” American Historical Review, 105 (2000): 1234–49, at 1237.

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65. See Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 66. Porter, “Orientalism,” in Politics of Theory, 184–5. 67. Samir Amin, Eurocentrism, trans. Russell Moore (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1989), 74–5. 68. Maddox, “Diversity,” 106–7. 69. My orthography alludes to Homi K. Bhabha’s critique of the discrepant temporality of the nation in “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 139–70.

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CHAPTER

SIX

Spirituality and Colonial Governmentality: The Jesuit Spiritual Exercises in Europe and Abroad J. Michelle Molina

If the marginalization of belief in history is constitutively linked to the lack of an adequate vocabulary to deal with its worldliness, I suggest that by recovering this history one may also begin the search for corrective ways of talking and writing about belief in terms other than “fundamentalist,”“premodern,” or “prehistory.”1 Modernity was never itself the object of a nonteleological investigation, a nonteleological criticism.This is what the postcolonial present demands.2 At the close of the nineteenth century, W. E. B. DuBois put the world on notice that “the color line” would be the defining issue of the twentieth century.3 It may not be too early to prophecy that issues of “religion” and “faith” will be critical issues for the twenty-first century. In his proposal for new approaches to studies of the colonial past, David Scott argues that if our task at present is to understand “the conceptual and institutional dimensions of our modernity,” then we ought also to bear in mind “a fundamental crisis in the Third World in which the very coherence of the secular-modern project . . . can no longer be taken for

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granted.” How does this affect our view of colonialism? What shape should colonial studies take in order to understand the history of our present? The crisis of secularism provides both the urgency and the conceptual space for studies that push the limits of current postcolonial criticism that has been stopped dead in its tracks at the specter of questions of religion and faith. In this context, I suggest that the religious roots of “the modern self ” is an aspect of colonial history that postcolonial theorists have largely ignored. Captivated by modernity’s self-conception as having made a radical break with the past, postcolonial critics rely upon an overdrawn distinction between “modern” and “premodern,” and are thus unable to see their own critique of modernity through to an end. The last decade of colonial scholarship has called our attention to an overreliance upon binary oppositions, yet the simplistic story of a rupture between “medieval” and “Enlightenment” practices remains the last binary to be shattered into more complex and interesting pieces. Just as “east–west,” or “colonizer–colonized” do not accurately represent the complex history of colonialism, so too do the categories “medieval” and “modern” oversimplify a history that is both contingent and continuous. Drawing upon the work of Michel Foucault and David Scott, the first part of this essay addresses the use of concepts of “governmentality” and “practices of the self ” in colonial and postcolonial literature. I argue that the centrality of Foucault to both the genesis of and subsequent shifts in postcolonial theory explains the omnipresence of “the modern self ” as a question in colonial studies, but has also resulted in a faulty periodization and a skewed account overemphasizing the Enlightenment as “rupture” and subsequently overemphasizing a break between “premodern” and “modern” colonial experiences. This essay then takes as its case study the Jesuit Spiritual Exercises to show one example of the making of “modern selves” in a Catholic and colonial context. I discuss them in three settings.The first is Ignatius of Loyola’s intentions when writing the Exercises in the early sixteenth century. The second is the way that the Exercises informed Jesuit evangelization practices in European cities and countrysides. The third is the way Jesuits used the Exercises in their missions in Iberian colonies abroad, primarily in India and New Spain. These case studies differentiate the practice as utilized by clergy, colonizers, and the colonized, and elucidate connections between European colonialism, reform, and governmentality that predate the Enlightenment. In particular, I argue that the Exercises and the general confession should be understood as modern “practices of the self,” showing how both were powerful means of

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self-improvement utilized not only in the European Jesuit colleges and missions, but were also fundamental components of a spiritual and practical outlook that was crucial to Europe’s earliest overseas civilizing projects. Building upon research that finds a Christian legacy of rationality in the disciplinary practices of Christian medieval monasteries,5 my own study shifts attention to a Catholic legacy of worldly rationality, emphasizing the practices of the self within the contours of a reforming Catholicism. Jesuit promotion of the Exercises and the general confession offer an example of practices that encouraged autobiographical accounts of private experiences, and facilitated a conception of “religion” as a private, personal practice, representative of one’s individual relationship with God. I also build upon Gauri Viswanathan’s challenge to recognize the concept of “secularism,” not as an antecedent to “religion,” but as its complement within the same time frame.The complementarity of secularism and religion has a history that, I suggest, we can begin to access through an investigation of the Exercises as a “practice of self ” whose development and spread among the Catholic laity took place at the very same time that Europe witnessed the formation and spread of Enlightenment thought. Studying the links between spirituality and colonialism in a period where profound shifts provoked new struggles for meaning in Europe and abroad should take us one step further from the implacable binary of medieval past/modern present that, as I argue in the next section, has limited the incorporation of early modern European expansion into the realm of colonial studies. Postcolonial Studies, Colonialism, and Latin American Colonial History: Setting up the Problem Why did the explosion of colonial studies in the 1980s and 1990s focus primarily on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century European, and primarily British, presence in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia? Certainly Latin America has been included in terms of conquest and “first encounters.”6 But why has there been no systematic treatment of Spain’s three-hundred years of rule in the Americas? There is no greater example of colonial cultural hegemony than that of Spanish tenure in New Spain.This is fertile terrain for exploring “colonialism’s culture.” In contrast, the study of culture in colonial Latin America, despite its groundbreaking work on the confluences of gender, religion, race, and sexuality in the early modern period, refrains from engaging

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cross-cultural and cross-temporal debates about the culture of colonialism.7 What keeps these fields separate and what do we miss by limiting our point of view in this manner? At stake is a meaningful and historically specific framework for understanding five-hundred years of European territorial expansion—for reconciling, in Mitchell Dean’s words, “the longue dureé with discontinuous history.”8 I would like to propose that there are two roadblocks between colonial studies, postcolonial theory, and the history of Latin American colonialism. One of these is circumstantial. Postcolonial theory was born of twentieth-century anticolonial politics. Most famously, the Subaltern Studies group, disillusioned with the disintegration of nationalist promises, sought to unmask the continuities between the colonial past and the postcolonial present. Latin America, in contrast, certainly had issues with the demise of revolutionary promises. Some examples would be a disillusionment with the Cuban Revolution or with the dictatorship of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) in Mexcio.9 Yet these are not linked with Latin American anticolonial politics, whose history belongs to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Stated briefly, the intellectual politics are quite different. The second and more enduring roadblock to taking a broader view of colonialism’s culture is conceptual in nature and consists, broadly speaking, of deeply ingrained assumptions about the Enlightenment and secularization. Students of colonialism have relied upon “the Enlightenment” to perform a significant amount of conceptual labor and have explained colonial reform as an extension of the European “Enlightenment project.”10 Spain’s tenure in the Americas is assigned an economic role in the development of modern capitalism, with a nod toward the effects that the silver mines had on the European economy. Yet New Spain as a non-secular power is excluded from discussions of the culture of colonial reform. Rather than reify “modernity,” I suggest that investigating a prior instantiation of reform in a colonial context might elucidate some of the connections between these disparate colonialisms that cross both space and time. Even scholars who seek to understand the bearing of religious practices on modernity and colonialism are stymied by entrenched ideas or lack of information about early modern colonialism.The recent collection Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity examines connections among conversion, colonialism, and the rise of the “modern self.”The essays succeed in undermining any facile divisions between “modernity” and “religion,” as overseas European missionaries struggled to impart both.Yet the book fails to treat Europe’s first overseas colonies,

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since according to editor Peter Van Der Veer, during the early modern period in Europe “conversion is still a major issue in the European polity itself and has not yet been transported outside of Europe.”11 He disregards an entire episode of early modern Iberian expansion that was justified in the name of both trade and conversion.The essays in the collection follow the classic Weberian model that relates the history of global capitalist modernity to the spread of Protestantism and Protestant values.12 Weber, we recall, conceded that aspects of Catholic asceticism were rational but argued that they never became socially important. Calvinism forced one to prove faith in “worldly activity.” By contrast, the rules of Catholic monasticism emphasized an enclosed asceticism that, Weber argued, “the more strongly it gripped an individual, simply served to drive him farther from everyday life, because the holiest task was definitely to surpass all worldly morality.”13 Weber mistakenly used St. Ignatius as an example of Catholic “monks.” As will become clear, the Jesuits were very explicit about their own “calling” to be active in the world. David Scott similarly relies upon a division between “premodern” and “modern” colonialism. Although not primarily concerned with religion and faith, his work bears discussion because his call for a critical rethinking of postcolonial studies is compelling and may well shape the next generation of colonial scholarship, as it has indeed shaped my own. Similar to the call by Paul Rabinow to “anthropologize Europe” and Dipesh Chakrabarty to “provincialize Europe,” Scott claims that the anticolonial agenda of postcolonial studies—once vital—has run its course. His book challenges the way postcolonial theorists have dismissed a reified “Europe,” suggesting in its place “a critical interrogation of the practices, modalities and projects through which modernity inserted itself into and altered the lives of the colonized.”14 As an example, Scott distinguishes “premodern” from “modern” colonialism, contrasting the early modern mercantile colonialism of the British East India Company in the 1600s with the transformation to control by the British government in the nineteenth century. At the end of the eighteenth century, what Scott calls the “modern turn” in colonialism’s history was the consequence of the fundamental rupture of the Enlightenment, with the resulting focus on reform and the self-regulating field of the social. This change in the target of power is what Scott has termed colonial governmentality, “a form of power that utilizes a range of strategies that support the civilizing project by shaping and governing the capacities, competencies, and wills of the governed. Government, in other words, is about ‘the conduct of conduct.’ ”15

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Can the turn toward the reform of colonial subjects be so neatly correlated to modern colonialism? Why have we been unable to talk about European colonialism, reform, and governmentality that predates the Enlightenment? A hidden culprit here is Michel Foucault.The language and categories in Scott’s article, as in much of colonial scholarship, are recognizably Foucauldian. An uncritical use of Foucauldian periodization is deeply imbedded in postcolonial studies. For example, in the History of Sexuality series, Foucault finds significant religious roots of what he calls “technologies” or “practices of the self ” in Catholic confessional practices and locates the roots of the discursive explosion of sexuality, or the institutional “incitement to discourse,” in the Catholic insistence upon “the confession of the flesh” (i.e., confession of sins related to sex) following the Council of Trent (1545–63). Historically rooted in ascetic and monastic settings, “[t]he seventeenth century made [confession] into a rule for everyone.” Yet, similar to the way in which Weber leaves the pinnacle of Catholic rationality burrowed away in remote monasteries, Foucault abandons this “rule for everyone” as an ideal articulated only at the discursive level: “It would seem in actual fact that it could scarcely have applied to any but a tiny elite; the great majority of the faithful who only went to confession on rare occasions in the course of the year escaped such complex prescriptions. But the important point no doubt is that this obligation was decreed, as an ideal at least, for every good Christian.”16 Thus, Foucault differentiates between the “invention of techniques,” which he periodizes as belonging to the seventeenth century, and the “calendar of diffusion,” which began in the nineteenth century.17 Yet the fruitful application of Foucault’s ideas to early modern Europe and its colonies suggests that the “calendar” needs to be revised to reflect both a seventeenth-century invention and diffusion of techniques of the self. Foucault is similarly omnipresent in recent work on colonial Latin America, particularly in studies of gender and sexuality.18 To take just one example, Serge Gruzinski draws on Foucault to explore the relationship between colonialism, confession, notions of sexuality, and “the establishment of the relationship of the subject to himself.”19 His case studies treat Spanish efforts to impose new categories and indigenous efforts to understand the categories, particularly “to read past actions through the individualistic filter of the Christian ethic.”20 His work has real implications for the study of governmentality in a colonial setting. Compelling for Gruzinski—as for Scott—was that the imposition of a Christian ethic “altered not merely the balance of forces in the struggle between colonizer and colonized, but . . . altered the terrain of struggle

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itself.”21 Latin American colonial historians, however, seem to contain or categorize their own work as “particular” and “local,” devoid of larger implications for colonial studies more generally. Yet the use of Foucault’s History of Sexuality to understand notions of “power” and “self ” in the colonial Americas has wider implications than simply the successful application of a “useful” theory. In fact, it should bring us to revise the theory in its current articulation as a post-Enlightenment phenomena. In New Spain, secular and ecclesiastical authorities were united in their efforts to impose a notion of “rationality” that was both Christian and civil, both sacred and rational. New Spain in particular was intended to be an ordered community of Christian individuals. In Foucault’s own terminology, the population of New Spain was, from very early on, an object of political calculation and control. An Early Modern Practice of the Self: The Jesuit Spiritual Exercises This section lays out the historical roots and development of the Jesuit Spiritual Exercises. I discuss some antecedents of this devotional practice, delineating continuities from earlier centuries, but ultimately illustrating how contingent events such as the Catholic Reformation and European global expansion altered and differentiated the shape, purpose, and practice of what became the Jesuit Spiritual Exercises. Ignatius wrote and revised the Exercises over a period of approximately twenty years, dating from his “second conversion” at Manresa in 1522. The second conversion was preceded by a period of crisis, in which (similar to Luther) Ignatius feared that salvation depended upon a “heroic, penitential asceticism of the monastic kind” impossible to achieve. Ignatius resolved this crisis by emphasizing internal spirituality, as can be seen in the Exercises, where he developed a deep concern with maintaining an active inner battle. The Exercises were written in a very functional manner, as a series of instructions, details, and suggestions for the one person helping another through the course. Although spiritual retreat and introspection predates the Exercises, this was the first time that such a program had been codified. Described as a “teacher’s manual,”22 the Exercises played a crucial role in promoting self-reform among Catholics in early modern Europe. In essence the Exercises entailed a precise method that called upon the use of memory, intellect, and will to enable the shaping of the self to conform to the will of God.The Jesuits recognized that knowledge of God’s will in one’s own life could be a tall order, but they were confident that this could become clear through a regular regime of prayer, meditation,

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and daily examinations of conscience. As the early Jesuits often noted, similar to toning and shaping the body through exercise, one could develop the faculties of memory, intellect, and will toward achieving spiritual goals.23 This was clearly a “practice of the self,” a method by which, in Scott’s words, the wills, capacities, and competencies of the governed were shaped. But who would have access to this practice? From an early date, the Jesuits made it clear that the Exercises were to have a wider audience than merely those in the Society of Jesus. In the 1590s, the Jesuit General Acquaviva led an effort to formalize the Exercises and requested input from Jesuit directors and practitioners of the Exercises in order “to rouse in these others a longing, so that they shall want to be helped by these same Exercises. Hence it is manifest that it should be the aim of all Ours, gently to attract as many as possible to go through the Exercises.”24 The Jesuit Roman College ran a printing press and its cheap copies of the Exercises succeeded in making them more widely available.25 However, taking thirty days to complete, the full Exercises proved to be cumbersome and difficult for the average person to make.The Jesuits quickly moved to make the Exercises more palatable for a larger public by reducing the retreat to the First Week.26 Most of the guides and commentaries on the Exercises written for the general public limited the practice to the First Week. An essential part of the First Week of the Exercises entailed preparation for the general confession. A general confession was different from the auricular confession promoted by the Catholic Church since the twelfth century. Rather than merely listing sins committed since the last confession, the penitent used the general confession to evaluate his or her entire life. By undertaking the Exercises, and adopting the practice of daily examinations of conscience, one would gain the ability to recognize enduring patterns of sin in one’s life and, in the general confession, narrate the story of sin in one’s life.This was not simply a matter of seeking absolution. In fact, one might include sins that had been absolved in prior confessions.27 The practitioner came away from this exercise with a clear view of the areas in his or her life that required improvement and self-reform. The general confession became a key component of Jesuit ministry, expanding beyond the confines of the Exercises to become an important ministry in its own right.28 Ignatius and the Jesuits were certainly not the first to write and preach about discovering and practicing the will of God. As Joseph de Guibert has shown, the historical and theological roots of the Exercises run deep. The Life of Christ attributed to Ludolph of Saxony (ca. fourteenth century) was among the religious exercises that predated and influenced

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the Jesuit Exercises. According to Ludolph, readers should use the imagination to fill in components of the Gospel that had remained unspoken.29 The primary place given to the use of the imagination had its possible pitfalls as it left the gospels open to personal interpretation. But, importantly, it also meant that the average person could successfully make the Exercises. One did not have to be a scholar or an ecstatic to see and feel one’s self present in the scenes that made up the life of Christ.30 This accessibility was key to the popularity of this “practice of the self ” among the laity. The Exercises have also been compared to Thomas a Kempis’s Imitation of Christ (1418).Yet Ignatius developed a notion of interiority different from the disavowal of the world by Kempis, for whom silence equaled safety while words bound one to the cares and distractions of the world. While Kempis did advocate deep reflection on Christ’s passion and death, Ignatius’s program of meditation closed with the more glorious envisioning of the resurrected Christ as King and Ruler. He called upon others to take an activist role in a militant spirituality—both internally and externally. Jesuit writings reflected a self-conception as “pilgrims” and “apostles” who must minister to “the Turks or any other infidels, even those who live in the region called the Indies, or . . . any heretics whatever, or schismatics, or any of the faithful.” There would be no Jesuit monasteries, as one Jesuit writer often proclaimed: “We are not monks! . . . the world is our house.”31 The Constitutions state their mission best: “ . . . to travel through the world and to live in any part of it whatsoever where there is hope of greater service to God and of help of souls.”32 The primacy of apostolic service differentiated Ignatius’s work from earlier Christian self-reform efforts. Late medieval spiritual works generally did not espouse labor throughout the world for the salvation of souls.33 The Exercises and the Society of Jesus were truly a product of their time. One can observe Ignatius living and experiencing the shift from “crusader” mentality to something more akin to a civilizing project. Jerusalem had been at the center of Ignatius’s evangelical drive, yet impeded by war from traveling to Jerusalem, and cognizant of the expanding role that Europeans were assuming in the world, the first Jesuits quickly turned their attention not only to the far reaches of Asia and the Americas, but also to the places closest to them in Europe. The Jesuit colleges and their Congregations or Marian sodalities were strikingly important in forming patterns of lay piety in many areas of Europe.34 Realizing that Catholics at home were in need of reform, the Jesuits went on “missions” to the European countryside.35 They preached,

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heard confessions, informed skeptical parishioners about Church doctrine, and founded Congregations, or at least reactivated existing confraternities. Contrary to Foucault’s notion that at this time in history worldly “practices of the self ” were merely a discursive ideal, these Jesuit religious congregations not only were built around the Exercises, but were also the machine that fueled the dissemination of the Exercises and the practice of the general confession throughout Europe. The “calendar of diffusion” clearly took place in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Prior to becoming a member of a Jesuit congregation, the candidate would undertake at least the First Week of the Exercises. These were practiced on an individual basis and further differentiated the Jesuit Congregations from the parish-based confraternities.The shaping of the individual mind and soul were of greater urgency than the formation of a group identity. Similarly, retreat houses and Congregations were associated with the Jesuit colleges—not local parishes—indicating that the choice to belong was made on a much more individual basis. People often came from different neighborhoods, even from towns miles away to join a Jesuit Congregation and make the Exercises. This was clearly illustrative of a personal desire for self-improvement, rather than an ideal imposed from above. Following the dictates of the Exercises, the Congregation rules stipulated that members examine the conscience every night, in order to regulate the spiritual life. Such a daily routine, it was hoped, would lead to selfimprovement.These practices spread beyond the Congregations, as members urged the general confession upon friends and family members as a method for attaining consolation.The adoption of the general confession, along with more frequent communion, was crucial to the spiritual reform of Catholic Europeans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.36 In this way, the Jesuit colleges and their Congregations were active centers of evangelization in Europe, and are critical to our understanding of the way reforms at Trent percolated into the daily lives of Catholics.The Exercises were indeed effective in altering the practices and lives of early modern Europeans. Could they do the same for colonized peoples? India, the Americas, and the Jesuit Missionaries Small wonder is it, then that with discoveries of new lands, seas, and peoples, and with an intellectual and spiritual renaissance going on, the little book written by Ignatius became a sensational textbook. . . .37

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The purpose of the Spiritual Exercises and the general confession was to attain self-knowledge of a particular kind: namely, it was to know sin, to recognize one’s self as a sinner, to reform the sinning self, and to lead an exemplary life.38 What were the implications of such self-knowledge in a colonial context? Francis Xavier led the Jesuits’ earliest overseas ministry in Portuguese India and his collected letters, considered “complete principles of a whole missionary spirituality,”39 contain themes that recurred again and again in Jesuit missions in India and the Americas. The Exercises played a decisive role in a reform that targeted specific behaviors and certain categories of persons.The missionaries themselves were the first object of reform as they were required to exhibit exemplary behavior in the colonies; second, Jesuit leaders hoped that the Portuguese and Spanish colonizers would heed this example of proper comportment for their own benefit as well as to aid in the conversion of the natives; finally, it was thought that the natives of all these lands might benefit from selected portions of the Exercises. Similar to the missions in Europe, the Jesuit college was the active center of evangelization. Immediately upon arrival in Goa (1542) and New Spain (1572), Jesuit leaders set up colleges where, consistent with the Jesuit colleges in Europe, its students undertook the Exercises. Only by first setting up colleges to train priests in languages and theology could any Jesuit mission proceed successfully. In New Spain, for example, the rapid expansion of Jesuit colleges meant that within twenty years there were nine functioning colleges. With the colleges as nodal points of communication and learning, ministry to the surrounding regions could take place; the college was the point from which God’s word should radiate throughout the rest of the region. Xavier had clear instructions for the exact manner in which God’s word, through Jesuit practices, should illuminate India and New Spain. He instructed the Jesuits to “live in control of yourself ” and to tend to one’s own spiritual well-being, advising them to examine their conscience often,“for if one is not good to oneself, how will he be good to others?”40 Evidence indicates that many Jesuits took this quite seriously. On his passage to China in 1578, Matteo Ricci and his fellow Jesuits maintained a regular schedule that included reading the Exercises and making the examinations of conscience twice a day.41 Once in Goa, Xavier requested that Ignatius send a priest specifically dedicated to giving the Exercises to other priests:“If he himself practices what he teaches in his lectures, he will inspire and inflame them with a love for God and the salvation of their neighbors when they see him doing what he teaches, for deeds are more moving than words.”42 This letter stresses

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what was to become a recurring theme: the importance of setting a good example. In the Americas, as in India, the Exercises were an instrument of spiritual maintenance and inspiration. Late sixteenth-century missionaries in the New World were less euphoric than the first generation of evangelizers about the ease of Christianizing indigenous peoples. José de Acosta, for example, paternalistic in his determination that natives in South America were not ready for the Exercises, argued that missionaries ought to first focus on eliminating the customs and practices considered contrary to Christianity.43 He provided a list of instances in Andean daily life that were the source of “pestiferous customs” that included such mundane practices as the manner in which natives crossed rivers to the ways in which indigenous peoples observed natural phenomena for omen, harvested, gave birth, married, died, and were buried. The most significant vices to be routed out were depravities of sexual lust, concubinage, and the observance of witchcraft and superstition. Indigenous peoples must be taught to live as “human beings” before they could learn about “the celestial and the divine.”44 In pondering solutions, Acosta lamented that, compared with the ability of the apostolic fathers to perform countless miracles, there was a decided lack of miracles in the modern age. He explained that the apostles were just simple men who needed to impress the superior intellect of their Greek and Roman audience. However, about the inhabitants of the Americas he commented: “What need is there of impressive miracles when what is lacking is a higher intelligence that might experience some curiosity regarding the sublimity of our doctrine? There is need for only one miracle among these people of the New World, a great and singular miracle, most efficacious in inculcating the faith. This is that [the missionary’s] mode of life be in accord with what he preaches.”45 Like Xavier, then, Acosta focuses first on the setting of examples. Acosta clearly aspired to teach the native Americans how to regulate their behavior in accordance with European norms. And such reforms would only be accomplished if the colonized were offered an example of Christian living. This need for circumspection recalls the words of Xavier in his Instruction to his fellow missionaries and was similarly reflected in the musings of Jesuit chronicler Andres Perez de Rivas from New Spain:“Nor are these Indians so barbarous that they do not admire the evangelical ministers’ purity and cleanliness in their lives and customs. Indeed, the Indians are so scandalized by the slightest slip in a priest’s conduct that they loudly spread news of it.”46

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What role, then, were the Exercises to play in reforming the colonizer? First, they were central to the “rules and precepts” for the Jesuit missions, for the constant improvement and regulation of missionaries who might be far away from their superiors. These regulations called for Jesuits to make the Exercises twice annually without fail. These were of such importance that even those Jesuits in remote missions were called upon to leave their homes and travel to convene with neighboring Jesuits for a retreat of eight days.47 Disparate missionaries would come together to make the Exercises, renew their vows, “and recover the strength anew to go out on new conquests.”48 One Jesuit Provincial, Joseph de Arjó was dismayed at the prospect of damage done by the example offered by some errant missionaries. He complained that missionary impatience or harsh treatment caused damage to the spiritual welfare of native Americans and advised that the Jesuit priests contain their feelings. Further, superiors were directed to “admonish and correct those who treat the Indians with a charity that is less than their tenderness demands.The lack of consideration by some missionaries is to be diminished as when they oblige the Indians to work or to suffer annoying delays as though they were aspiring to establish entailed estates.”49 In such cases, the Exercises could be administered as a corrective for poor behavior or “failures in charity:”“Let everyone know that whoever is seriously delinquent in this matter has to go to one of the colleges and make the Exercises for eight days together with the other penances which the Visitor deems suitable.” The remainder of the injunction makes clear the consequence of exemplary behavior and, more, the ill-effects of gossip:“Usually these failures in charity stem from too great a familiarity with the laymen.These men employ much liberty in speech and gossip thus estranging the spirits of some missionaries from the others. Then they compel them to disclose their weaknesses and the faults of their brothers so that once the laymen have heard about them, they are publicized everywhere. It is fitting that everyone reflect on the serious harm that inconsiderate speech causes; this pertains as much to private persons as to missionaries in general.”50 From this, we can see that the Jesuits were as concerned about the damaging effects for both Jesuits and “private persons.” Xavier was likewise clear about the utility and multiple uses of the Exercises outside of Jesuit circles.51 Politically savvy, Xavier recommended the Exercises as a means of remaining in the good graces and inner circle of the Governor and the Father Vicar of Goa. Regarding the latter, he wrote:“When you see him, kneel down and kiss his hand; and

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it is with his permission that you will preach, hear confession and become engaged in other spiritual ministries. Do not on any account quarrel with him and strive earnestly to become his friend so that you may give him the Exercises, at least those of the First Week if you can do no more.”52 Xavier’s letters repeated that a missionary’s work consisted of preaching, hearing confessions, giving the Exercises, and conversing with people.This work was divided between converting the natives and tending to the Christians, these being either converted natives or Portuguese living in India, often with more attention devoted to the latter: The need for members of our Society in these regions is very great . . . since, for the lack of preachers and spiritual persons, many Portuguese live outside our law. Because I perceive their great need, I shall send Antonio Gomes to Diu or Hormuz, for God our Lord has given him a great talent and zeal for preaching, hearing confessions, giving the Spiritual Exercises and conversing with Christians. . . . Wherever there was a preacher of our Society and another priest as a companion to assist him in hearing confessions and giving the Exercises, they would easily have a college in which they could first bring together the sons of Portuguese, and then others who are natives of this land.53 Here one can see a hierarchy of concerns for Xavier. First, the sons of Portuguese should be brought into the fold, and then attention could be turned to the natives:“When you have the time for it, you should work for the conversion of some of the pagans. Do not above all relinquish a universal good for one that is particular, for example, preaching in order to hear a confession, or failing to teach the prayers each day at the regular time in order to do some other particular thing.”54 The conversion of natives was thus secondary to tending to the Christian flock at the Jesuit Churches and Colleges. In Xavier’s directives to his brothers, it is clear that he harbored some skepticism about the ability of Christians in India to follow through with the good intentions that may originally have arisen from a confession: When you hear confessions, especially in these regions, before his confession move your penitent to reflect upon his past life for one, two or three days, recalling his sins and writing them down so that he reflect the better upon them; and after this hear his confession. Do not absolve him at once, but rather defer his absolution for one, two

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or three days, giving such persons as these some meditations from the First Week of the Exercises, so that they may meditate and weep over their sins, doing some penance and taking a discipline so that they may be moved to tears.You should persuade them to restore what they owe or to become reconciled with others, or to renounce their sins of the flesh or other sins with which they are burdened.Take care that they do this before you absolve them, since they promise much in their confessions but do little. It would be good if they did before you absolve them what they promise to do after they have been absolved.55 This instruction to an individual Jesuit was eventually copied and became standard instructions distributed to other missionaries of the Society over the years. Similarly, it was quickly determined in New Spain that missionaries were not the only colonizers who required reform. The creole population (persons of Spanish descent born in New Spain) comprised the second group of persons who had a need to “know sin” more intimately. In fact, the Jesuits were invited to New Spain partly because King Phillip II believed that they would amplify political as well as religious power in New Spain.56 The King wrote that the republic of New Spain “received good effects from the teaching and doctrine of the Jesuits . . . the sons of inhabitants are employed and spend time in praiseworthy exercises which before they passed only in idleness.” He concluded that the Jesuit schools were of use in making of Mexican inhabitants “very good subjects.”57 The Jesuits lauded themselves for their ability to deliver on the King’s wishes. In one annual letter, they describe the students at the Colegio de Mexico as all making general confessions and composing their lives as if they were priests: “Even those who are not called by our Lord to the religious life have composed their lives with much care as if they were called.”58 The Congregation of students at the Jesuit college undertook hospital ministry that inspired other religious orders to request membership in the Congregation. The students of the Congregation gave honorable funerals for the poor, “with much solemnity, giving good example and edification.” Further, the letter reported that it was due to the prayers of this Congregation that an image of the Virgin stolen by a Dutch cosario was safely recovered.59 Certainly, Jesuit spirituality had an effect on the stability of the colony. The availability of the Exercises to the native populations is more difficult to judge. Regarding the natives of Goa, Xavier admonished his

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brothers and sisters at the close of one letter to “remember that you will find nothing better to do than to have them make a general confession of their sins, making some meditations from the First Week of the Exercises so that they obtain contrition, sorrow, tears and grief at the sight of their perversity.”60 Note that the natives are given meditations from the Exercises and are not given the full First Week, let alone the entire program. In New Spain, similar to the Jesuit colleges in Europe, the students of the Colegio de Mexico made a mission to a local mining town, arriving the Saturday before the first Sunday of Lent and returning each week on Sundays, in order to educate the children in Christian doctrine. All the people confessed on the Day of St. Joseph, and it was reported that they “garnered the greatest amount of fruit” from a sermon about the mute devil (“el demonio mudo”), which inspired many people to make general confessions.61 These missions seem to emphasize practices important to the Exercises, such as communion, the act of contrition, and a general confession—but not the Exercises themselves. During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, it appears that the Exercises were reserved for the students and congregation members associated with the colleges as well as the urban elite. This changed dramatically in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when retreat houses were built in order to make the Exercises widely available to the laity. David Scott argues that the key to understanding modern colonial governmentality lies in the way that persons were obliged “to transform themselves in a certain, that is, improving direction.”62 I have suggested that the Exercises should be considered just such a modern practice of the self. The Jesuits and their college-based Congregations relied upon the Exercises, with their emphasis on regular examination of conscience and the general confession, to advocate self-regulation and improvement among the laity of early modern Europe and its colonies. While they certainly had an eye to the afterlife, the reform and self-improvement championed in the Exercises encouraged active engagement with the world. The emphasis in the Exercises on activity in this life changed the way people lived and made daily choices.The popularity of the Exercises can be attributed to their accessibility to the common layperson as well as the manner in which Congregation members promoted them among friends and family. Their effective “diffusion” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries belies Foucault’s notion that “practices of the self ” became important only in the eighteenth century. The effectiveness of the Spiritual Exercises in the lives of the colonized remains much more of an open question at this point and really can only

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be answered on a case-by-case basis. In India, for example, the Jesuit colleges were effective centers of apostleship for Portuguese colonizers and a limited number of natives, never breaking out much beyond the regions of Goa and Cochin. In New Spain, the Jesuits were much more successful.63 The difference may lie in the fact that contemporary Portuguese, Dutch, and British powers in Asia and Africa were tradingpost empires. Those powers established plantations and factories—not governments.64 By contrast, Spaniards were keen to found municipal governments—small cities and towns. Spanish colonizers were unique among their contemporaries in that they were the first European power to undertake a process of integration and “normalization.” Colonial power, while often imposed from the top down, casts a very wide net. Thus, the emphasis on reforming the colonizer should not be very surprising. Christianity itself was under close scrutiny with all of Europe subject to reform efforts.Thus, it makes sense that the Jesuits saw not only the pagan natives and the recently converted as needing reform, but also the Portuguese and Spanish colonizers, who, inhabiting foreign lands, were missing the “good effects” of Church reform. Indeed, the Jesuit colleges were originally formed in an effort to reform the clergy, and the popularity of their Congregations and of the Exercises was certainly not foreseen. The Jesuits grew into their ministry to the laity as a result of popular demand and a sense among many people that their personal lives, not just the institution of the Catholic Church, required a new level of self-regulation and reform. Catholics in Europe and abroad were undergoing a process of self-reform that contributed to the transformation of “religion” from a communal to a personal category. If, as I have argued, Jesuit spiritual practices form one chapter in the formation of the “modern self,” then I hope to have contributed to dismantling expectations that histories of our present come wrapped in tidy secular packages. The “Europe” under scrutiny in postcolonial theory excludes the histories of the Spanish and Portuguese empires in part because they are perceived as Catholic, irrational, and backward—in other words, the antithesis of who Westerners understand themselves to be today. Indeed, I am arguing against the manner in which “modernity” has been defined against Iberia and its colonial ventures. This has not only limited our understanding of Iberian empires, but has also dictated the very questions we ask of colonialism, circumscribing topics deemed either acceptable or peripheral to understanding our postcolonial present. If we take seriously the task to “provincialize Europe,” we will see that the early modern European expansion forms a part of the cultural history of modernity.

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Portions of this essay were presented at “Postcolonial Moves” (University of Miami, February 2000). 1. Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity and Belief (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), XVI. 2. David Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcolonialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 17. 3. W. E. B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Signet Classic, 1969), 54. 4. Scott, Refashioning Futures, 14–15. 5. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 205. 6. For example Tvetzan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (New York: Harper Perennial, 1984); Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions:The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 7. Exceptions include:Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy,Territoriality and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995); Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Enrique Dussel, “Beyond Eurocentrism: The World-System and the Limits of Modernity,” in The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998) (although not interested in postcolonial theory per se, Dussel does address the question of modernity and colonialism); Patricia Seed, “Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse,” Latin American Research Review, 26:3 (1991): 181–200; “More Colonial and Postcolonial Discourses,” Latin American Research Review 28:3, (1993): 146–52. 8. Mitchell Dean, Critical and Effective Histories: Foucault’s Methods and Historical Sociology (London: Routledge, 1994), 36. 9. John Beverly’s assessment of postcolonial and subaltern studies in a Latin American context discusses how the disintegration of the Nicaraguan Revolution affected his own research and reformulated the questions that seemed pertinent for Central American countries: Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Cultural Theory (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). In fact, when postcolonial approaches have been adopted among Latin American historians, it has been most widely in reference to issues pertaining to nineteenth- and twentieth-century development of the nation-state and nationalism, e.g., Florencia Mallon, Peasant and Nation:The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) and Fernando Coronil, The Magical State: Nature, Money and Modernity in Venezuela (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 10. Nicholas Dirks, Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992). 11. Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity, ed. Peter Van Der Veer (New York: Routledge, 1996), 5, my emphasis. 12. He also writes that “conversion becomes more and more a depoliticized, private matter of the individual conscience in Europe after the seventeenth century, while missionization campaigns are directed at the colonized areas.” This overlooks a period of “missionization” in Europe’s history. Interestingly, such a duality existed in colonial Latin America: the urban areas were more likely to undertake practices reflecting the development of a private individual conscience, the Exercises being predominant in the urban retreat houses, while urban civil and religious authorities made efforts to evangelize the countryside and secure the prior conversion of the rural areas inhabited by indigenous peoples. 13. Max Weber, Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Routledge, 1992), 119, 120–1. 14. Scott, Refashioning Futures, 17. 15. Scott, Refashioning Futures, 83 (my emphasis). 16. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York:Vintage Books, 1990), 20–1.

