Immature Pleasures: Affective Reading in Margery Kempe, Petrarch, Chaucer, and Modern Fan Communities
by
Anna Patricia Wilson
A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of PhD in Medieval Studies Centre for Medieval Studies University of Toronto
© Copyright by Anna Wilson 2015 ii
Immature Pleasures: Affective Reading in Margery Kempe, Petrarch, Chaucer, and Modern Fan Communities
Anna Patricia Wilson
PhD Medieval Studies
Centre for Medieval Studies University of Toronto
2015 Abstract
This thesis explores the ideological significance of immaturity to several late medieval texts that focus on the conjunction between reading and feeling. Using examples from modern fanfiction to help theorize affective reception (that is, reading and response that privileges feeling), this thesis argues that approaching medieval texts with a ‘fannish hermeneutics’ highlights how ideas of age and temporality structure relationships between reader and text across late medieval reading communities. In particular it examines how Margery Kempe, Petrarch, and Chaucer performed, resisted and played with the idea of immature reading in their texts. For each author, an immature relationship with texts becomes a space of inappropriate desires and emotional excess, ambivalence, anxiety, and subversive power. Although these authors moved in different intellectual communities, all interacted with a shared cultural ideology of immaturity and reading that emerged primarily from monastic theories of reading and worship from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. This study argues for the centrality of a ‘fannish hermeneutics’ to this reading tradition in Chapters One and Two, and in Chapters Three and Four further argues Petrarch’s debt to this same tradition of affective piety. Chapter Five treats Chaucer’s reception of Petrarch in the Clerk’s Prologue and Tale, arguing that Petrarch’s portrayal of vernacular poetry as childish is central to Chaucer’s poetics of reception. Finally, in addition to analyses of individual late medieval texts, this study also examines how metaphors of immaturity have shaped twentieth- and twenty-first-century reception of medieval texts, particularly in the relationship between ‘amateur’ (a category I juxtapose with ‘fan’) and ‘professional’ medievalism. How does the cultural narrative of the movement from childish love to mature objectivity structure our understanding of history? And how might returning to ‘childishness’ as a theoretical category shape studies of medieval literature? iii
Acknowledgments
I owe thanks firstly to David Townsend, Suzanne Akbari, and Will Robins, whose intellectual mentorship and personal friendship nurtured this project from start to finish, and to Karma Lochrie and Alex Gillespie for their generous criticism and feedback.
I am grateful for the financial and administrative support of the University of Toronto, the Jackman Foundation, the Centre for Medieval Studies, the McCuaig-Throop Fellowship, and the University of Toronto Women’s Association. Thanks also to the American Comparative Literature Association and the New Chaucer Society, both of which provided financial support to travel to conferences where I was able to present material from this thesis. Particular thanks go to Grace Desa, Rosemary Beattie, and Franca Conciatore, of the Centre for Medieval Studies, whose administrative competence makes the world go round.
Numerous friends and colleagues gave freely from their time, resources, wisdom, and energy to help me write this thesis. Thanks to Kaitlin Heller, Susannah Brower, Megan Graham, Morris Tichenor, Chris Piuma, Amanda Wetmore, Lochin Brouillard, Nicholas Wheeler, Daniel Price, Emily Blakelock, Michael Barbezat, Ika Willis, Jessica Taylor, and in particular to the members of my email accountability group, Alice Hutton Sharp and Jessica Lockhart; to Rachael Baylis, for being my IM work-buddy for so many years; and to to the members of my writing group: Jonathan Silin, Jessica Fields, Didi Khayatt, Scott Rayter, and Amy Gottlieb.
I am also grateful for fandom, where I learned how to read. Thanks to the community at large for your labour, humour, energy, anger, friendship, inspiration, and love. You create wonderful things.
A book seems an inadequate gift to thank my family - Mum, Alex, Jack, Tom, Dad, Hilary - and my wife, Jessica Taylor - for their years of love, support, wisdom, understanding, encouragement, advice, and shelter. Nonetheless, here it is. Thank you for making it possible for me to do what I love. This thesis is dedicated to you. iv
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ...... iii
Table of Contents ...... iii
List of Figures ...... vi
List of Appendices ...... vii
1 Introduction: Childish Medievalism ...... 1
1.1 Fans and Amateurs ...... 4
1.2 The Future of the Middle Ages ...... 8
1.3 Queer History? ...... 13
1.4 Chapter Summaries ...... 17
1.5 An Introduction to Fandom ...... 20
2 Towards A Fannish Hermeneutics ...... 48
2.1 The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Late Medieval Affective Piety ...... 48
2.2 Affect and Intimacy in Fanfiction ...... 59
2.3 Modern Fandom, Medieval Devotion ...... 63
2.4 Conclusion: Towards a Fannish Hermeneutics ...... 71
3 Visions and Supervisions ...... 72
3.1 Introduction to the English context ...... 73
3.2 Margery Kempe’s Immature Spirituality ...... 84
3.3 Immaturity and Supervision ...... 100
3.4 “Noli me tangere” ...... 119
3.5 Conclusion ...... 129
4 Petrarch, affective devotion and immaturity ...... 131
4.1 Introduction ...... 131
4.2 Petrarch’s Medieval Devotion ...... 134 v
4.3 The Textual Self: Petrarch, RPF and the Mary Sue ...... 154
4.4 Schoolboy reading ...... 179
4.5 Conclusion ...... 193
5 Writing to Petrarch ...... 194
5.1 Introduction ...... 194
5.2 Petrarch and periodization ...... 198
5.3 Fantasies of Encounter ...... 209
5.4 Writing to Petrarch ...... 217
5.5 Petrarch and the Queer/Fan ...... 235
5.6 Conclusion ...... 248
6 Bad Readers ...... 251
6.1 Introduction ...... 251
6.2 Bad Readers, Bad Subjects ...... 255
6.3 Fanfiction as ‘Bad Reading’ ...... 262
6.4 Petrarch’s Griselda ...... 276
6.5 When Chaucer Met Petrarch ...... 293
6.6 “He is deed and nayled in his cheste.” ...... 302
6.7 Chaucer and the dead ...... 307
6.8 Conclusion ...... 313
7 Conclusion...... 315
Bibliography ...... 322
8 Appendix: The fourteenth-century correspondence between Petrarch and 'Cicero' (Pier Paolo Vergerio) ...... 338
Letter from Petrarch to Cicero ...... 338
Letter from Vergerio to Petrarch ...... 341 vi
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1. Front cover of Not Tonight Spock! #1 (1984). Unknown artist.
Fig. 1.2. Front cover of Textual Poachers (1992); art by Jean Kluge.
Fig. 1.3. “Sick Manuscript Bro,” comic by Kate Beaton.
Fig 1.4. Screencap of paratextual frame from “Gentleman’s Relish” by Executrix on The Archive of Our Own
Fig 3.1. Panel 20 of “Ensign Sue Must Die!” a webcomic by Clare Moseley and Kevin Bolk.
Fig 3.2. Panel 25 of “Ensign Sue Must Die!”
vii
List of Appendices
Appendix 1: The fourteenth-century correspondence between Petrarch and 'Cicero' (Pier Paolo Vergerio) 1
1 Introduction: Childish Medievalism
Setting: outside an Oxford pub, the Eagle and Child.
Detective Sergeant Hathaway: “Do you consider Tolkien to be infantile?”
Professor Rutherford: “All fantasy is infantile until it turns sinister, which it does if you don’t grow out of it.”
Two men enter the Eagle and Child talking and laughing; they pause on the threshold, long enough for us to see that they are both wearing prosthetic ‘elf’ ears.
Professor Rutherford: “Arrested adolescence is a dangerous thing, Mr. Hathaway. Nasty and dangerous.”
Lewis, “Allegory of Love” (2009)
In an episode of the British television drama Lewis,1 Oxford police detectives Detective Inspector Lewis and Detective Sergeant Hathaway are called to solve the murder of a woman, where a prime suspect is a local author of medievalist fantasy and Oxford lecturer. The mystery unravels into a psychological morality tale about the deadly point of convergence between fans of medievalist fantasy literature and the rarified world of Oxford scholars, two communities that shelter people who refuse to ‘grow up’. In one scene which depicts a moment of overlap between these two worlds, a revival of the Inklings (the writing group to which C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien belonged), two men wearing prosthetic elf-ears are shown entering the historic pub, the Eagle and Child. They pause on the front steps; one leans back toward the other, laughing, to murmur something in his pointed ear. Are they a couple? Their potential queerness is
1 Lewis is a spin-off series from the long-running series Morse, both based on the crime novels of Colin Dexter. Bill Anderson, “Allegory of Love,” Lewis (ITV, March 22, 2009). 2 highlighted, or perhaps overshadowed, by the tokens they are wearing of membership in another community of desire: The Lord of the Rings fandom.
The “Allegory of Love” episode repeatedly suggests that medievalist fantasy accommodates not only the refusal to grow up in the life of the individual, but also the refusal to accept the temporal progression from one cultural age to the next; that is, medievalist fantasy provides a space for desire for the past in both the individual and in society at large. Lewis suggests that fan communities of medievalist fantasy offer a retreat from modernity, and in this way are not dissimilar from Oxford academia; Lewis portrays Oxford University as a relic of the medieval past, a preserved bubble of feudal England which thinks itself exempt from the rules of the modern world. The immature desires that these two spheres shelter include, in a problematic confluence of themes, mother-son incest, teenage crushes, fan obsessions, teacher-student relationships, pedophilia, and homosexuality.
The episode is named after C.S. Lewis’ major contribution to the study of medieval literature which won him his chair at Oxford: The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (1936). A character in the episode comments on The Allegory of Love that C.S. Lewis was “very perceptive about the subject, for one who’d not yet known love.” The episode thus suggests that C.S. Lewis’ period of success as a medievalist was part of his own adolescent stage, before he took up legally and culturally sanctioned heterosexuality in his relationship with Joy Gresham in his forties. “Allegory of Love” - and particularly that ambiguous moment of the two men wearing elf ears, laughing together in the shadows - draws an analogy between queerness, medievalism, and fannishness where the three have in common a kind of deviant temporality. The episode draws on a centuries-old intellectual tradition regarding the dangers of loving texts too much. Crucially, Lewis locates excessively affective, socially disruptive, temporally deviant love for a text in medievalism in particular. This episode’s refusal to differentiate between Oxford University’s medievalism and the popular medievalism of fantasy war-gaming and The Lord of the Rings-inspired novels and films suggests an intriguing point of overlap between academic consideration of the Middle Ages and popular medievalism, and also suggests that fannishness, as an identity of deviant desire, may exist within a kind of deviant 3 temporality, just as queer theory scholars have argued of homosexuality over the last few decades.2 The overlap between popular medievalism and academic medievalism is common knowledge in academic circles, but is also rarely taken seriously. Medieval Studies scholars often relate a youthful fascination with The Lord of the Rings or modern retellings of Arthurian romances, which evolves, through extensive university education, into a professional awareness of the distinction between the collective fantasy of the ‘Middle Ages’ in the modern imagination, and the ‘real’ Middle Ages of historical inquiry. But how does that enduring, but often unacknowledged, emotional relationship with an imagined past affect the way we, as a discipline, read medieval texts? And how does this cultural narrative of the movement from childish love to mature objectivity structure our very understanding of history?
From Burckhardt to Kenneth Burke, youth, age and childishness have recurred as evaluative concepts in discussing medieval reception of Classical and biblical texts. Histories of reading have all-too-often followed the narrative of the ‘rise of modernity’ which imagines the Middle Ages as the ‘child’ to the Renaissance’s ‘modern man’. Within this narrative, ‘medieval’ frequently becomes synonymous with “immature.” One of the teleological narratives that tend to dominate large-scale approaches to history also often links medieval modes of reading historical texts with irrationality, uncritical use of sources, and anachronism. However, the metaphors of age that dominate medieval descriptions of the kind of reading thought typical of the medieval period - that is, readings that were criticized in the Middle Ages themselves as affective, anachronistic, and irrational - have been largely overlooked. My thesis explores how several late medieval authors performed, resisted and played with ideas of immaturity and reading in their own texts; I also examine the ways in which these metaphors of age have shaped twentieth- and twenty-first-century reception of these medieval texts. In the texts I shall examine, immaturity appears as a source of anxiety or desire, a way of being in the world, an ethics, an erotics, a reading practice and a subject position. It is both a negative characterization used to dismiss and shame, and an immensely powerful historiographical hermeneutic. I do not argue that the reading
2 ‘Popular medievalism’ is the idea of the Middle Ages that exists in popular culture, in texts like BBC’s Merlin, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and other medievalist fantasy, and also in the activities of re-enactment 2 societies, and entertainment venues like Medieval Times™. 4 practices I will go on to describe were a part of any medieval youth culture, still less that they are universally characteristic of young people. I argue rather that these reading practices were (and are) understood and rhetorically constructed as immature, and our own understanding of them must therefore take cultural structures of immaturity into account.
In this project I draw on texts and theory from the fan cultures of the last seventy years (such as those arising around Star Trek, The Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter). The fan communities whose texts I study are a modern subculture of amateur readers whose reading practices are culturally marginalized, both for their subject matter – popular, ‘lowbrow’ television shows and books, often marketed at female or young-adult audiences – and for their affective, excessive style of reading. As I will show in the section of my introduction devoted to the history of fandom, fan communities have been shaped by their cultural relationship to youth and immaturity, so that ‘fan’ is above all an identity of immature desires. I discuss how Margery Kempe, Francis Petrarch, Nicholas Love, and Geoffrey Chaucer all use the idea of adolescence as a space of inappropriate desires and emotional excess. The persistence of immature loves into adult reading is a source of ambivalence and anxiety for Petrarch and Nicholas Love, and of subversion for Kempe and Chaucer, who use their position as vernacular authors to explore the subversive potential of immaturity.
The integration of fans and fandom into my project grows from several intellectual movements in Medieval Studies: recent interest in the role of the amateur, the rise of the Digital Humanities, and queer temporality theory. The following three sections of my introduction focus on these three contexts.
1.1 Fans and Amateurs
The reading I have described up to now as immature is excessive, embodied, and emotional, privileging affect. It is often marginalized, often gendered feminine, often viewed with homophobic suspicion (for its feminizing effects on men, and for its fostering of affective community among women). Its principal heuristic technologies are love, empathy and the imagination: love as the motivating force, empathy to identify with characters in a text, and 5 imagination to take their place, or join them, in the world of a text. Empathetic, affective reading of historical materials has been recently theorized within Medieval Studies under the umbrella of ‘amateur’ reading.
The word ‘amateur’ is situated in the context of institutions that have developed since the late eighteenth century, when the Oxford English Dictionary first dates the word’s emergence with both of its current meanings of ‘one who loves something’ and ‘a non-professional.’ ‘Amateur’ is not synonymous with ‘fan,’ a shortening of ‘fanatic,’ which seems to have first emerged in its modern sense in late nineteenth-century America to describe devoted followers of baseball teams.3 ‘Fan’ is used in a loose sense, and can describe anything from a person with a marked but passive preference for a team, television show, actor, or singer to a person who actively dedicates significant time and resources to their devotion. However, this word has a different meaning in fan communities. In these communities, people self-define as fans (adjective: ‘fannish’), and the word denotes active participation in ‘fandom’ - the network of (online) fan communities. The distinction between a fan and non-fan therefore is not so much in levels of devotion as it is in being part of a community of shared affect, through engaging in dialogue and (often) collaborative creative work with other fans. These fan communities (‘fandoms’) are ‘active’ audiences of popular media; The Lord of the Rings has famously generated one of the most knowledgeable and prolific fan communities, and medievalist fantasy following its legacy has inherited this distinctive culture of fans who produce reams of textual analysis and close-reading work, differing from professionally produced scholarship often only by medium and performance style. It is here that the overlap between ‘amateur’ and ‘fan’ occurs. ‘Amateur’ denotes pursuit of an activity or interest for love, rather than for financial gain, which suggests that this activity or interest has a professional field where such financial gain is possible. I would argue that in some fields, including popular media, a ‘fan’ is an amateur for whom no equivalent profession exists. Scholarship on popular media is still marginalized within the academy, so that the distinction between a ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ critic of popular media can seem blurred. Scholars of popular media cannot escape the assumption that they are, a
3 “Fan, n.2,” OED Online (Oxford University Press), accessed October 20, 2014, http://www.oed.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/view/Entry/68000. 6 priori, fans of those media, and that they first encountered and engaged with their text outside the academy. From the point of view of more established academic disciplines, being a ‘scholar’ of Coronation Street or Madonna songs can seem like a bit of a scam (“I’m a big Madonna fan, can I get paid for doing that?”) with the result that scholars trained in other fields sometimes attempt to moonlight in Cultural Studies without respecting or familiarizing themselves with the history, theory, or current discourse of the field, thus maintaining the lack of distinction between the amateur and professional reader of popular media, and producing substandard cultural criticism that gives the field a bad reputation.
The tension between the disinterested ‘professional’ and fannish amateur informs the currency of the term ‘fan’ in the academy. A university professor who teaches courses on twentieth-century literature may include Arthur Conan Doyle, and may even be a self-confessed fan of Sherlock Holmes, but would rarely present him- or her-self as such in the classroom or on paper, where the norms of academic discourse demand a stance of critical distance. This scholar’s professional contributions to the field of Detective Fiction Studies will hence be very different from the same person’s erotic fiction, short-form essays, and poetry about the bond between Holmes and Watson, published (pseudonymously) on the internet in the Sherlock Holmes fandom. And yet, these two bodies of work inevitably inform each other. This thesis is in part my own effort to reconcile my own movement between these two different modes of reading, these two different hermeneutics, which may be literally in opposition to each other, since each practice eats into the time of the other, and the existence of each persona may threaten the other (many professionals who are also amateurs in the same field take extreme pains to keep their identities separate). It is this tension between ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ modes of reading at the margins of academia which has motivated increasing interest in amateurism in Medieval Studies in the last two decades.
Scholars have increasingly recognized a trend in theoretical approaches to literature in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century that is now being called the ‘affective turn,’ manifesting in many disciplines as a heightened interest in what feelings mean, in memory, empathy, and in the spheres and activities of certain complex emotions that exist in between culture and nature, such as love, grief, shame, desire, and anger. Eve Sedgwick is a founding thinker on affect in the study of literature, particularly in her essay “Paranoid Reading and 7
Reparative Reading, Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You,” in which she identifies the paranoid impulse behind most forms of critical reading (that is, a suspicious, defensive attitude towards the text), and suggests the cultivation of ‘reparative’ reading - loving, nurturing, productive. Camp is one such mode of reading, Sedgwick suggests, and it is this mode which her followers have most prominently taken up, but her essay ends with a call to learn from the practices of “the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture - even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them.”4 Fan communities are undoubtedly among these, and it is to this call that I respond.
In Medieval Studies, queer theory has been at the forefront of the turn to affect, particularly in its focus on the affective life of the scholar-reader and the erotics of (queer) reading, following a Barthesian interest in the pleasures of the text. ‘Queer reading’ is a mode of reading that notices certain kinds of desire, certain kinds of affect; the queer reader seeks out queer moments in the text, out of a wish for resonance, even community, between their own desires and those in the text. Queer theory has been concerned with analysing this openly desiring readerly stance. Carolyn Dinshaw has seen this desire as a seeking for connection across time with others who have felt like her, while Heather Love’s Reading Backward - not a medievalist text, but influential on medievalists - posits shame as an affective point of connection with queers who have passed us by. Dinshaw’s work in particular forms part of a general shift in focus in Medieval Studies towards the work of medievalism itself – what it is that we do when we read medieval texts, and who comprises this ‘we.’5
4 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 151. 5 Some examples of this trend in the field include: Kathy Cawsey, Twentieth-Century Chaucer Criticism: Reading Audiences (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Pub., 2011); Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Post-Modern (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999); Louise Fradenberg, Sacrifice Your Love: Psychoanalysis, Historicism, Chaucer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Stephanie Trigg, Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). 8
1.2 The Future of the Middle Ages
This self-scrutiny in Medieval Studies has been particularly evident in the last five years, when a global recession and attendant cuts in arts funding have given rise to a heightened level of activism of various kinds among medievalists. This movement has overlapped with the growing sense of communal identity - and political mobilization - among scholars at the fringes of academia: graduate students, adjuncts, early-career scholars, and independent scholars (the latter a less stigmatized category as periods of unemployment or non-academic employment become a fact of life for aspiring academics). The demise of academia as a secure career choice - if it was ever thus - has brought renewed urgency to questions about the value of the emotional elements of medievalist identity and practice. Thus the ‘turn to affect’ in Medieval Studies has become entwined with more practical concerns: how does love for the medieval past stack against financial insecurity and a four-hour commute to teach part-time at multiple universities?
The need for extra-institutional community between these mobile academic workers and the sudden prominence of the Digital Humanities also means that much of this community formation is happening in social media spaces, such as Facebook, Twitter, and blogs, such that Medieval Studies professional community formation increasingly shares space with family photographs, cat memes, pictures of celebrities, and other affective, informal artifacts and discourses. These online spaces are often also shared with, and even (as in the case of blogging platform Dreamwidth) shaped by fan communities. The affective, informal norms of discourse in these spaces are changing the way medievalists form their professional identities.6 The blurred line between the paid professional and the amateur medievalist – loving, unpaid, often marginalized, perhaps deluded – is coming under increasing scrutiny in Medieval Studies.
However, there has been little attention in Medieval Studies to what ‘amateur reading’ might mean in practice, how ‘amateur’ might itself be claimed or performed as an identity within Medieval Studies, and what kind of community might form around this identity. Whatever the
6 For the relationship between affect and professionalism, see Jessica Anne Taylor, “Write the Book of Your Heart: Career, Passion and Publishing in the Romance Writing Community” (PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 2013). 9 changing face of the job market, the historical meaning of ‘amateur medievalist’ cannot, and should not, be avoided - indeed, the work of medievalists like Dinshaw and Trigg calls on us to seek out this historical community of amateur medievalists, looking beyond the structural changes within the university to the essence of the amateur as an affective identity. But what does medievalist amateurism look like now? And if we sought a historical community of amateurs, what kinds of amateurism might we find in the medieval past?
Dinshaw’s analysis of medievalist amateurism in How Soon Is Now begins with a “young man” wandering Central Park in a bathrobe at the Medieval Festival in Fort Tryon Park, New York, playing a recorder. While others at the festival wear carefully crafted, historically accurate clothing, he seems to be making an attempt at emulating medieval dress with something he had lying around, or perhaps is just coincidentally wearing a bathrobe in the park while a festival of kitschy medievalism goes on around him. Dinshaw’s focus on the young man - a clear outsider among the vibrant community of amateur medievalists - replicates, ironically, the inattention to such fan communities in Medieval Studies that Dinshaw herself remarks.7
This overlap between Medieval Studies and fandom becomes most visible in the program for the annual International Congress of Medieval Studies at the University of Western Michigan, Kalamazoo. This annual conference, the biggest Medieval Studies gathering in North America, includes popular medievalism within its remit, and attracts a strong presence from Cultural Studies, Media Studies, and Fan Studies. This includes the annual ‘Tolkien track’ of panels on J.R.R. Tolkien’s fiction works, which for years has been organized by Robin Anne Reid, a Fan Studies scholar at Texas A&M, and many individually organized panels on Harry Potter, World of Warcraft, Game of Thrones, and other pop culture medievalist texts. There are also numerous panels, demonstrations, and extra-curricular activities run by the SCA (the Society for Creative Anachronism, the largest historical roleplaying society in North America). The ICMS at Kalamazoo also draws many attendees who are not professional medievalists, including members of religious orders, blacksmiths, musicians, brewers, and weavers. In the Tolkien and other ‘pop medievalism’ panels, non-medievalist scholars and amateurs mingle with
7 Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), xii–xiii. 10 professional medievalists who are also fans. The latter often attend these panels out of personal interest rather than any relevance to their professional research. This overlap between fannish and professional space means that, perhaps uniquely among academic conferences, the ICMS can function as a clandestine fan convention. I myself have arranged numerous meetings with online friends at Kalamazoo; often I had known these people online (pseudonymously) before learning that they too were attending the conference in their capacity as academics. Chance references to upcoming trips to Kalamazoo, Michigan often effected the discovery and led to discreet inquiries (“Are you by any chance going to the Medieval Studies conference?”). The popular medievalism panels at Kalamazoo create a space of tension between fan and professional, private and public; this thesis attempts to imaginatively inhabit that space, and to bring it out into scholarly discourse.
The guardedness with which most people maintain this fannish/professional boundary makes it difficult to determine how many Medieval Studies graduate students are also frequent consumers or producers of fanfiction; however, from personal experience and anecdotal evidence, I estimate that at least half read or write fanfiction, or have in the past. In presenting sections of this project at conferences or discussing it in professional settings, I have been repeatedly struck by a sense of furtive connection between myself and a suddenly alert audience member, followed by a conversation in which we test the waters with oblique or coded references, full of the unspoken question: “are you?” There is a shade of the queer about this underground community of fans seeking to recognize each other in a professional context. Tom Shippey, a medievalist and an Anglo-Saxonist, and also one of the pre-eminent Tolkien scholars of the twentieth century, once suggested that being a reader of science fiction “has been rather like being gay” due to the fact that there was “definite pressure, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, not to admit the fact,” and that one sought out places to meet “others of the same persuasion.”8 Although Shippey’s suggestion betrays a rather staggering lack of sensitivity (one hardly faced systematic discrimination and violence for being a sci-fi fan, after all), my return to the analogy between secret fans and secret homosexuals in academia is not an idle one. As I shall
8 Tom Shippey, “Literary Gatekeepers and the Fabril Tradition,” in Science Fiction, Canonization, Marginalization, and the Academy, ed. Gary Westfahl and George Slusser (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002), 8. 11 suggest below, I see the rise in interest of affect and amateurism in Medieval Studies as a paradigm shift in interpretive frameworks comparable to the rise in queer theory in the 1980s and 90s that occurred alongside changes in the social and political visibility of homosexuality.
I and my peers, the first generation of medievalists to have grown up with the internet, will dominate academia in twenty-odd years time. In the meantime, a great many students in undergraduate Medieval Studies and other literature classes are bringing the modes of discourse of internet fan communities into the classroom. I would suggest that fannish reading, as I shall characterize it below, has gained huge new audiences with the rise of digital connectivity. If fannish reading communities have not already played a subtle role in shaping Medieval Studies in the late twentieth century (which the overlap between Tolkienists and medievalists suggests they have), they only become more prominent. Even if this were not reason enough to reassess the relationship between the Middle Ages of academia and the Middle Ages of the popular imagination, in the face of a worldwide recession hitting arts departments everywhere it has never been more important to forge links between the medievalisms existing inside and outside the academy.
As an experiment in methodology, I also see my dissertation as participating in collective reflection on not only the future of the profession, but the role of futurity within the profession. This is particularly relevant in discussion of the Digital Humanities, the field of scholarship located at the intersection of traditional humanities scholarship and new digital technologies. Over the course of my graduate career, there has been a general rise in expectation that academia will re-form around digital technologies. Numerous job postings for Medieval Studies now recommend or even require sub-speciality in the Digital Humanities, without any standardized expectation of what knowledge or expertise this entails. Meanwhile, universities lag behind in their ability to provide training in this field, nor is it clear what role achievements in the Digital Humanities, such as curating online editions or pioneering the use of technology in the classroom, will play in tenure reviews. The NMC Horizon Report: 2014 Higher Education Edition, the result of a collaboration between two international non-profit collaborative associations dedicated to the use of technology in higher education, shows the discrepancy between the speed at which universities are exerting pressure on faculty to master digital technologies, and the level of integration of the Digital Humanities into the infrastructure of 12 tenure review and research evaluation.9 Applicants in this job market who have significant digital literacy acquired through participation in fandom (in, for example, web design, formatting, database management, digital image manipulation, or video editing software) thus find themselves in an odd situation of having skills that are professionally desirable, but which have been acquired in a devalued, embarrassing sphere. They hence lack official certification, experience, and referees, and even a context for these skills that will fit with their professional identity. The Digital Humanities thus presents another point of friction between fandom and academia.
A review of the programmes of the two biggest annual conferences in Medieval Studies in the English-speaking world shows both the rapidity of the rise of the Digital Humanities since 2010, and also how intertwined the Digital Humanities has been with anxiety about the future.10 The following are typical examples of the titles of panels on digital or online medievalism: “Current Awareness: Looking Forward and Comparing Backward through the 1990s - A Workshop” (IMC, 2000); “Making the Old New Again: Digital Medievalism in an Ever- Changing World” (ICMS, 2005); “Is Medieval Studies Undergoing A Paradigm Shift?” (ICMS, 2010); and “The Distance Future: Where Does Online Education Go From Here?: A Roundtable” (ICMS, 2015). Conversation about the Digital Humanities in a Medieval Studies context seems to take place in a heightened sense of temporality.
It is clear that many medievalists see potential in the scholarly tools and professional connectivity offered by the Digital Humanities. However, it is all too easy for discourse surrounding digital futurity in academia to fall into denigration of digital communication and reading styles, which in turn often becomes denigration of the (often young) people who use
9 L. Johnson et al., NMC Horizon Report: 2014 Higher Education Edition (Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium, 2014), 20–24. 10 A review of a selection of past programmes from ICMS, at the University of Western Michigan, USA, and the International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds, England, shows a sharp increase in discussion on topics related to the Digital Humanities after 2010. At ICMS in 1995, one panel had the words ‘digital’ or ‘online’ in its title; in 2000, there were two; in 2010, six; in 2012, nine; in 2015, eleven. At IMC (Leeds), a more tightly thematic conference, in 1997 there was one panel with the words ‘digital’, ‘online’, or ‘internet’ in its title; in 2000, 2005, and 2010, there were two; in 2014, five. In the more recent conferences, it was also noticeable that many more individual papers with ‘digital’ or ‘online’ in their titles proliferated into non- digital-specific panels. 13 them, and, ultimately, all-too-familiar predictions of the end of the humanities and/or intelligent thought, with ‘today’s undergraduates’ as examples. Much has been written about the temporalities of digital spaces, from the short memory span of social media to the addictive procrastination of online games, but the effect of these digital temporalities on scholarship and scholarly communities has yet to be explored, nor yet the more abstract temporal states of obsolescence, immaturity, and rejuvenation that spring from the meeting of traditional scholarship and the internet in the Digital Humanities.
This thesis seeks in part to explore the friction of digital temporalities in the study of the past. This is not a typical Digital Humanities project, however, since I focus on modes of discourse more than digital tools. I discuss fans and fandom with an aim to theorize more generally the temporalities of different kinds of reading, and the temporalities of the different media, including the internet, within which reading happens. The worst predictions of the future of digital academia imagine the internet as a medium of ‘bad’ readers, while more optimistic visions tend to imagine the erasure of these readers. This thesis tries to explore a different set of imaginative spaces for the Digital Humanities, and to interrogate the ideas of immaturity and futurity that impinge upon it.
1.3 Queer History?
The immature person’s mind does not match up to the age of their11 body, creating a temporal misalignment. To be immature is to be behind schedule, temporally deviant; it is to fail to learn, develop, adapt in tandem with the progression of time as observed in the physical world. Temporality as it existed in the Middle Ages was both circular and linear, both micro and macroscopic. Time ran in a straight line from birth to the afterlife, from Adam to Christ, from Genesis to Revelations, and from the beginning of the world to Judgement Day; however, it also
11 I have chosen throughout to use ‘their’ as a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun, in keeping with emerging usage. The exception is in reference to fans, where I have used ‘her’ as the default pronoun; this is not only to emphasize the overwhelming majority of women in fandom, but also the importance of this presumed female readership for the formation of community and literary discourse in fandom. 14 looped back upon itself in the repetition of the monastic hours, the liturgical year, the cycle of the seasons, and in genealogical cycles of reproduction and inheritance. These are the rhythms not only of the life of the individual, but of society. In amongst these temporal structures, immaturity is disruptive and subversive; it squanders its patrimony, it loves where it should not, it shuns responsibility, it threatens succession, it celebrates too early or too late. In its most extreme form, immaturity disturbs the continuity of society.
As Lee Edelman has influentially argued, immaturity in this sense is queer, in that it threatens the continuity of heterosexual reproduction and the futurity this promises. Queer theorists of the past twenty years have unfolded the ramifications of this persistent association of queerness and disrupted temporal regimes, particularly the association of youth with homosexual desire.12 The queer temporality theory of the last two decades forms the theoretical foundation of my thesis; however, I hesitate to call this a queer theoretical project. In my reading of the two ‘elvish’ men above, I have suggested that their possible queerness is part of, but different from, their membership in a community of immature, desiring readers - a community, that is, of fans. Dinshaw’s work brings to her readings of medieval texts a “queer historical impulse” - “an impulse toward making connections across time between… lives, texts and other cultural phenomena”13 - which helps her to recognise moments of desire-driven temporal slippage in medieval texts themselves. Dinshaw identifies this impulse as queer because the community and sameness that she seeks in the past is one of shared queer desires. But this impulse itself is also queer, she explains, because it rejects the linearity of time, the linearity which is particularly complicit with western, heteronormative teleological narratives of reproduction, succession and
12 See e.g. Dinshaw, Getting Medieval; Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now?; Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004); Carla Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); Jose Esteban Munoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (NYU Press, 2009); Andrew Parker and Janet Halley, eds., After Sex?: On Writing Since Queer Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Valerie Rohy, Anachronism and Its Others: Sexuality, Race, Temporality (Albany N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2009); Valerie Rohy, “Ahistorical,” GLQ 12, no. 1 (2006): 61–83; Katherine Bond Stockton, The Queer Child, or Growing Up Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). 13 Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Post-modern, 1. 15 progress. Carla Freccero’s Queer/Early/Modern14 goes even further, imagining a ‘queer’ historical project that uses this kind of non-linear slippage between past and present, but is not necessarily focused on queer desire or community; indeed, she acknowledges that “If, in a given analysis, queer does not intersect with, touch, or list in the direction of sex—the catchall word that here refers to gender, desire, sexuality, and perhaps anatomy—it may be that queer is not the conceptual analytic most useful to what is being described.”15 Freccero’s “queer kind of history” is queer only in its hermeneutics, which focus on “dismantling the barriers between the world considered as an object of social scientific study and the world considered as infused with passional attachment, fantasy, and wish.”16 I have found the imaginative possibilities of the category of ‘queer’ ultimately limiting; I aim to disentangle the immature reader from her theorization in queer theory, in order to feel out the boundaries of the identity of the fan, who shares many characteristics, and even communities, with the queer, but has her17 own cultural narrative and social history.
Dinshaw’s book juxtaposes the young man in the bathrobe at the Medieval Festival with Morrissey of the British band The Smiths, singing “How Soon is Now?” in 1984. Both of these youth performances are, to some extent, ‘medieval’ and/or ‘queer’ in Dinshaw’s book, but their actual youth goes unscrutinized, although Dinshaw twice marks the man in the bathrobe as “young” (ix, x), while the “temporal situation” of the Smiths’ song, which expresses “the feel of the ‘80s gay club scene,” is also very much a young sound (Morrissey was 25 at the time of the song’s release; lead guitarist Johnny Marr was 21). Dinshaw’s reading of the (young) man in the bathrobe forms part of a pattern of appropriation and erasure of the childishness of youth in queer theory, where the child is persistently subsumed into the symbolic category of The Child.
14 A title which (coincidentally but not misleadingly) suggests, according to the conventions of fanfiction genre categorization, that her book will tell the story of the erotic or romantic relationship between those three terms. 15 Carla Freccero, “Queer Times,” South Atlantic Quarterly 106, no. 3 (2007): 490. 16 Freccero, “Queer Times,” 491. 17 See Introduction n. 12. 16
Maintaining a strong distinction between ‘queer’ hermeneutics and queer lived experience is particularly important in relation to the complex experiences of gender and sexuality of fans in online communities, on which I will elaborate in the section below on fandom. In addition, although queer possibilities and tensions appear throughout the texts I will read, much of my project draws so far away from queer embodied experience, modern or medieval, that I balk at describing it as a project in queer history, or even as a queer project, although I am myself a queer person using a ‘queer’ hermeneutics. I fear, like Sharon Marcus, that too-broad use of ‘queer’ “as a neologism for the transgression of any norm” may erode its meaning as a lived category, and its strength as a theoretical one.18 Many contributors to the volume After Sex, which asks this very question, resist the ‘after’ of the title, and think rather that “queer denotes not an identity but instead a political and existential stance, an ideological commitment, a decision to live outside some social norm or other” [author’s italics].19 However, I am inclined towards the view that a queer reading must both move from a subject position of queer desire, and seek out queer desires, experiences, movements, practices and inclinations in the text. The queer historical project emerged from the formation of a modern queer identity situated in a politically recognised community with an activist agenda. Doing a queer reading of Chaucer, in this context, does not imply an assumption that Chaucer is queer in the way that some members of this modern community are queer, but such a reading is still predicated on the discourse located in and around modern queer identities (or, at the very least, a monolithic queer identity formed by consensus among academics) which makes queer desires legible. ‘Queering’ is such a useful critical tool that it is tempting to expand its boundaries to encompass non-bodily, or non-same-sex ways of desiring, being, learning, and knowing; but the boundaries of queerness are what give the word shape, and make calling myself a queer woman meaningful. My move away from queer theory is therefore rooted not in a critique of its limits, but in respect for them.
18 Andrew Parker and Janet Halley, eds., After Sex?: On Writing Since Queer Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 7. 19 Richard Thompson Ford, “What’s Queer About Race?” in After Sex?: On Writing Since Queer Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 123. 17
1.4 Chapter Summaries
This thesis falls broadly into two parts. The first two chapters are concerned with devotional texts, the second three with texts that are (since I hesitate to use the word ‘secular’ for any medieval text) not explicitly concerned with religious worship, but are for entertainment or instruction. However, as my caveat suggests, this division is based on not on the texts’ subject matter, genre, or style, but on the other texts towards which the author’s readerly love is directed, and the discourses about reading that consequently emerge. In the first two chapters, I read texts whose authors lovingly read the Gospels and apocryphal texts describing the life and Passion of Christ; in the last three chapters, the authors discuss reading historiography and fiction lovingly. As I shall argue, this distinction was crucially important for the medieval readers of my study.
Chapter One will sketch out the idea of a ‘fannish hermeneutics’ as a particular way of coming to know a text through love that includes an emotional engagement with a text and ‘active reading’ that involves imaginative labour and ‘talking back’ to the text. I argue that this model of fannish hermeneutics is useful for framing certain works of late medieval affective piety, and particularly texts that guide meditation on the life of Christ, such as the Pseudo- Bonaventuran Meditationes vitae Christi and Aelred of Rievaulx’s De institutione inclusarum. The late medieval tradition of affective piety in England drew on continental texts like the Meditationes, but evolved within the tumultuous local religious politics of the late fourteenth century, in particular Archbishop Arundel’s campaign against John Wyclif and his pro- translation followers. This political context shaped the English conversation about reading into one concerned with issues of power and authority over the interpretation of texts; this circumstance makes the analogy with modern fanfiction particularly apt. I also discuss the recent theorization of certain forms of imaginative meditation as a kind of historiography, particularly within queer theory. Chapter One ends by identifying a series of characteristics of the ‘fannish hermeneutics’ on which I will build the arguments of the later chapters.
Chapter Two focuses on two close readings of late medieval English texts which were written and circulated around the time of Arundel’s ban on unauthorized vernacular devotional texts: The Book of Margery Kempe and the Mirror of the Blessed Life of Christ. Here I introduce immaturity as an interpretive framework and I argue its importance in late medieval religious 18 discourse, particularly within the English political context. I explore the uses of ideas of immaturity and adulthood in affective devotion, including the significance of Christ’s childhood and the gendering of affective reading. My close reading of The Book of Margery Kempe focuses on the figure of the child as both the object of her devotional focus and as a performative model for her worship. I argue that Kempe embraces and develops the childish figure of the “symple soule” for whom Nicholas Love considers imaginative devotion appropriate.20 This section of the chapter also considers the temporality of fannish hermeneutics. Immaturity is a disturbance of linear chronology; The Book of Margery Kempe internalizes this disturbance and makes it an integral part of its devotional methodology. The figure of the fan as immature reader not only opens up space to discuss Kempe’s visions as an approach to the Gospels with a fannish hermeneutics, but also draws out the issues of textual authority that surround the The Book of Margery Kempe. The final section of chapter two reads Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life as analogous to the ‘spin-off novel’ in its attempts to negotiate a role for clerical supervision in affective meditation.
The third chapter of the thesis moves on to another major area of affective reception in the later Middle Ages: that of Classical texts. I argue that there is a closer relationship than previously recognized between Petrarch’s reading style and the reading style of continental affective devotion, particularly as practiced among the Carthusians of Italy. Because in many histories of European cultures Petrarch himself often constitutes the traditional dividing line between the ‘medieval’ and the ‘Renaissance’ or ‘Early Modern’ periods, the impact of this spiritual tradition on his reading practices has been largely overlooked.21 Reading Petrarch’s Letters on Familiar Matters XXIV, his book of letters to Classical authors, I respond to Kathy Eden’s work on Petrarch’s hermeneutics of familiaritas in light of the fannish hermeneutics at work in the fanfiction genre of RPF (Real Person Fanfiction). I foreground Petrarch’s debt to medieval mysticism and imaginative meditation on the life of Christ - and his ambivalence to this tradition’s perceived “childishness” - to argue that specters of deviant aging haunt Petrarch,
20 Nicholas Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Full Critical Edition, ed. Michael G. Sargent (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 2005), 10.27–8. 21 I have chosen throughout to capitalize historical periods, both in accordance with Chicago Style, and to emphasize the constructedness of these periods. 19 and he uses them to play out his anxieties about the childishness of reading. While the disruption of linear chronology and the embracing of immature reading practices is a source of glory and validation for Kempe, for Petrarch it is a source of shameful pleasure.
I will suggest that Petrarch himself was engaged in resisting - and felt himself vulnerable to - ‘queer readings’ of his work and life by his own contemporaries. His writings show a constant awareness of his own unmarried status, the homosociality of his scholarly lifestyle, and the implications of his continued attachment to the texts and loves of his boyhood. His devotion to Classical texts here becomes, paradoxically, symbolic of his childhood (he has never moved beyond his early schooltexts) and his maturity as a poet. The relationship between Latinity, vernacularity and the dialectics of maturity in the medieval world will thus form a background to this chapter, and I spend some time discussing the significance of Petrarch’s role in the nascent humanist education project.
Chapter Four focuses on how Petrarch has shaped the conditions of his own reception. I develop my earlier discussion of his epistolary hermeneutics to read several letters written to Petrarch - two in the fifteenth century by the humanists Zabarella and Vergerio, and one in the twentieth century by Petrarch scholar Ernest Wilkins. I discuss how Petrarch uses his ‘Letter to Posterity’ to construct a ‘fantasy of encounter’ which invites readers in the future to encounter him as a ‘friend,’ while Petrarch dictates the terms of this ‘friendly reading.’ I show how these later letters to Petrarch respond to this invitation, and how reading Petrarch as a fan can help disrupt the unspoken assumptions of Petrarch’s offer of friendship. I end this chapter with some examples of fannish readings of historical figures, comparing the immature intimacy of these fannish readings with some scholarly debates of the later half of the twentieth century.
Chapter Five continues the previous chapter’s discussion of twentieth-century historiographical hermeneutics, but I return to the idea of fannish reading as bad reading that either fundamentally misunderstands or does damage to a text. This is the threat that hangs over Nicholas Love’s supervisory model of affective literature and Petrarch’s careful construction of his ideal reader. In this chapter I explore how twentieth-century medievalist scholarship and pedagogy has grown around the idea of ‘bad readers’ of medieval texts, a discourse, I argue, partly shaped by medieval discourses of language and authority. In this chapter I focus on one 20 particularly charged site of interpretation and authority: the prologues to the “Griselda” legend in Petrarch and Chaucer. I argue for a more highly politicized and ambivalent interpretation of Chaucer’s reading of Petrarch, one that is located in contemporary language politics and particularly in the idea of the vernacular as an immature language. Because of the ideological significance of these two writers in their national literatures, the historical relationship between them has also been of great significance to twentieth-century scholars, with many reading Chaucer as a friendly reader of Petrarch. I set Chaucer’s prologue to the Clerk’s Tale alongside examples of fanfiction as resistant or critical reading in order to explore the role of love in criticism, and vice versa. I situate this discussion within questions about the role of the humanities in the university today, and what is at stake in educating students out of ‘immature’ reading practices.
1.5 An Introduction to Fandom
This section gives an introduction to fannish practices and terms. Fandom has developed a distinct, specific literary vocabulary. This fannish terminology provides a detailed way to describe different imaginative approaches to and emotional engagements with a text. However, terminology may vary among communities and over time; there follows a brief overview below of the terminology I will use throughout my thesis, but my definitions should not be taken as prescriptive.22
Media fandoms are communities organized around love for a text. As a whole, fandom is both a thriving subculture, and a burgeoning field of study. In the latter sense, ‘fandom’ can cover a spectrum of communal behaviours from sports fans with painted faces chanting at a
22 Attempting to fix these terms down has an element of hubris; Jenkins divides fanfiction into ten categories which are useful for the unfamiliar reader (Textual Poachers 162-75), but Jenkins’ terms rarely conform to fandom’s own vocabulary, which has shifted significantly since the writing of Textual Poachers. Furthermore, terminology may vary slightly from fandom to fandom, or even in the different spaces occupied by a single fandom (i.e. terms may be current on Twitter that would not be recognized on Dreamwidth, and vice versa). I undertake to define these terms to the best of my ability according to the usages with which I am best familiar, but I have tried to indicate where usages vary or where synonyms exist. 21 football match, to webforum discussions of a recent episode of a popular soap. It is a noun that can refer to individual fan communities (e.g. “Is she in the Harry Potter fandom?”) and, in the singular without an article, to the state of being a fan, or to the wider sphere of fan practices (e.g. “I’ve been in fandom for years”). One may be a member of one or many fandoms at once, in this sense, while participating more generally in fandom. In this way, ‘fandom’ functions similarly to the word ‘sport’.
I will be focusing on English-language fandoms with a global audience.23 These fandoms are comprised of people from all over the world who self-identify as fans, and who participate in communal ‘active reading’ of a media text (which I will call a ‘source text’).24 Henry Jenkins’ seminal book Textual Poachers, although written on the cusp of fandom’s full-scale transition to the internet in the early 1990s, is still the most comprehensive introduction to western media fandom, despite the many changes since.25 From the 1960s-1990s, fan activity was based primarily in personal, face-to-face encounters at conventions and smaller gatherings, while fanfiction and essays were circulated in non-profit, fan-made zines which fans sold or exchanged by mail or at conventions. By the early 1990s fans had also begun to make use of the internet and fan communities had begun to use online mailing lists and message boards. Now, zines have become largely relics of nostalgia, and although conventions and smaller, informal gatherings still form a core part of many fans’ participation in fandom, fannish activity now happens predominantly online, on social media and blogging sites such as Dreamwidth, Tumblr,
23 Although some broad similarities exist between so-called ‘western media fandom’ and the vibrant fan cultures in Asia, particularly in Japan, the histories of Asian fandoms are bound up with the history of manga, a medium for which no real equivalent exists in the west. For an introduction to the historical context of Japanese manga fan communities, see Sharon Kinsella, Adult Manga: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society (University of Hawaii Press, 2000). 24 In fandom terminology, the source text is often called ‘canon’ or ‘the canon’. However, I will use ‘source text’ to avoid confusion with the other common meaning of ‘canon’ in literary studies. 25 Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992). Other books that have been important to my study are the essay collections Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson, eds., Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 2006), and L.A. Lewis, The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media (New York: Routledge, 1992). For a more comprehensive bibliography of works in fan studies, the fan studies journal Transformative Works and Cultures maintains an open-source, comprehensive, updated bibliography at the URL https://www.zotero.org/groups/11806. 22
Livejournal, Facebook, and Twitter, and other sites more specifically designed and maintained for the purpose of hosting fanart, fanfiction, fanvids, audio recordings of fanfiction, and other fannish creative output. Some of these sites are run in partnership with or by the owners of a specific source text, while many more are independent. Some are dedicated to a single source text (such as Gateworld, the premier fansite for the Stargate television franchise; Gateworld has more than 44,000 members and, although fan-run, has semi-official status and exclusive access to Stargate material and news released by MGM). Some large, independent sites, such as Fanfiction.net and Archiveofourown.org, host content for multiple fandoms, and are funded by advertising revenue or donations. Many smaller sites have no relationship to the owners or authors of their source texts, or are actively hiding from them.
A fandom, in this sense, is a community organized around dedicated, focused, detail- oriented and highly imaginative interaction with source texts. These communities exist outside the bounds of any legitimating institution (such as a university or a commercial enterprise), and as such are marginal to the means of production of source texts. They are often maligned in the popular media, and are marginalized by both cultural and legal sanctions, since many fan artifacts, although rarely produced for profit, have a doubtful legal status.26 In Textual Poachers, Jenkins draws on the work of cultural theorist Michel de Certeau’s characterization of active reading as “poaching.” He argues that fans refuse to be passive readers in relation to an active author, but rather are engaged in “an ongoing struggle for possession of the text and for control over its meanings.”27 Fans produce a number of creative artifacts as part of this ‘active reading’; I will be focusing on fanfiction (variously called fan fiction, fanfic, or simply ‘fic’). Fanlore, the fan-run open-source wiki of fannish terms, gives a minimalist definition: “Fanfiction is a work of fiction written by fans for other fans, taking a source text or a famous person as a point of departure.”28 The Wikipedia entry expands on this definition:
26 Alexis Lothian, “Living in a Den of Thieves: Fan Video and Digital Challenges to Ownership,” Cinema Journal 48, no. 4 (2009): 130-136. 27 Ibid., 24. 28 “Fanfiction - Fanlore,” accessed December 31, 2014, http://fanlore.org/wiki/Fanfiction. 23
Fan fiction is rarely commissioned or authorized by the original work’s creator or publisher, and is rarely professionally published. It may or may not infringe on the original author’s copyright, depending on the jurisdiction and on such questions as whether or not it qualifies as “fair use”. Attitudes of authors and copyright owners of original works to fan fiction have ranged from encouragement to rejection or legal action.29
Online, open-source wiki pages are created by the consensus of many members of these online communities, and are therefore ‘peer-reviewed’ from within the community that uses this terminology, while academic books often do not reach the vast majority of fans. Therefore I count Wikipedia or Fanlore not only as reliable sources, but also as reflecting the consensus of the community. Both of these definitions foreground the fact that fanfiction is creative work defined not by its methodology, but by its marginal relation to sources of authority. This follows Jenkins’ framing of the issue; however, Jenkins emphasizes that fanfiction is also a specific kind of ‘active reading’ - a textual practice that emerges from intensive, emotionally loaded discursive engagement with a text, an engagement usually described by fans as ‘love.’ Fanfiction often emerges from the same fannish desires and in the same community spaces as other fannish practices, such as costumeplay, collecting memorabilia, roleplay, essays (known as ‘meta’ in fan communities), fanart, and video remixing (‘vidding’); these fannish practices enrich fans’ pleasure in and understanding of the source text.
Fanfiction in its modern form emerged almost at the same time as modern fandom itself, with the airing of the original series of Star Trek in the USA in the late 1960s.30 Early fanfiction
29 “Fan Fiction,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, accessed December 31, 2014, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fan_fiction&oldid=640414426. 30 That is, Star Trek: The Original Series, created by Gene Roddenberry, aired from September 8, 1966 to September 2, 1969. Coppa notes in her excellent “A Brief History of Media Fandom” (in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet) that much of the infrastructure and jargon of fandom grew up out of the readership of science fiction magazines such as Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories from the late 1920s onwards, and that in fact fan activity around The Man From U.N.C.L.E. predated the original Trek by several years. I follow her account of the history of fandom in this section. 24 was published in home-made ‘zines’ and circulated among fans through catalogues, at conventions and informal exchanges. The fan communities from which fanfiction emerged have their roots in societies organized around the reading of Dickens and Conan Doyle in the nineteenth century, and in many ways this early Star Trek fanfiction is linked to reading practices that had existed both in science fiction fandom and film star fandom since the 1930s. It is thus intrinsically tied to the history of the modern popular audience.31 Fanfiction continued to be published and circulated primarily in zine form (bought, swapped and borrowed through mail- order catalogues and at convention stalls), through the rise and fall in popularity of other fandoms, such as Starsky and Hutch, Dr Who, Blakes 7, The Professionals, Star Wars, and later series of Star Trek. While fandoms like Xena: Warrior Princess and The X Files had thrived on earlier incarnations of the worldwide web (such as Usenet) in mailing lists and website archives for most of the 1990s, social media and blogging sites rose in popularity for hosting fannish content in the early 2000s. Fanfiction writers now most commonly upload or ‘post’ fanfiction to non-peer reviewed, public or semi-public online spaces.
31 Francesca Coppa, “A Brief History of Media Fandom,” in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, ed. Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 2006), 41-59; Sheenagh Pugh, The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context (Bridgend: Seren, 2005); Camille Bacon- Smith, Science Fiction Fandom (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994); Harry Warner, All Our Yesterdays: An Informal History of Science Fiction Fandom in the Forties (Chicago, IL: Advent Publishers, 1969). 25
Fig 1.1. Front cover of Not Tonight Spock! #1 (1984), a letterzine produced by Enterprising Press. Source: http://fanlore.org/wiki/Not_Tonight_Spock! . Unknown artist.
Fandom’s large-scale move online in the late 1990s and early 2000s coincided with the huge popularity of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, the Lord of the Rings films, and the Harry Potter films and books; fandom exploded in this period, with the huge, internet-savvy younger audiences drawn in by these fandoms, and with the increased rise in popularity and availability of Japanese manga and anime in the English-speaking world, particularly series aimed at younger audiences, such as Dragonball Z. There are now hundreds of thousands of people involved in writing fanfiction in many languages across the globe. In her 1992 study, Camille Bacon Smith quoted estimates that 90% of the people writing and reading fanfiction were women;32 given fandom’s sprawling, disparate existence on the internet, to do a more up-to-date demographic survey is
32 Camille Bacon-Smith, Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 110. 26 probably impossible; however, people who self-identify as women remain vastly in the majority. The gender imbalance of these fan communities was a subject of great fascination to early scholars of fandom. Anthropologically based studies suggested that fanfiction arose from ‘typically female’ reading practices (fluid, interpretive, emotional, physical, communal), while studies informed by literary theory suggested the feminist potential of fanfiction to subvert patriarchal discourse, and the importance of the fan community as a source of emotional support and solidarity for women.
A fanfiction writer uses her knowledge of the world and characters of the source text to create a new text which fills some perceived gap in the source text, often focusing on the emotional life of its characters. An unnamed fan cited by Sheenagh Pugh breaks down the desire motivating fanfiction into two distinct categories: desire for ‘more of,’ or desire for ‘more from’ a source text.33 This is a useful formulation for understanding the dual attitude of many fanfiction-writing fans towards their source text which is often both loving and critical, formed from both desire for the text and frustration at the text’s failings. The most fundamental lack at the heart of all texts is their finite quantity; most readers can identify with the hollow feeling that comes with the end of a book one has enjoyed. Fan communities have created a space where this desire becomes generative, the community’s own efforts going towards feeding its own rapacious desire for more. However, because fanfiction is, in theory at least, always subordinate to the text itself, fanfiction supplements but never expands the original text.
Despite existing at the bottom of this hierarchy of textual production, fanfiction, as a rule, sidesteps the cultural consensus that a creative work is a commodity to be bought and sold, with the author’s or owner’s rights protected by copyright law, and as such occupies a precarious space in the eyes of the law.34 Lucasfilm was among the most influential companies in capitalizing on fandom. Their lucrative empire of spin-off novels, merchandise, comics, toys and sequels set the standard for media marketing, now a major source of revenue for the owners of popular media texts, and has, in turn, made the question of ownership even more fraught.
33 Sheenagh Pugh, The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context (Bridgend: Seren, 2005) 29. 34 Ibid., 25. 27
Lucasfilm’s initial attempts to curb fan activities came from the recognition that the fan-created versions of toys, costumes and spin-off novels, available for free, might compete with their own.35 However, owners of franchises now often recognize that the risk of alienating their fanbase outweighs whatever profit may be lost to fanworks.36 Fanfiction communities today exist in an uneasy truce with owners and producers of popular media.
This sense of competition between media producers and fan producers emerges most clearly when fan texts depart from the source texts into areas deemed inappropriate by their owners. A common example of this is slash fanfiction, which often includes explicit gay content. This may be in direct opposition to the intentions of the author or producer, irritating their moral sensibilities; it may also threaten to tarnish a valuable ‘family-friendly’ brand. Television companies, publishers, and creators who are privileged by this structure which assigns cultural and monetary value to texts have attempted multiple times to prevent fan communities from this kind of transgressive reading. In response, several strands of fan activism and scholarship have been dedicated to constructing a legal defence against such efforts.37
Slash fanfiction, a hugely popular genre of fanfiction, imagines characters in romantic and sexual relationships with other characters of the same sex (most often, slash is written about two male characters). Slash draws on many tropes of the romance genre, and often imagines characters with far deeper emotional lives and with more extreme affective responses than they show in the source text. One influential strand of scholarship on fandom reads the emphasis on male emotionality in fanfiction as a feminist critical move which undermines the masculine ideals of the source text. Derecho notes that “most fanfic authors are women responding to media
35 Ibid., 30–31; 69. 36 cf. Suzanne Scott, “Revenge of the Fanboy: Convergence Culture and the Politics of Incorporation” (PhD thesis, University of Southern California, 2011). 37 Abigail De Kosnik, “Should Fan Fiction Be Free?”, Cinema Journal 48.4 (2009): 118-120; Lothian, “Living in a Den of Thieves: Fan Video and Digital Challenges to Ownership.” 28 products that, for the most part, are characterized by an underrepresentation of women,”38 while Jenkins says that fan readings “reclaim female experiences from the margins of male-centered texts.”39 Busse also takes this view in her introduction to an issue of the Cinema Studies journal In Focus dedicated to fandom: “fans complicate established binary relations when they return the 40 gaze as they manipulate representations of (and by) men and actively edit in their own desires.” By rewriting ‘masculine’ genres like police drama and science fiction into the ‘feminine’ genre of romance, female fans subvert and resist their own erasure in media texts and audiences. Although fanfiction may, for some, be a political act along the lines that Jenkins and Derecho imagine, it is self-evident that few people get involved in fan communities for purely political reasons. However, the generative lack in the source text is often not merely the text’s finite nature, but also its failure to meet a fannish reader’s particular desire or expectation. Hence the affect that generates fanfiction is characterized by Jenkins as “not simply fascination or adoration but also frustration and antagonism.”41
This failure may be an ending deemed narratively unsatisfying (such as a sudden death or an unpopular relationship development), action which does not meet the fan’s standard of emotional authenticity or seem ‘in character’ (this may seem paradoxical, but it is quite common in television shows written by committee for characters to fluctuate wildly from episode to episode), or a text’s political failure, such as racism. Fanfiction can address itself critically to its source text by taking points of view marginalized both inside and outside the text, imaginatively restoring experiences which have been erased. The 1987 Star Trek: The Original Series fanfiction “Demeter” by Jane Land is one example from earlier in the fanfiction tradition.42
38 Abigail Derecho, “Archontic Literature: a Definition, a History, and Several Theories of Fan Fiction,” in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, ed. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 2006), 71. 39 Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 167. 40 Busse, “In Focus: Fandom and Feminism: Gender and the Politics of Fan Production,” 106. 41 Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 23. 42 Robin Anne Reid, “‘A Room of Our Own:’ Women Writing Women in Fan and Slash Fiction” (presented at the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts, Orlando, FL, 2009). Source: http://robin-anne- reid.livejournal.com/27880.html. 29
“Demeter,” a novel-length story, imagines the Enterprise’s encounter with a lesbian separatist planetary colony. The usual protagonists - Kirk, Spock, and McCoy - must put together an all- female first-contact team (unheard-of in the show) while themselves remaining on the ship. The novel explores these women’s encounter with the feminist utopia and the subsequent re- evaluation of their lives and relationships in Starfleet. Through the medium of these female characters, Land interrogates the patriarchal nature of the Federation as we see it in the original Star Trek series. Fanfiction can, therefore, be viewed as a critical strategy which, by privileging unheard voices, emphasizes and interrogates their silence in the original text.
Many fan scholars have seen fanfiction as the successor to an older tradition of transformative, derivative or appropriative works in which the author adapts, reworks, reinterprets or otherwise engages with another work, assuming the audience’s knowledge of their source. In this tradition, much of the pleasure and interest in the new text comes from its engagement with the old. Fan scholars often refer to Greek tragedy’s adaptations of myth, the Aeneid’s reworking of Homer, the Arthurian canon, or more modern published examples such as Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Medieval literature is among the most commonly cited precursors to fanfiction. Indeed, the Wikipedia article on fanfiction cites Robert Henryson’s sixteenth-century poem The Testament of Cresseid (a sequel to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde) as “a very early form of fanfiction.”43 Amy Sturgis suggests, “one could say that the medieval authors who embellished and explored preexisting Arthurian legends were early, if not the earliest, fan fiction producers,”44 while Sheenagh Pugh begins her introduction to fanfiction with descriptions of Chrétien de Troyes and the Testament of Cresseid.45 Bacon-Smith’s Enterprising Women opens with a recitation of the disparate backgrounds of the women who participate in fandom: “housewives and librarians,
43 Wikipedia, “Fan Fiction.” 44 Amy Sturgis, “Make Mine “Movieverse”: How the Tolkien Fan Fiction Community Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Peter Jackson,” in Tolkien on Film: Essays on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, ed. Janet Brennan Croft (Mythopoeic Press, 2004), 283. 45 Pugh, The Democratic Genre, 9. 30 school-teachers and data input clerks, secretaries and professors of medieval literature.”46 Even Jenkins’ book, while not explicitly attempting to position fanfiction within the medieval tradition (he does not discuss the literary history of fanfiction), evokes it with its cover, which shows several characters from Star Trek: The Next Generation in medieval (or medievalist) dress (Fig 1.2).
Figure 1.2. Cover of Textual Poachers (1992), featuring fanart by Jean Kluge (characters featured from Star Trek: The Next Generation are, from left: Beverley Crusher, Tasha Yar, Data, and Jean-Luc Picard).
46 Bacon-Smith, Enterprising Women, 3. 31
Fanfiction scholars have also claimed the medieval ‘active reader,’ whose creativity spilled into glosses, commentaries and exegesis as part of the history of fanfiction writers.47 The popular Canadian webcomic artist Kate Beaton’s strip “Sick Manuscript, Bro” (fig. 1.3) seems to both highlight the appeal of such a history, and its amusing anachronism through the exaggeratedly ‘hip’ language the fanfiction-writing monk uses.
Figure 1.3. “Sick Manuscript Bro”. (Artist: Kate Beaton. Source: webcomic #266, www.harkavagrant.com, May 28th 2010.)
The arguments that link fanfiction with medieval literature were particularly predominant in the early stages of scholarship on fandom in the late 1980s and early 1990s; Gray, Sandvoss and Harrington’s introduction to their collection on fandom calls this, somewhat archly, the “fandom is beautiful” stage of Fan Studies.48 These comparisons with Classical literature draw attention to fanfiction’s place in a larger literary history, and also help highlight the currents of power,
47 Pugh, The Democratic Genre, 10–11; Mafalda Stasi, “The Toy Soldiers from Leeds: The Slash Palimpsest,” in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, ed. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 2006), 115-133. 48 Gray, Sandvoss, and Harrington, Fandom, 3. 32 authorship, intertextuality, and communal storytelling that exist in all these genres. However, such comparisons between fanfiction and these venerable literary traditions with great cultural cachet often go under-historicized and under-theorized, appearing largely in defense of fanfiction as a creative activity, or seeking a literary lineage of ‘high culture’ to display to a doubtful academy and public. I will stress, therefore, that I do not argue direct historical continuity between the creative practices of the Middle Ages and those of modern fan communities. To do so oversimplifies the case to such an extreme as to be meaningless, but also argues from a position of defensiveness, even embarrassment, which I deem unnecessary and detrimental to the study of fanfiction.
Fandom has a rich and well-documented recent history in the early twentieth and late nineteenth century reading communities surrounding Conan Doyle, Dickens, and other early serialized novels,49 and a strong, but largely unexplored, kinship to romance fiction - another literarily disreputable cousin - with which it shares a great many narrative tropes, focus on affect, female readership, and shared cultural marginalization. Uncritically referring to medieval or Classical literature as ‘early fanfiction’ is to ignore the significance of the context of fanfiction’s production, and the central importance of affect to both its authors and its audiences. Moreover, to argue that financial recompense and a publisher is the only difference between fanfiction and professionally published transformative works like Wide Sargasso Sea is a fundamental misrepresentation of the affective nature of fanfiction.50
Fanfiction’s primary focus on the emotional life of the source text has structured the way the genre has developed in almost every respect; this is particularly obvious on examining the apparatuses that structure online fanfiction archives, and the most common literary forms and subgenres within fanfiction. Online archives store fanfiction in ways that make them searchable to fanfiction readers, and they categorize them according to conventions that have grown up within the community. Stories are rarely categorized according to the genres conventional in publishing (such as romance, science fiction, or crime), but are categorized primarily by the type
49 Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 27. 50 Pugh, The Democratic Genre, 10–11. 33 of emotional or romantic relationships in the story. The three main categories into which authors place their stories51 are described below.
