UCLA Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies | Comitatus Abstracts, Vol. 35

Editorial Board: Carrie E. Beneš (History), Maria DePrano (Art History), Patricia Fetters (History), Cheryl Goldstein (Comparative Literature), Nancy Llewelyn (Classics), Holly Crawford Pickett (English), Jennie Wehmeier (Art History).

Managing Editor: Blair Sullivan (CMRS)

Fearing My Neighbor: The Intimate Other in Beowulf and the Old English Judith / Kate Koppelman. Combining theories of subject formation from Freud, Lacan, and Deleuze, and Guattari, this essay argues that the Anglo-Saxon heroic self is produced through an intimate association with the enemies he or she is meant to destroy. The hero, in both Beowulf and the Old English Judith, is a figure who is physically and psychically aligned with the monstrous. Beowulf is linked to Grendel through their mutual associations with foreign lands, as well as through their actual battles—fights that demand close physical contact. Judith is linked to Holofernes through similar bloody encounters, but also through the location of the fight itself—within a space of intimacy, the bed-chamber. The essay further argues that such intimate alliances transform the hero into a figure who cannot be reincorporated into the group for which he or she has fought.

Consecratio Cymiterii: The Ritual Blessings of Cemeteries in the Central Middle Ages / Derek A. Rivard. This article studies the Latin west’s liturgical tradition for the consecration of cemeteries and burial places, using traditional textual analysis combined with selective use of anthropological theory of ritual. The earliest texts of consecration are simple prayers found in insular sources, which later Frankish and Roman authors borrowed to create increasingly complex rituals found in the major pontificals composed from the tenth to the late thirteenth century. These benedictions transformed the space of the cemetery into a nexus where the divine, the living and the dead could commune. By means of prayers, songs, gestures and objects, such rituals established a sacred, separate space wherein the Christian community could access the power of the divine, ground its existence within the context of the sacred stories which defined its history and identity, and provide a safe place of rest for the departed members of the community.

Hideus a desmesure: Monsters and Monstrous Knights in Early French Romance / Elizabeth A. Hubble. From Beowulf to Marco Polo, monsters figure prominently across the medieval landscape. This essay looks at three medieval French romances whose representations of monstrosity allow the reader to interrogate the role of the monster as that which the knight must overcome. Exploring the complex relationship between knighthood and monstrosity, this essay argues that monsters can represent an integral part of what makes a knight a knight. Beginning with two more well-known characters from Chrétien de Troyes, this essay moves on to examine the monsters in the proto-romance, Le Roman de Thèbes. Monsters abound in Thèbes, and the most insidious monsters may be the heroes themselves. The text’s monstrous rhetoric illuminates the paradox of Oedipus’s sons–they are both valiant knights, in the mode of later courtly heroes, and monsters. Ultimately, this study interrogates the role of monstrosity in the developing genre of romance.

The Poetics and Praxis of Enclosure: Julian of Norwich, Motherhood, and Rituals of Childbirth / Claire Sisco King. This essay locates Julian of Norwich’s textual construction of Christ’s maternity within a set of material practices, arguing that the “meaning” of Christ’s maternity within Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love cannot be fully understood outside of the context of the interrelated ritualized practices of medieval childbirth and anchoritism. Specifically, this essay contends that Julian’s experience as an anchoress, her images of Christ as mother, and medieval ceremonies of childbirth are threaded together by a discourse and a praxis of enclosure in which the cell of the medieval anchoress resembles and recalls the lying-in chamber of a medieval mother. Understanding ritual practice as constitutive of knowledge and subjectivity, the authorargues that Julian’s textual fascination with Christ’s motherhood should be understood as deriving from the material parallels that existed between her experiences as an anchoress and those of laboring women and new mothers in the Middle Ages.

Alea iacta iudiciorum est: Legal Satire and the Problem of Interpretation in Rabelais / Bernd Renner. Much has been written about the changes that Rabelais’s work undergoes after the twelve years of silence that separate the first editions of Gargantua and the Third Book. This paper attempts to address the issue from the angle of satire, an aspect that has been somewhat underestimated in the discussion of the Pantagrueline Chronicles. An analysis of the three major episodes of legal satire, from Pantagruel, the Third and Fourth Books respectively, will show that the aforementioned modifications are reflected in the development of the satirical attitude that the author displays. These observations will facilitate the task of defining the hermeneutical shifts in Rabelais’s work in a more concrete fashion and thus shed some light on one of the major problems in Rabelais criticism: the question of interpretation.

Homer, Heliodorus, and Cervantes: Some Observations on Anagnorisis in Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda (1617) / Eric D. Mayer. For the contemporary reader, Aristotle’s concept of anagnorisis, or “recognition,” probably conjures thoughts of a hackneyed narrative tack by which an author might structure his fiction with a view to a“marvelous” if predictable conclusion. Yet, anagnorisis enjoyed privileged status in Renaissance literary theory and practice, being referred to as “the most important part” of the plot by one neo-Aristotelian. Closely reading Cervantes’s final work, a neo-Byzantine romance entitled Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, one discovers two divergent approaches to writing recognition. For example, one observes Cervantes closely imitating specific scenes and techniques from Homer and others whose recognitions had become paradigmatic in neo-Aristotelian poetics. Quite the opposite, in the episode of Feliciana de la Voz, one observes Cervantes deconstruction of the recognition process. Recognition’s move “from ignorance to knowledge” is rendered problematic, as Cervantes obscures the reader’s access to the “truth” of things, an exegetical problem not unfamiliar to readers of Don Quijote.

“The Merry Life and Mad Exploits of Captain James Hind,” or How the Popular Press Created Its First Outlaw-Hero in the Wake of the English Revolution / Karsten H. Piep. Between 1651 and 1652, no less than sixteen pamphlets hit the streets of London that chronicled the fantastic feats of James Hind, “notorious highwayman,” making him one of the first outlaw-heroes whose legacy was shaped neither by folk legend nor by “high” literature, but by England’s burgeoning popular press. Read before the backdrop of Civil War, regicide, and Republican rule, then, the pamphleteer’s representations of Hind as a champion of the common people highlight the popular press’s mounting sway over the political debates of the 1650s. More specifically, in extolling Hind’s unlawful deeds so as to foreground persistent societal ills, while transforming Hind into a mouthpiece for a novel brand of populist royalism, the popular press managed to mount a strong challenge to the young republican government, which was already burdened by a general crisis of legitimization.