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17. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 122. 18. Asuncion Lavrín, ed., Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989) and Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau, Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989) each discusses the History of Sexuality as inspirational to a new line of inquiry in Spanish and Spanish American history. 19. Serge Gruzinski, “Individualization and Acculturation: Confession among the Nahuas of Mexico from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century,” in Sexuality and Marriage, 96–117, at 98. See also his The Conquest of Mexico:The Incorporation of Indian Societies into the Western World, 16th–18th Centuries, trans. Eileen Corrigan (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993). 20. Gruzinski, “Individualization,” 99. 21. Scott, Refashioning Futures, 16. 22. John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 37, 47. 23. Michael Maher, Reforming Rome (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1997), 139. 24. Martin E. Palmer, On Giving the Spiritual Exercises: Early Jesuit Manuscript Directories and the Official Directory of 1599 (St. Louis:The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1996), 11. 25. Jonathan Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (New York:Viking Penguin, 1984), 132–4. 26. Ignacio Iparraguirre, Historia de la Practica de los Ejercicios de San Ignacio: Vol. III, Evolucion en Europa Durante el Siglo XVII (Roma: Institutum Historicum S.I., 1973). 27. Maher, Reforming Rome, 158. 28. J. Michelle Molina, Visions of God, Visions of Empire: Colonial Governmentality and Jesuit Spirituality (Ph.D. Dissertation: University of Chicago, forthcoming). See especially chapter 3, “Consoling Souls, Improving Habits: Jesuit Evangelization and Social Reform in New Spain.” 29. Joseph de Guibert, The Jesuits:Their Spiritual Doctrine and Practice, A Historical Study (St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1986), 154. 30. Maher, Reforming Rome, 135. 31. Cited in O’Malley, First Jesuits, 6, 67–8. 32. Ibid., 73. 33. De Guibert, Spiritual Doctrine, 157. 34. The best treatments of this phenomenon are Louis Chatellier, Europe of the Devout:The Catholic Reformation and the Formation of a New Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), and Iparraguirre, Historia de la Practica. 35. Louis Chatellier, The Religion of the Poor: Rural Missions in Europe and the Formation of Modern Catholicism, c. 1500–c. 1800, trans. Brian Pierce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Jennifer Selwyn, “Planting Many Virtues There”: Jesuit Popular Missions in the Viceroyalty of Naples, 1550–1700 (Ph.D. Dissertation: University of California at Davis, 1997). 36. Maher, Reforming Rome, 375. 37. Jerome V. Jacobsen, S.J., Educational Foundations of the Jesuits in Sixteenth-Century New Spain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1938), 6. 38. Chatellier, Europe of the Devout, 41. 39. De Guibert, Spiritual Doctrine, 189. 40. Instruction 11 in The Letters and Instructions of Francis Xavier, ed. and trans. Joseph Costelloe, S.J. (St. Louis:The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1992). 41. Spence, Memory Palace, 77.There is no mention of giving the Exercises to the sailors; however, he does mention that the problem of hearing confession on a crowded ship did prevent some sailors from making their confession. 42. Ibid., 55. 43. Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 44. Sabine Patricia Hyland, Conversion, Custom and “Culture”: Jesuit Racial Policy in Sixteenth-Century Peru (Ph.D. Dissertation:Yale University, 1994), 35–41, 158. 45. Cited in Sabine MacCormack, Religion in the Andes:Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 267.

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46. Andres Perez de Ribas, Historia de los triunfos de nuestra santa fe entre gentes las más bárbaras y fieras del Nuevo Orbe, 1642, ed. and trans. Daniel T. Reff, Maureen Ahern, and Richard K. Danford (Tucson:The University of Arizona Press, 1999), 91. 47. Charles W. Polzer, Rules and Precepts of the Jesuit Missions of Northwestern New Spain (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1976). 48. Laura Alarcón, Educación y evangelio en Sinaloa: Siglos XVI–XVII (Sinaloa: COBAES, 1996), 95 (quoting the Annual Letter of 1624). 49. Cited in Polzer, Rules and Precepts, 108.The letter is not dated, but he served as Provincial from 1722 to 1725. 50. Cited in Polzer, Rules and Precepts, 111. 51. Even prior to their departure from Lisbon, Xavier and his Jesuit brothers made use of their time giving the first week of the Exercises to prisoners of the Inquisition. Letter to Fathers Pietro Codacio and Ignatius of Loyola (in Rome from Lisbon, October 22, 1540) in Letters and Instructions. 52. Instruction 16 in Letters and Instructions. 53. Letter to Father Simao Rodrigues (in Portugal from Cochin, January 20, 1549) in Letters and Instructions. 54. Instruction 19 in Letters and Instructions. 55. Instruction for Father Barzaeus (departing for Hormuz from Goa, April 1549) in Letters and Instructions (my emphasis). 56. Peggy K. Liss, “Jesuit Contributions to the Ideology of Spanish Empire in Mexico, Part II,” The Americas, 29.4 (1973), 314–33, at 323. 57. Letter to Enriquez of Paril, May 14, 1579, cited in Liss, “Jesuit Contributions,” 324. 58. Archivo Romanum Societatus Iesu (ARSI), Mex 15, Carta Annua 1615, f. 5v. 59. ARSI, Carta Annua 1615, f. 6v. 60. Instruction 32 in Letters and Instructions. 61. ARSI, Carta Annua 1615, f. 8. 62. Scott, Refashioning Futures, 34. 63. Iparraguirre suggests that the Exercises became even more widespread in New Spain in the eighteenth century than they were in Spain (Historia de la Practica de los Ejercicios). 64. Phillip Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

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The Question of Occidentalism in Early Modern Morocco Nabil I. Matar

In one of the two major Arabic critiques of Edward Said’s theory of Western Orientalism, Aziz al-Azmeh argued that the representation of the cultural and religious Other had not been exclusive to the modern Europeans on whom Said had chiefly focused. Azmeh examined medieval Arabic literature and geography and showed that it too had developed a discourse about the Other, a discourse “similar to orientalism” in its representation of the barbarians of Europe, Africa, and other parts of the “unknown” world.1 Representations of other peoples, he explained, are not exclusive to the Western mediation of the Orient, but are inherent in any approach that one society develops about another: “States, civilizations and cultures expend much energy, not commensurate with size, in fixing moral boundaries, consolidating their difference from outsiders, and otherwise encircling themselves with frontiers impermeable to the exotic; and this energy intensifies in circumstances of commotion, instability and conflict, turning to a frenzy of positive hostility most dramatically represented by theoretical and practical racism.”2 For Al-Azmeh, representation of other peoples was not necessarily part of a colonial (as Said had argued) but of a human discourse. All societies, Occidental as well as Oriental, European as well as Arab, essentialize the Other through a system of dichotomization and representation. There have been sporadic attempts on the part of Arab critics to examine the Arab-Islamic counterpart to Said’s Orientalism—“Orientalism in

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Reverse,” as Sadeq Jalal al-Azm called it,3 or “Occidentalism”/istighrab (although this last term has remained unclearly defined and infrequent),4 despite Said’s warning that “the answer to Orientalism is not Occidentalism.”5 As Wang Ning has correctly observed, Occidentalism has not “yet become a theoretical topic.”6 In numerous Arabic journalistic articles, the term istishraq is used for any study of the West— without necessarily focusing on political or ideological discourse. Meanwhile, another Arab-Islamic critic of Said, Anouar Majid, has challenged Said by proposing an Islamic paradigm that dismantles the dichotomization of the East and West. In today’s polycentric world (or Foucault’s “decentered,” a term that Majid also uses), Majid states, there is, or should be, a place for a “progressively interpreted Islam”-ic discourse since it not only does away with the Orientalist dichotomization, which many Western readers have found both objectionable and unsettling, but opens up the possibility of hybridity and syncretism that are the “best available models to dismantle the unproductive polarizations inherent in the totalizing narratives of difference.”7 Majid thus, like Aijaz Ahmad and others before him, faults Said for operating within a unipolar, Euro-Americo-centric frame of reference, and for valorizing Western sources, documents, and inscriptions over and against the Eastern. In the polycentric world of the twenty-first century (Majid’s book appeared in the last/first year of the twentieth/twenty-first centuries), a place should be made for a discourse that is syncretic, nonWestern, nonnationalistic, non-secular (in this case, Islamic), and noncapitalistic.This “Islam”-ic discourse can show how the inescapability of discourse need not lead to an inevitability of oppositionality. Majid wants to move beyond Said to a brave new world where there is no dichotomization that perpetuates the sins of Orientalism and Orientalism, and where the Euro-Christian model of cultural separation need not be imposed. Coming from Morocco, and specifically from Tangier (as he writes), a city at the crossroads between Europe and Africa, the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, the white and the black, Christianity and Islam, he seeks to interrogate the oppositionality inherent in the discourse of Orientalism. Such interrogation is quite important because Azmeh’s generalization—that all societies construct an Other—paints all societies with the same brush and makes no distinction between the society that constructs a discourse to dominate, as Said showed, and another that constructs a noncoercive and even nonjudgmental discourse, as Majid argues in regard to “Islam.” In its vast and extended history, Islamic civilization developed numerous discourses with which it defined its relations to racial, religious, and

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ethnic Others. Each Islamic region developed its own discourse (articulated through jurisprudential decisions) depending on the religious or ethnic Others with whom it was engaged.The Islam of Majid’s Morocco had to contend with a peaceful religious Other (the Jews), an adversarial religious Other (the Euro-Christians), and an ethnic Other (the Berbers) at the same time that the Islam of Anatolia or Iran or India had to contend with both the Jewish and the Christian, and at the same time, other Others.To discuss “Islam” without taking into account the differences inherent to regions and continents, schools of jurisprudence, ethnicities, ascendancy or decline, independence or colonial domination (as with the Ottoman and later Western domination of the Mediterranean), ascendant Islam or Islam in minority, ignores the problematizations that have been historically decisive and divisive.8 Still Majid’s thesis is important in its appeal to the hybrid capacity within Islam. In this essay, I attempt to support that thesis by focusing on one historical case study in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—the “early modern” period between Azmeh’s terminus ad quem and Majid’s terminus a quo. In particular, I will focus on one region in the ArabIslamic world—Morocco—because that region alone remained outside the hegemony of the Turkish/Ottoman Empire while enjoying extensive economic, diplomatic, and military engagement with Europeans. In these two centuries, when Europe and the Mediterranean world of Islam were teetering on the edge of modernity, a modernity that Europeans will realize but that Muslims will not, the discourse that Islam constructed of the West/Europeans/Christians was not a discourse of oppositionality and dichotomization simply because the Arab-Islamic society and civilization of those centuries lacked the material conditions for constructing and sustaining such a discourse.The orientalist/occidentalist binary did not dominate the discourse of Morocco and therefore, when Moroccans mediated the Western Christian ifranj or ajam or ruum—generic terms for Westerners that later gave way to national European identities—they did not, indeed could not, produce a regime of rigid and discursive stereotypes in the manner of Orientalism. These material conditions were examined by Said in the rest of his Orientalism trilogy: The Question of Palestine, which looked at the historical role of Western Christian theology in the colonial enterprise over Palestine; and Covering Islam, which looked at the media’s collusion in the ongoing demonization of Islam, Muslims, and Arabs, and the association between media power and the authorized representation of news/truth. These two books, which as Said states, complete what he had started in Orientalism, are nearly always ignored in the critique of his

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work.Yet they demonstrate a continuing Orientalist discourse about the (Islamic) East: they show how theological and technological conditions made possible the rise not just of Orientalism but of every discourse that subsequently determined and dichotomized social reality between the West and non-West.The Western construction of the Islamic Orient was predicated on a Christian essentializing and repudiation of Islam that went back to the eighth century; while the dissemination of that construction from metropolitan centers of media power until they became “truths” could not have occurred without Western control over the means of intellectual re-production: the printing press.The discourse of Orientalism could not have emerged without the oppositionality toward the religion of the Other, and the material power to express in print, and therefore replicate, that oppositionality in societies where information had become centralized, mass-produced, and consumer-oriented. In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault stated that in the seventeenth century, discrimination and differentiation came to supercede resemblance, alikeness, and similitude—both in the scientific field, as he argued, as well as in the humanistic and anthropological fields.9 As European literature of that period shows, from Ariosto and Tasso to Shakespeare and Lope de Vega, polarization dominated the encounter between the European and the Moor, the Christian and the unbeliever, the captor and the captive. In England, Spain, France, and Italy, the fiction of novel, ballad, and drama played a major role in constructing and sustaining European polarization with the “Arab,” “Saracen,” “Moor,” “Turk” (often generically used for Muslim), and the “Mahometan:” fiction confirmed the link between brutality, deviance, sacrilege and the “Mahometan,” and subsequently justified European violence and (in the case of Spain and France) expulsion.10 The Muslims were culturally, historically, and socially dichotomized from their Christian counterparts.As Lope de Vega stated through the Moor Arbolan in his Los Esclavos Libres: el amor nació en España, y en el Africa, los celos. Sabe el español amar y sabe el moro guardar; el cristiano sólo arder, el africano temer; servir uno, otro celar. Acá cerramos las puertas, allá las dejan abiertas; acá a nadie se confían,

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allá de amigos se fían, con fianzas siempre inciertas. Acá no hay luz en las salas, allá de amigos se fían con fianzas siempre inciertas. Love was born in Spain And jealousy in Africa. The Spaniard knows how to love, The Moor knows how to hide, The Christian knows passion, The Moor knows fear. One worships; the other conceals. Here [in Algiers/Islam] we close doors, There [in Spain/Christendom] they are left open; Here no one trusts anybody, There friends trust each other; Here there are no lights in our parlors, There the gates are full of them.11 There was no point of contact between the two peoples. And should such contact occur, at the deep and meaningful level of love and marriage, as in Othello, the result could not but be violently destructive. Difference with the Moors was structural, even ontological. As one of the Spanish captives proclaimed in another play by de Vega, Los Cautivos de Argel, God has prohibited us from loving the foreign woman,“la ajena mujer.”12 There was a binary that was constituted to the point where continents, civilizations, and individuals could not have nonconfrontational contact. Europeans permitted Muslim traders and ambassadors to reside for limited periods of time on their soil, but at the beginning of the formation of European religio-national identity, difference superceded alikeness, and Europeans shut their doors to the Muslims as potential subjects. There is not a single political theoretician, or for that matter, religious thinker, statesman, or writer who argued for a place within the “religio-national state” and “western civilization” for the Muslim qua Muslim. Only in the writings of John Locke at the end of the seventeenth century did the possibility for the toleration of Muslims qua Muslims in England arise—but not before.13 And despite the importance of Locke’s theory, no practical changes were instituted to make Muslim citizenship possible in the Western national state in the way that

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the Islamic theocratic empires had made for the Christians and the Jews. The “othering” that de Vega described was what Europeans practiced. Meanwhile, Moroccans feared and admired, fought, married and traded with, enslaved and were enslaved by, the Christians. But they did not draw a line of structural separation and representation, nor did they fantasize about the European (to use Alain Grosrichard’s term).14 The reasons are twofold.The first and foundational factor that prevented such an oppositional discourse in Arab-Islamic thought of the Maghreb is Muslim respect for the “Prophet” of the Christians. No Muslim writer ever described Jesus in the vilifying manner that Christian writers described Mohammed. On the contrary, Moroccan writings include numerous references to the hadiths of the Prophet Mohammed that tell about “sayyidna Issa, alayhi al-salam” (our Master Jesus, peace be upon him), in which Jesus serves as an inspiration and guide to Muslims. The Muslim Jesus by Tarif Khalidi stunningly shows the prevalence of the figure of Jesus in Islamic devotion, piety, and history from the beginning of the Islamic revelation until the fifteenth century, and from Arabia to Africa.15 Likewise, writings of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Magharibas such as Ibn Yajbish al-Tazi, Ibn Askar, al-Hasan al-Yusi, Abu Abdallah Ibn Aishoon al-Sharrat, and others repeatedly quote and allude to Issa. Islamic discourse, in other words, redefined and coopted the central figures of the Christian revelations, as further witnessed by the Morisco appeal to the apocryphal “Gospel of Barnabas” (where the New Testament “Paraclete” is prophetically applied to Mohammed in the way that Christians turned the Old Testament into a prophetic anticipation of Jesus), the 1590s forging of the Lead Books16 with the beautiful Gospel of Mary (which grew out of the Qur’an’s pious attention to Mary),17 and the various mosques in North Africa that were named after “al-Masih”/Christ. From this perspective, as Said commented on Khalidi’s book cover, the idea of a clash of religious civilizations between Christendom and Islam, at least from the Islamic side, fades away. Since Jesus occupies a venerated position in Islamic discourse (and discourse it is, as the Qur’an presents a “Muhammadan” rather than a Nicene Jesus), then Jesus’s followers, despite their errors, occupy a unique status in Islamic theology and theocracy: they are either affiliate People of the Book who pay the jizya (tax) and are protected within the Islamic polity or misguided unbelievers who need direction and enlightenment. In both cases, the nasara (Christians) belong within the human submission to God. No Moroccan author left behind writings that demonize the followers of Jesus in the manner in which Luther, de Vega, John Foxe, and Tasso demonized the Muslims and, more venomously, the Prophet

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of Islam. For the Moroccan who was separated from the Euro-Christians by a mere strait, which he crossed for trade, diplomacy, and battle, the nasara were encountered on a regular basis as enemies and partners, friends and foes, depending on the contemporary state of affairs. They were not demonic or subhuman or monstrous; rather they were traders, immigrants, and converts residing in an area stretching from Meknes to Tunis with their chapels, hospitals, and a sense of community—in a manner that no Magharibi community enjoyed in any part of Western Europe.18 The contrast between the two discourses about the Other can be examined in two accounts of 1589, one Moroccan and the other English. In 1589, the Moroccan envoy, Mohammad Al-Majruti (d. 1593/4), left on a diplomatic mission from Tetuan to Istanbul that entailed crossing from one side of the Mediterranean to the other. It was a crossing fraught with danger as the Mediterranean was infested with “Christians, who are called in their language, corsairs [qarasina], and who lurk at sea and capture whoever of the enemy is weak. The inhabitants of Tetuan told us that the Christians, may God destroy them, followed us from Ceuta in eight ships, but God defeated their plans and sent them back empty-handed.” The Christians were the undifferentiated enemy, an adversarial religious horde that attacked and enslaved Muslims just because they were Muslims. On his return journey from Constantinople, for which he was grateful that God had made it “a barrier to prevent Christians from invading the lands of the Muslims,” he found himself having to describe again and again the piratical danger of “al-nasara al-kuffar,” the unbelieving Christians.19 In the same year, Richard Hakluyt published the account of John Fox, an Englishman, who escaped from Turkish captivity in Alexandria and returned home in 1577.The account of captivity and escape from Islam, the first in English annals, described the mariner’s terrible experience among the Muslims. Twenty years later, a hack writer by the name of Anthony Munday (1553–1633) rewrote Hakluyt’s account and published it. Munday had never been taken captive, nor, for all we know about him, had ever known a Turk.Yet, he loaded his rendering of Fox with animalizations of the Muslims: they were like “rats” climbing the ship, like “locusts” devouring a country, and like other animals.20 Munday feared and hated the Muslims as much as al-Majruti feared and hated the Christians. But what is different in their accounts is the animalization of the Muslims by Munday. Such animalization stems from a theological model that underpinned the Euro-Christian, especially Protestant, discourse about Islam and that originated in the commentaries

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and expositions of the eschatological texts of the Bible. In that vast corpus of Reformation and post-Reformation invention, fantasy, fear, and vituperation, from the Hapsburg–Ottoman rivalry, to the Protestant– Catholic Thirty Years War and the British Civil Wars, from Martin Luther’s Wittenberg to Henry Meade’s Cambridge, the animals with whom Mohammed and his followers were identified ranged from the monsters of Daniel’s vision to the dragon in the Book of Revelation. In between, Biblical allusions to animals were allegorically, anagogically, or historically identified with the (Muslim) descendants of Hagar: scorpions, serpents, adders, locusts, dogs, wolves, donkeys, birds of prey, and the ten-horned beast.21 This animalization of the Muslims became formulaically associated with particular verses in the Old and New Testaments, thereby confirming that the European separation from the Muslims was predicated on the inerrant word of God (in the way that during the Crusades, the Arabs animalized the European hordes and instituted separation from them).22 Having dehumanized the “Mahometans,” European writers and preachers did not and could not even view them as an Other within any religious, moral, or cultural discourse of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. No Arabic-Moroccan text of the period under study ever developed a Qura’nically based discourse to animalize the nasara. There were, of course, angry fulminations in which Muslim writers compared Christians with dogs: these analogies appear especially in the writings of the exiled Moriscos who were bitter against the Christians for expelling them from their homes and depriving them of their children.23 But there was no establishment of a tradition or school of interpretation that animalized the Christians and that served as a binding exegesis of specific Qura’nic passages for future poets, preachers, and jurists. AlMajruti feared and hated the Christians as did many Muslim travelers across the Mediterranean.And repeatedly, he and his coreligionists called on God to destroy the infidels: dammarahum Allah (may God destroy them) and khadhalahum Allah (may God weaken them) are frequently repeated invocations. The Euro-Christians are denounced and hated, but they are not subhumanized by al-Majruti because there is no exegetical Qura’nic tradition of animalization on which he could draw. Animalization was not canonical. Similarly, the Arabic letters sent from the Sublime Porte to the Moriscos in Andalus in the last quarter of the sixteenth century vehemently decried the Christians and their cruelty—but the Christians/masihiyoon (and this term is used in the letters, not the Qura’nic nasara) remained “kuffar” and “misguided kafara” (unbelievers),“worshippers of devils,” “practitioners of

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corruption and iniquity,” of “corruption and stubbornness,” and “enemies of religion.” These are words that stem from enmity and bloody conflict: after all, the violence of Spanish and Portuguese persecution, invasion, and destruction was devastating. But not from animalization.24 In 1611, Ahmad b. Qasim, the envoy of the Moroccan ruler, Mulay Zaydan (reg. 1603–27), to Holland and France, entered into numerous disputations with Protestant and Catholic Christians. Despite hearing insulting views of Islam from them, at no point did he subhumanize them; he castigated them and warned them of the consequences of their errors, but in his exchanges with them, he always appealed to rationality and to the Old and the New Testaments, which he quoted with reverence and deep respect.25 In a text that was written about the nasara and their theological errors for an exclusively Muslim audience, there is not a single animalization of the religious adversary. Similarly, Muhammad al-Guwazir (fl. 1610), wrote a polemical work, addressed to the rulers in Holland, defending Islam and showing the errors of Christianity. He ended it with an amazing declaration of spiritual and personal breadth: “If anything [in this letter] has been put too outspokenly, then I pray with all my heart that this my audacity may be forgiven, as your excellencies are wont to do because of the generosity and goodness characteristic of your natures, and I would think that I had failed to accomplish my task if I had not answered such an important question posed to me by such important Princes.”26 Toward the end of the century, in 1690, the ambassador to Spain, Mohammad Abd al-Wahab al-Ghassani, also decried the “worshippers of the Cross” and invoked God’s destruction on the infidel enemy,27 but he did not animalize them. On the contrary, one of his retinue who later visited France stated when asked about al-nasara:“Deenahum ka-dunyana, wa dunyahum ka-deenina” (Their religion is as bad as our [social and political] world, and their world is as perfect as our religion.)28 While the nasara were obviously in error, they were not dichotomously apart. For that traveler, engagement with the nasara had already taken place since he could see by contrast something of his own political culture in theirs, as he thought they might see something of their own religious culture in his. The absence of animalization in Islamic writing is significant: to essentialize the adversary as animal and to ground that essentialization on Qura’nic exegesis is to situate the Other in a discourse without hope. The Others-as-animals cannot be saved, mediated, or changed; they cannot be converted to the “true” religion and therefore “redeemed.” By not animalizing the nasara, Moroccan jurists, writers, rulers, and envoys

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retained a niche of hope for them: the Euro-Christians could still be enlightened toward the Straight Path. This is only a niche—which can well be rejected as demeaning and totally unacceptable from the Christian perspective. But it is a niche that makes possible the sociopolitical presence of the Christians and Jews as a protected community among Muslims, not to be expelled (as in Spain and France), nor to be excluded (as in all Christendom), but to be allowed continuity and safety (as in Ottoman Greece, the Middle East, and North Africa). A striking feature in the Magharibi discourse about sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Christians is the recurrence of the word mahabba (love/affection) in diplomatic exchange with them. Letters addressed to European rulers as early as the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had used the term mahabba.29 And when Don Sebastian met his death at Wadi al-Makhazen in 1578, the Moroccan ruler Ahmad al-Mansur wrote a moving letter to Philip II in which he assured him that the body of the Christian invader had been protected so he could be reclaimed by his coreligionists:“If mahabba prevails,” he concluded his letter,“all things become easy.”30 The word mahabba was so much a part of political exchange with the Europeans that the correspondence of every Moroccan ruler, and many in the Ottoman-dominated Regencies as well, shows the continuous use of the word. Mulay Zaidan used the word repeatedly in his letters to the Dutch: “the mahabba that is between us,” he wrote on 14 January, 1615; “true love between us,” he wrote on 31 October, 1615, and on many other occasions.31 Despite conflicts over territory, religion, and commerce, Zaidan aspired for accommodation with his European counterparts on grounds of mahabba. It was the same mahabba that the Moroccan envoy to Paris in 1699, Aisha bin Abdallah, expressed to a French lady and her husband.32 A quarter of a century later, the word was still being used in official communication, as the letter of the ambassador Mohammad bin Ali Abgali to the Duke of Newcastle in England on 8 July, 1726, shows.33 In light of this mahabba, and particularly during times of peace and cooperation, Moroccan writers rephrased the invocations at the beginning of letters addressed to Europeans. Instead of the traditional and exclusive “Praise be to God alone, and His blessings on His Prophet Mohammed,” the Moroccan letters (but not Algerian/Ottoman ones) use the more inclusive “Praise be to God alone, and His blessings on all His Prophets” so that the “Prophet” of the Christians, Jesus, could be included. Many of Mulay Ismail’s letters to British and French addressees praised them as believers “in God and His Prophets and Messengers.”34 By so writing, Ismail was not crossing his religious boundaries: he was appealing to the Qura’nic acceptance of all monotheistic prophets.

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The second factor that militated against the negative essentializing of Europeans in Moroccan thought is the absence of print. Among Europeans, print flourished as of the early part of the sixteenth century, creating markets of readers and writers, buyers and sellers. Printers were publishers as well as booksellers, and while they may not have needed to convince their public of the importance of buying biblical or classical texts (for devotion or study), they needed to advertise books of drama or novella or epic poetry and to convince the public of their value and interest. They had to create their readership through advertisement, patronage, and market management. It is in this context of market and print that fiction leaves its indelible mark. For fiction to sell, it needs polarization—protagonists and antagonists, heroes and villains. Sales thrive on conflict, passion, victory, and defeat—and the literature of early modern Europe, like all great literature, included all such motifs. Inevitably, in this fiction of heroism and Christian glory, the “Mahometan,” the Turk, and the Moor conveniently came to represent all that is different and dangerous and Other. Europe’s early modern great literature spans works from Orlando Furioso to Paradise Lost, Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta to de Vega’s Jerusalem Liberated wherein the image of the Muslim/Moor repeatedly appears. These and other works, which became the classics of Western imagination, were printed and reprinted, performed and studied, memorized and adapted, summarized and translated. They became the landmarks of national identity, religious certainty, and ideological power.They streamlined the consciousness of the emergent European nations and served as the instruments for the building of empires.35 As print prospered in Europe, so did schooling and literacy. The increase in school endowments and the promotion of secondary schools ensured the creation of a large reading public for whom there was a need to produce printed texts and reading material.The increased literacy, the gradual secularization of the universities, the availability of paper, and the improvement in printing technology—the industrialization and commercialization of the book/learning—made possible the creation and dissemination of texts of fiction, in drama as in novella, in verse as in prose. Such dissemination transformed printing into a medium of propaganda thereby reaching even the illiterate who assembled in theaters and church pews, coffee houses and public houses and listened to newspapers being read, stories being told, and plays being summarized, praised, and criticized. Print established a “form of hegemony” over all sectors of society.36 Furthermore, print internationalized the representation of the Muslim because it produced a network of communication and confirmation

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across borders and languages.37 As readers acquired texts in languages other than their own, and the literatures of Europe were so often interdependent—again because of print—they found that the manner in which their national culture had represented the Moor was similar to the way in which other European nationalities thought of him. El Cid was the Spanish hero of the anti-Muslim reconquest, but he still appeared six hundred years later in a French play by Corneille and in a Spanish play by Juan Bautista Diamante (and in a Hollywood movie production threehundred years later). Such repetition and inter-appropriation served to confirm prejudices and anxieties, while reprints served to consolidate them. Wherever the European/Western reader turned, the same image of the “Mahometan” appeared to him or her, on the page as on the stage, in the homily as in the sermon, in English or Italian, Spanish or French. As printing technology developed in Europe, it began to include engravings, woodcuts, lithographs, and other means of pictorial representations of Muslims. In consequence, even the illiterate could now gape at a picture of the grim Turk or the lascivious Moor (as in the Reformation period, his or her ancestors had looked at demonizations of the Pope or of Luther).The first publication on Islam in English, Treatyse of the Turkes Lawe called Alcaron (1519), showed the picture of a Muslim preacher standing in front of the figure of a horned beast-like devil.38 Picture culture also became available to many Europeans in the tapestries that adorned wealthy and royal households—such as the sixteenth-century Tunis tapestries, depicting Christian–Muslim war.39 These tapestries provided a kind of traveling propaganda, as they accompanied the royal residences in their progresses and journeys around the country. The development of such representational crafts and arts—in painting and sculpture, on tapestry and curtains—and the sophistication of the modes of production and re-production ensured a wide European audience for works of art that were also works of political and religious indoctrination, for both the rich who commissioned them and the poor who looked at them, for the literate who could read the cartouches and learn about the depicted events as well as the illiterate whose imaginations became indelibly stamped with Muslim devastation, brutality, and anti-Christianism. Meanwhile, for the homo ludens, the sixteen black pieces in chess helped to remind him always of the Moors, the anti-crusaders, the Turks, the Muslims, and the Saracens who threatened or were believed to threaten his world. Well into the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, chess sets continued to be produced depicting an irrevocable binary with the Muslims. For nothing could better represent polarization

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and oppositionality than a chess battle/set of white versus black, Christian versus Muslim, Crusader versus Saracen, Euro-Christian versus Ottoman.40 Because of the prohibition of pictoriality in Islam, there were no demonized images of European nasara at which children and illiterates could look. Nor were there chess sets that depicted evil-looking or threatening Christians in a culture that, despite playing chess extensively, used nonrepresentational abstracted shapes on the boards. Furthermore, the absence of print produced a unique ideological effect: because there was no information about the Europeans that was printed and reprinted for sale in the market of fiction, no demonized image of the European was developed in Arabic imagination similar to that of the “Turk” or the “Moor” in Spanish novellas or English drama or French and Italian epics. The absence of print prevented the establishment of canonical texts/writers who would mediate stereotypes of power and domination; it also prevented the occurrence of the most endemic ill that appeared in European writings—the blatant telling of lies, which as Percy G. Adams has shown, was widespread in European texts about the outside world during 1660–1800.41 It was not necessarily that Moroccan writers about Europeans were more honest than European writers about Arabs/Muslims: the Arabs simply lacked the financial market incentive that made lying appealing. European travelers sought publishers who would pay them generously for their labors—and therefore the more lies they told, the more readers they attracted, resulting in more sales and more income for both themselves and the publishers. No Moroccan writer had that kind of print superstructure. Manuscript copies were made of travelogues and letters about the nasara, and then they were circulated, but there were no market forces that motivated their writers to embellish and exaggerate in order to appeal to eager buyers. Indeed, as there was “scribal publication” in seventeenth-century England, so was there a similar “publication” process among the Moroccans. But, as scribal publication, according to Harold Love, limited the number of readers, and restricted the exposure of the audience to a specific stratum of the hierarchy (those who could afford them or those who had access to the coterie around the author and could therefore borrow or receive the manuscript),42 so did the scribal publications among the Moroccans. There were various sources of scribal information about Europeans—memoirs, travel accounts, captivity tales, traders’ records, and other sources—but not imaginative fiction for sale, nor captivity novels for titillation, nor fantastic plays for public entertainment and perusal.

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In this context, Michel de Certeau’s views on the difference between writing and orality may well apply to the difference between a print culture and a manuscript culture. On the one hand there is print, on the other orality and its intermittent manuscript recording: In combining the power to keep the past (while the primitive “fable” forgets and loses its origin) with that of indefinitely conquering distance (while the primitive “voice” is limited to the vanishing circle of its auditors), writing produces history. On the one hand, it accumulates, it keeps an inventory of the secrets from the west, it loses nothing, it preserves them in an intact state.Writing is an archive. On the other hand, it declares, it goes to the end of the world, toward those destined to receive it according to the objectives it desires . . . With writing the Westerner has a sword in his hand which will extend its gesture but never modify its subject. In this respect, it repeats and diffuses its prototypes.43 Printing is the means par excellence of repeating and diffusing prototypes, and taking them to the ends of the world.While manuscripts can also repeat and disseminate, they cannot do so as efficiently or speedily as print. Only print can make possible a “hegemonic reproduction”44 of knowledge that can influence not only its own reading society but the values, prejudices, and ideals of societies of other peoples in distant lands. The Moroccan writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries described the natives of America with a bigotry that was acquired from their reading of European texts: while traveling in Europe, they had purchased cheap, attractively printed, and easily accessible books, thereby building up their knowledge about peoples and worlds they had not seen—a knowledge that they accepted and reproduced uncritically.45 At the end of the eighteenth century, a Muslim Turk from Constantinople went to England, converted to Christianity, married a Christian woman, changed his clothes, hair style, name, and character, but was still unable to gain acceptance as a “Briton.”46 In England as in New England, in Spain and in New Spain, in Ceuta and in Malabar, Europeans constructed the definition of themselves by means of lineage and blood, real or mythic, producing such self-delusions as the Spanish Hidalgo and the Puritan Israelite. No people paid a heavier price for these identities than the native populations of the lands that these hidalgos and Israelites conquered, dominated, and transformed. In the age of European rebirth and self-discovery, of Cervantes and Milton, Racine and Voltaire, Europeans partly defined themselves by rejecting

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and excluding, among others, the Arab and the Muslim. They constructed and solidified the binary that would separate them permanently from the Arabs (both Muslims as well as Eastern Christians) in North Africa as in the Levant, in geography as in eschatology, in the fictional world of Lope de Vega, as in the courts of Paris and London, and the autos de fe of Madrid and Lisbon. Meanwhile, the tolerationist theology of the Qura’n and the absence of the printing press in Morocco (and the rest of the Islamic world)47 were conditions that prevented the emergence of an oppositional discourse of “Occidentalism.” While the relationship between Islam and Christendom was often conflictual, the Islamic discourse that developed in Morocco did not view the relationship with the Other as antagonistic and essentialized. Indeed, once the Moroccans liberated nearly all their land from the Portuguese, Spanish, and British invaders, they started thinking that they and the Europeans could inter-identify and integrate. Mulay Ismail explained to King Charles II of England in 1684 that as long as his “watchtowers and cannon” remained on Moroccan soil in Tangier, there could be no peace between them; but once they were removed and the King “relieved our shame and handed over our country to us,” then relations could be reconstituted on grounds of mutuality and cooperation.48 Having regained his usurped land, the Moroccan was willing to open a new page with the English monarch. Clearly, in his mind, the reason for the North African–European/Muslim– Christian conflict was not theological essentialization of the Other but the usurpation of Muslim-Moroccan land. In 1698, Ismail confirmed to King James II of England, during the latter’s exile in France, that “Communication between kings is [religiously] decreed and allowed despite differences in language and religions.”49 There were no barriers to political alliances and to Muslim–Christian cooperation—after national goals were realized. A year later, in February, Mulay Ismail sent his ambassador, Abdallah bin Aisha, to France in order to request for him in marriage the daughter of King Louis XIV. Mulay was thinking in terms of an alliance based on marriage—like many similar alliances in Europe. The ambassador’s address to his hosts openly called for an Arab–Latin fusion of the Mediterranean: “Cette amitié,” he said, “procurera le repos et la tranquillité aux peuples aprés une si longue guerre. C’est elle qui . . . rendra les Maures Français et les Français Maures.”50 Aisha believed that the French could become Moors and the Moors French: there could be an “Arabo-Latin” accord on political as well as religious grounds, a transformation of identity, an exchange of civilizations and a mutuality of

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nationhood that ranged from the cultural and political to the personal and intimate. “When I think of you,” he later wrote to his French host, Jean Jourdan, “I think of Abdallah Jourdan and Jean bin Aisha.”51 From the Moroccan side, there was no antagonism to the French but a “process of hybridity” whereby Aisha became both Abdallah and Jourdan, and where the Moroccan became French and the French “Maures.” The Arab-Islamic tradition of the Maghreb did not develop a discourse of alterity, “occidentalism.” Clearly, alterization is not structural, as al-Azmeh argued: there are societies with specific material conditions that do not (perhaps cannot) develop an “epistemic discourse” about the Other. In the “early modern” period, Majid’s Islamic model had worked. Notes I am grateful to Dr.Anouar Majid for reading this paper and extending helpful insights. Portions of this paper were presented at “Postcolonial Moves” (University of Miami, February 2000); all Arabic entries are transcribed as they appear in the Harvard University HOLLIS catalogue. 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

Aziz al-Azmeh, al-Arab wa-al Barabira (London: Riyad al-Rayyis, 1991). “Barbarians in Arab Eyes,” Past and Present, 134 (1992): 3–18, at 3. Sadik Jalal al-’Azm, “Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse,” Khamsin, 8 (1981): 5–26. For the term, istighrab, see Ahmad al-Sheikh in Hiwar al-Istishraq wa-al-Istighrab (Beirut: al-Markaz al-Arabi lil-Dirasat al-Gharbiyah, 1999) and the review in al-Hayat by Atef Madhhar (20 June, 1999), 23. Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), 328. Wang Ning, “Orientalism and Occidentalism,” New Literary History, 28 (1997): 57–67, at 63. Anouar Majid, Unveiling Traditions (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 98, 35. Majid focuses on Islam in the Arab world and in Africa. He does not touch on Islam in Central Asia, the Far East, and China, and a growing Islam in Western Europe and the United States. But there are more Muslims in just four non-Arab and non-African countries—Indonesia, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh—than in all the Arab countries together. Foucault, The Order of Things (New York:Vintage, 1994), 55. The unit in Albert Mas on the representation of the “Turks” in Spanish thought includes discussions of Turkish “cruauté; La cupidité; L’ivrognerie et la gloutonnerie; Orgueil, jactance et couardise; La ruse, la fourberie et la manque de parole; La lascivité; La sodomie,” Les Turks dans la littérature espagnole du siècle d’or (Paris: Centre de recherches hispaniques, 1967), vol. 2. See also William Wistar Comfort, “The Literary Role of the Saracens in the French Epic,” PMLA, 55 (1940), 628–59, at 650 and “The Saracens in Italian Epic Poetry,” PMLA, 59 (1944): 882–911. For studies on the image of the Moor in European thought, see Maria Soledad Carrasco Urgoiti, El Moro de Granada en la Literature (del Siglo XV al XX) (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1956, repr. 1989); Brandon Beck, From the Rising of the Sun: English Images of the Ottoman Empire to 1715 (New York: Peter Lang, 1987); Samuel Chew, The Crescent and the Rose (repr. New York: Octagon Books, 1965); Clarence Dana Rouillard, The Turk in French History, Thought, and Literature (1520–1660) (Paris: Ancienne Librarie Furne, 1941); Jack D’Amico, The Moor in English Renaissance Drama (Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1991); and my Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), chapters 4 and 5.