Gen
‘Gen’ is an abbreviation of the phrase ‘suitable for general audiences,’ borrowed from the American cinematic ratings system, but in a fanfiction context it usually implies that the story is not focused around romantic pairings, although gen stories often still privilege close friendships between characters. ‘Smarm,’ a subgenre of gen which was popular in the 1990s but has now almost vanished, focused on an emotionally and physically expressive relationship between a same-sex couple, often indistinguishable from a romance in its affective language and relationship arc, but without any sexual content.52 A popular fanfiction writer of ‘smarm,’ Martha, defined the genre as when “two men who love each other but who don’t happen to be lovers… are driven to touch, or speak, as intimately and gently to each other as lovers would.”53
Het
This category includes fanfiction containing or focused on heterosexual romantic pairings (often those also depicted or implied in the source text), such as Mulder/ Scully in The X-Files, Edward Cullen/Bella Swan in Twilight, Katniss/Peeta in The Hunger Games, and so forth.
51 As with print publishing, these genre categories are maintained through a combination of external and internal forces; some online archives demand that stories be sorted into a category, but even in more free-form online spaces, authors conventionally include a story’s generic categories in the story’s paratext in order to advertise the story’s contents to readers. However, inevitably many stories do not fit neatly into a single category, readers may disagree with an author on the story’s categorization, or authors may choose one of several potential categories when labelling the story in order to court a particular readership. 52 “Smarm,” Fanlore, accessed June 6, 2014, http://fanlore.org/wiki/Smarm. 53 “Cascade Library Featured Author: Martha,” Cascade Library: A Sentinel Fan Fiction Archive, 1999, http://tslibrary.skeeter63.org/featured-author/featured-author-martha.htm. 34
Slash
This category includes fanfiction containing or focused on same-sex romantic pairings, such as Kirk and Spock in Star Trek: The Original Series. These relationships are almost always, for obvious reasons, not depicted or even suggested in the source text. A few popular examples include Harry Potter/Draco Malfoy (Harry Potter series), Frodo/Sam (The Lord of the Rings), Sherlock/John (BBC’s Sherlock).
A story’s paratext also usually includes a rating of age suitability, which usually corresponds to the story’s level of sexual content; these ratings system are highly variable and idiosyncratic, with the rating usually decided upon by the author. Many archives use their own ratings system; some (such as the Archive of Our Own) distinguish between labels such as “general audiences,” “teen and up,” “mature,” and “explicit,” while many others follow the ratings system used by the Motion Picture Association of America’s rating system (G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17) or similar. It has also become common to include “warnings,” “trigger warnings,” or “content notes,” which warn for potentially upsetting content, such as rape, or the death of a major character (see fig. 1.4). 35
Figure 1.4. Screencap of paratextual frame from “Gentleman’s Relish” by Executrix on The Archive Of Our Own. (Source: http://archiveofourown.org/works/325339, accessed 29th June 2014.)
Stories are searchable by fandom (that is, by source text), and by relationship genre, but also by individual characters, so that readers may search the archive for stories starring a beloved character.
Through a detailed knowledge of a character’s actions, a fanfiction writer imagines that character’s emotional responses to situations, fleshing out events in the source text or inventing new ones.54 In this way, fanwriters draw on “points of key emotional impact in the original texts… as points of entry into the character’s larger emotional history.”55 Such a story may take the form of an exploration of the characters’ life outside the timeline of the narrative, for example, or may depict the ‘offscreen’ emotional fallout of an event, or may explore in more
54 Deborah Kaplan, “Construction of Fan Fiction Character Through Narrative,” in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, ed. Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 2006), 136-7. 55 Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 163. 36 depth a character’s relationships with other characters. The latter is particularly the case in slash fanfiction, which foregrounds the subtextual homoeroticism in television shows that are based around a male partnership. Examining the terminology used to describe genre in fanfiction shows how fan writers have developed a number of distinct narrative tools with which to explore the emotional content of texts, and have adopted and developed literary forms that are unusual outside of fandom. For example, a common literary form in fanfiction is the vignette, a short, static meditation on a character’s thoughts or feelings at a particular moment in the source text. The vignette has no action or narrative movement as such; its primary purpose is to demonstrate the author’s emotional knowledge, to share it with the reader, and to satisfy desire on both sides for communion with a beloved character. Another literary form widely adopted within fandom is the “drabble,” a hundred-word short story. These forms are ideally suited to intertextual, allusion-based literary forms such as fanfiction.
Two important fanfiction genres address themselves most closely to their source text, creating moments that fill narrative gaps in the source text. It is these genres which bear a resemblance to some forms of biblical and midrashic exegesis,56 and the devotional meditation guides I will be discussing in the next two chapters. The first is the ‘Missing Scene.’ This type of fanfiction, as the name suggests, imagines a scene that may have occurred in the narrative gaps of the source text, or ‘off camera.’ The ‘missing scene’ often sheds light on a characters’ actions and emotional state, or explains a confusing narrative jump or plot gap. For example, several pieces of fanfiction for the 2014 film Captain America: The Winter Soldier57 fill in a narrative gap in the film when Sam Wilson (aka The Falcon) explains that his mechanical wings are in a warehouse behind armed guards and barbed wire. Natasha Romanoff (The Black Widow) and Steve Rogers (Captain America) exchange a glance and say “Shouldn’t be a problem,” and in the next scene, Wilson has his wings. “Still A Stranger to the Ground”58 and “Wingthieves”59 both
56 Rachel Barenblat, “Fan Fiction and Midrash: Making Meaning,” Transformative Works and Cultures 17 (2014), http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/596/462. 57 Anthony Russo and Joe Russo, Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, 2014). 58 queerly_it_is, “Still A Stranger to the Ground,” Archive of Our Own, May 28, 2014, http://archiveofourown.org/works/1701479. 37 tell the story of the theft of Wilson’s wings, and take different approaches to building the friendship between Wilson, Romanoff, and Rogers that seems cemented in the next scene in the movie. There are a number of similar genres of fanfiction that have subtly different relationships to the narrative source text, and which have their own terminology.
A variation on the ‘missing scene’ genre that shows still another kind of imaginative engagement with the text retells scenes from the source text from a different character’s point of view; “Aral Vorkosigan’s Dog” by Philomytha, a novel-length story that explores the inner life and motivations of a character from Lois McMaster Bujold’s science fiction novel Shards of Honor. The character, Simon Illyan, is the inscrutable foil to the novel’s protagonist, Aral Vorkosigan; the action of “Aral Vorkosigan’s Dog” follows the events of Shards of Honor, including a number of ‘missing scenes’ from the novel. At several points, Philomytha retells scenes from the novel from Illya’s point of view, repeating dialogue from Bujold’s text. For example, this passage from Bujold’s Shards of Honor relates a key scene from the point of view of another character, Cordelia Naismith:
[Vorkosigan]’s lips moved silently around the shape of her name, and he entered, a sudden panic in his face almost matching her own. Then she saw he was followed by another officer, a lieutenant with brown hair and a bland puppy face. So she did not fling herself upon him and shriek into his shoulder, as she passionately wished, but said instead cautiously, “There’s been an accident.”
“Close the door, Illyan,” said Vorkosigan to the lieutenant. His features became tightly controlled as the young man came even with him. “You’re going to have to witness this with the greatest attention.”60
59 Sholio, “Wingthieves,” Archive of Our Own, May 19, 2014, http://archiveofourown.org/works/1659200. 60 Lois McMaster Bujold, Shards of Honor (London: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 119. 38
Philomytha’s story retells the same scene, elaborating on Illya’s perspective:
“There’s been an accident,” the woman said. Illyan looked at her again sharply as his whirling mind provided a name and far more information for her face than he could process at once. With an effort he pulled out the salient facts. This was the Betan woman, Commander Cordelia Naismith, whom Vorkosigan had encountered on the newly-discovered planet, whom, if the reports were to be trusted, Vorkosigan had asked to be his wife. Complications multiplied exponentially in his mind like bacteria, and it was a moment before he could respond to Vorkosigan’s request for him to close the door. He looked at Vorkosigan. His face was frozen, and even with several months of intensive practice Illyan could not discern his thoughts.
“You’re going to have to witness this with the greatest attention,” Vorkosigan said to him.61
The ‘puppy-faced lieutenant’ here gains full subjectivity as we see this crucial first meeting between Illyan and Naismith from Illyan’s perspective, his inner monologue developing both Naismith’s characterization and Illyan’s.
The second genre most often employed to fill narrative gaps is the ‘backstory,’ also sometimes called ‘pastfic’. Jenkins calls this “expanding the series timeline,” and explains further, “here the fans’ commitment to ‘emotional realism’ encourages them to expand the series’ framework to encompass moments in the characters’ past that may explain actions represented on the program.”62 For example, Altariel’s short stories “Run, Anna, Run” and “A Life Closed Twice”63 describe the events which led to the capture and imprisonment of Avon, who is already in prison at the beginning of the BBC science-fiction show Blakes 7. Altariel’s stories flesh out the bare bones of Avon’s past described in the episode “Rumours of Death” - his
61 Philomytha, “Aral Vorkosigan’s Dog,” Archive of Our Own, chap. 11, accessed November 13, 2014, http://archiveofourown.org/works/135363/chapters/199626. 62 Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 164. 63 Altariel, ‘A Life Closed Twice’, November 22, 2004, http://deadship.livejournal.com/477.html#cutid1; Altariel, ‘Run, Anna, Run’, November 22, 2004, http://deadship.livejournal.com/1264.html#cutid1. 39 betrayal by his lover Anna, a covert agent. Some pastfic imagines events in a character’s past which are only implied in the source text or are even the fanwriter’s sole invention, but may explain a character’s personality or actions. Kaneko’s “Intersections” similarly develops incidents only briefly mentioned in its source text (the television show Stargate: Atlantis) into two fully-detailed narratives of the childhoods of Lt. John Sheppard and Dr. Rodney McKay.64 “Intersections” suggests parallels and common points between the paths that led McKay and Sheppard to Antarctica, where we meet them in the pilot episode. These points of emotional intersection also provide the basis for their friendship and (in the story) their romance, as well as suggesting reasons for joining the show’s intergalactic expedition that are far deeper and more complex than those described on the show.
Other genres of fanfiction diverge from the source text’s narrative, and imagine the characters’ responses to new situations. These stories imagine scenarios that demand extreme affective responses, allowing the author and reader to develop the characters’ inner lives extensively. ‘Hurt/Comfort’ (often abbreviated to ‘H/C’) is the principle of these genres. Its popularity, controversy and long history are testified by the long article dedicated to it on the fan-run wiki Fanlore, which states that it “involves the physical pain or emotional distress of one character, who is cared for by another character. The injury, sickness or other kind of hurt allows an exploration of the characters and their relationship.”65 The extreme circumstances into which characters are thrown in hurt/comfort stories - often serious injury, abduction, imprisonment, or abuse - provide a narrative opportunity for male characters to show or discover emotions that would not normally be permissible, hence the genre’s enduring popularity as a slash romance genre. For Jenkins, hurt/comfort fics “cut to the heart of our culture’s patriarchal conception of the hero as a man of emotional constraint and personal autonomy, a man in control of all situations.”66 These stories offer an emotional payoff for the reader in the characters’ eventual comfort and healing, which is sometimes, but not always, twinned with a romantic resolution.
64 Kaneko, “Intersections,” November 14, 2009, http://archiveofourown.org/works/7123. 65 “Hurt/Comfort,” http://fanlore.org/wiki/Hurtcomfort. Accessed March 16 2015. 66 Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 174. 40
However, the ‘hurt’ in H/C is far from a dramatic convenience, but itself is an object of many readers’ desire. H/C stories dwell on their (almost always male) protagonist’s vulnerability, pain, fear and helplessness, and many hurt/comfort readers profess taking pleasure not only in the resolution of these stories, but in the characters’ suffering and anguish; a subgenre of Hurt/Comfort in the Blakes 7 fandom was known by the acronym BUARA, Beat Up And Rape Avon. An important early book on zine fandom, Enterprising Women, devotes an entire chapter to the genre, Bacon-Smith’s most controversial and soul-searching (Bacon-Smith herself was deeply disturbed by the popularity of stories in which the protagonist is raped, and was open about her discomfort). Fanfiction scholars have posited several psychological explanations for the popularity of hurt/comfort which I will not dwell on here, including what Cicioni calls this “the eroticization of nurturance,” and the importance of H/C as a therapeutic tool, with which writers may work through their own experiences of abuse.67 However, suffice to say that the popularity of this genre suggests that depictions of intense emotional experience lend themselves to affective reading, and that the extremes of torture and nurture can create spaces of affective connection or intimacy between reader and character, as well as between character and character, in texts.
Many other common genres of fanfiction also serve to highlight the emotional intimacy between reader and character. The ‘alternate universe,’ or ‘AU’ (which Jenkins calls “Character Dislocation”) removes the characters from their canonical setting, telling a completely different story about them in which the story’s success as fanfiction relies not only on the story’s plot and setting, but on the believable portrayal of a familiar character in this new setting. Salieri’s “Real Boys,” an AU fanfiction for the show Due South, displaces the two main characters of the show, a officer of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and a Chicago police detective, into a dystopic, futuristic world where Benton Fraser (the RCMP officer) is a robot. In Helenish’s “Patience, A Steady Hand,” two of the characters from the film Inception (a 2010 science-fiction thriller, dir. Christopher Nolan), are a Viking warrior and a captured Saxon slave in medieval Scandinavia. Unlike the previous example, this story incorporates no plot elements from Inception, but rather
67 Mirna Cicioni, “Male Pair-Bonds and Female Desire in Fan Slash Writing,” in Theorizing Fandom: Fans, Subculture, and Identity, ed. Cheryl Harris and Alison Alexander (Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press, 1998), 162– 4. 41 follows a fairly conventional romance plot with a medieval setting.68 ‘Crossovers’, another popular genre, bring together characters from different source texts - different fictional ‘universes’ - and often narrate the consequences of their encounters. Others bring together characters from different texts who share the same profession, era, or milieu, as in fanfiction for the multi-source ‘Age of Sail’ fandom, which is devoted to naval adventure fiction set in the Napoleonic era. For example, in “Shore Leave,” Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey, C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower, Bernard Cornwell’s Richard Sharpe, and Pirates of the Caribbean’s Jack Sparrow meet for an orgy in a discreet London club.69 In crossover stories, like AUs, the author’s skill is displayed in their ability to take a character, from their personality and backstory to (in the case of a character portrayed by an actor) their body language and verbal delivery, and replicate and develop him or her in a new context, still recognisable to other devoted and expert readers.
Perhaps the most notorious genre of fanfiction more literally allows the reader to impose their own desires on the text. The theorization and scholarship on this genre of fanfiction is particularly productive for studying the mechanisms of desire for a text. ‘Mary Sue’ fanfiction, named for the character in Paula Smith’s 1974 “A Trekkie’s Tale,” is extremely controversial, even reviled within fandom.70 Smith’s original story lampoons what she saw as low-quality, thinly disguised wish-fulfillment fanfiction starring original female characters. Smith said in an interview later:
You could see that every Trek zine at the time had a main story about this adolescent girl who is the youngest yeoman or lieutenant or captain ever in Starfleet. She makes her way onto the
68 Helenish, “Patience, a Steady Hand,” Archive of Our Own, March 13, 2011, http://archiveofourown.org/works/170021?show_comments=true#comment_212896. 69 damned_colonial, commodorified, and ladybretagne, “Shore Leave,” April 26, 2004, http://damned- colonial.dreamwidth.org/355629.html. 70 Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 171–3. 42
Enterprise and the entire crew falls in love with her... The stories read like they were written about half an hour before the zine was printed; they were generally not very good.71
Smith’s story is short, and worth including in its entirety:
“Gee, golly, gosh, gloriosky,” thought Mary Sue as she stepped on the bridge of the Enterprise. “Here I am, the youngest lieutenant in the fleet - only fifteen and a half years old.” Captain Kirk came up to her.
“Oh, Lieutenant, I love you madly. Will you come to bed with me?”
“Captain! I am not that kind of girl!”
“You’re right, and I respect you for it. Here, take over the ship for a minute while I go get some coffee for us.”
Mr. Spock came onto the bridge. “What are you doing in the command seat, Lieutenant?”
“The Captain told me to.”
“Flawlessly logical. I admire your mind.”
Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy and Mr. Scott beamed down with Lt. Mary Sue to Rigel XXXVII. They were attacked by green androids and thrown into prison. In a moment of weakness Lt. Mary Sue revealed to Mr. Spock that she too was half Vulcan. Recovering quickly, she sprung the lock with her hairpin and they all got away back to the ship. But back on board, Dr. McCoy and Lt. Mary Sue found out that the men who had beamed down were seriously stricken by the jumping cold robbies, Mary Sue less so. While the four officers languished in Sick Bay, Lt. Mary
71 Quoted in Pugh, The Democratic Genre, 85. 43
Sue ran the ship, and ran it so well she received the Nobel Peace Prize, the Vulcan Order of Gallantry and the Tralfamadorian Order of Good Guyhood.
However the disease finally got to her and she fell fatally ill. In the Sick Bay as she breathed her last, she was surrounded by Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy, and Mr. Scott, all weeping unashamedly at the loss of her beautiful youth and youthful beauty, intelligence, capability and all around niceness. Even to this day her birthday is a national holiday of the Enterprise.72
In the stories Smith parodies, an idealized original female character (usually very obviously a wish-fulfilling avatar of the story’s author, sometimes even sharing her name), enters the source- text world as a character in her own right. The wish-fulfilling elements may extend to her exaggerated perfection (one online essay describes the typical Mary Sue as a “violet-eyed, ivory- skinned, silky-haired, telepathic concert pianist”73) or her equally exaggerated importance within the world of the text (“the youngest lieutenant in the fleet”). A Mary Sue therefore exists, in Ika Willis’ words, at “the crossing point between self-insertion and idealization.”74 However, as Pat Pflieger attests in her essay on the development of the Mary Sue, the classic Mary Sue’s most distinguishing feature is the special intimacies she develops with the other characters.75
The Mary Sue is, I will suggest, an anthropomorphic representation of immature reading. The association of fandom and immaturity not only permeates representation of fans and fanfiction in the popular media, but also permeates Fan Studies and Media Studies scholarship; indeed, the critical impulse of Fan Studies scholars to legitimize fanfiction by linking it to
72 This short story first appeared in the zine Menagerie #2 (1973), ed. Paula Smith and Sharon Ferraro. 73 Firerose, “Who’s Afraid of the Mary Sue? In Defense of OCs,” September 22, 2002, http://www.viragene.com/OCs.htm. 74 Ika Willis, “‘Writers Who Put Themselves In The Story’: Dante Alighieri, Roland Barthes, Lieutenant Mary- Sue and Me” (presented at "Desiring the Text, Touching the Past: Towards an Erotics of Reception," University of Bristol, 2010), 2. 75 Pat Pflieger, “Too Good to Be True: 150 Years of Mary Sue,” March 31, 1999, http://www.merrycoz.org/papers/MARYSUE.HTM. 44 canonical literary texts from the past is an attempt to recuperate fanfiction’s reputation as comprised of the kind of immature reading that Mary Sue fanfiction represents. The association of fandom with immaturity is also evident in the enduring fascination of the popular media with the fannish obsession of teenage girls for male celebrities, most recently directed at teenage fans of Stephanie Meyer’s book and movie series Twilight, while media representations of older fans frequently suggest arrested development, a failure to move out of adolescence. The stereotype is of people financially reliant on their parents, unable to find or sustain a romantic relationship, playing games and occupying fantasy worlds instead of leaving behind their childish things and entering the ‘real’, adult world. The notorious William Shatner ‘Get A Life’ sketch, in which the actor lampooned his fans on the American comedy show Saturday Night Live, also harps on his fans’ failures to ‘grow up.’ The Trek star exasperatedly asks one fan, “you, there, have you ever kissed a girl?” Henry Jenkins’ analysis of this SNL sketch summarizes the popular narratives about fans that it contains. According to this sketch, fans:
a) [are] brainless consumers who will buy anything associated with the program or its cast b) devote their lives to the cultivation of worthless knowledge[...] c) place inappropriate importance on devalued cultural material [..] d) are social misfits who have become so obsessed with the show that it forecloses other types of social experience[...] e) are feminized and/or desexualized through their intimate engagement with mass culture[...] f) are infantile, emotionally and intellectually immature [...] g) are unable to separate fantasy from reality [...]76
76 Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 10. 45
In the popular media, Jenkins concludes, fans are “childish adults.” However, even as Jenkins defends fannish imaginative investment in a cult object, he explains it in terms of child’s play, criticizing Adorno’s denigration of fannish consumerism with his own reading of The Velveteen Rabbit.77 Matt Hills follows Jenkins by drawing on Adorno’s short essay on child’s play and toys in his Minima Moralia; here, Hills uses Adorno’s own essay to criticize the psychoanalytic theory that cult fandom represents a failure to let go of ‘transitional objects’ - a theory which suggests that fandom is a symptom of incomplete psychological development.78 Although these two arguments are ostensibly about the legitimacy and ‘adulthood’ of fandom, neither of these arguments examine their choice to argue this through the medium of child’s play. Likewise, Pugh opens her introduction to fandom, The Democratic Genre, with a description of her own Robin Hood ‘fanfiction,’ developed while playing with her children.
Many descriptions of fanfiction in the popular media which aim to introduce the phenomenon to a wider public reiterate the relationship between fanfiction and immaturity by characterizing fanfiction writers as predominantly young. The difficulty of accurate data- gathering on the demographics of fandom makes the factuality of this statement hard to assess, but common sense dictates that since the requirements for participation in fandom are internet literacy and a certain amount of free time (qualifications met by more people under the age of twenty-five than above), young people may well make up a substantial portion of participants in many fan communities. Many, of course, leave fandom in response to the growing pressures, responsibilities and constraints of adulthood. But many do not, and numerous women who became fans in their teens are now still participating in their forties, fifties, and sixties.
Supporters of fanfiction, including many in the growing ranks of published authors who cut their teeth in fandom, have reframed association between fanfiction and immaturity as positive, suggesting that fandom provides an ideal environment for beginning writers who are learning their craft. The writing website Fuelyourwriting.com recommends that writers try fanfiction: “Perhaps you’re not looking to write the next literary bestseller and you just wish to
77 Ibid., 50–52. 78 Matt Hills, Fan Cultures (New York: Routledge, 2002), 96–99. 46 practice your writing? Or maybe you want to blow off steam without worrying about word counts and works in progress? Or possibly just in need of a warm-up exercise before you launch into that tricky chapter in your latest work? In all three scenarios I think fanfic is useful.”79 This argument assumes, however, that fanfiction is something one must grow out of in order for it to be positive.
I have suggested that fandom and immaturity are inseparably linked both in the popular media and in scholarship on fanfiction; I have also suggested that establishing a historical link to a medieval literary tradition is a major part of the legitimizing strategies of early Fan Studies scholarship. Moreover, although Bacon-Smith’s overview of the fanfiction demographic - “housewives and librarians, school-teachers and data input clerks, secretaries and professors of medieval literature” - uses the professional medievalist as convenient rhetorical tool to demonstrate the sheer variety of occupations of fanwriters, it seems likely that she was thinking of an actual medievalist of her acquaintance to choose such an unusual profession. As I suggested previously, there is a large overlap between fans and medievalists.
As well as hosting the largest annual Medieval Studies conference in North America, Kalamazoo, Michigan also holds an important place in the history of the Mary Sue. From 1974-7 it played host to a number of important Star Trek conventions, including SeKWester*Con (1976) and SeKWester*Con, Too (1977). These were the first fan-only Star Trek fandom conventions in North America, landmark moments in the reconceptualization of fan conventions from spaces for meetings between fans and creators (such as actors, producers, scriptwriters, authors), to spaces for fans to meet each other and exchange fanworks. These conventions also refused the hierarchy that put show producers and actors above fans by putting fan output and critique at the centre of the convention. One of the organizers, Sharon Ferraro, writes of their decision to organize this convention:
79 Robert Smedley, ‘Fan-Fiction: Worth a Writer’s Time? | Fuel Your Writing’, November 30, 2012, http://www.fuelyourwriting.com/fan-fiction-worth-a-writers-time/. 47
We could not afford the “stars” and we realized that a lot of fans were in love with the Star Trek universe and were not necessarily groupies for the actors. The actors were merely that – actors in a fascinating universe. We wanted to peek behind the scenes, to explore the Federation of Planets and the infinite diversity in infinite combinations… the fan panels were captivating. Shatner and Nimoy could not explore the intricacies of their relationship the way the fans did. And the contact high was great. Back then of course, most fan contact was through mail – so it was very exciting to put a face to a name and discuss the issues that fascinated us without waiting a week or more for a response. 80
Sharon Ferraro was then an undergraduate student in history at the University of Western Michigan, which had been hosting the ICMS since 1963. Her co-organizer, Paula Smith - also an undergraduate student - was the author of the first piece of Star Trek fanfiction to coin the term ‘Mary Sue.’ Kalamazoo is thus, in a sense, the home of the Mary Sue.
The following chapters explore what it means for medievalists to share space, both conceptual (as in Bacon-Smith’s list) and physical (as at the Kalamazoo conference), with fans. They also discuss the implications of the divide Ferraro describes between the ‘authorized’ readers (such as Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner) and the fannish readers, and the consequences of imagining a space which privileges this fannish discourse, and finds it, in fact, more authoritative.
80 Sharon Ferraro, personal correspondence, November 19, 2014. My thanks to Sharon Ferraro for her generosity in answering my questions and permitting me to reproduce her words here. 48
2 Towards A Fannish Hermeneutics
This chapter will sketch out in more detail the idea of a ‘fannish hermeneutics’, and its appearance in modern fanfiction and late medieval religious thought as a particular way of coming to know a text through love, emotional engagement, labour of the imagination, and ‘active reading.’ Empathy - Person A’s compassionate (literally, suffering together) experience of feelings that they imagine Person B to be feeling - is a central technology of this hermeneutic as I envisage it.
2.1 The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Late Medieval Affective Piety
In his important study of the role of empathy in Christian mysticism, Morrison points to the recurrence of the statement or idea ‘I am you’ as a “signature” of this hermeneutic tradition. This idea occurs in a number of texts in the late medieval affective piety canon; for Richard Rolle, love is “the transforming of the desire into the loved thing itself,” that is, love enables emulation of Christ and an eventual spiritual transformation.81 In Morrison’s model of the way this hermeneutic works in these medieval texts, the stimulation of emotional states in readers that correspond with the people they are reading about creates a ‘partial common identity,’ a place in which in some sense the identities of the reader and the object of their empathy overlap. This overlap gives the reader a way of knowing their subject through emotion rather than through reason. Empathy - shared feelings - becomes a way to leap the ‘hermeneutic gap’ (that is, the gap of understanding between two people, here Christ and the believer).
81 Richard Rolle, The Fire of Love, ed. Richard Misyn, vol. 106, Early English Text Society (London, 1896), bk. I.18, 32. 49
For empathy to be the cornerstone of a hermeneutical practice, theologically complex ideas must be reimagined as concrete moments of heightened emotion and physicality; the focus on the Passion of Christ achieves this.82 Important texts in this tradition include Aelred of Rievaulx’s twelfth-century De institutione inclusarum, the thirteenth-century Ancrene Wisse, and particularly the widely circulated Meditationes vitae Christi, composed in the early to mid- fourteenth century and attributed to St. Bonaventure, but probably written by the Franciscan preacher Johannes de Caulibus for a nun at the convent of San Gimignano.83 These texts provide material for the reader’s imagination by describing in detail the physical and mental sufferings of Christ; the reader then cultivates these feelings in herself, so as to better understand them. In the Song of Songs-inspired language of late medieval affective piety, the desire to understand the textual subject becomes amatory, even erotic. Bernard of Clairvaux’s influential sermons on the Song of Songs dwell on the kiss between the Bridegroom (Christ) and the Bride (the soul who would be saved) as a symbol of their perfect union: “his living, active word is to me a kiss, not indeed an adhering of the lips that can sometimes belie a union of hearts.”84 Bernard is careful to distinguish this allegorical kiss from a literal one, but nonetheless, the erotic language of the Song of Songs infuses the way he and his later followers speak of their relationships with Christ.
These late medieval meditational guides suggested that the reader (often imagined to be a woman) imagine herself as an observer of, or even a participant in the text’s events, physically present in the time and place of its action. Thomas of Celano’s account of the first Christmas nativity scene in his first Life of St. Francis (completed between 1229-1230) stresses the importance that Francis of Assisi gave to the use of images and visualization as emotional triggers: “I wish to do something that will recall to memory the little Child who was born in Bethlehem and set before our bodily eyes in some way the inconveniences of his infant
82 Karl Frederick. Morrison, I Am You: The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Western Literature, Theology, and Art (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), 10–11. 83 The authorship of this text is still so in doubt, and the Bonaventure attribution so important to its tradition, that I shall follow recent scholars in referring to this text as 'Pseudo-Bonaventuran'; cf. Sarah McNamer's proposal in her 2009 Speculum article that Johannes de Caulibus (or someone else) extensively revised an earlier, anonymous text (possibly by a nun) in Italian and translated it into Latin. 84 Sermon II, Killian Walsh, The Works of Bernard of Clairvaux. Volume II: Song of Songs I (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Cistercian Publications, 1979), 8. 50 needs....”85 A vibrant tradition developed texts which described scenes from the Gospels in graphic and multisensory detail, enabling worshippers to construct, occupy, and experience intense re-enactments of Christ’s life in their minds. Worshippers used these imaginative meditations to generate in themselves intense love, grief, humiliation, and other spiritually beneficial emotions.86 These descriptive texts took their place alongside similar aids in other media, such as paintings, manuscript illustrations, plays, and the Jesus dolls some medieval female religious used as aids to worship.87
This affective spiritual style was particularly associated with women and femininity, partly because of the emphasis it put on Mary’s physical and spiritual guidance of Jesus, but also because in medieval thought, a strong affective sensibility and an imagination rooted in physicality were thought more suitable for women. Many of the most influential texts in the tradition are either letters of instruction to women by their male confessors, accounts of the lives and acts of female mystics by their male followers, or spiritual works by prominent female mystics such as Julian of Norwich, Bridget of Sweden, and Catharine of Siena. In De institutione inclusarum, Aelred of Rievaulx describes for his sister, a religious recluse, the kind of imaginative, affective meditations she should adopt.88 The Ancrene Wisse, a thirteenth-century
85 Thomas of Celano, St Francis of Assisi: First and Second Lives of St Francis, with Selections from Treatise on the Miracles of Blessed Francis, ed. Placid Hermann O.F.M. (Chicago, Illinois: Franciscan Herald Press, 1963), XXX.84. 86 McNamer, ‘The Origins of the Meditationes Vitae Christi’, 12.
87 For example, Margaretha Ebner (d. 1351), a Dominican nun in monastery of Maria Mödingen, had her own Christ-child figure which she embraced, cared for, swaddled, and rocked to sleep. See Rosemary Drage Hale, “Rocking the Cradle: Margaretha Ebner (Be)Holds the Divine,” in Performance and Transformation: New Approaches to Late Medieval Spirituality (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), 211–39. 88 Sarah McNamer gives some other early examples of meditations on the Passion written for/by women: The Libellus by John of Fécamp (c.1060) for Agnes of Poitou and an unknown nun; Anselm's impassioned prayers written to the recluse Adelaide, c.1081; the Prayers and Meditations to Matilda of Tuscany in 1104; the Liber confortatorius, for Eve of Wilton by Goscelin, c. 1080; The wooing of Our Lord, and St. Bonaventure’s On the Perfection of Life, Addressed to Sisters, for a convent of Poor Clares; also the Passion lyrics of Richard Rolle in the Ego Dormio, possibly for the recluse Margaret Kirkby, and one of the long prose Meditations attributed to him. Sarah McNamer, ‘The Origins of the Meditationes Vitae Christi,” Speculum, no. 84 (2009), 60. 51
English set of guidelines for anchoresses,89 develops Aelred’s romantic imagery even further,90 at one point encouraging its readers to imagine Christ as a knight from a romance91 and to keep themselves pure so as to be worthy of marriage to him.
This devotional practice also went hand in hand with the tradition of Brautmystik (‘bridal mysticism’), that is, the use of erotic imagery from the Song of Songs which cast Christ and believer in the roles of Bridegroom and Bride,92 through which male or female readers might take on a feminine reading persona to “pursue a heterosexual love affair with their God.”93 Some have argued that there was a two-way dialogue of influence between Brautmystik texts and contemporary romance; Newman argues that several influential Northern European Beguines drew on the language of love discourse from romances - the fin’ amour - to describe their relations with God in their visionary revelations.94
Many of the female mystics who developed this tradition through their acts and writings in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries thoroughly adopted this erotic language, at times coming far too close to literal marriage with Christ for the comfort of their critics. Angela of Foligno, in her great, formative vision on the road to Assisi in 1291, heard Christ call her, “my daughter and my sweet spouse,” and assure her, “I love you so much more than any other woman
89 In the late medieval context, ‘anchorite’ or ‘anchoress’ means a religious recluse, often living in a cell or house attached to a church, and often supervised by a particular priest or monk as confessor, but not living in a community bound to a particular monastic Rule. Such people often lived in urban centres and could have great spiritual authority. 90 Linda Georgianna, The Solitary Self: Individuality in the Ancrene Wisse (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 37–50. 91 The Ancrene Riwle (the Corpus Ms.: Ancrene Wisse) (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1956), 172–3. 92 Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 141. 93 Barbara Newman, “La Mystique Courtoise: Thirteenth-Century Beguines and the Art of Love,” in From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 138. 94 Newman, “La Mystique Courtoise: Thirteenth-Century Beguines and the Art of Love”; Jocelyn Wogan- Browne, “The Virgin’s Tale,” in Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature: The Wife of Bath and All Her Sect, ed. Ruth Evans and Lesley Johnson (London: Routledge, 1994), 165–94. 52 in the valley of Spoleto.”95 He also gives her an engagement ring, telling her, “You are holding the ring of my love. From now on you are engaged to me and you will never leave me.”96 The account of Bridget of Sweden’s visions and teachings between her widowhood in the 1340s to her death in 1373 recounts Christ informing her that he has a claim on her now that her husband has died and telling her, “In return for this great love of yours, it is only fitting that I should provide for you. Therefore I take you as my bride for my own pleasure, the kind that is appropriate for God to have with a chaste soul.”97 Many other mystics, including Margery Kempe, experienced contact with Christ that was framed in romantic or religious language, recalling or explicitly referring to the mystical marriage of St. Catherine of Alexandria to Christ.
Other genres of medieval text, such as hagiography, or revelation texts, include detailed accounts of visions which also can serve as inspirations for this kind of imaginative meditation. For example, the Book of Angela of Foligno describes how, at the elevation of the Host at Mass, she sees the crucified Christ before her in gruesome detail:
Sanguis apparebat sic recens et rubicundus per vulnera effluens ac si tunc immediate de recentibus vulneribus fuisset effusus. Tuncque etiam apparebat in iuncturis omnibus illius enedicti corporis tanta dissolutio compaginis et unionis membrorum ex dira protensione et tractura horribili virgineorum membrorum ab illis homicidis manibus perfidorum super patibulum crucis, quod nervi et iuncturae ossium illius sacratissimi corporis videbantur omnino laxati a debita harmonia iuncturae; nulla tamen apparebat in pelle continuitatis solutio.
95 Et incoepit dicere: Filia mea, dulcis mihi, filia mea, delectum meum, templum meum, filia, delectum meum, ama me, quia tu es multum amata a me, multum plus quam tu ames me. Et saepissimum dicebat: Filia et sponsa dulcis mihi. Et dixit: Ego diligo te plus quam aliquam quae sit in valle Spoletina. Il Libro, Memoriale iii.43-46; Angela of Foligno, Complete Works, trans. Paul Lachance (New York: Paulist Press, 1993), 140. 96 Et dixerat mihi: Tu habes anulum mei amoris et es arrata a me et de cetero non discedes a me. Il Libro, Memoriale iii.152-153; Ibid., 143. 97 Bridget of Sweden, The Revelations of St. Birgitta of Sweden, Volume 1, Liber Caelestis, Books I-III, trans. Denis Searby (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), bk. I, 2. 53
His blood flowed fresh and crimson as if the wounds had just recently been opened. Then she saw how the joints and tendons of his blessed body were torn and distended by the cruel stretching and pulling of his virginal limbs at the hands of those who had set upon him to kill him at the cross. The bones and sinews of his most holy body seemed completely torn out of their natural position, and yet his skin was not broken.98
Angela experiences this moment as intense identification with Christ himself, and she even feels his death pangs so that “it seemed to her that she was totally transformed in spirit and body into the pain of the cross.” On another occasion, at the feast of the Purification, she sees Mary walk into the church in which she is praying carrying her baby child; she places the naked boy in Angela’s arms, and Angela is overwhelmed with love.99 In one of the many auditory visions recounted in the Revelations of Bridget of Sweden, another important female mystic, the Virgin Mary describes to Bridget the pain she felt at her son’s crucifixion in terms that also encourage identification:
It felt like his limbs were my own limbs and heart... When something is half outside and half inside and the part outside gets hurt, the part inside feels a similar pain. In the same way, when my Son was being scourged and wounded, it was as though my own heart was being scourged and wounded. I was the person closest to him at his passion and was never separated from him. I was standing near his cross and, as that which is closest to the heart hurts the worst, so the pain was worse for me than for the others.... I can therefore boldly say that his pain was my pain and his heart my heart.100
98 Angela of Foligno, Complete Works, trans. Paul Lachance (New York: Paulist Press, 1993), 245; For Latin text, see Ludger Thier O.F.M. and Abele Calufetti O.F.M., eds., Il Libro Della Beata Angela Da Foligno: Edizione Critica (Rome: Editiones Collegii S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas, 1985) Instructio IV (a), l. 41-50. 99 Lachance, 273; Instructio xix, l.12-27 100 Bridget of Sweden, The Revelations of St. Birgitta of Sweden, Volume 1, Liber Caelestis, Books I-III, bk. I, 35. 54
Bridget’s detailed descriptions of biblical scenes influenced contemporary artists’ depictions, which themselves also were used as guides to meditation. The common appearance in medieval art of an anomalous figure in clerical dress, often identified as the artist’s patron or sponsor, kneeling at the side of the Nativity or Crucifixion and looking up at the scene in a prayerful attitude, is a testament to both the practice of meditation on biblical scenes, but also the extent to which devotees were encouraged to imagine themselves present in the scene, fully immersed and vividly present.
The feminist revisionary readings of affective piety in the last thirty years, led by Caroline Walker Bynum, have focused on the role of women in the affective piety movement, and the extent to which this was externally imposed by the male clerical establishment, or adopted by women themselves as a form of spirituality. Bynum argues that with the increasing institutionalization of theological learning in all-male universities, and the concentration of authority over convents and monasteries in male hands, affective devotion gave women access to religious authority, and also enabled them to reclaim ‘feminine’ carnality (often used to derogate women’s capacity for abstract thought) as a powerful spiritual hermeneutic which gave them special imaginative access to the experiences of the incarnate Christ. Thus “to women, the notion of the female as flesh became an argument for women’s imitatio Christi through physicality.”101 Likewise, Lochrie has argued that Margery Kempe’s intensely embodied spiritual practices, particularly her weeping and roaring, were both recognisable and authoritative to her followers in the context of the affective piety of medieval holy women: “Her method of reading depends upon the feelings of compassion, humility, and sorrow, rather than upon privileged access to the Text of Scripture protected by the medieval institution of the church.... In effect, she displaces the secret text of ecclesiastical culture with her own bodily reading of Christ’s Passion.”102
101 Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 263. 102 Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 196. 55
This focus on the role of women in the movement has shaped the approach to the language used in medieval texts to describe affective meditation; scholars have focused on the gendered elements of the language above all. I would add that the language of immaturity and childishness is just as, if not more, prominent. It is also important to note that most of the accounts of the visions and lives of female mystics were authored by men. It is possible that men interested in affective piety found assuming femininity in their imaginative meditation a useful exercise in humility, their identification with feminine corporeality and vulnerability itself a meditative aid to identification with Christ.103 The femininity of the reader of affective piety should not be assumed to match their gender, therefore, but can also be a more symbolic subject position to which a set of attributes associated with the feminine - passivity, malleability, vulnerability - could be assumed, performed, and explored. Likewise, although many of these texts could have been read by actual novices or lay ‘beginners,’ it is clear that most were in very limited circulation and unlikely to fall into the hands of such people; rather, the figure of the child could be a humble subject position from which to approach Christ.
Recent research into classroom and educational tracts suggest that identifying with characters (or historical figures) in texts was intrinsic to the Classical rhetorical tradition, and was long used in classroom exercises. Teachers tasked students to give a speech as if they were a historical or fictional figures at a crucial moment (often one of high emotion), imagining themselves in their places and experiencing their emotions as a spur to greater rhetorical achievement. Augustine describes in the Confessions his deep sympathy with Dido, as a result of such engagement with the Aeneid in the classroom.104 This method of learning endured in the medieval classroom until the twelfth century and beyond in a continuous tradition. Empathy was, therefore, already established as a hermeneutic before emerging in the context on which Morrison focuses - the affective piety that became popular among those influenced by Franciscan and Carthusian thinkers such as St. Bonaventure. It is important to note that empathy
103 Ibid. 23.
104 Augustine, Confessions I.13.20-22. Marjorie Curry Woods, "Rhetoric, Gender, and the Literary Arts: Classical Speeches in the Schoolroom." New Medieval Literatures 11 (2009) 113-132; Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric and the Making of Images, 400-1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 14–16, 29. 56 for characters in situations of extreme grief, violence, or eroticism was explicitly employed as a hermeneutic tool primarily, until the twelfth century, in pedagogical situations - that is, as a tool appropriate for children.
English writers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries usually framed affective devotion as suitable for untaught spiritual beginners more than for women specifically, even as they named specific women as the recipients of their writing. The link between affective piety and women remains, relying on not only the often explicitly female audience of these texts, but also the logic linking women with children, lack of higher education, and incomplete masculine adulthood (although the language of childishness also linked affective piety with the illiterate, lay congregation). Bernard of Clairvaux, whose mystical expositions of the Song of Songs were so influential on affective piety, embedded devotion to the physical body of Christ in a schema that mapped onto the growth of a person. Focus on the humanity of Christ was an exercise meant “gradually to raise [its practitioners] to a spiritual love” from carnal love. 105 For Bernard, the development from carnal devotion to spiritual devotion was a natural, but not inevitable, process, with the worshipper gaining in control and understanding in the passage of time and with much hard work. William of St-Thierry’s Epistola Aurea also ranks low the affective reader, “the animal man, newly come to Christ… the weak spirit which is only able to think of material objects and properties.”106 Readers of affective devotional texts were often encouraged to imagine themselves as children in relation to God. This would foster feelings of love, gratitude, humility and dependence in the soul towards God; the identification with children, or the imaginative de-aging of oneself in prayer, was itself a powerful affective tool. The Monk of Farne (d.1371), in a striking visual metaphor, likened Christ’s posture on the cross to that of a mother opening her arms to a little child:
105 Walsh, The Works of Bernard of Clairvaux Volume II: Song of Songs I, 152; Nicholas Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Full Critical Edition, ed. Michael G. Sargent (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 2005), 5. 106 Letter to the Brothers of Mont-Dieu of William St Thierry, aka The Golden Epistle, in Theodore Berkeley, trans. The Works of William of St Thierry, Vol 4: The Golden Epistle (A Letter to the Brethren at Mont Dieu), Cistercian Fathers Series 12, (Spencer, MA: Cistercian Publications, 1971) pp. 68-9 57
Even so is it with mothers who love their little children tenderly; if these happen to be at a distance from then, and want to run to them quickly, they are wont to stretch out their arms and bend down their heads. Then the little ones, taught in a natural way by this gesture, run and throw themselves into their mother’s arms... Christ our lord does the same with us. he stretches out his hands to embrace us, bows down his head to kiss us, and opens his side to give us suck....107
The Ancrene Wisse compares God allowing an anchorite to be tempted to a mother teasing a beloved son:
She runs away from him and hides, and leaves him on his own, and he looks around for her, calling “Mama! Mama!” and crying a little, and then she runs out to him quickly, her arms outspread, and she puts them around him, and kisses him, and wipes his eyes. In the same way Our Lord sometimes leaves us alone for a while... .108
In a poem in John of Grimestone’s preaching book (Harley MS 3945), Christ’s crucified body is compared to an ABC primer (backed with a wooden board) for teaching children to read:
[I]n place as men may se,
Quan a chyld to scole xal set be,
A bok hym is browt,
107 Dom Hugh Farmer, OSB, ed., The Monk of Farne (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1961), 40. 108 M. B. Salu, trans., The Ancrene Riwle (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1956), 102. 58
Naylyd on a brede of tre,
(th)at man callyt an abece […]
Red letter in parchemyn
Makyþ a child good & fyn
Lettrys to loke & se.
Be þis bok men may dyuyne
Þat cristis body was ful of pyne
Þat deyid on rode tre.109
In all three of these passages, the reader is invited to assume the subject position of a child with respect to Christ, to indulge in spiritually beneficial ageplay with Christ.
In Aelred’s De institutione inclusarum, the reader is encouraged to identify with John the Evangelist, because of his closeness to Jesus, as well as Mary Magdalene and the Virgin Mary. Sarah McNamer points to John’s feminized appearance in medieval art - beardless, and with long hair - and suggests that this makes him an appropriate subject of empathy and focalization for female readers.110 Another significant aspect of John’s appearance, not stressed by McNamer, is his youthfulness. The descriptions of affective spirituality as childish, immature, or for beginners are indeed feminizing, but should not be completely subsumed by their genderedness. Moreover,
109 Frederick James Furnivall and William Michael Rossetti, eds., Political, Religious, and Love Poems: From the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Lambeth MS. No. 306 and Other Sources, Early English Text Society (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), 271 l.1-5, 12-18. 110 Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 142–3. 59 the contemporary characterisations of affective devotion as childish are reflected by the importance of Christ’s childhood - and the figure of the child more generally - in affective devotion. Understanding the importance of the infantilized figures in the breastfeeding imagery so peculiar to this movement (a typical example of which appears in the Monk of Farne’s words above) complements the focus in feminist scholarship on the feminization or femininity of the breastfeeding figure (often Mary or Christ). This childhood seems purely symbolic; although, as I have suggested, the hermeneutics of empathy had a long tradition in the schoolroom, there is no evidence that real children practiced affective devotion. Indeed, twelfth century reforms of the age of novitiates meant that children had less place in monastic life than ever before, a fact which is almost certainly not unconnected to the rise of the symbolic cachet of childhood in monastic literature.111
The role of empathy in late medieval devotional piety is not simply a way of learning, reading, or understanding, but is an embodied practice, embedded in a context of the cultural expectations of age-appropriate and gendered behaviours, and battles for spiritual authority. As a reading practice with a rich, centuries-long tradition, it allows us to see what can be at stake in privileging affect in reading, and the political, theological, sexual, and social elements of an affective hermeneutics. Affective reading, it becomes clear, occupies a dubious space between the literal and the allegorical, the physical and the spiritual.
2.2 Affect and Intimacy in Fanfiction
As I discuss in the introduction, successful fanfiction demonstrates a high level of understanding and insight into its source texts, and, as a highly allusive literary form, rewards equally high levels of knowledge of the text in its readers. This knowledge has an erotic inflection, as in some early English translations of the Bible, where to ‘know’ is to intimately penetrate; theorists of
111 Caroline Walker Bynum connects the rise of affective literature in the Cistercian order in the twelfth century, and particularly the writings of St Bernard of Clairvaux and St Aelred of Rievaulx, to the restrictions on child oblates and the emphasis on adult choice and conversion: Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages, 157. 60 fanfiction often speak of fanfiction as “filling the gaps” in a source text,112 a phrase with its own sexual undertones that also accurately describes fanfiction’s self-assumed role as interlinear glossing of a source text, reading what is ‘between the lines’ and writing it down for all to see. Silences in the source text act as barriers to both understanding and intimacy, and fanfiction writers fill these silences with their imaginative activity, enabling deeper understanding of the world and characters of the source text. I therefore proceed from the assumption that in its current context in popular media fandom, fanfiction is, among other things, a heuristic tool, a mental technology that facilitates understanding. The hermeneutics of fanfiction are, like the hermeneutics of Christian mysticism as Morrison describes them, primarily affective.
One genre of fanfiction, the ‘Mary Sue story,’ engages particularly closely with questions of authority, immaturity, and interpretation. In this genre, as described in the introduction, the author (stereotypically a teenage girl) inserts an idealized character based on herself into the universe of the source text, and writes a story about this version of herself, usually finding love with its fictional characters in a wish-fulfillment fantasy. The Mary Sue has great utility as a hermeneutic tool for a reader to develop intimacy with fictional characters, and it is on this function that I wish to focus when discussing medieval literature. However, when discussing the Mary Sue in fanfiction it is important to distinguish between the satirical figure of Paula Smith’s original parody that coined the term ‘Mary Sue’ (see introduction), and the literary trope of the ‘Mary Sue,’ or idealized self-insert character, as it emerged (and still emerges) in the ephemeral form of fanfiction.
As Ika Willis notes, the Mary Sue “emerges in the context of an attempt to define what we must not do in order to be taken seriously as readers, writers, and/or critics;”113 more specifically, she emerges from a discourse about the literary merit of different kinds of fanfiction, in which writers like Smith attempt to develop community standards for writing. As a
112 See eg. Francesca Musiani, “‘May the Journey Continue’: ‘Earth 2’ Fan Fiction, or Filling In Gaps to Revive A Canceled Series,” Transformative Works and Cultures 5 (2010), http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/206/168. 113 Willis, “‘Writers Who Put Themselves In The Story’: Dante Alighieri, Roland Barthes, Lieutenant Mary-Sue and Me,” 4. 61 result of this, unlike ‘het’ or ‘slash,’ the ‘Mary Sue’ is far more often encountered as a cautionary tale than as a self-identified genre or trope of fanfiction, and is the subject of numerous didactic essays and writing guides produced within fandom, with titles like “Psychological Masturbation: Why Mary Sue Needs to Die.”114 Supporters of the Mary Sue see it as an empowering feminist trope, a practice-run for young authors to work on the representation of positive female characters in their fiction (with the caveat that they should eventually move beyond making their lead female characters transparent versions of themselves). Many sympathetic commentators, including Bacon-Smith, have argued that the antipathy against Mary Sues within fandom effectively serves to enforce misogyny in fiction, suppressing authors who want to write strong female characters, while male characters do not face the same scrutiny for realism (it is often pointed out that most male superhero characters meet the criteria for the Mary Sue). Bacon- Smith observed a tendency of Mary Sues to die in the stories she read for her study, and suggested that this trope enforces the impossibility of women getting everything they want, even in fiction.115
However, the fan critics who bemoan the appearance of female self-insert, or authorial avatar, characters in fanfiction often focus not on the self-insertion but on the Mary Sue’s idealized perfection as what makes the trope obnoxious. This focus on the Mary Sue’s unrealistic perfection has redirected the conversation about Mary Sues in recent years towards the representation of women in fiction generally rather than towards Mary Sue fanfiction as reading practice. Many fan-writers have written feminist criticisms of earlier anti-Mary Sue essays such as Kirk’s “Mary Sue Must Die,” as I suggested above. Indeed, in some areas of fandom, Mary Sue is being reclaimed as a symbol of the powerful female fan. For example, Themarysue.com is
114 Kirk, “Psychological Masturbation - Why Mary Sue Needs to Die,” February 14, 2002, http://web.archive.org/web/20020815093817/http://www.rinpu.com/storypages/mary_sue_rant.html. 115 adventuresofcomicbookgirl, “Mary Sue, What Are You? or Why the Concept of Sue Is Sexist,” December 8, 2011, http://adventuresofcomicbookgirl.tumblr.com/post/13913540194/Mary Sue-what-are-you-or-why-the- concept-of-sue-is; Bacon-Smith, Enterprising Women, 101. 62 a news site on popular media subjects with a feminist slant, claiming to be “a guide to girl geek culture.”116
The Mary Sue, therefore, emerges from a complex context with a history almost as long as western media fandom itself. The vitriol associated with her attests to her continued power and influence in fanfiction. The defensiveness of fandom as regards her stems, I would argue, from her place at the heart of fannish reading, as her many appearances in fan’s ‘origin stories’ suggests. Mary Sue is the most extreme representation of a desire for the text so excessive that it ceases to respect the text’s boundaries; she is the instrument by which the author makes love to the text, penetrates its spaces and touches its insides. As such, she is a powerful technology for affective reading. To use Morrison’s terms, the writer of the Mary Sue story attempts to bridge the ‘hermeneutic gap’ between reader and text; she does this by creating a textual avatar through which she can enter the text herself. However, the Mary Sue’s association with childish, self- insert fantasies, and her lack of respect for the text as a distinct, sacred object, also expose fans to ridicule and censure from outside the community. This was particularly the case for Smith’s immediate context, where many women had to defend the literary merit and age-appropriateness of their affective reading activities within their marriages and families, similarly to the women interviewed by Janice Radway on popular romance in her seminal study Reading the Romance (1984). A large proportion of scholarship on fanfiction also takes part in this defensive effort to establish fanfiction’s status as ‘real literature’ by arguing its Classical and medieval literary heritage, a pretension to seriousness that the Mary Sue threatens. Her occupation of the text is so openly affective, so in violation of the commonly established conventions of modern fiction, that it is always vulnerable to the charge of being a ‘mere’ adolescent wish-fulfillment fantasy. The Mary Sue also comes dangerously close to the most common stereotype of both fannish and feminine reading: over-investment in the text such that the fan loses all sense of distinction between fiction and reality, a stereotype that appears in many fictional depictions of fans.117 The Mary Sue’s lack of respect for a text’s boundaries also threatens the hierarchy of authority which
116 This sentence was written in 2012, and the quotation taken from their website; however, in June 2014 themarysue.com changed owners, and underwent a substantial shift in its stated aims and demographic to become a much less feminist-slanted site. 117 See, for example, Dean Parisot, Galaxy Quest, 1999. 63 fandom preserves between the source text and fanfiction. Even fandom, committed to fluid textual boundaries as it is, is self-censoring when it comes to the Mary Sue’s ultimate assertion of the text’s permeability, as I will show in chapter two, partly through a process of socialization in which writers are discouraged from writing Mary Sues, and partly through the tendency for the Mary Sue to die at the end of the stories Bacon-Smith and Pflieger survey.
The Mary Sue thus becomes the focal point of the worst criticisms of fanfiction itself: invasive, disruptive, silly, embarrassingly affective, and above all, immature: an anthropomorphized hermeneutic, a way of reading embodied in the figure of a teenage girl. Indeed, this negative characterization is part of the very nature of the Mary Sue, since she is in origin a satirical figure, an agent of socialization to discourage the very practice she represents. What might it mean, then, to take the Mary Sue seriously as a hermeneutic? To do so would be to explore fannish hermeneutics more generally - the affectivity, identification, romantic or erotic investment, lack of respect for a text’s borders (manifesting in penetration, self-insertion, or invasion of the text), and above all the immaturity of this way of knowing. Where else does a fannish hermeneutics appear? And how might one use it? In the next section, I suggest a relationship between this fannish hermeneutics and the ‘queer historiography’ imagined by Carolyn Dinshaw in Getting Medieval, and argue that this comparison helps to draw out other features of both styles of reading.
2.3 Modern Fandom, Medieval Devotion
I have a history of excessive identification with historical figures. During the writing of my undergraduate thesis at Cambridge, I sat in the Department of Classics library, with its long, regimented line of bookshelves and its windows looking out at some of the less glamorous examples of Cambridge University architecture, and I read all of the letters of Cicero in chronological order. During breaks I immersed myself in the Livejournals (semi-private online diaries) of other fanfiction writers, who included a burlesque dancer from Chicago, a homemaker and church administrator who I think lived somewhere in Ohio, a Dutch schoolteacher, an Australian graduate student, and a professor of American history. Cicero’s complaints about the 64 quality of servants and the loss of a load of marble for his renovations became inseparable in my mind from the blog entries updating me on the lives of those women, which combined equally the poetic and the mundane. I have never lost that sense of connection to Cicero as distant but present, real and contemporaneous. My fandom and academic activity blurred together, and I wrote impassioned Livejournal posts about him. I felt that we could be friends.
The first time I read the Book of Margery Kempe was during my MA. I read it all in one go, for a class the next day, on the couch in the tiny Toronto apartment I shared with five other graduate students; later I wrote in my Livejournal:
One of the amazing things about the book is how shockingly familiar it all is. … You feel like you’re there, like she’s that person who’s always there when you go on trips, the crazy religious woman singing in the corner who keeps trying to catch your eye and talk to you about Jesus. I’ve seen that woman, I’ve been that person who’s found her irritating and wanted to ditch her, and yet, this book is from her point of view. And I’ve also been that woman, alone in a strange country and in a strange hostel, or in a travel terminal trying to find your ship home, with big, unfamiliar, sexually threatening men everywhere and scared, and she can’t get the right travel documents because she can’t read or write or speak the language, she has to find a man to do it for her. The most frightening thing about reading her story about being lost in Jerusalem or Rome or Germany is how little things have changed.118
Kempe tends to inspire intensely personal reactions in her readers, often a combination of irritation and admiration. Criticism of her book has overwhelmingly responded to the intensity of her thereness to which I so responded as a student, most notably in the debate over her own role in the composition of the Book; the shadowy amanuensis or amanuenses of the Book stand between the “creature” Kempe and the reader, and yet her personality is stamped across the book
118 Personal record, Nov 1st, 2007 65 in such a way that the scholar is easily seduced into a sense of personal knowledge.119 Kempe’s ability to seem present from the past also emerges from the ease with which she herself imagines slipping into moments from the past. In several extended accounts of her visions, she describes herself helping to prepare the corpse of Christ and preparing a hot drink for Mary afterwards. In Getting Medieval, Carolyn Dinshaw scrutinizes her own sense of familiarity with Kempe. Dinshaw recognizes her as a member of her own queer community, a radical crossdresser and woman out of time. Dinshaw theorizes her own identification with Kempe as itself queer, a “touch across time,” like Kempe’s with Christ, that is intensely physical. In doing so, Dinshaw draws a connection between the brand of historiography emerging from the queer theory of the 1990s, and the imaginative meditation of late medieval piety. But the embodied desire at the heart of Kempe’s meditational practice felt familiar to me in another way, and spoke to our shared membership in another transhistorical community: fandom. In recognising a shared desire between myself and Margery Kempe - the love for a text - I find a point of empathy, a shared place of identification from which to elaborate on her experiences here for another community of loving readers.
Kempe’s visions of the Passion differ from other examples of late medieval affective meditations or visions, in that Margery is fully present as a character in the events of the Gospel narrative, acting within it rather than just observing. This is most visible in her climactic Passion vision in chapters 79-81, where she clasps Jesus by the clothes and speaks with him and Mary, but it is the distinctive stamp of all her visions. Like the meditations described by Aelred of Rievaulx, Pseudo-Bonaventure, and in other guides to affective devotion, her visions elaborate on the ‘gaps’ in the Gospel text with a fannish eye, drawing out the emotionality of the scenes. She focuses particularly on the Virgin Mary’s emotional reactions (mostly “swowning”) during her son’s Passion, as an object of empathetic identification and a spur to weeping. Lochrie has described how Kempe’s excessively physical and affective devotion - her uncontrollable weeping, her fainting at the sight of images of Christ, her sexuality - draws attention to the femininity of her own religiosity and was comprehensible, even admired, within that context by
119 Lynn Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994). 66 her contemporaries, despite the Book’s own narrative of unending persecution. However, reframing Kempe’s acts as fannish shows how Kempe responds to, even flaunts their immaturity as well, and that her Book embraces loving amateurishness and resists spiritual adulthood or professionalization. Exploring the relationship between the fannish hermeneutic tool of the Mary Sue and the mystic’s self-insertion also helps to tease out the relationship between reader and text in Kempe’s Book and in the contemporary Mirror of the Blessed Life of Christ, the Carthusian Nicholas Love’s translation of the Meditationes Vitae Christi.
I have already begun to gesture towards anachronistic similarities between modern fandom and medieval affective piety, both in their reading practices - fanfiction and self-insert meditation - and in the cultural narratives surrounding their communities and practices. However, the two communities do also have a historical association. As Valerie Rohy shows in her careful deconstruction of the analogy of blackness and queerness in modern identity politics (such as in the political slogan associating the gay rights movement with the civil rights movement, “Gay is the New Black”), the two are connected not inherently, but by a shared history of this analogy, stemming from nineteenth-century evolutionary science equating sexual backwardness with racial backwardness. The basis for this original analogy is demonstrably false, but Rohy shows that the analogy itself and its effects are real, and have generated more shared experiences.120 The analogy between fandom and popular religion dates from a similar point, from the formation of fan identity and community in the readerships of serial novels in the late nineteenth century, and in 1920s Hollywood film culture - hence it has been around for almost as long as popular media fandom in its modern form.
The word ‘fan’ itself is short for ‘fanatic,’ a word with strong religious connotations.121 Descriptions of fannish desires and practices in both the media and in scholarship are shot through with imagery of popular, unintellectual, excessive religiosity; fans are frequently
120 Valerie Rohy, Anachronism and Its Others: Sexuality, Race, Temporality (Albany N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2009), chap. 1. 121 According to the OED, the first use of the word 'fan' as an abbreviation for 'fanatic' was in the late seventeenth century as 'phann' or 'fann'; however, the word 'fan' in its modern sense - as an enthusiast, a keen and regular supporter/participant of a sport or hobby - moved into common usage in the late nineteenth century in the USA in reference to sports followers, and gained currency in the 1920s Hollywood fan magazines. 67 described, and describe themselves, with religious metaphors. A 1992 article on ‘Beatlemania’ describes how the movement “reached the proportions of religious idolatry,”122 while another describes visions of the spirit of Elvis which in several cases are clearly understood as religious visitations; the Reed family, recipients of several Elvis visitations, “are sure that Elvis appeared to their daughter in the operating room and escorted her to Heaven.”123 In Fan Cultures, Matt Hills deconstructs the common term ‘cult’ to describe certain kinds of media and fandoms.124 A strand of early sociological scholarship on fandom employed methodologies and terminologies used to study religion; the the 1977 book The American Monomyth describes Star Trek fandom as “a strange, electronic religion… in the making.”125
The trend towards anthropological analysis of fandom as religion ran in tandem with criticisms of popular fandom which saw it as a phenomenon arising from increasing secularization and the spiritual emptiness of twentieth-century life.126 However, the most telling example of this analogy comes from the mid-twentieth century cultural theorist Theodor Adorno, in a passage which is formative of Henry Jenkins’ argument in Textual Poachers. Adorno expresses anxiety about the destructive process of overconsumption, and the process by which prized texts - musical pieces, in this case - are transformed from sacred artifacts into “cultural goods” by the process of mass consumption: “irrelevant consumption destroys them. Not merely do the few things played again and again wear out, like the Sistine Madonna in the bedroom, but reification affects their internal structure... the romanticizing of particulars eats away the body of
122 Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs, “Beatlemania: Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” in The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, ed. Lisa A. Lewis (London, New York: Routledge, 1992), 86. 123 Stephen Hinerman, “‘I’ll Be Here With You’: Fans, Fantasy, and the Figure of Elvis,” in The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, ed. Lisa A. Lewis (London, New York: Routledge, 1992), 125. 124 Matt Hills, Fan Cultures (New York: Routledge, 2002), ix–x 125 Robert Jewette and John Shelton Lawrence, The American Monomyth (Garden City: NY: Anchor Press, 1977), 24, 27–31; Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 12. 126 In Joli Jenson’s words, “Fandom is conceived of as a chronic attempt to compensate for a perceived personal lack of autonomy, absence of community, incomplete identity, lack of power and lack of recognition.” Joli Jenson, “Fandom as Pathology: The Consequences of Characterization” in The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, ed. Lisa A. Lewis (London, New York: Routledge, 1992), 18. 68 the whole.”127 Here, the mass production and replication of musical pieces on records leads to a subsequent openness to deconstruction and dispersal, a loss of meaning afforded not only by context but uncritical reception. For Adorno, the most appropriate comparison to the damaging effects of popular consumption on the elite texts of Classical music is the mass production of religious art - the cheap reprints of Raphael’s painting for domestic, affective, personal worship. This persistent analogy of fan cultures and popular religion will be significant later in my discussion of Arundel’s Constitutions. Fandom and certain kinds of marginalized, affective religious engagement, therefore, share not only superficial resemblances but a sort of “partial common identity,” like the empathizer and object of empathy in Morrison’s analysis - a shared quality enabling empathetic connection across time. This lays the foundation for a critical comparison between fandom and late medieval affective piety, without losing sight of their individual historical contexts.
A curious example of this persistent association of fandom and religiosity is Sarah Arthur’s devotional companions to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.128 These are beginners’ guides to Christian ethics, intended for a teenage audience (most of its hypothetical scenarios are set in American high schools or summer camp situations). Each chapter consists of a discussion of a different section of the book, and ends with a set of questions for group discussion. These books do not read Tolkien’s works as Christian allegory - indeed, Arthur distances herself from this idea, citing Tolkien’s own denial that his work is an allegory - but rather as texts containing “teachable moments” and “timeless truths.”129 For example, Arthur expounds on the scenes when Gandalf propels Bilbo on an adventure: “Frankly, if you’re not really interested in adventures, it’s wise to hide when you see Jesus coming. He has Gandalf-like tendencies that are really quite alarming. ‘Follow me,’ he says… ‘Why do you
127 Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 52; Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening’, in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gabhardt (New York: Urizen, 1978), 281. 128 Sarah Arthur, Walking With Frodo: A Devotional Journey Through the Lord of the Rings (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 2003); Sarah Arthur, Walking with Bilbo: A Devotional Journey Through The Hobbit (Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 2005). 129 Ibid., xii. 69 worry about what you will eat or what you will wear? Seek first God’s kingdom.’”130 The introduction to Walking with Bilbo makes it clear that the motivation for the books is the author’s observation of almost religious devotion to the books by its fans, and her wish to direct this love in a more appropriate direction. She describes an encounter with Lord of the Rings fans thus:
Upon noticing my arrival, they greet me in Elvish. During the course of my talk, they correct me while I’m speaking: “Well, actually Frodo was Bilbo’s first cousin once removed on his mother’s side...” and during the Q&A time, they ask questions like “Some people insist that the books never say elves have pointy ears; could you expound on that?” Yeah, I can expound on that. But that’s not all I care about. I’m pretty sure that’s not all Tolkien cared about either... but back in the 1960s, when his American fans were going loopy about hobbits and... got married in Elvish, Tolkien got a bit irritated. And no wonder Tolkien, a devout Roman Catholic who took things like the marriage ceremony seriously, referred to those fans as his “deplorable cultus.”131
Arthur ridicules the pedantry and “misplaced devotion” of Tolkien fans, but in doing so she places their reading practices in the same category as, but inferior to, biblical exegesis; she also explicitly associates fannish reading with anticlerical, unauthorized Christianities that don’t take “things like the marriage ceremony seriously.” Arthur’s response will have intriguing resemblances to clerics’ responses to Margery Kempe’s over-affective readings of the Bible, which, although theologically orthodox, smell to them of Lollardy.