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11. “Los Esclavos Libres,” in Obras de Lope de Vega (Madrid: Real Academia Espanola, 1917), 4:418. 12. “Los Cautivos de Argel,” in Obras, 4: 227. 13. See my “The Toleration of Muslims in Renaissance England: Practice and Theory,” in Religious Toleration from Cyrus to Defoe:The Variety of Rites, ed. John C. Laursen (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999): 127–47. 14. Alain Grosrichard, The Sultan’s Court: European Fantasies of the East, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1998). 15. Tarif Khalidi, The Muslim Jesus: Sayings and Stories in Islamic Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). For a “fundamentalist” Muslim view of Jesus, see Mohammad Mitwalli al-Sha’arawi, Maryam wa-al Masih (Cairo: Maktabat al-Turath al-Islami, 1999). 16. See the summary of these books in L. P. Harvey, The Literary Culture of the Moriscos, 1492–1609 (D. Phil. Dissertation: Oxford University, 1958), 241ff. 17. See the detailed study of Jesus and Mary in Morisco thought in Mikel de Epalza, Jésus Otage (Paris: Cerf, 1987), chapter III, “L’image islamique de Jésus.” 18. For studies of Christian residence in Morocco, see Abd al-Hadi Ben Mansour, “Les immigrés européens à Alger et le lobby francais au XVII Siècle,” Majallat el-Tarikh, 21 (1986): 27–47; Youssef Courbage and Philippe Faragues, Christians and Jews Under Islam, trans. Judy Mabro (London: I. B.Tauris, 1998), 39;Andrew C. Hess, The Forgotten Frontier:A History of the SixteenthCentury Ibero-African Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). 19. Al-Nafhat al-Miskiyya fi al-Safara al-Turkiyya, ed. Sliman al-Sid al-Muhami (Tunis: n.p., 1988). 20. John Fox, The Worthy Enterprise of John Fox, in Richard Hakluyt, Principall Navigations (London: George Bishop, 1589), 150–6; Anthony Munday, The Admirable Deliverance of 266 Christians by John Reynard Englishman from the Captivitie of the Turkes (London:Thomas Dawson, 1608). 21. I have examined this theme at length in Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), “Eschatology and the Saracens.” As I pointed out, such animalization often included Catholics as well. 22. Carole Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2000), 293–305. 23. The Moriscos described Christians as “Pharoahs” and “dogs against Truth,” “Pestiferous Cerebrus” and “eaters of pork,” translated in Anwar Chejne, Islam and the West (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), 25. See also the references to Christians as “dogs” in a letter of 7 December, 1581, Abd al-Jelil Temimi,“Munawarat li-khittat isyaan bil-Andalus sanat 1582,” al-Majala al-Tarikhiyyah al-Magharibiyya, 95 (1999): 671–90, at 685–6; al-Maqqari’s analogy between the Ruum (the Christians) and dogs: Azhar ar-Riyad, ed. Mustapha as-Saqa (Rabat: Sunduq al-Turath al-Islami, 1978), 1:107.The dog is an unclean animal in Islam. 24. Abd al-Latif bin Muhammad al-Hamid, Mawqif al-Dawla al-Othmaniya tijah ma’sat al-Muslimeen fi al-Andalus, 1486–1609 (Riyadh: Al-Humayd, 1993). 25. Kitab Nasir al-Din ala ‘l Qawm al-Kafirin, ed. and trans. P. S. Van Koningsveld et al. (Madrid: Al-Majlis al-Ala lil-Abhath al-Ilmiyah, 1997), especially chapters 6–9. 26. Quoted in G. A. Wiegers, “The Andalusi Heritage in the Maghreb: The Polemical Work of Muhammad Alguazir,” in Poetry, Politics and Polemics, ed. Otto Zwarjes et al. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 107–32, at 125. 27. Mohammad bin abd al-Waham al-Ghassani, Rihlat al Wazir fi iftikak al-Asir, ed.Alfrid al-Bustani (Tanger: Muassast al-Jinral Franco, 1940); see my forthcoming translation of this account “In the Lands of the Christians”: Arabic Travel Writing in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2002). 28. Quoted in Henri de Castries, Moulay Ismail et Jacques II (Paris: E. Leroux, 1903), 62. 29. Los Documentos Arabes Diplomaticos del Archivo de la Corona de Aragon, ed. and trans. Maximiliano Al Alarcon y Santon and Ramon Garcia de Linares (Madrid: E. Maestre, 1940), 394, 396. 30. Darío Cabanelas Rodríguez, “Cartas de Ahmad al-Mansur a Felipe II,” Al-Andalus, 23 (1958): 19–47, at 31. 31. Castries, Sources inédites . . . Pays-Bas (Paris: E. Leroux, 1907), 2:462, 604. 32. Brissac, Sources inédites . . . France (Paris: E. Leroux, 1953), 5:291–3, 489–93; 6:184–7.

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33. Public Record Office (London), SP 71/17/43. The word was also used in Algerian letters to the French:“pour l’amour de nous,” “pour l’amour de Votre Majesté,” in Correspondance des Deys D’Alger, ed. Eugène Plantet (Paris: F. Alcan, 1889), 2:15 (4 October, 1701), 2:10 (9 May, 1720). 34. For example Mulay Ismail to Colonel Kirke in Tangier (which survives in English translation) (Public Record Office, London, CO 279/30/239). 35. For the relation of book printing and empire, see John Parker, Books to Build an Empire (Amsterdam: N. Israel, 1965). 36. Harvey J. Graff, The Legacies of Literacy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 124. 37. Henri-Jean Martin, The History and Power of Writing, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 266. See also Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Communication and Cultural Transformation in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 303. 38. The English Experience (Amsterdam:Walter J. Johnson, 1977), Aiv. 39. Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton, Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 31, 83–6. 40. Chess: A Selection from the Gustavus A. Pfeiffer Collection, introduction by Charles K. Wilkinson (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1968), illustrations 58, 59, 60, 61, and 65. 41. Percy G. Adams, Travelers and Travel Liars, 1660–1800 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962). 42. Harold Love, Culture and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 179–80. 43. The Writing of History, trans.Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 215–16. 44. Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory (London:Verso, 1997), 159. 45. Even a traveler from Iraq in the eastern-most part of the Ottoman Empire echoed the racist views of the Europeans in regard to the native inhabitants of the Americas. See my discussion of al-Mawsuli in Turks, Moors, and Englishmen, appendix B. 46. The Turkish Refugee: Being a Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, Deliverances, and Conversion, of Ishmael Bashaw (London, 1797). 47. The first Arabic press was established not in Marrakesh but in Istanbul in 1712 (earlier there had been a shortlived press in Aleppo during 1706–11), but it produced so few books that by the end of the century, there was no more than a score published. For the history of the press, see Wahid Qaddurah, Le début de l’imprimerie Arab à Istanbul et en Syrie: Evolution de l’environment culturel (1706–1787) (Tunis: Markaz al-Dirasat wa al-Buhuth, 1993). For the number and titles of printed books, see Abu al-Futuh Radwan, Tarikh Matba’at Bulaq (Cairo: Al-Matbaah al-Amiriyah, 1953), 10–15. 48. Letters from Barbary, 1576–1774, trans. J. F. P. Hopkins (London: British Academy, 1982), 31 and Public Record Office (London), SP 102/2 f. 128. 49. Henri de Castries, Moulay Ismail et Jacques II (Paris: E. Leroux, 1903), 2. 50. Mercure Galant, (February 1699), 241. See the study of the ambassador’s journey in Eugene Plantet, Mouley Ismael Empereur du Maroc et la Princesse De Conti (Paris: Librarie Plon, 1912). 51. Brissac, Sources inédites . . . France, 5: 284.

PA RT T H R E E

Through Time

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CHAPTER

EIGHT

History and Legend:The Exile and the Turk David Lawton

Con vauc torban! Soi serrazis o crestians? Qals es ma leis? Non sai. (How perturbed I am! Am I Saracen or Christian? What is my law? I do not know.) Raimbaut d’Orange1 “To write history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legend.” With this sentence Erich Auerbach concludes a paragraph in the first chapter of Mimesis in which, unusually, he considers his own contemporary moment beyond literature,“the history which we ourselves are witnessing.” Auerbach sees the currents of twentieth-century German history through to Hitler (whom he does not mention) as complex and contradictory, even at the level of the individual, so that “the slogans of propaganda can be composed only through the crudest simplification.”2 This has struck some of Auerbach’s readers as an unexpectedly guarded response to the Nazism that had deprived him, at the least, of academic tenure. It is certainly neither a statement of partisanship nor a request for sympathy; but it is also introspective and self-reflexive, underlining the ambiguities and contradictions of Auerbach’s own project, a study of “the representation of reality

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in Western literature.” The trajectory Auerbach traces is still influential— in, for example, Benedict Anderson’s move from the cohesive transcendence of the Middle Ages to modern nationalism. Auerbach traces the overturning of classical rhetoric and its modes, consummately in the work of Dante, by a system of signs and totalizing codes bonded by a doctrine of incarnation that makes possible the radical stylistic movement between high and low, grotesque and sublime. Auerbach then records the unraveling of this in an increasing immanence or realism. As insider/outsider, the Jewish Auerbach deftly describes the breakdown of a Christian ideology (though he does not use the term) and the cultural power of representation it confers. It will be part of my argument that in constructing this grand schema, Auerbach is responding to his extraordinary personal experience, and that in responding to it we must therefore invoke our own. Announcing from Istanbul the end of a “Western” “representation of reality” already past, Auerbach is, as Michael Holquist brilliantly argues,“the last European,”3 and the culture he describes is caught by his text in its slippage from the complex understanding of history to the simpler imaginings of legend. Ironically, however, Auerbach locates his own work within this slippage, speaking of his consciousness of writing, in effect, legend— an account that “runs far too smoothly” and “arranges its material in a simple and straightforward way.” For, as he states in his epilogue, a “systematic and complete history of realism” would have been “impossible”4 and, indeed, overcomplex compared to the brilliant simplification—the use of texts as culturally key or representative, or both—which Auerbach adopts as his process. But my use of the difference between history and legend in this essay has to do in the first instance with the reception of Auerbach’s own work. Legend, says Auerbach, detaches its material “from its contemporary historical context.”5 As Seth Lerer has written, rightly, of early reviews of Mimesis: “The Turkish exile is externalized, made either a problem in research or a badge of honor, yet nowhere relocated in the critic’s narrative.”6 And so it remains in the very volume of essays that these salient remarks introduce. The word “exile” already signifies as much. In the next essay of Lerer’s collection, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht produces an intellectual genealogy for Auerbach’s work, placing it solidly in a German intellectual tradition: “Undoubtedly the years between 1911 and 1929 were the formative period in Erich Auerbach’s life. I therefore do not believe that his passionate and distanced view of European culture emerged during his exile in Istanbul or even after his emigration to the United States in 1947.”7 The description of

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Auerbach’s focus, his “passionate and distanced view,” is fine, and the case for Auerbach’s indebtedness to German philosophical and intellectual tradition is incontrovertibly supported by Gumbrecht’s essay. Yet there are surely unexamined cultural preconceptions here as well: while going to the Ivy League is “emigration,” living in Istanbul is “exile,” a period of blankness that merely coincided with the decade of Auerbach’s greatest intellectual flowering and productivity. Both Mimesis and “Figura,” for example, were conceived and written during his residence in Istanbul.Yet exile this is in all accounts, including, influentially, that of Edward Said, for whom Auerbach is the ideal exile. Challenging this preconception—or, to give it its true name, prejudice—is no easy matter. Behind it lies another, large one, truly the stuff of which legends are made: the negative evaluation or elision of Turkey and things Turkish in our cultural assumptions about ourselves, the West, and the too easy binarism West/East that the geographical and historical fact of Turkey should disturb. (The “we” of my “our” here relates to Anglophone academics and readers concerned with cultural history or postcolonial theory, and the limited social consciousness beyond our professional group that our views may represent or express.) The difficulty is both addressed and demonstrated by Kathleen Biddick’s contribution to The Postcolonial Middle Ages. Revisiting Said’s Orientalism, Biddick writes against its binary categories, especially its temporal ones, in which the medieval is linked to adolescence and related, in Said’s own work by way of Auerbach, to the trope of exile. Biddick follows James Clifford in critiquing the term, but continues to employ it. It allows her to relate Said’s notion of Orientalism to his translation of Auerbach’s essay on Hugh of St. Victor. By way of textual influence, therefore, Auerbach becomes complicit with Said in Biddick’s critique of exile. What is lost in this web is the particular nature of Auerbach’s experience: such individual experience, I would argue, matters more, and has more analytical value, than our discourse easily accommodates. Though Biddick pays exemplary attention to Auerbach’s life and correspondence while in Istanbul, their materiality is finally overshadowed by the textual—I am tempted to say figural—relation between him and Said. In a sideways structure that Auerbach might well have admired, Biddick’s essay moves from Said (whose ideas preoccupy her) to Auerbach (whose ideas preoccupy Said) to Dante (whose work preoccupied Auerbach) and finally to the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk—whose New Life, Biddick notes, is preoccupied by Dante. And so the essay arrives, by way of the textual Orient Express of the essay’s subtitle, in Istanbul, where Auerbach wrote and much of the action of Pamuk’s novel takes place.8

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Biddick’s purpose is to demonstrate the connections between, and interrelations of, medieval and modern,“East” and “West.” She identifies a theme of murderous rivalry in Pamuk’s novel, in which the narrator ends up tracking down the former lover of the woman with whom he is obsessed and shooting him in a cinema. She pursues parallels with La Vita Nuova, suggested not only by Pamuk’s title but by his allusion to famous passages: the scene of the near-fratricidal murder becomes a gloss on Dante’s relation to Cavalcanti. The effect, unintentionally, is that Pamuk’s novel is subjected to Eurocentric reading; at its climax, it simply disappears back into the Vita Nuova. Pamuk’s work receives much notice of this kind. Cover blurbs routinely cite Nabokov or Ballard or Rushdie or Kafka, all conceived, it might seem, in a kind of Euro-American hyperspace somewhat removed from whatever geographic or ethnic or linguistic boundaries all but one of them has hopped.The tributes are admiring, but their too easy assumption is that literature knows no boundaries and that it therefore compliments Pamuk to see his work mainly outside his national culture. They all underestimate Pamuk’s ability to pastiche and collage major European texts in order to speak in a strikingly original way of the cultural polarities, and agonizing history, of modern Turkey—pulled by the contradictory impulses and equally unattainable identities of East and West, disregarded by both, and at home in neither. Pamuk’s book is an understated unfolding of Turkey’s modern cultural conflict. Its narrator’s New Life begins when the mystery woman Janan introduces him to the book that utterly transforms him and whose devotee he becomes. The book is never described, but it is traced by the narrator—whose name is variably Mehmet or Osman—to the work of his own late Uncle Rafi, a retired railway engineer who wrote mainly children’s books.Thus Pamuk describes something like a Turkish version of Scientology, except that it is a murderous underground network, mainly among students, and controlled from a house in Eastern Anatolia by a version of the Old Man of the Mountain called Dr. Pine, who is the father of Janan’s lover, also called Mehmet. The narrator Osman/ Mehmet wanders Anatolia in an incessant lifetime of long-distance bus rides, observing and describing the mess of originally Western-based but now global deculturation, such as Coca Cola signs, and cultivating the vicarious pleasures of bus crashes—during one of which he is temporarily reunited with Janan. Eventually, he hunts down Mehmet, who is both his rival and counterpart, his alter ego: they have even shared a name. Surreal as all this may seem, it is close to some realities of modern Turkish life: increasing Westernization and globalization at the level of economic exploitation, and a growing hankering after alternative local,

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religious, or ethnic identities that are at least equally fantastic and constructed. No one who has lived in modern Turkey will fail to recognize the ubiquity of long-distance overnight coaches: they are to modern Turkey what the highway system is to the modern United States—the key to a cultural map. They have largely supplanted the railroad, on which Uncle Rafi worked, which Ataturk hoped would be the iron agent of centralizing, westernizing government.And they crash regularly and horrendously as Pamuk describes, commonly and with a materiality sickening enough for there to be no need to invoke intertextually the queasier and rarified erotics of J. G. Ballard. Nor, alas, does it require any kind of a gloss about Dante and Cavalcanti to explain why Turkish students spent a number of years from 1970 killing one another for little or fantastic causes. At this point I feel obliged, contrary to conventional decorum but in keeping with my argument about Auerbach, to table personal experience.When I taught in Turkey during that period, my class size diminished each term because my students were literally engaged in mutual slaughter. Students in the major universities—in Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir—were faced with a choice of declaring themselves Left or Right. Those who did not were attacked by both sides. On the Left, few seemed to know anything beyond slogans: they spoke of Marx but in most cases had read nothing of his works, and at best took what solace anyone might from a little Sartre and invocation of Paris 1968. At worst, their spirit, if not their reading, was Maoist—destructive, contemptuous of human rights, and careless of life. On the Right, which was at least equally violent, Islam played a major rhetorical role: it was the rallying call, quite often, of young men from eastern Anatolia whose families had derived less economic benefit from Ataturk’s reforms than the middle classes of Izmir and Istanbul, yet whose merit had won them school or college places in western Turkey. This was not a conventional nationalism. That, by contrast, was the position of the army generals who saw themselves as the guardians of Ataturk’s secular legacy, and who took power from the elected politicians in 1960, 1970, and 1979. Throughout this period, Turkish youth maimed and murdered their peers in the name of ideologies they often could not expound, and books they often had not read. There seems no doubt to me that Pamuk’s novel refers to this history, and that the “New Life” of his title is therefore ironic. Pamuk’s book gives a compressed freehand version of the history and cannot even be called nightmarish, for it is relatively sanitized. His critique marks the extreme cultural confusion—Coca Cola signs and Western movies in the middle of the Anatolian plateau, the cultivation of esoteric secret

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societies on the flimsiest of grounds, and the fratricidal strife that occurs even within them in the multiple bus crash that is modern Turkish history.“Doctor Fine” and his movement, once placed in Eastern Anatolia, are unmistakably far right-wing. Seen from the viewpoint of an Istanbul student, however, it all seems at first inconsequentially solipsistic and romantic—and the absurdity that makes such a movement construct a canonical book from the retirement writings of a railway engineer (or indeed, Turkish nationalism from smatterings of Dante) appears all but routine.With a certainty verging on delusion people murder on the basis of portentous nonsense. Pamuk’s Dante allusion plays in all this as ominous bric-a-brac like Coca Cola signs; it reinforces questions about cultural affiliations against, or in frustration of, identity. And his play with names—two characters with the name of the prophet, Mehmet, one of whom kills the other and has the alternative name of Osman (as in Osmanli, the Turkish name of the Ottoman empire)—burlesques questions of national identity, personal destiny, and religious affiliation in ways that resemble the savage blasphemies of The Satanic Verses. Nothing that looks back to the past can do other than blight the already stricken future.And so in Pamuk’s parable, modern Turkey exists beset by its multiple fantasies—denied a full role in the West (Turkey has been an applicant for EU membership since the 1960s, and has seen almost the whole of Eastern Europe leapfrog its place in the queue), and riven by dreams of reverting to what for many Turks is an already obsolete Islam. Pamuk’s book plays out the fabulous nature of Turkish identities. Biddick’s suggestive essay ultimately falls short both of the reality of modern Turkey and of Auerbach’s experience living in Istanbul. Instead, though not uncritically, it follows Said into the trope of exile. Yet Auerbach’s experience was not exile in any negative sense. It certainly saved his career, after Marburg gave way to Nazi racist pressure and dropped him; for the same reason, since Auerbach was a Jew, it almost certainly saved his life. Auerbach was well aware of this. Movingly, he wonders how many of his former friends and colleagues would be alive to read his work. Removed from the copious homicide of the Reich to a benign and neutral environment,Auerbach was in the position Levinas would see as that of Jew: “perennially heteronomous,” “both familiar with yet excluded (and estranged) from the cities, the cultures, and the communities within which he/she circulates.”9 It radically facilitated the writing of Mimesis and much of the other major work for which he is and will be remembered.This is the plain meaning of his own epilogue to Mimesis: if he had not been in Istanbul, he would not have been able to write the work.10 He has there the creative freedom of which

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graduate students dream: the ability to defend his failure to read others’ work and to overlook scholarship on the texts he discusses. It is an extraordinary index of our professional abjection that we routinely seem to read this, po-faced, as an apology for his failure to provide footnotes. Auerbach well knows that he has had an unusually good war; he is a rare being in the 1930s and 1940s, a lucky German Jew. And a productive one, in writing one of the great texts of cultural study (I avoid the term history) of which residence away from “the West” was the enabling condition. Small wonder that Auerbach lingered in Turkey until 1947, and when he left it was not to return to Germany—or to accept invitations to Israel—but to tenure his statelessness in the United States. How might living in Turkey have facilitated Auerbach’s view of Western representation? He was responsive to every sign of demographic shift and cultural change in the suburbs of Istanbul, and he was entirely conscious of the critical moment in Turkish history that he was sharing. Auerbach arrived in the last year of the life of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the “father of modern Turkey,” who for Auerbach represented “fanatically anti-traditional nationalism,” “nationalism in the extreme accompanied by simultaneous destruction of the national character.”11 Auerbach, who was outspoken in his dislike of nationalism, disapproved of this, but he would have been all the more aware of the ferment it caused. The desired outcome of World War I, for both the British government of Lloyd George and the Greek government of Venizelos, was the destruction not only of the Ottoman empire but also of Turkey itself. Their failure is due in large measure to Ataturk, who seized power late in the war. He was always paradoxical:Westernizing, yet moving the capital from Istanbul to Ankara in Central Anatolia; abolishing all vestiges of Islamic law including Islamic divorce (the law that allowed husbands to be rid of their wives by facing East and saying three times “I divorce you”) yet divorcing his own wife by those means a little before the midnight hour of the law’s abolition. By and large, however, he undid the entire Ottoman enterprise. He was secularist where its major institution had been the Caliphate; he was centralist where that empire had worked more successfully than any Western colonial power with the local cultures, institutions, and languages. Ataturk was devoted to an extreme rhetoric of Turkish identity, began the repression of the Kurds (deemed, as today, not to exist but to be “Eastern Turks”), and wiped out the Armenian community with a ruthlessness that forever tempts the word “genocide.”Yet he was a red-haired Thracian, born in Europe, and utterly committed to a policy of thoroughgoing Westernization. In the 1920s, by Ataturk’s decree, Turks lost their historic costume, their alphabet

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(Roman letters replaced Arabic ones, which were banned within months), and even their names, being forced to invent for themselves Western-style surnames such as, in one case only, Ataturk. It was an extraordinary convulsion, achieved by repression and force of arms but little bloodshed on the part of the Turks. It was the twentieth century’s first, most thoroughgoing, most lasting and perhaps most successful cultural revolution. Its effect, however, was to leave Turkey in its modern state: more stranded than even its geography attests between East and West, unsure of its political and cultural affiliation, and divided by continuing clashes between secularist and religious visions of the future and national identity. The death of Ataturk in 1938, aged only 57, compounded its uncertainties. His reforms were left in the hands of his more cautious successor, Ismet Inonu, who kept Turkey neutral through World War II, allowed a restoration of free elections in 1950, and led his party into opposition when it lost them. Since then, the Turkish army has defended Ataturk’s legacy, distrustful not only of Islamic parties, which are outlawed whenever they threaten to win a plurality, but also of more mainstream conservative parties, however Westward-leaning, that attract support from the East of Turkey where many villagers are, in spite of everything, pious Muslims. Inonu’s Turkish state has been a bulwark of NATO from its early days, and the densest U.S. missile base outside Britain, yet has gained few of the expected benefits, such as EU membership or a stable economy. In the region, the effect of the fall of the Ottoman sultanate and caliphate was great: pan-Arab movements, the existence and growing hegemony of Israel, the development of more radical forms of Islamic fundamentalism, are all consequences. So too, perhaps, are the rise and (from the East) fall of the Soviet Union. The events of 1917, in which Ataturk saved Turkey at the expense of its empire, ended an imperialism in which Turkey could be imagined both as Orient and as a buffer between Europe and the “Far” East; they signaled the end of a history that ran back through the fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the Crusades. One might ask how much of this history is not elided in the notion of Orientalism.The Ottoman Empire was both the East and the gateway to a further East, which European colonizers and traders were not slow to explore, and whose image led Columbus to America. Turkey was a middle empire between the “West” and this second East. It presented at least two aspects: on the one hand, the cosmopolitan face of Istanbul (like Aya Sofya, the Holy Wisdom, itself, looking both East and West) and the South-stretching Levant, its coast dotted with Roman ruins and crusader castles; on the other, the more distinctive and

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culturally challenging Anatolian plateau from Konya to Erzurum. Travelers to whose work one looks for symptoms of Orientalism almost always betray their recognition that there is more than one Orient.The East is double or multiple, and the existence of Turkey helps make it so. Living in Turkey, Auerbach wrote Mimesis in Istanbul, the city whose fall in 1453 announced the end of a dream (never more than a dream) of a world Christian empire—a dream upheld in Auerbach’s eyes, as the polarities of Dante’s style are upheld, by the Christian notion of the incarnate word. Mimesis is Auerbach’s impressionistic and polyglot collage of the history of cultural change. As Holquist argues, plausibly, he writes of “the West” not as an Orientalist might but as one who sees a period come to its end. He writes, that is, to mark cultural change at a time when secularism and nationalism have irreversibly broken down the culture of tradition, the tradition he traces from its high point in Dante to the onset of its fragmentation in the realism of the nineteenth century. “Everyday reality” and “contemporary history” are no longer raised to transcendence by serious fictions but serve instead to authenticate them.12 Auerbach recognizes the process because he sees its cognate before him. His diagnosis of the “West” is the same as his experience of Turkey. This experience helps produce, at least enables, his account of cultural change. If this is so, we might then ask: to what extent is Auerbach’s Turkey already available in Christian Europe as a cultural locus of alterity? Or to what extent, as in accounts of the textual genesis of Mimesis, is the Turk marked by absence or unreality? To what extent can we see a transhistorical pattern of the cultural denial of Turkey and its importance? In the next part of this essay I move back to the high age of Christian representation that Auerbach links to Dante. I discuss contexts in which the representation of reality grounded in Christian transcendence is brought up against an Oriental figure, most often a Turk, in fables of unstable identity. Since, in the accounts of Auerbach and his followers, Christian sacramental representation of the Incarnation is central to Western modes of representation, the next part of this essay must also engage with the difficult and diffuse question that follows: what has Christ’s body to do with the Turk? *** More and more, Auerbach is claimed as a precursor: if the last European, then the inventor of a literary model of cultural history. The most significant claim of filiation is that by Stephen Greenblatt.13 Auerbach’s

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practice, mainly in Mimesis, becomes the model for new historicism: his exemplary use of a passage of text, says Greenblatt, models the new historicist anecdote. Greenblatt’s view of Auerbach recognizes his political position more clearly than most, and identifies with his antinationalism, his Jewishness, and his sense of being a part-outsider to the historical culture being described. For Greenblatt, the great enemy is the notion of the literary text as “a sacred, self-enclosed and self-justifying miracle” to be explained by a kind of literary priesthood. For all the difference reviewers have noted between Auerbach’s use of literary texts and the new historicist anecdote’s use of virtually anything but, this is the basis for valuing Auerbach’s method. Auerbach intervenes in the literary miracle, and writes the text into a legend of cultural change. Like Auerbach, Greenblatt is aware of identifying, and ultimately challenging, a pervasive notion of representation grounded in Christian typologies of immanence and transcendence. For Auerbach, this is a worldview grounded in the Incarnation; for Greenblatt, it has its “closest analogy” in “the Catholic Eucharist.”14 The postclassical “representation of reality”—its very sense of life, death, and community—is grounded in the body of Christ. Greenblatt goes on to concern himself with the depiction of the eucharist in the altarpiece made by Joos van Gent to go above an existing predella by Uccello in the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino.15 Uccello’s predella portrays a violent legend of Host profanation by a Jewish family, all of whom are put to death, screaming children and all. Gent’s painting, by contrast, is a rarified, theologically informed depiction of Christ giving communion to the apostles, extending to Peter the wafer that is his own body. He is watched, in the middle and background of the painting, by witnesses who may be identified as belonging to Urbino society at the time of the picture’s making. Prominent among these witnesses is one marked as oriental by his dress and turban. He has been variously identified. Greenblatt simply adopts Marilyn Lavin’s suggestion that he is a Jew, Isaac, recently converted to Christianity and renamed Sixtus in honor of the Pope. Isaac/Sixtus was in Italy as an emissary of the Persian king in the hope of gaining support for a war against the Turks. It is not necessary to accept this identification to see that the painting as a whole brings together in a theological and Christological context Jews and a conspicuous Oriental who witnesses the key Christian mystery. One might even want to argue that the painting evokes both Jew and Turk. Certainly, the predella and altarpiece together—in their combination of popular legend and careful theology, the gruesomely grotesque (profanation and killing) and the cerebral

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sublime (Christ’s ministry and its meaning)—are an example of the radical fusion of high and low that Auerbach sees as consummate in Dante and identifies as the Western Christian “representation of reality.” They are therefore an example of a particular and historically specific cultural energy, and can be analyzed culturally. Greenblatt notes this, but his analysis remains rather textual: I have argued elsewhere that he prefers an oddly centrifugal mode of explication, of tidily isolable points of fissure, over a centripetal account of the theme historically and in other cultural artifacts.16 The combination of just such scenes, and the disturbing energy that comes with it, are found elsewhere and in other forms. Textual analysis has to lead, as in Auerbach, to cultural history. This very combination of scenes is found conspicuously in the fifteenth-century English drama known as the Croxton Play of the Sacrament. As with the altarpiece and predella, the subject is the supreme value of the eucharist itself, and that value is attested by Jewish profanation. The Jews are seen in both contexts ambivalently as subject to punishment and to conversion: Jews are the enemies of Christianity, but Christians were originally Jews—possibilities expressed in Joos Van Gent’s painting by the figures of Judas Iscariot and Peter. Both contexts evoke Oriental trade and exchange, an outsider or outsiders from the East. In both, if we attend to Auerbach and Greenblatt, what is ultimately in question is the nature of “Western” representation of “reality.” The English play achieves this partly by means of a noteworthy absence: the absence of a Turk. The Croxton Play reinforces its lower mode with the appearance of a doctor who boasts of being able to cure all diseases and bring the dead to life. In this play, uniquely, his services are not called upon and he is dismissed as a fraud: the Jews are not deceived, and the healing of their maimed leader Jonathas is effected by his turning to Christ. This is the earliest datable occurrence in the text of an English play of the folk motif, the Mummers’ combat play, known from quite few records and the writing down, mainly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, of orally transmitted play parts.Though the evidence is therefore inconveniently inconclusive, it would seem logical that the scene in Croxton must testify to the prior existence of the form that is familiar to us from much later copying of folk drama. In the folk drama, the doctor’s function is not to offer to heal a maimed Jew but to raise back to life one of the injured combatants—St. George and, most commonly, a Turkish knight.17 This scene in the folk drama has the same effect as the figure of the Oriental in the Urbino altarpiece: it brings into a Christian cultural

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frame a powerful intimation of the Ottoman empire. (Or indeed, in the case of the folk play, it introduces its predecessors, the Selcuk Dynasty and before that the Saracen armies of the Sultan.) The confrontation it enacts is most plausibly a cultural memory of, and response to, the Crusades.The English cult of St. George is a crusader cult: St. George, who is to be the patron of English national cultural identity, enters English consciousness at much the same time, and in the same context, as the Turk.18 The context is of course one of contestation: from a Christian viewpoint, it concerns the supreme efficacy and validity of the Christian faith, which is the community of, and of faith in, Christ’s Body, which is the sacrament. At a similar point on a European cultural timeline, we can also read entries for the cult (and drama) of Corpus Christi and the play with legends of historical identity through migration (above all in the “legendary history” of Geoffrey of Monmouth). At stake is not only reality and its representation, but also the power to represent. It is the late folk play transcripts that most plausibly show almost the whole network of connections.The Christian champion is almost always St. (sometimes, corruptly, King) George; his adversary most commonly is Turkey Knight (sometimes a Black Moor, and once—in a fine example of late and geographically errant Orientalism—a “black American dog”).19 The two meet, threaten, vaunt, and fight. The Turkish knight dies, and generally is revived, but sometimes fights and dies a second time. In most but not all cases, he is then revived again, and the majority of scripts end with a handshake all round. It is like a paradox of Christian theology shorn of all theological reason: the desire for ultimate Christian victory must lead to an outbreak of peace that inconveniently qualifies that victory. It is not surprising that commentators share a tendency to gloss this plot anthropologically as a magic fight leading to the death and resurrection of a god.The link is all the more tempting in the many scripts that identify the Presenter as Father Christmas. He laments the death of the Turkish knight as the death of “my only son”—though it is immediately incongruous given this reference that the son whose death is mourned is the Turkish, only very rarely the Christian, champion.There is an instability here echoed in the plays’ geographical scope. The doctor who heals the consequences of the meeting of East and West has come from “Italy, Sicily, Germany, France and Spain, / Three times round the world and back again.”20 But sometimes the direction of travel is unexpected. In a script from nineteenth-century Cornwall, for example, the Turkish knight, as if mindful of his purely festive identity and a series of acting engagements, has come not from Turkey but from

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England and Spain: First I fought in England And then I fought in Spain, And now I am come back to England, To fight St George again.21 From late and textually dubious scripts, such slippages might not be significant at all, but they are supported by a very similar range and instability of geographical affiliation in the Croxton Play itself. Indeed, looking at the links between these scripts and the Croxton play, it is tempting to imagine that Croxton draws much more of its structure than is generally recognized from early versions of such folk plays. R. J. E. Tiddy detected in the Mummers’ play, “degenerate and undeveloped though it may be,” alternative types of ritual origin: representation of a magical attack on one’s enemy or “the eating of some representative of the spirit of life.”22 It is not just that Croxton happens to have both these elements. Combined, they are the play’s entire repertoire of Jewish responses to the sacrament. The verbal violence of the extant folk plays, especially in the rival vaunting passages, is highly suggestive of the violence performed upon the host at Croxton: the frying pan,23 dismemberment, and the constant comic threat—minced pies: “I’ll cut you and slash you and send you to Turkey to make minced pies baked in an oven.”24 In Cocking, Sussex, the name of St. George’s antagonist is not Turkey Knight but Minced Pie.25 Clearly, of course, both turkey and minced pie belong on the table when Father Christmas is Presenter, but the very association irresistibly brings to mind Lewis Carroll and absurd renditions of the eucharistic Host. The folk plays might well demonstrate a strange continuity from which every vestige of intellectual awareness has dropped away—and Croxton shows the more conscious linking of most elements at their earliest point of record. It may also be that the violence and stagecraft of the Croxton play are not only varied from the mummers’ plays but share with them elements drawn from the Legend of St. George. In the folk plays, St. George utters and receives the threat of being cut in pieces. In the apocryphal version of the legend, George is stabbed and chopped into ten pieces that are scattered, and the pieces reunited by angelic intervention. It is St. George who dies more than once, like Turkey Knight, and who is impermeable, like the Host in Croxton. George is then cut up and boiled in a caldron, then roasted in an oven.26 In one version, he returns as a child—like the Host in Croxton—in order to lead the Crusade into Jerusalem. The Legend of St. George, therefore, contains the entire program for the odd

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range of violence directed at the Body of Christ by the Jews of the Croxton Play. It lacks only the coup de grâce of the Legend’s canonical version: George finally dies and is transformed into a saint by decapitation. But the canonical version is if anything clearer about George as a type of Christ: his role is both to die, and to resuscitate the dead. To finish with the folk drama, however: anthropological scholars would probably regard its association with the legend of St. George as a late rationalization of rituals having to do with the death and rebirth of a god. But it may be that the St. George link arrives at the same moment as the cultural acquisition of the dramatic schema of this kind of combat play in Western Europe. For such scholars find the “closest congenors”27 of the Mummers’ combat play in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Thrace, in performances the young Mustafa Kemal might have attended.There is also a strong tendency to attribute the earliest models of the combat play to this region, and Asia Minor more generally—that is, to what is now modern Turkey in the region around Istanbul. Since there is no record of such drama in Europe before the twelfth century, it is probable that the crusaders found it there. Western folk drama is then largely Eastern in origin. For its part, the Legend of St. George was little known in the West before the Crusades. It became popular for much the same reason—because the Western armies invaded its home region, an area contested between eastern Christianity and Islam. St. George, like St. Nicholas (the forerunner of the play’s Father Christmas) is a Cappadocian—after the fourteenth century, a Turkish—saint. The drama evidently marks the appearance in the later medieval period of a kind of festive Turk, who enacts the role of enemy but is also potentially a double, mirroring the Western Christian (like the Jew of Croxton).This Turk is both unreal and multipurpose. But the representation is based upon real cultural exchange with a region whose tenure is contested first with the Saracen and then, from the thirteenth century and increasingly in representations of the fifteenth century on, the Turk. The nineteenth-century texts that have Father Christmas lament the death of the Turkish knight as “my only son” may just have captured the exchange transaction that makes the borrowed elements of legend and play so unstable. For, geographically speaking, St. George is originally a “Turkey Knight.” The drama represents him at war with himself or his brother. The nineteenth-century scripts—written for times such as the Crimean or World War I where the Turk might be friend or foe—act out the very question with which the crusaders concerned themselves as they marched under the banner of their British/Turkish saint: can