Despite this history of analogy between fandom and certain kinds of religiosity, talking about medieval affective piety and modern pop culture fandom in the same breath still risks seeming like a frivolous and critically immature act. It stimulates my sense of the bizarre, the
130 Arthur, Walking with Bilbo: A Devotional Journey Through The Hobbit, 1–6. 131 Ibid., viii–ix. 70 rebellious, the frivolous - perhaps even the queer. To disown my own pleasure in performing this critical act would be to lose sight of a crucial part of my enterprise. However, the identification I feel with Kempe as one fan with another, as with any kind of identification across time, has the potential to mislead us into losing sight of our differences, the unique historical and cultural circumstances that alienate us from one other. This anxiety about misleading myself also appears in the fannish reading of medieval affective mysticism; critics of Richard Rolle’s visionary writings warned that he made himself the only judge of his feelings’ authentic sanctity, while many tests and obstacles were put in place to verify the affective meditations and imaginative visions of female mystics.132 The Ancrene Wisse warns its readers to be wary of mistaking “devils in disguise” for authentic visionary experiences of the Holy Family or saints. Such anxiety appears in the defensiveness of fans, shown above, against the criticism that they are blind to the differences between fiction and reality - that is, between their own world and those of the characters in their texts - and in the self-policing of the Mary Sue. As I shall argue in later chapters, it also appears in Petrarch’s anxiety about the legitimacy and appropriateness of his connection to the Classical writers of the past.
This doubt also appears in the decades-long scholarly debate around the dangers of anachronism in drawing analogies between modern and past experiences, most notably in the debate in the history of homosexuality, as I described in the introduction. The search for community, sameness, and identification in the past is hedged around with suspicion, doubt, and anxiety. This doubt or anxiety, the wariness of losing sight of difference in the thrill of empathetic identification, is not an obstacle to practicing fannish hermeneutics, but a tension that is both inherent and central to fannishness as a mode of reading.
132 Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004) passim, but especially 182-230. 71
2.4 Conclusion: Towards a Fannish Hermeneutics
In conclusion, here are six characteristics which may help define what I mean by a ‘fannish hermeneutics’: A focus on moments of high emotion in a text that stimulate equally strong feelings in the reader. Readerly activity that ‘fills the gaps’ in the source text, like imaginative development of ‘character backstory’; this activity is designed to increase the reader’s emotional understanding of the characters’ actions and intimacy with the character. Readerly activity within communities and identities formed around love for a text; these communities are often characterised as being both immature and feminine, although they may not actually be comprised mainly of women or young people. The community’s essentially ‘amateur’ status (defined by a lack of access to the centers of interpretive authority). Tension and anxiety over the legitimacy or ‘reality’ of the intimacy with characters or historical figures resulting from these reading practices.
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3 Visions and Supervisions
This chapter reads the differing performances of immaturity in the Book of Margery Kempe and Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ alongside the fanfiction trope of the ‘Mary Sue,’ the female reader who enters the text in a disruptive, idealized form. I use this comparison to draw out how these two medieval texts differently negotiate issues of textual authority in late medieval England after Archbishop Arundel’s attempts to suppress vernacular devotional literature. Margery Kempe, in particular, has often attracted impatience from modern scholars for her crying, inconsistency, and simplicity, while others have sought to reclaim her as a feminist figure, arguing that these are features of a ‘feminine’ spirituality. But what if we were to take seriously Kempe’s immaturity? This is not mutually exclusive with recognizing the femininity of her spirituality, but is more of a shift in attention. Children and childishness appear throughout the Book, with more frequency and unity of thought than could be explained by either Kempe’s devotion to the child Christ, or by the large number of children in her own life. By taking them as emblematic of a childish mysticism, we see how Kempe’s immature religiosity claims the temporal queerness of immaturity as a source of spiritual power, allowing her to disturb, fold over, enter and re-enter time in a way suggested, but not fully realized by the meditation manuals of Aelred, Pseudo-Bonaventure, and Nicholas Love, as I shall argue below. Kempe’s reading of the Gospels is also recognisably, yet anachronistically fannish. Reframing Kempe’s acts as fannish suggests a relationship between the external characterization of her spirituality as childish and the ways in which she transforms that childishness. This reframing also shows how Kempe embraces loving amateurishness in order to avoid accusations that she is a Lollard, and simultaneously embraces spiritual ‘childishness’ as a route to greater intimacy with Christ.
This comparison with fanfiction also helps elaborate what is at stake in Nicholas Love’s translation of the guide to imaginative meditation, the Meditationes vite Christi. I argue in this chapter for a comparison with the operations of authority and censorship within the fanfiction community to elaborate what is at stake in entering a text. I begin with an introduction to the 73
English political context at the end of the fourteenth century, which shaped the writing and reception of The Book of Margery Kempe and the Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ.
3.1 Introduction to the English context
The educational system through which most literate clerics passed created a natural narrative of growth from vernacular to Latin. Within this teleological model, texts written in the vernacular were not only non-Latin but pre-Latin, an inferior stage even for those who were not expected to progress beyond it, such as women. English affective mysticism - which Nicholas Watson has called a “vernacular theology” - thus shared in the immaturity of its language, and was continually characterized as a beginner’s mode of devotion, because of its reliance on the visual and the bodily, rather than more abstract contemplation. The carnal was to the spiritual what the vernacular was to Latin. Thus for the preacher John Grimestone, the crucified body of Christ is the instrument of early learning - the Word in human flesh becomes the ABC, the first building blocks of adult language use.
This pattern was by no means unique to the English context. Dante, a defender of the vernacular, nonetheless described it as the language of children; in De vulgari eloquentia (written c.1303), his discourse on the evolution of language and apology for the vernacular as a literary language, Dante describes the vernacular as a language learned from wet-nurses,133 while in the Inferno, the point at which language fails the poet - the very depths of hell - is the point at which Dante returns to this description of the vernacular, “The language which calls mama and papa.”134 Likewise, in Chapter Two of the Italian mystic Angela of Foligno’s Memorial, her scribe recounts an episode which makes the voice of the mystic literally that of a child. Angela’s confessor and amanuensis, forbidden from visiting her by his superiors, uses a young boy, a
133 “quod vulgarem locutionem appellamus eam qua infantes assuefiunt ab assistentibus cum primitus distinguere voces incipiunt; vel, quod brevius dici potest, vulgarem locutionem asserimus quam sine omni regula nutricem imitantes accipimus.” Dante Aligheri, De Vulgare Eloquentia I.i, ed. Steven Botterill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
134 “da lingua che chiami mamma o babbo” Inferno XXXII.9. 74
“puer parvulus” (perhaps a novice) as an intermediary. The child’s Italian shorthand is not up to the task of transcribing Angela’s visionary account, and when the scribe reads the transcription to Angela later, she says he should destroy it rather than translate it into Latin in such a state. However, he ignores her. In the text following this account there is no demarcation of the end of the boy’s transcription, so that Angela’s and the boy’s voice blur together. The incorporation of the child’s inferior transcription, “valde diminute et male scripta” (“very degraded and badly written”) suggests that any part of Angela’s teachings is better than none.135 However, this episode also suggests the interchangeability of Angela’s speech with childish speech.
The episode of the child amanuensis is also one of many points at which Angela’s text raises the problematic question of translation, both of ineffable experience into any language and of Italian speech into Latin text. Angela continuously emphasizes to the scribe the inadequacy of speech to express what she has seen, and his awareness of the difficulties of translation heightens this anxiety about accuracy. The scribe has been translating Angela’s regional Italian directly into Latin, a rite of passage through which most female mystics’ words went in order to reach the respectability and increased circulation of the Latinate religious community. Underlying this anecdote is the contemporary characterization of the vernacular itself as the language of children and the unlearned, inferior to Latin for the expression of theological truths.
Angela of Foligno’s thought emerged from the Franciscan tradition of imaginative meditation that was developing a highly corporeal, highly affective style of devotion in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. From this context also emerged Meditationes vitae Christi in the early fourteenth century.136 This immensely popular text circulated throughout Europe, and
135 The Latin of this passage reads: “Ista revelatio Dominicae passionis quae scribenda est hic in principio istius quinti passus divinae unitionis et amoris, mea procuratione factum fuit, ut primo scriberetur a quodam puero parvulo vulgariter, quando ego frater scriptor propter prohibitionem fratrum illi fideli Christi loqui non poteram ad scribendum. Ideo valde diminute et male scripta fuit, sicut ego ab ipsa fideli Christi audivi, in tantum quod ipsa fidelis Christi dixit mihi legenti eam sibi semel, quod prius devastarem eam quam illo modo scriberem. Sed quia et ego frater non habui spatium corrigendi eam cum praedicta Christi fideli, rescripsi eam latine sicut reperi, nihil addens, immo sicut pictor pingens, quia non intelligebam eam. Quod sequitur ergo amodo, inveni scriptum vulgariter.” [my emphasis] Il Libro della beata Angela da Foligno, eds. Ludger Thier O.F.M. and Abele Calufetti O.F.M., Vii.a. 8-17 136 All references to the Meditationes are to Iohannis de Caulibus (Pseudo-Bonaventure), Meditationes Vite Christi, ed. M. Stallings-Taney, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 153 (Turnholt: Brepols, 1997). 75 was translated into many languages. The Carthusian prior Nicholas Love translated the Meditationes into English as the Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ. The interaction between these two translations makes visible many of the shared cultural currents that associated immaturity, the vernacular, and affective religion in England and Italy. Following Bernard and William of St. Thierry, Nicholas Love’s proem at the beginning of the Mirror prescribes his text “to symple creatures þe whiche as childryn hauen nede to be fedde with mylke of lyȝte doctryne & not with sadde mete of grete clargye and of h[ye] contemplacion.”137 and elsewhere to “symple soules” and those “þat kan not þenke bot bodyes or bodily þinges.”138
Likening simple and advanced instruction to milk and meat is a common metaphor in Christian teachings, stemming from Paul’s epistles:
And so, brothers and sisters, I could not speak to you as spiritual people, but rather as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for solid food. Even now you are still not ready, for you are still of the flesh.139
Aelred of Rievaulx’s De institutione inclusarum, which circulated in late medieval England and was translated into Middle English in the late fourteenth century and mid-fifteenth century,140
On the Franciscan context of devotional meditation, see e.g. Denise Louise Despres, Ghostly Sights: Visual Meditation in Late-Medieval Literature (Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1989), 33. 137 All citations refer to Sergent’s 2005 critical edition; I give the page number of the manuscript and line numbers in the form [page].[line number]. Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Full Critical Edition, 10.14–15; 10.23, 27, 35; 10.26–7. 138 Ibid., 10.27–8.
139 1 Corinthians 3:1-2. The Latin text from the Vulgate reads: “et ego fratres non potui vobis loqui quasi spiritalibus sed quasi carnalibus tamquam parvulis in Christo. lac vobis potum dedi non escam nondum enim poteratis sed ne nunc quidem potestis adhuc enim estis carnales.” (Douay-Rheims Vulgate, 1. Cor. 3:1-2). English translation: New Revised Standard Version c.1989. 76 extends this metaphor still further in its treatment of the Last Supper scene, in which the milk of simple knowledge is a simpler version of the communal wine drunk by John the Evangelist, who sits in Christ’s lap. The reader is encouraged to identify with John the Evangelist and imaginatively take his place, but if they cannot, the passage suggests an alternative:
Si ad potiora non potes, dimitte Ioanni pectus, ubi eum vinum laetitiae in divinitatis cognitione inebriet, tu currens ad ubera humanitatis, lac exprime quo nutriaris.
If you are not able to drink, leave his breast for John, where the wine of happiness will make him drunk on knowledge of the divinity, while you run to the breast of his manhood, and express milk from which you may be nourished.141
Late medieval spirituality often feminized Christ’s body, conflating the Virgin Mary’s breastfeeding of the baby Jesus with the risen Christ’s nurturing of his flock with the blood from the wound in his side, and many late medieval illustrations and paintings show the literal transformation of this blood into communion wine through the mystery of the Eucharist.142 In this passage, Aelred encourages the worshipper to imagine suckling the milk from Christ’s breast itself, a powerful gesture of intimacy and dependence which is also has a mnemonic lesson, suggesting the blood he shed for mankind. However, it is also a substitution for the communion wine that John imbibes directly. The wine-blood is transmuted through the body of Christ into
140 Aelred of Rievaulx, Aelred of Rievaulx’s De Institutione Inclusarum: Two English Versions, ed. John Ayto and Alexandra Barratt, Early English Text Society (London; New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). 141 Aelred of Rievaulx, “De Institutione Inclusarum,” in Opera Omnia, ed. Charles H. Talbot, vol. I, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis (Turnholt, Belgium, 1971), 46. 142 Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, Plates 12–29. 77 milk for Aelred’s more simple reader.143 Allegorically, this suggests that meditational focus on Christ’s manhood transmutes knowledge of him into something more digestible, less theologically and sensually complex than wine-as-blood.144 The “mylke” of imaginative meditation is baby-food, as opposed to the “sadde mete” of abstract theology.
I have suggested that the link between childishness and affective piety was present from its origins in St. Francis’ nativity diorama and St. Bernard’s teleological narrative governing carnal and spiritual meditations. However, in the political and religious atmosphere of England at the turn of the fifteenth century, this association became both more emphatic and more politically loaded. At the heart of this change was Archbishop Thomas Arundel, who attempted to curb the flowering of vernacular religion in England with his 1409 Constitutions, which forbade the translation of the Bible and the unlicensed publication of theological or devotional texts in the vernacular. This was aimed explicitly at curbing the activities of ‘Lollards,’ a loosely defined movement of lay preachers with anti-clerical leanings, but also had the effect of suppressing and regulating the popularity of imaginative meditation, which was written increasingly in the vernacular, as was befitting its professed audience of “symple soules.”
Affective piety was by no means inherently associated with revolutionary sentiments or anticlericism, despite its early links with the more radical elements of Franciscanism, suppressed in the late thirteenth century.145 The association between affective piety and vernacular theology was put under pressure by the ecclesiastical condemnation of the Lollards, or Wycliffites (after the Oxford theologian John Wyclif), who advocated for the translation of scriptures from Latin, the cessation of the use of images and the abandonment of the sacrament of the Eucharist. Several of the tenets of English affective piety, including the use of images and the interest in allegorical readings of scripture, were wholly antithetical to Lollard beliefs; in this incendiary atmosphere, however, figures like Margery Kempe and Richard Rolle, mystics who used the
143 Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 122–124. 144 Caroline Walker Bynum has discussed this metaphor extensively in her Holy Feast and Holy Fast and Jesus as Mother, but see especially Jesus as Mother, 126 145 Karnes, “Nicholas Love and Medieval Meditations on Christ,” 380. 78 vernacular and taught outside the church, were liable to accusations of Lollardy. But despite her disruptive style it is a mistake to align Kempe with politically radical sects, since she repeatedly asserts her own orthodoxy, which is accepted by Archbishop Arundel himself. However, in the atmosphere created by this persecution, to write in the vernacular became a fraught political act, and anxiety about orthodoxy and self-positioning is a recurring feature of religious vernacular texts produced at this time, including the Mirror and the Book of Margery Kempe.
Childishness was politically loaded, however, in more ways than one. Eleven years earlier, Arundel had played a key role in the deposition of Richard II and accession of Henry, Duke of Lancaster; on the 30th of September 1399, Arundel gave a sermon on I Corinthians to the lords of the realm assembled in Westminster Hall. He directed his sermon, on the verse beginning “Cum essem parvulus...,” against the remaining followers of Richard II.146 England, he proclaimed, was now at last ruled by a man (vir), not a boy (puer). Richard had inherited the throne at age ten, and his reign had been characterized by his struggle to wrest power from his advisers and mentors. Arundel now elaborated on the faults of boys: inconstant, playful, susceptible to flattery, unwilling to take responsibility: “And so now in the place of the playful will of the boy a man now rules the people.” A week later, the archbishop repeated himself in a sermon opening Henry IV’s new parliament, lamenting the court “for a long time directed, ruled and governed by children, and by the counsel of widows.”147 At the time of his deposition Richard was thirty-two, exactly the same age as his successor, Henry; this notwithstanding, Arundel’s sermon established for posterity Richard’s reputation as a childish, frivolous youth, an opinion echoed in several contemporary chronicles. In revisions to the Vox Clamatis, Gower called Richard “an undisciplined boy; he neglects the moral behaviour through which a man can grow up from a boy.”148 In early fifteenth-century England, therefore, childishness was a characteristic with strong negative political connotations. In the eyes of the nation, the king and
146 I Corinthians 23:11 147 J. Strachey, ed., Rotuli Parliamentorum; Ut Et Petitiones, Et Placita in Parliamento Tempore Edwardi R. I., vol. 3 ([London ], 1767), 415–53; translation from Christopher Fletcher, Richard II: Manhood, Youth, and Politics 1377-99 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 1–3. 148 Gower, Vox Clamantis vi.555-6, ‘rex, puer indoctus, morales neglegit actus, / in quibus a puero crescere possit homo.’ Fletcher, Richard II: Manhood, Youth, and Politics 1377-99, 1–3, 18. 79 his court’s immaturity was a cause of political unrest and failed international relations, resulting in Richard’s misguided desire for independence from the ‘adult’ faction of his advisors with whom Arundel aligned himself.
The logic which condemns as childish both a willful king and imaginative meditation can be explained with attention to the ways in which the structures of ecclesiastical authority in medieval England depended on control of the biblical text. Arundel’s Constitutions attempted to correct what he saw as an incursion against this authority by ‘Lollards’, although as Watson has pointed out, his sweeping mandates suppressed not only a small group of ‘proto-protestant’ radicals whose beliefs struck directly at the authority of the clergy as privileged mediators between the layperson and God, but also numerous moderates who might have advocated for an official translation of the Bible and for preaching in the vernacular, yet were supporters of the traditional ecclesiastical hierarchy.149 But how could this ‘vernacular theology’, which gave primacy to imaginative meditation, pose a similar threat to clerical authority as, for example, heretical interpretations of the role of the sacraments, especially as Lollard spirituality did not include interest in mystical experiences or imaginative meditation?
One answer may be in the extremely close relationship between imaginative meditation literature and vision texts. Meditation guides like the Ancrene Wisse and the Mirror of the Blessed Life of Christ were often bound into volumes with revelation texts like those of Bridget of Sweden and Angela of Foligno. The two genres share a focus on the corporeal and the life of Christ, and draw extensively on episodes from the so-called ‘Infancy Gospels’ of Thomas and James, which describe episodes in the life of the child Jesus. Margery Kempe mentions having read both Love’s and Bridget’s texts. However, the seemingly self-evident relationship between these revelatory texts and the guides to imaginative meditation circulating in late medieval Europe is in contradiction with the medieval rhetoric surrounding these visions. Barbara Newman articulates this paradox:
149 Nicholas Watson, “Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409,” Speculum 70 (1995): 844. 80
The dominant theology of visionary experience called for exclusive agency - whether divine, diabolical, or human - and had great difficulty admitting the possibility of mixture. In order to be considered authentic and reliable, a vision must have come directly from heaven: its authority could not survive any acknowledgment that it had been sought or improved upon by the seer.150
This compounds the difficulty for many modern scholars in approaching the subject of visions, so alien to the rationalist, secular intellectualism common in academia. There is a balance to be found between respecting that these were visions imparted by an external, divine source (as opposed to imaginative meditation consciously rewritten in the form of ‘visions’ for rhetorical effect), while acknowledging the influence of the cultural and intellectual context on the minds through which these visions were translated. The manuscript evidence suggests not only that many of these visions arose out of a culture of intense imaginative meditation, but also that people read vision texts as inspirational models for private imaginative meditation, perhaps in much the same way as they read meditational guides - following Kempe through the Passion narrative, for example, as they followed Love. The vision texts of Bridget of Sweden, Angela of Foligno, and others had the same readership as the meditational guides like the Meditationes and Aelred’s De institutione inclusarum, appearing in the same manuscript collations and libraries. The earlier English translation of Aelred’s work appears in a manuscript (MS Bodley Eng. poet. a.l., S.C. 3938-42) which includes the works of Richard Rolle, the A text of Piers Plowman, and the Ancrene Riwle, while the fifteenth-century translation (MS Bodley 423, S.C. 2322) appears with a collection of the revelations of St Bridget.151
The attitudes to imaginative meditation in late medieval England must be read, therefore, along with the political implications of the vision. A true vision, granted by God, has its own independent spiritual authority, with the disruptive and problematic potential to offer an
150 Barbara Newman, “What Did It Mean to Say “I Saw”? The Clash Between Theory and Practice in Medieval Visionary Culture,” Speculum 80 (2005): 5. 151 Aelred of Rievaulx, Aelred of Rievaulx’s De institutione inclusarum: Two English Versions, xiv, xxii. 81 authoritative message that differs from official religious doctrine, hence the elaborate apparatus that arose in the later Middle Ages for identifying ‘true’ and ‘false’ visions.152
Love’s Mirror, which was one of the first vernacular texts to be authorized and published under the auspices of Arundel post-Constitutions, follows Arundel’s political program by undermining the authority of imaginative meditation. In his important article on late medieval vernacular theology, Watson explicitly repeats Love’s metaphor of childhood to describe this process of subordination; the meditations, he writes, “seem to be designed to divert lay readers from doctrinal inquiry and to remind them of their childlike dependence on clerics who think for them [my emphasis].”153 Other commentators on this text have noted that Love, far more than the author of the Meditationes, “aligns the affective tradition of ‘carnal’ meditation on Christ’s humanity with intellectual and religious infancy.”154 Unlike the Meditationes and another fourteenth-century Middle English affective piety text, the Book to a Mother, Love does not map out any route from carnal meditation to spiritual (from “mylke” to “mete”), and effectively keeps the reader down among the lower ranks of Christ’s worshippers. As Michelle Karnes points out, in a comparable contemporary text, the Book to a Mother, the reader is advised to emulate Christ’s life in order that she might “better konne Holi Writ þan ony maister of divinite þat loveþ not God so wel as þou.”155 In contrast, Love develops St Bernard’s more hierarchical view of imaginative meditation. His introduction explains that the book is:
… wryten in englysche with more putte to in certeyn partes & [also] wiþdrawyng of diuerse auctoritis [and] matirs as it semeth to þe wryter hereof moste spedefull & edifying to hem þat
152 Elliott, Proving Woman. 153 Watson, “Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409,” 853. 154 Kantik Ghosh, “Nicholas Love,” in A Companion to Middle English Prose, ed. A.S.G. Edwards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 56; qtd. in Karnes n.21. 155 Karnes, ‘Nicholas Love and Medieval Meditations on Christ’, 388; Adrian James McCarthy, Book to a Mother: An Edition with Commentary (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1981), 39. 82 bene [of] symple vndirstondyng to þe which symple soules as seynt Bernerde seye contemplacion of þe monhede of cryste is more liking more spedefull & more sykere þan is hyȝe contemplacion of þe godhed.156
Karnes describes, as does Watson, a shift in England in the early fifteenth century in the power ascribed to affective piety as a route to knowledge. This shift is obvious in many features of Nicholas Love’s adaptation of the Meditationes, as I shall argue below, but particularly in the prologue. The Meditationes author stresses the real possibility of spiritual advancement through meditation on the life of Christ, “For above all studies of spiritual exercise I believe this more necessary and more effective, and that which is able to lead to a more heavenly (spiritual) grade.”157 These lines, however, and the confidence they imbue, are suppressed in the Nicholas Love version, replaced by the infantilizing language of “mylke” and “mete.”
Arundel’s calculated program of disempowerment of both affective piety and the vernacular had practical implications for those debarred from the clergy and Latin learning. However, for men and, to an extent, women who were empowered and protected within the institutions of the church and Latinate learning, taking on the role of a ‘child’ in relation to Christ could be an exercise in performing the Christian virtues of humility and submission, just as ‘reading as a woman’ could be an exercise in performing a kind of eroticized submission to Christ. Indeed, the feminized quality of childishness - or perhaps the childish quality of femininity - in medieval thought is essential to its subordination. The overlap between feminine and childish behaviours, and the implications for devotional practice that touch on temporality, becomes particularly clear in The Book of Margery Kempe, as I shall argue in the next section of this chapter.
156 Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Full Critical Edition, 10.19–25.
157 All quotes my translation. Latin edition: Iohannis de Caulibus (Pseudo-Bonaventure), Meditationes Vite Christi. “Vides ergo ad quam excelsum gradum meditacio vite Christi perducit... docet de omnibus, de quibus non est sermo ad presens,” Prologue l.72-76; “Super omnia namque spiritualis exercicii studia hoc magis necessarium magisque proficuum credo, et quod ad celsiorem gradum producere possit.” Prologue l.12-14 83
In the Book of Margery Kempe,158 almost contemporary with Love’s translation and rooted in the same political and religious context, we encounter a different take on the immaturity of affective meditation. The Book draws on the spiritual autobiography tradition along the lines of Augustine’s Confessions, but also on the memoirs of continental mystics such as Bridget of Sweden’s, and on conventional hagiography. It is often called the ‘first autobiography in English,’ but was more accurately, if cruelly, dubbed an “autohagiography.”159 By its own account, the Book was dictated to an anonymous amanuensis by Margery Kempe, a married laywoman of comfortable origins who bore fourteen children before coaxing her husband into a mutual vow of chastity and embarking upon an eccentric, itinerant religious life. Far from a representative of ecclesiastical authority, Kempe had many run-ins with church and secular authorities, accounts of which fill the book, and although Kempe’s visions of Christ, Mary and the apostles share many characteristics with the self-insert vision-text tradition that I have described, there are key differences which comparison with fanfiction can help us tease out.
Kempe scholarship of the past thirty years has been largely apologetic, contextualizing Kempe’s flamboyant devotional style within English and continental affective devotion. Feminist revisionary scholarship on Kempe, following Bynum, has argued for the importance of feminine spirituality to her performance; Karma Lochrie broke new ground by showing the relationship of Kempe’s thought to the behaviours of the medieval female saints treated by Caroline Walker Bynum. The ‘feminine’ piety described by these scholars reimagines the misogynist gendering of the carnal in medieval thought as a source of spiritual authority; granted special access to bodily experiences, women could have special insight into Christ’s suffering on the cross. This ‘feminine’ carnality, in affective meditation, also allows for a greater identification with Mary Magdalen and the Virgin Mary, privileged readers of the Crucifixion. Lochrie’s analysis, drawing on Cisousian theories of female bodily speech, interprets Kempe’s physical outbursts, such as weeping and laughter, as wordless, bodily vocalizations that draw attention to the
158 All citations are to Barry Windeatt, ed., The Book of Margery Kempe: Annotated Edition (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004). 159 Richard Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth-Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 6. 84 femininity of her own religiosity.160 I would argue that in these performances, Kempe is drawing as much on the language of immaturity surrounding affective meditation, and is reimagining this childishness into an immature hermeneutics.
I suggested in the last chapter an analogy between the Mary Sue - the idealized, wish- fulfilling authorial avatar who enters the source text and disrupts it - and the figure of the reader in imaginative meditation. This reader, too, enters the source text - the text of the Gospels, in this case - and sees, hears, touches those around her. The Mary Sue, as I showed, is a hermeneutic condemned as childish even within fannish discourse, which as a whole is more widely condemned as childish in the popular media and in academic scholarship. If we imagine a hierarchy of maturity of ways of reading in the contemporary English-speaking world, therefore, the Mary Sue surely near the bottom. As my introduction to this chapter showed, imaginative meditation occupies a similar position in its own contemporary discourse as an immature hermeneutic. Taking seriously the immaturity of Kempe’s reading practices opens up the possibility of taking seriously the immaturity of the Mary Sue, and vice versa; I argue that Kempe claims childishness as a subject position from which to approach a text, and in doing so, in this section and the following section, I argue for a reconsideration of the ways in which imaginative meditation, like the Mary Sue, both metaphorically transgresses the boundaries of a text, and literally threatens the interpretive authority of the clergy. While Kempe uses the childish Mary Sue as both a route to intimacy with Christ and a way to position herself in contemporary religious and political discourse, Nicholas Love, as I argue in the final part of this chapter, negotiates a middle way between the powerful popularity of imaginative meditation and the importance of the clergy in controlling access to Christ.
3.2 Margery Kempe’s Immature Spirituality
Children are notable in The Book of Margery Kempe both for their presence and their absence. The account of Margery’s spirituality opens not with her own birth, conception, or a miracle
160 Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh, 191, 155. 85 surrounding her mother’s pregnancy, as is conventional in hagiographic accounts, but with the difficult birth of her own first child, after which she enters a period of madness. Her first revelation restores her faculties, after which she resumes her place in her household; the child, their fate and their role in her life is not mentioned again. Nor are any of her other children mentioned except as pregnancies that hold back Kempe’s spiritual progress, until her spiritual mentoring of one of her sons in Book II. Finally, when Kempe is “newly delyveryd of a chyld,” she receives a command from Jesus both that she should bear no more children, and that she should go to Richard Caister, vicar of St. Stephens in Norwich: her protest at this mission is based on her own post-natal weakness, not the need to care for a newborn:
Owyr Lord Cryst Jhesu seyd to hir sche schuld no mor chyldren beryn, and therfor he bad hyr gon to Norwych. And sche seyd, “A, der Lord, how schal I gon? I am bothe feynt and feble.” “Drede the not, I schal make the strong inow.”161
This interest in the pregnant and post-natal female body recurs throughout the text. Kempe’s most notable ‘healing miracle’ is her relationship with a woman suffering from post-partum madness; another emotional meditation sequence occurs on the Feast of the Purification, where she sees Mary being purified after the birth of Jesus, and describes her own times of being “bareyn” of tears.162 Even Kempe’s relationship with her son after his conversion in Book Two is more that of a spiritual guide than a mother.
However, Kempe is highly sensitive to the affective power of Christ’s childhood. Her first extended vision is of the Virgin Mary as child and young mother, in which Kempe, imaginatively inserted into the narrative, provides “fayr whyte clothys and kerchys” for both the
161 Windeatt, The Book of Margery Kempe: Annotated Edition, ch.17, 865–869. 162 Henceforth all references are to the Windeatt edition. The Book of Margery Kempe, ch.82, 6715-6729. 86 young Mary and, shortly afterwards, the baby Jesus.163 During the period of her pilgrimage in Rome, she sees the baby Jesus in every boy-child she sees in the street, and she weeps “as thei sche had seyn Crist in hys childhode.”164 The symbolic power of childhood becomes divorced from actual children in her narrative; when Kempe’s husband becomes senile and incontinent as a result of a head injury, he turns “childisch agen,” and “as a childe voydyd his natural digestyon in hys lynyn clothys ther he sat be the fyre er at the tabil, whethyr it wer.” She views her care for him as a spiritual exercise, standing in for Mary’s care of her baby: “[she] servyd hym and helpyd hym, as hir thowt, as sche wolde a don Crist hymself.”165 Her care for her husband - now like her child - near the end of Book I mirrors her care for her child-husband Jesus near the book’s opening.
Kempe’s own spiritual performance also shows the power of childishness. She is most famous for her bodily performances, most notably her weeping, wailing, and rolling on the floor of churches. Scholars have rightly pointed out the long tradition of weeping as a devotional act in medieval Europe;166 however, the disruptive, public nature of Kempe’s weeping, and the (usually negative) attention it draws upon her, is a central part of her devotional performance which is not reflected in the wider medieval tradition. Almost every weeping episode emphasizes this disruptive element; in one fairly standard example, Kempe’s husband is so embarrassed that he publically abandons her:
On a tyme, as this creatur was at Cawntyrbery in the cherch among the monkys, sche was gretly despysed and reprevyd for cawse sche wept so fast bothyn of the monkys and prestys and of
163 The Book of Margery Kempe, ch. 6, 580-1
164 The Book of Margery Kempe, ch.35, 2827; also ch. 39, 3085.
165 The Book of Margery Kempe, ch. 76, 6066-6080.
166 e.g. Sandra J. McEntire, The Doctrine of Compunction in Medieval England: Holy Tears (Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen Press, 1990). 87 seculer men ner al a day bothe afornoon and aftyrnoon, also in so mech that hyr husbond went away fro hir as he had not a knowyn hir.167
Recent scholarship has largely interpreted her disruptive weeping in the context of feminine spirituality as an act which draws attention to her feminine carnality. However, her unrestrained, inappropriate public weeping also evokes the infants who form her devotional focus. She performs her ‘childish’ spiritual practices - drinking in the “milk” of visual meditation - like a real child, and her behaviour is embarrassing partly because it is age-inappropriate.
Another episode shortly after her prosecution and acquittal by the mayor and Abbot of Leicester illustrates the importance of childishness to Kempe’s spirituality. A priest takes issue with her white clothing, and the children of a monastery speak for her to the priest who accuses her:
And also sche had many enmyis whech slawndryd hir, scornyd hir, and despysed hir, of whech o prest cam to hir whil sche was in the seyd Mynstyr and, takyng hir be the coler of the gowne, seyd, “Thu wolf, what is this cloth that thu hast on?” Sche stod stylle and not wolde answeryn in hir owyn cawse. Childer of the monastery goyng besyde seyd to the preste, “Ser, it is wulle.”168
Here, the children around Kempe (strategically?) misunderstand the nature of the priest’s question (not what kind of fabric is her robe, but why is she wearing virginal white) and they take it literally, ignoring any allegorical possibilities. Kempe is supported by the children’s ludic innocence - she is not a wolf in sheep’s clothing, but a lamb.
167 The Book of Margery Kempe, Ch. 13, 857-862. 168 The Book of Margery Kempe, ch.50, 3990-3996. 88
The humour in this anecdote, as well as its calculated and instructive ignorance, is typical of Kempe’s rhetorical strategy elsewhere. She steadfastly refuses to admit of any underlying plan to preach, or any knowledge of Latin (the mark of adult learning); she bluntly tells a steward who questions her in Latin, “Spekyth Englysch, yf yow lyketh, for I undyrstonde not what ye sey.”169 She argues elsewhere that she does not “preche” (which would mean expounding on the Latin gospels, and which Archbishop Arundel’s anti-Lollard Constitutions forbade), but only uses “but comownycacyon and good wordys.”170 The very writing of the text itself evokes a childish difficulty in writing; the scribe’s inability to read his predecessor’s writing recalls Angela of Foligno’s scribe’s ill-fated use of a young boy as an intermediate transcriber.
The symbolic importance of children to Kempe’s spirituality is intertwined with the childishness of her devotional hermeneutics. Self-insertion into a beloved textual world, as a literary trope or hermeneutic device, is a central tenet of imaginative meditation, and of Kempe’s spiritual practice in particular; the devotional culture within which Kempe developed her spiritual style portrayed this kind of practice as childish. Kempe’s adoption of an exaggerated version of a childish hermeneutic device, in combination with the extreme symbolic importance of children in her account, suggests that her Book constitutes an exploration of the spiritual function and power of childishness, and particularly on the power of childishness to disrupt time, as I shall argue below. Kempe’s self-consciously childish self-insertion into the text of the Bible thus has striking and useful similarities to the fanfiction trope of the Mary Sue. As I described in the introduction, the Mary Sue is, almost by definition, a childish trope, associated with immature writers. Paula Smith’s short satire on teenage Star Trek fanfiction writers who write stories about teenage girls from the American Midwest saving the crew of the USS: Enterprise first appeared in Menagerie #2, a Star Trek zine published by Smith and Ferraro in 1973; since then, the term ‘Mary Sue’ has transcended its origins, and become a general derogatory term for idealized, authorial wish-fulfillment characters in fiction. However, the Mary Sue also interferes with the temporality of texts, in ways that illuminate the workings of Kempe’s take on imaginative meditation.
169 The Book of Margery Kempe, ch. 47, 3728-9. 170 The Book of Margery Kempe, ch. 52, 4213. 89
The youth of Paula Smith’s Mary-Sue is one of the first things we learn about her - “the youngest lieutenant in the fleet - only fifteen and a half years old!” The essay for would-be fanfiction writers entitled “Why Mary Sue Needs to Die” warns would-be writers:
Many experienced writers point out that Mary Sue-ism is the ‘baby stage’ of writing. Writing yourself into a story is easier than creating a well-rounded and quality character that can exist on its own merit. The problem is that most fanfic writers aren’t 6 year old [sic] children who simply don’t know any better, they are teenagers and adults who should be above such childish tendencies. Mary Sue authors are firmly in the grip of literary immaturity, unable (or unwilling) to ‘grow up’ as a writer.171
The association of the Mary Sue with not just incompetent but young writers is obvious in Paula Smith’s original parody. The “and a half” in particular - the unselfconscious pride in Mary Sue’s six-month advantage on other fifteen-year-olds, without awareness of the ludicrousness of such a distinction for her (adult) readers - suggests that her immaturity is an important part of her satirical characterisation. Her youth reflects a real trend among young writers as Smith saw it, but also has a socializing effect. A plethora of anecdotal evidence suggests that many fanfiction writers’ first piece of fanfiction - often produced before they are aware of fandom conventions, or even that the community exists - arise from childhood fantasies of their adventures or romances with fictional characters, and feature self-insert characters who they later identify as Mary Sues with embarrassment and nostalgia. The section of Enterprising Women which discusses Mary Sue fanfiction in zines is tellingly entitled “Recreating the Adolescent Self: Mary Sue.” In this chapter, Bacon-Smith attests to the Mary Sue’s importance in many fanfiction authors’ origins: “In spite of the controversy, and perhaps at the root of it, most fans will readily admit to having written at least one Mary Sue story. ... Usually it is the first story a fan writes.”
171 Kirk, ‘Mary Sue Must Die’, February 14, 2002, http://web.archive.org/web/20020815093817/http://www.rinpu.com/storypages/mary_sue_rant.html. 90
172 Pat Pflieger, in her history of the Mary Sue, suggests that this avatar-character is a sort of instinctive readerly reaction, engagement with the a beloved text on its most unsophisticated level: “A beginner… always writes about herself.”173 This stereotype is self-perpetuating, as the only fanwriters who do not know that Mary Sue stories are frowned upon are new to fandom and often young and inexperienced, so stories which feature self-insert characters are often also poorly written. As they learn to write within fanfiction conventions and gain mastery of their craft, they also learn not to write Mary Sues. This institutionalization of the Mary Sue as a beginner’s writing tool helps reinforce the narrative of maturation in fanfiction writing, the progression from literal self-insert to a more objective, oblique engagement with the text.
The Mary Sue is thus created as an immature hermeneutic by its place within a socializing cultural narrative, and because of this narrative, the Mary Sue always has temporal resonance. She gestures towards the future in which the author will grow up into a more mature engagement with the source text, and, as I will suggest later in this chapter, she also gestures towards her own death. In suggesting this, I draw on recent discussion in queer theory of the temporality of queerness. Part of the formation of the idea of homosexuality in the late nineteenth century included a temporal element (that is, queerness as atavism and arrested development); in addition, children and adolescents have been considered to be particularly vulnerable to homosexual influence (and same-sex education a particular site of homosexual behaviours) in twentieth-century discourse. Queer theory of the last twenty years has explored the implications for understanding the portrayal of queer desires and behaviours in literature of this persistent relationship of queerness to backwardsness in the cultural imaginary.174 Queerness becomes a metaphor to explore forms of anti-futurity and other alternative temporalities (alternative, that is, to progressive, future-oriented, heteronormative temporality that looks
172 Bacon-Smith, Enterprising Women, 94. 173 Pat Pflieger, “Too Good to Be True: 150 Years of Mary Sue,” March 31, 1999, http://www.merrycoz.org/papers/MARYSUE.HTM. 174 See, for example: Carolyn Dinshaw, “Temporalities,” in Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm, Oxford Twenty- First Century Approaches to Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 107–23; Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive; Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History; Rohy, Anachronism and Its Others: Sexuality, Race, Temporality. 91 forward to sexual and social reproduction). Because, like queerness, she exists within a particular temporal framework (the Mary Sue is young, the Mary Sue is for ‘beginner’ writers), she contains within herself a temporality that enters the temporality of the source text and disrupts it; as Willis notes, Paula Smith’s Mary Sue disrupts the temporality of the source text into which she enters, first by being the “youngest lieutenant in the fleet,” and then, at her death, her “beautiful youth and youthful beauty” leave a permanent scar on the temporality of the world of Star Trek in the form of a “national holiday” in calendar of the USS Enterprise, so that her birthday is celebrated annually “even to this day.”175
Kempe’s ability to enter the text of the Gospels in the scenes in which she, like a Mary Sue, invades the text to offer Mary a hot drink and speak with Christ and the disciples, stems, for Dinshaw, from Kempe’s queerness as a “creature whose body does not fit her desires” (wherein her wearing of virginal white becomes a kind of transvestitism).176 Kempe’s desire to touch Christ across time is thus akin to the ‘queer historiography’ that Dinshaw’s own project both describes and performs. Kempe is thus part of a transtemporal community with Dinshaw both as a queer historian and as a queer. Dinshaw’s use of queerness as a heuristic metaphor to ‘get at’ Kempe’s disruptive temporality is complementary to, not in opposition to, my use of the Mary Sue, since queerness and childishness overlap as conceptual categories. Kempe’s imaginative self-insertion into the Gospel texts has a disrupting effect on the various temporalities she occupies, I would argue, in part because self-insertion into texts is (like, but not equivalent to queerness) an erotic behaviour with its own temporality - both within Kempe’s cultural context and in ours. In embracing the childishness of imaginative meditation, Kempe exploits its potential to disrupt chronological narratives and temporal structures that threaten to impede her from ‘touching’ Christ.
The Book of Margery Kempe continually refuses to progress. The narrative jumps back and forth in time without warning, undermining its own chronology, and frustrates any attempt to
175 Cynthia W. Walker, “Interview: A Conversation With Paula Smith,” Transformative Works and Cultures 6 (2011): 6.1–12, http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/243/205. Willis, “‘Writers Who Put Themselves In The Story’: Dante Alighieri, Roland Barthes, Lieutenant Mary-Sue and Me,” 5. 176 Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Post-modern, 148. 92 impose a narrative of maturation onto it. One of the most dramatic and significant points in Kempe’s narrative of spiritual development is the vow of chastity made by herself and her husband in Chapter 11; however, several times afterwards the narrative mentions that Kempe has either just found out she is pregnant, or has just given birth, and thus is clearly still sexually active. Kempe draws attention to the performativity of age by making her body a site of contradiction: she wears the white of a virgin, but her body has bourn fourteen children. Indeed, this resistance to narratives of progress is intrinsic to her spiritual mission. When Jesus commands her to wear white, she resists: “A, der Lord, yf I go arayd on other maner than other chast women don, I drede that the pepyl wyl slawndyr me. Thei wyl sey I am an ypocryt and wondryn upon me.” This “wondryng,” however, is part of the suffering she must endure for Christ: “Ya, dowtyr, the mor wondryng that thow hast for my lofe, the mor thu plesyst me.”177 She and Christ exchange similar words when he commands her to begin eating meat again after many year’s abstinence, frustrating the expectations of progression towards perfection.
“Dowtyr, I badde the fyrst that thu schuldist leevyn flesch mete and non etyn, and thu hast obeyd my wyl many yerys and absteynd the aftyr my cownsel. Therfor now I bydde the that thu resort ageyn to flesch mete.” The sayd creatur with reverent drede, seyd, “A, blisful Lord, the pepil, that hath knowyn of myn abstinens so many yerys and seeth me now retornyn and etyn flesch mete, thei wil have gret merveyl and, as I suppose, despisyn me and scornyn me therfor.”178
Likewise, God takes away her ability to cry, just as some have begun to tolerate her crying because they believe that she can’t help it, which results in her being called a “fals feynyd ypocrite.”179 Being an object of “wondryng” and “merveyl” is part of Kempe’s martyrdom for Christ, but the book is reflective upon its own disruption of the reader’s expectations about
177 The Book of Margery Kempe, ch. 15, 1020-1024. 178 The Book of Margery Kempe, ch. 66, 5427-5430. 179 The Book of Margery Kempe, ch. 63, 5234-5. 93 temporal narratives, suggesting that the purpose of her behaviour is not merely to suffer, but to cause others to question the purpose and use of such narratives.
That the Book’s messy chronology offends some deeply held tenets of contemporary devotional literature is obvious in the frustration that its readers display, from the fifteenth century to recent years, and a tradition of reception that tries to ‘straighten out’ the book’s timeline. The Book of Margery Kempe’s single surviving manuscript resided in the library of the Carthusian priory of Mt. Grace, in North Yorkshire, for the fifteenth century; recent interest in the marginalia of the Book’s single manuscript has shown the level of readerly intervention by the monastic readers of Kempe’s text during this period. These marginal annotations suggest that these readers drew connections between the devotional performances of Kempe and of respected figures within their own community (Richard Methley, vicar of Mt. Grace until 1527, and John Norton, prior between 1509 and 1522), and in general that Kempe’s devotional practices provoked “ecstatic outbursts” by its readers such as repetitions of “Amen,” drawings of hearts, and a drawing of the five wounds, although it seems problematic to ascribe all of these to spontaneous emotion, rather than mnemonic annotating.180 These marginal annotations also show a persistent readerly attempt to make the Book fit the standards of narrative progression that is conventional in narratives of spiritual growth. The red annotations (customarily attributed to a single figure, known as the Red Ink Annotator, although Joel Fredell has recently put forward a contrasting interpretation of three annotators working in red ink) clearly show a strategy for improving the readability of the Book’s manuscript similar to that found in other Carthusian manuscripts, such as that used in the Mirror of the Blessed Life of Christ manuscript Cambridge UL MS Add. 6578. The red ink picks out the beginnings of text chunks, and
180 Sarah Gorman, “She Knelyd upon Hir Kneys, Hir Boke in Hir Hand: Manuscript Travel, Devotional Pedagogy, and The Book of Margery Kempe” (Undergraduate Humanities Forum Mellon Research Fellow Final Project Paper, University of Pennsylvania, 2007), 62; Kelly Parsons, “The Red Ink Annotator of The Book of Margery Kempe and His Lay Audience,” in The Medieval Professional Reader at Work: Evidence from Manuscripts of Chaucer, Langland, Kempe, and Gower, ed. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Maidie Hilmo, English Literary Studies Monograph Series 85 (University of Victoria: ELS, 2001), 150–1. Even this evidence of support for Kempe’s spiritual style are categorized as immature - Gorman attributes the general lack of scholarly interest in this marginalia to the “amateurish” and “simplistic” appearance of the annotations, while Samantha Mullaney calls them “childlike.” Given an understanding of the importance of childish simplicity to this kind of imaginative meditation, could we suggest that the Carthusian marginalia intentionally performs childishness also? 94 generally breaks up the intimidating blocks of black text, making the text easier to move through. Kelly Parsons, whose 2001 article includes a full transcription of the marginalia next to line references,181 argues that many of the annotations suggest an attempt to ‘tidy up’ the book for a female lay audience. These include additions of the word “gostly” into moments where the text seems to describe a material rather than spiritual experience, and the use of ‘nota’ marks and other highlighting to emphasise Kempe’s femininity and female experience appears in the text.
Gorman’s in-depth study of the marginalia of The Book of Margery Kempe draws a picture of a more systematic attempt to “locate the ascent to prayer that the Book prescribes.”182 Her study suggests that the marginal notes are trying to impose meaning and structure on the Book’s chaotic narrative, particularly in their emphasis on Kempe’s persecutions. For Gorman, these marginal notes “unify a suggested but buried narrative sequence that the monks perceive as already extant in the text,” while Gorman herself reflects the frustration she sees in the marginalia, commenting repeatedly on the Book’s “disorganized” and “disordered” structure.183 This frustration at the lack of any obvious scala (or spiritual ladder) in Kempe’s text is particularly obvious in one key aforementioned moment of readerly intervention into the text, the interpolated instruction in the same hand as the main text (but written partially in the inner margin and visually distinct from the text, so that the impression is of a marginal annotation), “rede first the xxi chapetre & than this chapetre aftyr that,” beside which is written in red ink, “nota.”184 As Gorman points out, there is also a “nota” next to Kempe’s important vision at Mt. Calvary, which the text describes as “the first crye that evyr sche cryed in any contemplacyon.” This is a confusing assertion, since the Book has already described multiple incidents of public
181 Kelly Parsons, ‘The Red Ink Annotator of The Book of Margery Kempe and His Lay Audience’, in The Medieval Professional Reader at Work: Evidence from Manuscripts of Chaucer, Langland, Kempe, and Gower, ed. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Maidie Hilmo, English Literary Studies Monograph Series 85 (University of Victoria: ELS, 2001), 116–216. 182 Sarah Gorman, “She Knelyd Upon Hir Kneys, Hir Boke in Hir Hand: Manuscript Travel, Devotional Pedagogy, and The Book of Margery Kempe” (Undergraduate Humanities Forum Mellon Research Fellow Final Project Paper, University of Pennsylvania, 2007), 18. 183 Gorman, “She Knelyd Upon Hir Kneys,” 31, 33, 42, 46. 184 Gorman, “She Knelyd Upon Hir Kneys,” 38. 95 devotional weeping. Gorman argues that, “the book’s disorderly composition perhaps obscures this moment in a series of other ecstatic outbursts,” but the annotation “re-claims the gravity of this moment by drawing particular attention to it.”185 In Joel Fredell’s new categorization of the marginal annotators (in which he identifies the annotator formerly known as ‘Little Brown’ as the manuscript’s scribe, Salthows), he too traces two annotators’ attempts to draw out narrative arcs in Kempe’s text: “Big Red N’s annotations construct Margery’s Book as a passio-narrative just as Little Brown/scribe Salthows constructs a vita, or biography of a saint’s life in the world.” As Fredell dryly comments, “Both constructions are undercut by the inconvenient fact that Margery is not dead at the end of the narrative.”186
The desire to find a scala-style narrative of growth in Kempe’s text is also obvious in its later reception. The Wynkyn de Worde version - the only version until the discovery of the manuscript in 1934 - chops up the text entirely, re-ordering much of it and removing Kempe’s own troublesome voice, to create a sanitized devotional handbook.187 The lack of obvious progress or evolution in Kempe’s spiritual journey also frustrated twentieth-century scholars in the first waves of scholarship on the newly emerged text. The general hostility to Kempe’s spirituality, ranging from patronizing to irritated (reactions which strikingly resemble those of bystanders in the Book itself), seems to stem less from Kempe’s highly physical spirituality, but more her failure to graduate from it. Other scholars have simply overlooked Kempe’s inconvenient backtracking. Dhira Mahoney’s article argues that her white clothing, celibacy, fasting, asceticism and tears give her authority through marking her as an outsider, following Peter Brown’s work on holy men in late antiquity, but she fails to provide an explanation for the fact that Kempe returns to eating meat after giving it up for many years, at times takes off her
185 Gorman, “She Knelyd Upon Hir Kneys,”46. 186 Joel Fredell, “Design and Authorship in The Book of Margery Kempe,” Journal of the Early Book Society, no. 12 (2009): 18. 187 Alyson Foster, “A Shorte Treatyse of Contemplacyon: The Book of Margery Kempe in Its Early Print Contexts,” in A Companion to the Book of Margery Kempe, ed. John H. Arnold and Katherine J. Lewis (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), 96–7. 96 virginal garb and then puts it on again, and stops fasting on Fridays.188 Much has been made of the narrator’s comment at the end of Book I that “sumtyme that sche undirstod bodily it was to ben undirstondyn gostly,” with many scholars arguing that this suggests that Kempe does indeed begin to conform to contemporary ideas about the hierarchy of carnal and spiritual contemplation of Christ. However, this comment is suspiciously in line with the efforts of the marginal annotator who has inserted “gostly” at several other places, and thus has the air of a retrospective attempt by the writer to ‘correct’ Kempe’s unruly spirituality.189 Nor does Kempe’s desire in Book II for contact with relics and sacred places in Book II suggest that she has ‘graduated’ from her childish carnal devotion.
Other scholars have approached the temporality of Kempe’s text more sensitively. Denise Despres suggests that the religious calendar gives shape to the “psychic rhythm” of the text, rather than the progression of years upon each other: “While Margery initially adopts the “conversion” pattern of hagiography - Paul’s and Augustine’s - her experiences reveal that the path to salvation is cyclical, like the liturgical year.”190 However, Despres’ model - while highlighting the important fact that Kempe’s memoirs are governed by their proximity to events in Christ’s life in the liturgical calendar - still describes Kempe’s spiritual life using metaphors of childhood and growth (“her spiritual childhood transforming into a mature faith).”191 The expectations engendered by the modern term ‘autobiography’ also encourage modern readers to seek linear progression from ‘childhood’ to ‘adulthood’ in The Book of Margery Kempe.192 But
188 Dhira Mahoney, “Margery Kempe’s Tears and the Power over Language,” in Margery Kempe: A Book of Essays, ed. Sandra J. McEntire (New York: Garland, 1992), 37–50. Kempe returns to eating meat after giving it up for many years (ch. 66), switches between wearing white and black clothes (chs. 15, 31, 34, 44), and stops fasting on Fridays (ch. 66). 189 The Book of Margery Kempe ch.89, 7405-7409; Parsons, “The Red Ink Annotator of The Book of Margery Kempe and His Lay Audience,” 150. 190 Despres, Ghostly Sights, 83. 191 Ibid., 78. 192 Not all autobiographies have a linear structure, of course; for two examples of autobiographies with circular structures (which are, not coincidentally I think, also queer autobiographies), see Alison Bechdel’s graphic novels Fun Home and Are You My Mother? 97 no such arc exists in this narrative, and in fact perhaps the opposite is true, that Kempe evokes a permanent, joyous spiritual childhood that allows her to break free of a regulating chronology.
In numerous places, the Book draws attention to its own chronological disorder. The beginning of Book I stresses the book’s non-linear ordering of events: “Thys boke is not wretyn in ordyr, every thyng aftyr other as it wer don, but lych as the mater cam to the creatur in mend whan it schuld be wretyn, for it was so long er it was wretyn that sche had forgetyn the tyme and the ordyr whan thyngys befellyn.”193 For example, the last extended meditation in Book I, in which Kempe celebrates her spiritual marriage to Christ in her heart, is immediately revealed to have taken place twenty-five years before the writing of the Book, and is therefore not the spiritual climax the narrative initially seems to suggest;194 shortly after her assertion that she cannot understand Latin, she expounds on “Crescite et multiplicamini;”195 many other chapters begin “On a tyme...” and present a disconnected and disordered series of events, which seem set down as the memories surface, rather than in any order. However, there is a sacred aspect to this chronological confusion, as the revelation at the end of Book I suggests as it describes Kempe’s experience of being disconnected from earthly time during a revelation:
Sche supposyd sumtyme of five owrys er six owrys it had not ben the space of an owr. It was so swet and so devowt that it ferd as sche had ben in an hevyn. Sche thowt nevyr long therof ne sche was nevyr irke therof; the tyme went awey sche wist not how.196
The transition between Books I and II also has a temporally disorienting effect; the scribe describes Kempe’s spiritual progression and the arc, such as it is, seems to reach some kind of
193 The Book of Margery Kempe, ch.1, 134-7. 194 The Book of Margery Kempe, ch.87, 7230. 195 ibid., ch.51, 4010-4017. 196 ibid., ch.87, 7255-7257. 98 conclusion, only for the narrative to self-consciously re-open in the following book with a completely different style of storytelling, not the disconnected episodes of Book I but a flowing narrative mapped along both temporal and geographic lines, which follows Kempe’s pilgrimage to the continent and back. However, Book II ends with not Kempe’s death, but a prayer which ends with the surety of resurrection in the Lord:
Hafe mend, Lord, of Lazer that lay four days ded in hys grave, and, as I have ben in that holy stede ther thi body was qwik and ded and crucifiid for mannys synne and ther Lazer was reisyd fro deth to lyfe, as wistly, Lord, yf any man er woman be ded in this owr be dedly synne, yf any prayer may helpyn hem, here my preyerys for hem and make hem to levyn wythowtyn ende.197
The Book ends, therefore, with an insistence on non-ending - with Kempe’s confidence in her ability to transcend time once and for all through Christ’s love.
Kempe’s performance of spiritual childhood embraces the childishness of affective spirituality. With her rejection of abstract contemplation, Kempe also rejects the forward movement of social time; the idea of spiritual growth is too intertwined with the social markers of time - birth, marriage, reproduction and death - for it to be otherwise. It is no coincidence that Book II, which in contrast with Book I is strikingly linear in its narrative, treats Kempe’s parental relationship with her son and daughter-in-law, the first mention of any of her children in the Book. Margery’s “absorption in the everlasting now of the mystic”198 allows her not only to occupy all these social roles simultaneously - child, virgin, mother, wife - but also to participate in the temporality of Christ, who is simultaneously the Son of God and a human man who lived and died in the past. By stepping outside of social time, Kempe can enter into the now of Christ’s life, to travel in time to be with him at every moment of his own life and his mother’s; likewise,
197 The Book of Margery Kempe II ch. 10, 8522-8527. 198 Dinshaw, “Temporalities,” 109. 99 the Book skips back and forward in time, following not a linear temporality, but a sacred time in which all things occur at once in God.
This interleaving of temporal moments is also striking in many of Kempe’s meditations. In her first long meditation on the youth of Mary and Christ Kempe cares for Mary “tyl it wer twelve yer of age wyth good mete and drynke, wyth fayr whyte clothys and whyte kerchys,” and then also begs for “fayr whyte clothys and kerchys”199 for the young Jesus when he is born. Like many imaginative meditation texts, the Book here draws on the ‘infancy gospels’, the apocryphal stories about Mary’s and Jesus’ childhoods that circulated widely in the Middle Ages.200 Kempe describes Mary passing from her view, then reappearing before her, pregnant: “The blysful chyld passyd awey for a certeyn tyme, the creatur being stylle in contemplacyon, and sythen cam ageyn and seyd, “Dowtyr, now am I bekome the modyr of God.”201 The repetition of the “fayr whyte clothys and kerchys” conflates the childhoods of Mary and Jesus into a single maternal experience for Kempe, as, later, all mortal babies blur into Christ, so that “sche wolde a takyn the childeryn owt of the moderys armys and a kyssed hem in the stede of Criste.”202 Just as Kempe here is mother and daughter to Mary at once, elsewhere Christ insists on her right to occupy all of the life-stages at once: “therfor I preve that thow art a very dowtyr to me and a modyr also, a syster, a wyfe, and a spowse.”203 In her long communion with Christ near the end of Book I, Christ promises her life everlasting in heaven “as my derworthy derlyng, as my blissyd spowse, and as myn holy wife,” and then thanks her, “for as many tymys as thu hast bathyd me in thi sowle at hom in thi chambre as thow I had be ther present in my manhod.”204
199 The Book of Margery Kempe, ch.6, 551; 580 200 Mary Dzon, “The Image of the Wanton Christ-Child in the Apocryphal Infancy Legends of Late Medieval England” (PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 2004). 201 Ibid., ch.6, 558-560. 202 Ibid., ch.35, 2827-2830. 203 Ibid., ch. 14, 714. 204 Ibid., ch. 86, 7202-6. 100
The act of bathing elides both Mary Magdalene and the Virgin Mary, and casts Kempe as both wife and mother, bathing the infant Jesus just as she begged for “fayr whyte clothys” for him.
Thus when Kempe embraces affective, bodily devotion to Christ, she also embraces affectively and bodily the rhetoric of age surrounding this affective devotion. The ever-present now she occupies through her intense love for Christ enables her to “touch across time,” in Dinshaw’s words, not just because of her empathetic connection to the infant Christ and the mother Mary, but because her childishness itself gives her the power to disrupt time. Her disruptive immature performances and subversion of linear ageing are intrinsic to her spiritual practices; moreover, they suggest a sophisticated engagement with both the political atmosphere and the discourse surrounding affective hermeneutics in late medieval England. The next section of this chapter explores further the disruptive potential of affective hermeneutics for orthodoxy, and the ways in which other writers used the metaphors of age and immaturity to police the boundaries of clerical authority, by reading the figure of the Mary Sue in Nicholas Love’s translation of the Meditationes, the Mirror of the Blessed Life of Christ.
3.3 Immaturity and Supervision
Arundel’s Constitutions and the crisis of vernacular theology brought about by the Wycliffite translation program represent a significant moment in the history of the policing of textual borders: not merely censorship but control over who could access, interpret, and teach as defined by language access. The late medieval criticisms in England of the widespread release of vernacular scriptures to a literate public show fear of a decentralization of authority in the interpretation of the Bible, with the attitude that anticlericalism and heresy can be the only result of letting the unalloyed Word out unsupervised among those lacking theological training. Lollards and other dissident groups challenged the meaning that dominant Christian discourse gave to sacred texts, and, in doing so, threatened the basis of the Church’s temporal and spiritual authority. However, as I have suggested, the rise in popularity of affective devotion constituted a potential challenge to clerical supervision. Vernacular books teaching imaginative meditation were read not only by monks and nuns but by devout laypeople and extra-institutional religious 101 recluses, anchorites like the audience of the Ancrene Wisse and Julian of Norwich, who occupied ecclesiastical margins, nominally subject to centralized spiritual supervision and authority but also fairly independent.
This is, of course, a simplified picture; the conflict arising from the different practices and approaches in late medieval English devotion was not a simple battle between two clearly delineated ‘sides,’ but a complex series of individual negotiations between tensions and influences, both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the ranks of the clergy. The site of one such negotiation is Nicholas Love’s translation of the Meditationes vite Christi, a guide to imaginative meditation in the Franciscan vein on the model of Aelred’s De institutione inclusarum. Love’s translation manipulates the ‘Mary Sue’ reading technique in order to find a middle way between completely shutting down the text to the reader’s imaginative interaction, and giving the reader the freedom to imaginatively interact with Christ and Mary in an unsupervised way. I will argue below that the relationship of the ‘spin-off’ or ‘tie-in’ novel to fanfiction is a useful analogy in drawing out what is at stake in Love’s translation, and particularly the ways in which Love envisions history - that is, the time of the life of Christ - as a space into which the reader can transgress.
In the imagined past opened up by the devotional manuals of Aelred’s De institutione inclusarum and the Ancrene Wisse, to an extent Christ himself is open to reinterpretation, recontextualization and change. Meditational guides and vision texts reveal the textual nature of the foundational legends of Christianity, and hence their instability and permeability. When the reader, as Mary Sue, enters the text, she reveals both the instability of the text, and the fragility of its connection to the ‘truth’ of history. Nicholas Love’s text, however, mediates between reader and text, offering more of/more from the life of Christ, and enabling affective hermeneutics as a route to intimacy and knowledge, while still preserving the inviolability of the past that the scriptures describe.