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violence finally be renounced in peace? Or is the last word to be Crusade? The whole cycle is inherent in the answer of one playscript’s “King George” to the Turk’s plea for mercy: “I never didn’t pardon a Turkish knight. / Therefore rise and fight thy might.”28 St. George and the Turkish knight are bound together both in rivalry and reciprocity by a process of cultural exchange and its largely unconscious collapsing, and transference, of Home and Away. (It remains to be determined how much the folk plays influenced British foreign policy, as they must have.) If so, the process was more flexible than that of more literary representations, as studied by Nabil Matar. It is not at all the case that there was a real ignorance of Turks, or Moors, in sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury England, or any real confusion of the two. Contact was by way of trade, including frequent visitors in both directions, piracy, and military service. Western mercenaries who served “the Great Turk” were honored as great heroes.Yet in the literature, says Matar,Turks and Moors were identically demonized in Orientalist alterity, and the representations of the theater were derived not from any real knowledge but from the stereotypes (already, of course, Orientalizing) applied to American “Indians.” Matar’s work is a cogent reminder that “the Age of Discovery was also the age of holy war,” that Western Europe feared imperial conquest and subjection especially by Turks, and that in England the fear of Catholicism was far greater than the fear of Islam.29 This is a historical reprise of a European culture grounded in division, fearing all but hating most bitterly that which was most like itself. I am suggesting a prehistory for Matar’s model, however, and a lower cultural register of text, in which the role of Catholic is taken by Eastern Christian and in which the festive Turk is both unstable and somewhat ambivalent. This is best shown in English texts from romances, which show not just Orientalist stereotyping but the result of cultural contact with Asia Minor— for example, in the way in which Beves of Hamtoun assimilates the role of St. George. The most striking English example is The Turk and Gawain.30 The Turk and Gawain is one of a group of related English romances— the most famous and earliest example of which is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (ca. 1380)—in which the Arthurian court is challenged by an outsider in the course of a feast or a royal hunt, or both.The outsiders are structurally interchangeable—whether ghost, green man, woman (Dame Ragnell), or Turk—and all turn out to be in some unexpected way related to the Arthurian world, most commonly by kinship. They are, therefore, from the start an Other that is not quite other, and almost all of them—in gendered ways, by bed or beheading—transform into

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something more hospitable: the Green Knight becomes a manly lord, the loathly lady a beautiful mate. They are festive and performative others, who from the first only pretend to be irreconcilable. The “Turke” in The Turk and Gawain (“And like a Turk he was made / Both legg and thye”31) appears at Court, and challenges it in word and in person. He nonetheless becomes Sir Gawain’s squire, and through his agency Gawain is able to defeat the atavistic giant who is King of the Isle of Man.The Turk arranges for Gawain to decapitate him: in a scene with Grail reminiscences, when the head is struck off the blood is caught in a bowl.The Turk is transformed by death into his true self, Sir Gromer. When Gawain refuses Arthur’s offer of the throne of Man, Gromer becomes the new King. The single copy of the poem occurs in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Percy Folio manuscript, from the Lancashire–Cheshire area. Both manuscript and poem plausibly have connections with the magnates of the area, the Stanleys, who are responsible for betraying Richard III in favor of Henry VII at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 and whose forebear, Sir John Stanley of Latham, is connected by recent scholars with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In The Turk and Gawain, cultural memory of Sir John Stanley appears to be alive in three distinct ways: he acquiesced in the overthrow and killing of a king, he saw military service with the Grand Turk, and he was himself appointed King of the Isle of Man by Henry IV in 1405.32 Like most of these poems, however (except Sir Gawain and the Green Knight), The Turk and Gawain is set further north than the Lancashire/ Cheshire/Derbyshire hinterland of the Stanleys, in the Cumbrian border countries close to Scotland. The geographical reference of these poems is wide (in Golagrus and Gawain, Arthur and his men are in France en route to Jerusalem as crusader pilgrims), but the landscape of each poem defaults to the Scots border country, and it is there in each case that issues of land tenure are bitterly disputed. The churl in The Carl of Carlisle and Galeron in The Awntyrs of Arthur are concerned about land rights in the forest areas claimed by Arthur as royal preserve. But there is a constant question in these poems: in these disputes over land, which side is which, and whose side are we to support? When in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Gawain arrives at Hautdesert—when the representative of a royal court arrives at a provincial lord’s house and finds it as magnificent as Arthur’s—he is not in a foreign country but in England. To arrive there he has traveled through Wales and gone past “the holy Head” into Wirral. Where, then, has Gawain come from? From Caerleon, perhaps, or Cadbury; but why not, say, from Cardiff? Could it not be, if Bercilak is English, that Gawain and the Arthurian world are

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seen here as Welsh, a Celtic other? In the Cumbrian context of the Scots borders, given that Gawain is from Midlothian, son of the (Norse) king of Orkney and lord of Galloway, could it not be that those who contest space in the Arthurian forest do so as English knights against the Scots? Of course, relations between the sides transcend ethnic boundaries: in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gawain turns out, in Hautdesert, to be at the home of his aunt Morgan Le Fay, and the Turk turns out to be Sir Gromer, brother of the Dame Ragnell whom Gawain must marry in The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell. But the reader remains potentially disoriented.The effect is like reading William Golding’s The Inheritors, told from the viewpoint of an advanced prehistoric species who struggle against their cruel and simian enemies; only on the last page of our reading do we find that the barbarous enemies are homo sapiens. And the Other, however more integrated than it first seems, remains, may even be more, insidiously hostile. Morgan Le Fay may be Gawain’s aunt, but she has tried to kill Guinevere; the Turk in The Turk and Gawain may not, after all, be a Turk, but in his new identity as Sir Gromer he will be an ally of Aggravayne and Mordred in the downfall of the Arthurian order, and in The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell, in which he tries to lay a trap for Arthur, he has been revealed as another with a grievance of forest tenure against the Arthurian order. Is the reformed Turk rendered safer because he turns out to be another of dubious ethnicity in a disputed border region? As King of Man, is he a figure of the Stanleys or of the Scandinavian kings who had to be dispossessed by them? Who is Gael, Norseman, or Celt, and who is English? The reader cannot conceivably know, and would then not know whose side to be on—which team is Home, which fixture Away. The effect, one might argue, is to unsettle the binaries on which Orientalism depends. And if the Turk is not a real Turk, he is a festive one: he belongs in the world of folk drama, with other representations of modified alterity who undergo transformation. His transformation by beheading puts him in the company of the Green Knight and the Carl of Carlisle; his blood, caught in a bowl, also places him in the fantastic registers of sacramental metamorphosis. Reborn, his full name is Sir Gromer Somer Joure, which places him in a context of folkloric and festive representation, Midsummer, equivalent to the Christmas games of the Mummers’ combat play and of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. He belongs there with the Green Knight of the Percy Folio poem, The Green Knight whose name is Sir Bredbeddle. These romances are best seen as scripts for festive performance, where the worlds of drama and romance converge.

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But they do so nightmarishly. I hope to have given some reason here for dissatisfaction with Thomas Hahn’s intelligent gloss on The Turk and Gawain: “the categorical term ‘Turk’ operates as an indeterminate Orientalist stereotype of difference and exoticism.”33 It is surely indeterminate, radically so. But notions of difference and exoticism, like discriminations of Orientalism, rely on a rather settled sense of who we are. It is just such determinate identities, as much in cultural affiliation as in character, that these works disturb. Two here is Orientalist company; three is a multicultural crowd. If there is more than one Other, where in the sequence are we? So, in the painting by Joos Van Gent analyzed by Greenblatt, there are two possible Orientalist Others, the Jew and the Persian or Turk. The very uncertainty regarding the figure in Oriental costume is eloquent. Is he a Jew, an Easterner (and if so a Turk or a Persian) or is he a bordercrossing Christian, maybe a Venetian? If Lavin’s identification is right, he is a Persian calling for war against the Turk: he then symbolizes a divided and multiple East.There is no single Orient in such a view—any more than in Mandeville’s Travels, with its sense of the complex geopolitics of an East beyond the East, a Tartar Khan beyond the Sultan who might be ally or Antichrist. One of the possible Easts, until 1453, was of course Christian. In his great rationalist history, Edward Gibbon is not slow to underline the historic Christian preference for disunity: negotiations to end the schism between Eastern and Western Churches continued until the Turks stormed the walls of Constantinople. It is a view voiced at the time in the anguished letter of Aeneas Sylvius, who blames the collapse of imperial Christendom on the competing Christian nation.34 After 1453, Europe has to renounce any dreams of a global empire.The Turks impinge on European territory and consciousness: the melding and porous nature of identity in romance and drama signifies the fear that we may become them, or they us. Etymology demands no less. It is in keeping with the doctrine of translatio imperii—the movement of empire from the fall of Troy continually West—that the words Turk and “Teucer,” Trojan, are cognate: Turks are Trojans, and descendents of Trojans are Turks. For their part, the Turks cherish such a fancy: as late as the 1970s Turkish schoolchildren at flag ceremonies sang a national song that invoked, among the names of the great Turks, Genghiz Khan,Attila the Hun, and Napoleon Bonaparte. And the Western rump of Christendom for its part expressed its divided identity in bitter civil religious conflict and concomitant myths of the complicit outsider, as in the romance or drama, or of Christian impermeability against assault—as in the ideology of the Host in the Croxton play and the Urbino altar, and as in the crusading legend of St. George.

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Crusade is forever a temptation, for war helps fix an otherwise labile sense of identity and nationhood.We die in order to become the people we say we are.The cultural danger otherwise is the loss of such an illusion of a single identity, and of the facile binarism that follows from it, of even the possibility of Orientalism. Instead of the grand certainties of faith, we would then inhabit a world like the Arthurian borderlands, of limited and unstable identity in which everyone is each other’s Other. In that world, Gawain is Scot or Welshman, Jews are Christians and Christians are Jews, St. George is the Turkish knight. And Auerbach writes Mimesis in Istanbul. *** This essay has tried to complicate categories of identity, urging both a geopolitical and a long view of cultural history and affiliation. Its movement has been oxymoronic: after insisting on the material context of Turkey for an understanding of Auerbach, it has engaged with “Turks” of the most fantastic and protean kind, in medieval and early modern drama and romance, that nonetheless can only have arisen from real cultural contact in the Crusades. I have tried to suggest a play of similarities as well as differences.Auerbach’s work anticipates this. Commenting on the simple declaration in La Chanson de Roland, “paien unt tort et chrestiens unt droit” (pagans are wrong and Christians are right), he notes that “the life of the infidel knights—except for the names of their gods—seems hardly different from that of the Christians . . . The Christianity of the Christians is simply a stipulation.”35 It is the similarities, indeed, that foster the real enemy to Christendom, treason. Yet Auerbach’s work is grounded in high culture, and leaves the matter there. I have made a case here for looking at evidence from a lower cultural register, and finding their traces of historical hybridity between East and West,Turks and Englishmen. The essay arises from my strong sense of the cultural and political importance of Turkey, historically and now, not least in mediating Orientalist oppositions.Turkey is now the key state between Europe and types of assertive Islam in Iran and the subcontinent, and a defensive mainstay of an increasingly Eastward-facing NATO. Historically, it is close to being the mythical cradle of Western civilization: it has some of the best “Greek” ruins; it is homeland to most of the churches of St. Paul (the keepers of Efes, Ephesus, still make the tacit claim that the Mother of God at least ended her life as a Turk); it is the original imperium of translatio imperii (Troy is now a hole in the ground near the twentieth-century war

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zone once known as the Dardanelles).Turkey awaits its Martin Bernal to give us an Oriental Athena. In the meantime we might remind ourselves that there is more than one East, and we have ties amounting to kinship with the closest. When Auerbach went to Istanbul, he went away to an unfamiliar culture. At the same time, he went home. England, a maritime power furthest removed from the land threat of Ottoman expansion, most openly acknowledged the possibility of ties, not always oppositionally. In 1579–80, under Elizabeth I, England was the first European country to conclude a formal alliance with the Turks. In doing so, its government recognized that the greatest threat came not from Islamic Asia but from Catholic Europe itself, especially from Spain (which had helped defeat the Turks at the naval battle of Lepanto in 1571). John Foxe had plainly compared the degrees of menace, wondering rhetorically whether the Turks or the papacy “hath been the more pernicious and bloody enemy to Christ . . . We war against the Turk with our works, masses, traditions and ceremonies, but we fight not with Christ . . . He that bringeth St George or St Denis, as patrons, to the field against the Turk leaveth Christ no doubt, at home.”36 Again, as Foxe’s digs against Catholic observance show, attitudes to Christ’s body are crucial. The geopolitical and the sacramental together form a new national affinity. Reformation England’s repudiation of the Real Presence enables its alliance with the Turk, and brings to an end the history of European crusading. The rather complex early history leads to the conclusion that Orientalism is a legend in Auerbach’s sense.This would come as no surprise to Said, for whom it is of course a cultural construction. But the danger is that in unraveling that construction we reconstruct it in our own terminology and perceptions. If we do so, the only middle space in which it is possible to move between extreme ideological fantasies of identity comes too easily to be canceled out as an unproductive no man’s land of exile.Then we would fail to see that the middle term is already present, in geography and culture, as the anomalous Turk. The project should be to read Said through the figure of Auerbach in Istanbul, who is not quite an exile.Who is to say that we will not discover new affinities with Turks, whose possible modern identities exist like ours under erasure from the Coca Cola sign? Notes 1. Raimbaut d’Orange, “Pos trobars plan,” ed. Alan Press, Anthology of Troubadour Lyric Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1971), 120, from The Life and Works of the Troubadour Raimbaut d’Orange, ed.W.T. Pattison (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1952), n. 16.

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2. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis:The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans.Willard R.Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 19–20.Written in German in Istanbul between 1942 and 1945, the book was first published in Berne, Switzerland, in 1946. 3. Michael Holquist,“The Last European: Erich Auerbach as Precursor in the History of Cultural Criticism,” Modern Language Quarterly, 54 (1993): 371–91. 4. Auerbach, Mimesis, 19, 556. 5. Ibid., 19. 6. Seth Lerer, “Introduction,” in Literary History and the Challenge of Philology:The Legacy of Erich Auerbach, ed. Seth Lerer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 1–10, at 6. 7. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “ ‘Pathos of the Earthly Progress’: Erich Auerbach’s Everydays,” in Literary History and the Challenge of Philology, 13–35, at 31. 8. Kathleen Biddick, “Coming Out of Exile: Dante on the Orient Express,” in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000), 35–52; Orhan Pamuk, The New Life (Yeni Hayat), trans. Guneli Gun (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1998). 9. Elizabeth Grosz, “Judaism and Exile: The Ethics of Otherness,” in Space and Place: Theories of Identity and Location, ed. Erica Carter, James Donald, and Judith Squires (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1993), 57–71, at 60, citing and paraphrasing Emanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1978) and Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. A. Lingis (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1979). 10. “I may also mention that the book was written during the war and in Istanbul, where the libraries are not well equipped for European studies . . . On the other hand it is quite possible that the book owes its existence to just this lack of a rich and specialized library. If it had been possible for me to acquaint myself with all the work that has been done on so many subjects, I might never have reached the point of writing” (Mimesis, 557). 11. Quoted from Auerbach’s letters by Stephen Greenblatt,“The Touch of the Real,” in Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000), 20–48, at 43. 12. Writing of Flaubert: “The serious treatment of everyday reality, the rise of more extensive and socially inferior social groups to the position of subject matter for problematic-existential representation, on the one hand; on the other, the embedding of random persons and events in the general course of contemporary history, the fluid historical background—these, we believe, are the foundations of modern realism . . .” (Mimesis, 491). 13. Greenblatt, “The Touch of the Real.” 14. Gallagher and Greenblatt, “Introduction,” in Practicing New Historicism, 1–19, at 12. 15. Greenblatt, “The Wound in the Wall,” in Practicing New Historicism, 75–109. 16. David Lawton, “Sacrilege and Theatricality: The Croxton ‘Play of the Sacrament,’ ” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (forthcoming). 17. The Croxton Play is edited in Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments, ed. Norman Davis (London: Oxford University Press, 1970). For the mummers’ plays, see E. K. Chambers, The English Folk-Play (London, 1933); R. J. E. Tiddy, The Mummers’ Play (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923); Alan Brody, The English Mummers and Their Plays (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970); C. R. Baskervill, “Mummers’ Wooing Plays in England,” Modern Philology 21, (1924): 225–72, and “Dramatic Aspects of Medieval Folk Festivals in England,” Studies in Philology, 17 (1920): 19–87. 18. John E. Matzke,“Contributions to the History of the Legend of St George, with special reference to the Sources of the French, German and Anglo-Saxon Metrical Versions,” PMLA, 17 (1902): 464–535, and 18 (1903): 99–169, and “The Legend of St George: Its Development into a roman d’aventure,” PMLA, 19 (1904): 449–78. 19. Chambers, English Folk-Play, 28. 20. Ibid., 8. 21. Tiddy, Mummers’ Play, 144. 22. Ibid., 70, 71.

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33. 34. 35. 36.

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Ibid., 146. Ibid., 142. Ibid., 200. Matzke, “The Legend,” 473. Chambers, English Folk-Play, 206; see Brody, English Mummers for a discussion of anthropological models. Tiddy, Mummers’ Play, 186. Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 1999), 167, 77. For this and most other texts cited here, see Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales, ed.Thomas Hahn (Kalamazoo:TEAMS, 1995). For Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, see J. R. R.Tolkien and E.V. Gordon, eds., rev. by Norman Davis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). The Turk and Gawain, ll. 14–15. See Michael J. Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism: Cheshire and Lancashire Society in the Age of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), and “ ‘Good Lords’ and ‘King Makers’: The Stanleys of Lathom in English Politics, 1385–1485,” History Today, 31 (1981): 12–17; David Lawton, “Scottish Field: Alliterative Verse and Stanley Encomium in the Percy Folio,” Leeds Studies in English, 10 (1978): 42–57. Thomas Hahn, Sir Gawain, 337–8. Robert Schwoebel, The Shadow of the Crescent: The Renaissance Image of the Turk 1453–1517 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1967), 9–12. Auerbach, Mimesis, 101–2. John Foxe, Acts and Monuments, ed. S. R. Cattley, 8 volumes (London: n.p., 1837–41), 4:122, 19–20; Christopher Tyerman, England and the Crusades 1095–1588 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 346–8.

CHAPTER

NINE

The Ghost of Leo Africanus from the English to the Irish Renaissance Bernadette Andrea

Moitié français, donc, et moitié libanais? Pas du tout! L’identité ne se compartimente pas, elle ne se répartit ni par moitiés, ni par tiers, ni par plages cloisonnées. Je n’ai pas plusieurs identités, j’en ai une seule, faite de tous les éléments qui l’ont façonnée, selon un “dosage” particulier qui n’est jamais le même d’une personne à l’autre. (Half French, then, and half Lebanese? Not at all! Identity cannot be compartmentalized; it can be divided neither by halves, nor by thirds, nor by parts. I do not have several identities, I have one alone, made of all the elements which have fashioned it according to a particular “dosage” which is never the same from one person to another.) Amin Maalouf, Les identités meurtrières (Deadly Identities)1 At the close of a millennium marked by the homogenizing forces of global capitalism and the particularizing tendencies of essentialist dogma and sectarian violence, the francophone Lebanese journalist, novelist, and expatriate Amin Maalouf claims a heterogeneous polyglot subjectivity as an antidote to lethally reductive identity politics. Maalouf ’s concern in his memoir with the complex imbrication of identity and politics is

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anticipated by his first novel, Léon l’Africain, which constructs an “imaginary autobiography” for the sixteenth-century poet, diplomat, and exile al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wezzan, also known in the Western European tradition as Leo Africanus.2 The historical Leo Africanus— a name Oumelbanine Zhiri stresses “qu’il ne s’est jamais donné luimême” (that he never gave himself)—was born in the Islamic kingdom of Granada and exiled as a child to North Africa with the overthrow of this kingdom by the Catholic coalition that would later become the Spanish Hapsburg Empire.3 His youth was spent in diplomatic travel concentrating on North Africa, but also venturing to the distant capitals of Timbuktu, Mecca, and Constantinople.Traversing the Mediterranean during one of his voyages, he was captured by Venetian pirates and presented as a slave to Pope Leo X, who lent him his Christian name.While in Rome, he was baptized and became a scribe in the papal service. His treatise Descrittione dell’Africa et delle cose notabili che ivi sono (1550), which he translated from his own Arabic notes into Italian, brought his name to the forefront of the emerging early modern discourse of empire centered in Western (Christian) Europe.4 Further complicating his heterogeneous identity, some sources suggest that he ended his life in North Africa as a Muslim.5 Symptomatic of the displacements Maalouf suggests are constitutive of modernity, Leo Africanus further epitomizes the “cultural amphibian” Edward Said proposes in Orientalism with reference to Shakespeare’s Othello, a character similarly based on the life and writings of Leo Africanus. Said stresses that, as epiphenomena of Orientalism, cultural amphibians are “always represented as outsiders having a special role to play inside Europe.”6 He expands this notion in Culture and Imperialism to include the possibility of resistance, remarking that “these voyages in represent . . . a still unresolved contradiction or discrepancy within metropolitan culture, which through co-optation, dilution, and avoidance partly acknowledges and partly refuses the effort.”7 The cultural amphibian produced by orientalist discourse, in sum, may function strategically as an anticolonial subaltern. Indeed, I argue elsewhere that “Leo Africanus” as fictionalized by Shakespeare and Maalouf and theorized by Said is ultimately grounded in the historical al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wezzan’s strategy of assimilation and dissimulation, encoded in the parable of Amphibia concluding the first book of his influential description of sixteenth-century North Africa.8 Invoking the cultural practice of taqiya, whereby (primarily Shi’a) Muslims are permitted to deny their faith under circumstances of extreme duress, this parable features “a most

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wily bird” who adapts herself to widely divergent political structures in response to the exigencies of exile, changing back and forth from bird to fish as necessary. Notably, Hasan/Leo concludes this parable with an analogy to his own ambivalent position as a European Muslim from Granada who was permanently exiled to North Africa and later transported as a captive to the center of Western Christendom. Establishing himself as arguably the prototypical early modern cultural amphibian, he declares: “For mine owne part, when I heare the Africans euill spoken of, I wil affirme my selfe to be one of Granada: and when I perceiue the nation of Granada to be discommended, then will I professe my selfe to be an African.”9 In the present essay, I shift from the historical al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wezzan’s literary, cultural, and political agency in negotiating his liminal subject position as a cultural amphibian to the Western European imperialist construction of “Leo Africanus” as a cultural palimpsest in the wake of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century translations of his Description of Africa into Italian, French, Latin, and English.10 In referencing the postcolonial heuristic of the palimpsest, I am adapting Sandra Messinger Cypess’s theoretical model in La Malinche in Mexican Literature: From History to Myth, where she combines semiotic and cultural anthropological approaches to adduce “the Malinche paradigm” as indicative of “the dependency of a given discourse on other discourses” within the colonial/postcolonial dialectic that constitutes modern Mexico.11 Focusing on an ambivalent early modern figure analogous to Leo Africanus, Cypess evaluates “the ways in which the signifier, ‘La Malinche’ [the sixteenth-century indigenous translator implicated in the Spanish conquest of Mexico], enters into mobile correlations with the content plane, or the signified . . . to meet the ideological requirements of a given socio-cultural moment.”12 Drawing on Cypess’s diachronic model of signification, I examine not only how Leo Africanus was interpellated as a translator for the imperialist discourses that emerged during the early modern period, but also how he functioned as a floating signifier that simultaneously unsettled and facilitated the Western European imperialist project.As such, his construction as a cultural palimpsest both rendered the Western European discourse of empire ambivalent and remained available for recuperation by subsequent postcolonial writers. While a comprehensive genealogy of the colonialist appropriations and the postcolonialist recuperations of Leo Africanus extends beyond the Western European tradition, as my reference to Maalouf suggests, in this essay I shall focus on the globally situated Anglocentric discourse of

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empire that emerged during the early modern period and on the concomitant discourses of resistance that developed in response to this ultimately dominant discourse.13 In tracing these complexly imbricated discourses of empire and resistance in the Anglophone tradition from the early modern period onwards, I emphasize two definitive moments for the construction of Leo Africanus as a cultural palimpsest. The first moment involves The Masque of Blackness, scripted in 1605 by the court poet Ben Jonson as part of the project of imagining a global British Empire when Great Britain was as yet a nation in name only and when the British (and, more specifically, the English) were dismissed as “belated imperialists” by continental Europeans.14 The second moment, a series of occult encounters the Irish poet and political activist William Butler Yeats delineates in his essay on Leo Africanus, articulates the “empire writing back” during the transition to contemporary postcoloniality through an unsettling series of identifications and disavowals between the Irish nationalist poet and his sixteenth-century “interlocutor.” Situated within a genealogy of the appropriations and recuperations of Leo Africanus as a cultural palimpsest, these resonant moments in the British tradition—the one apparently colonial and the other ostensibly anticolonial—complexly illuminate the contradictions inhering in the globally situated Anglocentric discourse of empire that assumed dominance from the early seventeenth to the late nineteenth century and in the counter-discourses of resistance that took shape towards the end of this period to presage our own postcolonial moment. Staging Imperialism: Noble Moors in Early Seventeenth-Century England First published in 1550 by the Italian humanist Gian Battista Ramusio, Leo Africanus’s record of his travels across North Africa became the most authoritative touchstone for Western European incursions into the African continent from the beginning of transoceanic expansion in the sixteenth century to the apex of global imperialism in the nineteenth. The English translation of Leo Africanus’s treatise, A Geographical Historie of Africa, Written in Arabicke and Italian, by Iohn Leo a More, borne in Granada, and brought up in Barbarie . . . Translated and collected by Iohn Pory (1600), appeared half a century after the first Italian edition as part of the ideological effort to promote global trade and colonization to the still insular British crown.15 As the translator of Leo Africanus for an English audience, and later as the Secretary of Estate for the fledgling colony of Virginia, Pory heavily invested his literary and administrative talents in

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establishing the discursive and material foundations for the first transatlantic British Empire.16 The designated protégé of the imperialist propagandist Richard Hakluyt, Pory shared his mentor’s critique of the English as belated global imperialists, “of all others for their sluggish security, and continuall neglect of the like attempts especially in so long and happy a time of peace.”17 The ambivalent status of Elizabethan England as a potential imperial power on the world stage accordingly motivated Pory’s tendentious rendition of Leo Africanus’s treatise as it was transmitted to him through at least two layers of Western European translators.18 In the wake of Pory’s translation, three political and literary spectacles were staged in England that have a direct bearing on the appropriation of Leo Africanus as a cultural palimpsest for the early modern Anglocentric discourse of empire: the Moroccan ambassador’s audience with Queen Elizabeth of England in 1600; the premiere performance of Shakespeare’s Othello, the Moor of Venice in 1604; and Ben Jonson’s participation in The Masque of Blackness in 1605.19 The third spectacle, which involves the complicated cultural production published by Jonson as The Masque of Blackness, is one I wish to dwell upon because it most explicitly evokes Leo Africanus as an ambivalent locus of imperial authority.20 It is nonetheless crucial to situate this masque as a symptomatic rather than as an anomalous instance of colonial ambivalence in early seventeenth-century England, by placing it alongside the relatively more obscure Moroccan embassy and the certainly more canonical Othello.21 Significantly, each of these spectacles showcases a “Noble Moor” during a period when the English definition of Moor was undergoing a transition from “a native of Mauretania, a region of Northern Africa corresponding to parts of Morocco and Algeria . . . who in the 8th c[entury] conquered Spain” to that of a sub-Saharan African subject to English enslavement.22 These divergent attitudes characterized the contemporary English stance toward Morocco, and toward Africa in general: as William S. Powell stresses, Pory’s dedication to his translation of Leo Africanus references “a nobleman from Morocco [who] had called upon Queen Elizabeth earlier in the year, yet in 1601 the Queen ordered ‘negars and blackmoores’ transported out of England.”23 In the context of England’s movement toward a global empire, then, the term “Noble Moor” was becoming increasingly oxymoronic. Importantly, The Masque of Blackness marked the first of many exclusive performances for the early seventeenth-century British sovereigns in which Jonson participated as a poet (or, more accurately, as a scriptor).24 Staged less than a year after Shakespeare’s Othello, this masque performs

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a particularly volatile blend of aristocratic women’s resistance to patriarchal absolutism through the racialized tropes that buttressed the expanding British empire.At the behest of the queen consort, Anna, the masque featured royal and aristocratic women as black(ened) beauties. Perhaps unexpectedly on Anna’s part, this spectacle of exoticized female agency provoked displeasure and even abuse from the Jacobean establishment. The conflict between the queen and Jonson, symptomatic of the larger contest of authority between the queen and King James, is one I analyze elsewhere in terms of “the ambivalent conjunction of literary and political authority, transgressive femininity, and unstable notions of blackness.”25 The appearance of the queen and her ladies as “black(faced) beauties” accordingly undermined the dichotomy of blackness and beauty assuming dominance at the turn of the seventeenth century as a result of England’s increasing investment in the still Portuguesedominated transatlantic slave trade. Yet, the masque also served as a staging ground for England’s accelerating global imperial project, which took off a century later when the English replaced the Portuguese as the foremost slave traders in the Western world.26 In the present essay, I focus on what might seem a more “supplementary” aspect of the masque: Jonson’s marginal gloss to the “Descrip. Afric. [Description of Africa]” (169), which authorizes the central conceit of The Masque of Blackness. This gloss is supplementary in the Derridean sense of being simultaneously marginal and constitutive.27 It therefore becomes decisive for analyzing the masque as a manifestation of shifting and conflicting discourses of empire, and the concomitant discourses of resistance, during the early modern period. Richmond Barbour endorses this view by pursuing a sophisticated source study to explicate what he refers to as the “Leo-Pory-Jonson” gloss. As Barbour remarks, the colonial ambivalence that characterizes the masque’s geography derives from a deeper lacuna in Leo Africanus’s “Geographical Historie of Africa (1600) [which] was translated into English by a man in attendance at the Masque of Blackness, John Pory.” This political and epistemological “haziness,” Barbour argues, becomes “functional” for Jonson’s project of promoting a still uncertain global imperial project to the newly installed King James I of England (who was also King James VI of Scotland).28 While I second Barbour’s grounding of the imaginary geography of this masque in the intertextual allusion to Pory’s translation of Leo Africanus, I propose to complicate his analysis of the “Leo-Pory-Jonson” gloss by emphasizing the previously downplayed construction of Leo Africanus as the allegorical figure, Father Niger. Simultaneously signifying the intensified paradox of “black beauty” and the increasing assertion of patriarchal

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authority, this allegorical figure stands in an analogous relationship to King James as the supreme patriarch, and perhaps also to the disgruntled court poet Ben Jonson in his struggle for authorial precedence. As such, Leo Africanus’s incorporation as a cultural palimpsest through this spectacle of empire not only justifies the imperialist project, but also embeds within it a counter-discourse to the racialized and gendered subject formation upon which it is based. Partly as a challenge to the queen’s authorial control over the masque performance, Jonson attempted to legitimate the published version of the masque’s script with an introduction that situates Leo Africanus within the standard genealogy of classical Greek and Roman authorities on Africa:“PLINY, SOLINVS, PTOLEMY, and of late LEO the African, remember vnto us a riuer in Aethiopia, famous now by the name of Niger; of which the people were called Nigritae, now Negro’s: and are the blackest nation of the world” (169). In his position as a court retainer promoting Jacobean patriarchy, Jonson thereby incorporates Leo Africanus into his own complicated resistance to the queen’s authority. Nonetheless, because the queen and Jonson chart their contest of authority over the racialized grounds of a masque that proposes “[t]o blanch an AETHIOPE” (177, l. 255), they similarly align their conflicting gender- and class-based modes of resistance with the discourse of empire that emerged in early seventeenth-century England. This challenge to the proposed denigration of blackness in the masque becomes doubly represented by Father Niger, who is praised as “Fayre NIGER” (172, l. 99) and who articulates the masque’s counter-discourse to the emergent elevation of whiteness over blackness in the sexual political realm. To this end, he defends his daughters’ “black beauty” as primary, preeminent, and perfect, concluding,“All which are arguments, to proue, how far / Their beauties conquer, in great beauties warre” (174, ll. 151–2).Yet, he subsequently concedes that his daughters have internalized the racialized standards of the Petrarchan tradition that transforms “fair” beauty, whether black or white, into the increasingly whitewashed definition of “fair.”29 Finally, as a representative of patriarchal authority, he undermines this radical defense with a conservative dismissal of female agency: “To frustrate which strange error, oft, I sought, / (Though most in vaine, against a setled thought / As womens are)” (174, ll. 177–9). We might plausibly read in these lines Jonson’s own frustration with what he deemed his queen’s arbitrary desire to appear as a black(ened) beauty, a desire that he graphically contains in his introductory disclaimer to the published masque: “Hence (because it was her Maiesties will, to have them Black-mores at first) the inuention was deriued by me,

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and presented thus” (169).The allegorical representation of Father Niger in this masque accordingly introduces an ambivalence into the dichotomy between blackness and beauty precisely as this dichotomy articulated itself with the globalized discourse of empire and the increasing patriarchalism that characterized the Jacobean court. The influence of Pory’s Leo Africanus on Jonson’s script for this masque thus exceeds the source studies to which it has hitherto been limited, even in the work of an astute critic such as Barbour. Rather, Leo Africanus as a palimpsest for colonial ambivalence embeds a dissenting voice, however muted, into the racialist dichotomies undergirding the emerging global British Empire. “A Second Leo Africanus?”: Postcolonial Appropriations in English Not until the late nineteenth century, during the “scramble for Africa” that marks the apex of British imperialism, was Pory’s translation of Leo Africanus reissued in a second edition. This edition, significantly, was sponsored by the Hakluyt Society and prepared by Robert Brown, whose oeuvre reveals him to be a fastidious scholar in the high imperialist mode.30 Leo Africanus’s prestige additionally reached a new peak in this period with an entry in Chambers’s Biographical Dictionary, which billed itself as the cosmopolitan counterpart to the more parochial Dictionary of National Biography.31 Paradoxically, the complexity of Leo Africanus’s historical and discursive circumstances are alternately restored and distorted in the Chambers’s précis. On the one hand, it corrects the centuries-long imposition of the name Leo Africanus by asserting that he is “properly” known as “Alhassan Ibn Mohammed Alwazzan.” It emphasizes, moreover, the possibility that al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wezzan “returned to Africa and (perhaps) his old faith, and died at Tunis in 1552.” On the other hand, though this entry correctly privileges Leo Africanus’s manuscript description of Africa (dated 1526) over Ramusio’s first edition of 1550, it errs in describing this text as “long the chief source of information as to the Soudan.”32 This influential reference tool thus betrays the imperialist investments of its historical moment, when the English were assailing the regions of the Sudan they would ultimately expropriate. So doing, it extends the geographical scope of Leo Africanus’s description to serve the nineteenth-century British imperial project.33 It is at this historical juncture that William Butler Yeats, selectively citing the Chambers entry on Leo Africanus’s life and the Hakluyt

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Society’s reissue of his works, introduced what he designates as “a second Leo Africanus” into the British cultural tradition, albeit in a postcolonial guise.34 During a lifetime that spanned the anticolonial resistance to English rule in Ireland and ultimately saw the founding of the Irish Free State, Yeats consistently defined himself as an activist intellectual struggling against the legacy of British imperialism. His celebrated role as one of the foremost proponents of Irish cultural nationalism and as a prominent political figure in the anticolonial struggle against the English nevertheless remains highly ambivalent. In the authorized biography, subtitled The Apprentice Mage, 1865–1914, R. F. Foster deftly outlines Yeats’s conflicted subject position: “He came to fame as the poet of the new Ireland, asserting its identity; his own discovery of his voice is often neatly paralleled with his country’s discovery of independence. But he was also a product of the ancien régime: Victorian, Protestant,Ascendancy Ireland.” Documenting Yeats’s life as “a palimpsest of Irishness,” Foster productively deconstructs the binary opposition between politics and poetics shaping subsequent evaluations of Yeats’s nationalism, particularly in the wake of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s polemical dismissal of Yeats for the continuing Irish nationalist project.35 Intervening in the debate over Yeats’s position as a colonial subject, Hazard Adams further explicates his conflicting subject positions to propose a theory of “antithetical nationalism” that usefully complements Foster’s strictly chronological approach.Antithetical nationalism, according to Adams, is an ongoing oppositional position comprehending “three sides to every argument.”36 It is a position of ambivalence upon which Yeats as an Anglo-Irish poet frequently reflected, as in the crux to his “A General Introduction for My Work”: “. . . my hatred tortures me with love, my love with hate. I am like the Tibetan monk who dreams at his initiation that he is eaten by a wild beast and learns on waking that he himself is eater and eaten.This is Irish hatred and solitude, the hatred of human life that made Swift write Gulliver and the epitaph upon his tomb, that can still make us wag between extremes and doubt our sanity.”37 Analyzing this passage as an exemplary instance of “antithetical nationalism,” Adams remarks that Yeats “finds the utterances to be both to and against a nation that tends to define him out of it, though it is his nation, he lives there.”38 In designating “a second Leo Africanus,” therefore, and perhaps himself as such, might Yeats be extending this position of “antithetical nationalism” into what will become the postcolonial project of writing back to the empire? In that case, what contradictions emerge in the context of his postcolonial appropriation? What identifications? What disavowals? Finally, in what sense does the ambivalence