The history of modern fandom is full of moments of tension between fans and the owners of popular media texts, where the latter have tried to prevent certain fannish practices in order to control the interpretations of their text. Lucasfilm (owners of the Star Wars copyright) made one such attempt in the early 1980s, using the official fan club as a mouthpiece to reach the wider fan community, in an attempt to prevent fanfiction writers from writing sexually explicit and/or 102 same-sex romance stories about characters from Star Wars. This fanfiction was usually circulated for free (or at cost, in the case of printed zines) within fan communities. Lucasfilms’ attempts to suppress fanfiction writing, according to Jenkins, did not stem from a wish to restrict all fannish imaginary engagement with Star Wars outside the bounds of the movie texts (indeed, Lucasfilm were pioneers in multiplatform marketing and in harnessing fan devotion for profit, commissioning numerous authorized ‘tie-in novels’ that capitalized fannish desires for more of/more from the Star Wars universe).205 Their aim rather was to shut down a school of interpretation of the Star Wars texts that threatened the basis of their continued profit (its intergenerational, ‘family-friendly’ appeal). Star Wars fanfiction, although almost always containing a disclaimer by the author about their independence from Lucasfilm, was (at least in theory) putting sexually explicit material under the Star Wars name, without any oversight by Lucasfilm over content. This fanfiction might (in theory) be difficult to distinguish from the ‘authorized’ spin-off novels published under the auspices of Lucasfilm. An open letter to the wider fan community from the official fan club contained a request that fans only circulate interpretations of the Star Wars texts that conformed to the spirit of the texts as defined by Lucasfilm: “Since all of the Star Wars Saga is PG rated, any story those [fanzine] publishers print should also be PG. Lucasfilm doesn’t produce any X-rated Star Wars episodes, so why should we be placed in a light where people think we do?”206 More recently, AOL Time Warner and Bloomsbury Books attempted to shut down a number of online archives of explicit Harry Potter slash fanfiction on the basis of the original text’s perceived ‘family values.’207 Individual authors, too, and even actors in television shows, have attempted to prevent ‘their’ characters
205 Several hundred Star Wars tie-in novels have been published by Bantam and Del Ray since 1976, known collectively as the ‘Star Wars Expanded Universe.’ 206 Open letter by Maureen Garrett (1981), quoted in Textual Poachers, 30-31. 207 Cf. Christopher Noxon, “When Harry Met Smutty,” Metroactive, May 26, 2003, http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/06.26.03/potter-0326.html. This article (although it does not cite its sources) was circulated widely in fandom at the time, and thus shows, at least, the way fandom perceived its persecution. Its author quotes a ‘formal statement’ from studio executives: “It is not only our legal obligation, but also our moral obligation to protect the integrity of our intellectual properties… This is especially true in the case of indecent infringement of any icon whose target audience is children.” 103 being made to do things which the original authors did not intend, explicitly opposing both the readings and the reading practices of some of their most active, expert readers.208
Authorized but extra-canonical novels are now a common part of multiplatform marketing strategies for most television and movie serials, and even for computer games. They are usually written by freelance writers commissioned, even recruited by publishing companies in partnership with large media owners like Lucasfilms or the BBC. Many tie-in novels (or ‘spin- off novels’) are written by fanfiction writers who have turned their intimate knowledge of and love for the source into a profit-making enterprise. The tie-in novel is an obvious and often desirable goal for a fan-writer seeking to become a professional author. Stargate: Atlantis novel tie-in writer Amy Griswold began her writing career in the show’s fandom, and spoke in a “Fanfic to Pro” panel at Shore Leave 36, a science fiction convention in 2014, which suggests that this ‘career path’ is both recognised and desirable within the fan community.209 Star Trek: Deep Space 9 and Dr Who novel tie-in author Una McCormack was first approached by a publisher who had heard about her Deep Space 9 fanfiction.210 These are two of many examples. Tie-ins are usually marketed not as works of their individual authors but under the ‘brand’ of the source text, and thus, like fanfiction, are directed towards fans of the television series or movies rather than of spin-off novel authors. For this reason, tie-in novels share an affective space with fan-created artefacts, but nonetheless are distinguished by being both officially recognised as being within the wider boundaries of the source text, and also as profit-driven, circulating outside the gift economy of fandom proper. As parts of the source text, they are potentially themselves sources of fanfiction and affective imagination, but they are nonetheless generated for - and often by - the love of the fan community. In her foreword to The Vulcan Academy Murders, Star Trek
208 Anne Rice notoriously sent a ‘cease and desist’ letter to multifandom archive Fanfiction.net in 2001; her website still states, “I do not allow fan fiction. The characters are copyrighted. It upsets me terribly to even think about fan fiction with my characters…. It is absolutely essential that you respect my wishes.” http://www.annerice.com/ReaderInteraction-MessagesToFans.html. Cf. Textual Poachers, 201 on the public objections to slash of ‘his’ character made by Paul Darrow, Blakes 7 actor. 209 Amy Griswold, “Shore Leave + Other Updates,” Amy Griswold, August 5, 2014, http://amygriswold.livejournal.com/9362.html. 210 Una McCormack, personal correspondence, August 28, 2014. I am grateful to Una McCormack for her generosity in allowing me to cite her correspondence. 104 tie-in novelist Jean Lorrah thanks Star Trek fandom, “which over the years has provided a forum for the stories I - and so many other fans - needed to tell,” and writes movingly of the importance of the community for fostering her friendships and early writing for fanzines.211
To explain the analogy between The Mirror and tie-in novels takes some explanation of the works’ context. The Mirror survives in sixty-four manuscripts and saw multiple print runs before the Reformation. Although a translation of an extremely popular thirteenth-century meditation guide attributed to St. Bonaventure, its popularity should be viewed not merely as an extension of the popularity of the Pseudo-Bonaventuran text, but rather was due to its timely issue in the immediate aftermath of the Arundelian Constitutions in England, and Love’s canny manipulations, suppressions, additions and reformulations of the original Latin text into an English version that generated its own popularity. The Carthusian monastery of which Love was prior, Mount Grace Priory in Yorkshire, had a special relationship with Arundel, who was given confraternity in the house c.1410, and who was a benefactor of the Carthusian order and of the Mount Grace house in particular.212 Mount Grace was also the originating point of the unique surviving Margery Kempe manuscript by the scribe Salthows, and the marginal notations made in that manuscript in the sixteenth century were almost certainly made by Mt Grace monks. However, unlike Love’s text, Kempe’s Book did not move far beyond this monastery, although some of the marginalia suggests a possible preparation of the text for a lay audience. This suggests both the overlap in the audience of the two texts, and their shared appeal and spiritual tradition.
Love’s Mirror is also distinguished by its ‘official’ status as one of the first vernacular devotional books put before and approved by Arundel for circulation after the publication of the Constitutions. Twenty of forty-two of the surviving versions of the text that are not missing their beginning or end append a ‘Memorandum of Approbation,’ which states that the work was presented to Thomas Arundel for inspection and examination, was commended and approved personally, and that Arundel had decreed that it be published “for the edification of the faithful
211 Jean Lorrah, The Vulcan Academy Murders (New York: Pocket Books, 1984), Foreword. 212 Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Full Critical Edition, intro 29–31. 105 and the confutation of heretics and Lollards.”213 Although written before the Constitutions were published, the Mirror fell wholeheartedly on his side of the ‘Oxford Debate.’214 Despite being a work in the vernacular, the Mirror’s place in the tradition of Franciscan spirituality, its interest in the exegetical tradition, allegorical reading, the apocrypha, its emphasis on various orthodox doctrinal points, and its explicit anti-Lollard statements make it unmistakeably anti-Wycliffite. Watson describes it as “affective exercises from which all doctrinal difficulties have been removed,” and Michelle Karnes has persuasively argued that in his adaptation of the Meditationes, Love removes the prospect of spiritual knowledge and advancement through affective meditation that Pseudo-Bonaventure offers, falling in with the Arundel agenda for the spiritual disarming of laypeople. In her words, “Love’s Mirror does not perpetuate the participatory spirit of the original.”215
Moreover, recent scholarship suggests that the Mirror is part of an ongoing program of supervisory interventions into affective piety. Sarah McNamer convincingly argues that the previously identified earliest manuscript of the Latin Meditationes itself represents, like the Mirror, a revision and translation of an earlier version in Italian, which is now uniquely witnessed by Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Canon. Ital. 175. The Meditationes as it survives, she proposes, prunes the emotionality of this earlier version, intersperses it with lecturing digressions, and tones down the intense focus on Christ’s humanity. McNamer thus proposes a similar relationship between the Meditationes and an earlier text as Watson and Karnes do between the Mirror and the Meditationes. Although McNamer’s argument that the Meditationes is itself a less liberal translation of a previous version is convincing (although it seems to me that there is not enough evidence to suggest, as she does, that the original Italian Meditationes was written by a Poor Clare nun), nonetheless the political circumstances of the translations are very different; the translator/editor of the Meditationes (possibly Johannes de Caulibus) was working in Italy, seventy years earlier, modifying a depiction of Christ too humble, humiliated, and poor
213 Ibid., 36–7. 214 Watson, “Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409,” 853. 215 Karnes, “Nicholas Love and Medieval Meditations on Christ,” 387. 106 for the combustible atmosphere of Franciscan reform. Love’s decision to translate the Meditationes, and the ways in which the methods of his translation respond to his own political atmosphere, merit its treatment as a separate text from the Meditationes and its possible Italian original. The spectre Love edits out is not the more radical St. Francis of the excommunicated Spiritual Franciscans, nor even John Wyclif, but the ‘Mary Sue’ - the English affective reader who imagines herself into the text.
The Mirror fills the narrative gaps in its source text (the Gospels), using many of the tropes and techniques of affective hermeneutics that appear both in fanfiction and in imaginative meditation: it dwells on moments of high emotion in the narrative, extrapolates from characters’ canonical actions to imagine their likely responses to events when these are not shown in the source text, and develops character ‘backstory,’ drawing on the apocryphal ‘infancy gospels’ to describe the early life of Mary (as does The Book of Margery Kempe). The Mirror also explicitly encourages the reader to empathize with the characters and become emotionally invested in the narrative as a spiritual exercise. In Love’s retelling of the Annunciation scene, he fleshes out the script of the Gospels closely, literally filling the gaps of Mary’s silences by detailing her emotional responses between biblical phrases (marked here in italics): “Marie… was astoned & abashed & no3t answered bot thought what this gretyng my3t be.”216 In Love’s Nativity scene, even the animals get emotional motivation: “anone the Ox & the Asse knelyng done leiden hir mouthes on the crach, brething at hir nesse vpon the child, at thei knowen by reson that in that colde tyme the child so simply hiled hade need to be hatte in that manere.”217 This style of fleshing out the emotional weight of scenes around lines from the original text is common in certain genres of fanfiction, as I described in the previous chapter, particularly in the genres of the ‘missing scene’ or ‘episode tag.’
The ‘missing scenes’ that appear in the Meditationes and Love’s Mirror also develop the relationships between characters, particularly between Mary and Jesus. Mary’s anguished night after accidentally leaving Jesus in Jerusalem elaborates on the sparse narrative in Luke, from the
216 Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Full Critical Edition, 24.18–20. 217 Ibid., 38.34–7. 107 moment of parental horror (“our lady seynge Joseph without þe child þat she supposed had gone with him. asked of him where was þe child? And he seid þat he wist neuver, for he wende as he seid þat she had ladde him wiþ hir”) - to Mary’s lament which, “as we mowe deuoutly suppose,” Mary sends up after searching all night for her son, “And þou my sweet sone Jesu where art þou now or how is it with þe? & where art þou now herborede?”218 Love dwells extensively on the heart-rending qualities of this episode, developing empathy for Mary, and also invites us to fill in Jesus’ activities while lost in the city:
What hope we þat he dide or where & in what menere lyued he þo þre dayes? We mowe suppose þat he went to some hospitale of pore men & þere he shamfastly praiede & asked herborgh, & þer ete & lay with pore men as a pore child. And sume doctoures seyn þat he begget in þo þre dayes.219
An even more striking example of Love’s development of moments of affective power in the Gospel narrative appears after Jesus’ confrontation with Satan in the desert, at which point, in Love’s narrative, angels approach him: “it is now ȝour tyme to ete. what is ȝour wille þat we ordeyn forȝow?” Jesus responds, “goþe to my dere modere, and what maner of mete she haþe redy bringeþ to me, for þer is none bodily mete so lykyng to me as þat is of hir dȝhtyng.” Mary lovingly provides a “lofe & a towel” and “a fewe smale fishes,” and spreading the blanket on the ground, the angels and Jesus have a picnic.220 Love develops the spaces of the unwritten in the Gospels into domestic, intimate moments.
However, the Mirror’s interest in setting a limit on the power of empathy as a hermeneutic is clear in numerous aspects of its content and construction. The prologue of the
218 Ibid., 59.4–17. 219 Ibid., 60.4–8. 220 Ibid., 73.31–75.5. 108
Meditationes includes an extensive passage explaining the theological value of imaginative meditation, and giving the reader authorization to use their own discretion in their meditations. The Mirror heavily edits this passage, removing much of the reader’s agency, since the original passage makes it clear that the book is meant to be used as a guide to further meditation, rather than the sum total of it.221 The passage also seeks to encourage rather than control the readers’ imagination and control over their own spiritual progress:
Non autem credas quod omnia que ipsum dixisse vel fecisse meditari possimus scripta sint. … Nam circa divinam Scripturam meditare, exponere et intelligere multifarie, prout expedire credimus possumus: dummodo non sit contra veritatem vite, iusticie aut doctrine, id est non sit contra fidem vel bonos mores. Cum ergo me narrantem invenies: Ita dixit vel ita fecit Dominus Iesus, seu alii qui introducuntur, si id per Scripturam non possit probari, non aliter accipias quam devota meditacio exigit.
You should not however believe that all that we are able to meditate on being said or done may be written down. … For we are able to meditate, understand, and expound on divine scripture in many ways, as far as we believe to be expedient, as long as it is not against the truth of [Christ’s] life, law or doctrine; that is, it is not against faith or good morals. When therefore you find me saying ‘Lord Jesus (or anyone else who may appear) said thus or did thus’, if is not possible to prove it through scripture, do not accept it except insofar as it is useful for devout meditation.222
Love’s version of this passage reads:
221 Sargent gives a full overview of the insertions, deletions, and modifications that Love makes to the Meditationes in his full critical edition, intro 38-54.
222 Iohannis de Caulibus (Pseudo-Bonaventure), Meditationes Vite Christi, Prologus 90-101. 109
And so what tyme or in what place in þis boke is written þat þus dide or þus spake oure lorde Jesus or oþer þat bene spoken of, & it mowe no be preuet by holi writ or grondet in expresse seying of holy doctors. it sal be taken none oþerwyes þan as a deuoute meditacion, þat it miȝt be so spoken or done.223
The difference lies primarily in the way the reader is conceived of weighing the supporting evidence for the meditations; in the original passage, the reader is given the criteria by which they may weigh the imaginative elaborations on scripture, which opens up the possibility that they, too, may produce their own imaginative elaborations that go beyond what Pseudo- Bonaventure has written. Love’s translation, however, subtly alters the sense of the passage into more of a disclaimer regarding the material of the book: that where he has not directly cited an authority, the reader must assume the text is merely “devoute meditacion.”
In a further passage in the prologue, the author of the Meditationes speaks of the great efficacy of his spiritual exercises: “Super omnia namque spiritualis exercicii studia hoc magis necessarium magisque proficuum credo, et quod ad celsiorem gradum producere possit” (For I believe that above all spiritual exercises this is more necessary and more beneficial, and able to produce a higher spiritual attainment”).224 He repeats this same formula later in the prologue. Love translates this sentiment into a more laicized sphere: “For among alle gostly exercyses I leue þat þis is most necessarye & most profitable, & þat may bringe to þe hyest degree of gude liuyng.”225
223 Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Full Critical Edition, 11.5–10.
224 Meditationes, Prologus 12-14; see also 72-76 for a similar statement. 225 Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Full Critical Edition, 11.32–5. 110
Love also omits the following passage from the Meditationes, which directs the reader to consult other sources regarding the Epiphany in order to supplement their imaginative meditation:
Qualiter ergo venerunt Magi ab Oriente Hierosolymam, et quid inter eos et Herodem actum est, et de ducatu stelle et quare talem oblacionem fecerunt, et aliis huiusmodi, legas textum Evangelii et sanctorum exposiciones. Et invenies.226
For how the Magi came from the East to Jerusalem, and what passed between them and Herod, and concerning the leading of the star and how they made such an offering, and the other things of this kind, read the text of John the Evangelist and the expositions of the saints. And there you will find it.
These omissions are indicative of a wider program in the translation that emphasizes the limits to the power, reach, and independence of imaginative meditation.
The Mirror also heavily emphasizes the role of the narrator as supervisor and intermediary between the reader and Christ. The narrator exhorts the reader to feel themselves present in the action, but their role is restricted to that of an entirely passive observer. Where Pseudo-Bonaventure and Aelred use the second person imperative, Love often uses the first person plural, with the authorial voice taking on the persona of a pushy tour guide in this time- travelling pilgrimage: “Take hede & haue in mynde as þou were present in þe pryue chaumbur of our lady,”227 “And so ymagine we & set we oure mynde & our þouht as we were present in the place [þ]ere þis was done at Betheleem. beholdyng how þees þre kynges comen with gret
226 Meditationes, IX.35-38 227 Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Full Critical Edition, 24.4–6. 111 multitude & a wirchipful company of lordes & other seruantes.”228 Although some of these narrative evocations are present in the Meditationes, many have been added by Love, and several actually replace sections in the Meditationes which encourage the reader to go to the Gospels and take greater control over what they imagine, as with the Epiphany passage quoted above. This has the effect of curbing and controlling, rather than freeing, the self-inserted reader.
One telling example of Love’s program of supervision occurs in the description of the raising of Lazarus. Where Love writes only, “bot now go we to the [birieles or] graue of lazare, folowyng oure lord Jesu with alle that meyne,”229 the writer of the Meditationes instructs the reader to “show to yourself, attentive as if you are present to them, what is said and done here; and freely mingle [converseris] in your mind not only with Lord Jesus and his disciples, but also with that blessed family so devoted to the Lord and beloved by the Lord, that is Lazarus, Martha and Maria.”230 The Meditationes author here plays on the ambiguity between the words ‘conversor’ (to socialize or mingle) and ‘converso’ (to turn over in the mind or ponder); here, the reader performs both actions at once. This sense of the text’s fertile interactivity is lost in Love’s translation; his reader is never invited to speak with Christ or anyone else.
The program of limitation in Love’s translation is also obvious in comparison with Aelred’s narrative technique. Aelred speaks to the reader in the imperative, a choice which his fifteenth-century English translator followed: “Arise now and lete vs go hens; whider, trowist thou? Certayn to folowe hym in-to Jerusalem... Leue hym not now but go with him in-to the hous where he made a soper to his disciples.”231 Furthermore, Aelred’s text exhorts the reader not only to approach Christ but to touch him in a way that is not only intimate but transcends
228 Ibid., 44.29–35. 229 Ibid., 131.15. 230 “Et ideo sic te attentam exhibeas ac si presens esses his que dicta hic et facta fuerunt; et libenter converseris non solum cum Domino Iesu et discipulis eius, sed eciam cum ista benedicta familia sic Domino devota et a Domino dilecta, scilicet Lazaro, Martha et Maria.” Meditationes, LXVI.2-7 231 Aelred of Rievaulx, Aelred of Rievaulx’s De Institutione Inclusarum: Two English Versions, 794–8. 112 physical reality, to “crepe in-to that blessed syde where that blood and water cam forthe.”232 This physicality, and the use of mystical or allegorical fantasy, is totally absent from Love’s text, which is comparatively dry in its insistence on the physical limitations of the world of the Gospels, as I shall suggest below.
Love exactly delineates limits, boundaries, and durations, mapping the reader’s location in both space and time, in addition to and elaboration of sections from the Meditationes which emphasize the physical limits of Christ’s world. Distances are given in careful and exhaustive detail; for example, the city of Nazareth is “from Jerusalem þe space of lx mile & xiiij or þere aboute,”233 the distance from Joseph’s house to Elizabeth’s is “þe space of sixty Mile & fourtene or þere aboute,”234 and the place from which the devil transports Jesus to Jerusalem to test him is “fro þat place about viij mile as men seyn.”235 This orientation around Jerusalem and the careful delineation of the distances evokes pilgrimage guides, and maps the text’s imaginative reach onto a physical geography that is firmly tethered in reality.
The Mirror’s concern with limits also encompasses temporality - both the internal chronology of the Gospels, and the way in which the reader uses her time. The Pseudo- Bonaventuran text has been reorganized by Love into seven parts corresponding to the days of the week, as is explained in the final section of the Proem, helping readers to organize their days, with “euery day on partie or sume þerof to be hade in contemplacion.”236 Love also suggests that this scheme can “longeþ to þe tymes of þe ȝere, as in aduent to rede & deuoutly haue in mynde fro þe bigynnyng in to þe Natiuite of oure lorde Jesu, & þere of after in þat holy feste of Cristenmesse, & so forþ of oþer matires as holy chirch makeþ mynde of hem in tyme of þe
232 Ibid., 863–6. 233 Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Full Critical Edition, 58.8. 234 Ibid., 31. 28. 235 Ibid., 72. 2. 236 Ibid., 13.10–14. 113
ȝere.”237 Love’s text also insists on keeping track of time internal to the narrative, just as it does of space. The number of days between Jesus’ birth and Mary’s purification,238 the duration of the feast for which the holy family enter Jerusalem,239 and many other intervals of time are carefully stated. The exact ages of John and Jesus at a given time must be carefully explained and authorities sourced:
John Euangelist came with his modere oure lady sistere to viset & se Jesus, þe which John was þat tyme aboute fyue ȝere olde. For as it is writen of him, he diede þe ȝere fro þe passion of oure lorde lxti & vij, þat was þe ȝere of his age XC & viij. So þat at þe passion of crist he hade in elde xxxj ȝere & crist himself xxxiij, or litel more. And so at þis aȝeyn comyng of Jesu þat was þen vij ȝere olde. John was fyue 3ere olde.240
Where there is time unaccounted for in the biblical narrative, the narrative is anxious to fill it in, as with the three days in which Jesus is lost in Jerusalem. The Mirror spends a whole chapter (ch. xiij) on the time between the holy family’s return to Nazareth and Jesus’ emergence as a spiritual leader at age thirty; the narrator asks whether he was idle (“God shilde”!) or why, if he did glorious things, they are not written of in the Gospel, and concludes that this is a place where it is permissible to use the imagination: “we mowe not opunly preue by holi writ or doctoures apreued. bot deuoutly ymaginyng to edificacion & stiryng of deuocion.”241 Based on Jesus’ humble and devout character, and the Gospel’s sole statement about this time (“Jesus profitede in age [&] in wisdome & in grace to fore god & man”) the reader is led to imagine these missing
237 Ibid., 13.20–24. 238 Ibid., 47.23. 239 Ibid., 57.29. 240 Ibid., 57.9–14. 241 Ibid., 61.24–5. 114 days, in which Jesus “went oft siþes to þe sinagoge, as to chirche,” “& aftur in tyme when he came home, halp his modere & also peraventure his supposed fadere Joseph.”242
This obsession with mapping and delineation extends to the detailed marginal apparatus passed down with the text, in a tradition that shows “a high degree of uniformity in a part of the text that might normally be expected to be quite unstable,” to the extent that Sargent insists that the marginal notes “must be treated as a part of the text itself, for all textual-critical purposes.”243 The marginalia include not only numerous Latin ‘notae’ to mark out important moments in the text, often using numbers, such as the notes in the margins of one passage that read “Tria notabilia / Primum / Secundum notabile / Tercium.” The marginalia also use the notations ‘N’ and ‘B’ to mark where Nicholas Love departs from the Bonaventuran text.244 In addition, two important manuscripts in the early tradition, Cambridge UL MS Add 6686 and Cambridge UL MS Add 6578, both show systematic efforts by either the original author or a subsequent annotator to add the day of the week for the meditations to the top of every page.
The marginal notation and the geographical and temporal details could be seen to be empowering the reader in her use of the text, but in conjunction with the omissions and changes from the Meditationes, they seem rather to be constraining. There is also the fact that the narrator’s presence is most insistent at the moments of the most heightened emotion, when there is the greatest possibility of the reader forming an affective connection with the characters that bypasses the narrator’s control. Love’s treatment of the conversion of Mary Magadelene is a particularly telling comparison. This is a moment of extraordinary sensuality and intimacy in Aelred’s text, when the reader is given an extensive and impassioned speech to deliver to Christ, begging him to allow her, too, to bathe and kiss his feet.
242 Ibid., 61.26–32, 37–8. 243 Ibid. intro 102–3. 244 Passim, but e.g. the marginal ‘N’ on page 60 in the left margin at l.9, and the ‘B’ at l.14. 115
If he still denies his feet to you, stay, beg, and burden your eyes with heavy tears, wrest what you seek with deep sighs and unutterable groans. Strive with God as did Jacob, that he may rejoice to be overcome. It will seem to you however that he averts his eyes, that he closes his ears, that he will take away his longed-for feet. Nevertheless, you cry, “Stay, cruel, churlish one; whence do you turn your face from me? Why do I cry, and you not listen? Render to me, good Jesus, the happiness of your salvation....”245
Aelred then imagines that the reader receives satisfaction from Jesus, since “Certainly he will not refuse his feet to a virgin, which he permitted to be kissed by a sinner.”246 The Book of Margery Kempe likewise focuses on this encounter between Mary Magdalene and Jesus as a moment of crucial emotional significance and identification for Kempe.247 The Meditationes also picks out this episode as a moment of particular identification for the reader, giving Mary Magdalene a moving speech of twelve lines that expand on her words in scripture; the author recommends that the reader “meditate seriously on this [episode] and strive to imitate such grace (caritas),” in order that they be received by their holy bridegroom (“te sponso tuo Christo Iesu acceptam”)248 and expounds on St. Bernard of Clairvaux on grace. Nicholas Love, in contrast, although his translation follows Pseudo-Bonaventure’s in the treatment of Mary’s speech, where the Meditationes offers the opportunity to seek Christ the Bridegroom through grace, Love inserts an extended digression on the sacrament of confession,249 explaining Mary Magdalene’s confession in technical terms that completely kill the mood: “so in þat dede she knowelech[ed] opunly hir
245 “Si tibi adhuc suos negat pedes, insta, ora, et gravidos lacrymis oculos attole, imisque suspiriis inenarrabilibusque gemitibus extorque quod petis. Luctare cum Deo sicut Iacob, ut ipse se gaudeat superari. Videbitur tibi aliquando quod avertat oculos, quod aures claudat, quod desideratos pedes abscondat. Tu nihilominus insta opportune, importune, [II Tim. iv, 2] clama: Usquequo avertis faciem tuam a me? [Ps. 12, 1] Usquequo clamabo, et non exaudies? Redde mihi, Iesu bone, laetitiam salutaris tui...” [Ps. 50, 14] De Inst. Incl. 31.992-103. 246 “Certe non negabit pedes suos virgini, quos osculandos praebuit peccatrici.” De Inst. Incl. 31.1001-2. 247 The Book of Margery Kempe, ch. 81, 6645-6662. 248 Iohannis de Caulibus (Pseudo-Bonaventure), Meditationes Vite Christi, XXVIII.66–7. 249 Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Full Critical Edition, intro 60–61. 116 synne in generalle, & also by wille in speciale.”250 Similarly, while at the Last Supper Aelred’s reader gets to lie in Christ’s lap, Love’s reader is treated to a short sermon on the Eucharist.251 It is no coincidence that at both of these moments of high emotion Love inserts digressions on important sacraments that emphasize clerical mediation - sacraments that were opposed by the Lollards.252 In Jesus’ confrontation with Satan in the desert, Jesus outwits Satan “by auctorite of holy writ.”253 However, Love leaves unspoken that the basis of Satan’s attack is also holy writ, which might suggest the instability of interpretation, and thus the reader’s room to move.254
These exegetical digressions not only break the emotional flow and draw the reader’s attention back to Love’s teachings rather than Jesus and Mary, but they also draw attention, through expanding on biblical quotations, to the textuality of Christ as the Mirror presents him - that is, they act as a reminder that the reader is interacting not with Christ himself, but with a mediated and potentially fallible textual representation255 that they need clerical help to interpret. This emphasis on the inability of Love’s text to provide direct, ‘transparent’ access to Christ is most obvious in the account of the Passion. After a highly detailed account of the preparation for Christ’s Crucifixion, with a wealth of detail punctuated with emotional outbursts (“A lorde in what sorowe is hir soule nowe?”256), at the very moment at which Christ is raised on the Cross, where the reader would be most primed to share in Christ’s pain and touch him through empathy, Love interrupts the dramatic impetus and the sense of direct connection with the past by abruptly casting doubt on his account’s truth, noting rather that “This is one maner of his crucifiyng after
250 Ibid., 92.13–14. 251 Ibid., 150.14–40. 252 Ibid., intro 60–63. 253 Ibid., 71.34–5. 254 “And he brought him to Jerusalem and set him on a pinnacle of the temple and said to him: If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself from hence. For it is written that He hath given his angels charge over thee that they keep thee. And that in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest perhaps thou dash thy foot against a stone. And Jesus answering, said to him: It is said: Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. And all the temptation being ended, the devil departed from him for a time.” Luke 4:9-13 (Vulgate, Douay-Rheims translation); Satan is quoting Psalms 90: 11-12. 255 That is, Love suggests that his translation is fallible, not the text of the Gospels. 256 Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Full Critical Edition, 174.24–6. 117 the opinione of sume men.”257 He then offers an alternative version, “Oþere þere bene þat trowen not þat he was crucifiede in þis manere. bot þat first liggyng þe crosse on þe gronde. þei nailed him þere upon, & after wiþ him so hangyng þei liften vp þe crosse.”258 Although this interruption follows the Meditationes, and ostensibly gives the reader more control over their meditations, in the context of Love’s earlier exegetical digressions the sense is subtly altered from the Meditationes. Love’s version draws attention to the scene’s textual, mediated quality, obscuring the possibility of visionary meditation, that is, access through the text to a real historical past, or even into an imaginative reality into which the reader can enter independently.259
With these narrative tactics, Love shifts the emotional focus onto the relationship between the Virgin Mary and Christ, and barely uses the bride/bridegroom metaphor that dominates earlier affective devotion, giving the reader on the one hand a much less privileged position within the text - that of supervised, silent observer - but on the other, inviting the reader to identify strongly with Mary, sharing in her profoundly emotional - but not erotic - bond with Christ.
Taken all in all, Love’s translation choices reflect the new caution in the contemporary political atmosphere of the English church with regard to readerly imaginative freedom. Love’s omission of the sections of the Meditationes that describe theory and technique, and his use of the supervisory first-person plural rather than the second-person singular, has the effect of curbing and controlling, rather than empowering, the self-inserting reader. The backlash in English devotional communities against Wycliffite teachings seems to have also created a new note of caution in allowing readers to roam in the world of the text without clerical supervision,
257 Ibid., 175.21–2. 258 Ibid., 175.23–4. 259 McNamer also finds the double Crucifixion - which she maintains was inserted by the translator-editor of the Meditationes, replacing a single Crucifixion - problematic, but for their differing portrayals of Christ: “it might seem that the author included both versions simply to double the imaginative options. But that interpretation fails to register a serious problem that the juxtaposition creates: the two images contradict each other in terms of the emotional responses they seem designed to elicit,” (941-2). 118 an attitude that reflects the increasing anxiety about allowing laypeople unmediated access to the word of God through translation into English.
And yet the narrator’s control is not total, and is at times even troubled. The second chapter of the text, translated from the Meditationes, calls on the visions of the mystic Elizabeth of Hungary as an authoritative source for the Virgin Mary’s early life (“And what [Marie] did & how she lyued þere in þat tyme, we mowen knowe by þe reuelationes made of hire to a deyoute woman [þe] which men trowen was seynt Elizabeth... þat oure lady tolde to þe same woman”260) thus acknowledging the possibility of visionary access to the past. Nor are the boundaries of Love’s own text entirely clear. As Sargent also observes, his narrative has a false end, with a formal explicit after the ‘transition paragraph’ leading into the final part, which “together give the impression of reopening a work that has already been completed.”261 This final part is the Treatise on the Sacrament, which recounts several Host miracles from the Lives of Edward the Confessor, Hugh of Lincoln, Gregory the Great, and a man of Love’s own acquaintance. These miracles, in which Christ’s real body becomes evident in the Eucharistic wafer, show the permeability of the boundaries between the present and past, making the moment of the Eucharist a sort of wormhole, a temporal anomaly that we will see exploited further in The Book of Margery Kempe.262 In his closing paragraphs of the main work, the narrator also expresses anxiety about the temporal rigidity of his structure, and allows the reader some independence and flexibility: “it semeþ not convenient to folowe þe processe þerof by þe dayes of the wike after þe entent of the forseide Bonaventur, for it were to tediouse as me þinkeþ… wherefore it semeþ to me beste þat every devoute creature þat loveth to rede or [to] here this boke, take the partes þerof as it semeþ moste confortable.”263 Love’s discursive attempt to police the text ends in uncertainty over whether readerly engagement with text can ever be wholly controlled, even as he defends the clergy’s authority to do just that.
260 Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Full Critical Edition, 19.34–39. 261 Ibid., intro 67. 262 A ‘wormhole’, or Einstein-Rosen bridge, is a hypothetical ‘shortcut’ through spacetime. 263 Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Full Critical Edition, 220.25–35. 119
Likewise, Love’s introduction to the Mirror explains the image of his (fairly conventional) title, the mirror, in a troubling image that suggests the inherent problem of self- insertion-as-empathy (or vice versa):
And so for als miche as in þis boke bene contynede diuerse ymaginacions of cristes life... may worþily be cleped þe blessede life of Jesu crist, þe which also because it may not be fully discriuede as þe lifes of oþer seyntes, bot in a maner of liknes as þe ymage of a mans face is shewed in þe mirroure.264
This confusing explanation alludes to St. Paul’s famous lines in order to express the ineffability of Christ’s life in contrast to other saints, but also suggests the paradox of the Mirror - Love’s prolonged struggle to prevent the reader from seeing her own face in the narrative.
3.4 “Noli me tangere”
I have argued above that Love’s anxiety about the temporality of the Mirror is inseparable from his consciousness of his book’s role in the front lines against the Wycliffite sympathizers. The Book of Margery Kempe also shows this relationship between atemporal or non-linear reading and with intimacy with Christ; Kempe’s immature desire ruptures the boundary between her own time and the first century CE, and allows her intimate contact with the Holy Family. Where the Eucharist, for Love, is symbolic of the importance of clerical supervision, for Kempe it becomes a proof of her own special, direct relationship with Christ and, moreover, her place in a community of female visionaries with their own special relationships with Christ. She sees the sacrament flicker, “as a dowe flekeryth wyth hir wengys,” and Christ tells her, “My dowtyr,
264 Ibid., 11.9–19. 120
Bryde [Bridget], say me nevyr in this wyse.”265 However, this is not to say that The Book of Margery Kempe imagines unrestricted access to the past, or a hermeneutic without limits. In fact, the Book dwells on a moment of rejection by Christ - the moment at which he tells Mary Magdalene (who, as I have shown above, was an important object of imaginative identification in this tradition), “Noli me tangere” (“Touch me not”). The importance of this moment for the affective devotion tradition suggests that far from imagining a completely permeable text, keeping the text in some way inviolable was at the very heart of imaginative meditation.
Comparison with the Mary Sue tradition shows a similar preservation of the source text in fanfiction communities. Paula Smith’s story has Mary Sue die before the end of her story; Pat Pfleiger recognizes a similar tendency for Mary Sues to die - that is, for the author to kill off her own self-insert character. As I suggested in my earlier discussion of the Mary Sue, her origins in a satirical parody make it clear that the Mary Sue is not a descriptive model, but prescriptive: she does not represent the real practice of wish-fulfilling self-insertion (except as a biased witness to the phenomenon of Star Trek fanfiction at the time of Smith’s writing), but rather is a negative stereotype used for the suppression of this practice, and continues to be used so today. The self- censorship of Mary Sue writers that Smith and Pfleiger observe may not continue in Mary Sue writing, but it does reflect the wider cultural suppression of the Mary Sue within the fan community, and as such is linked with the rhetoric of infantilization that is used to humiliate and ‘educate’ writers who write self-insert fanfiction.
Love’s likening of self-insert meditation to baby’s milk (“to symple creatures þe whiche as childryn hauen nede to be fedde with mylke of lyȝte doctryne”266) recalls the section from the “Why Mary Sue Needs to Die” essay, which suggests that Mary Sue writers “should be above such childish tendencies.”267 The shared infantilizing rhetoric suggests a point of contact between the modern and medieval strategies employed against the self-insert reader whose
265 The Book of Margery Kempe, ch.20, 1512-1523. 266 Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Full Critical Edition, 10.14–15; 10.23, 27, 35; 10.26–7. 267 Kirk, ‘Psychological Masturbation - Why Mary Sue Needs to Die’, February 14, 2002, http://web.archive.org/web/20020815093817/http://www.rinpu.com/storypages/mary_sue_rant.html. 121 imaginative creativity threatens the boundaries of the source text. She is immature, excessive, dangerous, and the damage she can cause to a text is figured as a literal physical penetration of the text’s world. This section, which concludes this chapter, discusses the different treatments of the noli me tangere episode in imaginative meditation texts and argues that these treatments represent a continuity of suspicion towards self-insert mediation within the tradition itself.
Treatments of the noli me tangere episode in the various devotional treatises I have examined are each characteristic of their reading strategies. Aelred’s text, early in the tradition and so confident in its empathic approach to the Gospel text, is agonized:
Don’t touch me, he says. Oh, harsh words, unbearable words. Touch me not. But why, Lord? Why may I not touch you? May I not touch your beloved feet rent by nails, drenched with blood - may I not kiss them?268
This agony is only temporary, however - Aelred imagines that this command is reversed after Mary Magdalene returns with the other women, and the reader, too, is granted a reprieve: “Then it was granted, what had been put off before. For they approached, and they held his feet.”269 The author of the Meditationes Vite Christi, who argues for the independence and authority of the imaginative reader, in fact seems to refuse Christ’s rejection of intimacy altogether.
Unlike Aelred’s text, the Meditationes does not dwell on the moment at which Christ says “noli me tangere,” but reads the quote in full as a moment of deferral rather than rejection: “Et currens ad pedes eius osculari volebat. Dominus vero volens animum suum elevare ad celestia ut non quereret eum in terra, dixit: Noli me tangere, nondum enim ascendi ad Patrem
268 “Noli, inquit, me tangere. O verbum durum, verbum intolerabile: Noli me tangere. Ut quid, Domine? Quare non tangam? Desiderata illa vestigia tua pro me perforata clavis, perfusa sanguine, non tangam, non deosculabor? An immitior es solito, quia gloriosior? Ecce non dimittam te, non recedam a te, non parcam lacrymis, pectus singultibus suspiriisque rumpetur, nisi tangam.” De Inst. Incls. 31, 1224-1231 269 “Redit, sed cum aliis mulieribus... Tunc est datum, quod fuit ante dilatum. Accesserunt enim, et tenuerunt pedes eius.” De Instit. Inclus. 31, 1234-1237. 122 meum.”270 The text goes on to read this moment as an ecstatic reunion between Christ and Mary Magdalene (“stant igitur dilecti cum iucunditate et gaudio maximo”), and even adds this revisionist addendum: “But although the Lord responded this way to her initially, I can scarcely believe that she did not touch him familiarly before she left from there, kissing his feet and hands.”271
Love, on the other hand, largely preserves the pseudo-Bonaventuran text, but adds in the text immediately surrounding “noli me tangere” a gloss that these words form Christ’s rebuke to Mary Magdalene: “that is to sey, I am not ȝit lift up in thi soule by trewe & perfite byleve, that I am evene with the fadere ferrey god, & therfore touch me not in that manere imperfitely.”272 For Love, this episode demarcates the limits of affective connection to Christ; imaginative meditation is ultimately a flawed hermeneutic, understanding physically what is in fact spiritual. Christ cannot be ‘touched’ by the reader with “unperfite affeccion to his manhode that was then dedely” [mortal] any more than Mary Magdalene may touch him now “after his resurrexion.”273 Unlike the author of the Meditationes, Love uses this episode to emphasize the ‘imperfection’ of carnal devotion, drawing again on Bernard of Clairvaux’s hierarchy of devotion. In the more suspicious atmosphere of post-Wycliffite England, where the inviolability of the sacred texts seemed under threat, this moment of rejection is preserved as an important reminder to the reader of the limits of their imaginative meditation for spiritual improvement.274
In The Book of Margery Kempe, Kempe’s visions include a startling amount of intimate contact with the people of the Gospels; however, they also include an equally unusual amount of rejection, which in fact is continuous with her interactions in everyday life. The Apostles tell Kempe to “cesyn and be stille” when she weeps too loudly at Mary’s deathbed, and Mary
270 Meditationes LXXXIV.14-16.
271 “Licet autem sic eidem a principio Dominus responderit, vix credere possum quin eum familiariter tangeret antequam inde discederet, deosculando pedes et manus.” Meditationes, LXXXIV.26-9 272 Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Full Critical Edition, 198.15–18. 273 Ibid., 198.10–11. 274 For another reading of the ‘touch me not’ scene in The Book of Margery Kempe, see Dinshaw 163-4 123 brushes her off when Margery offers her a “cawdel” to comfort her after Christ’s crucifixion, saying, “Do it awey, dowtyr. Geve me no mete but myn owyn childe.”275 Ultimately, Kempe meets rejection even from Christ, in a moment of emotional climax in her longest meditation on the Passion. Kempe observes the scene between Mary Magdalene and Christ, and identifies intensely with Mary, to the extent that there is some linguistic confusion in the text as if she is replaying the scene with herself instead of Mary:
Than owr merciful Lord, havyng pité and compassyon of hir, seyd, “Mary.” And wyth that word sche, knowyng owr Lord, fel down at hys feet and wolde a kyssyd hys feet, seying, “Maistyr.” Owr Lord seyd to hir, “Towche me not.” ... And than the creatur thowt that Mary went forth wyth gret joye, and that was gret merveyl to hir that Mary enjoyid, for, yyf owr Lord had seyd to hir as he dede to Mary, hir thowt sche cowde nevyr a ben mery. That was whan sche wolde a kissyd hys feet, and he seyd, “Towche me not.”276 (my emphasis)
This moment is of great significance to Kempe, and the narrative suggests that it is one that she replays over and over: “The creatur had so gret swem and hevynes in that worde that evyr whan sche herd it in any sermown, as sche dede many tymys, sche wept, sorwyd, and cryid as sche schulde a deyd for lofe and desir that sche had to ben wyth owr Lord.”277
It is remarkable that Kempe should be just as irritating to others in her own imagination; this suggests the extent to which the aggravation Kempe causes is part of her spiritual program, not an unfortunate side-effect. The hostile reactions Kempe meets on her adventures into the Gospel text recall how the world of Star Trek ‘pushes back’ against its invasion by Paula Smith’s Mary Sue. In “A Trekkie’s Tale,” Mary Sue dies after saving the entire crew of the Enterprise. In
275 The Book of Margery Kempe, ch.73, 5875; ch.81, 6560-6562. 276 The Book of Margery Kempe, ch. 81, 6645-6662. 277 The Book of Margery Kempe, ch.81, 6665. 124 a more recent parody of Star Trek Mary Sue stories, the webcomic “Ensign Sue Must Die!,”278 this trope re-appears. A young, blonde, beautiful crewmember, Ensign Mary Sue throws herself at every regular member of the cast, taking every opportunity to highlight her own disproportionate, impossible specialness and importance to the Star Trek universe - the markers of a bad writer who loves the text too much (she is the youngest crewmember on the ship, suffering from a deadly and mysterious disease, half-Vulcan, and orphaned in the same tragic accident that killed Kirk’s father). The webcomic imagines the immature reader’s intrusion into the text as literally damaging to the source text; Spock finally realizes that Ensign Sue is in fact a “dangerous force that is threatening the universe”:
Figure 3.1. Spock realizes the extent of the threat Mary Sue poses to the Star Trek universe. Panel 20 of “Ensign Sue Must Die!”, a webcomic by Clare Moseley and Kevin Bolk (Pot Luck Comics, July 2010; source: Interrobangstudios.com)
The crew of the Starship Enterprise repeatedly try to kill off Ensign Mary Sue, finally succeeding in a grisly fashion by ‘promoting’ her to Chief of Security - into the dreaded red uniform (it was a much-noted phenomenon in Star Trek: The Original Series that anyone who went down onto an alien planet with the first-contact team wearing the red uniform of the
278 Clare Moseley and Kevin Bolk, “Ensign Sue Must Die!,” Pot Luck Comics, July 2010, 125 security staff - that is, any extras who were not regular members of the cast - would inevitably die during the course of the episode).279 In the next panel, standing over a puddle of gore, Kirk remarks, “I never thought to see a Glornaxian Brain Sucking Rock Monster tear a girl limb from limb and then eat her corpse.”
The red uniform represents the temporality of the episodic television format, and one of the cast-iron rules of television script-writing - any new character introduced in an episode must be dead or dismissed by the end of it. The Star Trek universe’s internal temporality is ultimately too powerful for the external invader to overcome, and Mary Sue is violently pushed out of the text while being simultaneously assimilated into it as one of the many dead ‘red-shirt’ characters. Ensign Sue is made ordinary rather than extraordinary, and as such, loses the martyrdom that the original Mary Sue achieves with her heroic death. Pat Pflieger writes that the Mary Sue’s martyrdom was a recognized features of the genre in the earlier days of fanfiction: “traditionally, she dies in a beautiful scene, having saved everyone from everything.”280 The built-in limit of the wish-fulfilling self-insertion is the same as the reason for the death of the redshirts; the text must remain whole, intact, and recognisable for its serial continuity, and Ensign Sue is overtaken by the same internal logic which restores the regular cast of Star Trek: The Original Series to its proper number and prominence at the end each episode.
This ‘return to normalcy’ impulse in television scriptwriting has often been complicit with the underlying misogyny of media representation, particularly in television shows where the regular cast is small and all-male (such as Starsky and Hutch). Pat Pfleiger points this out: “The death [of Mary Sue] does serve the same practical purpose that the death of the media character’s lover does on the television show: it clears the decks for next week.”281 As Pfleiger notes, it is a commonplace of television writing that female characters introduced as love interests for male protagonists die by the end of the episode, re-asserting the importance of the exclusive homosocial bond that the show prioritizes (this is enough of a common trope that it has several
279 Hence the pop-culture term “redshirt” for a disposable, bit-part character. See eg. Redshirts, John Scalzi, 2013. 280 Pflieger, “Too Good to Be True: 150 Years of Mary Sue.” 281 Ibid. 126 names in fan media analysis, including “Dead Girlfriend of the Week” and “Women in Refrigerators Syndrome,” the latter a term coined by comic books writer Gail Simone in 1999).282 To an extent, the tendency of Mary Sues to die thus represents the internalization of institutional misogyny of the media by fanfiction writers, and highlights the extent to which m/m slash - the celebration of this homosocial bond in fiction, and preferable, for many fanfiction commentators, to Mary Sue stories - is itself problematically complicit in the erasure of women on television.
However, to kill off the Mary Sue, or somehow remove her from the ‘universe’ to “clear the decks” (or, indeed, to preserve “the very fabric of space time itself”283) is also to preserve the separation between reader and text. The writer of the Mary Sue, a loving reader, thus preserves the text for her own re-entry, for her own and others’ loving, imaginative re-reading generated by the gaps in the text, including their own absence. The noli me tangere scenes in the Passion meditations likewise are explicitly intended to generate dismay and pain in the self-inserting reader; Christ’s refusal to touch the loving female worshipper in the English tradition of devotional reading preserves the lack that is the generator of desire to reread.
However, in stories in which the Mary Sue is martyred, her death generates an affective response in the characters; that is, she leaves an affective trace in the text itself that replaces her physical presence. Ika Willis notes that in “A Trekkie’s Tale,” the characters mourn for Mary Sue by making her birthday a national holiday.
Her reading – her unique, irreplaceable participation in the text, figured by her birthday, both an identifying marker and a celebration of her coming-to-be-in-the-world – changes the text
282 “Women in Refrigerators,” Fanlore, accessed November 25, 2014, http://fanlore.org/wiki/Dead_girlfriend_of_the_week_syndrome; Gail Simone, “Women in Refrigerators,” Women In Refrigerators, 1999, http://lby3.com/wir/. 283 Moseley and Bolk, “Ensign Sue Must Die!,” 20. 127 profoundly and permanently. It reorganizes the temporality of the text, the calendar of its fictional universe and its public and communal (national/sacred) rhythms of work and rest.284
The birthday is also a reminder of Mary Sue’s primary distinguishing feature - her age - which her death scene also emphasizes with comedic excess, as Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Scottie stand around her death bed “all weeping unashamedly at the loss of her beautiful youth and youthful beauty.”285
Mary Sue’s birthday is integrated into the cyclical, calendar time of the Star Trek universe, becoming part of the episodic rhythm that she threatened to disrupt, just as in “Ensign Sue Must Die!” where she becomes a ‘redshirt’. Mary Sue’s continued presence in this way subverts her physical absence and death.
Kempe’s desire for martyrdom has previously been read as a conventional, if misguided extension of her devotional practice, and was one of the features that led Richard Kieckhefer to call the book an ‘autohagiography.’ There are numerous examples of Kempe’s fantasies of martyrdom:
Hyr thowt sche wold a be slayn for Goddys lofe, but dred for the poynt of deth, and therfor sche ymagyned hyrself the most soft deth, as hir thowt, for dred of inpacyens, that was to be bowndyn hyr hed and hir fet to a stokke and hir hed to be smet of wyth a scharp ex for Goddys lofe.286
284 Willis, “‘Writers Who Put Themselves In The Story’: Dante Alighieri, Roland Barthes, Lieutenant Mary-Sue and Me,” 5. 285 Walker, “Interview: A Conversation With Paula Smith,” 6.11. 286 The Book of Margery Kempe, ch. 14, 944-948. 128
However, read in the context of her concern for temporality, this desire for martyrdom must also be read not only as a desire to please Christ by demonstrating her love for him, but as a desire to enter into the community of saints, and hence to gain greater intimacy with Christ. Moreover, being martyred would enter Kempe into the liturgical calendar as a saint, thus assimilating her into cyclical the temporality of Christ. The liturgical calendar brings Christ’s presence into the daily life of worshippers in a very physical way, as is evident from the frequency with which liturgical celebrations, particularly at Easter, give the setting for visions in affective mysticism texts such as Angela of Foligno’s Memorial and The Book of Margery Kempe. The number of late medieval Eucharist miracles in which Christ appears at Mass also attests to the power of liturgical celebrations for affective devotion more generally. Indeed, Nicholas Love’s Mirror includes a series of accounts of these miracles, some known to Nicholas Love personally, appended to its account of Christ’s life, evoking the relationship between Eucharist miracles and the daily or weekly meditation on Christ’s life that the Mirror suggests. Martyrdom means joining Christ in heaven in the company of saints, but also, potentially, entering into liturgical time through having her own saint’s day, just as Mary Sue’s birthday is made a national holiday. Tellingly, Kempe’s repeated meditation on Christ’s words “Noli me tangere” also includes an experience of her failure to be martyred: every time she hears these words in church (read as part of the liturgical calendar, at Easter) she weeps as though “sche schulde a deyd for lofe and desir that sche had to ben wyth owr Lord.”287 In traditional affective worship, the distance between Christ and worshipper in this life generates the tears that are of such spiritual benefit. The metaphorical death of the self-inserted reader is also necessary to preserve the distance which makes necessary the role of the cleric as mediator, intercessor, and interpreter of the Word. It also keeps the text intact and pristine, both for re-reading and for the wider reading community who share a single text for imaginative access: for all these reasons, Mary Sue must die.
287 The Book of Margery Kempe, ch.81, 6665. 129
3.5 Conclusion
After Ensign Sue’s death in “Ensign Sue Must Die!” the text takes a strangely mystical turn; the intensity of Ensign Sue’s love for everything Trek ensures that after her gory death, she is given a mission from God (pictured as a huge figure seated on a throne, face obscured by intense brightness) to re-enter other texts and take her “powers of goodness and light” to them - starting with J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter universe. Mary Sue is, ultimately, unstoppable, nor is she unambiguously a negative stereotype, even in this parody webcomic. Moreover, her ignominious death is re-imagined as a martyrdom; God tells Mary Sue that her death has not been in vain: “your presence united the crew of the Enterprise. And your sacrifice will allow them to carry on.” Given further instructions to “continue to grace the galaxies with your presence,” Ensign Sue says, “Thanks, God, you’re the greatest!” “No, Mary Sue,” answers God, “You are.” The final panel reveals that God is herself an enormous Mary Sue.
Figure 3.2. Mary Sue’s divine mission is revealed. Panel 25 of “Ensign Sue Must Die!”, a webcomic by Clare Moseley and Kevin Bolk (Pot Luck Comics, July 2010; source: Interrobangstudios.com)
130
In the next panel, Mary Sue awakens in a field next to Harry Potter, who hands her a broomstick and says, “Thank goodness! I need you to take over as Seeker, Mary! The Quiddich Cup depends on it!” Where Mary Sue previously had a cutie-mark on her cheek (and the God-sue had an infinity sign), she now has a lightning-shaped scar similar to the one on Harry’s forehead, suggesting her disproportionate specialness and significance within JK Rowling’s world and her bond with Harry. Even as it parodies her, “Ensign Sue Must Die!” celebrates the irrepressible quality of the Mary Sue, and in doing so, celebrates immature love for texts, which transcends the internal limits of any given source text.
In one important moment in the Book, a priest encounters Kempe as she is weeping over a pieta, and rebukes her, “Damsel, Jhesu is ded long sithyn.” The priest’s rebuke suggests that her level of grief is excessive, given her lack of intimacy with Christ; he frames this lack of intimacy as a distance within a linear temporal scheme - Christ’s death is so “long sythyn” that Kempe cannot possibly feel so strongly for him. Kempe responds by rejecting his assumption about her relationship to time: “Sir, hys deth is as fresch to me as he had deyd this same day, and so me thynkyth it awt to be to yow and to alle Cristen pepil.”288 Kempe’s affective piety - her love and tears - configures her into a different relationship with time, giving Christ’s death an immediacy which she suggests is more spiritually respectable than his cynicism. The relationship of affective devotion to historical distance is the subject of the next two chapters, which turn to Petrarch and the early humanist’s devotion to Cicero and other Classical writers.
288 The Book of Margery Kempe, ch.60, 4962-4966. 131
4 Petrarch, affective devotion and immaturity
My previous chapter proposed ‘fannishness’ as a theoretical frame for exploring the affective reception in a particular set of devotional texts in medieval England. I used the Mary Sue as a means to explore the affective hermeneutics employed in those texts. I also discussed the ways in which these devotional texts employ immaturity as both part of a repressive negative stereotype and a liberating hermeneutics that enables an imaginative freedom from linear time. This chapter will turn to another set of texts about reading that hold in tension affect and immaturity in ways complementary to, but also different from the literature of affective piety: the letters of the fourteenth-century Italian scholar and diplomat Petrarch.
4.1 Introduction
Petrarch (1304-1374) is not only well known now for his Italian lyric poetry and his lifelong love for ‘Laura,’ but also occupies a unique position as a scholar and antiquarian in the mythology of the Renaissance and the rise of modernity. His role in shaping the intellectual community that brought about the florescence of humanism came about less through his vernacular poetry and more through his Latin oeuvre and his work of promoting and re-introducing into circulation many texts from the Classical Latin past. Despite many recent interventions into the modern historiographical narrative of the Renaissance, most notably the move in the last two decades towards renaming the period ‘Early Modern,’289 the prominence given Petrarch by Burckhardt and many later scholars in this narrative has led to an almost overwhelming association of Petrarch with the humanists of the fifteenth century. Because Petrarch’s work is so identified
289 I prefer the term ‘Renaissance’ to ‘Early Modern’ because I believe that the idea that there was a cultural movement of revival of Classical learning in the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries in Europe results in less unscholarly othering of the Middle Ages and anachronistic identification with the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries than the division of the world into ‘modernity’ and ‘premodernity’ suggested by the term ‘Early Modern.’ In addition, I use the term ‘Renaissance’ in this chapter because it has been so key to the reception of Petrarch in the last century, with which my chapter is partly concerned. However, the term ‘Early Modern’ does speak to an important mode of critical approach to Petrarch – as ‘the first modern man’ – which I will discuss at length here and later in the chapter. 132 with fifteenth-century humanism and the Classical revival, the influence of contemporary religious reading culture on his work has been neglected, through what Quillen calls the “scholarly schizophrenia” that haunts Petrarch scholarship.290
Petrarch’s discovery of Cicero’s Letters to Atticus in 1345 is often perceived as a formative moment not only in the history of the personal letter genre but also in the cultural changes of the Renaissance. Three distinct but interrelated historiographical narratives that have dominated Petrarch scholarship for the last hundred years take this discovery as a point of departure. This chapter explores the assumptions underlying these narratives, and reconsiders Petrarch’s relationship to devotional spirituality. I now briefly summarize the positions of these three narratives:
1. The evolution of Latin style. Cicero’s letters influenced the classicizing Latin style Petrarch affected in the Familiarum Rerum Libri, which later humanists further refined and developed, setting the model for ‘Neo-Latin’ studies and the Classical literary revival more generally.291 2. The rise of individual subjectivity. Petrarch’s development of the personal letter as an intimate space for self-reflection and a mirror for interior life, breaking from the regimented model of the ars dictaminis, would have enormous influence not only on humanist epistolography, but also on shaping humanist intellectual communities and their development of ‘modern subjectivity.’292 3. Attitudes to the past. The rediscovery of the Letters to Atticus offered
290 Carol E. Quillen, Rereading the Renaissance: Petrarch, Augustine, and the Language of Humanism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 12; Two exceptions: Alexander Lee’s recent discussion of the debt of Petrarch’s conception of friendship to St Augustine and the medieval reception of Cicero, Alexander Lee, Petrarch and St. Augustine: Classical Scholarship, Christian Theology and the Origins of the Renaissance in Italy (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 229–275; Gur Zak, Writing From Exile: Petrarch’s Humanism and the Ethics of Care of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 291 Ronald G. Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origins of Humanism From Lovato to Bruni (Boston: Brill, 2000), 264–5. 292 Quillen, Rereading the Renaissance, 109–113. 133
Petrarch a new perspective on Cicero, who would become so important to the Renaissance. Petrarch’s letters to Cicero inaugurate modern historicism – that is, empirical historical inquiry based on studying original texts in their context. This is in contrast to medieval historiography, whose distinguishing features are a casual attitude to anachronism and an uncritical approach to sources.293
This last historiographical narrative - ‘attitudes to the past’ - will be the subject of my next chapter, where I will focus on how Petrarch’s relationship to the middle ages takes on meaning in the modern historical imagination. In this chapter I shall address the first two narratives by focusing on the letters themselves.
This chapter will explore the affective hermeneutics of Petrarch’s letters, arguing that many of Petrarch’s imaginative practices are drawn from affective piety. The second part of this chapter discusses the role of immaturity in Petrarch’s affective hermeneutics. Petrarch inherits the characterisation of affective hermeneutics as immature, I shall argue, from contemporary affective piety together with the imaginative practices that enable his hermeneutic work. Here, continuing the use of fanfiction as a theoretical model, I shall use RPF (‘real person fanfiction’) as a tool to explore what is at stake in Petrarch’s experiments in affective reception as historicist enquiry. This comparison will have implications for my argument in Chapter Five against Petrarch’s symbolic role in the myth of modernity and the rise of modern historicism, and particularly the scholarship that would set Petrarch apart from his medieval cultural background as ‘the first modern man.’
293 For this view of medieval historiography, see e.g. Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past (London: Edward Arnold, 1969); Theodor Mommsen, “Petrarch’s Conception of the ‘Dark Ages,’” Speculum 17, no. 2 (1942): 226–42; Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). 134
4.2 Petrarch’s Medieval Devotion
Although Petrarch’s Italian works circulated extensively in Italy during his lifetime, his fame and reputation across Europe for much of the following century were based primarily on his Latin works. Petrarch wrote extensively in Latin, including numerous long poems in various states of completion, but the letters are his most extensive literary legacy beside his Italian poems, and arguably the most polished and complete of his Latin works. They constitute a miscellaneous repository for meditations on the Classical past, politics, literature, old age, faith, memory, his past, friendship, reading, solitude, plagiarism, travel, pride, poetry, love, and many other subjects. The Familiarum Rerum Libri (Letters on Familiar Matters)294- contain numerous letters to dead people, some of whom Petrarch had known in their lifetime, and some who had been dead for more than a thousand years. His other letter collection, the Res Seniles (Letters on Old Age), also contains one letter to Petrarch’s future readers, known as the “Letter to Posterity.” The letters’ breadth of scope, personal nature, and their combining of autobiography and a certain flexible temporality have made Petrarch seem to later readers to stand apart from his time, and for these reasons the letters seem to offer complete intimacy with their author, and to invite both confidence and confidences.
Petrarch’s attitude to the past is expressed primarily through his love for Classical historical figures, sensitively expressed in his letters and inseparable from his crushing fear of his own future demise and consignment to history. Thomas Greene frames Petrarch’s relations with the dead in highly romantic terms: “the ancients whom Petrarch loved as friends maintained a marble or a bronze repose that could break hearts.”295 Kathy Eden’s 2012 book The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy296 suggests that Petrarch’s letters, in a radical break from the medieval
294 All English translations of the Familiarum Rerum Liber and page numbers are from Aldo S. Bernardo’s translation, Letters on Familiar Matters (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1975-85); all Latin quotations are from Vittorio Rossi’s edition, Le Familiari - Edizione Critica (Firenze 1997). All English translations of the Seniles are from Letters of Old Age: Rerum Senilium Libri I-XVIII, trans. Aldo S. Bernado, Saul Levin, and Reta A. Bernardo (Racconigi (Cuneo): Nino Aragno, 2004). All Latin quotations are from Francesco Petrarca, Le Senili, ed. Ugo Dotti and Felicita Audisio, 2 vols. (Torino: Nino Aragno, 2004). 295 Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry, 43. 296 Kathy Eden, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 49–53, 57. 135 ars dictaminis, develop from Ciceronian style what she calls a ‘hermeneutics of intimacy’ that uses affect to reach into the past for connection. This hermeneutics is built around the key term familiaritas, familiarity or intimacy. However, I argue that Petrarch’s letters create a fusion of Ciceronian familiaritas and the hermeneutic intimacy of Christian affective piety, drawing extensively on a medieval mnemonic tradition associated with monastic practice, a tradition which gave affect a key position in the reading and memorization of texts. This tradition is essential to understanding Petrarch’s letters to Classical authors; far from being divorced from medieval culture, Petrarch’s thought and whole literary enterprise is steeped in the tradition of monastic reading and mnemonics. Through a complex engagement with the medieval mnemonic and epistolary tradition, Petrarch also puts pressure on the possibilities and the inherent tensions of the epistolary form, its blurring of the lines between absence and presence, past and present, and its own role in the mnemonic tradition.
The concept of familiaritas (intimacy, or familiarity, containing the concept also of familial or domestic relation, membership in the same microcommunity) is central to Petrarch’s letters. Eden and Hinds attribute the concept’s importance to the influence of Cicero’s letters on Petrarch. The Letters to Atticus are a subtle treatise on personal and political friendships, teasing out the semantic ranges of amicus and the “Ciceronian buzz-word” familiaris.297 Petrarch adopts the concept of familiaritas from Cicero’s letters to imagine an intellectual community united by ties of friendship and shared admiration of Classical literature, and connected by letter-writing on the Classical model. Nancy Struever sees this epistolary network as a response to the loose academic institutions of universities like Bologna, which Petrarch left before completing his law studies, and its replacement of this model of intellectual community with “a community conceived as a circle of friends devoted to litterae.”298 This is a community explicitly united around love and intimacy - that is, love between its members, and love for a specific set of texts. It shares this in common with the devotional communities within which many of the devotional texts of the previous chapter circulated in England in the fourteenth and early fifteenth century,
297 Stephen Hinds, “Defamiliarizing Latin Literature, from Petrarch to Pulp Fiction,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 135, no. 1 (May 23, 2005): 56-57. 298 Nancy S. Struever, Theory As Practice: Ethical Inquiry in the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 6. 136 and with many media fandoms. Petrarch’s explicit attempts, however, to develop an intellectual community based upon affect makes it singularly appropriate to examine his letters using fandom as a comparison. Moreover, as I have suggested in previous chapters, the modernization of historiography is inseparably entwined with the history of its professionalization, as the qualities of empiricism, objectivity, and attention to historical context that are associated with Renaissance historicism are those now valued by the profession. Because of the symbolic importance of the humanists’ community of intellectual friendship in the narrative of historiography’s modernization and professionalism, arguing for their medievalism, amateurism and fannishness has the potential to subvert this narrative. As I will argue in the next chapter (and have touched on in my introduction), there is a fundamental connection between ideas of the ‘fan’ or ‘amateur’ and the ‘medieval’ in modern discourse, a connection on which many of the assumptions behind much early modern scholarship are predicated. Petrarch is a key figure in the triumphalist narrative of the rise of the modern professional historian and of modernity itself. To argue for Petrarch’s medievalism and his immaturity therefore also troubles this dominant periodizing narrative.
This section of my chapter will take issue particularly with Kathy Eden’s argument in her recent The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy that Petrarch’s affective, epistolary hermeneutics derived exclusively from a Classical tradition of epistolary theory that he rediscovered in Cicero’s letters to Atticus in 1345.299 Eden observes that Petrarch’s historical hermeneutic is above all affective and inseparable from his use of the epistolary format. That is, that his main means of affective historical inquiry is the letter, by means of his letters to Classical authors. Eden’s insight is profoundly important to my project, as is her brilliant condensation of the role of intimacy in Classical epistolary and rhetorical theory.300 The generic assumptions created by the epistolary framing device of the letter demand that its reader believe in the possibility of connection across distance, and the possibility of intimacy through text
299 Eden, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy; see also Kathy Eden, “Petrarchan Hermeneutics and the Recovery of Intimacy,” in Petrarch and the Textual Origins of Interpretation, ed. H. Wayne Storey and Teodolinda Barolini (Leiden: Brill, 2007). 300 See Chapter One of The Renaissance Recovery of Intimacy. On the importance of the letter for Petrarch’s reading, see also Quillen p.109. 137 alone, since, as Eden writes, “Like letter writing, letter reading is rooted in the intimacy associated with friendship.” She quotes Petrarch, “Every friend’s language I truly understand as though it were my own.”301 These two assumptions are at the heart of Petrarch’s affective, epistolary historiography: that friendship is founded on frank language offering true knowledge of the other, and that true friendship is possible between two people who have never met.
Cicero argues both of these assumptions in De Amicitia, a foundational text for medieval conceptions of friendship and which Petrarch praised in his letters.302 Based on these assumptions, Petrarch could be a friend to those whose friendly letters he received across time, and could also have true knowledge of these friends in the past. Petrarch’s receipt of Cicero’s friendly Letters to Atticus thus allowed him - in his thought - to understand Cicero’s character more deeply than his fourteenth-century contemporaries. Empathy, or identification, is a major part of Petrarch’s affective hermeneutics, as both Eden and Quillen have noted. “Reading through identification was central to Petrarch’s humanism because it allowed him to imagine and to stage conversations among individuals across time and space,” writes Quillen.303 This corresponds to medieval and Classical ideas of friendship as the cultivation of an “alter idem,” a second self, a concept that Alexander Lee argues is central to Petrarch’s theory of friendship, which is received primarily from Cicero and Augustine.304 Quillen too sees this empathy in the context of the goals of humanism: “[The humanists] assumed that these authors could, despite their acknowledged otherness, speak powerfully to modern concerns. The writings of early Renaissance humanists thus imagine a context in which authors ancient and modern, Christian and pagan, can converse in a common language about abiding questions fundamental to the
301 Bernardo, Fam. 56; “Equidem sic michi omnis amici sermo probatur, ut proprius nec sermo tantum sed silentium et nutus.” Fam XVIII.8.20-21; Eden, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy, 67. 302 Lee, Petrarch and St. Augustine, 235. See Fam. IV.3 and XII.8. 303 Quillen, Rereading the Renaissance, 15. 304 Lee, Petrarch and St. Augustine, 236. For the quote that a friend "is, as it were, another self," see Cicero, De Amicitia XXI, 80. Cf. Lafleur, Pétrarque et l’amitié (Quebec City: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2001). Lafleur concludes that Petrarch’s concept of friendship is essentially Ciceronian (49-50), with little trace of Christian sensibilities or Augustinian influence (31). 138 human condition.”305 Eden describes how Petrarch develops this historical approach, which she describes as a “hermeneutics of intimacy,” out of the Ciceronian concept of intimacy or familiarity – familiaritas – that Cicero develops extensively in the Letters to Atticus. However, Eden’s otherwise careful and scholarly book describes Petrarch’s new historicism emerging from his “spectacular encounter” with Cicero’s letters to Atticus in 1345, without attending to the intervening medieval tradition.306 However, it is clear that this sense of empathy, of identification or shared experience with Classical authors, is mediated not only through a long tradition of thought on amicitia but also through medieval affective piety.