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already encoded in this cultural palimpsest make its (re)appearance as Yeats’s “second Leo Africanus” resistant to even a postcolonial appropriation? In general terms, the question of the conflicted subject position Yeats articulates through his cultural poetics and politics has intervened productively in current debates about the status of postcoloniality. In his influential essay, “Yeats and Decolonization,” Edward Said recuperates Yeats from his mainstream canonization to reposition him as “a poet who belongs in a tradition not usually considered his, that of the colonial world ruled by European imperialism during a climactic insurrectionary stage.” Hence,Yeats becomes a poet of “decolonization,” if not precisely postcoloniality. In a telling comparison, Said links Frantz Fanon and Yeats, concluding: “The difference between Fanon and Yeats is that Fanon’s theoretical and perhaps even metaphysical narrative of antiimperialist decolonization is marked throughout with the accents and inflections of liberation . . . Fanon’s is a discourse of that anticipated triumph, liberation, that marks the second moment of decolonization. Yeats’s earlier work, by contrast, sounds the nationalist note and stands at a threshold it cannot cross.”39 From this perspective,Yeats’s life and writings map the possibilities as well as the pitfalls of anticolonial movements. In particular, bound to the ambivalent love/hate relationship of the nationalist moment of decolonization, Yeats remains susceptible to fascist leanings and occult ideologies. In a recent article, Jahan Ramazani takes up where Said leaves off in “Yeats and Decolonization” to ask “Is Yeats a Postcolonial Poet?” Drawing on Said’s, David Lloyd’s, and Declan Kiberd’s treatment of Yeats in the context of anti- and postcolonial Ireland, Ramazani concludes that “Yeats’s intellectual relation to the third world is not entirely assimilable to a paradigm of affiliation, but neither is it reducible to Orientalist oppression.”40 Beginning where Ramazani leaves off, then, I propose Yeats’s “second Leo Africanus” as symptomatic of the productive tension between “neither” and “nor” marking what we might call Yeats’s “antithetical postcoloniality.” Yeats’s encounter with Leo Africanus occurred in the context of what Mary Catherine Flannery indicates are the “[t]wo ideas [that] had begun to work with equal force on his consciousness: Ireland and Magic.”41 Specifically, during the years 1909–12 when Ireland was moving toward national independence,Yeats engaged in a series of séances that brought him a “Guide” in the guise of Leo Africanus.42 These séances were documented under the auspices of William T. Stead’s circle of spiritualists, dubbed “Julia’s Bureau” after the American woman whose posthumous correspondence Stead published as Letters from Julia.43 In her official report of the séance of 9 May, 1912, the Bureau’s secretary Edith

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K. Harper details this encounter with a combination of verisimilitude and inconclusiveness:44 “In a little while a very deep voice spoke through the trumpet, evidently for Mr Yeats, whom it addressed as ‘Mr Gates.’ Voice spoke loudly and distinctly.When asked ‘Who are you?’ replied ‘Leo,The Writer!’ Went on to say he was the Guide of Mr Yeats, had been with him a great many years, and impressed him and worked through his brain. Pressed for identification said he was a Writer and Explorer, and added ‘You will find me in the Encyclopedia, . . . at Rome,’ or words to that effect” (17). The ghost of Leo Africanus, embedded in the British imperialist project since the turn of the seventeenth century, thus announces itself intertextually in this transitional moment toward a postcolonial Irish nation. Yet, Leo Africanus appears not merely as a guide for Yeats, but also as a guise for the ambivalent Irish poet, antiimperialist and proto-nationalist. The official report continues: “The voice of ‘Leo’ had a slight Irish accent, not unlike Mr Yeats’s own. It was deep and resonant, somewhat of the quality of John King’s but without the latter’s abrupt manner of speaking” (17–18). An Irish Leo Africanus? For an English and Anglo-American audience? In this transitional moment, the political distinction between “English” as the imperialist standard and “english” as the coding of postcolonial resistance that Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin delineate in The Empire Writes Back enacts itself through the diacritical difference of the accent.45 Notably, in his account of the same evening,Yeats begins by displacing the official report’s fetishization of the trace of an Irish accent on the colonial language by instead emphasizing that “[t]he Medium had a strong American accent” (18). Yeats’s assessment of the Irish Leo Africanus is correspondingly modulated: “I noticed that ‘Leo’ had a strong Irish accent, whereas the Medium had a strong American accent. I also had the impression that the Irish accent was not quite true. The kind of accent an Irishman some years out of Ireland, or an Englishman who had a fair knowledge of Ireland, might assume in telling an Irish story” (19).Yeats further scripts his resistance to the stereotypes the official report advances with a revised assessment of the séance:“One of the sitters, however, told me that she considered the accent like my own, and not stronger than mine. I had thought it stronger” (19). Again, Leo Africanus functions as a cultural palimpsest, though this time for the ambivalent negotiations of the postcolonial poet in the Irish setting. As a culmination of these occult encounters, Yeats drafted an essay on—or, to follow Yeats’s dialogic approach, “with”—Leo Africanus over which he labored intensely but which he never published.46 Yeats premises this epistolary exchange on the displaced authorship characteristic of

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automatic writing, a mode he highlights in a personal recollection written immediately prior to his composition of the essay: “He would control me in that reply so that it would be really from him.”47 Writing during the apogee of epistolary fiction as a pan-European genre, Yeats further fashioned his essay as an exchange of letters: the first, from Yeats to Leo Africanus (21–7); the second, Leo Africanus’s reply to Yeats (27–38); and, the third, Yeats’s last words (38–9).48 Yeats’s essay on Leo Africanus thus finds itself embedded in the much more complicated sense of intertextuality that Mikhail Bakhtin details in his discussion of literary heteroglossia: “Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s intentions; it is populated—overpopulated—with the intentions of others.”49 To articulate Bakhtin’s dialogism with Yeats’s occultism, then, language is filled with ghosts.50 During the period Yeats encountered Leo Africanus, he drafted similar dialogues with what R. F. Foster calls “an imaginary alter ego.”51 Contesting such psychologism as reductively antithetical to the discursive construction of the postcolonial subject, rather than productively antithetical in the sense elaborated by Hazard Adams, I propose (pace Foster) that Yeats’s Leo Africanus functions not so much as an aberrant epiphenomenon of a man facing a midlife crisis to match the political crisis of the Irish nation on the cusp of its postcolonial era, but as a constitutive component of the conflicted subject position Yeats most strikingly articulates in his subsequent “A General Introduction for My Work.” Yeats’s interest in the 1600 Pory version of Leo Africanus, written when the expansionist British imperialist project was still uncertain, rather than the later redaction by Samuel Purchas, prepared during the initial consolidation of the first global British Empire, confirms this link.52 Perhaps the most significant difference between the Purchas and Pory editions is the omission by Purchas of the majority of passages referring to the original inhabitants of Africa.53 These passages are especially noteworthy for their explication, and implicit rationalization, of the Arab invasions of North Africa throughout the seventh and eighth centuries. Leo Africanus as an Arab-African, that is, stands in an analogical relationship to Yeats as an Anglo-Irishman: hence, his resonance for Yeats during a period when the meaning of “Irishness” was beginning to be contested along sectarian lines. The first letter in Yeats’s three-part essay on Leo Africanus immediately establishes the double-voiced discourse of literary heteroglossia through a progressively receding narrative of intertextuality, which also

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begins as an address: I have beside me as I write the translation of the only work of yours extant today—from this one assumes that you still exist—It was published in London in 1600 & was translated by John Pory “lately of Goneuill and Caius College in Cambridge” & called “A Geographical History of Africa written in Arabicke & Italian by John Leo, borne in Granada and brought up in Barbarie.” There is also a long subtitle announcing that it contains descriptions “of the regions, cities, towns[,] mountains[,] rivers & other places throughout all the north & principal partes of Africa” & other matters “gathered partly out of ” your own “diligent observations & partly out of the ancient records & Chronicles of the Arabians & Mores.” (21–2) These words, however, are neither Yeats’s nor Leo’s; rather, they derive from John Pory’s extensive framing apparatus for his 1600 translation of Leo Africanus. Ostensibly, then, the early modern English imperialist frames Yeats’s Leo Africanus. Nonetheless, in an enactment of intertextuality as resistance rather than incorporation, Yeats exceeds this containment by extrapolating from Pory’s translation his own imaginary account of Leo Africanus:“When you first came to me I had to the best of my belief never heard of you nor of your work, but now I have read a good part of it & picture you with some clearness, especially as a young man studying & making verses in the town of Fez you have described with such minute detail” (22). Hence, though the few critics who have glanced at Yeats’s essay on “Leo Africanus” have tended to treat it as an instance of Yeats’s political and psychological retrogression, I argue that Yeats’s exchange with Leo Africanus propels him towards the model of antithetical postcoloniality that he will later elaborate as his Vision for an independent Ireland.54 Hence, the Leo Africanus that emerges from Yeats’s imaginary account in the first letter of this essay is not confined to the position of “native informant” in the Western European discourse of empire, but is granted autonomy apart from the tradition that had hitherto contained him.The intertextuality of this narrative nevertheless approaches a mise-en-abîme structure as Yeats’s evocative description of Leo Africanus in Fez ultimately reveals itself to be a tissue of quotations from Pory’s translation: . . . at this moment I imagine you as a student of this college where there were “three cloysters to walk in, most curiously and

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artificially made with certain eight-square pillers of divers colours to support them—And between piller & piller ‘arches’ overcast with golde, azure & divers other colours” walking perhaps where “runneth” through the college “a little stream in a most clear & pleasant channell the brims & edges whereof are workmanly framed of marble & stones of Majorica” or perhaps with your fellow poets whose songs on all other days of the year “entreat of love” going “betimes in the morning” upon Mahomets birthday “unto the palace of the chiefe judge or governour” that from “the tribunal seat” you may also read some “elegant & pithie” poem in the Prophets praise “to a great audience of people.” (22) Yeats draws on Leo Africanus’s “A most exact description of the citie of Fez” (2: 419): particularly his description of “two most stately colleges” (2: 423) and “[o]f the African poets” (2: 455), rearranging the latter section to (mis)identify Leo Africanus as the celebrated poet of the passage. By refashioning Leo Africanus as a student, poet, and politician of Fez, and by drawing on Leo Africanus’s description rather than Pory’s introduction,Yeats thereby functions as a resisting reader of the early modern discourse of empire that had cast Leo Africanus as an apologist for the enslavement of Africans and the colonization of Africa. It is in this sense that Yeats’s subsequent representation of Leo Africanus as a “shade” (22, passim), informed by my reinflection of the Bakhtinian notion of heteroglossia as language “overpopulated” with ghosts, may be layered with the colonial/postcolonial dialectic that Yeats highlights elsewhere in his oeuvre. Notably, despite Yeats’s initial resistance to Africanist and Orientalist discourses, the second letter of this dialogic series casts Leo Africanus as a distinctly exoticized Other. In a significant echo of the séances preceding his essay,Yeats’s reference toward the middle of his first letter to a “slight Irish accent” initiates the dialectic of identification and distrust that will define Leo Africanus’s unstable subject position in the second letter (22, 23). Yeats further presages the instability he will assign to Leo Africanus by concluding his first letter with the resonant image of “a second Leo Africanus a shadow upon the wall, a strong echo, & yet made subtle by powers that old traveller had known & wise with knowledge & faculties reaped from many minds” (27). Over time, that is, the tension between identification and distrust in the postcolonial dialectic Yeats projects onto his “second Leo Africanus” splits into the dichotomy of Guide, a positive force of intervention, and Frustrator, an ultimately negative force. In the second letter, titled “Leo Africanus to WB Yeats”

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(27), the latter aspect becomes most pronounced in its relentless critique of Yeats’s empiricist and rationalist leanings. Yet, after a harangue that closes with a comparison of Yeats’s “contrary mind” (28) and his own,Yeats’s Leo Africanus establishes himself as “a brooding & braggart shade, & even in this I am not wholly stable, for at times I am aware of a constraint upon my thoughts or my passion deepens because of one who is remote & silent & whom while I lived in Rome I was forbidden to call Mahomet” (29).This crescendo, then, incorporates Leo Africanus as both a Guide and a Frustrator into the ongoing construction of Yeats’s antithetical postcoloniality. In a manner reminiscent of “A General Introduction for My Work,” Yeats’s Leo Africanus concludes the second letter by encoding postcolonial ambivalence toward the master tongue, which forbids the power of naming to the colonial subject, by positioning himself as a socially constituted unstable subject. It is from this point of frustration, moreover, that Yeats imagines a new biography for Leo Africanus as a “shade” who witnesses the imperialist battles launched in 1492 with the expropriation of the New World launched from the Iberian peninsula and the expropriation of the kingdom of Granada contained within it.The veiled reference to the “Franco Spanish War” (25) in the first letter thus segues into Leo Africanus’s subsequent description of the divisions, including the self-division of “a nature rent in two” (31), following the battlefield death Yeats imagined for him.The visions of this “second Leo Africanus” nevertheless stray by the end of his narrative from anticolonial resistance to blatant colonial prejudice when the voice of Yeats’s own historical moment surfaces in the comment, “so we soon discover that a mediumistic mind splits in a half a dozen easy dramatizations—a child always in high spirits, a gruff deep-voiced man, an American Indian perhaps whose simple dialect in which you hear constantly ‘big water’ ‘great chief ’‘squaw’ & so on” (36). Here, then,Yeats’s response to Leo Africanus functions as a medium for the colonial stereotypes that the Irish, when they identified as “white,” projected onto other colonial subjects of the British Empire.55 This is the conflicted subject position with which Ramazani concludes the essay “Is Yeats a Postcolonial Poet?”: “Though white and canonical, though non-third-world and Anglo-Irish,Yeats has at least enough in common with the present members [of the postcolonial cadre Said outlines] to make for some animated conversation.”56 As we have seen,Yeats’s “correspondence” with Leo Africanus—in the dual sense of an exchange of letters and an identification between two ambivalently colonial subjects—foregrounds this conversation as part of his antithetical postcoloniality.

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In this spirit, the letter from “Leo Africanus to W B Yeats” closes with a gesture of defiance toward the colonial tradition that had hitherto contained him and that continued to constrain Yeats:“Yet do not doubt that I was also Leo Africanus the traveller, for though I have found it necessary, so stupifying is the honey pot to reread of my knowledge of self through your eyes & through the eyes of others, picking out biographical detail through the eyes of those, who are not conscious of ever having heard my name[,] I can still remember the sand, & many Arab cities, & I still as you have reason to know remember Rome & speak its language, & could I but find fitting medium, I could still write my Arab Tongue”(38).Though Yeats attempts to contain this passage by returning in the third letter to the monologic voice of authorial skepticism, his dialogic exchange with this “second Leo Africanus” ultimately allows him to preserve his defiant persona for the Irish nation’s postcolonial project. Leo Africanus, that is, becomes a cultural palimpsest for postcolonial ambivalence that cannot be contained by imperialist attempts at authoritative closure. Yeats’s last words in this dialogue—“Yet I am confident now as always that spiritual beings if they cannot write & speak can always listen. I can still put by difficulties” (39)—thus remain open to historical and textual alterity in a productively disturbing way that allows for still other postcolonial readings of Hasan/Leo. (Post)Colonial Ghosts What, then, might be the significance of Amin Maalouf ’s decision to draw the epigraph for his novel Léon l’Africain—“Yet do not doubt that I am also Leo Africanus the traveller”—not from the early modern translations of Leo Africanus but from Yeats’s dialogic essay?57 We may begin to answer this question by locating the motif of the ghost within contemporary postcolonial theory. Most notably, in challenging the binary opposition of margin and center in theoretical articulations of postcolonialism, Sara Suleri follows Homi Bhabha in stressing the anxieties, complicities, and ambivalences that constitute the colonial relation. Suleri, nonetheless, goes beyond Bhabha in arguing that “colonial facts . . . move with a ghostly mobility to suggest how highly unsettling an economy of complicity and guilt is in operation between each actor on the colonial stage.”58 Further refining Suleri’s model, which depends on a nineteenth- and twentieth-century archive, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen in The Postcolonial Middle Ages remarks that, “like all ghosts,” the slippage between “post” and “colonial” in the contested term “post-colonial/ postcolonial” challenges the historical binarisms that efface the layers of resistance to colonialism before the modern era.59

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My attention to the ghost of Leo Africanus in the discourses of empire and resistance from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century confirms this complicated dialectic between actors on the colonial stage, and thus moves beyond the dichotomy of (first world) self and (third world) other that limits the study of postcolonial discourses prior to the nineteenth century. I have argued that Leo Africanus’s construction as a cultural palimpsest encodes not only the discourse of empire that characterized England’s global imperialism from the seventeenth century, but also the anticolonial ambivalences inscribed in this discourse from its inception. Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness, produced on the eve of England’s advance as a world empire, simultaneously presents Leo Africanus as an authoritative voice supporting English incursions into Africa and as an allegorical figure who challenges the dichotomy of blackness and beauty that underpinned this imperial project.Yeats’s essay on Leo Africanus, composed during Ireland’s transition toward national independence, establishes an anticolonial dialogue that oscillates between Irish identification with the colonized nations of Africa and Irish alliances with Western Europe.We therefore may see Maalouf ’s inscription of Yeats’s Leo Africanus into a narrative of postcolonial resistance as signaling his own identity “à la lisière de deux pays, de deux ou trois langues, de plusieurs traditions culturelles” (at the border between two countries, two or three languages, and several cultural traditions): greater Syria and Western Europe; Arab, French, and English; and multiple varieties of Christianity and Islam.60 Maalouf ’s Leo Africanus, to conclude, offers the palimpsest as the facilitating condition for writing beyond imperialist dichotomies. Notes Portions of this essay were presented at “Postcolonial Moves” (University of Miami, February 2000) and at the Modern Language Association (December 2000). 1. Amin Maalouf, Les identités meurtrières (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1998), 10. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the French are my own. Maalouf ’s memoir has recently been translated as In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Arcade, 2000). 2. Maalouf, Léon l’Africain (Poitiers: Jean-Claude Lattès, 1986); Leo Africanus, trans. Peter Sluglett (Lanham, Md.: New Amsterdam, 1988).The novel is defined as an “autobiographie imaginaire” in the publisher’s note to the French edition. 3. Oumelbanine Zhiri, L’Afrique au miroir de l’Europe: Fortunes de Jean Léon l’Africain à la Renaissance (Geneva: Droz, 1991), 49. 4. An influential touchstone for my argument has been Walter Cohen, “The Discourse of Empire in the Renaissance,” in Cultural Authority in Golden Age Spain, ed. Marina S. Brownlee and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 260–83. My conceptualization of the Western European discourse of empire has also been informed by

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7. 8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

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Anthony Pagden’s Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, 1500–1800 (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1995). Importantly, while cautioning against eliding colonial dynamics prior to the modern era, Robert Bartlett in his influential The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) clarifies the distinction between “Medieval and Modern Colonialism” (306–14) in qualitative terms that signal a paradigm shift for early modern discourses of empire. Most notably, Louis Massignon, Le Maroc dans les premières années du XVIe siècle: Tableau géographique d’après Léon l’Africain (Alger: Adolphe Jourdan, 1906), 34. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York:Vintage, 1979), 71. Cf. Aijaz Ahmad’s reference to Saidian “cultural amphibian” in “Orientalism and After: Ambivalence and Metropolitan Location in the Work of Edward Said,” in In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London:Verso, 1992), 210. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York:Vintage, 1994), 244. Bernadette Andrea, “Assimilation or Dissimulation?: Leo Africanus’s ‘Geographical Historie of Africa’ and the Parable of Amphibia,” Ariel, 32.3 (2001): 1–23. Jonathan Burton provides a parallel reading of this passage in “ ‘A most wily bird’: Leo Africanus, Othello and the Trafficking in Difference,” in Post-Colonial Shakespeares, ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (London: Routledge, 1998), 43–63. Leo Africanus, The History and Description of Africa and of the Notable Things Therein Contained Written by Al-Hassan Ibn-Mohammed Al-Wezaz Al-Fasi, a Moor, Baptised as Giovanni Leone, but Better Known as Leo Africanus. Done into English in the Year 1600, by John Pory, 3 vols., ed. Robert Brown (New York: Burt Franklin, 1896), 1: 189, 190. Unless otherwise indicated, all subsequent references to Leo Africanus’s Description are from this edition. Natalie Zemon Davis coined the descriptor “Hasan/Leo” to indicate this subject’s historical ambivalence. My ongoing project on Leo Africanus has benefited immensely from Professor Davis’s comments during the seminar “Between Worlds: Cultural Mixture and Translation,” The Folger Shakespeare Library, March 10–11, 2000. Zhiri provides a full bibliography of these translations in L’Afrique, 227–8. Sandra Messinger Cypess, La Malinche in Mexican Literature: From History to Myth (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), ix, x. For a survey of Chicana feminist treatments of Malintzin/Malinche, see Norma Alarcón,“Chicana’s Feminist Literature:A Re-vision Through Malintzin/or Malintzin: Putting Flesh Back on the Object,” in This Bridge Called My Back, ed. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, 1983), 182–91, and her essay “Traddutora, Traditora: A Paradigmatic Figure of Chicana Feminism,” Cultural Critique, 13 (1989): 57–87. Cypess, La Malinche, 4. In citing “dominant, residual, and emergent” social formations, I draw on Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 121–7. For the construction of the British as belated imperialists, see Richard Hakluyt, “The Epistle Dedicatorie in the First Edition, 1589,” of The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation, vol. 1 (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1904), xvii–xxii. On the “tardiness” thesis concerning English overseas imperialism, see Nicolas Canny, “The Origins of Empire: An Introduction,” in The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Nicolas Canny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 1–33. Barbara Fuchs examines the tendentious representation of early modern British imperialism as “belated” in her essay for this volume. Anthony Pagden details the scope of England’s imperialist efforts during the Elizabethan era in “The Struggle for Legitimacy and the Image of Empire in the Atlantic to c. 1700,” in The Origins of Empire, 34–54. For a useful biography, see William S. Powell, John Pory, 1572–1636:The Life and Letters of a Man of Many Parts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977). Hakluyt, “The Epistle Dedicatorie,” xviii.

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18. See the analysis of Pory’s additions and alternations in Zhiri, L’Afrique, 82–3. Also see Emily Bartels,“Imperialist Beginnings: Richard Hakluyt and the Construction of Africa,” Criticism, 34 (1992): 517–38. 19. On the Moroccan ambassador to England, Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud ben Mohammed Anoun, see Bernard Harris, “A Portrait of a Moor,” Shakespeare Survey, 11 (1958): 89–97. For an exemplary anticolonial analysis of Othello, see Martin Orkin, Shakespeare Against Apartheid (Johannesburg: A. D. Donker, 1987). Anthony Barthelemy provides a useful survey of previous critical trends in his Introduction to Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s Othello (New York: G. K. Hall, 1994), 1–50. For a related reading of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, see John Michael Archer, “Antiquity and Degeneration in Antony and Cleopatra,” in Race, Ethnicity, and Power in the Renaissance, ed. Joyce Green MacDonald (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997), 145–64. 20. “The Queenes Masques. The first, Of Blacknesse: Personated at the Court, at White-Hall, on the Twelv’th night, 1605,” in Ben Jonson, eds. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, vol. 7 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), 169–80. All subsequent references to this masque will be drawn from this volume and will be indicated through parenthetical references. 21. On (post)colonial ambivalence, see Homi Bhabha’s “Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 85–92. 22. Anthony Gerard Barthelemy quotes this Oxford English Dictionary definition in Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Renaissance Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 7. Recent treatments of this politico-semantic shift include Ania Loomba, “ ‘Delicious Traffick’: Alterity and Exchange on the Early Modern Stage,” Shakespeare Survey, 52 (1999): 201–14 and Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). 23. Powell, John Pory, 14. For “Queen Elizabeth’s response,” see Peter Fryer, Staying Power: Black People in Britain Since 1504 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1984), 10–12. Also see Arthur L. Little, Jr.’s astute analysis of these Elizabethan edicts in Shakespeare Jungle Fever: National-Imperial Re-Visions of Race, Rape, and Sacrifice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). For documents relating to English travel in North Africa during Elizabeth’s reign, see Henri de Castries, Les sources inédites de l’histoire du Maroc, vol. 1 (1540–89) (Paris: E. Leroux Luzac, 1918); vol. 2 (1590–1625) (Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1925). 24. For the distinction between “author” and “scriptor,” see Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music,Text (New York: Noonday Press, 1977), 142–8. 25. Bernadette Andrea, “Black Skin, The Queen’s Masques: Africanist Ambivalence and Feminine Author(ity) in the Masques of Blackness and Beauty,” English Literary Renaissance, 29 (1999): 246–81, at 247. Other recent treatments of gender and racial ambiguity in The Masque of Blackness include Richmond Barbour, “Britain and the Great Beyond: The Masque of Blackness at Whitehall,” in Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in English Renaissance Drama (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998), 129–53; Leeds Barroll, “Inventing the Stuart Masque,” in The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque, ed. David Bevington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 121–43; Stephen Orgel, “Marginal Jonson,” in The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque, 144–75; Mary Floyd-Wilson,“Temperature,Temperance, and Racial Difference in Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness,” English Literary Renaissance, 28 (1998): 183–209; Suzy Beemer, “Masks of Blackness, Masks of Whiteness: Coloring the (Sexual) Subject in Jonson, Cary, and Fletcher,” Thamyris, 4 (1997): 223–47. 26. For the English role in the transatlantic slave trade, see David Richardson,“The British Empire and the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1660–1807,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire.Vol. II:The Eighteenth Century, ed. P. J. Marshall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 440–64. 27. Jacques Derrida theorizes the “logic of the supplement” in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 141–64. 28. Barbour, “Britain and the Great Beyond,” 132, 134.

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29. For the racial import of Petrarchism, see Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 62–122. 30. For instance, Robert Brown, The Story of Africa and Its Explorers, 4 vols. (London: Cassell, 1911). 31. William Geddie and J. Liddell Geddie, eds., Chambers’s Biographical Dictionary: The Great of All Nations and All Times (New York: Macmillan, 1957), which is a reprint of the first edition of 1897. In his authorized biography of Yeats, R. F. Foster describes Chambers’s as “first port of call for mediums and their researchers,” Foster, W. B.Yeats:A Life. I:The Apprentice Mage, 1865–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 465. 32. Geddie and Geddie, Chambers’s, 584. 33. For nineteenth-century British imperialist investments in the Sudan, see Colin Newbury, “Great Britain and the Partition of Africa, 1870–1914,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. III: The Nineteenth Century, ed. Andrew Porter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 624–50. 34. William Butler Yeats,“The Manuscript of ‘Leo Africanus,’ ” ed. Steve L.Adams and George Mills Harper, Yeats Annual, 1 (1982): 3–47, at 27.All subsequent citations from Yeats’s “Leo Africanus” will be drawn from this edition and will be indicated through parenthetical references. Adams prepared a scholarly edition of “W. B.Yeats’s Leo Africanus” as his master’s thesis (Florida State University, 1979), which should be consulted for its extensive textual and explanatory notes. 35. Foster, W. B.Yeats: A Life, xxviii, xxix. Cf. David Lloyd’s deconstruction of this binary opposition in “The Poetics of Politics:Yeats and the Founding of the State,” in Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 59–87. Conor Cruise O’Brien’s 1965 manifesto, “Passion and Cunning: An Essay on the Politics of W. B. Yeats,” is included in Yeats’s Political Identities, ed. Jonathan Allison (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 29–56.Also see Bruce Stewart,“ ‘The Bitter Glass’: Postcolonial Theory and Anglo-Irish Culture—A Case Study,” Irish Review, 25 (1999/2000): 27–50, and Edna Longley, “Postcolonial versus European (and Post-ukanian) Frameworks for Irish Literature,” Irish Review, 25 (2000): 75–94. 36. Hazard Adams,“Yeats and Antithetical Nationalism,” in Yeats’s Political Identities, 309–24, at 310. 37. William Butler Yeats, “A General Introduction for My Work,” in Essays and Introductions (New York: Macmillan, 1961), 519. 38. Adams, “Yeats and Antithetical Nationalism,” 319. 39. Said, “Yeats and Decolonization,” in Culture and Imperialism, 220, 234. 40. Jahan Ramazani, “Is Yeats a Postcolonial Poet?” Raritan 17, (1998): 64–90, at 77. In addition to Said’s and Lloyd’s studies of postcoloniality and Ireland, which have been cited above, Ramazani references Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press, 1995). I wish to thank Professor Ramazani for his generous reading of an earlier version of this essay. 41. Mary Catherine Flannery, Yeats and Magic:The Earlier Works (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), 17. Related studies include Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (New York: Macmillan, 1948), George Mills Harper, ed., Yeats and the Occult (Toronto: Macmillan, 1975), and Brenda Maddox, Yeats’s Ghosts: The Secret Life of W. B. Yeats (New York: Harper Collins, 1999), as well as Foster’s chapters on “Occult Politics, 1990–1901,” and “Ghosts, 1911–13,” in W. B. Yeats: A Life, 225–56, 453–91. Also see Peter Kuch’s explication of Yeats’s essay, “Swedenborg, Mediums, and the Desolate Places,” which Yeats wrote during the same period: “ ‘Laying the Ghosts’—W. B. Yeats’s Lecture on Ghosts and Dreams,” Yeats Annual, 5 (1987): 114–35.Yeats’s essay “Swedenborg, Mediums, and the Desolate Places” may be found in Lady Augusta Gregory’s Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland (1920) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 317–36. 42. For an apropos definition of “Guide” and “Frustrator,” see Adams and Harper’s introduction to “The Manuscript of ‘Leo Africanus,’ ” 5. 43. W.T. Stead, Letters from Julia, or Light from the Borderland (London: Grant Richards, 1899). In the preface to this volume, Stead explicates the method of “automatic writing” that influenced

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46. 47. 48.

49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57.

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Yeats’s later works. Also see Edith K. Harper, Stead: The Man (London: William Rider and Son, 1918). Harper’s report and Yeats’s parallel account are reproduced in Adams and Harper’s “The Manuscript of ‘Leo Africanus,’ ” 17–20. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds., The Empire Writes Back:Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989). Cf. Kiberd’s chapter on “Deanglicization,” in Inventing Ireland, 136–54. For an astute analysis of Yeats’s dialogic approach, see Lloyd, Anomalous States, 59–87. This personal recollection is cited in Adams and Harper, “The Manuscript of ‘Leo Africanus,’ ” 13. As Thomas O. Beebee stresses in Epistolary Fiction in Europe, 1500–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), Bakhtinian dialogism characterizes the literary letter (101–2, 144–5). M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 294. For an astute study that situates the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century vogue for spiritualism within the imperialist context of Anglo-India, see Gauri Viswanathan, “The Ordinary Business of Occultism,” Critical Inquiry, 27 (2000): 1–20. Also see Daniel T. O’Hara,“The Spirit Medium: Yeats, Quantum Visions, and Recent Lacanian Studies,” boundary 2, 29.2 (2002): 87–108. Foster, W. B.Yeats: A Life, 427, 465. For the edition of Leo Africanus that Yeats consulted, see Foster, W. B.Yeats: A Life, 615: n. 44. Cf. Leo Africanus, 1: 129–30. For an explication of this poetical-political-mystical text, see Hazard Adams, The Book of Yeats’s Vision: Romantic Modernism and Antithetical Tradition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). For a postcolonial interpretation, see Kiberd, “The Last Aisling—A Vision,” in Inventing Ireland, 316–26. Cf. Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995). Ramazani, “Is Yeats a Postcolonial Poet?” 89. “The Manuscript of ‘Leo Africanus,’ ” 38. Maalouf renders this epigraph as, “Cependant ne doute pas que Léon l’Africain, Léon le voyageur, c’était également moi,” and describes Yeats as, “Poète irlandais.” Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 3 (emphasis added). Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Introduction: Midcolonial,” in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 3. Maalouf, Les identités meurtrières, 9.