Both Quillen and Eden rightly note Petrarch’s pointed, deliberate break with the medieval ars dictaminis, the regimented style of epistolography that dominated letter writing in the thirteenth and early fourteenth century across Europe, and had a strong relationship with the scholastic modes of thought associated with the medieval university.307 However, the “hermeneutics of intimacy” as Eden describes it is almost identical to the “hermeneutics of empathy” that Karl Morrison finds in late antique and medieval devotional literature. As a result of Petrarch’s own erasure of all influences except Classical ones - and thanks to the contemporary disciplinary boundaries and periodization that have in part resulted from Petrarch’s view of history - Petrarch’s debt to medieval devotional culture has been overlooked by most modern scholars. Ronald Witt, for example, writes that Petrarch’s Familiares I.1, “suggests an imaginary self-transport across history, of the kind that no one before Petrarch, so far as I know ever claimed to have made,”308 ignoring the many examples of similar self- insertion into scenes from the life of Christ in devotional meditation and visionary literature of the twelfth to fourteenth century. In fact, Petrarch’s affective hermeneutics show a strong
305 Quillen, Rereading the Renaissance, 4. 306 E.g. "the textual recoveries behind the rediscovery of intimacy begin with Petrarch’s spectacular encounter with Cicero’s lost letters to Atticus in 1345" (2); "What he discovers will stun subsequent generations of humanists, including Erasmus and Montaigne. With their help, this stunning discovery will change how early moderns expect to read and write" (10). 307 Quillen, Rereading the Renaissance, 107–9; Eden, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy, 57–9; Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients, 256–7. 308 Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients, 277. 139 affiliation with the contemporary devotional meditative practice that I explored in my previous chapter.
Petrarch’s break with the ars dictaminis is pointed and deliberate, as his letter on his refusal of the role of Papal Secretary on the grounds of the incompatibility of his literary style makes clear.309 Petrarch’s letters vary in length, do not conform to the strict subject partitions of the ars dictaminis, and follow a classicizing style of Latin that tries to avoid medievalisms.310 The opening letter of Petrarch’s collection lays out his stylistic approach to the private letter. He writes that he will use “a plain, domestic, and friendly style,”311 that is, ‘familiariter,’ as did Cicero to his friends, and that his letters, like Cicero’s, will be about personal matters, familiaria (Fam I.1 32-34).312 Eden argues that Petrarch developed his ‘familiar’ style based on his study of Classical rhetorical and epistolary theory,313 particularly from Cicero’s own rule that the letter should model its style on sermo - oral communication, or everyday speech. In the Classical letters from which Petrarch took his inspiration, this conversational style has a unique power to transcend the distances between friends, a trope common in Classical letters, such as Seneca’s fortieth letter to Lucilius: “I never receive a letter from you without being in your company forthwith.”314 It is this quality of ‘familiar’ speech to generate both intimacy and the sense of immediacy between reader in the moment of reading and writer in the moment of writing – a “touch across time,” to use Dinshaw’s phrase – in which Petrarch finds such potential for historical inquiry, as Eden argues.
309 Fam. XIII.5; Ernest H. Wilkins, Life of Petrarch (Chicago, MI: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 110–11. 310 Silvia Rizzo, “Il Latino Di Petrarca,” in The Uses of Greek and Latin: Historical Essays, ed. A.C. Dionisotti, A. Grafton, and J. Kraye, Surveys and Texts 17 (London: Warburg Institute, 1988). 311 "Hoc mediocre domesticum et familiare dicendi genus amice leges" (I.1.114-6). 312 Eden 239; "familiaria et res novas ac varios illius seculi rumores in epystolis includit" (I.1.224-5). 313 However, as Eden notes, it seems likely that Cicero’s Epistolae ad Familiares were named in the Renaissance after Petrarch’s letter collection rather than the other way around. 314 Ad Lucilium epistulae morales 40.1. 140
Petrarch’s use of an intimate, conversational style is designed to stimulate an affective connection between reader and writer, a sense of intimacy or friendship. However, his epistolary theory and style show clear signs of being mediated by the ideas about language and affect that were current in monastic circles. The tradition of affective piety had long developed the potential of this affective bond to transcend temporal borders, as the previous chapters have discussed, and in Petrarch’s time there was a sophisticated and centuries-old tradition of affective piety in Italy, with strong lines of communication between monastic and other religious communities across Europe.315 Many of its most important thinkers gained public notice during Petrarch’s lifetime. Angela of Foligno died in 1309, five years after Petrarch’s birth, while Bridget of Sweden came to Rome in 1350 and remained there until 1373, dying only a year before Petrarch. The Meditationes vitae Christi is thought to have been written in a small town near Florence316 only a few years after Petrarch’s discovery of the letters to Cicero, and its proliferation and translation into multiple languages occurred during Petrarch’s lifetime. Another important figure in European affective piety, Catherine of Siena, is often linked with Petrarch for their simultaneous and public advocacy for Pope Gregory XI to move the curia back to Rome from Avignon. Moreover, Petrarch was, as numerous scholars have noted, a deeply spiritual man who moved in religious circles, nor is there any reason to think that he was insulated from affective and imaginative piety. In fact, the evidence suggests the opposite: that Petrarch sincerely admired the monastic life, counted many members of monastic orders among his friends, was profoundly affected by his brother Gherardo’s entry into the Carthusian Order, and had considered becoming a monk himself. His attitude was by no means the norm among his contemporaries, and should not be taken for granted (consider, for example, Boccaccio’s satirical portrayals of monks and clerics in the Decameron).317
315 The classic work on this form of affective piety is Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast; See also Despres, Ghostly Sights; Kathryn M. Rudy, Virtual Pilgrimages in the Convent: Imagining Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011). 316 Sarah McNamer, “The Origins of the Meditationes vitae Christi,” Speculum 84 (2009): 905–54. 317 Giles Constable, “Petrarch and Monasticism,” in Francesco Petrarca: Citizen of the World, ed. Aldo S. Bernardo (Padua; Albany: Editrice Antenore, and State University of New York Press, 1980), 61; 68–70. 141
Petrarch was greatly influenced by monastic spiritual practices, particularly Carthusian. The Carthusian Order, whose members spent most of their days in silent meditation and prayer, had reached new popularity in the fourteenth century, with a reputation for being rigorous and zealous servants of God, and prolific writers and copiers of books; reading had a special role in the Order’s spirituality, and many of the mystical meditations I have discussed in the previous chapters, although first nurtured by Franciscan thinkers, were transmitted and read in Carthusian houses (Nicholas Love, for example, was a Carthusian prior). Petrarch was also popular with the Carthusians; his writings with the strongest religious themes - De vita solitario, Psalmi penitentiales, and De otio religioso - were recorded and circulated in Carthusian monastery libraries, and were often collated in manuscripts alongside popular Carthusian spiritual writings such as Ludolph of Saxony's Vita Christi, so that Carthusians played a significant role in the transmission of his works, particularly in England, Italy, and Germany.318 De otio religioso begins with an account of a visit with the Carthusians and praise for their way of life, and some copies bear a dedication to Gherardo, to the monks of Montrieux and La Grande Chartreuse, or to the Carthusian Order generally.319
Although the general scholarly consensus is that Petrarch’s admiration of monasticism was sincere but did not amount to a rigorous understanding of any particular theory of monasticism,320 in his recent study of Carthusian influences in Petrarch’s works, Demetrio Yocum argues that “specific Carthusian solitary ascetic practices played a pivotal role in shaping Petrarch's Christian humanist program of care, training, and examination of the self.”321 This program - and its Carthusian influences - are particularly evident in De vita solitaria, the De otio religioso, and the Secretum. Yocum points to Petrarch’s emphasis on solitary devotion, the importance of reading, and his hermeneutics that emphasize the emptying of the self; however,
318 Demetrio S. Yocum, Petrarch’s Humanist Writing and Carthusian Monasticism: The Secret Language of the Self, Medieval Church Studies 26 (Turnholt, Belgium: Brepols, 2013), 19; Dennis D. Martin, Fifteenth-Century Carthusian Reform: The World of Nicholas Kempf (Brill, 1992), 244, n.12. 319 Constable, “Petrarch and Monasticism,” 66. 320 Anna Maria Voci, Petrarca e la Vita Religiosa: Il Mito Umanista della Vita Eremitica (Roma: Istituto storico italiano per l’età moderna e contemporanea, 1983); Constable, “Petrarch and Monasticism,” 72. 321 Yocum, Petrarch’s Humanist Writing and Carthusian Monasticism: The Secret Language of the Self, 5. 142 these are fairly general attributes rather than theological fine points, and it is not clear that Yocum’s vision of Petrarch’s spirituality varies from the “literary interpretation of monasticism” that Brian Stock and others attribute to Petrarch.322 Petrarch’s brother Gherardo joined the charter house of Montrieux where Petrarch visited him twice in 1347 and 1353; Petrarch also twice stayed with the Carthusians of Garegnano in 1354 and 1357.323 The years 1342-1353 have often been identified as a period of religious crisis and introspection for Petrarch, triggered by Gherardo’s entry into a monastery, during which time Petrarch also began to write the Secretum and his other most religious works. These writings, and other letters on religious themes, suggest that he longed for the internal consistency and commitment that would allow him to join a monastery, before he found some peace with his place in the world in the later 1350s.324 It was during this period that he discovered and read Cicero’s Letters to Atticus in 1345; Petrarch’s rejection of the secular politician whom he met in those letters is bound up with his movement towards a more ascetic, spiritual way of life.
However, more than this general admiration of monks and interest in the ascetic way of life, Petrarch’s writings show a familiarity with numerous eleventh- and twelfth-century monastic writers whose thought is bound up with affective meditation, including Bernard of Clairvaux and Aelred of Rievaulx.325 Refusing the common scholarly interpretation of Petrarch’s solitary ideal as a secular, humanist asceticism, Giles Constable emphasizes the “mystical elements” of De vita solitaria.326 In a letter written late in his life, Petrarch writes to Boccaccio of the importance of reconciling the self to death by meditating on the Passion of Christ, in a
322 Brian Stock, After Augustine: The Meditative Reader and the Text (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 85. Giuseppe Mazzotta, Worlds of Petrarch (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 148. 323 Ernest Hatch. Wilkins, Petrarch’s Eight Years in Milan (Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1958), 17, 138–42, 198–9. There is evidence that Petrarch also had an illegitimate half-brother, Giovannino, who became a Benedictine monk; see M. Tagliabue and Antonio Rigon, “Fra Giovannino, Fratello del Petrarco e Monaco Olivetano,” Studi Petrarcheschi 6 (1989): 225–40. There is no evidence that Petrarch had a close relationship with him, however. 324 Constable, “Petrarch and Monasticism,” 58; Wilkins, Life of Petrarch, 36. 325 Anna Maria Voci, Petrarca e la Vita Religiosa, 62-5; Constable, “Petrarch and Monasticism,” 87. 326 Constable, “Petrarch and Monasticism,” 64. 143 passage that suggests that he was familiar with this genre of imaginative meditation, if not the Meditationes specifically:
… ut sepius moriamur et rem vulgi opinione durissimam consuetudine leniamus, meditatio frequens efficiet non natura. Que quails fuerit philosophis, norunt ipsi. Nunc clarius multo quam prius nostra, id est Christianorum, meditatio: Cristus est vitalisque Cristi mors ac de morte victoria.
Frequent meditation, not nature, will allow us to die more often and to relieve through practice something the multitude considers hardest. How the philosophers did this is for them to explain. Now much more clearly than before, our meditation - that is, Christian meditation - is through Christ and Christ’s life - giving death and victory over death.327
These signs of Petrarch’s own deep religious conviction and connection to devotional culture, and his interest in the Carthusian culture of devotional reading, help suggest that affective piety influenced Petrarch’s development of his own reading practices. Indeed, Stock names Petrarch as an example of a “devotional reader” who kept alive the medieval tradition of meditative reading, part of the “revival of contemplative reading techniques” that occurred towards the end of the Middle Ages.328
Moreover, meditational reading such as the devotional tradition taught was also central to Petrarch’s system of care for the self, and, ultimately, to the humanist system of pedagogy that would develop from his emphasis on the potential for moral improvement in Classical texts. Gur Zak argues that Petrarch’s “meditative reading” of pagan texts aimed to shape his inner self
327 Bernardo, Old Age 21; Sen. I.5.33-34; see also Zak, Writing from Exile, 144. 328 Stock, After Augustine: The Meditative Reader and the Text, 22. 144 through absorbing their valuable lessons in a ‘secularization’ of the medieval tradition of using reading and writing as a spiritual exercise.329 In doing so, Zak argues, Petrarch sets up his own humanism as a form of “secular spirituality,” an alternative to monastic traditions of spiritual self-care.330 Yocum, however, argues that Petrarch’s ideas that seem to draw on Classical Stoicism are mediated by Carthusian attitudes towards reading and the shaping of the self.331
Throughout his life Petrarch treated writing itself as a meditational exercise, the creation of a mirror in which one might come to greater knowledge of oneself.332 The eleventh- and twelfth-century writers who would influence the Franciscan imaginative meditative tradition, such as William of St Thierry in his Golden Epistle and Hugh of St Victor in his commentary on Rule of St Augustine, recommended using writing for self-exploration with the understanding that a knowledge of the self would lead to greater understanding of God, and Petrarch knew these writers and followed their example just as much as Cicero’s.333 The ‘secularization’ Zak refers to means that the end result of Petrarch’s writing is no longer a greater knowledge of God, but a perfection of the self in the world, hence Zak’s characterization of this as a “humanist” care of the self. This is particularly true in Petrarch’s later life, when he had given up once and for all on becoming a monk. However, previous scholarship has underestimated Petrarch’s exploration of his anxiety and self-doubt about the ‘secularization process’, and the importance of this ambivalence in his development of a hermeneutics of historicism that privileged affective forms of knowing.
In addition to his emphasis on affect, through the example of the letters to Classical authors Petrarch encourages readers to imagine Cicero, Virgil, Livy and other ancients as living
329 For the classic work on reading as a monastic spiritual activity, see Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, trans. Catherine Misrahi (New York: New American Library, 1962). 330 Zak, Writing From Exile: Petrarch’s Humanism and the Ethics of Care of the Self, 119. 331 See e.g. Yocum, Petrarch’s Humanist Writing and Carthusian Monasticism: The Secret Language of the Self, 207. 332 Zak, Writing From Exile: Petrarch’s Humanism and the Ethics of Care of the Self, 110–2. 333 Michelle Karnes, “Nicholas Love and Medieval Meditations on Christ,” Speculum 82 (2007): 380–408. 145 interlocutors, just as the Meditationes vitae Christi and Aelred of Rievaulx’s De institutione inclusarum encourage their readers to imagine Christ, Mary and the saints as present before them, and shows clearly that he was imagining the writers this way as part of his reading process, and that this imagining had a strong affective element. This imaginative reading was particularly developed in the affective devotional tradition, but also appears in texts associated with the mnemonic tradition that developed around the twin practices of lectio and meditatio, monastic meditative reading. Affective piety is in some ways a branch of learning from the root of this tradition, some of whose key thinkers were also highly influential in the affective devotional tradition, such as Hugh of St Victor and St Augustine. Medieval mnemonic theory as developed and practiced by mnemonic writers and the affective devotional tradition are, therefore, intertwined intellectual traditions with many similar underlying assumptions.
Petrarch was also steeped in the medieval mnemonic tradition alongside his exposure to Classical literature in his early education in Avignon, home of the papal court, and his unfinished legal schooling in Bologna.334 He was named alongside Cicero and Thomas Aquinas in many Renaissance texts on memory as one of the most outspoken adherents to the use of an artificial memory system, and his use of this system is indicated by the heavily marked margins of the books from his own library.335 He compiled a florilegium of Valerius Maximus, Dicta et facta memorabilia, a textbook for handy memorization and rumination that formed, in Carruthers’ words, part of “an unbroken tradition of medieval pedagogy,”336 and also a florilegial collection of commonplaces, Rerum memorandarum libri. The importance of medieval mnemonics to his epistolary theory, however, has been largely overlooked.
The mnemonic craft that was developed over the centuries and was practiced as part of monastic life through the early and high Middle Ages, as Mary Carruthers shows in her comprehensive reviews of the tradition, was developed in Classical antiquity as a craft of
334 Carruthers, Craft of Thought, 15, 29. 335 Quillen, Rereading the Renaissance, 77–86. 336 Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 184. 146 inventio, designed to help orators improvise on the spot. As such, it draws significantly on the imagination as an aid to the memory, and does not distinguish between the two faculties of memory and imagination in the same way as twenty-first century western psychology and neuroscience. Medieval monks developed an “orthopraxis for creative invention of meditation and prayers”337 that remained fairly stable throughout the Middle Ages, despite evolutions in the theory, particularly in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. However, central texts of memory theory like the Ad Herennium were still keystones of education in Petrarch’s time. Imagination and the emotions played an important role in creating the system of ‘tags’ to sort and store these memories, and in recalling them. Carruthers has argued that in this tradition of medieval mnemonic theory, “emotions are not discrete mental ‘entities,’ but are intricately woven into exactly the same memory networks as are the facts and objects of our experience.”338 Jody Enders and Anthony Bale’s work has explored in detail the medieval use of violent imagery to aid learning;339 imagery that provokes other strong emotions, such as love or sadness, played a similar mnemonic role. In the highly influential section on meditative reading in De Trinitate (which Petrarch had read closely, as his annotations on his copy show340), Augustine wrote, “no one loves God before he knows Him. And what is it to know God except to behold Him and steadfastly perceive Him with the mind?”341 Augustine’s assertion of the importance of visualization for love and, conversely, the driving force of love in generating visualization, underlies the founding assumptions for the fourteenth-century texts like the Meditationes vitae Christi which recommend the visualization of Christ while reading of his life as a powerful reading practice that develops the reader’s love for Christ. Medieval mnemonic theory supports
337 Carruthers, Craft of Thought, 2. 338 Ibid., 16. 339 Jody Enders, “Rhetoric, Coercion, and the Memory of Violence,” in Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages, ed. Rita Copeland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 24–55; Anthony Bale, Feeling Persecuted: Christians, Jews and Images of Violence in the Middle Ages (London: Reaktion, 2010). 340 Rerum Senilium Liber, XVI.1 (to Luca da Penna, Papal secretary, on Cicero’s books); Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric and the Making of Images, 400-1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 121. 341 De trinitate VIII.4. 147 the idea that knowledge of a text must involve affective connection and emotional investment; through the development of this tradition in affective piety, visual, emotional reading was inextricably associated in Petrarch’s time with the reading of religious texts – specifically, the life of Christ. The reading practices Petrarch applies to Classical texts are, although based in Classical textbooks like the Ad Herennium, informed by the mediating tradition of centuries of medieval devotional reading.
Medieval memory theory varied on whether memories were located in space or in time; the Ad Herennium locates memories in space, recommending memorization techniques that involve the imaginary construction of tableaus to aid memorization and a spatial system of memory ‘filing,’ while Augustine, following Aristotle, locates memories in time.342 Memory as practiced in the Middle Ages has a dehistoricizing power which has led to accusations of anachronistic thinking and lack of awareness of history in late antique and medieval thought. Jerome’s description of his visit to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem shows him treating physical space as text, where each place sets off a chain of remembered association which seems to transcend the time gap between the reader and when the events actually took place: “whenever we enter the Holy Sepulchre we see the Lord lying in his winding sheet, and, dwelling a little longer, again we see the angel at his feet, the cloth wrapped at the head.”343 Jennifer Summit notes the resemblance between this associative approach to the landscape in the twelfth-century pilgrimage text Mirabilia Urbis Romae and Petrarch’s Familiarum Rerum Libri IV.I, his description of his tour through the ancient sites of Rome. This letter, Thomas Greene claims, is demonstrative of the break with the Middle Ages that Quillen and Eden also identify in Petrarch’s letters, while Greene wrote of the Mirabilia: “its mingling of Christian miracle and topographic error betokens an incapacity or unwillingness to perceive the passage of history.”344 But as Summit shows, Petrarch too ‘reads’ the ruins of Rome, finding ‘triggers’ for his memories
342 Carruthers, Craft of Thought, 12–13. 343 Jerome, ep. 46:5 (PL 22.486); see also Carruthers The Craft of Thought, 42-3, Bale, Feeling Persecuted, ch. 5 and 6. 344 Jennifer Summit, “Topography as Historiography: Chaucer, Petrarch, Medieval Rome,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30 (2000): 224; Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry, 91. 148 of all the texts with which he is familiar - secular and Christian.345 Several of Petrarch’s letters to Classical figures also contain imaginative interactions ‘triggered’ by mnemonically powerful sites in the Italian landscape. In Petrarch’s letter to Livy, in which he rhapsodizes on the power of Livy’s works to transport him through time in his imagination (“You often make me forget present evils by transferring me to happier centuries...”), he writes that he is now “standing before your gravestone.”346 Petrarch’s letter to Virgil similarly locates its writer in the Mantuan countryside: “Mantua is shaken by the disturbances of her neighbours... it is here I have composed what you are reading, and have enjoyed the friendly repose of your rural fields. I wonder by what path in your wanderings you sought the unfrequented glades, through what meadows you were wont to stroll... such sights bring you vividly to my eyes.”347
In addition to a vivid sense of shared physical space with the ancient Roman writers, expressions of friendship with these dead authors are a characteristic feature of Petrarch’s Classical reading. “The concept of books as persons was an abiding concept with Petrarch,” writes Ernest Wilkins. “A book, to him, was not a mere object: it was the emanation of a personality; and he constantly sought acquaintance - at times even friendship - with the personalities thus revealed.”348 Petrarch consistently describes his interactions with Cicero’s writings, and with the physical books containing them, as with the man himself. “My beloved Cicero has now wounded my leg as he once did my heart,”349 he writes to one friend, after dropping a heavy volume painfully on his leg, and to another, on the difficulties of sending books through a warzone, he writes, “It seemed unlikely that this unattended and unarmed Cicero
345 Summit, “Topography as Historiography: Chaucer, Petrarch, Medieval Rome,” 211–232. 346 Bernardo, Fam. 332-3; “quod immemorem sepe presentium malorum seculis me felicioribus inseris,” Fam. XXIV.8.25-6; “ante ipsum sepulcri tui lapidem,” 46-7. 347 “Mantua... recusat... hic tibi composui que perlegis, otia nactus / ruris amica tui, quonam vagus avia calle / fusca sequi, quibus in pratis errare soleres, assidue mecum volvens, quam fluminis oram... ambieris... atque ea presentem michi te spectacula reddunt.” Fam. XXIV.11.38-50. 348 Ernest H. Wilkins, Life of Petrarch (Chicago, MI: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 21. 349 Fam. XXI.10.16. 149 would arrive safely through the clash of arms and the flashing of swords.”350 Petrarch goes beyond the common trope of treating the book as a metonymy for the person, frequently describing, in a playful, if slightly affected way, the ups and downs of his relationships with ancient authors, most frequently Cicero, but also many others. When Petrarch moves to a house reportedly once inhabited by Simplicianus (mentor of St. Ambrose and bishop of Milan after his death) after a period of residence in a house reportedly once owned by St. Ambrose, he writes to the monk Francesco, “nor do I fear Ambrose’s annoyance since in my thoughts I have not abandoned him and really have moved closer to his father - for thus Augustine calls Simplicianus.”351 In the famous letter to Boccaccio on plagiarism, Petrarch likewise writes, “I ask you to pray to Virgil with me for forgiveness, asking him not to be annoyed if, just as he stole many things from Homer, Ennius, Lucretius and others, I inadvertedly took, but did not steal, a little something from him.”352 Petrarch displays his erudition in these two moments, which blur the concept of familiaritas as intimacy between persons with familiaritas as the intimacy of a person with a text.
Because it enables friendships across time, familiaritas thus becomes a technology of transtemporal connection, as well as a mechanism by which Petrarch defines himself and his literary goals. It is also vital to Petrarch’s construction of a transtemporal epistolary community, including not only his contemporary correspondents, but an imagined community of past readers and writers:
nectantum familiari convictu probatos et qui mecum vixerunt, sed qui multis ante me seculis obierunt, solo michi cognitos beneficio literarum, quorum sive res gestas atque animum sive
350 Fam. XVIII.11. 351 Bernardo, Fam. 199; “Hec me oportunitas et fuga hominum ex urbe detraxit, nec sum veritus ne egre ferret Ambrosius, cum ab eo nequaquam mente discesserim, quod ad patrem eius accesserim - sic enim Augustinus vocat Simplicianum: ‘patrem in accipienda gratia Ambrosii epyscopi,’” Fam. XXI.14.5. 352 Bernardo, Fam. 302; “mecum ipse Virgilium ores, det veniam nec moleste ferat si, cum Homero, Ennio, Lucretio multisque aliis multa sepe rapuerit, ego sibi non rapui, sed modicum aliquid inadvertens tuli.” Fam. XXIII.19.17. 150 mores vitamque sive linguam et ingenium miror… cupidiusque cum illis versor quam cum his qui sibi vivere videntur.
…not only those known through face-to-face contact and who have lived during my lifetime, but also those who died many centuries before me, those known to me only through the mediation of writing, those whose actions and mind, or character and life, or eloquence and intellect I admire. And I more eagerly talk with these friends than with my contemporaries who imagine themselves alive….353
This imagined community also includes Petrarch’s own future readers, who are explicitly addressed in his “Letter to Posterity,” the final letter of the Seniles, which Petrarch probably wrote before 1361 (with later additions), early in the process of forming the shape of the Seniles, and he always intended it to end the collection.354 Petrarch constructs his historical understanding based on the familiaritas between a reader for a beloved writer, especially a reader of letters. As a friendly recipient of Cicero’s friendly letters, Petrarch assumes the rights of friendship, including both intimate understanding and the right of rebuke, that Cicero outlines in his letters and in De amicitia.355 As Hinds puts it, “Petrarch is allowing himself to write back across the centuries to Cicero with a ‘familiarity’ equal to that which he cultivates with his own contemporary correspondents, and modeled upon the ‘familiarity’ with which Cicero had interacted with his contemporary correspondents.”356 Petrarch thus writes to Cicero “as though to a contemporary friend, with the familiarity which I have with his thought” (“tanquam
353 Bernardo Fam. 236; Fam. XV.3.14; see also Quillen, Rereading the Renaissance, 115. 354 Ernest H. Wilkins, Petrarch’s Later Years (Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1959), 268. 355 Hinds, “Defamiliarizing Latin Literature,” 53; Eden, “Petrarchan Hermeneutics and the Recovery of Intimacy,” 240–1. 356 Hinds, “Defamiliarizing Latin Literature,” 53. 151 coetaneo amico, familiaritate que michi cum illius ingenio”).357 Here, Petrarch conflates his knowledge of Cicero’s writings with his knowledge of Cicero the historical person; this is not simply a play on the trope of substituting the text for the writer, but demonstrates the extent to which Petrarch’s hermeneutics of empathy and his theory of friendship overlap.
Absolute familiarity with the text was at the heart of medieval mnemonic theory: in spontaneous composition, one’s creativity was measured in one’s ability to absorb, process and rearrange memorized material to create something new. This was the process by which texts were memorized and known so thoroughly that they became part of the reader’s mental makeup, a process that was often described as physical internalization. Gregory the Great taught, “We ought to transform what we read into our very selves, so that when our mind is stirred by what it hears, our life may concur by practicing what has been heard.”358 The influence of medieval mnemonic theory on Petrarch’s ‘hermeneutics of intimacy’ is clear in the way he expands the meaning of the term familiaritas to mean not only intimacy between friends across time and space – including dead Classical authors – but also this intimate knowledge of a text. In the Secretum, Petrarch’s imagined dialogue between himself and St Augustine, ‘Franciscus’ describes, with approval from ‘Augustinus,’ how he isolates and reads imaginatively a moment from the Aeneid, and uses imaginative elaboration to aid his allegorical reading: “As I carefully study every word, I have heard with my ears the fury, the rage, the roar of the winds; I have heard the trembling of the mountain and the din. Notice how well it all applies to the tempest of anger.”359 Petrarch here demonstrates the imaginative reading taught within the medieval mnemonic tradition, where reading, memorizing and interpreting draw on the imaginations and emotions together. The saint here advises him to memorize what he reads, so he can recall it at will in times of spiritual torment:
357 My translation; Fam. I.1.292-3. 358 Moralia in Job I, 33 (PL 75, 542C). 359 Petrarch’s Secret, transl. Draper, 101; Francesco Petrarca, Secretum, ed. Ugo Dotti (Rome: Archivio Guido Izzi, 1993), II.16.8. 152
Whenever you read a book and meet with any wholesome maxims by which you feel your spirit stirred or enthralled… make a point of learning them by heart and making them quite familiar [multoque studio tibi familiares effice] by meditating on them, as the doctors do with their experiments, so that no matter when or where some urgent case of illness arises, you have the remedy written, so to speak, in your head. [my emphasis] 360
Augustinus’ use of the term familiaris here suggests a link between using friends as guides to virtue and using texts as moral guides. Cicero’s assertion that friends love virtue in each other and that true friendship arises from self-knowledge of virtue was developed in Augustine and his followers into a Christian amor in which true friends find God in each other and come, through their friendship, to greater knowledge of God in themselves.361 Petrarch writes to Francesco Nelli that friendship is mediated by God, “who made us, who made friends, who made even the name of friendship itself.”362 The internalizing of texts with which one is friends is akin to the self-knowledge that comes with true friendship; the best parts of texts can be incorporated into oneself, ready to be there at need for moral guidance, just as true friendship with a person leads to knowledge of God in oneself.
Another of Petrarch’s letters describes this total internalization of a text as familiaritas, but also distinguishes between plagiarism and the creative transformation of an assimilated work. In the case of plagiarism, the blurring of self and ‘friend’ (or, in this case, friendly text) becomes problematic. Petrarch praises his young protégé Giovanni Malpaghini to Boccaccio for his prodigious memory, but notes the pitfalls of excessive enthusiasm for the greats, and a lack of originality which he associates with immaturity; “as is the way of youth, he delights in imitation... so enamored of Virgil’s charms is he that he often inserts bits taken from him into his
360 Secretum II.16.2; see also Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, 168. 361 Lee, Petrarch and St. Augustine, 252. 362 Bernardo Fam. 145; “Illum… qui et nos et amicos et ipsum amicitie nomen fecit,” Fam XII.4.9-10. 153 own work.”363 But much to Petrarch’s surprise, when he rebukes the boy, Malpaghini retorts with a half-line from one of Petrarch’s poems which is lifted word-for-word from the Aeneid. Petrarch insists that his assimilation of Virgil’s work has been so total that he reproduced him without even realizing it, and tells Boccaccio in another letter that he knows some authors so well that he has “thoroughly absorbed these writings, implanting them not only in my memory but in my marrow and they have become one with my mind” (“hic se michi tam familiariter ingessere et non modo memorie sed medullis affixa sunt unumque cum ingenio facta sunt meo” [ my emphasis]), to the extent that he sometimes finds himself using their words as if they were his.364 This memorization is thus a process of internalization of texts, so that Petrarch empathizes with Virgil to such an extent that he becomes him, temporarily, when writing, unknowingly repeating his lines. Memorization and active reading of texts, here, becomes a kind of empathy with their author. This letter suggests that Malpaghini’s plagiarism is an immature, incomplete kind of intimacy with the Classical writers, typical of his youth (“quod suum habet etas illa”), but Petrarch’s own accidental plagiarism suggests the artificiality of such a distinction - or it suggests that Petrarch’s own practices are barely removed from immaturity.
The second part of this chapter will focus on Petrarch’s use of the concept of immaturity, and how his portrayal of the relationship between affective reception and immaturity resembles and differs from the Meditationes vitae Christi and related devotional texts. Petrarch often sees a tension between his Christianity and his love of Classical texts, which he links to his failure to relinquish his youthful loves and to live and read in an age-appropriate – that is, Christian adult – way. His anxiety about the propriety of his desire for the past and the associated themes of retrogression, backsliding, immaturity, necrophilia and impotence run through his writings, more so in his Latin writings, where he rejects his Italian poetry, the writing of his youth, in favour of the Classical literature of his childhood. Reading Petrarch in the context of medieval affective devotion and, retrospectively, in the context of modern fan communities, makes it clear how
363 Bernardo, Fam. 301; “imitationibus gaudet, quod suum habet etas illa… huius [Virgilii] hic amore et illecebris captus, sepe carminum particulas suis inserit.” Fam. XXIII,19.66-7, 74-5; c.f. Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 219. 364 Bernardo, Fam. 212; Fam. XXII.2.76-79. 154
Petrarch internalizes contemporary discourses surrounding affective reading and maturity in his own writing.
4.3 The Textual Self: Petrarch, RPF and the Mary Sue
Petrarch also works through the problem of the inevitable failure of readers to fully and permanently immerse themselves in a textual world, as does Margery Kempe in her meditations on Christ’s words “noli me tangere.” Petrarch’s crisis of intimacy with Cicero that results from his discovery of the Letters to Atticus gives rise to the first letter to Cicero, where Petrarch expresses frustration and anguish reminiscent of what Kempe’s and Aelred’s mysticism express at their own moments of contact failure. For Petrarch, however, this crisis has consequences for the very knowability of the past – that is, for the possibility of historicist reading. In this section, I will compare Petrarch’s affective reception with Real Person Fanfiction (RPF, or RPS), fanfiction that renders real people into textual characters for the pleasure of the reader with little regard to external reality, mimicking the worst excesses of the ‘bad amateur’ historian. RPF, however, also provokes its readers and critics to imagine the object of their affection viewing them in return, an imagined encounter that has the potential to turn sour. RPF offers a space to fanfiction writers in which to imagine this encounter positively. Meanwhile, the possibility of incurring the bad opinion of beloved figures from the past haunts both Petrarch and the Petrarchan reception I shall discuss in the next chapter.
I shall compare his textual strategies with the modern example of ‘Real Person/People Fiction’ (usually referred to as RPF or RPS – Real Person/People Slash).365 This subgenre of fanfiction probes at the line between historicist reading and the pleasure in exploring possible readings of texts without investment or belief in their historical truth, demonstrating a more playful, ‘literary’ approach to historical documents such as is also the guiding force behind many historical novels. In the next chapter I will examine several examples of later historians who evaluate Petrarch as a historian by this same means, attacking or confirming Petrarch’s intimacy
365 The Fanlore.org entry gives a good, if necessarily incomplete short history of the genre: http://fanlore.org/wiki/RPF. See also Trinity, "RPS on the Net,” Citybeat: the SlashCity monthly webzine, (posted June 11, 2001), http://web.archive.org/web/20010801230323/citybeat.slashcity.org/article.php?sid=29. 155 with the past rather than evaluating this hermeneutic strategy. Here, however, I will establish the commonalities between Petrarch’s imaginative and affective strategies and those used in affective piety, and their common basis in medieval mnemonics. I will then examine the tensions within Petrarch’s own writing about the legitimacy of using the hermeneutics of affect to ‘know’ not Christ, but figures from the pre-Christian past.
Petrarch’s letters suggest that he has constructed images of the textual personae of Classical authors in his imagination, and, moreover, that to him Cicero’s textual presence is vivid and coherent, transparently signifying the man Cicero. As I have suggested, contextualizing Petrarch’s reading practices in contemporary devotional practice suggests its influence on his tendency to connect texts to their authors in a vivid and personal way. Using RPF as another point of comparison for his approach to Cicero makes it clearer what is at stake in Petrarch’s reading. Petrarch approaches a man from the past as a body of texts; his discovery of the Letters to Atticus triggers a crisis when his reading up to that point proves to have rendered an inadequate portrait of Cicero, proving that he is not as ‘familiar’ with Cicero as he had prided himself upon being. This crisis reverberates through the letters to Classical authors in Fam. XXIV in imagery of wounds and maimed bodies. Petrarch’s anxiety about the efficacy of friendship as a route to intimacy is also inextricable from his anxiety about immaturity, as I shall argue in the final part of this chapter, in which I suggest that Petrarch associates inadequate, emotional reading with both the schoolroom and the immature, amateur engagement with texts of affective piety.
In De trinitate St. Augustine gives a vivid account of the role of the imagination in reading: “Who, upon reading or listening to what Paul the Apostle wrote or what has been written about him, does not fashion in his mind … the appearance of the Apostle…?”366 Just as Augustine reads Corinthians and imagines St Paul, so Petrarch himself imagines Augustine as he reads the Confessions. This imagined version of Augustine becomes more concrete in the Secretum, in which Petrarch’s own self-insert character, ‘Franciscus,’ conducts a philosophical dialogue with ‘Augustinus’ within the conventional fiction of a vision. Petrarch’s intimate
366 “Quis enim legentium uel audientium quae scripsit apostolus Paulus uel quae de illo scripta sunt non fingat animo… ipsius apostoli faciem … ?” Augustine, De trinitate VIII.iv.7 156 familiarity with Cicero’s writings, and other writings about him, makes it possible for him to extrapolate an imagined personality with whom he can interact, not merely a mnemonic image. Thus Petrarch writes to Cicero, “and if I have come to know your mind from your works, which I do seem to know as though I had lived with you.”367 This is an elaboration of the common metaphor in Classical and medieval letters of the letter as a proxy for physical contact between writer and reader,368 as when Cicero writes, “I embrace you, although absent, in my mind; I kiss the letter.”369 Seneca famously writes more explicitly of the letter as touch across distance:
I never receive a letter from you without being in your company forthwith. If the pictures of our absent friends are pleasing to us, though they only refresh the memory and lighten our longing by a solace that is unreal and unsubstantial, how much more pleasant is a letter, which brings us real traces, real evidences, of an absent friend!370
Augustine chooses St. Paul to exemplify imaginative reading here perhaps because he is a letter a writer; the epistolary format gives unique opportunities for self-construction, which Paul particularly exploited. His self-construction in his letters to the Roman and Corinthian churches form part of his efforts to imagine a Christian community; his letters thus invite even his later readers into retrospective membership in this community, and thus also to ‘see’ him as Petrarch sees Cicero, “tanquam coetaneo amico.” Petrarch’s imaginative interactions with Cicero suggest that he recognizes that the ‘Cicero’ of Cicero’s letters and dialogues is a carefully crafted
367 Bernardo, 320; “Si ex libris animum tuum novi, quem nosse michi non aliter quam si tecum vixissem,” Fam. XXIV.4.9. 368 Stowers, Stanley K., Letter Writing in Greco Roman Antiquity (London: Westminster Press 1986) p.58 369 "complexus igitur sum cogitatione te absentem; epistolam vero osculatus," Fam.III.11.2. 370 “Quod frequenter mihi scribis gratias ago; nam quo uno modo potes te mihi ostendis. Numquam epistulam tuam accipio ut non protinus una simus. Si imagines nobis amicorum absentium iucundae sunt, quae memoriam renovant et desiderium [absentiae] falso atque inani solacio levant, quanto iucundiores sunt litterae, quae vera amici absentis vestigia, veras notas afferunt? Nam quod in conspectu dulcissimum est, id amici manus epistulae impressa praestat, agnoscere” (Ep. Mor. 40.1). 157 narrative construct, as is the ‘Petrarch’ we meet in his carefully crafted letter collection. Likewise, letters offer the illusion that distances can be transcended, a generic characteristic that allows Petrarch the conceit of writing to writers from the past by re-imagining temporal distance as spatial. In doing so he draws not only on pagan and Christian ideas of the afterlife as a place to which one can travel and return, but on the meditative tradition that allowed readers to travel in their minds to the place and time of Christ’s Passion, and even speak to those they met there.
It is this interactivity with the past that I argue Petrarch inherits from affective meditation. However, he also inherits the anxiety about the legitimacy of his contact and the possibility of failure, such as is also found in the devotional texts at the moment they engage with Jesus’ words to Mary Magdalene, “touch me not.” In the Familiarum Rerum Libri, Petrarch lingers not only on the possibility of connection or on the fulfillment of intimacy, but on their failure. In the letters of Book I-XXIII Petrarch usually gives a straightforward date and place as a suffix (i.e. “Ticini, V. Kal. Novembris”).371 Nonetheless, by not giving the year, these letters in the main part of Familiarum Rerum Libri “tend to escape or erase the specific moment of their historical origin.”372 However, Petrarch’s first letter to Cicero concludes, “From the land of the living, on the right bank of the Adige, in the city of Verona in transpadane Italy, on 16 June in the year 1345 from the birth of that Lord whom you never knew.”373 The letter to Seneca ends, “in the year 1348 from the birth of Him whom I know not whether you really knew;”374 the letter to Varro, “in the year 1350 from the birth of Him whom I wish you had known;”375 to Livy, “in the year 1351 from the birth of Him whom you might have seen or heard, had you lived a little
371 Fam. XXIII.19.17 372 David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 266. 373 Bernardo, Fam. 318; "Apud superos, ad dexteram Athesis ripam, in civitate Verona Transpadane Italie, XVI Kalendas Quintiles, anno ab ortu Dei illius quem tu non noveras, MCCCXLV" (XXIV.3.7) 374 Bernardo, Fam. 325; "Apud superos, in Gallia Cisalpina ad dexteram Padi ripam, Kalendis Sextilibus anno ab orto Eius quem an tu rite noveris incertum habeo, MCCCXLVIII" (XXIV.5.26) 375 Bernardo, Fam. 328; "Apud superos, in capite orbis Roma, que tua fuit et mea patria facta est, Kalendis Novembris anno ab ortu Eius quem utinam novisses, MCCCL" (XXIV.6.11) 158 longer.”376 Almost all the other letters to Classical authors end with variations on this theme, insisting on the impossibility of true understanding or community with the recipient in their eternal separation from Christ, even as they insist on the possibility of contact in their very epistolarity. These suffixes have the effect of startling the reader out of the intimacy - the familiaritas - of the letter’s language, instead conveying, in Thomas Greene’s words, “the deep yearning for a transaction, a yearning that was by definition unquenchable.”377
The letters contain numerous examples of the “incomplete embrace,” in Greene’s words, or “missed connection,” as Stephen Hinds describes the series of just-missed meetings and not- quite legible books in Book XXIV and the Africa.378 The great gulf between Petrarch and the Classical authors opened up by the coming of Christ is only one of many obstacles that stand in the way of the “affective connection across time” (in Dinshaw’s words) that he so desires. The lost books of Classical authors are an evocative representation of this gulf, and are a pressing absence in a number of the letters in Book XXIV. Petrarch writes to Cicero, “Here are the titles of the books whose loss is most to be deplored: De republica, De re familiari, De re militari, De laude philosophie, De consolatione, and De gloria... even of the surviving books, large portions are missing... particularly in De oratore, the Academica, and De legibus.”379 His letters to Livy, Varro, and Pollio also lament their lost books, and in his letter to Varro he lists thirteen other prominent Roman authors whose works have not survived at all.380 Petrarch even commissions Livy to inform Pliny the Younger and Crispus Sallust in the underworld of their failure to leave a
376 Bernardo, Fam. 333; "Apud superos, in ea parte Italie et in ea urbe in qua natus et sepultus est... VIII Kalendas Martias, anno ab Illius ortu quem paulo amplius tibi vivendum erat ut cerneres vel audires natum, MCCCLI" (XXIV.8.6) 377 Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry, 43. 378 Stephen Hinds, “Petrarch, Cicero, Virgil: Virtual Community in Familiares 24, 4,” Materiali e Discussioni per L’analisi dei Testi Classici 52, Re-Presenting Virgil: Special Issue in Honor of Michael C. J. Putnam (2004): 163–71. 379 Bernardo, Fam. 320; XXIV.4.86-95. 380 Bernardo, Fam. 327; XXIV.6.70-76. 159 legacy: “their nightly vigils enjoyed no happier a lot than yours.”381 Petrarch also uses the imagery of the wounded body to describe these absences in the Classical canon. Cicero’s fragmentary works are “our maimed generals” (“duces nostros... truncos”),382 and he calls Quintilian’s incomplete De institutione, “the dismembered limbs of a beautiful body,”383 a description which recalls the famous moments in Virgil and Lucan of beautiful young men killed in battle.
This metaphor has interesting ramifications, as it suggests an extension of the metonymy of the body of work with the body of the author, or, alternatively, extends the idea that memorization or ‘assimilation’ of a text is a physical absorption, so that the wounds are Petrarch’s own. Where his assimilation of a text has been incomplete, leaving a gap in his knowledge, represented as a physical wound; his lament for Varro’s lost books is more explicit on this point, saying that the reminder of their loss is like the re-opening of a wound.384 Hinds reads Petrarch’s anecdote of the heavy volume of the Letters to Atticus injuring his leg as a parable of the dangers of over-familiarity (the book, so near at hand, is too easy to knock over and damage him), but it also suggests the physicality of Petrarch’s relationship with these authors - he jokingly accuses Cicero of attacking him.385 Furthermore, each missing book represents the inadequacy of Petrarch’s knowledge - the impossibility of gathering enough information to have true familiaritas with these long-dead authors - and the potential for a nasty shock, as with Cicero’s Epistulae ad Atticum, when he discovers that the Cicero of his imagination had gaping holes in him. There is a eucharistic note in Petrarch’s representations of books as flesh; Cicero’s books, however, do not represent the whole with a small piece, but rather, they add up to a whole person, and missing sections are imagined as wounds. These lists
381 Bernardo, Fam. 333; "Plinium Secundum... Crispum Salustium salutes, quibus nuntia nichilo feliciores eorum vigilias fuisse quam tuas," Fam. XXIV.8.6. 382 XXIV.4.14 383 Bernado, Fam. 329; "vidi formosi corporis artus effusos" Fam. XXIV.7.2. 384 "Quid nunc libros perditos enumerem? quot librorum tuorum nomina, totidem fame nostre sunt vulnera; prestat igitur siluisse, nam et contrectatione vulnus recrudescit et sopitus dolor damni memoria excitatur." (XXIV.6.4) 385 Hinds, “Defamiliarizing Latin Literature,” 55; Fam. XXI.10.16. 160 of missing books are a symptom of Petrarch’s “frustrations of ultimate unbridgeability,”386 the inability of the imagination to fully reconstruct the dead. Petrarch’s first letter to Cicero is driven by anger, “ira dictante,”387 after discovering the Letters to Atticus and reading them for the first time. His anger arises from his disappointment at the disjunction between Cicero’s self-presentation in his philosophical writings and his ‘real’ self that appears in his letters: “I read [the letters] with great eagerness. I listened to you speak on many subjects, complain about many things, waver in your opinions... and I who had known the kind of guide that you were for others now recognised the kind of guide that you were for yourself.”388 Petrarch’s distress on discovering his lack of true familiarity with Cicero is perhaps also akin to the shock he feels on realizing he has unintentionally plagiarized Virgil389 - it is a failure of his own mnemonic, imaginative reading practice. The act of imagination described by Augustine, used to aid meditation on a text, is also an act of memory, similar to the process described in more detail by Alcuin, in the case of a reader imagining the distant Holy City described in his text: “He does not imagine the actual walls and houses and squares of Jerusalem, but whatever he has seen in other cities known to him, these he fashions as being possibly like those in Jerusalem; from known shapes he fashions a thing unknown....” 390 Alcuin’s description clarifies the way in which an imagined thing or person is a composite; just as the imagined Jerusalem is composed of cities the viewer has seen, so Petrarch’s Cicero is a composite, produced out of his knowledge of the different Ciceronian texts he has read. Thus his intimacy with Cicero is founded on the success of his absorption of his texts. It is at this point that I wish to introduce a comparison with RPF (Real Person
386 Hinds, “Petrarch, Cicero, Virgil: Virtual Community in Familiares 24, 4,” 157. 387 "Quibus [sc. epistolis] legendis delinitus pariter et offensus, temperare michi non potui quominus, ira dictante, sibi tanquam coetaneo amico, familiaritate que michi cum illius ingenio est, quasi temporum oblitus, scriberem et quibus in eo dictis offenderer admonerem" (Fam. I.1.42) 388 Bernado, Fam. 317; "Epystolas tuas... avidissime perlegi. Audivi multa te dicentem, multa deplorantem, multa variantem, Marce Tulli, et qui iampridem qualis preceptor aliis fuisses noveram, nunc tandem quis tu tibi esses agnovi" (Fam. XXIV.3.1). 389 Fam. XXIII.19.16 390 Alcuin, Liber de animae ratione 7 (PL 101.642A-C) qtd. in Carruthers The Craft of Thought, 119-20. 161
Fanfiction), but first it may be useful to revisit the idea of a fannish hermeneutics that I have been developing through this thesis. My model draws on Karl Morrison’s idea of a Christian ‘hermeneutics of empathy’ developed in his book I Am You where he suggests that identification with strong emotional components is an important reading strategy in early Christian discourse, with Augustine as a key early figure. Earlier pedagogical evidence suggests that imaginative identification with fictional characters was a key part of Classical education. Composing a speech to, or from the point of view of, characters from history or myth at moments of high emotional tension, such as Dido, was a common exercise in Classical and medieval education. In Morrison’s account of the workings of empathy in reading, a reader identifies with (in this case) Christ as a means to cross the ‘hermeneutic gap’ between reader and Christ; this ‘gap’ is a lack of knowledge, for example of some aspect or moment of Christ’s life, which the reader then imagines. “Deprived of information needed to complete the pattern emerging before him [sic], a reader or interpreter becomes co-creator of the text in the process of reading.”391 A reader employing this hermeneutic strategy engages with the text through their affect, and through progressive stages of imitation and self-fashioning, aspires to a union with the textual subject - a union which is often initially described as amatory or erotic. I have argued that fanfiction, rather than being simply transformative or derivative literature, privileges affect to an extraordinary degree, and as such is inextricable from the intensive, emotionally loaded discursive engagement with the source text that happens in fan communities. Fanfiction and fannish transformative works emerge from the same fannish desires and in the same community spaces as other fannish practices such as collection, dressing as characters from the text (costume play, or cosplay), vidding, roleplaying games, group reading or viewing, discussion or ‘meta,’ the circulation of information about the show such as interviews, behind-the-scenes footage and pictures, and the shared admiration, erotic or otherwise, of a particular actor or character. Fanfiction is one example of the multiple kinds of affective reception practiced by fan communities, but it also represents a particular set of textual strategies for gaining greater knowledge of a text’s soul, so to speak, by fleshing out its world and filling its gaps with the imagination supplemented by memory and knowledge of the text. Fanfiction
391 Karl Frederick Morrison, I Am You: The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Western Literature, Theology, and Art (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), 80. 162 ultimately contributes to and enriches pleasure and understanding of its source text. However, the generative lack in the source text is often not (or not only) the text’s finite quality, but its failure to meet a fannish reader’s desire or expectation. Hence desire for the text is characterized by Jenkins as “not simply fascination or adoration but also frustration and antagonism.”392 In the previous chapter I discussed the struggle for control over the text between ‘authorized’ and ‘unauthorized’ readers and creators (for the line is blurred now, as in the Middle Ages) in fan communities, and how the figure of the Mary Sue, the fan who invades the text, is helpful for understanding the mechanisms of affect in English devotional literature. In Petrarch’s letters to Cicero and other Classical authors, the ‘source text’ with which Petrarch engages is not only Cicero’s letters, but the Roman past, about which he sets himself up as an authority through his intimacy – his familiaritas – with the ancient dead. Therefore RPF, more than the Mary Sue, offers a way to refine the concept of the hermeneutics of empathy in affective literature and to discuss what is at stake in Petrarch’s affective historicism. Two aspects of RPF are particularly useful for discussing Petrarch: the first is the concept of the ‘fantasy of encounter,’ as I call it, between fan and beloved, which provides a useful point of comparison in its treatment of the problem of identifying real people with their traces in text. RPF takes as its material the fragments of lives conducted in the public eye – the texts that constitute a “publicly available private celebrity”393 – as the ‘source text’ for which it writes fanfiction. A popular subgenre of fanfiction, it has existed alongside other kinds of media fanfiction since the 1960s, and with a literary predecessor in fictionalizations of the lives of popular movie stars licensed by big studios in the 1920s-40s.394 Pop music artists, athletes, and actors are the most common subjects of this genre, but the fiction about them is no more constrained by realism than any other kind of fanfiction, and includes everything from short
392 Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 23. 393 angstslashhope, Untitled post, posted October 15, 2005, accessed August 27, 2013, http://angstslashhope.livejournal.com/677324.html. 394 The "Whitman Authorized Edition" series of novels published between 1941-1947 featured contemporary female movie stars as heroines of Nancy Drew-style mystery adventures, aimed at young teens. Titles include Judy Garland and the Hoodoo Costume (1943), Jane Withers and the Swamp Wizard (1944), Betty Grable and the House with the Iron Shutters, (1945), and Shirley Temple and the Screaming Specter (1946), all by Kathryn Heisenfelt; and Ginger Rogers and the Riddle of the Scarlet Cloak, by Lela E. Rogers, the actress’ mother (1942). These can be read online here: http://archive.org/details/WhitmanAndGrossetBooksAndStories. 163 erotic stories about an actor and his agent having a tryst in their limousine en route to the Oscars395 to novel-length stories in which the members of an indie rock band are characters in a space opera.396 A great deal of RPF depicts same-sex relationships between celebrities (Real Person Slash, or RPS). Early RPS zines in the 1960s depicted the relationships between members of the band Led Zeppelin, and more recent popular RPF fandoms have often focused around music bands, sports teams, and other non-text-producing celebrity groups. Some major fandoms in the last twenty years have included ‘popslash’ fandom (late 1990s, depicting sexual and romantic relationships between members of ‘boy bands’ N*Sync and the Backstreet Boys), ‘bandom’ (2000s, focused on a group of American indie rock bands including Panic at the Disco, My Chemical Romance, and Fall Out Boy), and hockey players in the NHL (a fandom that experienced a boom in 2011-13). However, instrumental in the ‘coming out’ of RPF in the 2000s was the huge popularity of LOTR RPS fandom (aka ‘lotrips’), the RPF fandom for the actors in the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy directed by Peter Jackson. These RPF fandoms share a focus on closely bonded, all-male friendship groups surrounded by massive publicity machines that generate a ‘text’ that the fans can use in lieu of the media texts that form the basis of other kinds of fanfiction. For example, the Lord of the Rings DVDs contained hours of extra footage of interviews and documentaries with the cast that presented a narrative that paralleled that of the films, following the group of mostly young, attractive, male actors397 in their two years filming in New Zealand together.
More obviously than other fanfiction, RPF is a commentary on the ways in which mass media and ‘celebrity culture’ enables (and perhaps necessitates) creation of consciously artificial personas for and by people in the public eye. A common interpretation of RPF by its creators is that, like other fanfiction, it is a subversive transformation of a commercial commodity ‘owned’ by an entertainment conglomerate; in this case, however, the commodity is not a fictional
395 "Idol", trinityofone, posted March 5, 2006, accessed September 23, 2014, http://trinityofone.livejournal.com/58311.html. 396 "Parallax" by ignipes, posted January 3, 2009, accessed September 23, 2014, http://ignipes.livejournal.com/384545.html. 397 Although actresses Cate Blanchett and Liv Tyler do feature in LOTR RPF, the focus of the fandom was overwhelmingly on the nine male actors who made up the ‘fellowship.’ 164 character or world but the public persona of a celebrity. RPF writer Olivia C. Breckinridge (aka olivia_circe) stresses the distinction she draws between the textual incarnation of a popular musician and her ‘real’ self, or “Victoria Asher the real person” and “Vicky-T [Victoria Asher’s stage name] the character”:
I don’t know Victoria Asher, I don’t know Pete Wentz, I don’t know Gerard Way. All I know is the characters they play, the celebrity images they present to their fans and the world at large. I’m writing very, very fictionalized versions of real people, in stories that are sometimes very, very fictionalized adaptations of real events. It’s exactly like writing historical fiction, except that the real people the characters are based on aren’t dead, and the canon is a growing, changing, ever-adapting organism.398
In an even more extreme version of this idea, RPS writer lobelia321 describes the subjects of RPF in Barthesian terms as “empty signifiers”:
The characters exist only in the represented canon399 fragments of the media: pics chosen for us by Getty and Fifa400 [or, in the case of lotrips401, the cameras of fevered fans, *g*,402and the
398 Olivia C. Breckinridge, “Holy Jesus Fuck, Or, ‘Good Call on the Stockings’: An Essay on Fandom and Celebrity Interactions,” posted February 14, 2008, accessed September 23, 2014, http://olivia- circe.livejournal.com/186057.html. 399 lobelia321 here uses ‘canon’ in the sense it is used in fandom, meaning the official, authorized source text, as opposed to fan-authored supplements, additions or transformative texts. 400 Getty is a digital media provider, FIFA is the Fédération Internationale de Football Association. Both are mentioned here in their capacity as providers and curators of celebrity or footballer photographs. ‘Pics’ is short for pictures, and in fannish jargon generally refers to photographs. 401 Fannish jargon for ‘Lord of the Rings RPS’ (ie. fanfiction about the actors in the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings movie trilogy. The name ‘lotrips’ is the vocalization of the acronym LOTR RPS). 402 "*g*" is an internet slang abbreviation for ‘grin’, the equivalent of a smile emoticon. 165
‘sneak pics’ of dubious teenie mags], interviews, bits of words here and there, film footage -- but who knows what they really think?403
The relative freedom in RPF (as opposed to other kinds of fanfiction) from the restrictions of ‘canon’ is here a source of pleasure; for a commenter on her post, however, RPF fans are profoundly involved in this process of celebrity self-fashioning through their collective decision-making about what constitutes ‘canon’ (the authorized source text), based on their previous involvement with more traditional fanfiction fandoms that rely on a source text:
I’ve been having a long-standing theory, however, that may or may not be true and it separates popslash from lotrips to a degree and a lot of actor RPS insofar as i always felt that popslash was incredibly invested in canon, establishing and selecting a shared canon, and I think that might have been because with just a few exceptions (I can think of one off the top of my head) everyone came from mediafandom and reliance on source text and canon.404
In many ways, therefore, RPF fandom uses the methodology of a historian, reconstituting and imagining events using textual traces available to them, often discovered through extensive research involving many hours of labour and expensive travel to events where the celebrities appear. RPF fans treat the resulting historiographical ‘text’ compiled collaboratively by the fandom as manipulable, labile and open to creative interpolation and invasion, just as writers of other kinds of fanfiction treat their own source texts. “Maybe I needed a blank slate, an opportunity to get obsessed about something immense and ever-changing, something full of
403 lobelia321, “RPS: Another Persepctive”, posted March 22, 2005, accessed May 22, 2013, http://lobelia321.livejournal.com/479296.html. All formatting and spelling sic. 404 Cathexys, comment on lobelia321’s post, “RPS: Another Persepctive”, posted July 10, 2006, accessed May 22, 2013, http://lobelia321.livejournal.com/479296.html?thread=3870784#t3870784. Some abbreviations expanded for clarity, otherwise all formatting and spelling sic. ‘Popslash’ is the slang name for the RPF fandoms based around the bands N*Sync and Backstreet Boys. This was a very popular RPF fandom around the late 1990s and early 2000s, around the same time as LOTR RPS (lotrips). 166 potential stories and fascinating characters and unanswered questions and the opportunity to do research,” writes RPF writer Olivia C. Breckinridge on the appeal of RPF. RPF fans who ‘ship’405 a particular celebrity relationship have built a thesis (e.g. of a homosexual relationship between two celebrities) out of historiographical evidence, but they assume postures of varying degrees of ironic distance from the truth of their thesis. In fact, RPF fandom has its own vocabulary to define degrees of seriousness of approach to this kind of historiographical thesis- building, or RPF shipping; most RPF fans gather the information, debate theories and read fanfiction for pleasure alone, while fans who genuinely believe in the reality of a relationship between celebrities that they ‘ship’ are known derogatorily in the fandom as ‘tinhats’ (referring to the stereotype of the conspiracy theorist wearing tinfoil hats to protect the brain from space rays).406
A notorious (perhaps the definitive) example of tinhatting appeared in The Lord of the Rings RPF fandom. This community had a small but vocal contingent of fans who appeared to not just enjoy writing fanfiction about, but genuinely believe that two of the actors (Elijah Wood and Dominic Monaghan) were gay, closeted, and secretly having a relationship that they were being forced to hide from the public by their management. More recently, the fandom of the British band One Direction (aka 1D) contains a much larger contingent of fans who similarly believe in the secret relationship of two of the band members, Louis Tomlinson and Harry Styles, based on their intimacy and comfort with each other in photos and social media, despite the band’s repeated denials and Tomlinson’s public relationship with a woman. In 2012, Aja Romano wrote a piece for The Daily Dot (a fandom news site) comparing 1D fans to Elijah/Dominic tinhat fandom. Her article provoked an enormous backlash from 1D fans who were offended by the article’s (they felt) patronizing tone, and its implicit assumption that the
405 This fandom shorthand, which is short for ‘relationship’ and is a verb (I ship, you ship, s/he ships), operates on two objects or a relationship (as in, “I ship Kirk and Spock” or “I ship Kirk/Spock”) and means ‘to believe in or be committed to imagining as a couple (often to the exclusion of other possible romantic pairings); to prefer fanworks focusing on x as opposed to other romantic pairings.’ 406 Fanlore, “Tinhat” last modified 27 July, 2014, accessed September 23, 2014, http://fanlore.org/wiki/Tinhat. 167 two 1D members were not in relationship, with many accusing Romano of homophobia or collusion with the band’s management.407
This prominent distinction between levels of fictionality in RPF fandom points to the importance of the ‘realness’ of the characters in these texts and the shaping influence it has had on the fandom. Since its inception in the 1960’s, RPF has been a highly controversial subgenre, attracting a great deal of criticism and condemnation within fandom. Many fandom virtual spaces (such as web archives, Livejournal communities and listservs) have historically excluded RPF (although in the last five years RPF fanfiction has aroused less comment and has been increasingly integrated into other fanfiction communities and archives). The resistance to RPF comes from doubt about the ethics of writing fictional stories about real people, particularly erotic fiction that portrays the (often professedly straight) celebrity engaging in explicit homosexual acts; critics of RPF often see this as a violation of privacy verging on sexual assault.
RPF as a narrative form requires the fanfiction reader or writer to imagine the celebrity as a real, whole person with an interior life, and thus to empathize with them; however, this imaginative act inevitably exists in tension with the possibility of the celebrity’s negative reactions to their own fame and fans. RPF is problematic for many fans because an encounter between fan and celebrity is possible; with the reciprocal gaze comes the possibility of the fan’s imagined familiaritas being shattered by their ‘friend’s’ ignorance, indifference, hostility, or contempt. Most RPF writers go to great lengths to maintain separation between themselves and the celebrities they write about, and fans who break the unspoken pact of silence by sending fanfiction or fan-art to the celebrities involved are often shunned by the community. RPF writer Olivia C. Breckinridge sums up this ethos of separation:
We want a solid line between us and them. We want to read their blogs and look at their photos and watch their buzznet videos. We love it when they play to us, and when they talk about how
407 Romano, Aja, “One Direction fans have trouble separating their ‘Larry Stylinson’ fantasy from reality”, posted August 22, 2012, accessed June 6, 2013, http://www.dailydot.com/culture/one-direction-fans-tinhat-larry- stylinson. 168 awesome their fans are. But they’re celebrities, and we’re a subculture, and the last thing in the world we want is for the subjects of our subculture to look back at us.408
The term given to this kind of “unidirectional” relationship (such as Petrarch has with Cicero) in modern media theory is “parasocial”; this phenomenon is particularly associated with the entry of the television into people’s homes in the 1950’s. TV gives the illusion “of actually being with other people,” writes A. A. Berger. “That is why people often have parasocial relationships with television performers, that is, they feel (or more precisely they have the illusion) that they ‘know them’ intimately.”409 RPF – publicly accessible, and possibly unwelcome to the celebrity it features – forms a possible point of contact between fan and celebrity that could shatter this sense of intimacy if the celebrity rebuffs or rejects the fiction about them. The criticisms against RPF are haunted by the possibilities of this ‘fantasy of encounter.’ Participants in the virtual communities of fandom, both pre- and post-internet, have been particularly well-placed to be aware of the process of crafting a textual self, and the discourse surrounding RPF in fandom helps highlight the anxieties about the division between textual and physical self in Petrarch’s work. Allucquére Rosanne Stone’s work on virtual communities of hackers410 and phone sex operators in the early 1990s describes the potential afforded by the internet for “disembodied subjectivity,” a prescient view of the fragmentary online identities sustained across numerous social media platforms by most internet users today. The technologies Stone describes act as “prostheses” for their users, extending their subjectivities. These technologies offer the potential for their users to create and occupy new selves through their online activities which are divorced from their ‘real’ selves, complicating semiotic systems that
408 Breckinridge, “Holy Jesus Fuck, Or, ‘Good Call on the Stockings’: An Essay on Fandom and Celebrity Interactions.” 409 Arthur Asa Berger, Narratives in Popular Culture, Media, and Everyday Life (London: Sage, 1996), 114. 410 In the programmer parlance Stone uses, this word describes programmers or coders with an ethos of play, without implying illegal or malignant activity. 169 assume that power originates with a human with physical agency where “the buck stops.”411 When Cicero writes, “I embrace you, although absent, in my mind; I kiss the letter,”412 he expresses the idea that by being a product of its author’s physical agency, the letter becomes physically part of, or a metonymy for, its author. The letter thus becomes an extension of the letter-writer’s self through epistolary technology. In order to participate in fandom, most people construct a virtual entity – an online self – that imaginatively corresponds to their ‘real’ self in a similar way to how Cicero imagines the letter corresponding to its author. They participate in fandom entirely under their online identity, whose connection with their ‘real name’ is often fiercely defended, revealed only to close and trusted friends. For the aforementioned reasons, this is particularly true in RPF communities. This notwithstanding, the authenticity of their online self is important for building online friendships and participating in the community. Fan studies scholar Kristina Busse links the rising popularity of blogging platforms like Livejournal.com among fans with the rising popularity of RPF/RPS in fanfiction communities in the late 1990s; these online spaces allowed for a space where erotic fiction writing and autobiographical self-construction blurred together, and, in turn (Busse suggests), gave rise to a heightened awareness of the difference between a ‘textual’ and ‘real’ self. Fans could use these online spaces for a performance of queerness, sexual experimentation and/or erotic play that might not reflect their real-life bodily practices or identities. Busse writes, “There is an awareness in both RPS and [discourses within Livejournal.com communities] of their simultaneous reality and performativity.” These fans are highly aware of their own practices of textual self-fashioning: “fans engage with one another’s personas, all the while knowing that they may not fully coincide with the real person offline,” making it easier for fanfiction writers to grasp that “celebrities are simultaneously real and fictional.”413 Likewise, the rise in popularity and acceptability of RPF is surely linked to the rise in general use of social media and
411 Allucquére Rosanne Stone, “Split Subjects, Not Atoms; Or, How I Fell in Love with My Prosthesis,” Configurations 2, no. 1 (1994): 182. 412 “Complexus igitur sum cogitatione te absentem; epistolam vero osculatus” (Fam.III.11.2). 413 Kristina Busse, “My Life Is a WIP on My LJ: Slashing the Slasher and the Reality of Celebrity and Internet Performances,” in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, ed. Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 2006), 209. 170 the growing acclimatization to online visibility and self-fashioning. Letter-writing, like the internet, “messes with whereness”414 by scattering the subjectivity of the writer over distance. Stone describes the increase in “locational technologies” that accompanied the rise of online spaces (like Livejournal) that enabled this fragmentation and multiplicity of self in the later twentieth century. These locational technologies, such as telephone numbers, identity documents and home addresses, were meant, Stone maintains, “to halt or reverse the gradual and pervasive disappearance of the socially and legally constituted individual in a society in which the meanings of terms such as distance and direction are subject to increasing slippage.” These locational technologies perform “warranting,” another term Stone adopts from virtual systems studies that describes the process of connecting the discursive and physical selves. Stone, although speaking in terms of social control and surveillance, identifies a more general pressure that technologies which enable the fragmentation of self (like letters, or online blogging platforms) put on identity. Can intimacy with such a fragment be authentic? Such intimacy relies on a meaningful connection between the textual and ‘real’ self. Anxiety about the authenticity of online ‘textual selves’ haunts the media, particularly when it comes to young women, through numerous media scares about cyber-predators who construct fake online identities in order to groom potential victims by cultivating friendships or love affairs online. For this reason, even though ‘internet dating’ is ever more common, online relationships are still suspect. Both Petrarch and RPF communities are concerned with the problem of “warranting,” that is, in Stone’s terms, the connection between the ‘real’ body and the virtual self that exists in text, whether constructed through a blog, a letter collection, or the “pics chosen for us” - the celebrity media apparatus that lobelia321 describes. The distinctions in RPF fandoms between ‘tinhatters’ and RPF fans focus on differing attitudes within the community to the link between a celebrity’s “legible” and physical selves, while the ‘fantasies of encounter’ that recur in discourse in and around RPF fandoms play out scenarios of “warranting,” in which the relationship between physical and “legible” selves is tested by the celebrity’s direct encounter with RPF. In these scenarios the link either fails, as in
414 Stone, “Split Subjects, Not Atoms; Or, How I Fell in Love with My Prosthesis,” 180. 171 the unnamed letter-writer’s and Frewelling’s fantasies of a disgusted celebrity who wholly rejects his or her legible self, or succeeds, as in the depictions of positive fantasies of encounter in fanfiction itself, which I shall discuss in the next chapter. Likewise, Petrarch’s letters to Cicero dwell on the extent to which he can trust the connection between an author’s legible self – the self with whom he imagines himself interacting when he reads their books – and the historical, physical self. Brian Stock’s study of Augustinian ideas of self-representation and narrative also describes this divide between the textual and historical self; Stock distinguishes between those who left no writings behind but retained “oral, personal, and charismatic” literary authority, like St. Francis of Assisi and St. Anthony, and authors for whom “authority is transferred to a text” in a “hermeneutic fashioning of the self,” like Petrarch.415 As scholars on Petrarch have long observed, Petrarch was unusually focused on the problem of autobiography and the construction of textual self. He uses his many different writings to reflect, and to reflect upon, a “fragmentary” textual self.416 At the end of the Familiarum rerum liber, Petrarch’s process of creation of his textual self is (at least temporarily) complete, enabling him to imagine an interaction between his own textual self and the textual selves of the Classical authors to whom he writes. However, the continuation of this self- construction in the Seniles problematizes the wholeness of the textual Petrarch who interacts with Cicero in XXIV.3-4. Petrarch’s locational suffixes in his letters to Classical authors (“From the land of the living, on the right bank of the Adige, in the city of Verona in transpadane Italy, on 16 June in the year 1345 from the birth of that Lord whom you never knew”417) act as a “locational technology,” fixing the relationship between Petrarch’s textual self and physical self, and emphasizing the gulf of time between Petrarch and Cicero. Petrarch’s self-warranting yokes his textual self firmly to his own time and place, undermining the ability of his letters to construct a remote textual self that might interact with Cicero.
415 Stock, After Augustine: The Meditative Reader and the Text, 69. 416 Mazzotta, Worlds of Petrarch, 6. 417 Bernardo 318; "Apud superos, ad dexteram Athesis ripam, in civitate Verona Transpadane Italie, XVI Kalendas Quintiles, anno ab ortu Dei illius quem tu non noveras, MCCCXLV" (XXIV.3.46-8). 172
Returning to the figure of the Mary Sue helps clarify how Cicero’s real location in a historical place and time problematizes Petrarch’s fannish reading, for the ‘text’ into which Petrarch ‘self-inserts’ is history itself. Petrarch’s letters to Classical authors, like Margery Kempe offering Mary a hot drink after the Crucifixion and Mary Sue joining the Enterprise, imagine the possibility of dialogue with beloved characters through self-insertion into a text, and assert in some way the ‘specialness’ of the writer. This ‘specialness’ in later Mary Sue stories comes to be signalled not only by her unique physical characteristics and accumulation of powers, but also by her extraordinary insight into the other characters and the attraction she holds for them.418 Likewise God tells Angela of Foligno, “I love you so much more than any woman in the valley of Spoleto,” and tells Margery Kempe, “My dowtyr, Bryde [Bridget of Sweden], say me nevyr in this wyse.”419 Petrarch’s privileged status with respect to Cicero comes from his knowledge of him, through his assimilation of his texts, and particularly his advantage over his contemporaries in Ciceronian lore through his rediscovery of the Letters to Atticus, as his introductory letter to Book XXIV shows (see below). Both the Mary Sue stories and the affective devotional texts are also complicit in the author’s self-fashioning as part of an exclusive community. Petrarch’s Latin writings too are profoundly invested in excluding “the common and vulgar breed of people making a living off of words not their own,”420 and in constructing “a textually constituted, transhistorical literary community”421 in which he is a member along with the Classical authors to whom he writes. This impulse perhaps follows Dante’s famous inclusion of himself in the group of ancient poets who he meets at the beginning of the Inferno, when he writes, “ch’e’ sì mi fecer de la loro schiera, / sì chi’io fui sesto tra cotanto senno,” (“They took me as a member of their company, / So that I was sixth among those great intellects,”)422 a moment that Ika Willis reads through Barthes as a moment of desiring self-insertion and self-idealization in the model of
418 Bacon-Smith, 98-99, account of a classic Mary Sue story in which the original female character (‘Piper’) forms a "subliminal connection" with Kirk. 419 Il Libro, Memoriale iii.43-46; Angela of Foligno, Complete Works, trans. Paul Lachance (New York: Paulist Press, 1993), 140; Windeatt, The Book of Margery Kempe: Annotated Edition, chap. 20, l.1523. 420 Francesco Petrarca, Le Senili (Roma: Archivio Guido Izzi, 1993) 2.877. 421 Quillen, Rereading the Renaissance, 117. 422 Dante, Commedia, ed. Charles S. Singleton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), I.IV.101-2. 173 a Mary Sue fanfiction.423 The letters to Cicero represent Petrarch’s desire not only to be part of this community of auctores through his familiaritas with Cicero, but to be recognized as part of this community by both Cicero and his own readers. In the Secretum, Augustinus validates Petrarch as a writer of poems in the Classical style when he comments on a “fine poem” that he wrote, “The sweet accents of it charmed me while you were writing.”424 Petrarch’s ‘specialness’ is also in his identification with Cicero, in that they share not only various experiences and sympathies, but also the text of Cicero’s works, which Petrarch has assimilated into his own body through the process of memorization, and Cicero held likewise in his own head while composing them.
Although reading Cicero is part of Petrarch’s construction of self, Petrarch comes to knowledge of himself through reading Cicero not only because reading is for him a meditational process of self-discovery, but also because Cicero is a friend, an “alter idem,” and to come to know him is to know himself. Writers on Mary Sue fanfiction have described the complex relationship between identification with others and self-discovery in fanfiction. Well-known Star Trek fan and fanfiction writer Judith Gran has asserted that identification with characters intertwined with self-discovery in her fanfiction writing: “You want to reach out to Mr. Spock and in the process you get in touch with yourself.”425 In her essay on Mary Sues, Gran speaks of her writing process when she writes Star Trek fanfiction; she does not create an original female character as a Mary Sue but instead imaginatively inhabits Kirk, using him to perform the self- insert role that Mary Sues might play in other stories. “Most of the time I use Kirk as a Mary Sue, because Kirk is who I’d really like to be.”426
Karl Morrison names this shared ‘space’ between selves that allows people to identify with each other the “partial common identity.” This shared space gives rise to problematic
423 Ika Willis, “‘Writers Who Put Themselves In The Story’: Dante Alighieri, Roland Barthes, Lieutenant Mary- Sue and Me” (presented at the Desiring the Text, Touching the Past: Towards an Erotics of Reception, University of Bristol, 2010). 424 Draper, 150; Dotti III.10.5. 425 Quoted in Bacon-Smith, Enterprising Women, 97. 426 Judith Gran, “On ‘Mary Sue’ and ‘Lay’ Stories,” circa 2000, http://www.webcitation.org/6DHZzt722. 174 possibilities in the hermeneutics of empathy. In the ‘hermeneutic circle’ Morrison describes, there is always the danger that the reader may fill the hermeneutic gap with him- or her-self,427 mistaking projection for empathy. In other words, a reader may identify with a character to such an extent that, as Gran professes to doing, she may erase the character’s subjectivity and replace it with her own. In the case of Captain Kirk, this has consequences; however, such a possibility was greatly feared and guarded against in medieval devotional spirituality where readers were encouraged to identify with Christ.
Although framed in different terms, the many debates over the role of empathy in modern historiography come to much the same question - to what extent is using empathy as a route to knowledge simply rediscovering oneself? Budding historians are encouraged to guard against over-identification with one’s subject, since belief in one’s empathy with the subject can come to trump historical evidence. This issue has been much-discussed in queer and feminist scholarship particularly. Where written record of the past is lacking, queer or feminist scholars may bring personal experience to imaginatively fill in the gaps in the historical record. However, this runs the risk of assuming an essentialist view of a consistent ‘queer’ or ‘female’ experience across time, and losing sight of the difference of the past and the contextualization of historical experience, a criticism levelled at John Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, which controversially claimed to be a history of “gay people.”428
Different knowledge communities find different ways of regulating and controlling the hermeneutics of empathy. Dyan Elliott has discussed in detail the medieval mechanisms of control over visionary and meditational contact with Christ429 amid increasing anxiety over non- clerical religious authority. The regulatory system Elliott describes for testing visionaries for demonic possession was particularly visible in England, where the Wycliffite (or Lollard)
427 Morrison, I Am You, 294. 428 John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); For details of the reception of Boswell’s book, see Matthew Kuefler, ed., The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 429 Elliott, Proving Woman. 175 movement threatened to take religious authority outside the ecclesiastical hierarchy. As I have said, even fandom regulates the bounds of the hermeneutics of empathy, since a fanfiction story’s success is based on how ‘in character’ it feels to its audience of knowledgeable fans. Not only are Mary Sue (self-insert) stories generally condemned by the fanfiction reading community, but readers may also accuse authors of distorting a canonical character into a wish- fulfillment vehicle in erotic fantasies to the extent that the character is no longer recognisable to readers (in fact, this is often described as “Mary Sue-ing” or “Gary Stu-ing” a character). These two comments in online discussions about Stargate: SG1 and Stargate: Atlantis fanfiction about John Sheppard and Rodney McKay show an example of this process of social regulation of the hermeneutics of empathy:
I got turned off by reading fan fiction after coming across a few horrible ones where the characters were just Mary Sue/Gary Stu copies of the author, instead of staying true to the canon character seen on-screen.430
I think a lot of bad Rodney characterization comes from the fact people Gary Stu431 the hell out of him. People in fandom tend to relate to Rodney a lot more than John, and so we have 34573457347 fics where either through John’s eyes or through Rodney’s POV, he’s a woobie/sex god/the best person ever.432
430 Message board post by Allons-y!, posted February 28, 2011, accessed August 6, 2013, http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/502507-things-you-wish-happened-in-stargate-sg1-sga- sgu#comment_27168591. 431 This is a less-common term for a male idealized self-insert character (‘Marty-Stu’ is also sometimes used). 432 “POV” stands for “point of view” (meaning here, the narrative viewpoint). “Woobie” is fandom slang for a character who evokes pity and the desire to comfort, a ‘poor darling’. Comment by Eleveninches on “five things in sga fanfic that i am thinking about”, posted June 4, 2006, accessed August 6, 2013, http://seperis.dreamwidth.org/324946.html?thread=8112978#cmt8112978. 176
The frequency with which Mary Sues die also suggests the internalization of these regulatory norms in fandom by Mary Sue writers. There is a similarity here, as I have suggested in my previous chapters, to how Margery Kempe and Aelred dwell on the moment of rejection when Christ refuses touch to his worshipper. Petrarch’s insistence on the division between himself and the Classical authors, the “missed connections,” and the wounded bodies created by failures of memory and preservation, all also suggest anxiety about the power and appropriateness of empathy as a hermeneutic practice.
For both Augustine and Alcuin, it is not the accuracy of the mnemonically constructed imaginative meditation that matters, but how it is used by the reader, and its efficacy in aiding a reader’s understanding of the text. When he describes the process of imagining St Paul while reading Corinthians, Augustine continues:
And since among the large number of men by whom these words are so noted, one person represents his features and figure in one way, and another in a different way, it is assuredly uncertain whose thoughts are closer to and more like the reality... even the earthly face of the Lord Himself is represented differently by all the different people having thoughts about Him, even though in actuality His face was only one, whatever it was really like. But for our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, it is not the image which the mind forms for itself (which may perhaps be far different from what he actually looked like) that leads us to salvation, but, according to our mental representation, what [thoughts we have] about his humankind. 433
Likewise, as I described in the previous chapter, pseudo-Bonaventure emphasized the spiritual expedience of ‘filling the gaps’ in the Gospel with the imagination, and although concerned that his readers should not imagine things that were ‘impious,’ he was not overly concerned about their historical accuracy:
433 Augustine, De trinitate VIII.iv.7; qtd. Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, 121. 177
Nam circa divinam Scripturam meditare, exponere et intelligere multifarie, prout expedire credimus possumus: dummodo non sit contra veritatem vite, iusticie aut doctrine, id est non sit contra fidem vel bonos mores.
For we are able to meditate, expound and understand many things about divine scripture, just as we believe to be expedient; as long as it is not against the truth of his life, of law or doctrine, that is not against faith or good morals.434
Brian Stock describes this as a distinctly Christian attitude to life-writing in contrast to pagan historiography and biography: “It was possible to interpret the central events of Christ’s life in different ways… but not to detach them fully from the historicity of that life… Moreover, that life-history was experienced sensorially.”435 In medieval Christian thought, therefore, Christ’s life could be ‘read’ by the body through empathetic imitatio, even by people who could not read (Stock gives the example of Anthony, who interpreted the gospels correctly despite being illiterate, a story Augustine relays in the Confessions). In Petrarch’s letters, too, memory and imagination allow his readers “to conserve the traces of historical reality within the mind which also permits them to fabricate alternate images and chronologies that are profoundly unfaithful to the ‘original’ sense experience.”436 For Ascoli, this is the key to understanding Petrarch’s narrativization – and perhaps falsification – of autobiographical details for the purpose of crafting a spiritually efficacious meditation on conversion. Petrarch is not concerned with ‘historical accuracy,’ but with perfecting his hermeneutics of intimacy. The salutatio to the letter
434 Iohannis de Caulibus (pseudo-Bonaventure), Meditationes Vite Christi, Prologus ll.95–98. 435 Stock, After Augustine: The Meditative Reader and the Text, 18. 436 Albert Russell Ascoli, “Petrarch’s Middle Age: Memory, Imagination, History, and the ‘Ascent of Mount Ventoux,’” Stanford Italian Review 10, no. 1 (1991): 19. 178 to Cicero, “Franciscus Ciceroni suo salutem”437 thus places an ironic spin on the traditional expression of affection and intimacy; here, it takes on a double, ironic meaning, for it is in fact to his Cicero that Petrarch writes – the Cicero of his imagination. The subject of the letter this salutatio introduces is the dismay that this Cicero is not ‘his’ Cicero at all. Petrarch’s drive to collect more books could be compared with the desire of Alcuin’s hypothetical reader to see the ‘real’ Jerusalem; his encounter with Cicero’s letters shows the vulnerability of his reading practices to the discovery of new information, but retains an essential continuity with the medieval tradition, with an anxiety about its validity that has much in common with developments in the devotional tradition that were happening in England in the later decades of the fourteenth century.
Petrarch’s self-insertion into the textual world of which history is constituted is also hedged around with anxieties about his methodology – anxieties which are framed by metaphors of age. I have shown in my previous chapter that imaginative devotional reading was deeply intertwined with the idea of immaturity. Although Petrarch’s anxieties about age-appropriate love are usually seen as purely autobiographical, arising from his desire to overcome his long- term obsession with Laura, the context of medieval devotional literature sheds new light on the role of immaturity in Petrarch’s letters. In fact, Petrarch’s association of empathic reading with immaturity arises in part from his debt to the hermeneutics of devotional piety. Reading his letters in this context suggests a Petrarchan counter-discourse to modern teleological readings that find, in Petrarch’s backward gaze, a gaze that paradoxically looks forward while looking backward, anticipating modernity by rereading the classics. But Petrarch’s love for Classical authors is hedged around with fears of sterility and inappropriate ageing that, far from embracing a new and exciting future of humanism, suggest an anxious, childish refusal to let go of the security blanket of the past.
437 Fam. XXIV.3.1 179
4.4 Schoolboy reading
Scholarship on Petrarch’s Classical reception almost always places him within a triumphalist narrative of restored knowledge and regained glory, a narrative I will explore in depth in the next chapter. This narrative overlooks the ambivalence and doubt with which Petrarch frames his encounters with the Classical past, and particularly his affective hermeneutics of reading. As I suggested in the previous section, Petrarch envisions this encounter as very physical, capable of inflicting wounds; in the Secretum he links his reading habits with a distorted ageing process resulting in perverse bodies of old babies and babyish old men. He associates his love for Classical literature with adolescence, sexual incontinence, and a touch of queerness that he longs to distance himself from, but also cannot entirely abandon. His hermeneutics thus become a battleground for his struggle for Christian maturity.
Petrarch’s writings are haunted by the spectre of the “childish old man,” who has either, like Margery Kempe’s husband, reverted to babyish incontinence in his senility, or who refuses to behave in a way that befits old age. The Italian poems continually return to Petrarch’s inability to abandon his youthful love (which ongoing paralysis is also the subject of his famous letter “the Ascent of Mt Ventoux”) while also remarking on the speedy passing of time and its effects on the poet’s body even as his heart does not change. The ‘anniversary’ poems mark off the time since he met Laura, the seventeenth lamenting, “How true is the proverb that ‘we lose our hair before our habits,’”438 and yet these poems too are divorced from time, inconsistently and unclearly marking the time since Petrarch and Laura’s first meeting. As Marco Santagata points out, Petrarch’s retrospective re-editing of the Canzoniere that Petrarch continued throughout his life disguises any traces of the maturation of his style, a process that Santagata explicitly links with Petrarch’s attempt to ally himself with the Classical world: “the concealment of the past, and therefore of the tradition, like the denial of history, even personal history, are fundamental acts of that classicizing strategy.”439 However, as the above poem suggests, the changes in Petrarch’s physical appearance cannot so easily occlude the passage of time.
438 “Vero è ‘l proverbio ch’ altri cangia il pelo / anzi che ‘l vezzo” (Canzoniere 122) 439 “L'occultamento del passato, e quindi della tradizione, come la negazione della storia, anche personale, sono gesti fondamentali di quella strategia classicistica.” Marco Santagata, Per Moderne Carte: La Biblioteca 180
In both the Secretum and Fam I.1, Petrarch associates immature old men with the inability to let go, not of youthful love but of youthful works. In the third dialogue of the Secretum, ‘Augustinus’ rebukes ‘Franciscus’ for his inability to either abandon or finish his great classicizing Latin epic, the Africa, and the history of Rome he has undertaken, while in the opening letter of Rerum Familiarum Libri Petrarch describes the process of rereading all his old work, at first with pleasure and then with embarrassment at the enormous projects he has taken on and been unable to finish:
Temeritas, imo vero insania visa est in tam brevi et incerto tempore tot longos certosque labores amplecti, et vix ad singula suffecturum ingenium in diversa distrahere.
It seemed rashness, indeed madness, to have undertaken so many and demanding works in such a brief and indefinite period of time, and to have directed my talents which would hardly suffice for limited undertakings to so great a variety of writings.440
‘Augustinus’ further rebukes Petrarch by dwelling on the incongruity between his ageing body and his youthful obsessions:
Gratusque tibi est quisquis non senex occurrit, qui te infantulum vidisse testetur; presertim si, more comunis sermonis, id heri aut nudius tertius se se vidisse contendit… Nonagenarios pueros videmus passim de rebus vilissimis altercantes, puerilia nunc etiam sectantes studia. Dies nempe
Volgare di Petrarca (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990), 12; see also Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy, 266. 440 Bernardo 4-5; Fam. I.1.54-7. 181 fugiunt, corpus defluit, animus non mutatur. Putrescant licet omnia, ad maturitatem suam ille non pervenit, verumque est quod vulgo ferunt, animum unum corpora multa consumer. Pueritia quidem fugit; sed, ut ait Seneca, puerilitas remanet… Pudeat ergo senem amatorem dici.
You are delighted when you come across some rather elderly person who declares he knew you when you were a child, especially if, as people generally do, he makes out that it was but yesterday or the day before... we can look here and there and find infants of ninety quarrelling about trifles and even now occupied with infantile toys. The days flee away, the body decays, the soul is where it was. Though everything is rotten with age, the soul has never grown up, never come to maturity. Infancy passes, but, as Seneca remarks, “childishness remains.” Blush, therefore, to pass for an aged lover!441
The passage rings with the echo of ‘pudeat’ and ‘pueriles,’ associating shame with childishness, and particularly with age-inappropriate behaviour; ‘Augustinus’ distinguishes sharply between “pueritia” and “puerilitas” - ‘childhood’ and ‘childishness’ - and reserves his scorn for the spectacle of the “nonagenarios pueros” (the ‘ninety-year-old boys’). The perverse bodies of these childish old men also appear in Fam I., where Petrarch writes how his writing style has gone from strong to weak as he has grown older, instead of the other way around:
Pudet vite in mollitiem dilapse; ecce enim, quod epystolarum ordo ipse testabitur, primo michi tempore sermo fortis ac sobrius, bene valentis index animi, fuerat… sequentia in dies fragiliora atque humiliora sunt, neque sat virilibus referta querimoniis… Ergo ego in adolescentia vir fuero, ut in senectute puer essem? Infelix et execranda perversitas!
441 Draper, 159-60; Secretum III.12.4-7. 182
I am ashamed of a life fallen into excessive softness. The very order of my letters will testify to this. My style was strong and sober in the early years, an indicator of a truly strong mind…with the passage of time it became weaker and more humble and seemed to lack strength of character… could it be that I was a man in my youth and a youth in my old age? Unfortunate and cursed perversity!442
Petrarch expects his style to change with his mind, growing in strength and rigour, while instead it follows the aging process of his body, going from vigorous to flabby. This passage reflects the continual theme in his poetry of his inability to abandon the temporal world: his punishment – the adherence of his style to his flesh – is apt. Here the letter collection is another perverse body, a ‘senectute puer,’ aging in reverse. When the letters are gathered together “at one time and one place, after having been written over many years and sent to various regions of the world,” Petrarch writes, “facile deformitas uniti corporis apparuit, que per membra tegebatur” (“the deformity of the whole body was easily apparent, although it was hidden in the individual limbs”).443 The deformity of this literary body is another example of Petrarch’s tendency to equate the textual and physical self, recalling the wounded and maimed bodies of the Classical corpus with missing texts. These other wounding encounters evoke the pain he risks in his over- familiarity with the past; Eisner points out that Petrarch uses the same verb, offendere, to describe his leg wound as he does his intellectual wound on first reading Cicero’s letters in Fam. I.1.444 Reading texts that show his own past self is also painful for Petrarch, and results in a distortion, a folding across time as the older self identifies with the younger self, and finds that he has changed too little.
442 Bernado 11-12; Fam. I.1.262-70. 443 Bernardo 10; Fam I.1.214-5. 444 Martin Eisner, “In the Labyrinth of the Library: Petrarch’s Cicero, Dante’s Virgil, and the Historiography of the Renaissance,” Renaissance Quarterly 67, no. 3 (2014): 777. 183
Petrarch is tempted to rearrange the letters, “mutare ordinem,”445 to disguise his deviant maturation, but he knows it will not deceive his friend ‘Socrates,’ to whom he writes, who has all the original letters with their original dates. He asks his friend to destroy these letters to aid him in his editorial efforts to hide this ‘deformity,’ and particularly to conceal the immature weakness of his later letters.446 He has now, Petrarch continues, edited the letters so as to begin and end with “virilibus sententiis” (“the most manly phrases”).447 The Familiarum rerum libri, however, ends in fact with the book of letters to Classical authors, which suggests that the letters to the past are representative of this more ‘virile’ style and thought that he has, anachronistically, moved to the end of the collection (Petrarch acknowledges in Fam I. that he has gathered Book XXIV together by theme rather than placing the letters in chronological order with the rest of the collection),448 their out-of-order arrangement reflecting the way Petrarch is aging out of order. However, this placing also reflects the periodizing narrative that would be adopted by the Renaissance, suggesting that the Classical period is paradoxically due for a rebirth; the letters to Classical authors evoke a culture in the flower of strength while Petrarch’s own times are on the wane, despite the benefit of Christ’s wisdom. However, this disorderly placement also suggests that the Classical period, too, is age-deviant, the “in adolescentia vir” to the “senectute puer” of the Middle Ages. Petrarch persistently associates Cicero with his own aged immaturity, most clearly when, in Fam I.1, he compares his own aged childishness with Cicero’s vacillations and inconsistencies; he himself has been worn down by troubles and disasters in the face of which
445 Bernardo 12; Fam I.1.270 446 “Illa precipue ut occultare studeas, precor.” Fam. I.1.266-7. 447 My translation; Fam. I.1.325. Ronald G. Witt suggests that Petrarch may have “retarded the development of a sense of the historicity of the Latin language” by ignoring historical context of idiom and linguistic usage in the development of his individual style: Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients, 270–275. cf. Sylvia Rizzo, “Il latino di Petrarca” in The Uses of Greek and Latin: Historical Essays, ed. A. C. Dionisotti, A. Grafton, and J. Kraye, (London: Warburg Instititute Surveys and Texts, 1988), 54. Rizzo argues that Petrarch does in fact show consciousness of the temporality of different Latin styles, and tends to prefer Classical usage. 448 For details on the writing and arrangement of Petrarch’s letters, see Wilkins, Life of Petrarch; Wilkins, Petrarch’s Later Years. 184
Cicero too “agit molliter” (“goes soft”).449 It is this weakness of Cicero’s, he writes, that first impelled Petrarch to write to him in a fit of irritation “sibi tanquam coetaneo amico, familiaritate que michi cum illius ingenio est, quasi temporum oblitus” (“as if he were a friend living in my time, with an intimacy that I consider proper because of my deep and immediate acquaintance with his thought… forgetting, as it were, the gap of time”).450 Petrarch complains to Pulix Vicentinus of Cicero’s “childish mania for wrangling… so unseemly in [an aged] philosopher” (“sine fructu iuvenile altercandi studium in sene philosopho”),451 while to Cicero himself he writes, “What false splendor or glory embroiled you, an old man, in the wars of youths?” (“Quis te falsus glorie splendor senem adolescentium bellis implicuit?”).452 The stark contrast of “senem” and “adolescentium” here highlights that Cicero’s behaviour is not merely unbefitting of a philosopher, but inappropriate to a man of his age. However, as I have shown above, Petrarch condemns this same vice in himself in numerous places elsewhere; in this age- inappropriate behaviour, Cicero and he are alike, and it is this ‘partial common identity’ that enables the familiarity of Petrarch’s letter to Cicero.
The characteristic that Petrarch shares with Cicero is their inappropriate ‘molles,’ softness or tenderness, in the face of adversity in their old age. Petrarch sets this in explicit contrast to ‘virilis;’ in both Classical and medieval usage, ‘molles’ frequently refers to effeminacy in men, with a suggestion of inclinations towards sexual passivity. This touch of queerness about Cicero and Petrarch enables the affective touch across time that Carolyn Dinshaw describes as “queer.”453 It is their shared immaturity which allows Petrarch to bridge the gap of time between himself and Cicero, just as, I have argued, Margery Kempe embraces immaturity through her bodily practices as a way to touch Christ across time. Petrarch is both aware of this touch of queerness and disturbed by it; a vivid tension exists in Petrarch’s letters
449 My translation; Fam. I.1.287. 450 Bernardo 12-13; Fam. I.1.282. 451 Bernardo 316; Fam. XXIV.2, 115. 452 Bernardo 317; XXIV.3.14-15. 453 Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, passim; 1, 50. 185 between the homosociality of his intellectual world and the heteronormative expectations of Italian secular masculinity. This tension manifests itself particularly in the association of Classical texts with immaturity, because of their location (in the periodizing schemas of the Middle Ages) before the maturity of the world – that is, before the birth of Christ (even the writers who technically were born after Christ are still marked as pre-Christian) – and because of their association with the homosocial schoolroom.
Petrarch’s epistolary friendship networks replicate the all-male world of the schoolrooms and university lectures where he would have first encountered Classical texts. In most medieval curricula and pedagogical systems, Latin poetry was part of grammatical instruction, in the earlier stages of Latin education. Much of the Latin verse was Classical; these poems included Virgil’s Aeneid, Eclogues, and Georgics; several works of Ovid, particularly the Ars amatoria and the Metamorphoses; composition guides like Horace’s Ars poetica; the epic poems of Statius and Lucan; some of Juvenal’s satires; and finally, Boethius’ philosophical poem, De consolatione philosophiae.454 After this, if they entered higher education rather than an apprenticeship, fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds would go onto higher studies of prose rhetoric, the ars dictaminis, theology or law at a university.455 This is a general picture of medieval education as a whole, but there were, of course, regional and individual variations; furthermore, a privileged, gifted child being educated in an Italian enclave at the papal seat in Avignon, with a passion for reading and surrounded by indulgent adults and manuscript resources, Petrarch seems to have had some measure of control over his own syllabus. Petrarch speaks several times of the roots of his love for Cicero (and Virgil) in his childhood. After a discursion on his belief that
454 Woods and Copeland, “Classroom and Confession,” 380–5; Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, 111–4; Suzanne Reynolds, Medieval Reading: Grammar, Rhetoric, and the Classical Text (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 7–11. 455 Marjorie Curry Woods, “Rhetoric, Gender, and the Literary Arts: Classical Speeches in the Schoolroom,” New Medieval Literatures 11 (2009): 113–32; Marjorie Curry Woods and Rita Copeland, “Classroom and Confession,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 376–406; Paul F. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300-1600 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). Robert Black, Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy: Tradition and Innovation in Latin Schools from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). For a sweeping history of Latin culture in Italy and the role of education up to the thirteenth century, see Ronald G. Witt, The Two Latin Cultures and the Foundation of Renaissance Humanism in Medieval Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 186
Cicero is compatible with Christianity he writes, “I have always loved and cherished [him] from boyhood.”456 In a late letter to Luca da Penna, the Papal Secretary, on the books of Cicero, Petrarch elaborates that:
Siquidem ab ipsa pueritia, quando ceteri omnes aut Prospero inhiant aut Esopo, ego libris Ciceronis incubui… eta illa quidem etate nichil intelligere poteram; sola me verborum dulcedo quedam et sonoritas detinebat... erat hac, fateor, in re pueri non puerile iudicium… nichil intelligentem id sentire quod tanto post… sentio.
From early childhood, when everyone else was poring over Prosperus or Aesop, I brooded over Cicero’s books… at that age of course I could understand nothing; only a certain sweetness or tunefulness of the words so held me…. On this, I confess, a child’s judgement was not childish…. While I understood nothing, I felt what I feel so much later.457
In this same letter, Petrarch recounts a story in which his father throws young Petrarch’s books of literature in the fire “as if they were heretical books” (“quasi heresum libri”) so that he will concentrate on his law studies, “quo spectaculo non aliter ingemui quam si ipse iisdem flammis inicerer” (“at the sight of which I groaned just as if I myself had been tossed on the same fire”).458 His father relents and saves from the fire two volumes: Cicero’s Rhetoric and the works of Virgil. This anecdote imbues the classics with the eroticism of the forbidden, and frames Petrarch’s subsequent abandonment of his law career and his return to writing and the classics as a Peter Pan-style refusal to “grow up.”
When, in the Secretum, St Augustine creates the vision of the childish old man in order to shame Petrarch into abandoning his worldly ways and overambitious projects, he and Petrarch play out a strangely homoerotic teacher-schoolboy scene of humiliation:
456 Bernardo, Letters on Familiar Matters, 187; “michi ab ineunte etate tam carus semper et tam cultus,” Fam. XXI.10.104-5. 457 Bernardo, Letters of Old Age, 601; Sen. XVI.1.6. 458 Bernardo, Letters of Old Age, 601; Sen. XVI.1.8. 187
A: Provectioris te quidem ingenii arbitrabar, nec putabam adhuc tam puerilibus admonitionibus indigere….
F: Quid pares ignore. Iam nunc tamen frontem meam rubor invasit, experiorque quod, pedagogis obiurgantibus, pueri solent.
Augustinus: I thought your mind was more advanced, and I had no idea you still needed lessons so childish…
Franciscus: I know not where you want to take me, but already I am aware of the blush mounting to my brow, and I feel like schoolboys do in presence of an angry master.459
Here Petrarch is manifestly unable to transition, unlike Augustine in the Confessions, not only from carnal to spiritual love, but also from pagan to Classical literature.460 He cannot give up the books (like the Aeneid) which Augustine, too, loved at school, and take up theology, which the Confessions shows is the real subject of adult intellectual inquiry. Augustine represents his love for the classics in the famous passage in which he weeps for Dido as a schoolboy. Augustine represents this as frivolous affective reading, wasting his passion on pagan fiction; Marilynn Desmond shows that Augustine here draws on a long critical understanding - which Petrarch would have known - of the Aeneid as allegorically representing the four ages of man, with Book IV (in which Aeneas dallies with Dido) as the unrestrained passion of adolescentia, which Aeneas must give up in order to grow to maturity and found Rome.461 Petrarch weeping for
459 Draper, 11; Secretum I.2.2-3. 460 On Petrarch’s alienation from the post-conversion sections of Augustine’s Confessions, see Victoria Kahn, “The Figure of the Reader in Petrarch’s Secretum,” PMLA 100, no. 2 (1985): 158. 461 Marilynn Desmond, Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality, and the Medieval Aeneid (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 75–92. 188
Cicero and Virgil thus has a number of queer resonances; Cicero and Virgil come to stand in for Dido, who allegorically represents adolescent lust, but also suggests the illicit sexual partners that both Augustine and Petrarch discarded in order to reach their ideal of mature Christian continence; in Augustine’s reading, she also represents pagan literature and religion, which he discards in favour of Christianity. However, Petrarch’s anecdote comes in the context of a love he has never truly discarded, just as he has never truly discarded his love for Laura.
Although Petrarch associates Cicero with his boyhood childhood passions, he also is anxious at several points – particularly in the letter with which he introduces Book XXIV of Familiarum rerum libri, the book of letters to Classical authors – to demonstrate that he has moved beyond this childish reading. In this letter, Petrarch describes an encounter at a party with an elderly man, a huge fan (“mirator maximus”)462 of Cicero. The conversation turns to Cicero, as conversations do at parties, and this elderly man refuses to accept the unflattering aspects of Cicero’s personality Petrarch has discovered in Cicero’s Epistolae ad Atticum, obstinately (“obstinatius”) clinging instead to the Cicero of the philosophical and rhetorical dialogues, the “auctor” of medieval Ciceronianism. The man’s enthusiasm for Cicero is uncritical, so that “he preferred to praise him even when he erred, and embrace the vices of his friend along with his virtues rather than to perceive them.”463 Petrarch upsets the man so much with his novel criticism of Cicero’s character that he closes his eyes and flinches away, physically identifying with Cicero “as if these things were said not about the reputation of another but were brought down on his own head.”464 Petrarch compares this elderly man’s over-identified, uncritical attachment to Cicero with his own as a child: “I was amazed to find a man who loved [Cicero] more than me, whom I had always loved more than anyone… the opinion that I remembered
462 Fam. XXIV.2.73. 463 Bernardo, Fam. 315; “… uno autem illo sene obstinatius obluctante, qui est claritate nominis et amore captus auctoris, erranti quoque plaudere et amici vitia cum virtutibus amplecti mallet quam discernere, nequid omnino damnare videretur hominis tam laudati.” Fam. XXIV.2.47-51. 464 “Claudebat oculos et quasi verbo percussus avertebat frontem ingeminans…hec dum dicerem, cohorrebat et quasi non in famam alterius sed in suum caput dicerentur, aversabatur.” Fam. XXIV.2.57-8, 71-2. 189 holding as a boy had become deeply rooted in the old man.”465 The old man’s stubborn love is ill-suited to his seniority: “he could not understand even at his age,” Petrarch exclaims, “that if Cicero were a man, it followed that… he must have erred.” The placement of this anecdote provides the context for Petrarch’s letters to Cicero that follow, suggesting that Petrarch wishes to place his own reasoned, ‘adult’ approach to Cicero in contrast to the old man’s fervour, as Martin Eisner suggests;466 however, this anecdote is perhaps a more ambivalent reflection on the immaturity of Petrarch’s own devotion.
Petrarch’s description of this encounter also associates incomplete masculinity and immature reading with misguided religious love, just as Augustine’s enthusiasm for Dido is also symbolic of not only pagan literature but his pre-conversion spirituality. The old man reacts to Petrarch’s criticism of Cicero “as if we were dealing not with a man but with a god,” and with an “almost religious devotion.”467 Petrarch continues,
Quesivi igitur an deum fuisse Tullium opinaretur an hominen; incuntanter “deum” ille respondit, et quid dixisset intelligens, “deum” inquit, “eloquii”. “Recte”, inquam, “nam si deus est, errasse non potuit; illum tamen deum dici nondum audieram; sed si Platonem Cicero suum deum vocat, cur non tu deum tuum Ciceronem voces? nisi quia deos pro arbitrio sibi fingere non est nostre religionis.”
I asked therefore whether he thought Tullius was a god or man; at once he answered “god,” and then understanding what he’d said, he said, “a god of eloquence.” “Indeed,” I said, “For if he is
465 “Mirabarque invenisse hominem qui plus me illum diligeret…quique quam michi puero fuisse memineram, eam de illo senex opinionem gereret altissime radicatam.” Fam. XXIV.2.77-81. 466 Eisner, “In the Labyrinth of the Library: Petrarch’s Cicero, Dante’s Virgil, and the Historiography of the Renaissance,” 764. 467 “Quasi non de homine sed de deo quodem ageretur,” Fam. XXIV.2.9; “reverentiam… tantam religionem” XXIV.2.12. 190 a god, he was not able to err; however he had not yet heard God speak; but if Cicero called Plato his god, why should not you call Cicero your god? Except that our religion does not permit us to set up our own gods.”468
Ultimately Petrarch approves of the old man’s veneration, “despite its Pythagorean flavour.”469 This reference probably refers to Cicero’s description in De natura deorum of the slavish deference to authority among the Pythagoras’ followers, legendary in the Renaissance, who according to Cicero, when anyone questioned assumptions based on Pythagoras’ teachings, answered simply, “Ipse dixit” (“He said it [therefore it is true]”).470 The misplaced authority associated with the Pythagoreans resembles the reverence of Aristotle that Petrarch loathed among the scholastic schools. The old man, for whom “authority held the place of reason” (“rationis locum teneret autoritas”)471 thus demonstrates the uncritical adherence to authority characteristic (to twentieth-century scholars) of the Middle Ages, rather than the fresh assessment of the evidence that Petrarch exemplifies. In the old man, this devotion persists in the face of new evidence, and is thus also ‘Pythagorean’ in that it is an outdated remnant of an older time, as Pythagoras was the forerunner of the Platonic and Stoic philosophy to which (as Petrarch reminds us in the quotation above) Cicero adhered and which would experience such a revival among the humanists. The old man’s love for Cicero thus resembles medieval historiography (as it has been portrayed in modern scholarship): anachronistic, outdated, and uncritical. His affective approach, Petrarch says explicitly here, is a boy’s passion that should have been left behind as he grew into a man.
468 Bernardo 315; Fam. XXIV.2.44-67. 469 Ibid. 470 Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Natura Deorum, ed. Arthur Stanley Pease (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), I.v.10. Umberto Bosco’s editorial footnote on Fam. XXIV.2.44-67 in the edition overseen by Vittoria Rossi points to this passage in De Natura Deorum as an explanation for Petrarch’s rather cryptic remark. See also S. K. Heninger, Touches of Sweet Harmony: Pythagorean Cosmology and Renaissance Poetics (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1974), 22. 471 Bernardo 315; Fam. XXIV.2.47-54. 191
This old man’s love is also potentially un-Christian, suggesting again its kinship to Petrarch’s love for Laura before he took the tonsure and swore himself to the celibate life – and yet, he cannot wholly give up this love either, a struggle he dramatizes in the Secretum and also in his famous letter recounting his and his brother’s ascent of Mt Ventoux in southern France. On this climb, Petrarch’s brother (who would soon join a Carthusian monastery) takes the straight, hard route, and Petrarch dithers, looking for an easier way up. When he finally reaches the top of the mountain, he reflects on how his life up to this point has also been characterized by promising starts and shameful backtracking, driven by laziness and desire: The circularity of his soliloquy mimics his tendency to literally backtrack along the paths up the mountain:
Hodie decimus annus completur, ex quo, puerilibus studiis dimissis, Bononia excessisti [...]. quod amare solebam, iam non amo; mentior: amo, sed parcius; iterum ecce mentitus sum: amo, sed verecundius, sed tristius.
It has been ten years since, having abandoned my youthful studies, I left Bologna…. What I used to love, I do not now love. I’m lying - I love, but sparingly. And again, look, I told a lie: I love it, but with shame, with sorrow.472
In Petrarch’s self-allegorization here, the climb up the mountain represents the literal growth from youth to maturity, and also the growth from spiritual immaturity to maturity. From his secular studies and temporal loves, Petrarch makes the hard climb to the spiritual maturity that his brother has attained with such single-minded purpose. At the top of the mountain, he opens the Confessions to a passage about self-knowledge and memory, cementing the self-reflexivity of this anecdote as he recalls it in a letter. Petrarch’s spiritual journey is also suggested through a number of textual resonances, such as the ascent of Mt La Verna and subsequent vision of the
472 Bernardo 176. Fam. IV.1.154-157. 192 ascent to heaven described in Bonaventure’s Itinerarium mentis in Deum, and with the climactic moment in the Confessions in the garden in Milan when Augustine hears the voice telling him “tolle, lege,” and, like Petrarch, performs sortilege. But Petrarch’s account is suffused with ambivalence and frustration at, as Albert Ascoli writes, “his inability to effect a final passage from the earthly desires of youth to the heavenly desires of maturity.”473
In his debate with the old man at the party, Petrarch seems to suggest that his own critical, informed, adult love for the classics is not in conflict with his Christianity – an assertion he repeats in another letter where he reverses Jerome’s famous adage against the classics, “I have no fear of being any less a Christian for being a Ciceronian, for to my recollection Cicero never said anything against Christ.”474 This suggests that Petrarch has doubt about his affective connection with the past not only as a historical methodology – can he really know Cicero through love? – but also as part of a moral Christian life. The old man’s near-worship of Cicero as a god comes dangerously close to Petrarch’s own imaginative meditations on Classical authors, affective reading more appropriate to Christian meditation. Petrarch adopts the reading strategies of affective piety for his Classical reading, applying immature reading styles to his boyhood loves for schoolroom texts from pre-Christian times. The letter describing Petrarch’s ascent of Mt Ventoux, like his regretful sign-offs to his letters to Classical authors (“From the land of the living … on 16 June in the year 1345 from the birth of that Lord whom you never knew”), suggest ambivalence about the fact that he lingers in the time before conversion.
473 Ascoli, “Petrarch’s Middle Age: Memory, Imagination, History, and the ‘Ascent of Mount Ventoux,’” 13. 474 Bernardo, Fam. 186. “Neque enim vereor ne parum cristianus sim, si ciceronianus fuero; nichil enim contra cristum Cicero loquitur, quod certe meminerim.” Fam. XXI,10.52-54. In his famous letter to Eustochium, Jerome wrote of a dream he had after his conversion but before he could bring himself to give up his library of pagan writers: “Interrogatus condicionem Christianum me esse respondi: et ille, qui residebat, ‘Mentiris,’ ait, ‘Ciceronianus es, non Christianus; ubi thesaurus tuus, ibi et cor tuum.” (“Asked who and what I was I replied that I was a Christian. But He who presided said: “You lie, you are a Ciceronian and not a Christian. For 'where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.'”) Jerome, Ep. XXII.30. 193
4.5 Conclusion
The anxieties about immaturity, including the queer undercurrents and religious doubt, that run through the Secretum and the letters clearly help structure Petrarch’s encounters with the Classical past. However, how does this change our understanding of Petrarch himself as an important mediating figure in how we ourselves encounter the Classical past? How does reimagining Petrarch as using an ‘amateur’ hermeneutics, as I do above, intervene in the narrative of Petrarch as the first ‘modern’ historian? In the next chapter I shall discuss the way Petrarch’s ambivalence to his own hermeneutics in encountering the past have helped structure the way modern scholars have encountered Petrarch, and what is at stake in retaining the image of Petrarch as a ‘professional.’ 194
5 Writing to Petrarch
5.1 Introduction
In the previous chapter I argued that Petrarch constructs his relationship with the past as an emotional one, an affective connection constituted by memory and imagination, and in doing so he draws extensively on monastic traditions of devotional meditation and imaginative reading. I showed that Petrarch develops the letter into a transtemporal space where he can both achieve his desire to touch the past and explore his ambivalence to this desire. The confused temporal status of the letter is inherent to the epistolary form, caused by the clash of times as the reader encounters the writer’s present, which is now the past. The confusing temporality of the direct address is a feature of the letter that many classical writers drew attention to and played with. Petrarch takes the examples of his Classical forbears a step further by expanding the possibilities of epistolary time: he writes his letters to recipients in the past for readers in the future. Through his exploitation of the epistolary form, Petrarch explores the confused temporality of his desire for the Classical past, desires which he formed in the schoolroom. Petrarch’s passionate love for the past becomes a focal point for his anxiety about his own immaturity, and the queer undercurrents of his homosocial affective bonds. He plays out this anxiety through the arrested development of the letter, a text representing a frozen moment in time; however, through his constant retrospective editing, Petrarch complicates even this temporal aspect of his letters.
This chapter explores some consequences of Petrarch’s use of the epistolary form and anxiety about time: specifically, in the way he has been received by modern scholarship. In the previous chapter I described three historical narratives that now are used to frame Petrarch’s discovery of the Letters to Atticus in 1345; this chapter concerns the third narrative, which I now repeat: 195
The rediscovery of the Letters to Atticus is a landmark moment in historiography, offering Petrarch a new perspective on a historical figure who would become so important to the Renaissance. His letters to Cicero inaugurate modern historicism – that is, the commitment to studying texts within their own historical context. This is in contrast to medieval historiography, which (to Early Modernists) is typically characterised by a casual attitude to anachronism and an uncritical approach to sources.475
In a way, all letters are written to the future, but Petrarch wrote one letter explicitly to the future, the “Letter to Posterity”. According to Ernest Wilkins’ analyses, Petrarch wrote this letter, which became Seniles XVIII.1, early in the stages of collecting the Seniles, probably before 1361, but he always intended it to conclude his epistolary collections.476 This letter, a short autobiography, begins:
Francis Petrarch to posterity, greetings. Perhaps you will have heard something about me, although this too is doubtful, whether a petty, obscure name would reach far into either space or time. And perhaps you will wish to know what sort of a man I was, or what were the results of my labors, especially of those whose fame has reached you or whose bare titles you have heard…
This introduction to Petrarch for his own readers seems oddly placed at the end of the collection if one assumes that the reader will read the collection in order, from beginning to end; rather, it seems to suggest the writer at the end of his life anticipating a gaze looking back at him from the future that will encounter this letter, these words, before it delves further back into his youth. Not
475 Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past (London: Edward Arnold, 1969); Theodor Mommsen, “Petrarch’s Conception of the ‘Dark Ages,’” Speculum 17, no. 2 (1942): 226–42; Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). 476 Wilkins, Petrarch’s Later Years, 268. 196 only a gaze, but a message: Petrarch here imagines himself as one of the Classical authors to whom he writes in Fam. XXIV, such as Pollio, whose name remains but whose works have disappeared. At this point in his life, Petrarch’s concern is his reception by future generations, and by writing to those generations, he invites letters back, just as he himself wrote to those Classical authors. Petrarch’s awareness – indeed, his creation – of a reciprocal gaze looking at him from the future just as he himself has looked back at the past suggests the possibility of his openness to affective relationships between himself and his future readers once he himself is long dead, even if only this letter remains of all his work. His “Letter to Posterity” thus intentionally creates a space in which readers can entertain fantasies of encounter with Petrarch.
It is important that we recognize the extent to which Petrarch deliberately invites friendships from the future so that we may denaturalize the sense of recognition and identification that modern scholars have felt for Petrarch, and recognise the role of affective connection in scholarship on his work. Heavily engaged in affective, imaginative identification with the past, Petrarch is himself a seductive object of identification by modern scholars, who have often felt kinship – how could they not? – with his intellectual goals, interests, and pasttimes. In studying Petrarch as a literature scholar interested in Latin or Italian literature, Latin education, the history of language, the endurance of Classical culture, and the preservation of knowledge, one is inevitably encountering someone who is not only like oneself, but someone who invites, even demands community with those who share these interests with him. Moreover, Petrarch was heavily involved in shaping how his contribution to literature and culture would be remembered after his lifetime, a fact acknowledged in Petrarch scholarship, but not much resisted. As Witt dryly observes, “Petrarch would have been pleased by modern scholarship’s endorsement of the reputation that he tried to create for himself.”477 Placing these transhistorical friendships in the spotlight will allow me to interrogate the role of empathy in the periodization of Petrarch as ‘modern’. This aspect of Petrarch’s reception, I will argue, is largely a result of this identification between modern readers and Petrarch.
477 Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients, 230. 197
This chapter also examines the experience of reading Petrarch after Petrarch. Three scholars – Francesco Zabarella and Pier Paolo Vergerio, Sr. in the fifteenth century, and Ernest Wilkins in the twentieth – responded to Petrarch’s implicit invitation and wrote letters back to him, long after he was dead. Although very different, these letters suggest their recognition of the potential for transtemporal friendship between themselves and Petrarch. I use Wilkins’ 1958 “We Answer a Letter” to propose fandom as a way to frame modern scholars’ affective reception of Petrarch. Reading Petrarch scholars as fans of Petrarch will thus also stage an intervention in the myth of Petrarch as the first practitioner of historicism, and in the corresponding historiographical narrative of Petrarch’s role in the ‘rise of modernity.’ By doing this I seek to show that narrative of Petrarch as ‘first modern man’ aligns the paradigms of modern/medieval, adult/child, and professional/amateur, while a closer examination of the complexities of Petrarch’s own relationship with medieval hermeneutics and the idea of immaturity should complicate these binaries.
I will end this chapter with my own experience of reading Petrarch, in order to discuss the limitations of empathy. To read Petrarch as a fan (and I intentionally retain the ambiguity of that statement, the possibility that I am reading Petrarch while myself a fan, or that I am reading Petrarch himself as a fan) can help not only to direct interest towards the movements of affect and eroticism in Petrarch’s reading, but also to deconstruct why one might efface or ignore these aspects of Petrarch’s writings. I will suggest that the modern scholarly attempt to classify Petrarch as ‘modern’ is inseparable from a wish to suppress Petrarch’s own ambivalence about the propriety of his love for the past, an ambivalence which continues to inform the rhetoric of the humanities in the public sphere today. The modern emphasis on Petrarch’s role in the development of humanism and modernity waves aside his association of his love for the past with backwardsness, sterility, and death; moreover, by always framing his rediscovery of the Classics as the rise of modern historicism, we lose sight of the amateurism that dominated Petrarch’s antiquarian pursuits, and that invites ‘fannish’ responses such as Wilkins’ letter. Empathy for Petrarch leads to ignoring in Petrarch what is so often ignored (or derided) in the ‘professional’ practice of medieval historiography: amateurism, love, immaturity, anachronism, and fannishness.
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5.2 Petrarch and periodization
Petrarch’s love for the past has frequently been understood by modern scholars as a symptom of the nascent rise of humanism – that is, of the growing change in the intellectual relationship with the past that characterized the Renaissance. The work and writings of Petrarch’s followers and other early fifteenth-century Italian humanists form, for these scholars, the beginnings of modern historiography, where ‘modern’ means an attentiveness to historical context and an awareness of historical difference. Such an idea, of course, relies on the assumption that the Middle Ages lacked this awareness, and rather saw history as a single, jumbled together moment. This dichotomy was most clearly articulated in the 1960s by art historian Erwin Panofsky, who sought to contextualize the new styles emerging in Renaissance Classicism in the rise of humanist historicism. The synoptic representations of saint’s lives on the walls of churches, where the saint would appear several times in the same picture at different phases of his or her life, contrasted pleasingly with the Renaissance figure paintings of the individual captured at a particular moment in time; thus in his Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (1960), Erwin Panofsky linked the increasing use of (visual) perspective in Renaissance art with this rise of ‘historical perspective’ in writers like Petrarch.478
For Panofsky, the Renaissance emerged with, and was distinguished by, “what we may call a historical point of view – historical in the sense that the phenomena are not only connected in time but also evaluated according to ‘their time.’”479 Peter Burke wrote even more bluntly in 1969 that “during the whole millennium 400-1400, there was no ‘sense of history’ even among the educated,” and he dubbed the Middle Ages a period of “diachronic innocence.”480 Burke’s stark articulation of this historical narrative (which I shall, perhaps unfairly, call Mommsenian), is frequently cited and repeated uncritically, even in Caferro’s excellent introductory overview
478 See Panofsky, and also Keith Moxey, 'Perspective, Panofsky and the Philosophy of History, ' New Literary History 26 (1995), 775-86. 479 Erwin Panofsky, “The First Page of Giorgio Vasari's 'Libro',” in Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History, 1st ed. (Garden City: NY: Doubleday, 1955), 205. 480 Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past (London: Edward Arnold, 1969), 1. 199
Contesting the Renaissance481 and Witt’s magisterial In the Footsteps of the Ancients.482 In this school of thought, people of the Middle Ages consistently presented the elements of Classical and Biblical cultures anachronistically, because of their ignorance of, or indifference to, historical change. The evidence for this is the insertion of anachronistic detail and explanation into Classical stories, such as, in Burke’s example, Ricordano Malespini’s assertion in his thirteenth-century Florentine History that the Roman Republican politician Catiline’s wife attended an Easter Mass.483 Likewise, Panofsky points to artistic representations of the Trojan War as a series of chivalric jousts, and to biblical figures and saints depicted in medieval dress.484 Both scholars also note the tendency of medieval historiography to feature monsters and other irrational phenomena, and the genre’s apparently casual attitude to verifiable facts, common accusations which many medievalists have addressed over the last few decades.485 For Panofsky and Burke the growing interest in archaeology in the fifteenth century, the editing of classical texts, and the consequent discoveries such as Lorenzo Valla’s detection of the forgery of the Donation of Constantine486 demonstrate the growth of a recognisably modern approach to history, one that shakes off the authority of centuries of Christian learning in order to reassess the past.
481 William Caferro, Contesting the Renaissance (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 104. 482 Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients, 260. 483 Ibid., 2. 484 Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1960), 84. 485 The idea that medieval historiography does not demonstrate scholarly rigour or interest in empirical evidence has been extensively addressed by medievalists working on medieval historiography, most notably Nancy Partner's Serious Entertainments: The Writing of History in Twelfth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), and more recently Chris Given-Wilson, Chronicles: The Writing of History in Medieval England (London, UK: Hambledon and London, 2007); Caroline Walker Bynum, “Miracles and Marvels: The Limits of Alterity” in ed. Franz J. Felten, Nikolas Jaspert unter Mitarbeit von Stephanie Haarländer, Vita Religiosa im Mittelalter: Festschrift für Kaspar Elm (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1999), 799-817; Gabrielle M. Spiegel, The Past As Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) and Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth- Century France (New York: Routledge, 2005). 486 A document, also known as the Constitutum Constantini, which purported to prove the Roman Emperor Constantine's donation of the empire to the papacy, but which Valla showed, through analysing linguistic and handwriting changes, could not have been written in the fourth century CE, i.e., within Constantine's lifetime. 200
The story that the Dark Ages ended in a flowering of knowledge and the great intellectual revival of the Renaissance has proved persistent in scholarship and popular culture, despite continual resistance by medievalists, not to mention general acknowledgement by early modernists of its fallacy. It is a narrative that is simply too seductive to eliminate entirely. In his introduction to the New Historicism Reader (1994), Aram Veeser wrote of the “unimaginable excitement that men and women of the Renaissance must have felt as the rigid constraints of medieval institutions and physical hardships began to fall away.” (It is telling that Veeser modifies this statement with a footnote that a colleague, Lawrence Davies, has told him that this is “not fair.”)487 New Historicism, indeed, has been a particular culprit in maintaining this narrative. An important critical movement in literary studies in the 1980s and 90s, and spearheaded by scholars of early modernity, New Historicism likewise emphasized a return to situating texts within their historical contexts, and this association of early modernity and historicism in turn helped reify the association between the rise of the awareness of historical difference and the Renaissance. Stephen Greenblatt in particular has often been accused of relying on inaccurate caricatures of the Middle Ages as steeped in unselfconscious and unknowing anachronism; there was an outcry in the medievalist community in 2011 when Greenblatt’s book The Swerve was showered with critical accolades and won the Pulitzer, the National Book Award and the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize despite containing numerous inaccurate stereotypes about the Middle Ages that feed directly into the perception of the medieval as a ‘Dark Ages.’488
It is important to recognise the persistence, appeal, and importance of this myth in the way Petrarch has been read in the twentieth and twenty-first century. Petrarch appears again and again as a figurehead, a symbol, and a representative of this new ‘modern’ approach to the past, most particularly of the attempts to understand texts from the past in their own historical context. Although often the much-touted ‘rediscovery’ of classical texts was not a recovery of what was lost but the movement of a possession from the hands of one community into another, classical texts did move, through the efforts of Petrarch and his followers, from the East and the remnants
487 H. Aram Veeser, The New Historicism Reader (New York: Routledge, 1994), 14, note 22. 488 “Book Review Forum: The Swerve: How the World Became Modern,” Exemplaria 25, no. 4 (2013). 201 of the Byzantine Empire to Western Europe, from monastic libraries into private hands, from religious intellectual spheres into secular. In his influential 1942 Speculum article, Theodor Mommsen credited Petrarch with having originated the idea of the ‘Dark Ages,’ the classic idea that the Middle Ages were a period of intellectual staleness and paucity, religious tyranny and fearful ignorance. Mommsen credits Petrarch with first using the imagery of light and dark to describe this imagined moment of historical change. At the end of Africa, his unfinished Latin hexameter epic about the Roman general Scipio Africanus, Petrarch envisions his work being read by a future generation for whom classical antiquity has been fully recovered: “Poterunt discussis forte tenebris / Ad purum priscumque iubar remeare nepotes” (“When once the darkness has been dispersed / Our descendents can re-emerge into the earlier pure and radiant light.”)489 Petrarch is just as prominent in more recent accounts of the rise of Renaissance historicism. Marc Laureys repeats this common view in his 2006 article on the fourteenth- century historian Cavallini:
The basic change in [the historiographical] tradition that occurred during the Renaissance with respect to the Middle Ages was the growing acquaintance with a steadily expanding body of source material, both literary and archaeological evidence, and the concomitant advance of historical consciousness and method.
He goes on to single out Petrarch’s role in this development:
Petrarch’s reception of Classical authors stands out above the similar pursuits of all his contemporaries… because he approached the Classical authors not merely as a paradigm for his own society, but above all as historical persons in their own context. His textual and source
489 Francesco Petrarca, L’Africa, ed. Nicola Festa (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1949), IX 456–7; Mommsen, “Petrarch’s Conception of the ‘Dark Ages,’” 240. 202 criticism of Classical authors always reached out beyond the specific passage at hand to the historical situation of the author and his work, and ultimately aimed at providing single contributions to a better global understanding of classical culture.490
Laureys recalls Petrarch’s antiquarian efforts, his attention to the collection, copying and dissemination of classical texts; other scholars have found the birth of a historicist impulse in Petrarch’s emphasis on reading classical authors in their entirety, as opposed to the out-of- context classical tags and aphorisms, typical in medieval florilegia.491
The idea that Petrarch and his followers developed historicism is inseparable from the supposed “birth of the subject” in Renaissance Italy, the rise in “individualism” that Burckhardt described as characteristic of this historical moment, and that has defined Renaissance and Early Modern scholarship, despite many re-evaluations and amendments. Patricia Parker and David Quint link the rise of ‘modern individuality’ directly with historicism: “As the humanist saw how the ancients differed historically, he perceived his own historical difference and individuality.”492 In his important 1993 Worlds of Petrarch, Giuseppe Mazzotta both re- evaluates and re-inscribes this idea: “With his insistance on subjective individualism and his steady concentration on the innermost landscape of the mind, Petrarch is said to generate an epoch-making transition to modernity. The mark of the modern he inaugurates lies in the transformed understanding of the self….”493 Mazzotta traces the complex relationship between Petrarch’s investment in autobiography and his antiquarianism; for him, the essence of Petrarch’s
490 Marc Laureys, “Antiquarianism and Politics in 14th-Century Avignon: The Humanism of Giovanni Cavallini,” in Petrarch and His Readers in the Renaissance, ed. Karl A. E. Enenkel and Jan Papy (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 35, 41. 491 Although Petrarch defines himself against the decontextualized, ahistorical readings of the scholastics, he all too often follows their reading practices himself, using florilegia and decontextualized quotations, as Carol Quillen's careful study shows (passim, but especially chapter 2 of Rereading the Renaissance). See also Riccardo Fubini, Umanesimo e Secolarizzazione da Petrarca a Valla (Roma: Bulzoni, 1990), 146–61. 492 David Quint, “Introduction,” in Literary Theory, Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 2–3. 493 Mazzotta, Worlds of Petrarch, 2–3. 203 historiographical project is that “the only worthwhile, imaginable knowledge… is knowledge of oneself and study of one’s character, or to say it a bit differently, true knowledge is coextensive with the concrete individualities of history.”494 Petrarch’s creation of a historical narrative that has since become naturalized thus seems, in retrospect, like his recognition of historical fact, and this in turn reinforces the narrative. Petrarch’s historical imagination thus seems strikingly modern to modern sensibilities because his ideas about the Middle Ages match our own, and this is because Petrarch originated them – it is a self-fulfilling prophecy.495
In the shadows of this narrative, the medieval comes to stand for both the amateur and the childlike; Burckhardt famously described the Middle Ages as “lying dreaming and half awake beneath a common veil… woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession.”496 Petrarch’s recognition of the “past as past”497 is thus indication and symptom of his own burgeoning individuality and modernity, but also his maturity. Thomas Greene announces in The Light in Troy that Petrarch “was the first to notice that classical antiquity was very different from his own medieval world... Petrarch took more or less alone the step an archaic society must take to reach maturity: he recognized the possibility of a cultural alternative” (my emphasis).498
This association of historicism with maturity is widespread in reception studies. In her forthcoming article in the Blackwell Companion to the Reception of Classical Myth, Ika Willis critiques the current distinction between the two modes of reception of classical myth in modern culture: the ‘live’ or historicist allusion to classical myth which engages with the myth in its original source or context, so that the meaning of the alluding text (and, ideally, also of the text alluded to) is produced or enriched by a knowledge of the original text. A ‘dead’ (or
494 Ibid., 108. 495 Likewise Quillen argues that Petrarch's reading of Augustine seems strikingly modern not because it is more 'true' or 'historical' than the medieval or late antique Augustine but because it was so influential on the twentieth-century reception of Augustine. Quillen, Rereading the Renaissance, 20–1. 496 Jacob Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S.G.C. Middlemore (London: George G. Harrap, 1929), 143. 497 c.f. Mommsen, “Petrarch’s Conception of the ‘Dark Ages.’” 498 Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry, 106. 204 anachronistic) allusion, by contrast, is a simple generic tag, not enriched by contextual knowledge. The ‘dead’ allusion is dehistoricized and unhistoricist; it exists in cultural products that do not “increase, directly or indirectly, their viewers’ store of accurate knowledge and true beliefs about classical world (as ratified by classicists).”499 Willis’ article argues for an alternative methodology for classical reception that would not only value historicist classical reception; she gives a reading of the dehistoricized classical reception of Xena, Warrior Princess, arguing that the show self-consciously uses classical myth divorced from history as a source of pleasurable storytelling in a way that interrogates the value and meaning of “true history.” Willis frames her argument in response to a position statement in Simon Goldhill’s book Love, Sex, and Tragedy: How the Ancient World Shapes Our Lives, in which Goldhill links ahistoricism with both pop culture and immaturity,500 slightly paraphrasing Cicero: “If you do not know where you come from, you will always be a child.” 501 The dehistoricized readings of ‘low’ culture are, for Goldhill, childish, and therefore to be dismissed or discouraged. Moreover, childishness and amateurism (that is, engagement with the classical world unmediated by the mastery of the skills and knowledge of a trained Classicist) go together. Goldhill’s ‘dead’ allusion, perhaps coincidentally, greatly resembles a mode of engagement with Classical literature common in the Middle Ages: the use of florilegia, collections of decontextualized classical quotations for memorization and edification (one of which Petrarch wrote).