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CHAPTER TEN

Postcolonial Courtiers: Performing French Classicism from Versailles to Nouvelle-France Jean-Vincent Blanchard

In the history of Western metaphysics, the dualistic split between mind and body has underwritten numerous claims to superior rationality and political power.The theory of this split has a particularly French history, one that ultimately enabled French colonial discourses of racial superiority.1 In various ways, the historical narration of the mind/body split in aesthetic discourses, such as rhetorical theory, lent considerable force to colonizers’ discriminatory tales. Colonizers described their own bodies as more evolved because they could narrate the progressive detachment of their minds from their material substance. Locating colonized bodies in history consolidated, in turn, the reliance of Western epistemologies on concepts of disembodied reason and emancipatory teleologies. My purpose here, then, is to examine how this bind between narration and metaphysical dualism emerged in the seventeenth century to constitute, literally, a French body politic.2 The work of René Descartes (1596–1650) is a good place to begin understanding this tale of disembodiment since this philosopher had a chief role in formulating modernity’s mind/body dualism. In the Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), Descartes realized that he could only be sure of one thing: that he existed as a sheer intellectual substance. He then opposed subjectivity to material reality. Thus many commentators have held Descartes responsible for discriminatory attitudes towards the body.3 In both the Discourse on the Method (1637) and

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the Meditations, however, Descartes recognized that body and mind influence each other and are inescapably united in a third way. This unity is displayed when sensations and passions influence our rational capacity. What matters for us is that Descartes could not describe this union, but wanted questions pertaining to that substance to be asked in the field of social relations and language. In The Search for Truth, he insisted that language, particularly the rhetoric of conversation, was an essential part of his philosophical project.When asked by Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia how he conceived of the unity, he answered: “But it is the course of ordinary life and conversation, and abstention from meditation and from the study of things which exercise the imagination, that teaches us how to conceive the union of the soul and the body.”4 What prompted Descartes to conceive of conversation as a practice of embodiment? The question seems even more relevant for us when considering the importance of conversation theory in the constitution of the modern French state. In Descartes’s time, theoreticians of social interaction (politesse mondaine) paid great attention to the practice of conversation. Among these, Antoine Gombauld (Chevalier de Méré, 1607–84) and Madeleine de Scudéry (1607–1701) stand out. Later, linguists such as Dominique Bouhours (1626–1702) and Bernard Lamy (1640–1715) contributed further to this definition. According to Bouhours, conversation expressed the natural spirit of France (esprit), and was elevated, as a contemporary scholar puts it, to be “le genre des genres français.”5 By talking politely, individuals constituted the nation as a tasteful, ethical, and rational body. To converse defined an ontological public sphere where, in theory, all members of the nation could be represented. Yet the recourse to an essentializing notion of French esprit should lead us to view such claims of inclusiveness with suspicion. In an article on the role of language and rhetorical styles as nation builders in seventeenth-century France, Hélène Merlin rightly remarks that the notion of community, whatever its definition, is highly problematic in the perspective of l’esprit:“Le mythe de la communauté devrait toujours nous être suspect. Le mythe de l’esprit aussi. On voit comment il neutralise les contradictions plutôt qu’il ne les met en lumière, comment il masque des conflits sociaux, escamote des questions politiques” (We should always view with suspicion the myth of community, and the myth of spirit as well. It is a myth that neutralizes contradictions instead of bringing them to light. It hides social conflicts and conjures away political questions).6 Indeed, the efforts of Descartes’s contemporaries to think the French social body as a conversational sphere went together

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with a suspicion of social and political difference. Conversation also rested on an imperative of conformity called bienséance. To be bienséant required respecting a core of commonly held values. Individuals gave a social performance with respect to a status quo, and in doing so shut their private interests from the public sphere, including the interests pertaining to a certain bodily specificity. These social conceptions were integral to what historians came later to define as French classical taste. These efforts at theorizing the French social body through the social ethics of conversation must also be contextualized in the wake of long, traumatic, and bloody civil conflicts: the Wars of Religion (1562–98) and the Fronde (1648–52). Moreover, this crucial definition took place at a time when travels by individuals, but also colonial enterprises and diplomatic contacts, brought forward new representations of cultural, religious, and ethnic difference. For example, the travels of Jean de Thévenot, Laurent d’Arvieux, and Antoine Galland in the Ottoman empire caused much interest and contributed to popularizing the image of the exotic Turk, an image which eventually found a place in Molière’s comedy Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (1667). Meanwhile, the kingdom of France sought to build a network of commercial relations that was founded on territorial colonization and the subjection and exploitation of native population. In 1627, Richelieu granted The Company of One Hundred Associates a land charter for territories extending from Florida to the Arctic regions.The city of Québec had been founded by Samuel Champlain in 1608. Eventually, several commercial companies were constituted, including the Compagnie des Indes orientales (1664) under the ministry of Colbert. These actions necessitated the formulation of the infamous Code noir (1685), which defined slavery within the law. Nouvelle-France, the French West Indies (Martinique, Guadeloupe), and Guyana were definitively annexed as royal possessions in 1663 and 1674. A postcolonial inquiry into this early modern French culture can learn much from Descartes’s letter to Elizabeth and its conjunction of the mind/body problem with social theory and language. Was the rhetorical theory of conversation bound with a discourse on incorporation and history that made social relations inherently discriminatory against different bodies, at a time when France was laying the foundations of its colonial empire? Were the thinkers of the French social body unequivocal and unanimous in negatively valuing the special interests of bodies against the imperatives of bienséance? This last question assumes an important role insofar as it has the potential to transform our very inquiry into a political performance, should classicism turn out to be

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a concept still valid for describing contemporary social relations between the French and their former colonized subjects. Identity, Gender, and Postcolonial Performance To avoid reproducing the metaphysical dualism that we see as a crucial premise to the colonizer’s discourse, our first move should consist in describing postcolonial subjects as bodies, challenging the traditional opposition between soul and bodily matter. But then, what concepts of subjectivity are we to invoke and accept? A first element of response can be found in Shoshana Felman’s The Literary Speech Act, where she reminds us that representational acts always involve an unrepresentable irruption of the body in language, no matter how rational these acts claim to be: “If the problem of the human act does consist in the relation between language and body, it is because the act is conceived—by performative analysis as well as by psychoanalysis—as that which problematizes at one and the same time the separation and the opposition between the two. The act, an enigmatic and problematic production of the speaking body, destroys from its inception the metaphysical dichotomy between the domain of the ‘mental’ and the domain of the ‘physical,’ breaks down the opposition between body and spirit, between matter and language.”7 The idea of a postcolonial performative body seems to be fruitful, insofar as it imagines subjectivity as an act that blurs the mind/body split. But what distinguishes such an act from conventional claims of identity and requests for social justice? Are we, here, concerned with the kind of representations that J. L. Austin defined in his famous work How to do Things with Words?8 When speaking of bodies, don’t we always end up using the very metaphysical terms that we seek to avoid? Answers to these questions come about if we recognize that a theory of postcolonial interests necessarily intersects with gender studies because of its emphasis on the notion of performance. The psychoanalytical interpretation of performance provided by Judith Butler not only leads to a better understanding of identity, but it allows us to say that postcolonial political action can be viewed as a queering gesture, that is, a performance of political camouflage. Butler explains that in the Oedipal narrative of psychic development, the emphasis put on incest prohibition makes bisexuality appear to be a natural, free, and transgressive form of desire. Through a rereading of Freud, she argues that this notion of bisexuality is already a cultural effect: it is the result of a prior gender identification caused by the prohibition of homosexuality. There is an encompassing and productive

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notion of bodily desire that is not marked by the and/or of sexual division.The first effect of the law of the Father is to prohibit transgressive desire, which is incorporated as loss in a process similar to melancholic mourning. Homosexual desire is fixated on the body to create a specific erogenous zone according to the prescription of cultural law. A sexual organ becomes meaningful, thereby creating gender.9 This is how bodies are brought to corporeal existence, how a depth effect is achieved to create the mind/body and rational language/bodily emotion distinctions. Bodies and identities are performative acts, “styles of the flesh,” to use Butler’s felicitous formula, and we shall consider this general notion to be valid for other bodies as well. Of course, it has often been argued that understanding postcolonial subjects in the frame of Western critical discourse is in a certain way a colonial act that refutes their own specificity. But as we shall see, our goal here is to devise a representational strategy within the very discourse of colonial power. What Butler derives from this performance is a notion of agency in claims of recognition, and in narratives of that recognition. While proposing her concept of the performative body, she acknowledges that the sedimentation of cultural representations is such that they cannot be challenged and changed so easily. Subjects of identities are essentialized, and must constantly face the negativity of their gendered and ethnic bodies insofar as these are discursively produced. This pessimistic notion is further subtantiated by the Foucauldian idea that all transgressive action would be ultimately coopted by power, and situated again in a subaltern position. Identity is always already an effect of power. Postmodern political action would then be more a subversive appropriation of modernism’s binary oppositions than a deposition.Without any outside dimension to power, and the tired metaphysical notion of agency abandoned, political action consists of a strategy of camouflage, or mimicry. In regimes of coercion, the reality effect of a given identity must be achieved through constant citation, and this iteration is what constructs the force of the statement. It also occasions its slippage, thereby revealing the differential construct of its meaning and the possibility of subversive mimicry. As Homi K. Bhabha has observed, political performances then stand in the margins of representations, in the subversive play and tension between elements of metaphysical oppositions and identities.10 In Gender Trouble, Butler suggested that hyperbolic imitations such as drag have the power to disrupt the sedimentation of gender identities. But there is an important aspect of that sedimentation that should not be overlooked if mimicry is to be strategic. Identifications must be repeated, cited, and abstracted from their historically discursive constitution to

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seem natural. The power to narrate that sedimentation is then vital to secure their naturalizations. We have suggested that in the context of French colonialism, these narrations are of even more importance, and could provide strategic elements for a postcolonial mimicry. But for us to make any political sense of an inquiry into the early modern colonial épistémè, there needs to be, of course, a reason to do so, and also a sense that historic representations hold some significant value in contemporary French society. This seems actually to be the case. As Benjamin Stora suggests, it is possible to view French minorities’ struggle for recognition as pertaining to the postcolonial inquiry, since many of these minorities come from the provinces of the former colonial empire.11 The French rightly take pride in a long tradition of hospitality toward the excluded, but they have also reacted with much suspicion to the challenges of multiculturalism posed by these minorities.12 One of the many elements in these challenges concerns the influence of private interests in the public sphere. The perception of unfairness by minorities, due to their ethnic identity, often leads to claims of special status in the definition of laws or other practices. Such was the case when the Institut des sciences politiques developed a pilot program to help students from disadvantaged backgrounds in joining the school. The opposition to recognizing such representation of ethnic bodily specificity is strong. Opponents argue that all French citizens are represented fairly by les valeurs de la République, and that no exception can be made to the principle of republican universalism.There are many discourses, practices, and technologies that lend their discriminatory forces to these values, and our goal is to locate some of them in the field of rhetoric while also elucidating how history has added legitimacy to the French national status quo. A key element of this narrative is how the French mirror themselves in the century of Louis le Grand as a lieu de mémoire, a prime commonplace of memory. Many facts contribute to this status of the Grand Siècle. Descartes, for example, is presented in schools as a cultural icon that symbolizes a healthy skepticism and a rational order.13 Buildings erected by rulers of the early modern age now harbor republican institutions such as the Senate and the Conseil d’Etat. Advertisement cultivates the notion of French spirit and taste, as theorized by Bouhours in the seventeenth century, to motivate consumption. Most importantly, the French language, in its current appearance, is widely seen as having been purified and refined in the age of Bouhours and Vaugelas to achieve an archetypal and optimal aesthetic value.14 The narration of history is always political, but in this early modern context, its practice resonates with particular force in the constitution of French identity representation.

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Conversation and Narratives of Recognition A closer look at conversation in early modern French national discourse can act upon this foundational moment of France’s lieux de mémoire, revealing, within the colonizer’s very discourse, the necessary contingency of its historical representations. Two important works written by Jürgen Habermas and Hélène Merlin will help characterize the emergence of the body’s political interests in the early modern period. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, a work that primarily concerns the Enlightenment, Habermas observes that bourgeois rational capacity was first exercised in discussions about literary works.15 Habermas favors this idea of the body politic, because the bourgeois idea of the political sphere, being driven toward consensus, excluded issues that were considered private insofar as they did not relate to the life of all citizens and their general interest. Many concerns pertaining to bodily specificity were thus excluded from public discussions. Habermas then writes that the origins of “publicity” can be traced to seventeenthcentury aristocratic salons, where literary discussions were also a favorite topic. He remarks that the exercise of reason in the seventeenth-century public space was hampered by the private interests of both power and the individuals participating in the debates. Rational public discourse was driven by the need to flatter the aristocratic host, or by the need to let egos shine through rhetorical skill (bon mots). Habermas is right to designate conversation as a crucial element in this public sphere. But his belief in a purely rational kind of speech leads him to dissociate form and substance in language. He thus claims that to become citizens of the Enlightenment, the honnête homme and the honnête femme of the seventeenth century had to give up associating ethical values with rhetorical ones. The chief goal of Merlin’s book, Public et littérature au XVIIe siècle, is not to show the relevance of early modern discourse in contemporary political debates, although she hints at such a possibility. Her main purpose is to highlight the role of literary quarrels—on works such as Le Cid (1637) and La Princesse de Clèves (1678)—in the formation of seventeenthcentury public spaces of conversation.16 Instead of using the notion of the bourgeois rational consensus as a benchmark of publicity, she situates her analysis in the wake of historical events and sixteenth-century political theory. This allows her to bring forward several types of bodies politic, including some in which individuals valued the influence of private interests in the form of emotions brought about by their readings. For Merlin, the existence of such public spheres is inseparable from the birth of the modern state in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century

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France, a creation that represents in her opinion a fundamental epistemic change in the French body politic. During and after the Wars of Religion, the ontological bond uniting medieval ruler and subjects vanished, enabling the emergence of an autonomous public and political sphere in the seventeenth century. In the modern state, it became possible for subjects to conceptually represent themselves on a political stage, and to hide their interests from the public if necessary. Subjects were political representations. The political theorists of the sixteenth and the seventeenth century, with Machiavelli in a prime position, were now eminently and epistemologically relevant for the French.This splitting of the public and the private, theorized as the idea of “reason of state” (raison d’état) and dissimulation, also came to define spaces of sociability such as the salons. In that context, dissimulation is a useful notion to locate a theory of the performative body in early modern political theory. Reason of state justified secret, unlawful, and immoral decisions by the prince, if these decisions were beneficial to the greater good of the State.17 The prince was then said to dissimulate from the public sphere, where morally sound decisions and legitimate acts of government were the only ones acceptable. Among the many theoreticians of reason of state, Justus Lipsius stands out for his influence on Michel de Montaigne and Pierre Charron.18 For Lipsius and those he influenced, the dissimulation necessary to exercise reason of state was a lesser evil, acceptable only when practiced by rulers and the counselors close to them.19 There were many other theorists, such as the Italians Ludovico Zuccolo and Matteo Peregrini, who contributed to the definition of reason of state by adding that dissimulation could only be justified by specific circumstances, and in case of emergencies.20 Many of these ideas were grounded in the moral philosophy of Stoicism. The thinkers of dissimulation, like the Stoics, relied on the notion of fatum, that is, a belief in the utter contingency of the world from the human point of view. The ethical dissimulation of the self could only happen in a particular and unforeseeable situation, on which it was impossible to comment in advance.Therefore, to formulate principles of dissimulation was morally wrong, signaling the rule of egoistic private interests instead of the common good.21 Yet considering the rule of unpredictability, can we actually define dissimulation as a cleavage of the self? In the presentness of the right moment, dissimulated self and public persona are actually reconciled in the subject. In the context of a random history, selves that lived with their own times also lived in a performative tension that reconciled their private and public persons.

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This conception of the masked subject emerged at court and in the world of the salons. Throughout the seventeenth century, the French monarchy consolidated its power by fostering social relations at court. There, aristocrats were kept busy with entertainment and ceremonies, while being closely watched at the same time. In this context, the notion of a reason of state of the individual appeared. Principles from the work of Roman historian Tacitus were used to compose books such as Puget de la Serre’s Les Maximes politiques de Tacite.22 These “breviaries of the courtier” were political survival guides that instructed the general public on how to represent the self.This notion of individual dissimulation was also viewed as crucial in the public sphere of the salons. Often set in the residences of the aristocracy, the salons provided a meeting place where the social and rhetorical rules that governed public behavior and representation were defined by common interest, and much less by the imperatives of monarchical propaganda; even commoners could participate.23 The example of Antiquity, often adopted through the works of Italian theorists such as Baltasar Castiglione (1478–1529), first served as a guide to social behavior. The French quickly formulated their own ideal, expressed in works by Madeleine de Scudéry and the Chevalier de Méré. At the Hôtel de Rambouillet—where from 1613 to 1650 Catherine de Vivonne exerted considerable influence on society—or at the residence of Madeleine de Scudéry, women and men of letters defined prominent social qualities such as honnêteté, bienséance, and taste.24 The chief rule of honnêteté required men and women to display a public self that respected the core ethical and rhetorical values of the community, to respect bienséance.25 Bienséance was defined by public opinion, and varied according to the nature of the subject, the persons involved, and the places:“L’air le plus conforme au rôle qui se présente et qui vient le mieux à la personne qui le joue, est la principale cause de la bienséance” (The principal cause of propriety is the air that most easily fits the role and that best suits the person who plays it).26 This social ethic was wide-ranging, including civil, religious, and moral laws. For the Chevalier de Méré, cultural productions could not be taught outside the rule of social ethics:“Ce qui sied bien est bon, ce qui sied mal est mauvais” (What is appropriate is good, what is not is bad).27 Honnêteté applied to the substance of speech, but also to its style, including delivery, costume, and posture. Social beings were artful representations. A flaw in one’s judging of taste was a moral flaw.This is why Bouhours included political judgment in his discussions of taste in Les Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène.28 What we see here is a concept of the rhetorical self that defined what aspect of the body was acceptable on the political and social stage.

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Nothing was more crucial in this context than the art of tasteful conversation. As Madeleine de Scudéry puts it, conversation was “le lien de la société de tous les hommes” (the bond of all human beings’ society).29 A polite individual always had to dissimulate part of the self, to be in tune with the social circumstances.30 Theoreticians such as Scudéry conceived of politeness as an “honest dissimulation.” Much like the art of the courtly dissimulators, politeness was a fracture of the self that lived the erasing of that fracture as a circumstantial performance of ethics. Méré explains, for example, that outside appearances always mirror the real nature of the person:“Rien n’y peut tant contribuer [à se faire aimer des personnes qui nous sont chères] que de paraître honnête homme, en toutes rencontres; et pour le paraître il faut l’être en effet; car les apparences du dehors ne sont que les images du dedans” (Nothing contributes more to being loved by those we esteem than appearing to be a gentleman, on all occasions.And to appear as such a gentleman, one must actually be one, because outside appearances are merely the images of the inner self.31) This is a surprising declaration from a man who knew the world, its dissimulation, and ruses. Of course, he could mean that in the case of a morally impeccable person, there is no need to hide part of the self. But then why would Méré insist so much on the need to appear? Was he advocating hypocrisy? I take this passage to express the fact that the ethical self is always divided between the private and the public, and that when appropriate, this dissimulation is actually nonexistent from an ethical point of view. The subject was a moral performance, by which mind and body were united when tuned to contingent circumstances. Here a new question arises. The cardinal rule of sociability required the free expression and participation of all conversationalists, and also a duty to listen.32 Any good conversationalist then faced a paradoxical situation. Conversation might have revolved around general topics, but one had to express particular opinions. This truth is expressed by Bouhours quite forwardly: “Un bel esprit est riche en son fond: il trouve dans ses propres lumières ce que les esprits communs ne trouvent que dans les livres” (A worthy mind is witty at heart, and finds in its own riches what common minds can only discover in books) (158). How was it possible to express oneself and have private interests recognized, when individuality was considered a selfish display of personal interest? Could private interests be revealed on the public sphere, and negotiated to become part of the status quo? What rhetoric permitted social change to be brought about? The texts of the early modern theoreticians of civility suggest different interpretations of a rhetoric of individuality, which might have included interests pertaining to bodily specificity.

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First, the wise conversationalist could solve this problem by suggesting, instead of affirming, his or her own beliefs. Bouhours spells this out eloquently in La Manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages d’esprit. For him, a principle of generosity is comprehended in the idea of delicateness. Delicateness consisted in speaking clearly, yet concisely, so as to leave the listener to draw his or her own conclusions.33 The rhetorical power of language was a form of dissimulation. But was this strategy good for all circumstances? Weren’t there moments when politeness and subtle rhetoric had to be left aside, or at least used to carry out projects that required more forceful affirmations of the self ? The following anecdote shows a second way for bringing change to the commonplaces of bienséance.The Chevalier de Méré narrates an episode in which the Duke of Buckingham, wearing an extravagant costume, made a remarked appearance at a royal ball: Il y eut un grand bal au Louvre, où la Reine assembla tout ce qu’il y avait de plus agréable, et de plus galant parmi les Dames, qui ce soir-là ne s’étaient pas négligées. Les hommes non plus n’avaient rien oublié de ce qui leur pouvait être le plus avantageux. De sorte qu’on n’eût su imaginer une plus belle et plus brillante assemblée. Mais il n’y avait point de parure qui tînt tant soit peu du ballet, et qui ne fût à la mode. Néanmoins le duc de Buckingham se présenta en habit à la Persienne, avec un chapeau de velours tout couvert de plumes et de pierreries, et des chausses si troussées, qu’elles laissaient voir non seulement la forme de ses jambes qu’il avait belles, mais aussi beaucoup au-dessus des genoux. Cette invention était bien hardie et bien douteuse, et même dans une cour étrangère, où tant de gens bien faits, et de grands Seigneurs, qui lui portait envie, ne cherchaient qu’à le tourner en ridicule. Cependant le Duc sut si bien soutenir son entrée, et dansa de si bon air, que les Dames qui riaient d’abord pour s’en moquer, ne riaient sur la fin du bal, que pour lui plaire, et qu’avec sa parure bizarre et surprenante, il effaça la mode française, et les plus galants de la Cour. The Queen gathered the most pleasant and gallant ladies at the Louvre for a great ball. Those ladies had not neglected themselves that night, and neither had the gentlemen forgotten anything that could be most suitable for them. It was difficult to imagine a more beautiful and brilliant assembly. All attires fitted the ballet, and were in fashion. But the Duke of Buckingham showed up in Persian dress, including a velvet hat adorned with feathers and jewels, and chausses tucked so high that it was possible to see his

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good-looking legs well beyond the knees. This style was quite daring and dubious, and even more at a foreign court, where handsome gentlemen, and great Lords, were envious, and sought to ridicule him.Yet the Duke held up his entry so well, and danced with such good air, that the ladies, who first mocked him with laughter, were laughing at the end of the ball only to please him. With his awkward and surprising dress, he outshone French fashion, and the most gallant at court.34 The Duke had obviously not opted for the practice of honest dissimulation on that night! To be sure, Méré’s text could be construed as an orientalist scene, whereby the exotic Other is admired, but also designated as a foil that will consolidate the colonizers’ own representations. But let us note that by wearing an exotic and extravagant costume, the Duke risked the first order of sanctions for crimes of bad taste: ridicule. And for there to be ridicule, there must be a measure of identification, because utter difference does not provoke laughter. Thus the Duke appeared as belonging to the courtly crowd, while being different. He was able to keep up appearances by showing determination. Even more, he seems to have been successful in making his particular dressing style accepted by convincingly playing the role that he had chosen (soutenir son entrée), that is, dancing and acting in the proper manner, with “good air.” The identification that allowed ridicule ended up working to his own advantage. Determination and courage produced a reality effect that in the end made the representation of identity plausible, no matter how unusual.A similar effect seems to be depicted in Molière’s Bourgeois gentilhomme, where anybody can be a Turk, as long as it fulfills expectations. Indeed, that is the point of orientalism.Yet Méré’s anecdote signifies that a measure of strategic rhetoric was also essential to foster acceptance of difference at court. Attitudes of dissimulation and determination may at first appear as diametrically opposed.Yet they were close in their resolve to perform in the presentness of the moment what the ancient Greeks called kairos. These attitudes show that French bienséance was more than a set of ideas defining the public sphere. The concept was open to the possibility of change; it was constantly negotiated.35 Selves were performative because they existed in a tension between the social and political self brought about by the negativity of the other, because they displayed a readiness to recognize and negotiate the inclusion of private interests in the public sphere. In this version of classicism, French esprit remained a theoretical horizon. French subjects were always about to become classical in

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their conversation if they recognized that others were free to manifest their differences. In this performance of social ethics, subjects lived the union of their mind and bodies in ways that resisted philosophical description, and maybe this is why Descartes thought that questions concerning the unity of the mind and the body could not be asked, but rather practiced in conversation. In conversation theory, the narrative of recognition is not a described as a progress, but as a random succession of events.36 What defined leisurely social exchange was the absence of a master narrative. People were free to shift the topic in the manner that suited them. Conversational history was caused by the desire of others to be recognized, a desire that was unpredictable and ever-changing. Honest dissimulation in conversation had Stoic roots insofar as it was bound with a type of narrative.While the Stoic notion of dissimulation was justified by the notion of historical unpredictability, in the conversational space the randomness of narratives defined the subject as playing in a performative hiding game. Interestingly, a different concept of history was bound with a redefinition of the French social and political body. This happened when linguists and rhetoricians, including the same ones who had contributed to a differential understanding of conversation, imposed private interests that were nonnegotiable. There is an ambivalence in thinkers such as Méré and Bouhours insofar as their social system defined a differential concept of identity, but that also brought forward concepts that made conversation an exclusionary political structure. For such authors, the natural history of recognition in conversation was juxtaposed with a fable that rationalized the progressive assimilation of all interests to the benefit of the dominant ones. Identification with this norm signified the end of the narrative. The story of how this ideological bind between public values and teleological narrative came to work is well known. It first concerned the rhetoric of the arts patronized by the king.37 But a reification of public values came to exist also in the world of the salons. This involved the claim that a state of linguistic and rhetorical perfection had been attained, and a change in the notion of linguistic usage. Merlin observes that against the authority of the Académie française, men such as La Mothe le Vayer affirmed the rule of usage in the definition of a common language. For linguists Gilles Ménage, Bouhours, or Bernard Lamy, common understanding also defined public discourse. Much like social behavior, public opinion defined vocabulary, grammar, and style. Not even the king could singlehandedly alter the meaning of a word.38 French linguists and rhetoricians recognized that changes in the body of

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language happened constantly, and that no agency defined that phenomenon. The public was a speaking community, capable of absorbing new ideas, yet resistant to the imposition of single and authoritarian interests. The inclusive notion of usage, however, also turned out to be considered in a restrictive sense. The same Méré and Bouhours affirmed that the perfect norm was the usage of the “saner part of the court.” In Les Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène, Bouhours described this norm, Ciceronian Atticism, as the perfect incarnation of the French language.39 This rhetorical style united the qualities of Caesar’s prose, known for its clarity and simplicity, with the qualities of Tacitus’s writing, known for its capacity to strike deep into the mind while revealing layers of wise meaning. Ideal discourse for Bouhours was clear and logical—the interlocutors were to immediately grasp its meaning. It was sober, natural, and spontaneous—the speakers had to casually reveal their true selves.Their words, however, had to incite reflection and allow others to follow them subjectively. Finally, discourse had to be pleasing and lively.40 Ciceronian Atticism, in the mind of Bouhours, was the result of a natural evolution of French. This evolution started with the invasion of Gaul by the Romans, continued through the invasion of the Franks and their own idiom, and then slowly advanced towards the advent of a powerful French absolutist state. The notion of French was thereby fixed in history and related to the triumph of absolutism. Far from conceiving optimal rational expression as a neutral, abstract, and almost mathematical language, Bouhours viewed it as an embodiment that was best incarnated in the practice of conversation. He was following a common notion at the time, here expressed by his fellow linguist Lamy: Il est important de bien marquer la distinction qui est entre l’âme des paroles, et le corps; c’est-à-dire entre entre ce qu’elles ont de corporel et ce qu’elles ont de spirituel . . . Les idées qui sont présentes à notre esprit, lorsqu’il commande aux organes de la voix de former les sons, qui sont les signes de ces idées, sont l’âme des paroles: les sons que forment les organes de la voix et qui n’ayant rien de semblable en eux-mêmes à ces idées ne laissent pas de les signifier, sont la partie matérielle ou le corps des paroles. The soul of words and their bodies, that is, their material and spiritual nature, must be clearly distinguished . . . The ideas we have in our mind when it commands the organs of the voice to form sounds (which are the signs of those ideas) are the soul of words.

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The sounds formed by the organs of the voice (which in no way in themselves resemble ideas but nonetheless signify them) are the material part or body of words.41 Likewise, Bouhours essentialized linguistic embodiment by describing it as a materialization of reason. He argued that the corporeal form of Frenchness had reached a perfect stage, permitting the transparent, yet embodied, expression of discourse.The story of French was proposed as a perfect and successful synthesis of matter by reason. As Shoshana Felman would put it, there could be nothing scandalous about the French Attic body.With this move by Lamy and Bouhours, one form of the linguistic body came to represent national unity, and defined what speaking bodies could look and sound like on the public stage.The political force of this standard body came from its alleged rationality, historicity, and connection to class status, race, and gender. A metaphysical dualism definitely participated in the exclusion of embodied subjects from the public sphere by instigating a political structure of exclusion. This embodied bienséance required the adaptation of specific private interests to public values without the possibility of negotiating between the two sides. Classicism itself, then, acted coercively to naturalize the imposition of the will of one group to the detriment of others.

A Postcolonial Monologue Many aspects of this discursive theory of identity are at work today. Since the seventeenth century, the repetition of bienséance, especially the linguistic version, has contributed to its naturalization and its force in the field of power relations. French values promise the colonial Other happiness through its adoption into the body politic, and yet make its inclusion a very difficult achievement. No matter how hard one tries, it is very difficult to live up to the expectations of French authenticity. Indeed, how is it possible to negotiate social change if the very linguistic style of that negotiation signifies the preeminence of certain individuals because of the romanced historical mastery of their bodies? French Atticism naturalizes a specific type of body, at the expense of recognizing other bodies in the public sphere. From this perspective, the specific force of French republicanism is inherited from classicism. Facing such particular imaginary and melancholic identifications, the strategy of the colonized can take many forms within the concept of a subversive hyperbolic imitation. A crucial aspect of this rhetoric of mimicry concerns the performance of history.

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To conclude, let us explore some final insights into the concept of historical performance in French culture through La Duchesse de Langeais, a theatrical monologue by the Canadian author Michel Tremblay. This play, presented for the first time in 1969, features a creature of uncertain gender somewhere in the “warm countries,” downing scotch-whiskey on the terrace of a café. During the two-act play, the duchess recalls her brilliant life as an actor, cabaret-drag queen, and rent-boy touring Europe with a generous older gentleman. In the stage instructions, Tremblay prescribes that the character of the duchess should be a “complete” and “perfect” caricature.42 But how can a caricature be complete and perfect? This requires comparison with a norm (and, by definition, a caricature exceeds the norm, otherwise it becomes just a realistic representation). Tremblay’s remark signifies that identities are nothing but successful and sedimented caricatures, prone to be unsettled. The demonstration of the contingency of performances then becomes a motive for laughter (not unlike the Duke of Buckingham’s ball entrance).The text turns out to be a political comedy of failures—in the realms of gender, sexual bienséance, class appearance, but also of manners and, most important for our discussion, of French identity. Alluding to her command of metropolitan French culture, and her capacity to look and sound French, the duchess recites a verse taken from Athalie, a tragedy by Racine, the quintessential classical author: “C’était pendant l’horreur d’une profonde nuit” (It happened in the horror of a deep night).43 The marks of her Québécois upbringing then reappear in the guise of her accent, revealing her imposture: she becomes the nightmare of French classical culture as the very mark of its embodiment. Racine’s verse is found in a passage in which the tyrannical queen Athalie tells the priest Mathan about dreaming of her kingdom’s religious fragmentation, and finally her own death at the hands of a child that eerily resembled her.44 We can take the murderous feelings of this child, who turns out to be her grandson, to signify how hostility is sometimes necessary for an overly possessive mother to accept sexual (and political) differentiation. Spoken by the Duchess, Racine’s Oedipal scenario also describes the horror of the profound night where France’s fantasmatic identifications as the “Mère-Patrie” are revealed for what they are: fetishes that conceal the impossibility of historically fashioning the body (its own and those of her colonial children) into one essential appearance. By presenting failed stereotypes that work to disrupt identities and temporality, La Duchesse de Langeais becomes a trope of postcolonial France. Contributing to this effect is the fact that Québec is also Nouvelle-France (New France), founded in the seventeenth century—that

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is, other and yet the same. The past does not show up to fulfill exactly the expectations of classicism, and the Duchess’s lapses in French Atticism perform a genealogy of French classical ambivalence. Moreover, the sexual uncertainties displayed in La Duchesse make obvious the fact that France’s political idea is, like all bodies, a “gendered corporealization of time.”45 La Duchesse de Langeais thus underscores that postcolonial courtiers are transnational, transgendered, and ahistorical bodies, engaging in a strategic play within the field of power relations. When practicing honest dissimulation, political acts concern the stylization of the body. They are acts that must point to the artifice, corporeality, and historicity of performances. Notes Portions of this essay were presented at “Postcolonial Moves” (University of Miami, February 2000). 1. On the constitution of the colonizer’s body by Western discourse, see Londa L. Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston: Beacon, 1993). 2. On the French resistance to such theorization, see Emily Apter, “French Colonial Studies and Postcolonial Theory,” SubStance, 76–7 (1995): 169–80. 3. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), 17. 4. To Princess Elizabeth, 28 June, 1643; my emphasis, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, D. Murdoch, and A. Kenny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985–91), 3:227. 5. Marc Fumaroli, Le Genre des genres littéraires français: la conversation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); also published in Trois Institutions littéraires (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 111–210. 6. Hélène Merlin,“L’Esprit de la langue,” in L’Esprit en France au XVIIe siècle, ed. François Lagarde (Paris and Seattle: Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature, 1997), 29–51, at 51.This and subsequent translations are mine, unless noted otherwise. 7. Shoshana Felman, The Literary Speech Act: Don Juan with J. L.Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 94. 8. J. L. Austin, How to do Things with Words (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962). 9. “As an antimetaphorical activity, incorporation literalizes the loss on or in the body and so appears as the facticity of the body, the means by which the body comes to bear ‘sex’ as its literal truth” (Butler, Gender Trouble, 87). 10. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). 11. Benjamin Stora, Le Transfert de mémoire: De l’Algérie française au racisme anti-arabe (Paris: Découverte, 1999). 12. See Post-Colonial Cultures in France, ed. Alec G. Hargreaves and Mark McKinney (London: Routledge, 1997). 13. On Descartes as a cultural icon, see François Azouvi, “Descartes,” in Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, dir. P. Nora, ed. L. D. Kritzman, trans.A. Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 3: 483–522. 14. Claude Favre de Vaugelas, Remarques sur la langue française (Paris:Vve J. Camusat and P. Le Petit, 1647). 15. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into the Transformation of a Bourgeois Category, trans.T. Burger (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989).

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16. Hélène Merlin, Public et littérature en France au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1994). 17. William F. Church, Richelieu and Reason of State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972); Nannerl O. Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); La Raison d’État: Politique et rationalité, ed. Michel Senellart (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1992); Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Raison et déraison d’État, ed. Michel Senellart (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1994); Michel Senellart, Les Arts de Gouverner: Du Régimen médiéval au concept de gouvernement (Paris: Seuil, 1995). 18. In his crucial book on political art, Lipsius defines the concept of mixed prudence: Politicorum sive civilis doctrinae libri sex (Leyde, 1589); Charron, Sagesse (Bordeaux: S. Millanges, 1601), 3:2. 19. Torquato Accetto, Della Dissimulazione Onesta (Naples: E. Longo, 1641), in Politici e moralisti del Seicento (Bari: Laterza, 1930); Pedro de Rivadeneira, Tratado de la religion y virtudes que debe tener el principe cristiano para gobernar sus estados, in Obras escogidas (Madrid: Atlas, 1952), 2:4. Modern studies include: Louis Van Delft and Florence Lotterie, “La Notion de ‘dissimulation honnête’ dans la culture classique,” in L’Honnête homme et le dandy, ed. A. Montandon (Tübingen: Narr, 1993), 35–57; Jean-Pierre Cavaillé, “Simulation/dissimulation: Notes sur feinte et occultation, XVIe–XVIIIe siècles,” in Il Vocabolario della République des Lettres, ed. M. Fattori (Firenze: Olschki, 1997), 73–102; “De la Construction des apparences au culte de la transparence: Simulation et dissimulation entre le XVIe et le XVIIe siècle,” Littératures classiques, 34 (1998): 73–102. 20. Ludovico Zuccolo, Della Ragione di Stato (1621), in Politici; Matteo Peregrini, Chè al Savio è convenevole corteggiare (Bologna:Tebaldini, 1624). 21. “Ma l’insegnar ex professo i modi e i mezzi d’operare per ragione di stato ne’ rei governi è opera non da uomini onorati ma da scrittori iniqui ed empi, come il Machiavello e i seguaci suoi” (Zuccolo in Politici, 38); “Suo è l’haver pronto il rimedio ad ogni sinistro abbatimento. Qual riposo, o qual’ arte egli usa in questo, o quello evento, l’occorrenza particolare fa malagevole il darne conto. Gli avenimenti hanno infinita varietà . . . la sanissima sapienza è l’usar ben la sapienza” (Peregrini, Chè al Savio, 383). 22. Puget de la Serre, Les Maximes politiques de Tacite, ou La Conduite des gens de la cour (1664); on Tacitus in France, see Jacob Soll,“Amelot de la Houssaie and the Tacitean Tradition in France,” Translation and Literature, 6 (1997): 186–202; J. Rohou,“De la générosité à l’intérêt: une révolution des motivations,” in Caractères et passions au XVIIe siècle, ed. D. Souiller (Dijon: Éditions Universitaires, 1998), 129–48. 23. Carolyn Lougee, Le Paradis des Femmes: Women, Salons and Social Stratifications in SeventeenthCentury France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976); Emanuel Bury “Les Salons à l’époque classique,” in Les Espaces de la civilité, ed. A. Montandon (Mont-de-Marsan: Éditions InterUniversitaires, 1995), 27–39. 24. Maurice Magendie, La Politesse mondaine et les théories de l’honnêteté, en France, au XVIIe siècle, de 1600 à 1660 (Paris: F.Alcan, 1925); Jean-Pierre Dens, L’Honnête homme et la critique du goût: esthétique et société au XVIIe siècle (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1981); Emmanuel Bury,“Civiliser la personne ou instituer le personnage? Les deux versants de la politesse selon les théoriciens français du XVIIe siècle,” in Étiquette et politesse, ed. A. Montandon (Clermont-Ferrand: Association des Publications de la Faculté des Lettres et Sciences humaines, 1992), 125–38; Littérature et politesse: l’invention de l’honnête homme (1580–1750) (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1996); Claude Chantalat, À la Recherche du goût classique (Paris: Klincksieck, 1992); Orest Ranum, “Courtesy, Absolutism and the Rise of the French State, 1630–60,” Journal of Modern History, 52 (1980): 426–51. 25. “Le goût se situe dès lors au point de jonction où une sensibilité particulière rejoint un réseau d’exigeances imposées par la coutûme et l’usage” (Dens, L’Honnête homme, 106); “La vraisemblance ne peut se maintenir qu’au sein d’un accord la liant à une idéologie” (Ibid., 126). 26. Antoine Gombauld, Chevalier de Méré, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: F. Roches, 1930), 2: 20. 27. Ibid., 2:29.

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28. “Car c’est quelques fois un faible dans la politique d’avoir trop de pénétration et trop de lumière: tant de biais et tant de jours différents dissipent l’esprit et nuisent souvent à l’exécution: le temps d’agir se passe à délibérer,” in Dominique Bouhours, Les Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène [1671] (Paris: Bossard, 1920), 171–2. 29. Madeleine de Scudéry, “De la Conversation,” in Les Conversations [1680] (Amsterdam: 1686); Bouhours, Entretiens, 173–4. Modern references include: Christoph Strosetzki, Rhétorique de la conversation: sa dimension littéraire et linguistique dans la société française du XVIIe siècle, trans. S. Seubert (Paris: Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature, 1984); Elizabeth Goldsmith, Exclusive Conversations:The Art of Interaction in Seventeenth-Century France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988); Fumaroli, Le Genre;“L’Art de la conversation, ou le forum du royaume,” in La Diplomatie de l’esprit: De Montaigne à La Fontaine (Paris: Hermann, 1994), 283–320; preface to L’Art de la conversation, ed. J. Hellegouarc’h (Paris: Dunod, 1997). 30. “Ce qui tient de l’étude est presque toujours mal reçu. Il faut même retenir son esprit en beaucoup d’occasions, et se cacher de ce qu’on sait de la plus grande valeur . . . c’est la conformité qui fait qu’on se plaît ensemble” (Méré, Oeuvres, 2:106). 31. Ibid., 3:141; see also Baltasar Gracian, El Heroe, in Obras completas (Madrid:Atlas, 1969):“Ventajas son de ente infinito envidar mucho con resto de infinidad. Esta primera regla de grandeza advierte, si no el ser infinitos, a parecerlo que no es sutileza común” (244). 32. “Il ne doit point y avoir de tyrannie dans la conversation: que chacun y a sa part, et a droit de parler à son tour; et qu’enfin ce ne peut jamais être, que par l’attention de ceux qui écoutent, que ceux qui parlent bien, on droit de parler plus que les autres” (Scudéry,“De la conversation,” 95). 33. Dominique Bouhours, La Manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages d’esprit [1687] (Paris: Delaulne, 1735), 195, 482–3. 34. Méré, Oeuvres, 2: 131–2. 35. Ibid., 3:131, and:“Du reste, que l’on ne se mette point en peine si tout sera suivi et soutenu. Il n’importe guère que l’on soit d’abord si égal, ni si régulier, pourvu que la manière soit belle et si noble, que ceux qui la considère ne puissent dire jusqu’où l’on peut aller . . . je connais des gens qui parlent bien, mais c’est toujours le même ton” (1:53). 36. “J’aime dans la conversation: que l’on cherche une agréable diversité; que l’on passe par des lieux détournés, et que l’on s’élève de temps en temps si l’occasion le permet. Quoi qu’on s’écarte, et qu’on prenne l’essor, on se retrouve bien. Il faut, si l’on m’en croit, aller partout où mène le génie, sans autre division, ni distinction, que celle du bon sens” (Méré, Oeuvres, 1: 67). 37. Marc Fumaroli, L’État culturel: Une Religion moderne (Paris: Éditions de Fallois, 1992); on this work by Fumaroli, see my “Conversation and the Genealogy of Recognition,” EMF: Studies in Early Modern France, 7 (2001): 48–72. 38. Merlin, L’Esprit, 45. On usage: Gilles Declercq, “Usage et bel usage: l’usage de la langue dans Les Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène du père Bouhours,” Littératures classiques, 28 (1996): 113–36. 39. Marc Fumaroli, “The Genius of the French Language,” in Realms, 3: 555–606. 40. Françoise Berlan, “Le Père Bouhours, ou L’Air de la cour dans la langue et le style,” in De la mort de Colbert à la révocation de l’édit de Nantes: Un Monde nouveau, ed. Louise Godard de Donville (Marseille: CMR, 1984), 97–109; Gilles Declercq,“Bouhours lecteur de Balzac, ou Du Naturel,” Littératures classiques, 33 (1998): 93–113. 41. Bernard Lamy, De L’Art de parler (1672), cited in Merlin, “L’Esprit,” 30. 42. Michel Tremblay, Hosanna, suivi de La Duchesse de Langeais (Montréal: Leméac, 1984), 75. 43. Ibid., 84. 44. Jean Racine, Athalie, in Théâtre complet, ed. J. Morel and A.Viala (Paris: Garnier, 1980), 713. 45. Butler, Gender, 179.Tremblay’s text also undermines the North/South opposition.The duchess did travel to a warm country to seduce young locals, but fell desperately in love, and became a victim of her own games. Aiming first at offering a colonial monologue to the natives, she ends up wishing for a dialogue.

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CHAPTER

ELEVEN

Antipodean Idylls: An Early Australian Translation of Tennyson’s Medievalism Louise D’Arcens

Colonial Medievalism and Postcolonial Medieval Studies In a colony like this . . . there is constant temptation to indolence or sensuality, in the absence of permanent interests, of the thousand refinements which European civilisation provides for the imagination and the heart . . . . Doorm’s land needed not more the sword or the avenger, than a young society requires help against moral and material meanness.1 For the Reverend John Woolley,Tennyson’s land of Doorm provided an irresistible exemplum for discussing the drawbacks of life in colonial Sydney.The physical parallels were obvious: like Sydney, Doorm’s realm languished, dust-covered, under a “blistering sun.” Socially, it was a “realm of lawless turbulence,”2 whose population of brawny, bestial men and listless, resentful women called to Woolley’s mind the colonial communities he occasionally encountered in his role as public educator. Perhaps most crucial, however, was the fact that for Tennyson’s Enid and Geraint this land, like the Australian colonies, was a place of exile, far from the refined society of Camelot. Speaking in December 1860 to the Darling Point Mutual Improvement Association, Woolley repeatedly stresses that this cultural exile was the gravest danger facing the new British colony—far graver

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than the physical perils for which it was becoming infamous. In what has since developed into a national pastime, he lampoons foreign misconceptions of Australia as a badland whose population roamed “armed with bowie knife and revolver.” Speaking in 1861, he drily conjures up a future when the people of Europe will learn “that aborigines do not encamp in George St, nor bushrangers lurk in the purlieus of Hyde Park.”3 While Sydney’s settler community need not fear marauding criminals or encroaching natives, it does live daily, for Woolley, under the threat of cultural death. Reading through his public addresses, it is impossible to ignore his conviction that without the nourishment of English culture, Sydney will descend into a barbarism comparable to that of Doorm’s “naked hall.” In this respect Woolley is a typical colonial educator, striving to temper the local preoccupation with survival by promoting the need for cultural refinement. Of central importance is the fact that it is to the Victorian Middle Ages that Woolley turns, not only to explore this problem but also to offer its remedy. Most specifically, I am concerned with examining Woolley’s adaptation of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King into a vehicle for exploring cultural life in the “young and uncemented” society of the antipodean colony.As Sydney’s first professor of medieval language and literature, Woolley’s reading of the Idylls provides a fascinating insight into how the Middle Ages could be reinterpreted to characterize Australia’s— and especially Sydney’s—nascent colonial identity in the mid-nineteenth century. I argue that with its transposition of the Arthurian world to “the unpoetical streets of Sydney” (391), Woolley’s reading of the Idylls holds up an often unflattering mirror reflecting the aspirations and anxieties at the heart of colonial life.Writing at a time when cultural ambitions and economic imperatives contended to dominate the local scene, he uses his Arthurian framework to issue a strong, yet limited, critique of the mercantilism and utilitarianism underpinning the colonial project. Many today are familiar with the role of the medieval period in providing a myriad of imagined pasts for nineteenth-century culture.A vast corpus of scholarship examining popular medievalism in the nineteenth century has been emerging for some time out of Victorian studies.4 These accounts have been supplemented by medievalists since 1979 by the valuable interdisciplinary forum Studies in Medievalism. More recently still, medieval studies has witnessed the growth of another complementary strain of scholarship that critically evaluates the development of medieval studies as an academic discipline from the late eighteenth century into the twentieth.5 Of the scholarship produced so far, much has been devoted to exploring the role of medievalism in the formulation of cultural, political, and

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national identities not only in Europe and Britain, but also in North America.6 This vital aspect of Victorian medievalism is captured in Charles Dellheim’s description of it as a “symbolic language” that formed part of a broader “quest for cultural orientation” in the unfamiliar world of burgeoning industrialization. Indeed, Dellheim situates the quest for identity at the heart of all nineteenth-century medievalist practice:“Medievalism . . . was nothing if not a plastic language.What unites the diverse uses of medieval symbols is that they may all be seen as part of a quest for identity—provincial, national, aesthetic, religious, and political.”7 As I aim to demonstrate, Dellheim’s claim is certainly verified by the speeches of Sydney’s first professor, who had frequent recourse to Victorian notions of medieval culture to frame a series of national, colonial, and civic identities. I am, moreover, writing partly to offer a postcolonial reply to Dellheim’s call for “comparative studies of the uses and abuses of medievalism in different times and places.”8 I want to show that our understanding of Victorian medievalism will remain deficient if we do not extend the geographical scope beyond the Northern hemisphere to consider how medievalism came to be articulated within less examined colonial environments such as Sydney. Examining how the Middle Ages was perceived in a broader range of environments promises a more nuanced understanding of the role of medievalism in national, imperial, and colonial histories.9 My aim is also to extend current analyses of medievalism’s role as a vehicle for imperialist ideals, to include an analysis of it as a discourse central to the practices of colonialism.10 Such a reorientation is vital for illuminating how the seemingly conventional Victorian medievalism of the Sydney professors, in fact, takes on a new significance when expressed in a colonial environment. Medievalists have given much attention to the potency of the Arthurian legends for providing mythic models for gender, nation, and empire. Studies have proliferated that situate the Arthurian revival at the center of nineteenth-century English popular medievalism.11 Within this scholarship Tennyson’s Idylls are singled out as providing a historical vision in which, to quote Ian McGuire, “the Arthurian ideal [is] the ideal of Britain and Empire.”12 However, few are aware of the relevance of Tennyson’s Arthurianism to the formation of local identity in colonial Australia. For in this far corner of Empire, we also find colonists such as Woolley drawing on Arthurian legend to comprehend their experiences in an unfamiliar place.What is most captivating about much of this colonial medievalism is its inventiveness. Rather than being a slavish or derivative variation on Victorian medievalism, it translates images of the English Middle Ages to speak to the peculiarities and exigencies of life in the Australian colonies.

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This is certainly the case with Woolley’s reading of the Idylls. It would at first seem that in describing Sydney in terms of the Arthurian past, he is disavowing the colony’s spatial and cultural distance from England.The situation is, however, far more complex. What we find on examining Woolley’s reading is that the conditions of his new environment prevent him from reproducing the tropes found in the readings of his contemporaries in Britain, and lead him to formulate a reading of the Idylls that extends the poem’s relevance to the specific environment of colonial Sydney. One of the central questions in examination of colonial discourse is whether geographical displacement necessitates an adamant reproduction of the familiar, or encourages a transformed discourse acknowledging the particularities of the new environment. In approaching Woolley’s reading of Tennyson, I wish to suggest that both discursive directions are possible, that in his colonial discourse we see him paradoxically both remaking Sydney as England and recognizing the impossibility of doing so. Woolley’s lecture is of historical interest irrespective of its content. Tennyson published the first four Idylls in 1859, and Woolley writes in 1860. Given the time it took for books to arrive in the colony, it constitutes a very early—if not the earliest—Australian response to the Idylls. That this reading is so strikingly reflective of its context makes it doubly interesting to Australianists,Victorianists, and medievalists alike. For Woolley, Tennyson’s Arthurian landscape functions not only as a spatialized history of empire but as a typological forerunner offering a surprising series of parallels to life in the Australian colonies: “Enid, Elaine, and Arthur . . . Geraint, Launcelot, Vivien, and Guinevere . . . [e]ach has a separate and living type, familiar to our daily observation, suffering, repenting, in the nineteenth century, and the unpoetical streets of Sydney, just as they did long ages ago in the wild forests of Devon, or the romantic castle of Astolat, in the glittering hall of Camelot, or the cloistered cell of Almesbury.”13 Ian McGuire suggests that Tennyson’s narrative of the Arthurian world was conventionally seen by critics as a kind of spatial history of the British empire, in which “medieval England is both a metaphorical version of the empire and the metonymic origin of that empire.”14 The innovation of Woolley’s colonial account is that it interprets Arthurian spatial history from the “other end” of the imperial relationship. Interestingly, Woolley can be seen to have recognized the practical applicability of the poem to the colonies before Tennyson himself, who did not overtly acknowledge the imperial “realms to their last isle” until

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his Dedication of 1862.Victor Keirnan argues that the Idylls’ vision of empire was non-pragmatic: “[d]uring the years of the Idylls [Tennyson] was not, in fact, writing about imperial achievements in the visible world, as opposed to his imaginary one.”15 Analyzing Tennyson’s changing relationship to imperialism, Kiernan argues that the later 1850s nevertheless provided the poet with a charged backdrop for the writing of the first four Idylls, witnessing conflicts between settlers and indigenes in South Africa and New Zealand, the second China War (1856–60), the 1857 attack on Persia, and, crucially, the suppression of the Indian Mutiny in 1857–8. He argues that these Idylls were written in a climate of horror at non-Western barbarism but also of optimism at the imposition of English order. It is arguably this optimistic will-to-(English) order that Woolley wishes to adapt to practical ends, along with Tennyson’s view of Camelot and empire as spaces that should be “above vulgar thoughts of self.”16 Kiernan argues that through Tennyson’s prolonged composition of the Idylls, we can trace a developing faith in England’s expanding empire that was inversely proportionate to his developing disaffection with what he saw as Europe’s implosion into decadence and anarchy. These developments notwithstanding, it is clear from reading the early Idylls that these tales already point to the seeds of English decay and disorder, critiquing such qualities as Arthur’s and Elaine’s blind idealism. It is to these early warnings that Woolley attends, setting himself the task of applying them to his own sphere of colonial life. In arguing for Woolley’s “colonializing” of the Idylls, I am not suggesting that he is resisting the poem’s imperialist implications. Rather, Woolley’s reading is best understood in terms of what Stephen Slemon has described as the mixture of complicity and resistance to British culture that has long characterized the subjects of settler cultures. According to Slemon, for such colonial subjects “the sites of figural contestation between oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and colonized, have been . . . internalized,” resulting in voices that are ambivalent, mediated, and “radically compromised” by their divided cultural allegiances.17 I find Slemon’s analysis helpful because it deals with the cultural and discursive forces specific to settler societies. Unlike Indian and African theorists, whose examination of colonialism necessarily focuses on the impact of occupation by a ruling minority, numerous Australian postcolonial scholars have attempted to formulate theories of colonialism that encompass the impact of colonialism on two related fronts: the indigenous cultures displaced by European settlement, and the settlers who were the practitioners and conduits of this colonialism.18 Two pivotal matters when examining the latter group are, first, understanding

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settlers’ sense of themselves as British and not-British, “European subjects but no longer European citizens,”19 distant from and objectified (or forgotten) by their “own” culture; and, second, grasping the ways in which they both resisted, and yet partly internalized, notions of themselves as “second-class—belated or feral—Englishmen.”20 In examining Woolley’s ingenious deployment of medieval tropes, I wish to reassert the importance of continuing to develop Australian settler-theory in order to comprehend the political, discursive, and psychological complexity of settler subjectivity. Woolley is a consummate example of the divided settler subject, writing simultaneously as an imperial servant and a citizen of Sydney, with an attitude to England that is reverent and resentful by turns. While for the most part he promotes British culture, the voice of the neglected colonial is occasionally in evidence, as when he reproves “the insolent ignorance which the English affect [toward] distant regions.”21 He is less resistant to the processes of colonialism than he is to Britain’s under-recognition of Australian settlers as her own people. Woolley’s statements reinforce but finesse Australian settler theorists’ arguments about complicity and resistance, epitomizing the snarled psychology of the loyal but forgotten Englishman in Australia. It is this ambivalence that underpins and fuels Woolley’s reading of Tennyson, tethering it to his broader mission to bring about a future in Sydney that is rich in cultural as well as material production. In his hands, the Arthurian world is not simply imperialist and nostalgic, but also colonial, pragmatic, and forward-looking. “The Poet’s Comforter, and the Poor Man’s Guide”22 Sydney in 1860, when Woolley delivered his speech, was a place riven by contradictions. Established only some seventy years earlier as a colony for convict transportees overseen by a largely grudging and inept administration, it had begun, whilst still bearing this legacy, to metamorphose for its settler population into a place of opportunity, pride, and even freedom, with a civic population in 1851 of 54,000. Its development into a mercantile harbor city, the discontinuation of penal transportation to the mainland in 1840, and the increase in free settlement (77,000 free immigrants had arrived in the Australian colonies over the 1840s) contributed not only to the economic growth of the colony, but also to the development of a colonial “society” in Sydney. On a broader scale, the gold rushes that had swept through the Eastern States of Victoria and New South Wales in the 1850s had the dual effects of creating wealth and attracting immigrants who would eventually settle in the major cities,

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a development complemented inland by the burgeoning of the wealthy landholding class. Federal political administration (established 1901) was still some decades away, and the federalism and nationalism that were to characterize the 1890s had not yet gained momentum; nevertheless, the notion of “Australia” as a unified entity had, if only at the level of the cultural imaginary, been in place at least since the first known use of the term in 1824. While this is only a sketch, it establishes that these successful colonizing ventures ensured that mid-century Sydney, that erstwhile unpromising destination, had begun to be regarded by its more influential inhabitants as a place where British civilization could take up residence in earnest. One such influential citizen was William Charles Wentworth, son of a convict woman and a ship’s surgeon, whose initiatives from 1848 resulted in the establishment of Australia’s first university. This achievement was not the outcome of a widespread campaign for colonial tertiary education; in fact, Wentworth’s proposals met with active resistance among those who thought the colony unready for such an ambitious cultural development. Nevertheless, due to the determination and, at times, intransigence of Wentworth and his supporters, the University of Sydney was incorporated and endowed in 1850 and inaugurated on 11 October, 1852.23 John Woolley arrived in Sydney to take up his post as Principal and inaugural Professor of Classics on 9 July, 1852. Born in Hampshire in 1816, he had been educated at Exeter College, Oxford, between 1832 and 1844; in 1840 he became a fellow of University College, Oxford. Woolley’s career before Sydney reveals a prior interest in colonial education, as he had applied for positions at Bishop’s College Calcutta and the bizarre preemptively colonial British Ionian University of Corfu. Despite his status as a clergyman, Woolley upheld the University of Sydney’s nonsectarian and secular pedagogic policy, and promoted the education of a local colonial governing class. During his time as New South Wales’s highest-profile educator, he gained repute not only for his work at the university, but also for his commitment to promoting literary pursuits among the general community through lectures at Schools of Arts and other public facilities. Given the utilitarianism prevalent in the colony,Woolley’s commitment to a liberal arts curriculum met with criticism and resulted in low enrollments, so that his later years were increasingly dogged by a sense of defeat. In 1864 he took leave to seek out a post in England, but had no success. Woolley died on 11 January, 1866, when, returning from England, the London went down in a storm in the Bay of Biscay.24

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Analyzing how Woolley perceived his role in the colonial project—at least before the onset of his disillusionment25—it becomes apparent that a penchant for Victorian chivalric discourse features prominently.This is hardly surprising: having left England in 1852 in his mid-thirties, Woolley had spent his adult life surrounded by nineteenth-century medievalism in all its guises. Chivalric imagery is thus evident in a range of Woolley’s public addresses, including his inaugural speech at the University of Sydney in 1852. Addressing the university’s dozen-strong body of undergraduates, and various founders and supporters, he formulates the mission of educating the colony by using tropes of knightly vocation and chivalric battle, gradually building to the rhetorical pitch of his concluding exhortation: “Onward, therefore, in the spirit and the power which once nerved the hand and kindled the eye of the young aspirant for knightly renown! Onward, with your untarnished but yet undecorated shield, in the proud and high resolve that whatever has been achieved by your predecessors in the field of glory, that, by God’s blessing, Sydney University shall achieve.”A decade later we find Woolley still favoring this rhetoric in a sermon delivered to Sydney’s volunteer forces in 1862, which also concludes with a surge of chivalric hyperbole. Here, he rallies these peacetime Christian Soldiers with the prospect that they might be “worthy successors of those gentle warriors who carried into the forefront of battle, blazoned onto their armor, graven in their hearts, ‘the dear memory of their dying Lord.’ ”26 From these speeches we see that chivalry provided a rich iconographic fund to describe nineteenth-century colonial practice. In arguing for the ubiquity of these metaphors in this context, I take issue with Mark Girouard’s claim that chivalry was regarded as an inappropriate metaphor to describe colonial endeavors. Despite his assertion that imperialism and the chivalric code of gentlemanly conduct were “so intertwined that it is not surprising to find this code affecting the way in which the Empire was run,” Girouard goes on to state:“Imperialists, however much the ideals of chivalry lay at the back of their thinking, were not often compared to knights, or even described as chivalrous . . . moreover, colonial officials were so obviously elevated in a position of power and prestige that it was easier to see them as rulers ruling, than knights protecting, the peoples of the countries they served. Indeed, chivalrous metaphors could more naturally be used for those who tilted against the Empire rather than for it.”27 These instances of Woolley’s rhetoric suggest that Girouard’s statement cannot be sustained. This is especially the case in the “field of glory” evoked by Woolley in his inauguration speech. This image, with its reference to the tournament field

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as the space of public chivalric display, suggests that Woolley’s educational endeavors are conducted as much for the benefit of those looking on as for his own glory as a chivalric aspirant. From this we can detect the extent to which Woolley speaks not as a “ruler ruling,” but as a “knight protecting,” a vassal performing under the Imperial Gaze: the Queen is watching, and her colonial champions must defend and enhance her honor.28 The value of applying chivalric tropes to colonial life is nowhere more apparent than when Woolley draws on the events and dramatis personae of Tennyson’s Arthuriad.Woolley’s love of Tennyson was legendary among his fellow colonials. Judging by an 1862 letter written by the poet Henry Kendall, however, this devotion earned the professor less than universal approbation in Sydney’s burgeoning literary scene. In his letter we find the young Kendall disparaging Woolley to his fellow poet Charles Harpur, describing the professor as “a crammed man—who admires Tennyson by rote.”29 Kendall’s aversion to Woolley’s admiration of Tennyson is best understood in the larger context of Kendall’s aspiration to establish a nonderivative national literature. Considering, however, that Kendall had in fact rejected an offer of patronage from Woolley, we should not too readily regard the latter as a mere advocate of English verse. Indeed, throughout his writings we find him pressing for the development of a poetic movement in Australia. In his lecture “Schools of Art and Colonial Nationality,” he warns against indifference to poetry by calling up the tragic picture of a “provincial Tennyson” who perishes with his talent unrealized.30 This image returns in another speech, but there Woolley ventures a more sanguine future for the colonial poet. While describing Sydney as a “weary place” for such a fellow, he argues that it is precisely this that can provide the conditions for poetic production. Deploying one of his more florid medievalist tropes, he proclaims: “severe discipline is good for the literary postulant, as for the knightly champions of old. He must be proved by privation, fatigue, solitude. He must wander forth on his quest alone. He must keep vigil through the night, if he seek the golden meed in the morning” (286). Just as he had presented education as a knightly endeavor, so too poetry is a lonely but rewarding quest. This parallel is worth noting, as it indicates that Woolley’s intellectual vision embraced both learning and the appreciation and writing of poetry. In what must be one of the earliest identifications of Australian “cultural cringe,”31 he goes on to urge colonial audiences against regarding poetic activity as “a luxury of old countries—an exclusively European manufacture, too costly for our own production,” also appealing to them to stop treating “the colonial

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article” as “counterfeit” (287). It is this encouragement of local poetic activity that led the poet Henry Halloran to commemorate Woolley as “[t]he poet’s comforter.” In light of this, we can see that rather than interpreting Woolley’s medievalism as a discouragement to the development of local poetry, it is more productive to regard Tennyson as the main exemplum of what Woolley describes as the literary “apostles” whose poetry has “smitten the Goliath of materialism with the sling of spiritual aspiration” (239). It is this antimaterialist ethic that informs not only Woolley’s vision of a local laureate in the mold of Tennyson, but also his appreciation of the Idylls, to which I now turn. “Imperial Moulded Forms”:32 Idyllic Women and the Mercantile Colony According to John Fraser, the metaphoric association of the intellectual and the knight is “an old one . . . [l]ike the knight, the scholar gives his word that his achievements have been arrived at honestly and honorably, without falsification, [and] without shortcuts in the interests of money or prestige.”33 This last stipulation is of special interest because it suggests a direct conflict between the chivalric behavior of the intellectual and the ethos of mercantilism—a conflict that is most pertinent when we consider that it is in the colony’s business world that Woolley located those infidel partisans of ignorance against whom he waged his cultural crusade. Much has been written on the ideological uses of medievalism in Victorian England, with many noting the amenability of medievalist discourse to both conservative and liberal social critiques. Dellheim points out that “what united these medievalist social critics” was their opposition to the nineteenth-century phenomena of “laissez-faire capitalism, economic individualism, utilitarianism and the belief in progress through technology.”34 This appears to be at least partly true of Woolley’s medievalism, which evinces a liberally oriented anti-utilitarianism. This is most apparent in his lecture on the Idylls, especially in his portrait of Enid.This portrait is one of three around which Woolley structures his reading, the others being Guinevere and Elaine. Tennyson’s female figures provide exempla through which Woolley exhorts his audience—whom we suspect are predominantly female—to the creation of a colonial utopia modeled on the image of a “union of perfect womanhood with perfect manhood” (388) that are “twain together . . . [to] change the world” (422). These Arthurian women are also charged, as

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mentioned earlier, with a broader typological significance, representing desirable, undesirable, or unrealized tendencies in Sydney’s colonial community. Despite acknowledging Guinevere’s centrality to the Idylls, Woolley describes Enid as the poem’s “unconscious heroine” (391), and devotes the most time to discussing her virtues. In Tennyson’s “Enid” these are manifold, including unadorned grace, stoic submission, and unquestioning loyalty. In Woolley’s response, these qualities are transmuted into the ideal moral and practical accoutrement of the colonial bride. For him, Enid embodies the resilience vital to flourishing in an antipodean setting. Willing to “ride . . . into the wilds” (398) at her husband’s bidding, she is capable of being transplanted from the refinement of her home. Then, having arrived in the wilds, she bravely faces their harsh demands, as exemplified in Tennyson’s image of her “bar[ing] her forehead to the blistering sun.”35 Woolley makes much of Enid’s readiness to don her “faded silk” for Geraint, which becomes symbolic in his schema of the colonial subject’s—and most particularly the colonial woman’s— readiness to shed her finery and fit herself for the hardships of life in Sydney. In this respect Woolley’s reading is idiosyncratic and intimately bound up with the place in which he writes. It is this place that provides the ideal conditions for the forging of Woolley’s heterosexual utopia. Sydney is likened to Doorm’s realms that, for all their brutality, brought Geraint and Enid together: “Not in the splendid palace of Camelot, but in the naked and riotous halls of Doorm Geraint learnt to know his wife” (404).Thrown back onto one another’s society in this forbidding context, the colonial couple can develop their candor and loyalty. What Woolley most admires in Enid is her realism: “Enid is not a heroine of romance. She is but a pure woman, such as many of us know and love.There are many modern Enids . . . mated to a man of action—soldier, statesman, merchant, any whom inclination or duty brings into contact with the busy world . . . Such men are all more or less Geraints” (403). In this statement we see a clearer portrayal of Geraint and Enid as a busy colonial merchant with his “sunny” and sunburnt bride. Woolley offers a relatively conventional Victorian use of anti-utilitarian medievalism, presenting the mercenary and prosaic qualities dominating the lives of the colony’s “Geraints” as a failing chivalric quest: “The practical mind has but a loose hold on faith. Be we even champions on the side of truth, yet, if our championship is not of the closet, but in the actual battle of life, we are ever falling from our allegiance” (403). Mercantile self-interest is presented here as a stumbling block to attaining Woolley’s grail of faith, scholarship, and culture.

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However, as in Tennyson’s account, the colonial Geraint can be saved by his Enid.The stoic helpmeet also plays the role of cultural muse, undertaking a special duty in saving “a young society,” whose youthful selfdoubt is not offset by a sense of its illustrious local history from the “moral and material meanness” that has dogged it from its earliest days. In describing her thus,Woolley demands hard semiotic labor of Enid: as well as embodying resilience and realism, she also represents the possibility of cultural refinement under duress:“Great thoughts can be nursed amid vile associations, like Enid in her faded silk” (404). Woolley’s analysis of Enid also, however, exposes the limitations of his anti-utilitarian position. Florence Boos discusses the function of the “medieval” for providing the Victorians with characters and symbols that aestheticized “contemporary capitalist and imperialist Realpolitik.”36 This is relevant to Woolley’s Enid, whose role is not to battle against her husband’s mercantile practices, but to provide “inward poetry” to mitigate his “absence of outward grace,” offering an aesthetic salve to the “humdrum routine of business” in the colony (404). Woolley’s account thus adapts to the colonial environment what Margaret Linley describes as “the ideology of the separate spheres, in which virtue was linked with woman by placing her outside the realm of self-interest and activity.” Linley astutely points out that while at one level this points to the drawbacks of mercantile life, this separation also “enabl[ed] at least rhetorically, the preservation of morality without hindering production.”37 Like Geraint and Enid, Arthur and Guinevere are also presented as a colonial couple. Here, the dynamic between the couple is treated more fully than in his other portraits. Unlike a number of famous commentators such as Swinburne,38 Woolley does not dwell on the poem’s moral explanations for the breakdown of the couple’s union, but instead draws out its pragmatic implications, focusing on the threat it poses to the colonial utopia. He does mention Guinevere’s infidelity, but is only minimally interested in its sexual nature, preferring to turn it into a parable of government. In this parable, the queen comes to represent the jaded, directionless colonial subject who succumbs to the “temptation to indolence or sensuality” that is the colony’s greatest pitfall. Woolley’s Guinevere is presented as an industrious character who has gone astray through frustration because her “power of ministration” has been neglected by Arthur. The King, on the other hand, is presented as a paternalistic autocrat who “failed to recognise her share in the great work to which they were jointly called . . . [s]he was to be his partner and equal. But Arthur would do it all himself. He repeated the capital error by which ‘paternal governments’ . . . persist in barring the progress of

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humanity” (422). For Woolley, Tennyson’s Arthur is a noble yet flawed leader whose poor judgment of character leads him to neglect his fellows’ need of industry. At first glance, Woolley’s remedy to this plight appears to contradict the separation of spheres that dominates his account of Enid:“If he would treat her as a friend and ‘yoke-fellow,’ trust her, take counsel with her, divide with her the labour and responsibility, she would . . . convert Arthur’s shadowy Valhalla into a real and glorious company of human-heroes” (423). Lest, however, we are tempted to see Woolley as criticizing the separation of spheres here, we must bear in mind that he depersonalizes and “de-genders” Arthur and Guinevere’s union, so that their marital failure points to the potential failure of a colonial community in which the administrative reins are held too narrowly. Within the unstable Arthurian topography of his account,39 an analogy is now drawn between Sydney and Camelot as two places that could meet with the same fate. In Woolley’s analysis of “Elaine and Lancelot,” the focus is again on Elaine. The Lily-Maid of Astolat is, for Woolley, emblematic of a phenomenon in the colonial community that threatens its stability and prosperity: an inability to cope with reality. He regretfully advises that Elaine is “not meant for the rough uses of life . . . she has not the noble unconsciousness, the unconquerable faith, the selfless devotion of Enid” (409). The Elaines of both the Idylls and “The Lady of Shalott” are fragile, ethereal souls who live “in fantasy,” and therefore cannot last in a place where “the brutal and base” are daily facts of life.Too many such spirits would result in a community unfit for the harsh realities of colonial life. Just as the Astolat-bound Elaine longs for Camelot, her counterparts in colonial Sydney long for the refinements of British life. Elaines are, nevertheless, “God’s best though saddest gifts” because they “do but look down upon us, and are drawn up again. They come for a few happy days . . . bringing with them airs from the Heaven which is their home” (408). Elaine’s portrait is especially significant when read in the context of Woolley’s ongoing critique of those for whom life in the colonies is transient. In “The Soldier’s Ministry” he criticizes, in rather harsher terms than those reserved for Elaine, those opportunistic defectors who “have gone forth from our midst—men who owed to this country all their wealth and title to consideration— and have uttered cruel calumnies against us in the land of our Fathers.” Woolley had already broached this theme in his 1861 address to the Wollongong School of Arts. Here he offers his own life as a counterpoint to these deserters, saying “Although not a native Australian . . . my hopes and fortunes are for all embarked upon this fair land” (13).

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He acknowledges the necessity of occasionally returning to Camelot, but urges a cheerful return to the wilds:“he is a true patriot who is not tempted to linger . . . but who comes back from his pilgrimage not regretful and dissatisfied, but with a hopeful and patient courage . . . persevering until by God’s grace he too has laid one stone in the foundation of a ‘New Britannia in another World’ ”(13). Looking at Woolley’s life in subsequent years, we can speculate that it is precisely in Elaine’s transient quality that we can locate her fascination: it is this quality that seems to speak most directly—and most painfully—to his own increasing ambivalence toward life in the colony. Just as Elaine nurses what he calls a “childish longing to go up the great river to the Court” (413), so Woolley, despite his protestations to the contrary, ultimately succumbed to a desire to return to Camelot. It is, moreover, impossible not to notice the tragic coincidence of their deaths: in the image of Elaine’s dead body “all alone upon the flood” (l. 1039) we see a haunting, even prophetic, parallel to Woolley’s own watery end. Through Tennyson’s women, then, we see the importance of the Middle Ages for Woolley as an early Australian colonist.Woolley’s admiration for Tennyson’s Arthuriad is not, however, for its nostalgic value but its modernism. He not only acknowledges the Victorian Middle Ages as a “lyric” anachronism, but also states his preference for the recreated medieval period over the real one, which he characterizes as “an age to which the subtle analysis of Tennyson would be pure mystery” (190). This statement can be likened to Prince Albert’s 1860 compliment that Tennyson improves on the medieval story by adding to it “the graceful form . . . [and] softer tone of our present day.”40 By undertaking this exegesis Woolley offers a specifically colonial variety of the medievalism that, to quote Chris Waters, “attempted to draw from the medieval past guidance for the transformation of Victorian society.”41 Woolley’s Academic Medievalism Woolley is a crucial figure in a consideration of medievalism in early Australia also because his dual function as University Professor and public intellectual allows us to examine the relationship between his popular and institutional treatments of the Middle Ages. Medieval scholars have paid increased attention to the convergence of popular and academic medievalism for nineteenth-century scholars as a means of destabilizing the notion of the discipline as politically neutral. David F. Hult remarks that, among other distinctions, the “distinction between

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professionalism and dilettantism” was less central for mid-nineteenthcentury medieval scholars than for their successors.42 For many of the former, the ideological sympathies were openly acknowledged in their research and their teaching in a way disavowed by later scholars. With this in mind it now remains to examine briefly how Woolley’s allegiance to popular medievalized imperial ideals expressed itself in, and interrelated with, his actual professing of medieval culture at the University of Sydney. We need to evaluate the extent to which the curriculum he devised and taught—a curriculum that was to become formative in the development of Sydney’s early intelligentsia—can be seen to promote British cultural imperialism. In The English Men: Professing Literature in Australian Universities, Leigh Dale argues that the literature curriculum in Australian universities has, until recently, reflected, supported, and instrumentalized colonial power. As “the embodiment of the racial, cultural, and geographical connection with England,” literature studies were, according to Dale, vital in facilitating the mission to “write over” the three most troubling aspects of Australian colonialism: its convict past, its materialistic underpinnings, and “the material, sexual psychological, and cultural violence that characterized the encounter between the colonizers and the Aborigines.”43 Dale makes a case for medievalism as being especially implicated in the “writing-over” process.Woolley’s inaugural speech for the University of Sydney would appear to support Dale’s assertion. Here, we find him openly depicting the colony as an uninhabited wilderness ripe for the introduction of European language, literature, and philosophy. Here, again, Woolley uses a favorite nineteenth-century “medievalism,” the cult of Alfred,44 to characterize his own colonialist activities: “[N]ine hundred and eighty years have passed since our glorious Alfred provided . . . a home of union and refuge for the poor and scattered scholars . . . Did he anticipate, with a noble pride, the Anglo-Saxon root which he had planted, not merely after a thousand years living undecayed . . . ? Did his imagination dare her flight beyond the limits of his island-home, and picture in the remotest corners of the earth the children of his race, nurtured in his institutions, bearing forth the spirit and the form which they loved into a yet wilder solitude, and a more inaccessible wilderness?” (4–5, emphasis mine). In all of his speeches,Woolley makes only one other brief medievalist reference that can be construed as relevant to the theme of colonial cohabitation. In the same speech, he presents the founding of Oxford (and hence of Sydney University) as an event signifying the victory of the intellect over ignorance, a victory only achieved after “a struggle

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more arduous than against the invading Dane, a conquest more glorious than the subjugation of a kingdom” (5). I have discussed elsewhere the complicated colonial anxieties underpinning his comment.45 Here, I will simply say that by using the historical image of the Britons beating back the Danes,Woolley does not depict the university as involved in colonial expropriation but in cultural reclamation, an activity “more glorious than the subjugation of a kingdom.” In this last comment we again sense a strain of disavowal, in which an obvious aspect of the Realpolitik of Australian colonization—subjugation in the most brutal terms—is masked by reference to the glorious cultural mission of education. What this suggests, then, is that while Woolley uses medievalism as a tool to critique the excesses of colonial materialism, this is only for the threat they pose to the survival of scholarship and culture, rather than for any detrimental effect they might have on the indigenous populations, whose dispossession he mentions briefly and uncomfortably (323–4). Thus we see that although Woolley’s popular medievalism was used to criticize some of the central ideals of colonialism, its ethnocentrism was not one of them. As was the case for many of his contemporaries, Woolley’s role as Professor of Classics involved devising and teaching a range of medieval subjects. An analysis of Faculty of Arts archives, lecture synopses, and examination papers uncovers what appears to be Woolley’s genuine attempt to establish a comprehensive medieval curriculum in history, languages, and literature. While Woolley’s curriculum unsurprisingly includes English history, it would be disingenuous to present it as a thoroughgoing project directed at offering English content at the exclusion of other cultures. For example, as early as 1853, the year after the university was founded, we find evidence of the teaching of Romance languages but not of English, which until the late 1880s was only taught sporadically. The December 1855 examination is another case in point. Of the fourteen questions in its Modern History paper, nine pertain to English medieval history, a number that would suggest a privileging of English culture. However, when we turn to the English History paper, we find, surprisingly, that no less than four of eleven questions (all of which are medieval) refer to events in Europe rather than in England. Returning to Woolley’s inaugural speech, this is less surprising than we might have thought. For amid his occasionally shrill AngloSaxonisms, he expresses the classicist’s resolute belief in the study of philology, including medieval philology, not in the spirit of nationalism or ethnocentrism, but precisely to “restore concord and unity” between the European nations. Philology allows us, Woolley argues, to “trace

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back the stream of time to its fountainhead,” not simply to discover the “mysterious cradle” of humanity, but also, crucially, to understand “the history of our gradual alienation” (16–17). It is not difficult to discern the Eurocentrism that underpins not only Woolley’s remarks, but also the curriculum he developed for the teaching of medieval languages, literature, and history. However, as I have argued elsewhere,46 it is also important, given the nationalism and ethnocentrism driving much nineteenth-century language study, to recognize the relative anti-ethnocentrism manifest in the earlier comments. What this analysis points to, then, is a significant discrepancy between Woolley’s popular medievalism, which was devoted to the colonial application of British imperialist ideals, and its academic counterpart, which was arguably broader and more cosmopolitan in its affiliations. It is worth considering the significance of this in light of both Hult’s earlier comments and Kathleen Biddick’s recent argument that “medievalism (old and new) inhabits medieval studies as an abiding historical trauma,” an “exteriority” to which the discipline is indebted yet which it disavows.47 It would seem that in his dual role as public educator and professor,Woolley both reaffirms and contradicts Biddick’s claims. It is true that he separated his amateur medievalism from his professional teaching of medieval history and literature; but this never led him to straightforwardly disavow his medievalist dilettantism, which he continued to expound enthusiastically in his public addresses. This notwithstanding, I believe that it is still worth viewing Woolley’s relatively de-ideologized professional practice as a conscious and laudable, if limited, attempt to free his teaching from the imperatives of imperial politics.What this separation suggests, further, is that medieval studies in nineteenth-century Sydney University was a culturally divided phenomenon, a discipline whose internal conflicts presaged the struggle between Anglocentrism and cosmopolitanism that was to characterize Australian culture for decades to come. While this struggle was far from unique, Woolley’s often tortuous and contradictory references to the Middle Ages reveal the way it was inflected in the context of colonial Sydney. We are only in the early stages of our investigation into the ways in which medieval culture has been studied, imagined, and interpreted in Australia.48 With continued and growing interest, however, I believe this investigation has the potential to offer a new and fascinating angle into our understanding of the development of Australian cultural identity. By understanding the function of the medieval period in Australia’s colonial past we will be better able to understand how it might continue to be relevant to our postcolonial present and future. It is also my hope that these

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analyses will offer international colleagues a unique and illuminating perspective into the inexhaustible significance of the medieval period for the modern world. Notes 1. John Woolley, Lecture IX,“The Idylls of the King,” in Lectures Delivered in Australia (Cambridge and London: Macmillan, 1862), 404. Further references are cited parenthetically by page number. 2. From “Geraint and Enid,” in Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King, ed. J. M. Gray (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), ll. 515, 521.When discussing “Enid,” the line numbers refer to the tale as it has stood since 1873, when Tennyson divided the poem into “The Marriage of Geraint” and “Geraint and Enid.” Although the text Woolley read had not been divided up in this way, its substance was the same. 3. John Woolley, Schools of Art and Colonial Nationality: A Lecture Delivered at the Inauguration of the Wollongong School of Arts, May 28th 1861 (Sydney: Reading & Wellbank, 1861), 7. 4. For example Alice Chander, A Dream of Order:The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century English Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970); Charles Dellheim, The Face of the Past: The Preservation of the Medieval Inheritance in Victorian England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Kevin L. Morris, The Image of the Middle Ages in Romantic and Victorian Literature (London: Croom Helm, 1984). 5. For two of the better known texts in this burgeoning area, see Norman Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages (New York:William Morrow and Company, 1991) and Helen Damico and Joseph Zavadil, eds., Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies in the Formation of a Discipline (New York: Garland Publishing, 1995, 1998). 6. For example R. Howard Bloch, “Naturalism, Nationalism, Medievalism,” Romanic Review, 76 (1985): 341–60; Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols, eds., Medievalism and the Modernist Temper (Baltimore:The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Hans Ulricht Gumbrecht,“ ‘Un Souffle d’Allemagne ayant passé’: Friedrich Diez, Gaston Paris, and the Genesis of National Philologies,” Romance Philology, 40 (1986): 1–37; and the numerous volumes of Studies in Medievalism devoted to national medievalisms. 7. Charles Dellheim, “Interpreting Victorian Medievalism,” in History and Community: Essays in Victorian Medievalism, ed. Florence S. Boos (New York: Garland Publishing, 1992), 39–58, at 53–4. 8. Dellheim, “Interpreting Victorian Medievalism,” 54. 9. Some of this material appears in a different form in Louise D’Arcens, “From Holy War to Border Skirmish: The Colonial Chivalry of Sydney’s First Professors,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 30:3 (2000): 519–45. 10. For the vexed distinction between imperialism and colonialism, see Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1998). By “imperialism” I refer less to the governmental practicalities of empire than to imperial ideology:“the principal or spirit of empire; advocacy of what are held to be imperial interests” (OED). By “colonialism” I refer to the practices of settlement whereby the “parent” culture is introduced in the new environment, generally at the expense of displacing the cultures already existing there. 11. These studies include Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981); Debra N. Mancoff, The Arthurian Revival in Victorian Art (New York: Garland Publishing, 1990); King Arthur’s Modern Return, ed. Debra N. Mancoff (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998). 12. Ian McGuire, “Epistemology and Empire in ‘Idylls of the King,’ ” Victorian Poetry, 30:3–4 (1992): 387–400, at 389. 13. Woolley, Lecture IX, “The Idylls of the King,” in Lectures, 390–1.