499 I am grateful to Ika Willis for allowing me access to early versions of this article. 500 Goldhill's association of a knowledge of the Classics with real maturity obviously also has its roots in a separate but related trend in the UK, the use of classical education as a tool of social strafication in an age of increasingly widespread university education. This classist ideology infantilizes the underprivileged classes – those without access to the (few, largely privately funded) schools that offer Latin or Classical Civilization qualifications at the secondary level in the UK, or the leisure and security to pursue such a financially unwise specialization at the tertiary level – in order to justify their subjugation. On the history of education in Latin in Western Europe as a technology of power, see Françoise Waquet, Latin, or, The Empire of the Sign: From the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century, transl. John Howe, (London; New York: Verso, 2001). Originally published as Le Latin, ou, L'empire d'un signe XVIe-XXe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel), 1998. 501 Simon Goldhill, Love, Sex & Tragedy: How the Ancient World Shapes Our Lives (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 3. "Nescire autem quid ante quam natus sis acciderit, id est semper esse puerum," ("Not to know what happened before you were born is to remain always a child,") Orator ad M. Brutum XXXIV, 120. 205
Petrarch’s combination of his Augustinian account of self-discovery and personal growth with his increasing knowledge of Classical texts makes it easy to read these two journeys – Petrarch’s own, and the wider cultural change coming about as a result of the Classical revival – as one and the same, so that Petrarch’s own growth from childishness to maturity becomes historiography’s growth from the childishness of the Middle Ages to the maturity of the Renaissance. Consequently, Petrarch can be, and is unblushingly said to “stand metonymically for his era, for Renaissance individualism, and for modernity itself.”502 In a recent conversation between myself and a colleague, a specialist in Elizabethan drama, I explained that the second half of my thesis was organized chronologically. He asked in that case why did I treat first Petrarch, then Chaucer? It emerged that he thought that Petrarch was a fifteenth-century author, post-dating Chaucer. Chaucer is so universally categorized as a ‘medieval’ writer by the organization of departments, class syllabi, and anthologies, and Petrarch as ‘early modern,’ that this specialist in the period (for whose intellect and knowledge I have the greatest respect, I should add) had naturally always assumed that Petrarch came later. In the Norton Anthology of World Literature, for example, Volume A ends with fifteenth-century Indian poetry, while Petrarch (1304-1374) appears in the beginning of Volume B, alongside sixteenth-century poets including Shakespeare.503 Likewise, in the Broadview Anthology of British Literature, Petrarch’s sonnets appear in Volume 2: The Renaissance and the Early Seventeenth Century, while Chaucer’s writings, which post-date Petrarch’s, appear in Volume One: The Medieval Period.504
A malapropism from an essay by an unknown undergraduate has reached the status of urban myth in Early Modern Studies: “Petrarch had one foot in the Middle Ages, while with the other he saluted the Renaissance.”505 Albert Ascoli repeats this anecdote in his analysis of how Petrarch has come to embody modernity itself in part because of his own investment in doing so.
502 Dolora Chapelle Wojciehowski, “Francis Petrarch: First Modern Friend,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 47, no. 4 (December 1, 2005): 269. 503 The Norton Anthology of World Literature (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2012). 504 The Broadview Anthology of British Literature (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2007). 505 Ascoli, “Petrarch’s Middle Age: Memory, Imagination, History, and the ‘Ascent of Mount Ventoux,’” 5. 206
Thus Petrarch is also “one of the first truly modern men” for Burckhardt,506 the “first modern man” in numerous textbooks, popular histories, and articles,507 and even “Dr Modernity”508 – in other words, he is the first representative of this new historical consciousness, the first ‘individual,’ and the most common ‘Renaissance life’ in the textbooks Caferro surveys.509 “He recognized from the very beginning the crisis enveloping the concept of unity that historically can be said to belong to the ‘Dark Ages,’ to a time when an individual existence had an objective, firm, and congruent basis in a vision of preordained wholeness,” writes Mazzotta. Even in works which seek to problematize or deconstruct the association of individuality and modernity or which qualify it in some way, Petrarch remains pre-eminent and representative of what we mean when we talk about the Renaissance self.510
Two letters in particular were singled out by Burckhardt as indicative of Petrarch’s historical individuality: the famous account of the ascent of Mt. Ventoux, and the description of visiting the ancient sites in Rome with Giovanni Colonna (in which letter Mazzotta also finds a “revelation of both time and space as ruptured both in themselves and from each other”).511
506 "No other leitmotif occurs as often in his texts as the contention that the Italians of the Renaissance were the 'first-born among the sons of modern Europe' ... and that 'the first truly modern man' 'a wholly recognizable prototype of modern man' appeared in the period of Petrarch and the Quattrocento."Hans Baron, “Burckhardt After A Century,” in In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism: Essays on the Transition from Medieval to Modern Political Thought, vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 165. 507 Wojciehowski discusses the history of this cliché in “Francis Petrarch: First Modern Friend.” The introduction to the 2006 volume Petrarch and His Readers in the Renaissance by the book's editors, Enenkel and Papy, repeats this trope: “He was even hailed to be the 'first modern man' in the sense that he was the first writer who can be regarded as an 'individual' in modern terms.” Enenkel and Papy expresses some doubts about this, but nonetheless lets the idea stand. Albert Ascoli gives a number of other examples of authors who repeat this trope in “Favola Fui,” p.17 n.6. 508 Margaret Brose, “The Worlds of Petrarch, by Giuseppe Mazzotta (Review),” Speculum 70, no. 4 (1995): 943– 46. 509 Caferro, Contesting the Renaissance, 34–5. 510 E.g. Zak, especially p. 9; David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy, passim; John Martin, Myths of Renaissance Individualism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), especially p.5; the special issue of the Journal of Modern and Medieval Studies, Rethinking Periodization, ed. Summit and Wallace, 37.3 (2007); Summit, “Topography as Historiography: Chaucer, Petrarch, Medieval Rome.” 511 Mazzotta, Worlds of Petrarch, 22. 207
These two letters have become fables of the Renaissance, one or both appearing in many influential teaching sourcebooks or surveys of this period,512 their account of the pursuit of self- knowledge symbolizing the ‘birth of subjectivity’ or the ‘rise of the individual’. Both evoke the humanist spirit scholars have found in the next age, the spirit of exploration and inquiry focused on the human self as expressed in history, medicine, culture and languages, in Petrarch’s story of climbing a mountain purely for the achievement of it. Through a Burckhardtian lens, the climb up Mt Ventoux also symbolizes the maturation of western culture from medievalism to humanism and the Renaissance. The selection of this letter by modern scholars to symbolize a moment of historical change in the nature of selfhood reflects Petrarch’s own desire in the letter for a spiritual reform in himself; moreover, Petrarch offers himself as “a mediating figure for a more crucial spiritual dislocation - a hoped-for transit from youth through an ambiguous ‘middle age’ to achieved conversion and Christian selfhood.”513 In this letter, scholars agree that Petrarch “concentrated into one episode an influence stretching over several years,” writing (or extensively revising) this letter in the 1350s, many years after its ostensible date, creating a narrative following the model of the Confessions in which he offers ‘autobiography’ as allegory.514 Thus the “Ascent of Mt Ventoux” is particularly amenable to the form of close reading popular in New Historicist scholarship that reads an overarching historical narrative through ‘thick description’ of a single moment: here, alone515 on the peak of Mt. Ventoux, Petrarch surveys the view, looking back across the shadowed lands of the Middle Ages into the brighter Classical past, and forward into the sunlit Renaissance and the modern age beyond it.516
512 E.g. Witt 276-77; Kenneth R. Bartlett, The Civilization of the Italian Renaissance: A Sourcebook, 2nd ed., (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011) includes Petrarch’s first letter to Cicero, his Letter to Posterity, and the Ascent of Mt Ventoux. 513 Ascoli, “Petrarch’s Middle Age: Memory, Imagination, History, and the ‘Ascent of Mount Ventoux,’” 13. 514 Giuseppe Billanovich, “Petrarca e il Ventoso,” Italia Medioevale e Umanistica 9 (1966): 389–401; Constable, “Petrarch and Monasticism,” 96–98 especially n.199. 515 Apart from the village porters carrying the bags, of course, whose invisible labour makes Petrarch’s introspection possible; their absence in the historiographical narrative is very telling. 516 Ascoli, “Petrarch’s Middle Age: Memory, Imagination, History, and the ‘Ascent of Mount Ventoux,’” 28. 208
The role of these letters in the complex history of Petrarchan reception in the twentieth century suggests two important elements in the way we have read Petrarch: a) the spatialization of time, and b) Petrarch’s invitation that others read him as embodying a moment of historical change in the relationship between the self and the past. The extreme effects on the historical imagination of this division of historical periods appears in Jan Papy’s article discussing the identity of Petrarch’s close friend ‘Socrates’ (thought to be Ludovicus Sanctus of Beringen, a musician). Papy expresses consternation about their friendship: “one wonders, especially when confronted with Sanctus’s own ‘medieval’ writings, what kind of erudition and education Petrarch had in mind when praising his northern friend to the skies.”517 These two men, schoolmates and lifelong friends, are envisioned by Papy as belonging to two fundamentally and irreconcilably different worlds, one ‘medieval,’ the other ‘Renaissance.’
The three letters to Petrarch by Zabarella, Vergerio, and Wilkins punctuate the history of his reception, and in many ways encapsulate how Petrarch continues to be singled out as a representative of a dramatic shift in the way people understood their past, even as the story of this dramatic shift becomes less and less plausible. Papy’s article suggests the power of the narrative of the Renaissance as the ‘rise of modernity’ to induce circular logic, so that possession of ‘modern’ characteristics determine when (and who) is ‘modern.’ The next section of this chapter argues for the relationship between the epistolary hermeneutics of Petrarch, Zabarella, Vergerio and Wilkins, and fans who produce fanfiction about real people (often called RPF - Real Person Fanfiction – or RPS – Real Person Slash). RPF, a controversial subgenre of fanfiction which I discussed in the last chapter, generates emotionally charged fantasies of encounter – and sometimes real encounters – between its authors and a beloved author or celebrity. Examining the way in which affective connection between fan-writer, fan-reader, and the real person who is transmuted into text through the process of being written into fanfiction, helps us to theorize the ways in which emotional responses to the idea of encounter with him have shaped Petrarchan reception, and the consequences for literary studies.
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5.3 Fantasies of Encounter
The “Ascent of Mt Ventoux” and its reception in the twentieth century lay the foundations for the Mommsenian idea that Petrarch’s sense of the distance between past and present emerged from his discovery of Cicero’s Letters to His Friends in 1345. For this school of thought, Cicero’s letters “led [Petrarch] to recognize the gulf between the standards of his own day and those of Cicero’s time. Precisely this capacity to recognize individual personality and cultural difference marks him as a – perhaps the first – ‘Renaissance man.’“518 Petrarch’s extreme emotion and excitement at this discovery led him to burst out with a letter to Cicero himself; the letter, written to the past, suggests both that Petrarch was imagining the past as separate and distant from himself, but also, at some level, to still have some point of contact with his own time. I do not suggest that Petrarch truly imagined that Cicero might read his letter, of course, but I propose taking seriously the emotions that this encounter generates, and how its emotional consequences resonate through scholarship on Petrarch. The two letters to Cicero and the other letters to Classical authors explore the possible negative emotional consequences of familiaritas – friendship, intimacy – with people who can only be known through texts.
Petrarch’s letters to Cicero are, like Mary Sue stories, built around a fantasy of encounter. The immediacy and intimacy of Cicero’s letters adds to the illusion that they project an authentic and whole self, so that in reading them Petrarch can seem to now ‘meet’ the ‘real’ Cicero whom he has known for many years through his other texts. Petrarch begins his letter with a reminder of this prior intimacy: “If I have come to know your mind from your works - which I do seem to know as though I had lived with you....” However, where Mary Sue stories usually tell a story of pleasure at this encounter, the first letter to Cicero suggests that this touch between past and present is an uncomfortable or distressing one, a source of friction that has rubbed Petrarch the wrong way. Petrarch describes his excited discovery of the letters, and his disappointment, even anger, at their contents: “I read [the letters] with great eagerness. I listened to you say a great
518 John Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship (Cambridge: CUP 1958; reprint 1967), 2:6-7, quoted Quillen 106.
210 many things, complain a great deal, waver in your opinions... and I who had known what a preceptor you were for others now recognise the kind of guide that you were for yourself.”519 This is a reaction not to “the gulf between the standards of his own day and those of Cicero’s time,” as a common interpretation of his letter suggests,520 but to the distance between the philosopher of the Tusculanae quaestiones, De amicitia, De finibus and De oratore, and the hectic politician, advocate, and family man of the letters and orations that came to light in Petrarch’s lifetime. Petrarch’s first letter to Cicero suggests that the discovery of Cicero’s letters has had both a familiarizing and defamiliarizing effect – Petrarch now knows Cicero better than ever, but also knows that he never really knew him at all. As I have suggested, Petrarch’s letters open up a space in which exists the possibility of friendship, of contact, with people who can only be known through the medium of text; the spatialization of time in his work blurs the distinction between those who are far away geographically, such as the numerous friends all over Europe with whom he keeps up a correspondence, and those who are far away chronologically. In addition, because Petrarch’s letter collection does not contain any responses from his living friends, his correspondences with the dead do not on the surface appear any less one-sided than those with the living. Petrarch’s Letter to Posterity, which explicitly addresses his population of future readers, creates a space in which this reader of posterity may imagine her own encounter with Petrarch; moreover, it attempts to justify Petrarch’s actions, to defuse just the kind of negative response that Petrarch had towards Cicero.521 Petrarch’s disappointment in Cicero, his anger (“ira dictante”522) suggests the possibility that we, too, may be disappointed in Petrarch – or that he may be disappointed in us. Petrarch’s letters to other Classical figures are haunted by the possibility of their disappointment at their neglect by future generations, news that Petrarch delivers with apologetic sympathy. He writes to Varro,
519 Bernardo Fam. 317; “qui iampridem quails preceptor aliis fuisses noveram, nunc tandem quis tu tibi esses agnovi.” Fam. XXIV.3. 520 This interpretation is summarized in Quillen, Rereading the Renaissance, 107. 521 Albert Russell Ascoli, Favola Fui: Petrarch Writes His Readers (Binghamton, N.Y.: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, SUNY, 2010), 12. 522 Fam. I.1.42. 211
But be of good cheer, and grasping in good conscience the fruits of your uncommon labours, grieve not that mortal things have perished…. There is a throng of illustrious men whose works resulted from dedicated labour similar to yours and who enjoy no greater fortune, whose example should serve to convince you that you must bear your fate with greater equanimity.523
Petrarch’s letter to Homer not only consoles him for his losses, and for his comparative neglect in Italy because so few can read Greek, but also responds to his complaint that Virgil plagiarized from him. Apparently responding to a letter from an unknown friend writing in the guise of Homer’s ghost, Petrarch consoles the author, “You utter many complaints about your imitators… when I, the least of men, rejoice, and not only rejoice, but even boast that I am now held in such esteem that there may be someone… who wishes to follow and imitate me?”524 He adds that “no one imitates unless he loves” (“nemo enim nisi amet imitabitur”),525 and that it is a compliment to a writer if they are imitated and, indeed, surpassed by their followers, for what else “should an author desire for the child of his intellect?” Earlier in the letter Petrarch positions himself as one of these ‘children’ of the authors to whom he writes, “dulce michi velut infanti est cum dissertissimis nutritoribus balbutire,” (“it is sweet to babble like an infant with my eloquent tutors”).526 Nutritor - a very unusual word, the masculine equivalent of nutrix (‘wet nurse’) - implies feeding and nourishment, suggesting again the pervasive metaphor in devotional spirituality where imaginative, affective reading is the “mylke of lyȝte doctrine,” suitable for beginners and children.527 In using this strikingly rare word, Petrarch is surely recalling another instance of its use, in Statius’ Achilleid (a common classroom text), where the young Achilles - a
523 Bernardo 327; Fam. XXIV, 6, 66-68. 524 Bernardo 345; Fam. XXIV.12.111-130. 525 My translation; Fam. XXIV.12.128. 526 My translation; Fam. XXIV.12.47-8. 527 Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Full Critical Edition, 10.14–15; 10.23, 27, 35; 10.26–7. 212 queerly gendered figure, since he is in disguise as a woman for much of the poem - uses it of Charon, the centaur who has been his guardian and tutor.528 This allusion suggests that Petrarch stands in company with Statius as a literary imitator of Homer, but also conceives of literary imitation as a form of reception with affective significance and consequences, an overture that always risks the possibility of rejection by the original author.
The film Julie and Julia529 feelingly depicts the distress of a fan when she is rejected by her object of fannish emulation and affective reception. Based on an autobiographical memoir by the food blogger Julie Powell, the movie follows Julie (played by Amy Adams) on a year-long attempt to cook her way through Julia Child’s classic recipe book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Her journey is interlaced with the story of Child’s own self-discovery as a cook in France in the 1940s, and Julie’s burgeoning relationship with this textual Julia. At several points Julie imagines that she has a kinship with Julia, that “it was like she was there, like Julia was there in the room, on our side like some great big good fairy.” However, the present, actual Julia Child - still alive, and in her nineties - remains in the background, a shade whose reality is barely acknowledged. When a friend asks Powell, “Do you think Julia knows about you?” she confesses, “I wish. I have this fantasy that she comes for dinner and I show her my new lemon zester. We become very close.”530 However, this imagined friendship is crushed when the real Julia Child, contacted by a journalist, is dismissive of Powell’s book project. Powell’s shock and humiliation when her familiaritas with Child is revealed to exist only in her imagination is only assuaged by her visit to Julia Child’s kitchen in the Smithsonian Institution, the preserved set from which she cooked for her television show, where she can reconnect with ‘her’ Julia Child, the constructed, textual personality of her cookbooks and her television programs who invites connection and friendship.
528 Statius, Achilleid, I.276. 529 Nora Ephron, Julie and Julia (Columbia Pictures, 2009). 530 Quotations from unofficial transcript, Drew’s Script-o-Rama, http://www.script-o- rama.com/movie_scripts/j/julie-and-julia-script-transcript.html. 213
I return now to Real Person Fanfiction as a place to explore the possible tensions surrounding fans’ fantasies of encounter with beloved celebrities. RPF is, like other fanfiction, a mode of affective reading relying on a hermeneutics of intimacy, but it differently conceptualizes ‘text’ and ‘person’ in a way that overlaps in many ways with the concepts used by literary historians. RPF focuses more than other fanfiction on constituting a personality behind a series of fragmentary texts, and more closely overlaps with the history of celebrity and devotion to individuals. I discussed in the last chapter how media theorists, since the widespread entry of television into the home, have observed how readers, viewers and consumers of media texts often form ‘parasocial’ relationships with characters and celebrities that are predicated on a sense of knowledge or intimacy of that celebrity, held simultaneously with the knowledge that this relationship is not ‘real’ or reciprocal. However, writing Real Person Fanfiction brings about the danger that the beloved’s reciprocal gaze will be turned upon the fan with dislike or disapprobation for the way she expresses her love. Since its inception in the 1960’s, RPF has been surrounded by debates about the ethics of writing fictional stories about real people, particularly erotic stories. Opponents often criticize RPF as a violation of or lack of respect for a celebrity’s privacy, or even as a form of sexual assault, and criticisms of RPF often focus on the discomfort or distress that the subject of the stories might feel were they to discover them: the fantasy of a bad encounter is a persistent feature of criticisms of RPF. Moreover, since (as I have argued) fanfiction is in part a demonstration of its writer’s intimate knowledge of the beloved, shared with and affirmed by the community, such a rejection of the story by the story’s subject would also be a denial that the fan ‘really’ knows the celebrity, showing her intimacy to be false or imagined.
In her essay “Holy Jesus Fuck, or ‘Good Call on the Stockings’: An Essay on Fandom and Celebrity Interactions,” Olivia C. Breckinridge (aka olivia_circe)531 describes her own encounter with a celebrity when a member of the band Cobra Starship, the keytarist Vicky-T, left a positive comment on a publically accessible piece of RPF fanfiction by Breckinridge starring her. Breckenridge writes:
531 Olivia C. Breckenridge is her full fannish pseudonym. As with other fan writers whom I cite, I will use the name she has chosen to attach to her activity in the community. 214
My first impulse, when [receiving Vicky-T’s feedback] was still the most surreal thing that had ever happened to me, was hysterical laughter…. My second impulse, when it was horrifying and nausea-inducing and made me feel completely exposed, was to go into total lockdown: turn off my internet, take down the fic, and hide under my bed.532
Breckinridge’s essay describes the affective consequences of this reciprocal gaze even when the encounter was, essentially, positive; the band member’s feedback was generous and friendly. But, as Breckinridge summarizes, “the last thing in the world we want is for the subjects of our subculture to look back at us.” This fantasy of the ‘bad encounter’ haunts RPF, and is one of the aspects of RPF fandom that provides a useful point of comparison with Petrarch’s textual practices. Petrarch’s conceptualizes his receipt of Cicero’s letters as an encounter with him that has gone wrong; Cicero’s letters cause him to recognize the failure of his own prior reading of Cicero to create a true familiaritas with the author. The first letter to Cicero expresses his humiliation, anger and distress at this discovery. Moreover, through its intimate language and its creation of the illusion of reciprocal dialogue, Petrarch’s letter to Cicero opens up a space to imagine a reciprocal relationship between fans and authors long dead. However, this space also opens up the possibility of a relationship between Petrarch and his own future readers with may turn sour; it is this threat which the “Letter to Posterity” attempts to manage and contain. However, the anxiety of RPF exists in tension with the Mary Sue model of fandom,533 which also focuses around fantasies of encounter, but largely involves fictional characters who cannot reject the writer (although tellingly, many critiques of Mary Sue fanfiction imagine the fictional characters rejecting the Mary Sue, such as the webcomic “Ensign Sue Must Die,” in
532 Breckinridge, “Holy Jesus Fuck, Or, ‘Good Call on the Stockings’: An Essay on Fandom and Celebrity Interactions.” 533 Although of course there are stories in which Mary Sue characters have romances with celebrities – the two genres are not mutually exclusive. 215 which the characters who inhabit the Starship: Enterprise are variously horrified, panicked, and disgusted by the Mary Sue character who appears on their ship534). The impossibility of reciprocal scrutiny makes fictional worlds safe(r) places to explore positive fantasies of encounter. But despite the efforts to which most RPF writers go to escape the notice of the subjects of their fiction, celebrities are increasingly fandom-literate and aware of fanfiction, and RPF is increasingly publicly accessible. As a result, as Breckenridge’s experience shows, celebrities do sometimes encounter and respond to RPF. Given the anxiety inside and outside the RPF community about this very possibility, it may seem odd that a fairly common trope in RPF depicts celebrities discovering RPF fiction about themselves. However, this trope provides RPF writers and fans a space to imagine this encounter in a more positive way, or to negotiate their anxiety about the possibility by fictionalizing it. In these stories, a celebrity reading a fan-authored erotic story featuring him-or- herself and another celebrity is often the catalyst, in the story, for the relationship becoming a reality – a ‘MacGuffin’ that brings the protagonists together.535 These stories often imagine a loving reciprocal gaze that also acknowledges the rightness of the fans’ theories and re-affirms their intimacy with the celebrity. For example, this passage from “Common Knowledge” by Elucreh, a story about two actors from the PBS show Supernatural, describes actor Jared Padalecki’s feelings after he has read a number of fanfiction stories about himself and other members of the Supernatural cast:
He really should be a lot more freaked out by this. A lot more freaked out by it. But...it’s fun. Whatever their beliefs or fantasies or whathaveyou about his personal life, he likes these girls, who are articulate and unabashedly enthusiastic. Jared’s favorite people have always been the ones that get involved with and excited about their favorite things, who aren’t afraid to be called
534 Moseley and Bolk, “Ensign Sue Must Die!” 535 Elucreh, “Common Knowledge,” Livejournal.com, November 19, 2007, http://lu- fics.livejournal.com/6774.html. Telesilla, “They’re Gaying Us Up, You Know,” Archive of Our Own, May 25, 2007, http://archiveofourown.org/works/38507. buffyx, “Kris/adam Drabbles,” Livejournal.com, July 16, 2009, http://buffyx.livejournal.com/483523.html. 216 dorks or geeks because they’re having too much fun to worry about what strangers might think of them.536
Here the fan’s intimacy – her familiaritas – with a celebrity is imagined as recognized and reciprocated. The author’s summary of the story encapsulates this positive fantasy of the returned gaze and validated fan intimacy. It simulates an introduction between the actor and the fans, with a twist: “Jared, your fangirls. Fangirls, I believe you already know Jared. Better than he knows himself.”
It is useful to think about RPF in relation to Petrarch because discourses around RPF bring into focus the fine gradients of distinction between textual and ‘real’ intimacy, while RPF also provides space to imagine moments when textual intimacy translates to friendship or love, as in the encounter between Jared and his fans in the example above, or when this intimacy breaks down. The “queer touch across time” with historical figures from the past that Carolyn Dinshaw proposes as a model of historiography assumes the acceptance of this touch, and even its reciprocity; I imagine this reaching touch to look like Michaelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam.” Dinshaw proposes the ‘queer touch’ as a way of reclaiming and re-imagining the presence of a marginalized community in the past, but this methodology also depends on the marginality of its subjects, whose desire for our friendship can be imagined into their (relative) silence. Marginal communities whose voice is lacking from the historical record leave a ‘gap’ that affective historiography can arguably fill better than other kinds of historiography - but as Morrison’s analysis of the hermeneutics of empathy suggests, in imaginatively identifying with voiceless subjects in the past, the historian may fill the gap with herself. I do not mean to repeat the tired argument that a historical queer person would not have recognized or identified with modern gay politics, and that this invalidates any attempts by historians to claim them as part of a transhistorical queer, or gay, community. I suggest rather that it is worth imagining not merely what might happen if such a hypothetical, historical queer person were to read modern affective
536 "Common Knowledge," Elucreh, Chapter 6: "The Fangirl Online," Livejournal.com, posted 19th November 2007, , http://lu-fics.livejournal.com/8143.html#cutid1. 217 historiography and say, “You don’t know me at all!” but also what the historian might feel about such a rejection, and why. Exploring the implications of rejection by the past can broaden our understanding of what is at stake in affective historiography.
In Feeling Backward, Heather Love explores queer ‘backwardsness’ in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature and the ambivalence of modern queer critics to books like Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, whose politics do not fit into the ‘Pride’ ethos.537 Love’s interest in the possible failure of a queer community across time imagines modern critical reactions to queer texts from the past as moments of “failed or interrupted connection”538 that she examines in the context of the gay liberationism of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Together, Love and Dinshaw articulate a range of complex affective responses to texts from the past and their implications for modern community formation and scholarship; however, the hermeneutic tools provided by RPF and its discourses allow for a greater focus on the distinctions between different kinds of textual intimacy, and the imaginative possibilities inherent in them. Petrarch’s invitation of reciprocal friendship to the future, and modern critical responses, require such nuance of approach because of the complexity of Petrarch’s portrayal of friendships, self, and intimacy. The next section of this chapter uses the conceptual tools provided by RPF to explore three letters to Petrarch written after he was dead, and how they fulfill, in various ways, the possibility of reciprocity that the “Letter for Posterity” anticipates, while drawing on Dinshaw’s and Love’s affective historiographies.
5.4 Writing to Petrarch
Petrarch opens up the possibility of encounter between himself and his readers, despite geographical or chronological distance, and the power of his invitation is such that his readers have felt compelled to respond, to stage an encounter of their own with Petrarch. At least three scholars have written and published letters to Petrarch long after he was dead: Francesco
537 Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. 538 Ibid., 24. 218
Zabarella (1360-1417), Pier Paolo Vergerio, Sr. (1370- c.1444), and Ernest Wilkins (1880-1966). However, to my knowledge nobody has compared the extraordinary similiarities and differences of reading strategy in their letters, and Wilkins’ letter to Petrarch seems to have gone entirely unnoticed. This section of this chapter will read their letters alongside each other to examine the different ways these writers responded to Petrarch’s invitation to friendship, and the way they imagine their encounters as mediated by historical difference.
Zabarella and Vergerio were friends who moved in the same humanist circles, and probably trained together as lawyers at Bologna. Although both had attained high political office by the end of their lives, Vergerio’s legacy as a humanist has outlasted that of his colleague. Vergerio was a humanist thinker, canon lawyer, and statesman who was trained by Petrarch’s student and amanuensis, Giovanni Malpaghini. Because of this connection, his own scholarly reputation, and his connection with Coluccio Salutati, the members of the Petrarchan circle at Padua commissioned him to edit Petrarch’s great unfinished Latin epic, the Africa, in 1393. Vergerio thus stood in Petrarch’s long shadow even more than his contemporaries. Written c. 1394, Vergerio’s letter to Petrarch (see Appendix) assumes the voice and persona of Cicero in order to reply to Petrarch’s letter. Although the two authorities on this correspondence, Sottili and McManamon, disagree on which letter came first, the two were almost certainly written in consultation with each other, or as part of a scholarly game.539 Zabarella’s letter, written around the same time, is shorter and in his own name, but otherwise bears many similarities to Vergerio’s letter in the essence of its historical argument. Zabarella’s and Vergerio’s letters, both written in Latin, strongly rebut Petrarch’s accusations to Cicero about his conduct.
These letters to Petrarch were written in the context of a contemporary debate over the role of the philosopher or scholar in politics, in which both men were deeply involved as they balanced their humanist scholarship with their careers as canon lawyers and statesmen (Zabarella was a cardinal; Vergerio became Papal Secretary). Cicero, as philosopher, politician and
539 Agostino Sottili, “la Questione Ciceroniana in una Lettera di Francesco Zabarella a Francesco Petrarca (tav. IV),” Quaderni per la storia dell’università di Padova 6 (1973): 25–58. 219 advocate, had taken on enormous symbolic value in this debate.540 Although in the main this dispute took place when Petrarch was already dead, Petrarch’s praise of solitude and his ideal of the reclusive philosopher in his De Solitaria Vita was highly influential, and drew extensively on Cicero’s portrayal of Scipio as the ideal statesman who retired from public life, preferring philosophical studies to civic honours.541 Vergerio and Zabarella, however, believed in the possibility – indeed, the necessity – of the philosopher being involved in public life. Vergerio was the author of a work on pedagogy which recommended Cato, rather than Scipio, as the humanist ideal, a man who continued to be heavily involved in politics for his entire life and reputedly studied philosophy between Senate sessions. Their letters to Petrarch, particularly Vergerio’s, must be understood therefore as manifestos on how to read Cicero.
Although the two letters differ in length, rhetorical strategy, and tone, both contain essentially the same message: that Petrarch possessed inadequate knowledge of Cicero’s historical context to understand his actions, and that his reading of Cicero is therefore impossibly misguided. Vergerio’s letter, longer and far more detailed than Zabarella’s, particularly shows off his sophisticated understanding of the political and historical contexts behind Cicero’s political choices that Petrarch so decried. This extensive biographical knowledge the two men shared came from the collections of Cicero’s letters and speeches that had come to light shortly before or after Petrarch’s death.542 Their letters form part of a major revisionist school of Cicero studies which would also result in new biographies by Jacopo Angeli and Gasparino Barzizza, and finally Bruni’s own important (if biased to the point of mendacity) 1413 biography, based on his own translation of Plutarch’s Life of Cicero.543 McManamon gives a detailed comparison of
540 Hans Baron, “The Memory of Cicero's Roman Civic Spirit in the Medieval Centuries and in the Florentine Renaissance,” In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism, vol. 1 (Princeton University Press, 1988), 158-90. 541 Giuseppe Billanovich, “Petrarca e Cicerone,” in Letteratura classica e umanistica: per Alessandro Perosa, vol. 4 of Miscellanea Giovanni Mercati, Studi e testi 124 (Vatican City: BAV, 1946), 88-106. 542 A codex of Cicero's second large collection of letters, the Epistolae ad Familiares, was found by the Milanese Chancellor Pasquino da'Capelli in 1392, the year before Petrarch's death, and was copied and circulated by Coluccio Salutati. 543 David Marsh, “Cicero in the Renaissance,” in The Cambridge Companion to Cicero, ed. Catherine Steel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 306–17. 220
Vergerio’s and Zabarella’s letters as examples of Renaissance historiography;544 however, the letters also treat Petrarch’s fantasy of encounter with Cicero very differently, the significance of which has been overlooked in the past.
Francesco Zabarella’s letter is written in his own name, and takes on the task of persuading Petrarch that he has been wrong to criticize Cicero. 545 Zabarella loosely emulates the strategy Cicero often took in his own conciliatory letters, that of a plea for reconciliation by a mutual friend with great esteem for both parties (“one burning with love both for him and for you”)546. However, Zabarella’s tone is formal, closer to that of a diplomat, which more suits his own office and training. His interjection is polite, even deferential:
Perhaps if I might only dissolve this quarrel, maybe, not to set myself up as a judge, but because I don’t want to neglect my duty.547
Zabarella outlines what he sees as Petrarch’s main criticisms against Cicero: his hypocrisy, and his immaturity.
544 John M. McManamon, Pierpaolo Vergerio the Elder: The Humanist as Orator, vol. 163, Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies (Tempe, Arizona: MRTS, 1996), 52–4. 545 For the Latin of Zabarella's letter I use the edition published in Agostino Sottili's 1973 article, 55-7. I am greatly indebted to Morris Tichenor and David Townsend for their help with the English translation of this difficult text. 546 "Ipsius tuique amore flagranti," (Sottili, 55). 547 "Si quoque modo potuissem dirrimere litem libuit; non quo me prefecisse arbitrum, sed officio non defuisse velim," ibid. 221
You criticize the mistakes of that man, which you have condemned as uninformed by good sense: [you criticize] that he often lashed with the stings of curses many whom he had frequently praised; [and] that he involved himself in the wars of young men when he was old.548
He then addresses these concerns one by one, arguing for the rightness of Cicero’s course in fulsome terms (“O prince of philosophers, oh most trustworthy voice of the republic, oh undoubted saviour of those desiring to live a good life, who could sufficiently lament that you were killed in the service of good, that you were sent to the grave early and deplorably?”). However, although Zabarella positions his letter as a mediation between friends, it does not seem to imagine any reciprocity or shared relationship between Petrarch and Cicero, but rather directs his argument at restoring Cicero as a moral authority for Petrarch. At one point, however, he uses a curious image to describe Petrarch’s criticism that suggests both awareness and disapproval of Petrarch’s implicit self-insertion into Cicero’s life. Petrarch disparages various moments of Cicero’s career, Zabarella writes, “so that you seem to trample all over the entire path of his life, [as if you were] born among the mortals of his age” (“ut insultare per omnem eius vite semitam videare inter evi eius mortales ingenitus”). The metaphor of “insultare” (to leap on, dance/trample on, insult, jeer at, attack) in combination with “semitam” (path) seems to suggest a physical trespass onto forbidden ground, which Zabarella immediately links with Petrarch’s fiction of sharing time with Cicero - Petrarch criticizes Cicero as though he were his contemporary, Zabarella seems to say, but it is unclear whether he is simply summarizing Petrarch’s formal choices, or suggesting that only a contemporary would have the right to attack Cicero the way that Petrarch did.
The criticism of Cicero’s life blurs syntactically into the sharing of time, so that Zabarella seems to view both as “insultare,” an act of misguided aggression. However, he ends by reminding Petrarch of how important Cicero is to him (“you say that he is your most beloved, the
548 "Erroris arguis viri, quos censeas racione non formatos:
Vergerio’s letter,551 written in Cicero’s persona, takes quite a different tack. Between the lines of Vergerio’s letter is a rejection in strong terms of Petrarch’s authority and influence over the humanist movement, a generation after his death; it is a strong rebuttal not only of Petrarch’s political position, but Petrarch’s familiaritas with Cicero. Vergerio uses a polished, rigidly Ciceronian Latin style, frequently quoting Cicero’s letters, and in doing so implicitly rebukes Petrarch’s robust but idiosyncratic Senecan style, with its occasional medievalisms. Vergerio’s letter also plays out the scenario of rejection by the past and future that Petrarch imagines in the letter to Cicero. His letter is deliberate, formal, and icily sarcastic, as indeed Cicero could be:
At last I received your letter, whoever you are: too late, since laments do indeed seem no more benefit to me now than advice... But you, who claim to be a great lover of my name, were indeed
549 "Tu tuum amantissimum atque preceptorem doctrinarum admirabilem etiam moribus integerrimum fuisse iam dicas," (Sottili, 56). 550 "Tuas nempe raciones per singula tollere frustra censeo, cum et ipse victus esse quam victor in hac concertacione plane cupias," (Sottili 56). 551 I use the Latin edition of Vergerio’s letter in Pier Paolo Vergerio, Epistolario di Pier Paolo Vergerio, ed. Leonardo Smith, vol. 74, Fonti per la Storia d’Italia (Rome, 1934), 436–445. 223 able to speak very gently and to think very generously about me, when both the Senate and the people of Rome and the whole of Italy once splendidly esteemed me!552
Vergerio’s letter is free of the affective language of Petrarch’s and Zabarella’s letters, refusing, in Cicero’s name, to acknowledge that Petrarch’s friendship should have any claims on him at all. Vergerio’s letter ends, “And so farewell at last, whoever you are. All this happened a long time ago, and there’s very little need now for me to concern myself with silencing my critics.”553 Vergerio here unites his insistence on historical context with an insistence on historical distance.
Vergerio’s letter takes the implications of Zabarella’s “insultare” metaphor and runs with them. His letter is not simply an attack on Petrarch, but an attack on his hermeneutics of intimacy, which Petrarch outlines to Cicero himself: “and if I have come to know your mind from your works, which I do seem to know as though I had lived with you....”554 For Vergerio and Zabarella this is an impertinence and an inaccuracy. Petrarch did not live with Cicero, and he has neither the knowledge nor the right to criticize his actions, about which, they suggest, he knew next to nothing. Petrarch’s sense of intimacy with Cicero that he has developed through his reading is thus revealed to be hollow. Historical context is all; affective or imaginative reading is inadequate to understand who Cicero really was, nor is friendship with authors from the past possible.
Vergerio’s letter plays out a worst-case scenario of the fan’s meeting with their idol; like Julia Child in response to Julie Powell’s tribute project, Vergerio’s Cicero is cold and even
552 “Sero iam tandem, quisquis es, epistolam tuam habui, quando quidem nichilo magis profutura michi lamenta quam consilium videbantur [Vergerio here quotes Petrarch's letter to Cicero, Fam XXIV.3, 8]… sed poteras qui es nostri nominis amantissimus, et modestius dicere nobis et existimare benignius, quandoquidem et senatus populusque Romanus et Italia tota magnifice quondam iudicavit,” (Smith, 436-8). It is clear from the context that ‘Cicero’ (Vergerio) is being sarcastic here. 553 “et tandem vale, quicunque es, de rebus enim meis actum est iandudum, ut iam minime opus sit valere me a quoquam reprehendi,” Smith, 445. 554 Bernardo 320; "si ex libris animum tuum novi, quem nosse michi non aliter quam si tecum vixissem," Fam. XXIV.4.9. 224 scornful. In playing out this fantasy of a bad encounter between Cicero and Petrarch, Vergerio also denies the possibility of friendship or intimate contact between Petrarch and himself. Unlike Zabarella, he does not enter into a space that invites reciprocal dialogue; Vergerio’s letter to Petrarch is not only not ‘from’ Vergerio, but it ends with a fairly explicit refusal to have any further contact. The two letters thus seem to propose similar strategies for reading Cicero, but opposite strategies for reading Petrarch. Zabarella argues for, essentially, a hermeneutics of intimacy in reading Petrarch; Zabarella’s “burning love” for (and hence intimacy with) Petrarch is such that he knows, despite Petrarch’s own words, that Petrarch did not really want to criticize Cicero, his “amantissimus.” Vergerio, however, seems to argue for skipping over Petrarch altogether in favour of reading Cicero’s historical works, hearing Cicero’s own voice. Petrarch’s historical understanding is inaccurate, therefore his writings on Cicero are worth nothing. We know of course from his other works that Vergerio esteemed Petrarch in many ways, but this letter is a powerful statement about Vergerio’s position not only as regards Cicero’s political choices, but also how to read.
Ernest Wilkins’ 1958 letter to Petrarch555 is also a manifesto on how to read Petrarch and historical texts more generally, one that imagines this fantasy of encounter between fan and beloved playing out in yet another way from Zabarella and Vergerio. Ernest Hatch Wilkins (1880-1966) was one of the most important Anglophone scholars of Italian literature of the twentieth century; indeed he is credited with rejuvenating Petrarch studies in North America. An academic who rose to the heights of his profession, holding many high-ranking administrative positions as well as international respect for his research, Wilkins made his name with his reconstructions of Petrarch’s life and writing in a number of biographies and editions, particularly through his research into the notes and marginalia Petrarch left on his numerous books and manuscripts, which he used to reconstruct, with meticulous attention to detail, an almost moment-by-moment view of Petrarch’s composition and editing processes.556 Wilkins’ Life of Petrarch (1961), Petrarch’s Later Years (1959) and The Making of the Canzoniere and
555 Ernest H. Wilkins, “We Answer a Letter,” Speculum 33 (1958): 339. 556 Vincenzo Cioffari, “In Memoriam: Ernest Hatch Wilkins (1880-1966),” Italica 43, no. 2 (June 1, 1966): 97–99; “Oberlin College Archives - Ernest Hatch Wilkins (1880-1966) | Biography,” accessed January 30, 2014, http://www.oberlin.edu/archive/holdings/finding/RG2/SG7/biography.html. 225 other Petrarchan Studies (1951) still dominate the discussion of how to date the composition of the Canzoniere, despite being reassessed in the light of new editorial possibilities using digital tools.557 Moreover, Wilkins’ methodology would now never pass muster (and even at the time raised eyebrows) since in all his examination of the manuscripts of the Canzoniere he relied on microfilm, facsimiles, and anecdotal descriptions, never travelling to Italy himself after his graduate studies (he told his student, Aldo Bernardo, that one trip to Italy “was more than enough for a scholar who didn’t want to waste time”), and as a result he neglected many codicological elements of the manuscripts.558
Wilkins spent much of his scholarly life totally immersed in fourteenth-century Italian literature, and his obituary in the journal of the American Association of Teachers of Italian seems to identify him with these writers, describing him as “the man who best personified the ideals of humanism.”559 Wilkins was a great administrator and proponent of learning, an advocate for peace, and wrote on many subjects, all characteristics associated with humanism; however, the writer of his obituary may also be thinking of his devotion to the past, and to his historicist ideals. Wilkins was a great believer in the possibilities of the empirical process to gain complete knowledge of the past; that said, Wilkins’ letter shows that he himself felt a deep sense of connection with Petrarch, as is hardly surprising, since such a lifelong dedication to his work surely suggests some attraction. His preface to The Invention of the Sonnet and Other Studies in Italian Literature reads “the writers who have filled the treasure house of Italian literature are a most extraordinary and a most life-enhancing company: I am glad to have had companionship with them.”560 Moreover, Wilkins speaks in his classic The Making of the Canzoniere of the importance of having even a facsimile of Petrarch’s own manuscript, not to confirm his findings,
557 H. Wayne Storey and Dario Del Puppo, “Wilkins nella Formazione del Canzoniere di Petrarca,” Italica 80 (2003): 495–512; Germaine Warkentin, “Infaticabile Maestro: Ernest Hatch Wilkins and the Manuscripts of Petrarch’s Canzoniere,” in Petrarch and the Textual Origins of Interpretation, ed. Teodolinda Barolini and H. Wayne Storey (Leiden: Brill, 2007). 558 Warkentin, “Infaticabile Maestro: Ernest Hatch Wilkins and the Manuscripts of Petrarch’s Canzoniere,” 51–2. 559 Cioffari, “In Memoriam,” 97. 560 Ernest H. Wilkins, The Invention of the Sonnet and Other Studies in Italian Literature (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1959), preface. 226 but for their affective power: “in that case my pages will have a much better chance to convey to my readers the sense I so desire them to have: the sense of close and understanding companionship with the great artist....”561 Wilkins’ repeated use of the word “companionship” suggests something slightly different from friendship, and is significant, especially given his repeated refusals to actually go to Italy and visit the places and things that Petrarch himself frequented, which might give another person a sense of contact with the author. Wilkins instead imagines that the kind of intimate knowledge his work enables readers to have of Petrarch is similar to the familiarity emerging from a friendly co-occupancy of a communal space and shared life, just as Petrarch writes to Cicero that through reading his texts, he seems to knows him as though he had lived with him. This paradoxical tension between distance and companionship emerges in Wilkins’ own letter to Petrarch.
Wilkins’ letter is a reply not to Petrarch’s letter to Cicero, but to his “Letter to Posterity,” which was written at about the same time as the letters to Cicero and long intended to be the final letter of Petrarch’s collection (it was finally appended to the end of the Libri rerum senilium, Petrarch’s second and final letter collection). However, Wilkins’ letter implicitly responds to Petrarch’s two letters to Cicero by modelling itself on them, often echoing Petrarch’s own phrasing in its mingled praise, sympathy, and criticism. Wilkins delivered this letter as his presidential address to the 33rd annual meeting of the Medieval Academy of America on 24 April 1958, when he was seventy years old and still an active scholar. It was then published in the MAA’s journal Speculum in its final form.562 The letter is both whimsical and painfully sincere in its expression of love, conciliation, and reassurance to a recipient anxious about his reception in the twentieth century. Despite its very different sentiments, Wilkins’ letter also contains a fantasy of encounter with Petrarch; this is a far more positive interaction than what Zabarella and Vergerio imagine, but the letter also has extraordinary poignancy, as Wilkins devotes far more time to the difficulties of negotiating the distances between himself and Petrarch, so much greater for himself than for Vergerio. However, Wilkins’ letter, delivered as a speech to a wider
561 Ernest H.Wilkins, The Making of the Canzoniere and Other Petrarchan Studies. (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1951), ix. 562 Ernest H. Wilkins, “We Answer a Letter,” reprinted in Ernest H. Wilkins, Studies on Petrarch and Boccaccio, ed. Aldo S. Bernardo (Padua: Editrice Antenore, 1978). 227 audience, also forms a manifesto for how to read Petrarch, and, more generally, devotion to the past in a United States in the grip of rapid social change.
Wilkins’ short introduction to his letter enters immediately into the fantasy of reciprocal correspondence with the future that Petrarch constructs by addressing his letter “ad posteritatem,” and thus sets the scene for the fantasy of encounter that the letter contains:
There has come to me a copy of a letter, written a little while ago, that is addressed to all members of this Academy. It is addressed, to be sure, not to us alone, but to us quite as much as to anyone else. It is addressed, moreover, not to all of us as a group, but to each one of us as an individual: the second word of the letter is tibi.563
Far from Vergerio’s dismissive “whoever you are,” Wilkins sets the stage of an intimate encounter between persons that, although public and general, is also intimate and individual. He also asserts Petrarch’s closeness to them in a way that nonetheless draws attention to his distance: a thousand years is, Wilkins writes, “less, on the scale of eternity, than the twinkling of an eye.” Wilkins’ letter thus opens by attempting to negotiate the paradoxes of not only writing to a person who cannot receive it, but in delivering a personal letter as a public speech. Petrarch’s letter also contains this tension between public and private, intimate and common, and by drawing it out into the open Wilkins raises the question of to whom exactly Petrarch is writing.
Wilkins’ letter slips back and forth between English and (untranslated) Latin, suggesting the ease of Wilkins’ translingual, transtemporal contact, and his confidence that his audience will share his own comfort with Latin. Even pre-Vatican-II, and with Latin far more common in American secondary education than it is now, this was probably misplaced confidence in a large proportion of his audience, most of whom would not have been specialists in Latin literature (and
563 Wilkins, “We Answer a Letter,” 339. 228 even specialists would be largely unused to oral Latinity). The Latin is not a conventional salutation, because although it contains an address – “ad Franciscum Petrarcam” – it does not contain Wilkins’ name; however, it gives Petrarch the honorific “poetam laureatum,” and goes on to reply to Petrarch’s first sentence (his concern that those whom he addresses may not have heard his name):
Gratissima pervenit nobis epystola illa magna, multaque continens de vita tua et de successibus studiorum tuorum. Nomen illustre tuum non modo audivimus sed etiam litteris aureis inscripsimus in tabellis memorie nostre.564
Switching into English, Wilkins continues to emphasize the transparency of time by stressing that it is possible to know intimately people from the past:
We know that six hundred years ago this very April... after dinner on Monday the thirtieth, having in your hands your draft of the first capitolo of the Triumph of Love, you noticed that the word cosí appeared in two lines that were close together; and that you then revised the first of the two lines, avoiding use of the word cosí, and wrote in the margin “hoc placet propter cosi quod est infra proxime.”565
The ‘we’ here is deceptive, of course: this vivid physical picture of Petrarch comes through Ernest Wilkins’ reconstruction of the chronology of Petrarch’s life through examination of
564 “That great letter of yours reached us and was extremely welcome, containing as it does many facts about your life and about the progress of your studies. We have not only heard your illustrious name but also we have written it in golden letters on the tablets of our minds.” Wilkins, “We Answer a Letter,” 340 (my translation). 565 Ibid. 229
Petrarch’s marginalia and annotations. However, Wilkins here extends his own familiaritas with Petrarch to his audience along with his Latinitas. He repeats many small, physical details from Petrarch’s “Letter to Posterity” that add to this illusion of intimacy, such as that Petrarch wore glasses after the age of sixty. In combination with these small details that suggest such profound familiarity with not only Petrarch’s texts but his daily life, Wilkins also stakes his position on various contentious issues of Petrarch’s biography, such as his political affiliations, his commitment to personal gain, his Christian faith, and the existence of ‘Laura,’ in a series of sentences almost resembling a catechism: “We know also that your personal religion was genuine and deep…. We believe also in the genuineness, the depth, and the essential purity of your love for the Provençal woman whom you once called ‘Laureta.’” Wilkins seems to embrace Petrarch’s hermeneutics of intimacy when he conceptualizes the objects of his study as ‘friends:’ “Yet more than all else, in the area of human relations, you were a friend... Your letter to us implies that you counted us, also, potentially at least, as friends: we gratefully accept and reciprocate your friendship.”566 This is a far more explicitly two-way relationship than the “companionship” Wilkins imagines elsewhere, and is a suggestion of the power of Petrarch’s Letter to Posterity.
The next section returns to the sentiments of the opening sentence to reassure Petrarch of his fame in the future; unlike Petrarch in his letters to Classical authors, Wilkins dwells not on the texts that are lost, but on those that have survived, in an extensive bibliographical digression that also functions as a brief review of Petrarch’s works for the audience. The contrast of Wilkins’ triumphant tone with Petrarch’s mournful lists of lost texts shows how insistent Wilkins is on Petrarch’s accessibility as a living, present author, a friend. Wilkins himself was a prolific letter-writer, corresponding with colleagues all over the world, and with every Oberlin-affiliated GI overseas during the Second World War. Because of his refusal to travel to Italy, he relied extensively on correspondence with Italian friends who would check details of local manuscripts for him. In a very real way, Wilkins gained his knowledge of Petrarch through letters.567
566 Ibid., 342. 567 See Warkentin, “Infaticabile Maestro,” for extensive quotations from Wilkins’ correspondence. 230
The final section of the letter departs into more whimsical territory, imagining how Petrarch might have fared living in various different historical periods. However, although the concept is light-hearted, Wilkins takes the opportunity to turn his letter into a lament on the state of the modern world, forming the second half of his manifesto. Wilkins expresses sympathy and understanding at Petrarch’s feelings of being a man alienated by his own time: “We do not wonder that you disliked your age….” Seventy years old at the time of writing, Wilkins himself was a lifelong (if quiet and institution-bound) anti-war activist, who transformed the institution of which he was president, Oberlin College, into a centre for Peace Studies, and he cannot have been easy in his mind in 1958. The US and Russia were locked in the early stages of the space race, launching the first of the Sputnik and Explorer satellites; Bertrand Russell launched the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; Martin Luther King, at the head of the American civil rights movement, survived a second attempt on his life; and growing paranoia about the influence of Russian communism in Asia was escalating American involvement in Vietnam. Wilkins compares the vicissitudes of society in Petrarch’s lifetime (“the Black Death mowed down its millions; the medical and legal professions were in general sadly debased; and a cardinal who was presently to become a pope believed you to be a necromancer simply because you read the works of Virgil”568), with those of his own:
In this present age of ours you would have found causes both for approval and for dismay. The Church you served, though no longer alone in Christendom, stands high in strength and honor, and your Italy has at last attained freedom and unity; but the Empire is dead... Half the world is endeavouring to safeguard and to increase its precious and perplexing liberties: the other half
568 This anecdote appears in Fam. IX.5 (Bernardo 16). Petrarch’s account is plausible, given that there is a strong medieval tradition of Virgil as magician (Petrarch uses the word ‘necromancer,’ but according to Kieckhefer this was a synonym for what we mean by ‘magician’ or ‘sorcerer’ and does not suggest the raising of the dead in medieval thought), but Petrarch's account of the exchange is quite flippant; it is interesting that Wilkins seems to have taken it seriously, but given McCarthy-era reactionary politics, perhaps this is not surprising. See Putnam and Ziolkowski eds., The Virgilian Tradition: The First Fifteen Hundred Years (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 821-879; Richard Kieckhefer, Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer's Manual of the Fifteenth Century (Stroud: Sutton Press, 1997), 61-4. For a greater treatment by Wilkins, see his Life of Petrarch 111. 231 lies under the encroaching shadow of a fearful tyranny.... at one and the same time we are contemplating the conquest of space and the possibility of our own extinction.569
After reviewing and rejecting various other possible periods for Petrarch to inhabit (the Classical period was before Christ and Laura and therefore undesirable; Augustine’s age saw the fall of Rome, which would be upsetting; the Renaissance saw the beginnings of the fragmentation of the Catholic Church that Petrarch so loved), “all in all,” Wilkins concludes, “you seem to us to have been well cast in your own age.”570 Wilkins develops Petrarch’s desire for contact with the past and future into the idea of Petrarch as a “restless spirit,” capable of wandering back and forth across time periods; this suggests Wilkins’ sense that his intimate access to Petrarch’s daily life through its traces in the manuscripts also gives a near-magical ability to travel through time.
The imaginative exercise of re-casting Petrarch in different time periods also suggests a trope common in fanfiction, the Alternate Universe or “AU,” which Henry Jenkins calls “Character Dislocation,” in which the beloved characters are imagined in a setting sometimes quite different from their original source. The story’s success as fanfiction571 relies on the author’s believable portrayal of the characters’ responses to this setting. In AU stories, the fanfiction writer demonstrates her intimacy with and knowledge of characters by situating them in a different story but keeping them recognisable to other devoted and expert readers. (For example, in the short story “Travelling Companions” by Petra, the author re-imagines the characters from Patrick O’Brian’s Napoleonic-era naval adventure novels into a science fiction universe, giving rise to the delightful opening line, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a
569 Wilkins, “We Answer a Letter,” 344. 570 Ibid., 343–4. 571 However, many AU stories can be, and are, enjoyed as, essentially, original fiction even if they are not particularly successful as adaptations of the original source. The Twilight AU novel-length fanfiction which E.L. James then adapted into her erotic bestseller Fifty Shades of Grey, changing little but the character names, is a good example of the flexibility of this genre, since despite the author's admission that her characters were inspired by the Twilight characters, the resulting story bears little to no relation to the Twilight saga and suffered no copyright restrictions as a result. 232 consciousness in possession of a spaceship, must be in want of a companion.”572) Wilkins’ alternate universe scenarios for Petrarch are another way of demonstrating the flexibility and strength of his familiarity with the author, but also, as with AU fanfiction, he implicitly assumes his audience’s familiarity with Petrarch too, since his fantasies rely on a knowledgeable audience to succeed as pleasurable. These imaginative exercises thus function like Wilkins’ introduction to the letter, inviting the audience into an affective community characterised not only by intimacy with Petrarch but by pleasurable play. The light-heartedness, even silliness of imagining Petrarch in different time periods contrasts strongly with the melancholy tone with which Wilkins describes the twentieth century; there is an element of escapism in this letter that echoes Petrarch’s own desire for the peace of books rather than the tumult of the world. Wilkins’ letter also suggests a profound identification between the two scholars as men out of time with nostalgia for the past. Cioffari’s obituary of Wilkins also oddly gives this impression of him as a man out of time; the piece lingers on his last days of undignified frailty, and the writer describes their last conversation:
We called and the nurse allowed Dr Wilkins to come to the phone: his voice was scarcely audible, but warm and affectionate as always. When I took over the phone to say good-bye, it was really a voice from another world, and I never heard it again.
The tension between distance and proximity in the first half of the letter in the second half broadens to encompass the same issues that drive Vergerio’s and Zabarella’s letters: the role of the humanities in the wider world, the relevance of the past to the present, and, ultimately, the ethics of being a scholar of medieval literature. Overall, Wilkins’ letter to Petrarch is charming, whimsical, and almost embarrassingly sentimental. As a moment of Petrarchan reception, it suggests the profound role of empathy, identification, and fannish love behind the work of this epitome of the successful professional scholar.
572 Petra, “Travelling Companions,” Dreamwidth.org, March 8, 2010, http://petra.dreamwidth.org/417298.html. 233
Wilkins clearly felt the need to defend some aspects of Petrarch before the Medieval Academy, and to use the podium with which he was provided to pronounce on some controversial aspects of Petrarch’s life. This was perhaps in part because of the ascendant star of Dante in American scholarship; the second of Charles S. Singleton’s seminal studies of Dante was published in 1958, opening up new, exciting avenues of approach to the other great Italian poet. But aside from this more discipline-specific goal, what is the function of this letter as a presidential address to the MAA? The childish old man of Petrarch’s letters seems to inhabit the elderly Wilkins in my imagined vision of him delivering this speech to a hall full of scholars in 1958 (not all that many years before he is reduced in his friend’s eyes to a child’s dependence upon a female authority figure, a nurse who “allows” him to come to the phone). The scholars laugh politely, and the hall is charged with mingled bemusement, affection, and embarrassment.573 The uncomplicated first person plural of Wilkins’ letter is reminiscent of the tour-guide voice of Nicholas Love in as he guides the anchoress through the Holy Land in her imagination. Both guiding and obstructing, Wilkins invites his listeners and readers to speak to Petrarch with his voice, and following his guidance about the conclusions we are to come to (“We know also that your personal religion was genuine and deep…”). The audience is assumed to share Wilkins’ sympathies, Wilkins’ admiration of Petrarch, Wilkins’ comprehension of Latin. His sign-off concludes:
Peace, then, to your restless spirit. Eternum vale, Socratemque tuum et Lelium et Simonidem ac reliquos comites tuos salvere iube. Apud superos, ultimaque in Thule, VII Kalendas Maias, anno etatis ultime MDCCCCLVIII.574
573 Wilkins seems often to have indulged in whimsy in his academic work, perhaps especially in his later years. In "Petrarchan Byways," PMLAA 61 (1946) 1317-1326 (reprinted in Studies on Petrarch and Boccaccio), Wilkins recounts his discovery of a scribe’s annotation in a Petrarch manuscript about a duel between two humanists fought in 1432 in Ferrara; Wilkins devotes the rest of the article to describing this duel, which he writes up, apparently for the pure fun of it, in the form of a ballad. Also see below on "An Hour in the Renaissance." 574 “Farewell forever, and say good-bye to your dear Socrates and Laelius and Simonides and the rest of your friends. From among the living, in Ultima Thule, 7th Kalends of May, in the 1958th year of the last age,” (my translation). 234
Wilkins reaches out to Petrarch’s wider community in his final Latin salutation, which uses Petrarch’s own Classical nicknames for his closest friends, suggesting that Petrarch’s familiarity with them may extend to Wilkins, and to Wilkin’s “we.” By ‘writing to Petrarch’ on behalf of the Medieval Academy of America, Wilkins emphasizes the MAA’s role as part of a transtemporal community of scholars with a common language – Latin – and loyalties to each other beyond the vicissitudes of war and religious upheaval, able to communicate by letter across great distances, as Wilkins did with his colleagues in Italy. Wilkins thus imagines himself and his audience into a scholarly community that occupies a shared space with Petrarch’s scholarly community, apart from but concerned with the tumult of the societies they occupy. This is a compromise between Petrarch’s Carthusian ideal of the solitary scholar, and Vergerio’s idolization of Cicero the politician.
Wilkins’ letter differs yet again from Zabarella’s and Vergerio’s in its position on the hermeneutics of intimacy, and as a fantasy of encounter. He sets his lists of historical facts about Petrarch (“in your later years you had to wear eyeglasses”), and his catechism of belief about Petrarch’s character (“you did your best for [your age’s] religion and for its government”), within a frame of friendship, suggesting that this affective connection is central to accurate knowledge of Petrarch as a historical figure. Moreover, this letter is driven by the desire for a positive encounter: a desire not only to respond to Petrarch’s letter, but to be the recipient that Petrarch wanted and imagined. Wilkins’ playful description of his own location as “Ultima Thule” is a joke referring to Petrarch’s own interest in the location of this legendary lost country (Fam. III.1). Wilkins is perhaps playing on the fact that the continent of America was as mysterious and distant to Petrarch as Ultima Thule.575 However, this joke also suggests the reciprocity of Wilkins’ desire for the past; in addition to writing to posterity, Wilkins suggests, Petrarch searched for Ultima Thule, which turns out to be America – or, perhaps, Ultima Thule is the future itself. Wilkins’ letter is a manifesto that proclaims twentieth-century North
575 To my knowledge Thule has never been identified with America (it is usually thought to be an island in Scandinavia or the Baltic). See Joanna Kavenna, The Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule (London: Penguin, 2007). 235
American Petrarchan scholarship as a fulfillment of Petrarch’s desires for the future: the recognition of his name, the survival of his works, the comprehension of his Latin, the confirmation of belief in his good faith in religion, love and politics, and even the materialization of a legendary land – America/Thule.