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14. Ian McGuire “Epistemology and Empire,” 391. 15. Victor Kiernan, “Tennyson, King Arthur, and Imperialism,” in Culture, Ideology, and Politics: Essays for Eric Hobsbawn, ed. Raphael Samuel and Gareth Stedman Jones (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), 126–48, at 146. 16. Kiernan, “Tennyson,” 144. 17. Stephen Slemon, “Unsettling the Empire: Resistance Theory for the Second World,” in Contemporary Postcolonial Theory:A Reader, ed. Padmini Mongia (London:Arnold, 1996), 72–83, at 80–1. 18. See, for instance, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back (London: Routledge, 1989). For a discussion of the need to distinguish between the postcolonial situations of settler and non-settler nations, see Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge, “What is Post(-)Colonialism?” Textual Practice, 5 (1991): 399–414. For a clear outline of the debate over the value of “settler theory,” see Australian scholars Anna Johnston and Alan Lawson, “Settler Colonies,” in A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, ed. Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray (Oxford: Blackwells, 2000) 360–76. 19. Johnston and Lawson, “Settler Colonies,” 363. 20. Ibid. 21. Woolley, Schools of Art, 7. 22. “The general humanist, the special friend—/The scholar, patriot, and the brave divine—/The poet’s comforter, and the poor man’s guide” (memorial description of Woolley by Henry Halloran, Sydney Morning Herald [March 27, 1866]); cited in Ann-Mari Jordens, The Stenhouse Circle: Literary Life in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Sydney (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1979), 81–2. 23. For an account of the process leading to the development of the University of Sydney and the educational influences behind it, see J. J.Auchmuty,“The Idea of the University in its Australian Setting,” The Australian University, 1: 1 (1963): 146–70; C.Turney et al., Australia’s First:A History of the University of Sydney, vol. 1, 1850–1939 (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1991);W. J. Gardner, Colonial Cap and Gown: Studies in the Mid-Victorian Universities of Australia (Christchurch: University of Canterbury, 1979). 24. See K. J. Cable, “John Woolley,” in Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 6 (1851–90), ed. N.B. Nairn (Carlton, Vic: Melbourne University Press, 1976); “John Woolley: Australia’s First Professor,” Arts:The Journal of the Sydney University Arts Association, 5 (1968): 47–66. For discussions of Woolley’s role in education in colonial Australia, see G. L. Simpson,“Reverend Dr John Woolley and Higher Education,” in Pioneers of Australian Education: A Study of Education in New South Wales in the Nineteenth Century, ed. C.Turney (Sydney: University of Sydney Press, 1969), 81–113 and David MacMillan, “The University of Sydney—The Pattern and the Public Reaction, 1850–1870,” The Australian University, 1: 1 (1963): 27–59. 25. The latest of Woolley’s available published lectures is 1862. 26. “The Soldier’s Ministry,” A Sermon Preached at the Special Parade of the Volunteer Forces of Sydney, at Christ Church Sydney, April 6, 1862 by John Woolley, D.C.L. (Woolley archive, University of Sydney). 27. Girouard, The Return to Camelot, 227. 28. Kiernan also provides examples of colonialists in India,Africa, and America using chivalric and, indeed, Arthurian tropes in comparable ways (“Tennyson,” 140). 29. Cited from Jordens, The Stenhouse Circle, 87. 30. Woolley, Schools of Art, 12. 31. The term “cultural cringe” was coined in the 1950s to articulate the cultural anxiety many Australian artists and writers experienced over Australia’s marginality in relation to the metropolitan “centers” of European high culture. Cultural cringe manifested itself in the assumption that Australian art had first to receive accolades overseas in order to be recognized as worthy back at home. In this mood of cultural anxiety, as Michael Heyward remarks, art often aspired to “imaginary standards and trends detected in largely imaginary places, creative work that

256 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39.

40. 41.

42. 43. 44.

45. 46.

47. 48.

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exposed itself to international influence tended to pastiche,” The Ern Malley Affair (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1993), 13. Taken from Arthur’s description of Guinevere in Tennyson, “Guinevere,” l. 545. John Fraser, America and the Patterns of Chivalry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 223. Dellheim, “Interpreting Victorian Medievalism,” 46. Tennyson, “Geraint and Enid,” l. 515. Florence S. Boos,“Alternative Victorian Futures:‘Historicism,’‘Past and Present,’ and ‘A Dream of John Ball,’ ” in History and Community, 3–37, at 13. Margaret Linley, “Sexuality and Nationality in Tennyson’s ‘Idylls of the King,’ ” Victorian Poetry 30.3–4 (1992): 365–86, at 365; see also Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments:The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Swinburne’s famous commentary in Under the Microscope (1872) is partly reproduced in Tennyson: The Critical Heritage, ed. John D. Jump (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), 318–21. The instability of Woolley’s imperial topography continues throughout his writings. In his 1862 speech “The Soldier’s Ministry,” Woolley draws together imperial center and colonial periphery through the image of the grieving and recently widowed Queen Victoria:“we think of the widowed wife . . . God bless and comfort her! not for her greatness and glory; but because she has set us an example how to make an abiding place for ourselves in the wilderness.” Cited in Mancoff, The Arthurian Revival, 167. Chris Waters,“Marxism, Medievalism and Popular Culture,” in History and Community, 137–68, at 140.While I am citing Waters’s discussion of Meier, Meier’s own taxonomy of “positive” and “negative” medievalisms can be found in William Morris, the Marxist Dreamer (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1978), 1: 94. David F. Hult, “Gaston Paris and the Invention of Courtly Love,” in Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, 192–224, at 206. Leigh Dale, The English Men: Professing Literature in Australian Universities (Toowoomba: Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 1997), 190. Alfred’s ubiquity as a model of leadership in Victorian England is amply documented. However, Sir Walter Besant’s 1897 declaration stresses the imperial, and most pertinently, antipodean compass of this ubiquity: “Alfred is, and will always remain, the typical man of our race, call him Anglo-Saxon, call him American, call him Englishman, call him Australian—the typical man of our race at his best and noblest,” cited in Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity, ed. Allen J. Frantzen and John D. Niles (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997), 10. See Louise D’Arcens, “From Holy War to Border Skirmish,” 538–9. See Louise D’Arcens “Europe in the Antipodes:Australian Medieval Studies,” in Medievalism and the Academy: Studies in Medievalism X, ed. Kathleen Verduin and David Metzger (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998), 13–40. Kathleen Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 2–3. Apart from my own work, the 1990s saw the publication of two volumes on the history of Norse Studies in Australia: Geraldine Barnes, Margaret Clunies Ross, and Judy Quinn, eds., Old Norse Studies in the New World (Sydney: Department of English, University of Sydney, 1994) and Katrina Burge, ed., Treasures of the Elder Tongue (University of Melbourne: Department of Germanic & Russian, 1995). Other work now being produced includes Andrew Lynch’s work on the poet Francis Webb, and a forthcoming volume Medievalism and the Gothic in Australia edited by Stephanie Trigg. The only socially analytical articles before this time are P. Munz, “Medieval History in Australasia, or the End of the Ancient World,” Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand, 11:41 (1963): 1–17; J. Gilchrist, “Medievalism and Australian Culture,” Twentieth Century, 14 (1960): 293–302; M. J. Charlesworth,“The Study of Medieval Philosophy in Australia,” Twentieth Century, 16 (1961): 131–7.

INDEX

Academic disciplines, 1–9, 13, 19–45, 47–70, 71–90, 111–12, 126–27, 173–79, 238–39, 250–54 Achebe, Chinua, 47–48, 57, 62, 67 Aeschylus, 3, 6 Aesthetics, 20–29, 36, 217, 222, 239, 248 Africa, 12, 32, 34, 37, 47, 57, 77, 81–85, 112, 118, 128n21, 135, 149, 153, 154–58, 162, 167, 168n8, 196–202, 206–8, 211, 241, 255n28 Agency, 8, 10, 23, 33, 48, 67, 188, 197, 200–1, 221–22, 229–30; see also Resistance, Psychoanalysis Ahmad, Aijaz, 154, 212n6 Al-Azmeh, Aziz, 153 Alexander the Great, 93 Alexandria, 159 Alfred, King, 5, 251, 256n44 Algeria, 31, 199 Almeria, 116–17, 120–24 Americas, 7, 9, 15n24, 32, 34, 35, 77, 85, 88, 134–52, 166, 170n45, 180, 184, 219, 255n28; see also Canada, Caribbean, Latin America, Mexico, Québec, United States Anachronism, 3, 7, 61, 78, 126, 250 Anatolia, 155, 176–81 Andalusia, 82, 117–18, 121, 169n26 Anderson, Benedict, 3, 14n5, 68n28, 81, 89n29, 174

Anglocentrism, 7, 12–13, 197–99, 253 Anglo-Saxon, 27, 251, 252, 256n44 Anjou, 114 Anthropology, 2, 30, 51–52, 111–12, 137, 156, 175, 184, 186, 197, 207 Appiah, K. Anthony, 7, 21, 89n25 Arab, 10, 11, 32–33, 78, 111–27, 130n48, 153–69, 180, 196, 206–7, 211 Aragon, 118, 129n31, 130n48 Ariosto, 73, 156, 163 Aristotle, 111 Arthur, King, 13, 53, 101–2, 109n51, 117, 187–89, 191, 237–56 Ashcroft, Bill, 5, 11, 68n22, 74–75, 79–81, 205, 255n18 Asia, 78, 135, 141, 149, 168n8, 186, 187, 192 Auerbach, Erich, 11–12, 39n2, 173–75, 177–79, 181–83, 191–92 Austin, J. L., 129n44, 220, 233n8 Australia, 7, 13, 237–56 Authenticity, 4, 22, 26–28, 181, 231 Averroes, 111 Avicenna, 111 Baghdad, 124 Baker, David, 86, 88n15, 88n18 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 206, 208 Balibar, Etienne, 75 Barthes, Roland, 213n24

258

Index

Bartlett, Robert, 11, 69n42, 74, 75, 80, 128n24, 129n37, 129n43, 212n4 Bede, 40n36 Bédier, Joseph, 25, 27, 31, 128n19 Benjamin,Walter, 26 Berber, 118, 120, 128n30, 155 Bhabha, Homi, 2, 3–4, 21, 54, 81, 107n23, 111, 131n69, 210, 213n21, 221 Biddick, Kathleen, 12, 40n36, 53, 58, 68n16, 125–26, 175–76, 178, 253 Bilingualism, 33, 118–21, 124, 181, 195–96; see also Language Bloch, R. Howard, 25, 31, 40n17, 43n81, 254n6 Borders, 20, 35, 47, 66, 72, 74, 82, 86, 93, 96–98, 100–3, 112–14, 126, 153, 159, 162–64, 176, 188–91, 211 Britain, 12, 47–67, 69n29, 77, 84–87, 93–105, 135, 137, 149, 159–60, 180, 183–91, 198–215, 237–56; see also England Briton, 64, 101, 166 Brown, Catherine, 43n83, 48, 50–51 Burke, Edmund, 72 Butler, Judith, 220–22, 233n3, 233n9, 235n45 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 68n10, 68n11, 95, 106n11, 107n24 Byzantium, 7, 117, 125, 126 Caesar, 230 Canada, 7, 12–13, 31, 219, 232–33 Canonical, 8, 9, 55, 71, 76, 82–87, 160, 165, 178, 186, 199, 204, 209 Capitalism, 13, 14n7, 39n4, 39n6, 43n68, 113, 116, 126, 136–37, 150n13, 163–66, 195, 223, 238–39, 242–43, 246–50; see also Economics Caribbean, 35, 54, 136, 219 Carolingian, 37, 128n24 Castile, 114, 117, 118, 128n21 Catalonia, 34, 78 Catholicism, 52–53, 82, 95–96, 134–49, 160–61, 182–92, 196; see also Religion

Celestina, 27 Celtic, 99, 189 Cervantes, Miguel, 9, 82–83, 166 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 3, 21, 137, 149 Champlain, Samuel, 31, 219 Chanson de Roland, 5, 31, 62, 113, 119–20, 126, 128n18, 191 Charlemagne, 32–33, 114, 125, 128n17 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 5, 8, 48, 53, 55, 58–67, 69n39, 70n44 Chicana, 40n36, 212n11 China, 143, 168n8, 241 Chivalry, 32–33, 84, 183–89, 123, 244–54 Chrétien de Troyes, 117, 129n31 Chrisman, Laura, 6, 21, 112 Christianity, 37, 50, 52, 59–66, 77, 82–84, 95–105, 113–30, 133–52, 154–69, 173, 180–88, 190–94, 196, 211, 219, 224, 244; see also Religion Cicero, 230 Civilizing, 2, 47–48, 55–59, 98, 105, 135–49, 217–33, 237–54 Class, 9, 13, 21, 60, 86, 99, 177, 201, 231–33, 242–43; see also Economics Classicism, 11, 12–13, 217–35 Clifford, James, 127n8, 175 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 6, 11, 31, 69n28, 69n41, 106n2, 106n4, 109n62, 210 Columbus, Christopher, 7, 32, 180 Conrad, Joseph, 8, 47–48, 55–60, 62 Constantinople, 126, 130n62, 159, 166, 180, 190, 196; see also Istanbul Conversation, 12–13, 146, 209, 218–35 Conversion, 2, 10–11, 59–67, 77, 82, 105, 113–27, 136–37, 142–49, 159, 161–62, 166, 182–83, 196, 202; see also Religion Corneille, Pierre, 164, 223 Coronil, Fernando, 54, 68n25, 150n9 Creole, 31, 147, 249 Croxton Play of the Sacrament, 183–92 Crusades, 10, 63, 124–26, 141, 160, 164–65, 180, 184–88, 190–92; see also Religion Culler, Jonathan, 22, 37

INDEX D’Arcens, Louise, 53, 254n9, 256n45, 256n46 Dante, 5, 11, 31, 41n48, 126, 174–78, 181 Davis, Kathleen, 14n18, 58, 60, 68n17 De Certeau, Michel, 45n104, 166 De Man, Paul, 22 De Vega, Lope, 156–58, 163, 167 Deconstruction, 22–23, 29, 34, 37, 47, 62, 75, 59, 84, 111, 200, 203 Deleuze, Gilles, 54 Derrida, Jacques, 22, 28, 29, 200 Descartes, René, 217–20, 222, 229 Desire, 1–2, 7, 26–27, 34, 36, 50, 52–54, 64–66, 83, 117–18, 126, 142, 166, 179, 184, 201, 220–21, 229, 250; see also Psychoanalysis Dinshaw, Carolyn, 53, 60, 111 Dirlik, Arif, 4, 9, 21, 29 Discourse, 5–7, 11, 12–13, 21–29, 37, 51–53, 74–82, 98, 111–12, 125, 138, 142, 153–68, 175, 196–211, 217–33, 239–46 Drama, 156, 163, 165, 183–92, 198–202, 211, 232–33 Du Bois,W. E. B., 3, 133 During, Simon, 39n16 Dutch, 77, 78, 84, 149, 162 Economics, 13, 21, 31, 54, 81, 112–17, 120, 126, 136–37, 155, 157, 159, 163–66, 176–77, 180, 183, 187, 219, 238, 242–43, 246–50; see also Capitalism, Class, Globalization, Marx Egypt, 117, 126, 128n26 El Cid, 164, 223 Elizabeth I of England, 67n7, 82, 84, 88n13, 192, 199, 212n15, 213n23 England, 6, 7, 9, 13, 35, 57, 71–72, 82–87, 94, 156–57, 162, 165–67, 185–88, 192, 198–202, 211; see also Britain English, 5, 6, 7, 12, 47–70, 72, 78, 82, 86, 93–105, 159, 164–65, 183–92, 197–215, 237–56 Epic, 5, 31–33, 73, 77, 118, 125, 163, 164, 165, 191

259

Essentialism, 82, 111, 153–68, 218, 221, 231; see also Universalism Ethics, 52, 85, 138, 218–19, 223–26, 229, 246 Ethnicity, 52, 57, 63–67, 77, 126, 154–55, 176–77, 189, 195–96, 219, 221–22, 252–53; see also Race Etymology, 20, 54, 100, 130n46, 190; see also Language Exile, 11–12, 13, 96–104, 113–27, 160, 167, 173–92, 196–97, 237–38 Exoticism, 9–10, 12, 62–63, 83, 94, 111, 153, 190, 200, 208, 219, 227–28; see also Orientalism Expansionism, 1, 4, 7–9, 30–38, 71–87, 126, 135–49, 192, 198, 202, 206 Fabian, Johannes, 2, 51, 127n1 Fanon, Frantz, 204 Fantasy, 29, 47–48, 56, 125, 158–65, 177–78, 181, 189–92, 232, 249; see also Psychoanalysis Felman, Shoshana, 220 Fetish, 22, 35, 205, 232 Feudalism, 10, 113–27 Flanders, 74, 116, 125, 128n16, 130n62 Fleischmanm, Suzanne, 28, 40n24, 40n25, 40n28 Foreignness, 31, 34–37, 50, 52, 65, 98, 120–21, 149, 157, 188, 228, 238; see also Home, Orientalism Foucault, Michel, 10, 26, 49, 51, 64, 81, 84, 134, 138–39, 142, 148, 154, 156, 221 Foxe, John, 158, 192 Fradenburg, Louise, 6, 41n42, 41n47, 43n71, 68n16 France, 7, 10, 12–13, 35, 72, 86, 113–30, 156, 161, 162, 167–68, 184–85, 217–31 Franks, 33, 62, 118, 122, 125, 230 Frantzen, Allen, 27, 256n44 Freccero, Carla, 6 French, 10, 31, 32, 34–35, 113–27, 164–65, 195–97, 211, 217–35 Freud, Sigmund, 2, 220

260

Index

Fuchs, Barbara, 70n43, 87n5, 89n36, 212n14 Gallagher, Catherine, 49–50, 193n14 Gaul, 33, 56–57, 230 Geertz, Clifford, 30, 112 Gender, 9–10, 12–13, 38, 51, 60, 75, 82–83, 95–105, 113–27, 135, 138, 187, 199–202, 220–22, 231–33, 239, 246–51; see also Incest, Marriage, Miscegenation, Queer Studies, Rape Genealogy, 10–11, 49, 64, 73, 111, 113–27, 166, 174, 197–98, 201, 233 Genoa, 77, 82, 116, 117 Geoffrey of Monmouth, 184 Gerald of Wales, 9–10, 93–99, 105 German, 31, 58, 69n29, 99, 113, 173–75, 178–79, 184–85 Ghosts, 3, 6, 12, 26, 47, 84, 125, 184, 187, 195–211, 250; see also Supernatural Gibbon, Edward, 58, 190 Globalization, 1, 21, 24, 31, 126, 136–37, 139, 176–78, 190, 195, 198–202, 206; see also Economics Granada, 34, 77, 83, 196, 197, 207, 209 Greek, 7, 14n16, 34, 112, 118, 144, 162, 179, 191, 201, 228 Greenblatt, Stephen, 12, 49–50, 106n5, 150n6, 181–83, 190; see also New Historicism Guattari, Felix, 54 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, 43n71, 43n81, 174–75, 254n6 Habermas, Jürgen, 223 Hadfield, Andrew, 90n43, 106n5, 107n22 Hagiography, 61–62, 96, 98–99, 114, 183–92 Hahn,Thomas, 70n42, 190 Hakluyt, Richard, 85, 90n40, 159, 199, 202–3, 212n14 Hapsburg, 160, 196 Hebrew, 34, 120

Hechter, Michael, 73, 76, 90n43 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Freidrich, 54 Hegemony, 12, 13, 23, 30, 126, 135, 155, 163, 166, 180 Helgerson, Richard, 67n7, 86, 88n13 Henry II of England, 93–94, 97, 130n57 Hierarchy, 3, 8, 20, 25–27, 99, 121, 146, 149, 165 Hobsbawm, Eric, 14n16 Hodge, Bob, 3, 4, 43n68, 255n18 Holland, 161 Holquist, Michael, 174, 181 Holsinger, Bruce, 14n18, 31, 51, 68n20 Home, 8–9, 36–37, 47, 59, 83, 102, 116–25, 141–42, 159–60, 176, 186–92, 247–51; see also Foreignness Hugh of St.Victor, 175 Hulme, Peter, 14n8, 76, 81, 89n28, 90n44 Hult, David, 40n23, 42n52, 45n109, 250–51, 253 Hutcheon, Linda, 28, 36 Hybridity, 4, 78–80, 111, 113–14, 126, 154–55, 168, 191, 196–97; see also Purity Ignatius of Loyola, 10, 134–52 Incest, 62, 220 India, 3, 7, 11, 53, 68n28, 112, 134, 137, 141, 143–48, 155, 168n8, 215n50, 241, 243, 255n28 Indigenous, 7, 22, 35, 37, 57–58, 73, 80, 85, 93, 96–98, 121, 138, 142–49, 166, 187, 197, 199, 207, 209, 219, 238, 241, 249–52; see also Minority, Primitivism Ingham, Patricia Clare, 11, 67n2, 68n10, 68n24, 107n23 Internal colonization, 7, 9, 33, 35, 71–87 Iran, 155, 191 Iraq, 170n45 Ireland, 6, 7, 9–10, 37, 53, 74, 78, 86, 93–105, 202–11, 214–15 Isabel of Spain, 34, 82

INDEX Islam, 14n8, 39n15, 50, 59–65, 70n44, 75, 77, 83, 114–30, 154–69, 177–92, 196–97, 208–11; see also Religion Israel, 179, 180 Istanbul, 170n47, 174, 175, 177–79, 181, 186, 191, 192; see also Constantinople Italy, 24, 77, 78, 82, 83, 85, 112, 128n26, 156, 164–65, 182, 184–85, 196–98, 207, 224–25 Jacobson, Roman, 37 Jameson, Fredric, 14n2, 30n4 Jerusalem, 124, 126, 130n56, 141, 185, 188 Jesuitism, 134–52; see also Religion Joan of Arc, 11 Jonson, Ben, 12, 85, 90n40, 198, 199–202, 211 Judaism, 112, 114, 118, 155, 158, 162, 174, 178–79, 182–83, 186, 190, 191; see also Religion Kinoshita, Sharon, 62–63, 70n43, 131n63 Klor de Alva, Jorge, 80–81 Language, 7–8, 19–38, 53, 61–65, 77–78, 86, 114, 119–21, 126, 176, 179, 181, 195–96, 202–10, 217–35, 251–53; see also Bilingualism, Etymology, Monolingual,Translation Latin, 3, 7, 25, 31, 34, 40n36, 52, 74, 111, 114, 117, 120, 121, 130n62, 167, 197 Latin America, 9, 10, 34, 48, 76–82, 85–87, 135–39 Law, 34, 52, 61–67, 99–100, 146, 179–80, 219, 221–25, 237 Lawson, Alan, 106n10, 255n18, 255n19, 255n20 Lawton, David, 63, 68n12, 193n16, 194n32 Lebanese, 195–96 Leland, John, 49 Leo Africanus, 195–215 Lerer, Seth, 174, 193n6

261

Locke, John, 157 London, 57, 167, 207 Loomba, Ania, 15n20, 212n8, 213n22, 254n10 Luther, Martin, 139, 158, 160, 164 Lyotard, Jean-François, 39n4 Maalouf, Amin, 195–96, 197, 210–11 Machiavelli, 72, 224 Maghreb, 11, 117, 153–69 Majid, Anouar, 154–55 Mandeville, John, 50, 53, 190 Manuscripts, 8, 24–38, 50, 53, 55, 62, 93, 94, 98, 127n15, 128n16, 165–66, 188, 202; see also Philology Marco Polo, 112 Marginality, 22, 26, 32, 35, 60, 74, 79, 93, 133, 220; see also Minority Marie de France, 99 Marriage, 37–38, 59–66, 99, 104, 113–27, 157, 158, 167, 179, 246–50; see also Gender Marvel, 49–50, 77, 93–105, 114, 178; see also Supernatural Marx, Karl, 84, 177, 212n13; see also Economics Matar, Nabil, 169n13, 169n21, 169n27, 170n45, 187, 194n29, 213n22 McClintock, Anne, 2, 44n90 Mediterranean, 56, 77, 78, 82, 112–27, 154–69, 196 Menocal, María Rosa, 78, 127n14 Metaphor, 2, 10, 24, 26, 28–31, 35, 38, 48, 50, 52–54, 95, 98, 233n9, 240, 244, 246 Metropolitan, 8–9, 23, 48, 55, 71–87, 156, 196, 232 Mexico, 7, 136, 143–48, 197 Middle East, 135, 155, 162, 168n8 Mignolo,Walter, 29, 30, 32, 34, 48, 54, 79, 81, 150n7 Milton, John, 166 Minority, 7, 35, 48, 53, 86, 155, 222, 241; see also Indigenous, Marginality

262

Index

Miracles, 93–94, 98, 114, 116, 144, 182, 185–86; see also Supernatural Miscegenation, 10, 111–27 Mishra,Vijay, 3, 4, 43n68, 255n18 Molière, 219, 228 Monarchy, 34–35, 59–60, 76, 82, 97, 99, 101–5, 113–25, 147, 167, 182, 188–89, 199–202, 224–25, 227–30, 232, 245, 248–49 Monolingual, 34, 78; see also Language Monsters, 55–58, 93–105, 159–60, 164; see also Supernatural Montaigne, Michel de, 224 Moore-Gilbert, Bart, 5, 9, 170n44 Moors, 64, 74, 77, 82, 114, 156–68, 184, 187, 198–202 Morocco, 7, 11, 117, 129n30, 153–69, 199 Music, 38, 48, 54–55, 103–4, 117 Naples, 74, 115 Napoleon, 32–33, 190 Nationalism, 2, 5, 7–13, 19, 30–31, 34, 36, 78, 125–27, 136, 154, 174, 177–83, 198, 203–11, 243, 252–54 New Historicism, 8, 48–55, 75, 76, 82, 84, 88n13, 181–83 Nichols, Stephen G., 24, 32, 33, 40, 41, 43, 44, 254n6 Normans, 10, 86, 114, 124, 126 Nostalgia, 26, 58, 125, 242, 250 Occidentalism, 153–69 Orality, 79, 102, 104, 166 Orientalism, 11–12, 59–67, 79, 83, 111–13, 153–69, 173–94, 196, 204, 208, 227–28; see also Exoticism, Foreignness, Occidentalism, Said Ottomans, 74, 155, 160, 162, 165, 178, 179, 180, 184, 192, 219 Pagan, 37, 48, 55, 61–66, 100, 104; see also Religion Pagden, Anthony, 72, 87n1, 87n3, 88n17, 151n43, 211n4, 212n15

Pamuk, Orthan, 175–78 Paris, 162, 167, 177 Paris, Gaston, 28, 254n6 Parry, Benita, 6, 21 Performance, 3, 12–13, 37–38, 99–100, 121–23, 163, 186–89, 199–202, 217–33, 245 Persia, 3, 182, 190, 227, 241 Petrarch, 201 Philology, 7–8, 19–38, 69n29, 200–2, 252–53; see also Language, Manuscripts Pilgrimage, 10, 60, 96–97, 114–16, 126, 141, 188, 250; see also Religion Plato, 23 Pliny, 93 Porter, Dennis, 112, 126 Portuguese, 143, 146, 149, 161, 167, 200 Post-, 7–8, 10, 19–38, 105, 210–11 Postmodern, 1, 8, 19–29, 36–38, 39n4, 52, 79–80, 111, 221 Prakash, Gyan, 43n70, 89n30 Primitivism, 1–3, 47–48, 55–58, 93–105, 125–26, 144, 153, 166, 189, 237–38, 241; see also Indigenous Progress, 1–3, 11, 22, 33, 49, 58, 67, 176–81, 217, 229, 237–54 Propaganda, 84–85, 163–64, 173, 199, 225 Protestantism, 137–39, 158–61, 164, 166, 192, 203; see also Religion Psychoanalysis, 2, 51, 62, 220–22; see also Agency, Desire, Fantasy, Subjectivity Purity, 6, 8, 36, 83, 144, 222; see also Hybridity Québec, 219, 232–33 Queer Studies, 75, 220–22, 232–33 Race, 3, 9, 33, 38, 57–58, 64, 74, 77, 82, 85, 94, 118–19, 122, 133, 135, 153–54, 178, 199–202, 209, 211, 217, 219, 231, 251; see also Ethnicity Racine, Jean, 166, 232 Raimbaut d’Orange, 63, 173

INDEX Rape, 10, 113–25 Realism, 21, 174–75, 181–84, 228, 232, 247–48, 252 Religion, 1, 5, 86, 118–19, 219, 224, 232, 243; see also Catholicism, Christianity, Conversion, Crusades, Islam, Jesuitism, Judaism, Pagan, Pilgrimage, Protestantism Resistance, 3–4, 10, 12, 13, 21, 23–24, 33, 35, 53, 61, 63–67, 74, 99–105, 115–27, 136–37, 164, 182, 196–98, 200–11, 229–33, 241–43; see also Agency Romance languages, 7, 19–45, 114, 120, 252; see also French, Spanish Romance genre, 10, 12, 53, 77, 83–85, 113–27, 187–91, 247 Rome, 3, 8, 32, 33, 37, 48, 55–66, 69n29, 69n30, 72–73, 82, 101, 113, 118, 123, 128n24, 140, 144, 180, 196, 201, 205, 209–10, 225, 230 Ronsard, Pierre de, 73 Rudel, Jaufré, 28 Rushdie, Salman, 176, 178 Said, Edward, 5, 12, 23, 48, 54, 55, 79, 111–12, 126, 153–56, 158, 175, 178, 192, 196, 204, 209; see also Orientalism Saladin, 10, 113, 124, 130n60 Santiago Trail, 10, 115, 123 Saracen, 55, 62–67, 113–27, 156, 164–65, 184, 186 Saxon, 61, 68n28 Scotland, 59, 61, 64, 78, 86, 188–89, 191, 200 Scott, David, 2, 133–34, 137–38, 140, 148, 151n21 Seed, Patricia, 76, 82, 88n19, 150n6, 150n7 Shakespeare,William, 3, 11, 86, 156, 157, 196, 199, 213n23 Sicily, 83, 126, 128n29, 129n38, 129n45, 184–85 Slavery, 10, 115–18, 120–22, 158–59, 165, 196, 199–200, 208, 219

263

Slemon, Stephen, 5–6, 241 Sovereignty, 8, 35, 71–73, 82, 99, 199 Soviet Union, 14n11, 180 Spain, 6, 7, 9, 31, 34, 63, 70n43, 71–72, 74, 77–87, 113–27, 134–52, 156–57, 160–62, 166, 167, 184–85, 199, 209 Spanish, 24, 34–35, 77–86, 112, 164–67, 168n10, 196, 197 Spenser, Edmund, 15n20, 85, 86, 98, 106n5 Spiegel, Gabrielle, 40n24, 40n28, 50–51, 67n6, 68n15, 128n16 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 44n88, 81, 130n50 Stock, Brian, 6, 30 Stoicism, 224, 229 Subaltern Studies, 51, 53, 121, 136, 150n9 Subjectivity, 2, 6, 10, 19, 21–23, 33, 36–37, 49, 53–54, 75–76, 126, 133–49, 166, 195–211, 217–35, 242, 247; see also Psychoanalysis Suleri, Sara, 3, 54, 210 Supernatural, 185–86, 204–11; see also Ghosts, Marvel, Miracle, Monsters Syria, 8, 48, 59–64, 70n43, 117, 122, 130n51, 211 Tacitus, 58, 69n29, 225, 230 Tasso, 156, 158 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 13, 237–56 Tiffin, Hellen, 39n16, 68n22, 205, 215n45, 255n18 Todorov,Tvetzan, 150n6 Tolerance, 50–52, 60–67, 82, 114, 125–26, 153–68, 218, 253 Translation, 6, 9–10, 13, 31–33, 36, 51, 72–73, 87, 111, 118, 163–64, 175, 190–92, 196–211, 237–54; see also Language Travel, 34, 38, 72–73, 97, 112–27, 141–49, 160–66, 181, 184, 188, 196, 198, 208, 210, 219 Tremblay, Michel, 13, 232–33 Troy, 72–73, 190, 191–92 Tunis, 159, 164, 202 Turk and Gawain, 187–91

264

Index

Turkey, 7, 11, 63, 83, 113, 124, 141, 155, 156, 159, 163–66, 168n10, 173–94, 219, 228 United States, 11, 49, 53, 79, 168n8, 174, 177, 179, 180, 204–5, 239 Universalism, 6, 8, 9, 11, 13, 21, 23, 31, 35, 36, 176, 217–33; see also Essentialism Venice, 112, 116, 196 Violence, 7, 11, 31, 50, 54, 56, 83–85, 99, 112, 115–16, 121, 125, 141, 145, 156–64, 167, 176–92, 195, 209, 219, 237–38, 251–52 Virgil, 72, 82

Viswanathan, Gauri, 133, 135, 215n50 Voltaire, 166 Wales, 7, 86, 188 Wallace, David, 50 Warren, Michelle, 41n48, 43n82, 69n29, 69n41 Weber, Max, 137, 138 Welsh, 7, 15n24, 53, 78, 86, 189, 191 Williams, Raymond, 212n13 Woolley, John, 237–56 Yeats,William Butler, 12, 198, 202–11, 214–15 Zumthor, Paul, 28