5.5 Petrarch and the Queer/Fan
Taken together, these three letters suggest the extent to which Petrarch’s own desires for the future have shaped his reception. I end this chapter by interrogating the role of empathy in the place Petrarch has assumed in the Renaissance narrative as the “first modern man.” Wilkins’ letter suggests that scholars have above all found likeness in Petrarch, a sense of shared ground, and a mind which seems to speak to theirs – literally, in Petrarch’s “Letter to Posterity” – and who shares other feelings and concerns common to many who have chosen to devote their lives to the past and to live in the bubble of the academy, such as a sense of alienation from and disgust with society. That is, they find a friend who invites, and seems to reciprocate, their friendship. Petrarch’s utilization of the techniques of imaginative reading and the epistolary form to create a space to imagine transtemporal connections between secular writers and readers particularly invites this kind of empathetic connection. But what might a postmodern approach to Petrarch look like, an embrace by an audience he did not intend? What, moreover, might it mean to imagine another kind of fantasy of encounter with Petrarch different again from Vergerio, Zabarella, and Wilkins – one where Petrarch rejects our friendship? In early 2011 I attended a writing workshop run by the poet Ronna Bloom for graduate students in my department. The writing exercises were specifically designed to help us break free of the writer’s block common to many graduate students who are facing the new possibility of their work being read by a critical scholarly public, and are trying to make the leap to ‘professionalism’ in their academic prose. To escape this imagined hostile audience, Ronna invited us to imagine ourselves sharing a meal with someone who inspired us in our scholarly or creative writing. It was a cold January morning in Toronto, and I craved something hot, salty, and comforting, so I imagined myself eating Pizza Hut deep-pan pizza with Petrarch. I wondered later at the irony of my choice, so symbolic of the distances between us: not only junk food 236 created with processes that could only exist in my own time, but also a ‘national’ dish of an Italian diaspora that Petrarch would not have recognized. I imagined myself with him at his desk in his country home, with his view of a stream. In deference to the Canadian winter the stream was iced over, in my fantasy, and covered with snow, even though Petrarch didn’t spend the winters there. We ate quietly, his pen and parchment set down on the floor beside us so as not to get them greasy, and we were grateful for the homely, fatty warmth of our pizza. But when I tried to get beyond that simple companionship to imagine myself asking him anything, I found that I could not imagining him answering. Because I was young, because I couldn’t speak his language, because I was a woman, queer, and a foreigner, I could not imagine myself into a friendly dialogue with him in which he would talk with me. I wrote in my diary later, “I have, in a very real sense, left my home and my family for a miserable old racist several hundred years my senior who can’t settle down and hates women.”576 The possibility of rejection that haunts Petrarch’s letter to Cicero overwhelmed and silenced me. Whose experience defines modernity? My own experience suggests to me that the empathy Wilkins feels with Petrarch is born of a comfortable assumption of shared experiences, one elderly male scholar to another, one lover of the past to another, one member of an elite and overwhelmingly male intellectual community to another. Wilkins may not have articulated his connection with Petrarch along these lines, but they nonetheless were a set of shared qualities that made this imagined friendship possible.577 Wilkins was Petrarch’s sort of person. Is there any wonder that Wilkins should feel such identification with Petrarch, or that Petrarch’s experiences might feel recognizable, even contemporary, as Cicero’s experiences did to Petrarch? May we not go further and suggest modern scholars have felt this recognition,
576 For Petrarch’s racism, quite apart from his numerous statements of the superiority of the Italian race in Fam. I.3-4, there is his nasty rant about the influx of slaves from the Russian steppes and Eastern Europe in Sen. X.2: “Already a strange and enormous crowd of slaves of both sexes, like a muddy torrent tainting a very clear stream, taints this very beautiful city with Scythian faces and hideous filth. If they were not more acceptable to their buyers than they are to me, and if they were not more pleasing to their eyes than to mine, these repulsive youths would not crowd our narrow streets... instead they would be plucking the scanty grass with their teeth and nails on the stony soil of their Scythia, with parched and pale Hunger,” (Bernardo, Sen. 371). 577 Nor is Wilkins the only scholar to have explored an affective relationship or blurred shared identity with Petrarch; Marco Santagata, a distinguished scholar of Petrarch and Dante, is also a prizewinning novelist, whose 2006 novel L' amore in sé follows a middle-aged professor teaching a course on Petrarch’s sonnets, whose exegesis of the poetry intermingles with his recollections of his own youthful love affair with an unattainable woman. 237 companionship, empathy or familiarity and named it “modern subjectivity” or “modernity”? I feel no such companionship, no sense that here is a subjectivity or experience that reflects my own in a way that is fundamentally distinct from his medieval predecessors. Am I not modern? Queer and postcolonial theorists of the last forty-odd years have dissected the political aspects of periodization, in particular how non-western cultures, deviant identities, and other minority viewpoints are periodized as ‘medieval’ or ‘modern.’578 The powerful questions asked by these theorists have motivated a slow interrogation of the idea of the Renaissance, as in Joan Kelly’s seminal 1977 article, “Did Women have a Renaissance?” The narrative of the rise of new intellectual horizons for humanity has gradually been deconstructed to show that ‘humanity’ has generally meant ‘white elite men.’ Nevertheless, the narrative of Petrarch’s special modernity remains insistent and powerful. Why is this? I do not contest that he was an influential figure, or that he helped shape a cultural moment. I argue that there needs to be more critical inquiry into the extent to which Petrarch’s particular combination of classical epistolary rhetoric and the medieval hermeneutics of empathy has resulted in a personality who seems especially accessible, especially recognisable, to modern scholars, and to what extent the success of Petrarch’s rhetorical strategy has resulted in his being proclaimed the founder of modern subjectivity, and why his own problematization of and ambivalence to the power of affective hermeneutics in historical work has been largely ignored. These questions open up space not only to critique Petrarch’s role in the power structures of academia and hence to seek other voices and modernities, but also to suggest ways to reclaim Petrarch as a feminine, queer author.
The resounding silence in the scholarship around Petrarch on the potential queerness – or queer potential – of his writings is worth examining. Given the role of empathy among modern scholars in work on Petrarch, it seems possible that here, as in other areas, Petrarch and modern scholars have colluded to become the readers Petrarch wanted. The remarkable dearth of queer readings of Petrarch’s work in modern scholarship is perhaps a result of Petrarch’s (literal) distancing of his own friendships from male-male eroticism, the resounding silence surrounding
578 E.g. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, 2nd ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008); For an articulation of these theories as regards the Middle Ages: Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100–1450 (Cornell University Press, 2012). 238 homosexuality in his writing, despite the fact that his letters at least are entirely focused on relations between men, and his concern with the uneasy movement from youth to maturity (a cultural phenomenon inextricable, in medieval Italy as today, from the management of sexuality between men). To find a comparative example that demonstrates this silence, entering the terms ‘Queer Shakespeare’ into Google or the search bar of a university library catalogue yields hundreds, even thousands of hits, but a search for ‘Queer Petrarch’ in Google finds, as its very first hit, an entry from the New Advent Online Catholic Encyclopedia, on the sentence, “He entered rather freely into the gay and fashionable life at Avignon.”579 It is hard not to see the search engine’s algorithmic substitution of ‘queer’ for an innocent, de-queered meaning of ‘gay’ as a willful misreading, reflecting the refusal to see queerness in Petrarch’s work in the scholarly community as a whole.
The persistence of the narrative that associates queerness or sodomy with adolescence, a phase that all but the deviant will ‘grow out of,’ has been observed by numerous historians of sexuality, and it was no less present in Renaissance Italy, perhaps exacerbated by a cultural expectation in many cities, particularly Florence (the home of Petrarch’s parents before their exile to Avignon), that noble-born men would get married late, often to women very much younger than them.580 As I suggested in the previous chapter, Petrarch’s childhood/childish love for Cicero is inextricable from the childhood world in which he first encountered him, the homosocial world of the schoolroom, which develops into the equally homosocial world of the intellectual communities Petrarch cultivates around Europe.
The world of the letters is almost entirely male. Laura’s name is never mentioned (although Petrarch refers to his love for her once or twice), and only very rarely does he mention his children by another woman to whom he was not married (although he legally acknowledged the children, a son and a daughter). Despite knowing so much about Petrarch’s life (through his own writings and those of others), we do not even know her name. In fact, there is only one letter
579 “CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Francesco Petrarch,” accessed January 14, 2015, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11778a.htm. 580 Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 239 to a woman in the entire collection of all his letters, a ceremonial letter of congratulations to Empress Anne, wife of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV in praise of women, that begins, somewhat inauspiciously, “Nor is your joy, indeed mine and others’, diminished because your first child is a girl: for as wise men are wont to say, better fortune often follows upon a weak beginning.”581 Petrarch devoted thousands of lines to the creation and maintenance of love between men, but he stringently avoids any mention of sodomy or other male/male sexual activity, except in one letter, Fam I.4, a satirical, racy story about Charlemagne and his necrophiliac and homosexual obsessions caused by a magic ring. This letter, early in the collection, displaces homosexuality firmly into the realm of the fantastic, the non-Italian, and the medieval; it simultaneously distances necrophilia, a thoroughly repugnant kind of love for the dead, from Petrarch’s own intimacy with historical figures. Although Petrarch’s sexual interest in women is not in doubt (his early work is overshadowed by his passion for Laura, and he later fathered two children with a woman whom he did not marry, and about whom he tells us nothing), the spectre of immaturity creates spaces of uncertainty in Petrarch’s writing and reading, inseparable in his cultural background from inappropriate, unsanctioned, non- reproductive sexuality.
The link between necrophilia and male homosexuality in the Charlemagne story suggests their shared ‘backwardness,’ an orientation towards the past, whether clinging to one’s adolescence (the time in which experimentation with romantic attachments to men was most acceptable in medieval Italy, as in many other cultures), or literally towards the behind, the anus. The witty title of the 1999 essay collection Queer Renaissance Historiography: Backward Gaze582 further exploits the potentialities of this image. The editor’s introduction reads the historiographic ‘backwards look’ in the light of queer eroticism, “Our backward gaze can be compared to the look directed over the shoulder at the attractive stranger who has just passed by.
581 Bernardo 175; “nam ut sapientibus placet, sepe principium debile melior fortuna prosequitur,” (Fam. XXI, 8 19-20). 582 Vin Nardizzi, Stephen Guy-Bray, and Will Stockton, eds., Queer Renaissance Historiography: Backward Gaze (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009). 240
We want to see the texts we discuss as both alluring and strange.”583 The title also implicitly suggests the proverbial ‘backwardness’ of gays in nineteenth-century medical discourse that diagnosed homosexuality as a form of arrested development.
Queer theorists like Carolyn Dinshaw, Valerie Rohy, Heather Love and Carla Freccero have drawn out the queer valences and potential of this idea of ‘backwardsness’ and modes of temporality that interrupt the forwards flow of time associated with heteronormative life schemes, the mode that Edelman has called “reproductive futurity.”584 Dinshaw’s work in particular has developed ideas on how the hermeneutics of affect and the ways they disrupt temporality are ‘queer’. In How Soon Is Now, she extends this to explore the idea of the amateur as operating with queer hermeneutics and queer temporalities:
…amateurs – these fans and lovers laboring in the off-hours – take their own sweet time, and operating outside regimes of detachment governed by uniform, measured temporality, these uses of time are queer. In this sense, the act of taking one’s own sweet time asserts a queer force. Queer, amateur: these are mutually reinforcing terms.585
Petrarch’s letters to classical authors also suggest this; his hermeneutics based on intimate friendships between men structure both his own backward gaze and his anticipation of the backward gaze of his future readers. Petrarch’s perverse, childish old bodies who represent the dark side of affective hermeneutics, the excessive love that overwhelms reason, suggest another aspect of the twisted body, the body turned backwards. In a letter to Francesco Nelli, Petrarch denies the accusation that he is overly concerned with making his letters elegant, revising them over and over, “quite like a lascivious youth who examines not only his face but his back in the
583 Ibid., 4. 584 Queer/Early/Modern, "Ahistorical," Feeling Backward, Getting Medieval. 585 Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now?, 5. 241 mirror.”586 This process of revision also strips the temporal specificity from the letters, dehistoricizing them; the gender or sexual deviance of the young man looking at his own behind in the mirror suggest the queerness of this atemporality. The image also recalls the backward- turned bodies of the diviners, astrologers, and soothsayers in the eighth circle of Dante’s hell: “ché da le reni era tornado il volto, / e indietro venir li convenia / perché ’l veder dinanzi era lor tolto” (“they had their faces twisted towards their haunches / and found it necessary to walk backward / because they could not see ahead of them”).587 Tiresias is one of those named whose bodies have ironically twisted around to punish them for their arrogance in presuming to see the future, and the poem lingers on his sexual transformation from a man to a woman and back again, linking again the atemporality of queerness to the figure of the backwards look.
The image of the man looking at his own behind also suggests a certain recursive desire for the reflected self in the text, as Gur Zak writes, “the written text, just like the image in the mirror, becomes an object of desire, a self-image that provides its author with delight and self- satisfaction, holding the promise of eternal praise and fame.”588 In the Secretum, Augustine offers this self-knowledge as a rebuke, suggesting that Petrarch has been using mirrors to preen, like the lustful young man in the letter for Francesco Nelli, rather than to school himself to age- appropriate behaviour:
Have you looked in a mirror recently? … Have you not noticed that your face is changing from day to day, and that from time to time grey hairs begin to show themselves around your temples?589
586 “Quasi lascivior adolescens, non tantum vultus in speculo, sed terga contempler” (Fam. 18.8.1). 587 Dante Alighieri, La Commedìa: Testo Critico, ed. Antonio Lanza, 2nd ed. (Anzio: De Rubeis, 1996), Canto XX, ll.13–15. Transl. Allen Mandelbaum, The Divine Comedy (New York: Everyman, 1995), 141. 588 Zak, Writing From Exile: Petrarch’s Humanism and the Ethics of Care of the Self, 128. 589 Petrarca, Secretum, III.10.5. 242
Finally, the figure of the mirror also offers an intriguing point of connection with the affective hermeneutics of devotional literature. Nicholas Love’s introduction to the Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ suggests that self-insertion meditation may be imagined as a mirror in which one may see Christ in oneself, through imitatio Christi:
And so for als miche as in þis boke bene contynede diuerse ymaginacions of cristes life... may worpily be cleped þe blessede life of Jesu crist, þe which also because it may not be fully discriuede as þe lifes of oþer seyntes, bot in a maner of liknes as þe ymage of a mans face is shewed in þe mirroure.590
However, Love’s text is an extended attempt to prevent the reader from seeing their own face in the narrative – that is, inserting herself into the action as a Mary Sue – by guiding and mediating her imaginative interaction with the text. Wilkins’ letter likewise has this prescriptive effect, inviting his audience to see themselves in Petrarch, as if his letters were a mirror – however, this suggests that Wilkins expects that the audience will see in Petrarch someone very like themselves, and like Wilkins. Indeed, Warkentin speculates that Wilkins’ passion for order led him to interpret the manuscript evidence in such a way that he found a similar level of organization in Petrarch’s editing process: “Perhaps it is not surprising that this orderly man in the end fashioned a Petrarch in his own mould.”591 In Karl Morrison’s theorization of the hermeneutics of identification and imitation, he visualizes this process as a “hermeneutic circle” by which person A must negate their own self in order to identify with person B (as in imitatio Christi), but in doing so there is always the danger that instead they will impose their own characteristics upon person B in their imagination.592 Medieval mystical writers, particularly women, thus maintained an uneasy balance between self-effacement and the acquisition of
590 Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Full Critical Edition, 11.14–16. 591 Warkentin, “Infaticabile Maestro: Ernest Hatch Wilkins and the Manuscripts of Petrarch’s Canzoniere,” 63. 592 Morrison, I Am You, 236. 243 sacred authority through their practices of imitatio Christi, policed by the careful scrutiny of others and the fear of demonic influence and false inspiration.593 Morrison’s hermeneutic circle too suggests a sort of queer intercourse, the possibility of role-switching creating a dangerous ambiguity.
The historian also walks this tightrope between self-effacement and self-insertion in the practice of writing history; historians of queer sexuality have particularly agonized over the heuristic advantages and disadvantages of using ‘homosexual’ as an anachronistic identity- category in talking about people in the past (although this same debate has emerged in other contexts, including the use of psychoanalytic theory).594 The introduction to Queer Renaissance Historiography, in the metaphor of the backward gaze, implicitly likens the process of finding queers in the past to the practice of cruising for sex in some gay male communities, seeking out hidden signs to identify others like oneself. Valerie Traub’s seminal introduction to her book on lesbianism in Early Modern England, often cited as a textbook example of how to ‘do’ gay history, returns to this image of the mirror as an example of immoderation in one direction in the project of historiography, expecting instead, “neither that we will find in the past a mirror image of ourselves nor that the past is so utterly alien that we will find nothing usable in its fragmentary traces.”595 It is now expected that queer historians must exercise moderation over their pleasure in identifying – or finding community – with people from the past; we are encouraged to avoid the example of John Boswell, a trailblazer in the field, in response to whose book Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian era to the Fourteenth Century (1981), a fan wrote to him,
593 Elliott, Proving Woman. 594 See e.g. David M. Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); John T. Sebastian, “Chaucer and the Theory Wars: Attack of the Historicists? The Psychoanalysts Strike Back? Or a New Hope?,” Literature Compass 3, no. 4 (July 2006): 767–77; Elizabeth Scala, “Historicists and Their Discontents: Reading Psychoanalytically in Medieval Studies,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44, no. 1 (2002): 108–31. 595 Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1. 244
Whereas I have often felt intellectual ‘friendships’ across the centuries – historical thinkers with whom I have felt such strong affinities that I feel I know them and that we speak for one another, I had never felt – until I read your book – that I had gay friends across the centuries.596
The hermeneutics of intimacy remain central to the practice of queer historiography, but the hundreds of pages of scholarship invested by queer theorists in addressing the question of anachronism in writing the history of sexuality attests to the constant presence of this anxiety among scholars of sexuality (and their opponents) that they, too, may be misreaders blinded by desire to see themselves in the past; that in seeking “gay friends across the centuries” they may in fact construct wish-fulfilling versions of people from the past and by doing so suppress, in some way, their ‘real’ historical selves. Historicism is queer history’s guilty conscience, representing the supposed authenticity of the past that queerness somehow threatens. However, reading Petrarch as queer shows the ways in which historicism has read itself into Petrarch’s recognition of the past’s “otherness,” seeing it as a hetero, rather than homo desiring relationship with the past, and thus marginalizing the queer, medieval, amateur currents in Petrarch’s love for Cicero.
I will end this chapter with an example of an amateur, queer reading in which the tension between the objective historicism and amateur affect is vividly present, but gives rise to generative friction. ‘Historical RPF,’ a subgenre of RPF (‘real person fiction’, described in more detail in the previous chapter) is written about real historical figures rather than contemporary celebrities. Historical RPF can be distinguished from historical fiction written outside the fanfiction community by its debt to the generic tropes of fanfiction, including its extraordinary focus on affect, and in the way it is embedded, like other fanfiction, in its context of production, the affective economy of fandom. Historical RPF is a small subgenre, small and fragmented enough that its readers and writers do not consistently produce enough material with enough of a unified readership to sustain a community. Its largest internet presence therefore is within the archives of an annual fanfiction gift exchange festival called ‘Yuletide,’ which has run since
596 Letter, 9th June, 1983, quoted in Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, 28. 245
2004. Every year, the Yuletide administrators (fan volunteers) co-ordinate an anonymous gift exchange in which fanfiction writers are matched to other participants’ fanfiction requests. Participants write gift stories for their recipients which are publically released onto the archive on December 25th. The popularity of Yuletide rests on the fact that it only accepts requests for fanfiction in small or ‘rare’ fandoms, and thus generates fanfiction in fandoms too small to maintain an active community, hence the popularity of historical RPF in the festival.597 Participants in Yuletide customarily write ‘letters’ to their as-yet-unknown story donor, usually using their personal space on social media, such as a blog post on livejournal.com or tumblr, in which they outline their specific request and their general likes and dislikes in fiction in order that their writer may tailor their story to them as closely as possible. The following is a series of excerpts from a Yuletide ‘letter’ by user Emilyenrose, detailing her request for historical RPF featuring Cicero and his friend Titus Pomponius Atticus:
So this request is a bit of a long shot, but I have a thing to confess, and that thing is: I love Marcus Tullius Cicero. No, seriously, I adore him. I’m fascinated by his intelligence, his ambition, his - grandness, I suppose you could call it; he’s a historical figure who is genuinely larger than life. I’m also fascinated by his weaknesses - the pomposity, the self-absorption, the obsession with what other people think of him, the compromises he makes to get what he wants. He is just interesting […] Sixteen of the volumes [of Cicero’s letters] are addressed to Cicero’s lifelong best friend Atticus, and they are fascinating - they’re so personal and affectionate, and they show a completely different side of him from all the political works.[…] (If you want some actual you are so important to me, Atticus writing, read letter I.17 - it is darling.)[…] I would
597 Although it is difficult to gather exact data about the number of Historical RPF stories in any specific archive because they tend to be categorized somewhat idiosyncratically, with overlapping fandom tags (ie. a story about William Shakespeare might be tagged “16th Century CE RPF,” “16th and 17th Century CE RPF,” and “Literary RPF”). However, there are 16,197 stories in the Yuletide archive on the Archive of Our Own (which includes all stories written for the festival between 2009 and 2014) as of 12 February 2014; of this, approximately 145 are Historical RPF, sorted into numerous diverse categories, including “Classical Music RPF” and "Mongolian History RPF.” The largest single Yuletide Historical RPF category is “Classical Greek and Rome Literary and Historical RPF,” with 21 stories, making it one of the more popular Yuletide fandoms, with the same number of stories as 30 Rock, Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea series, the Indiana Jones movie series, and Bill Watterson's comic Calvin and Hobbes. 246 love some Roman schoolboy Cicero and Atticus fic. It’s up to you how you spin it - I have a slight preference for a friendship story over a romance, I think, but I’d be interested in reading either.598
This request shows that fanfiction and the fan community allows scope for expressing love for the past in a way that academic work does not. Emilyenrose reveals that her desire for this affective connection comes out of her undergraduate academic work on Cicero, even as she uses colloquialisms and unconventional formatting to mark her desire as both decidedly and embarrassingly unacademic: “I am, um, doing my undergrad dissertation on the letters (well, one book of the letters, there are like thirty-five volumes) and it has made me want fic.” (original formatting). This request makes it clear that her academic interest in Cicero’s character is bound up with her investment in the intensity of his friendship for Atticus, a commitment to affect that this fannish space and language allows her to express. Although she is requesting a work of fiction, her request is framed by her scholarly understanding of Cicero’s biography, so that her request allows – indeed, expects – historical knowledge and accuracy. She gives the numbers of Cicero’s books as proof of his extraordinary bond with Atticus - “there are sixteen books of Atticus letters. Compare that to: ONE book of letters to Cicero’s brother. ONE book of letters to his personal slave” – and other historical evidence – “the earliest letter we have dates from 68 BC, when Cicero was in his mid-30s - but Nepos’ biography of Atticus says that he and Cicero met at school.”599 Emilyenrose thus firmly ties the Cicero of her imagination to the historical Cicero, placing the letters in their historical context, but in a fannish space that opens them to imaginative interpolation and creative supplementation. Her reading is not anachronistic, but neither is it historicist; her self-conscious desire is not only for playfully imagining and magnifying Cicero’s emotional life, but for doing so in a historically accurate and knowledgeable way, nor are these two desires seen as contrary to each other.
598 emilyenrose, “Yuletide Funtimes!,” Livejournal.com, November 16, 2009, http://emilyenrose.livejournal.com/183813.html. 599 Ibid. 247
Emilyenrose’s request shows the extent of the possible slippage between academic and fannish engagement with texts, as Emilyenrose supports her fantasy with her academic credentials; however, these credentials come after Emilyenrose’s profession of affective engagement – “I love Marcus Tullius Cicero” – and her demonstration of her intimacy with his character by listing his character traits she finds most “fascinating,” rather than any historical details. Her request invites readers to read specific letters, assuming that this set of obscure Latin letters is accessible to people with fannish rather than academic interests, and indeed, one commenter on her post writes, “now I want to read all of Cicero’s letters.” The access point to Cicero for the fannish audience is the intensity of Cicero’s friendship as expressed in the letters. Moreover, Emilyenrose invites them to imagine this not only as a queer friendship, but a “schoolboy” friendship, situating their bond in the pedagogical environment in which she herself has encountered and built her relationship with Cicero. Love between schoolboys, ambiguously queer and inseparable from the burgeoning love of newly-encountered classical texts, is the scenario most satisfying to Emilyenrose’s fannish-academic desires and most appropriate to this amateur, immature, affective mode of historical engagement.600
This Yuletide letter reverses the ideological energies of the queer, immature friendship, imagining it as generative; Atticus and Cicero’s relationship here can give birth to a piece of creative writing, but also to the acquisition of historical knowledge by her readers who are now eager to seek out and read the letters, and themselves form friendships with Cicero. Historicism is here imagined not as the rival or antithesis, but the natural complement of amateur, queer love for the past.
600 A story was written in response to this request: Toft, "De Amicitia," http://www.archiveofourown.org/works/33638. 248
5.6 Conclusion
In reading queerness into Petrarch’s work I find myself uncomfortably identifying with the position of the ‘tinhatting’ fans of the British boy band One Direction.601 It became evident in the aftermath of the release of a controversial article by Aja Romano in 2012 that a large proportion of the One Direction fandom believed that two of the band members, Louis Tomlinson and Harry Styles, were secretly in a romantic relationship, despite the band’s repeated denials and Tomlinson’s public relationship with a woman. These fans cited the band’s overwhelming displays of affective homosociality, and accused people who disagreed with them of homophobia. The desire of these fans to claim their heroes for the queer community (whether or not the fans themselves are queer) – to know them, like the readers of the Supernatural RPF fic “Common Knowledge,” “better than they know themselves” – seemed, to many on the outside, to have overwhelmed their ability to distinguish between fiction and reality, as the title of Romano’s article suggest - an accusation often (and unfairly) lobbied at fans in general.
The One Direction fans who left angry online comments on Romano’s article were sensitive to an association between their emotional hermeneutics, queer reading, and immaturity, despite the fact that Romano’s article avoids explicitly making this association except for suggesting a “generational shift” in fannish culture. In fact, one commenter calls on academic expertise in queer theory in support of the Tomlinson-Styles relationship: “a lot of larry shippers studied gay theory and gender sexuality so I think they know what they’re talking about.”602 This commenter also writes (sarcastically), “I like how she tries to make larry shippers look like 4 year olds,”603 while another commenter responds, “I am not some immature adolescent who knows nothing about the music industry. I am a college graduate and I work in entertainment
601 Aja Romano, “One Direction Fans Have Trouble Separating Their ‘Larry Stylinson’ Fantasy from Reality,” The Daily Dot, August 22, 2012, http://www.dailydot.com/culture/one-direction-fans-tinhat-larry-stylinson/. 602 Comment, anonymous commenter, August 22, 2012. http://www.dailydot.com/culture/one-direction-fans- tinhat-larry-stylinson/ 603 That is, those who believe in and support a relationship between Louis Tomlinson and Harry Styles – portmanteau shorthand names like 'Larry' for relationships (or 'ships') are common in fandom. 249 thank you very much.”604 Both these commenters who argue for proficiency of ‘Larry shippers’ in gender and sexuality theory are anxious to assert that they are educated adults to support the legitimacy of their queer readings. Where I empathize with Petrarch, I do so in my sense of our partial common identity as fans; I ‘recognize’ Petrarch as part of a fannish, homosocial ‘virtual’ community, and as an RPF writer. This profoundly amateur, childish, queer, feminine partial common identity I share with Petrarch brings him closer to Margery Kempe than to Pier Paolo Vergerio (whose births and deaths in fact coincide to within a few years); despite being an identity founded in a twenty-first century community, it is aligned with the child/medieval/amateur side of the linked paradigms I have been exploring. Under the influence of the Mommsenian school, scholars have fairly universally read Petrarch’s book-collecting and imaginative interactions with classical authors as indicative of historicist goals and a ‘modern’ (or ‘professional’) approach to the past. Proposing to read Petrarch ‘as a fan’ is to find in his reading activities not a ‘modern’ historicist impulse and a recognition of a difference of the past, but a hermeneutics of empathy or intimacy: immature, amateur, and both figuratively and literally medieval.
Petrarch’s life forms an important marker in the history of the periodization of methodology. We have seen in Bernard of Clairvaux and Nicholas Love the association of childishness or immaturity with anachronism and emotional hermeneutics, maturity with historicism and empirical research into historical context. Petrarch inherits this tradition of ideas from the medieval tradition and engages with it in an ambivalent and complex way. He maps his movement from affective to historicist reading onto his own literal growth from childhood to adulthood, but he continually undermines this narrative, never fully achieving the transition, never fully renouncing his childish love. Modern scholarship has ignored this ambivalence in Petrarch’s texts, however, and has embraced the circular logic of periodization that is exemplified by Jan Papy’s division of Petrarch and his friend ‘Socrates’ into ‘modern’ and ‘medieval’ men, despite being of the same generation. However, reading the letters to Petrarch shows that empathetic, anachronistic reading has a profound presence in the history of Petrarch studies. Ernest Wilkins published an article in 1923 entitled “An Hour in the Renaissance,” a
604 Comment, Lisa Miceli, August 22, 2012. 250 series of vignettes imagining the activities of a number of historical figures around the world at three o’clock in the afternoon, March 11th, 1521.605 But of course this article describes not one hour, but many, since we see Paracelsus watch Tartar healers on the Russian steppes, Copernicus draw astronomical maps in his office, Pope Leo X finger a golden goblet in his hand, the court of the Spanish governer at Naples, Titian’s studio in Florence, Cortez planning his assault on the Aztec capital, Luther in his cell at Wittenberg, Francis I in a portrait studio in Paris, Dürer sketch the carcass of a whale on a cold Dutch beach, Magellan on board ship a month from his death in the Philippines, and Sir Thomas More feed the birds in his Chelsea garden, all at three p.m. – but all in a different timezones. There could be no better example of the sway the Renaissance narrative holds over temporal logic; out of sheer excitement, this article presses the disparate events of fifteen hours together into a single ‘Renaissance’ hour. Warkentin calls this piece “a delightful reading for beginning students,”606 echoing Bernard of Clairvaux’s assignment of imaginative meditation to spiritual ‘children,’ their milk to adults’ meat; Wilkins’ article approaches a mature time with an immature hermeneutics, a perfect example of the troubled relationship between periodized methodology and Early Modern scholarship.
605 Ernest H. Wilkins, “An Hour in the Renaissance,” in The Invention of the Sonnet and Other Studies in Italian Literature (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1959). First published The Historical Outlook 14 (1923), 203-205. 606 Warkentin, “Infaticabile Maestro: Ernest Hatch Wilkins and the Manuscripts of Petrarch’s Canzoniere,” 64 n.74. 251
6 Bad Readers
6.1 Introduction
I ended the previous chapter with the suggestion that we read Petrarch with the conscious awareness of being – or even the intent to be – an audience he did not want. This is not so much the feeling of alienation or total separation from the past that is associated with radical historicist readings, as it is the refusal of his friendship. What might it mean to read Petrarch affectively, acknowledging the possibility of connection – even feeling the pull of empathy – but nonetheless reading him with anger, or with irritation, distress, shame, disappointment, embarrassment, or boredom? Or to do more than reject his friendship, and read him with vindictiveness or rebellion? This final chapter focuses on the ‘bad encounter’ with the text-as-author (or author-as- text), whose possibility haunted Petrarch. I write ‘bad’ here not because the feelings arising from such an encounter are objectively bad in all respects – they may be important, productive, even pleasurable – but because they are feelings that would be considered bad by the author who has caused them: they are anathema to Petrarch’s ideal of the reader-text encounter as a meeting of like-minded friends. In the last two chapters I discussed the importance of familiaritas - empathy, familiarity, friendship - to Petrarch’s reading of Classical authors, the consequences of this for his relationships with the past, and the uses to which his hermeneutics have been put in periodizing narratives of reading. Petrarch’s desire for intimate contact with men from history is framed by his epistolary network of contemporary, friendly male readers, but the possibility of rejection, of bad encounters, haunts his letters to Cicero and others. Many of Petrarch’s letters – most notably the opening letter of the Rerum familiarum libri and his “Letter to Posterity,” the last of the Seniles – attempt to control his own reception by future readers and ward against more bad encounters.
The bad encounter also suggests the possibility of the bad reader. The bad encounters that haunt Petrarch are when he either meets a bad reader of his own work, or he himself turns out to 252 be a bad reader of someone else’s. The bad reader is the reader who has not yet learned to understand what they read, or has not enough familiarity with the author to discern their true intent; they are also, therefore, readers who fail as friends to the author. Bad reading is a failure of intimacy. However, the bad reader can also indulge in malicious, willful misunderstanding or twist the text’s meaning for mischievous ends; by reading the text in ways it was not intended, this bad reader might also be a critical, rebellious, or satirical reader.
As I suggested in my previous chapter, to read queerness into a canonical figure like Petrarch smacks of ‘bad reading’ in the context of his scholarly legacy in English-language scholarship, which has been so dominated by the intense affective connection to Petrarch’s legacy as a poet, lover of Laura, classicist, and founding figure of modern, masculine subjectivity. To ‘queer’ Petrarch has an affective consequence for me; I am intensely aware of the vulnerability of my position to accusations of immaturity as a junior scholar, compounded by the feminine/immature hermeneutics of fannishness that I am acknowledging as part of my work, and my avowed lack of political objectivity as a queer theorist. I feel a lurking anxiety at the possibility that others may feel anger at me for “spoiling” Petrarch for them, or indignation at my reading him irreverently, or contempt for my fannish interests. This sense of vulnerability and self-doubt, the possibility of being a bad reader in the sense of being ignorant, foolish, immature, simply incapable of really understanding Petrarch, is one of “the narrative/epistemological entailments” for me as a “seeker, knower, or teller”607 that Eve Sedgwick insists we notice about our hermeneutics. The flip-side of the bad reader - the naughty reader - allows me to inhabit and reclaim the childishness of the bad reader, to be fannish and critical, loving and resistant.
The affective burden upon scholars not to be bad readers has a pedagogical value, of course – anxiety about being found out as a bad reader spurs scholars to be more rigorous, more careful in their work – but it can also cause paralysing writer’s block and be a real impediment to a scholarly career. This anxiety - which is sometimes discussed under the umbrella of ‘imposter syndrome’ - disproportionately affects women, people entering the academy from working-class backgrounds, and people from black, Hispanic, and other ethnic backgrounds to whom the
607 Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You,” 124. 253 western university is more closed.608 There is therefore a political imperative to unpick the associations of immaturity and reading in the academy, towards which I explore the ‘naughty reader’ as an alternative model. ‘Naughty’ is an odd word - it suggests childish and/or sexual misbehaviour, and it provokes discomfort in me to use it in an academic register, particularly as I (like, I imagine, many academics) was utterly mortified if I was ever told off for being naughty at school. I can probably count the times that it happened on one hand, and still remember each of them. But that discomfort is part of the word’s power: it brings forward childishness as an erotic identity, charged with shame and pleasure, as a property of the reading subject in the academy.
I seek in the chapter below to complicate the idea of fannishness that I have been exploring as a loving mode of reading. In this chapter I explore the possibilities of fanfiction as an intentional act of violence to a text. As I shall show in the first half of this chapter, fanfiction encompasses a number of critical stances and forms which place the writer and reader in complex affective relationships with the source text. These practices often draw on affect generated by the fantasy of the ‘bad encounter,’ and perform various kinds of ‘naughty reading.’ Critical fanfiction, I will argue, suggests a paradigm within which to accommodate more complex responses to texts, and complicates the idea of affective reading as a loving reading which has dominated my previous chapters.
Building on some of the theoretical frameworks emerging from queer affect theory and from fanfiction practices, I narrow my focus to the relationships between the ‘bad encounter,’ ‘bad reading,’ and ‘naughty reading.’ To do this, in the second half of this chapter I look closely at another textual interaction between Petrarch and one of his readers, who is often read as his fan, but who I read as a ‘naughty reader’ of Petrarch: Chaucer. Here I expand on how the
608 There are numerous articles in publications on education and careers more generally about imposter syndrome; however, for a sample, see Kate Bahn, “Faking It: Women, Academia, and Impostor Syndrome,” Vitae, the Online Career Hub for Higher Ed, accessed January 22, 2015, https://chroniclevitae.com/news/412-faking-it- women-academia-and-impostor-syndrome. David J. Leonard, “Impostor Syndrome: Academic Identity Under Siege?,” The Chronicle of Higher Education Blogs: The Conversation, February 5, 2014, http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2014/02/05/impostor-syndrome-academic-identity-under-siege/.“Feel Like You’re Fooling Everyone? Beat the Impostor Syndrome,” About.com Education, accessed January 22, 2015, http://gradschool.about.com/od/survivinggraduateschool/a/impostor.htm. For a fuller expression of this idea, see e.g. Alan Sinfield, Cultural Politics - Queer Reading, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2005), 1–40. 254 marginalization of immature reading can be reclaimed in strategically performed, ‘weaponized’ immaturity. In this kind of fanfiction, affective reading strategies are used to subvert or resist marginalizing forces.
Reading Chaucer as a reader in willful rebellion against Petrarch has consequences for Chaucer’s place in the periodizing framework in which he is read, and, in turn, the pedagogical logics behind the narrative that shapes the canon of English Literature. In this chapter, I examine the readerly encounter between Chaucer and Petrarch and the ways in which this encounter has been mythologized in Chaucer scholarship, often with the aim of yoking Chaucer to the narrative of Renaissance progress. In contrast to this romantic tradition of imagined friendship between Chaucer and Petrarch is the paradox that, in Elizabeth Gross’ words, “the writer who best knew what the Italians were doing systematically rejected their innovations.”609 In the Clerk’s Prologue and Tale, Chaucer’s Clerk ‘replies’ to Petrarch’s letter to Boccaccio in which he translates his story of Griselda, engaging with Petrarch’s epistolary discourse on translations and transitions between youth and age, past and present, vernacular and Latin. I read Petrarch’s Griselda letter alongside what I argue is its mirror in the collection, Fam. I.4, in which Petrarch translates another story about a despot’s improper liaison. Comparing these two letters draws attention to the ways in which the Griselda story occupies an uncertain space between fiction and history. The comparison also emphasises the ways in which translation, in both these letters and in Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale, is a way of negotiating desire for the past, so that Chaucer’s rejection of Petrarch’s model of affective connection with the past becomes more visible. Bringing to the fore the historiographical hermeneutics in play between Chaucer and Petrarch also allows us to reconsider the affective connection between scholar and author which we have seen in Ernest Wilkins’ work on Petrarch, and the “unspoken and increasingly unspeakable desire to see and speak with Chaucer” that Stephanie Trigg identifies in her history of Chaucerianism.
Chaucer’s Italian connection – his reception of Italian early humanist writings – has played an important part in his reception as an exemplary early English author in the overarching humanist narrative of the formation of subjectivity. In reading the Italian writers of the two
609 Karen Elizabeth Gross, “Chaucer’s Silent Italy,” Studies in Philology 109, no. 1 (2012): 20. 255 previous generations – Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio – Chaucer is, paradoxically, looking forward to the Renaissance; I read Chaucer as a resolutely and self-consciously ‘Medieval’ author at the transitional moment between the Medieval and Renaissance, who performs an immature reading of Petrarch in a way that resists Petrarch’s influential scheme of periodized reading – the same scheme that now governs the humanist pedagogical model of the western university liberal arts curriculum. Reading Chaucer as a ‘naughty reader’ of Petrarch also makes it possible to imagine the role of these kinds of reading in the academy and the classroom. The fanfiction I read in this chapter suggests that an affective reading is not necessarily loving, and helps to draw out the affectivity of Chaucer’s non-loving reception of Petrarch. The non-loving examples of fanfiction also help to interrogate common ideas of what constitutes bad reading, and to reimagine forms of critical reading as fannish and vice versa.
6.2 Bad Readers, Bad Subjects
Academic discussions of different kinds of bad reading appear in volumes on pedagogy, media studies, and literary theory, but these discourses rarely speak to each other, or consider the commonalities between the undergraduate in the classroom who loves Jane Eyre too much to accept (for example) a postcolonial critical reading of that text that shows its participation in racist colonialist ideologies, and the scholar who writes that criticism. The affective dimension of criticism has attracted increasing interest in recent years, perhaps most importantly articulated in Eve Sedgwick’s essay “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” in which she argues against the ubiquity of the “hermeneutics of suspicion” – or, even more evocatively, the “epistemologies of enmity” – that form the basis of most forms of literary criticism, and she suggests the need to “unpack the local, contingent relations between any given piece of knowledge and its narrative/epistemological entailments for the seeker, knower, or teller.”610 Her essay analyses the negative affect of the hermeneutics of suspicion, and suggests the possibilities of love and hope
610 Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You,” 124. 256 as critical positions from which to launch ‘reparative’ rather than ‘paranoid’ readings, offering camp as one such form of reparative reading.
Sedgwick’s essay ends with an implicit call to improve the limited theoretical vocabulary for affective critical positions, a call that queer theory has answered: the recent ‘turn to affect’ in queer and postcolonial theory has generated a number of books on ‘bad feelings,’ particularly shame, such as Kathryn Bond Stockton’s work on the intersectionality of racial and sexual shame, Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where ‘Black’ Meets ‘Queer,’ and the anthology arising from the important 2003 conference at the University of Michigan, Gay Shame (2008), while Carolyn Dinshaw’s work on the loving amateur in How Soon is Now begins to explore the critical hermeneutics of love.
At the same time, love in the classroom is the subject of an emerging discourse among pedagogical theorists: Michael Warner’s essay “Uncritical Reading” questions the naturalization of ‘critical reading’ in the classroom and the academy, and also questions the relevance of the ideal end result of the humanist education: the humanist subject. From other forms of reading, Warner argues, might emerge “not just a different technique of text-processing, or a different attitude about the text object, but a different kind of subject to which the technique is oriented.”611 Critical reading in the university is geared towards the formation of the subject who we mean to emerge from the university system, a system shaped by western, broadly Christian, ‘modern’ ideologies; accordingly, ‘critical reading’ is defined by the subjectivities it rejects:
We are here, we like to tell our students, to save you from habits of uncritical reading that are naïve, immature, unexamined – or worse. Don’t read like children, like vacation readers on the beach, like escapists, like fundamentalists, like nationalists, like antiquarians, like consumers, like ideologues, like sexists, like tourists, like yourselves.612
611 Michael Warner, “Uncritical Reading,” in Polemic: Critical or Uncritical, ed. Jane Gallop (New York; London: Routledge, 2004), 19. 612 Ibid., 15. 257
Warner’s list of the ‘uncritical’ material and hermeneutic interactions his students perform with texts in his classroom have a great deal of overlap with the affective, empathetic, excessive reading practices of fandom:
They identify with characters. They fall in love with authors… they shop around among taste- publics, venturing into social worlds of fanhood and geekdom…. Their attention wanders; they skim; they skip around. They mark pages with pink and yellow highlighters. They get caught up in suspense. They laugh; they cry. They get aroused (and stay quiet about it in class). They lose themselves in books, distracting themselves from everything else, especially homework like the reading I assign.613
The students’ “naïve, immature” reading practices are particularly marked by the students’ adherence to alternative temporalities: the students ignore both the text’s internal chronology and the chronology of the university by skimming scenes, skipping sections, losing productive work hours to escapist reading, and not doing their homework. Their flirtation with alternative, unscholarly reading communities and publics is part of their resistance to the authorized temporality of the university, and the process of adult subject formation it entails.
Warner’s argument implicitly acknowledges that fans read with an hermeneutic framework alternative to ‘critical reading’; fandom therefore becomes a possible site of alternative reading subjects and subjectivities. Fan Studies has to some extent explored its oppositional relationship to the academy,614 but as a marginal subdiscipline studying texts that
613 Ibid., 13. 614 Matt Hills, Fan Cultures (New York: Routledge, 2002); Joli Jenson, “Fandom as Pathology: The Consequences of Characterization,” in The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, ed. Lisa A. Lewis (London, New York: Routledge, 1992), 9–29; Lawrence Grossberg, “Is There a Fan in the House? The 258 are culturally devalued even within popular culture, Fan Studies scholars have often been more concerned to justify their place in the academy than to oppose it. Sedgewick notes the predominance of “sappy, aestheticizing, defensive, anti-intellectual, or reactionary”615 rhetoric used to describe reparative readings motivated by love or pleasure; rhetoric matching this description still overwhelmingly dominates most discussions of fan culture in both the public and academic sphere, and until the last decade or so, Fan Studies was still largely organized defensively rather than according to its own theoretical impulses and currents.
Fanfiction writers in particular often face accusations of being bad readers for being variously over-attached, subjective, obsessively attached to minutiae while willing to ignore large aesthetic or moral failures in their texts, and even, in the case of slash readers, willfully misreading their texts in ways that taint them for other readers by ‘introducing’ homoerotic or sexual subtext into ‘innocent’ texts. As Warner’s description of his students suggests, and as I have shown in previous chapters, the fan as bad reader is an immature figure.616 This common characterisation of the fan (particularly the young female fan) is negotiated in a variety of ways within fan communities, in Fan Studies and the metacriticism generated within fan communities. This sense of a dual, even paradoxical identity has led to the rise of the term ‘Aca-fan’ among Fan Studies academics who are also themselves fans, in order to negotiate their dual identities inside and outside the fan context. Embracing the term ‘aca-fan’ means facing the possibility that as academics they are bad readers of fandom, or as fans they are bad readers who do not meet the standards of academic reading. “The media scholar ought to resist aca-fandom, even as he or she embraces it,” writes Ian Bogost, in an article where he opposes love for a text (which Bogost assumes is uncritical) with the academic task of criticism:
Affective Sensibility of Fandom,” in The Adoring Audience, ed. Lisa A. Lewis (London: Routledge, 1992), 50– 68. 615 Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You,” 150. 616 See e.g. Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 10. 259
The fact that something feels pleasurable or enjoyable or good (or bad) need not be rejected, of course, but it ought to issue an itch, a discomfort. As media scholars, we ought to have self-doubt about the quality and benefit of the work we study. We ought to perform that hesitance often and in public, in order to weave a more complex web around media—not just to praise or blame particular works.617
To give free rein to the ‘fannish’ side of the aca-fan, for Bogost, is to risk reducing the work of criticism to simplistic praise and blame; Bogost insists on maintaining the hermeneutics of suspicion in order to retain critical credibility and integrity. Thus fannishness is aligned with uncritical affective response, “praise or blame” without historical awareness or measure. This is a typical stance, although Bogost is unusual in acknowledging the possibility of a balance, or a negotiation between affect and suspicion, rather than placing the two forms of reading at two distinct points on a reader’s journey from uncritical affect to critical maturity. Bogost instead refers to the need to “perform that hesitance [sic] often and in public,” aligning the fan/academic dichotomy with binaries of internal/external and private/public. However, the apparent paradoxicality of the aca-fan is a product of the patronising rhetoric surrounding fannishness in the wider media; in fandom itself, the combination of criticism and fannishness, love and suspicion, is more complex, as I shall show later in this chapter.
But what, for now, does all this have to do with Chaucer? Chaucer’s place within the dialectic of Renaissance maturity and its symbolic importance within the modern humanities is the subject of this chapter. As the founding father of English literature, Chaucer occupies a curious place in the liberal arts curriculum. The Canterbury Tales is the first text students study in many first- or second-year English Literature survey courses in the United States and Canada, while Chaucer has consistently featured in the curricula for A-Level and GCSE English Literature examinations in the UK.618 Since English literature survey courses are almost always
617 Ian Bogost, “Against Aca-Fandom,” July 29, 2010, http://www.bogost.com/blog/against_aca-fandom.shtml. 618 A-Levels are the exams many students in England, Wales and Northern Ireland who have not switched to vocational courses take in Year Thirteen (or the ‘Upper Sixth Form’), in their last year of secondary education. 260 ordered chronologically, Chaucer is often taught at the beginning of the school year and at the beginning of the socialization process of students into ‘critical readers.’ Chaucer can occupy a similar role in the professionalization of early career Medieval Studies scholars, for whom demonstrating a mastery of Chaucer through teaching a Chaucer class or writing a Chaucer chapter (as, indeed, I was advised to do) is an important part of making oneself an attractive candidate on the job market. Chaucer thus not only represents a beginning of English Literature and a beginning of the development of modern subjectivity through the cultural figure of the author, but also a beginning of the formation of a critical reader and adult subject through a humanist education. Moreover, the narrative of progress and genealogical influence that places Chaucer at the beginning of the English literary canon also makes his texts the ones that students, as yet unsocialized into proper reading practices, are more likely to read affectively, and ahistorically – in fact, to read like premodern subjects, according to the history of reading that is so commonly accepted among English Literature scholars.
The chronological ordering of the English Literature survey course, although of course logical in many ways, gives medieval literature a significant role in the humanist socializing process. Chaucer is also perhaps most difficult and alienating author in the English literary canon (Beowulf and romance texts being often read in translation) to read unmediated, both because of the linguistic differences from modern English, and the unfamiliar society and values. Stephanie Trigg’s analysis of the history of Chaucer scholarship shows that since the sixteenth century, Chaucer scholarship has primarily emphasized its own necessity as a mediator between the past and present, supplying historical knowledge and linguistic assistance to modern readers; Trigg shows that this trend continues in the profitable business of publishing study guides on Chaucer for undergraduates.619 The question of how to properly access the past has polarized Chaucer studies since the nineteenth century, from the controversial figure of F.J. Furnivall and his activism for popular access to Chaucer through the Early English Text Society editions and
GCSE exams (previously O-Levels) are taken at age sixteen, in Year Eleven, which was until 2013 the last year of mandatory secondary education in England. 619 Trigg, Congenial Souls, 111, 225–30. 261 the activities of the Working Men’s College,620 to the mid-twentieth-century ‘theory wars’ between New Criticism and Robertsonian exegesis, with an emphasis on personal interactions between reader and text on the one hand, and a heavy apparatus of Augustinian exegetical tools on the other.621 Since the 1980s, this division between affective and historicist readings in Chaucer scholarship has re-emerged in the critical movement known as New Historicism on the one hand, and approaches influenced by queer, psychoanalytic, and feminist theories on the other. To speak generally, New Historicism (with Stephen Greenblatt its most notable proponent) follows Robertsonian exegesis (although not to the same extreme) in taking a historicist approach to texts - that is, reading authors first and foremost within their historical context. Lee Patterson, a prominent Chaucer scholar commonly identified with the New Historicist school, demonstrates the opposition between these approaches in his polarizing 2001 article “Chaucer’s Pardoner on the Couch,” which takes aim at psychoanalytic and queer readings which impose, he argues, anachronistic hermeneutic frameworks onto the past.622 Partly in response to the interrogation of New Criticism by New Historicist scholars like Patterson, Chaucer scholarship of the twenty-first century lays ever more emphasis on methodology, so that scholars must encounter Chaucer through a number of intensely theorized critical paradigms. As Trigg shows, the emphasis on intimacy and familiarity that governed early Chaucer reception and fed New Criticism is now, although still a part of the discipline, relegated to the fringes of Chaucer scholarship, performed in the more informal margins of academia – in book prefaces, on blogs, at conferences, in the classroom, and in study guides aimed at beginner readers.623 Even when using editions with modernized spelling, the weight of the technology needed to interface with Chaucer as opposed to other authors - glosses, marginal apparatuses, and historical context - can create in students a sense of their own alienation, immaturity, and unreadiness. It
620 Ibid., Chapter 6; William Benzie, Dr. F.J. Furnivall, Victorian Scholar Adventurer (Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1983). 621 Cawsey, Twentieth-Century Chaucer Criticism; Sebastian, “Chaucer and the Theory Wars: Attack of the Historicists? The Psychoanalysts Strike Back? Or a New Hope?” 622 Lee Patterson, “Chaucer’s Pardoner on the Couch: Psyche and Clio in Medieval Literary Studies,” Speculum 76, no. 3 (2001): 638–80. 623 Trigg, Congenial Souls, passim, but see 228–9. 262 can also emphasize their dependence on the professional university teacher in reading the English canon. Chaucer thus plays a role in defamiliarizing students from the English language; medieval literature’s role in the survey course reveals the inadequacy of dehistoricized reading practices before students move on to texts which might otherwise seem too approachable and accessible. Chaucer is thus so placed as to make his junior readers feel like immature readers.
Chaucer’s relationship with the writers of the Italian Renaissance has not been considered in the light of his role in the university, and hence in the legacy of humanist pedagogy. Throughout this thesis I have sought to show the ways in which fannish reading stands in relation to both ‘medieval’ and ‘immature’ reading; the next section of this chapter examines several ways in which fanfiction itself performs ‘naughty reading.’ Reading the fannishness of Chaucer helps to pick apart the ways in which he is and is not characterized as immature and/or medieval within scholarship on his relationship with the ‘Renaissance’ writer Petrarch, and the ways he himself intervenes in this discourse and performs immaturity to political ends.
6.3 Fanfiction as ‘Bad Reading’
One influential strand of scholarship on fandom reads fanfiction as always already subversive, because of the challenge it offers to the authorial model and the capitalist publishing industry that have dominated literary culture since the eighteenth century. Equally, the way fanfiction privileges emotionality has been read as a feminist critical move which undermines the masculine ideals of the hegemonic culture, in order to “reclaim female experiences from the margins of male-centered texts.”624 In her introduction to an issue of the film journal In Focus dedicated to fandom, Kristina Busse frames the ‘reciprocal gaze’ image in explicitly feminist, political terms: “fans complicate established binary relations… when they return the gaze as they
624 Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 167; See also Abigail Derecho, “Archontic Literature: A Definition, a History, and Several Theories of Fan Fiction,” in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, ed. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., n.d.), 61–78; Alexis Lothian, “Living in a Den of Thieves: Fan Video and Digital Challenges to Ownership,” Cinema Journal 48, no. 4 (2009): 130–36. 263
625 manipulate representations of (and by) men and actively edit in their own desires.” By recasting genres conventionally gendered masculine, like police drama and science fiction, into the conventionally feminine genre of romance (so the argument goes), female fans subvert and resist their own exclusion from media texts, even to the extent of literally inserting themselves into the canon, such as in Mary Sue fanfiction.
However, although fanfiction may, for some, be a political act, it is self-evident that few people become fans as a mode of political activism. Moreover, many patriarchal structures and oppressions are reproduced within fannish communities, and a great deal of fanfiction either uncritically or uncaringly makes use of misogynist and homophobic tropes. Nor is fandom a utopia of communal creativity; indeed, plagiarism, attribution, influence, and the inviolability of the text are policed just as, if not more viciously within fandom, and, irony notwithstanding, fans are almost as likely to make statements that they do not want transformative works made of their own work as original authors.626 Therefore although I agree that (free, fan-produced) fanfiction is always already resistant to certain paradigms of capitalism and authorship, fanfiction is certainly not always already politically aware or subversive. However, it would also be wrong to believe that fanfiction always arises from reading which is both adoring and uncritical. As many scholars have argued, fanfiction responds to a lack in the source text; this can be simply the text’s finite nature, a lack which inspires fans to generate more content, but it also may be the text’s failure to meet a fannish reader’s desire or expectation, whether narrative or political.
625 Kristina Busse, ed., “In Focus: Fandom and Feminism: Gender and the Politics of Fan Production,” Cinema Journal 48, no. 4 (2009): 106. 626 This is a complex subject that deserves more time than I can give it here, but see e.g. Icarus Ancalion’s essay on a plagiarism scandal in Lord of the Rings fandom, “The Line between Plagiarism and Fanfiction” (http://icarus.slashcity.net/essays/plagiarismandfanfiction.html), and the list of fan-authors who have refused permission for other fans to make audio recordings of their work (podfic), and some other forms of transformative work on Fanlore (http://fanlore.org/wiki/Blanket_No_to_Podfic). To pick a random example from this list (compiled as a central resource for podficcers), the fan-author Hackthis states on her Livejournal.com blog user profile, “Do NOT podfic*, record, kindle, ebook, republish, translate or archive my stories without permission as this makes me cross. You will NOT like me when I’m cross. *ETA: I am not currently allowing my stories to be podficced, recorded or translated,” (http://hackthis.livejournal.com/profile, accessed 27th March 2014). 264
Hence the fan’s relationship with the text may be as antagonistic as it is loving, just as a sports fan may spend more time criticizing their team than they does praising them.627
Although many ‘gaps’ in the text that fanfiction seeks to fill are narrative failures such as, for example, an act by a character which seems (paradoxically, perhaps) out of character to a fan, or an unsatisfying ending to a plot arc. Perhaps even more generative is a text’s political failure, where fan-readers attempt to negotiate a “bad encounter” with the text, just as Petrarch’s letters to Cicero attempt to negotiate his encounter with Cicero’s letters. When the fannish, affective hermeneutic – the fan’s attempt to connect with the text through empathy, to find herself in the text – breaks down, the effect can be devastating. Postcolonial and anti-racist fanfiction takes a critical position on the treatment of characters of colour in the source text, and imaginatively inserts experiences and viewpoints into the text that, because of the cultural erasure of non-white subjects in popular western media, are absent from it.628 In a way, postcolonial fanfiction functions similarly to Mary Sue stories, creating a point of empathetic connection between reader and story where none exists. This is often done by inserting an original character or by developing a very minor character into a major one, since by its very nature, postcolonial fanfiction must create a voice where none exists. However, postcolonial fanfiction bears none of the stigma of Mary Sue stories – or at least, it is not stigmatized for its immaturity, or associated with bad (juvenile) writing. But critical fanfiction is at odds with the love of many fans who cannot, or will not, see flaws in their beloved text, or acknowledge the ways in which their pleasure is complicit in the marginalization of others, and therefore critical fanfiction itself occupies a marginal space in fandom. By pointedly empathizing with the experiences of marginalized characters, postcolonial fanfiction often demonstrates the extent to which the text does not invite this kind of connection from its readers of colour.
Critical fanfiction should not be confused with parodies or satires circulated in the mainstream; written and circulated within the fanfiction community, critical fanfiction arises
627 Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 23. 628 See André Carrington, “Speculative Fiction and Media Fandom through a Lens, Darkly.” (PhD dissertation, New York University, 2009); in press, University of Minnesota press, 2015. 265 from reading in the fannish mode – affective, passionate, and empathetic – and often takes the source text intensely seriously while responding to a reader’s bad encounter with that text, often due to the text’s failure to anticipate her as a reader. Fanfiction that critiques the racial or sexual politics of its source is particularly fertile for this kind of reading. Defenders of fanfiction who wish to reconcile text owners to fan activity often emphasize that fanfiction is, above all, a sign of interest in and love for the source text, rather than an attempt to supplant or alter it. However, critical fanfiction demonstrates different ways in which affective connection to the source text within a loving community can play out.
For example, Pogrebin’s short story “Dissipate” responds to the hermeneutic gap caused by J.K. Rowling’s failure to imagine the experiences of non-white wizards in her Harry Potter series. “Dissipate,” which begins with a quote from E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, imagines the journey of two minor characters, twins Parvati and Padma Patil (whose background is not explicitly stated in Rowling’s novels, but who Pogrebin writes as second-generation Anglo- Indian immigrants), to India to visit their aunt. In her home in Bombay they encounter an alternate wizarding tradition that shakes their faith in the monolithic Western, Latinate magical system which they have been taught at Hogwarts, and further complicates their relationships to each other and to their national, cultural and ethnic identities. The story gestures towards a different set of magical norms and values that expose the Eurocentricity of Rowling’s world:
Parvati’s about to conjure up a glass of pumpkin juice when Padma grabs her wrist. “Not here,” she warns, reminding Parvati that they are not in England. A wand is a sign of strength in England, whereas in India it is a crutch, betraying their phoren origins more obviously than their English accents.629
629 Pogrebin, “Dissipate,” January 29, 2004, http://pogrebin.livejournal.com/26088.html. 266
Although Pogrebin’s story suggests dissatisfaction with the source text and a wish to point out its deficiencies, it does not mark the end of her engagement with Harry Potter or an abandonment of her fannish activity; on the contrary, it is part of a long and prolific activity as a Harry Potter fanfiction writer.630
The writing and circulation of stories like “Dissipate” as fanfiction, within the fanfiction community and using fandom tropes and styles, suggests that its writers do have an affective connection with the source text, but are able to read the text critically as well. Postcolonial fanfiction, written within fannish communities, can act as a device to mediate and negotiate anger towards a beloved text. Enacting critique within a space where a loving relationship with the text is assumed has the effect of softening the “epistemologies of enmity” that Sedgwick identifies as driving many forms of literary criticism. “The First Time” by bravecows demonstrates this negotiation of negative affect fanfiction in its reader comments and the author’s responses. “The First Time,” a Star Trek631 fanfiction, narrates a conversation between two Malaysian members of Starfleet, an officer and a cadet with a crush on her, in which the officer gently breaks to the cadet the existence of institutional racism within Starfleet and the unlikelihood that she will achieve the same opportunity for distinction and lightning-fast promotion as James T. Kirk, about whom they have heard in the news.
The characters’ marginality to the source text appears reflected in their geographical distance from the events of the movie Star Trek, both in their country and Starfleet academy of origin, and in their current deep-space mining assignment, far from any possibility to excel under fire.
630 Pogrebin, “COMPLETE FIC & META LIST,” Livejournal.com, accessed April 8, 2014, http://pogrebin.livejournal.com/61926.html. 631 J. J. Abrams, Star Trek (Paramount Pictures, 2009). 267
“Don’t you know?” said Sharanjeet. She sounded puzzled. “Why you think the big ships always got so many Westerners, and we all are just like ASEAN in space?” “I didn’t really think about it,” said Feera.
The characters both speak in Malaysian English, and the officer, Sharanjeet, wryly comments on the fact that the ship computers do not understand their accent. Her previous activism and jaded attitude contrasts with the cadet Feera’s naiveté and optimism:
“We all use to complain when I was in the Akademi,” said Sharanjeet reminiscently. “Everybody join some society. Every day EGM here, EGM there. All useless lah. You also went to AS Terengganu, kan? Your generation not so political, is it?”632
The story drew a large response from readers; unusually for fanfiction, however, there are striking disparities in the kinds of affect readers display in their comments (most comments on fanfiction are uniformly positive). Some readers are delighted to recognise themselves in the story and their own ‘Manglish’ (Malaysian English) dialect: Vi writes, “Sharanjeet and Feera’s voices were so clear and it made me go YES because it meant I (or family members and friends) could belong in that world.”633 This reader’s comment demonstrates the self-insert function of postcolonial fanfiction, and the important political work this can do. The author invites readers like Vi who share the author’s subject position to inhabit the story, offers delight at being included in a source text from which they feel alienated, delight which other readers of this story and its comments can see from afar and compare to their own experiences.
632 EGM: Extraordinary General Meeting. AS: Akademi Starfleet. 633 Vi, Comment, http://bravecows.dreamwidth.org/7595.html?thread=617643&style=mine#cmt617643. 268
Other readers write that the story has made them feel discomfort, shame and anger. One reader writes, “the meta made me uncomfortable to hear, glad it was being said, and sad it had to be said. I really admire how you fueled the itch of angry hope…” while another has a more visceral response, “Oh goddamn. Shit. I think I have been hit in the stomach with how goddamn realistic this is. OUCH!” These responses to the story are not rejections of its message, however, but acknowledgements of their affective consequences on readers who had not previously considered the marginality of non-white and/or non-American people in the Star Trek universe. Their discomfort clashes oddly with the positivity of the author, who insists, “I didn’t want this to be sad/angry-making!” and “ I didn’t mean to sucker punch anybody. :( I was feeling pretty cheerful writing the story because it felt good to be telling the truth as I saw it.”634 The dialogue between this subset of readers and the author mirrors the interaction the story depicts; the readers’ responses mirror the discomfort of Feera, the narrator of “The First Time,” whose dawning awareness bravecows describes, “It was as if she had thought she was living in a warm comfortable world but she had actually been living in a cold one, and she only realized it when someone took her cloak away from her.” Bravecows’ jaded, cynical but nonetheless cheerful view of the Star Trek universe is closer to that of the older officer, Sharanjeet, who ends the conversation with the advice to Feera, “Be realistic, but don’t give up. Okay?”
‘Bad reading’ appears in two different incarnations in the comments on “The First Time.” One anonymous reader turns their own discomfort with the story onto the author, accusing her of unfairly attacking the Star Trek franchise for not overcoming the constraints put upon it by marketing to a western audience.
But [this story] does make me uncomfortable. The premise of Star Trek is “Perfect World” and that’s what they do try to present.
I feel like you’re saying that Star Trek is lying about getting there, that fans are fools for buying into it, instead of acknowledging the social failure of now.
634 Bravecows, Comment, http://bravecows.dreamwidth.org/7595.html?thread=241323&style=mine#cmt241323; Bravecows, Comment, http://bravecows.dreamwidth.org/7595.html?thread=317611&style=mine#cmt317611. 269
It’s impossible to achieve, though, given the context of our world, and especially the context of our mainstream media. I feel like you’ve purposefully misconstrued what you were given and expanded on it to contradict canon, making all the main characters flawed narrators.635
This reader accuses bravecows of having taken a “cheap shot” at Star Trek in a way that unfairly ascribes malicious intent to Star Trek and its fans. Ironically, the reader identifies precisely what bravecow has done – revealed the flawed (because narrow) worldview of Star Trek – but they read this as a malicious, warped reading of the source text, an actively bad reading. In their interpretation, bravecow has made the main characters flawed narrators, and has “purposefully misconstrued” the text that Star Trek’s creators have bestowed upon her. Moreover, by attributing racist intent to the text’s authors (“lying”), she has also attributed ignorant assent to racism (“fools for buying into it”) to fans of the film. This anonymous reader acknowledges institutional racism, but will not see Star Trek (2009)’s reflection of it as a flaw in the movie.
This anonymous reader’s devotion to Star Trek is reminiscent of the old man Petrarch meets at the party, the “mirator maximus” who reacts with such anguish when Petrarch criticizes his hero, Cicero. Petrarch writes that this man “preferred to praise him even when he erred, and embrace the vices of his friend along with his virtues rather than to perceive them.” Petrarch sees this uncritical loyalty as childish, like “the opinion that I remembered holding as a boy,”636 a relation different from the friendship within which he presents his criticisms to Cicero in his letters. Likewise, postcolonial fanfiction is criticism between friends. Just as Petrarch situates his anger with Cicero within their friendship, drawing on Cicero’s own philosophy of friendship in De amicitia, postcolonial fanfiction situates its negative affect within fandom, an affective framework that promises commitment to an ongoing positive relationship with the text and its loving readers.
635 Anonymous comment, http://bravecows.dreamwidth.org/7595.html?thread=589483#cmt589483. 636 Bernardo 315; Fam. XXIV.2.13. 270
As I have suggested, although postcolonial fanfiction circulates within very different fannish discourses from Mary Sue stories, both generate negative affect in their readers through a similar narrative strategy – the insertion of a voice into the text which is, implicitly, identified with the author’s subject position. This suggests the potential power of the willful appropriation of the “immature” reading strategy of self-insertion for the purposes of critique. Like Mary Sue fanfiction, postcolonial fanfiction represents a moment where the fannish hermeneutics of empathy are put under strain.
Perhaps because subaltern positions are all-too-often subject to the delegitimizing critique of childishness, immaturity, or anachronism, postcolonial fanfiction has not embraced the gleeful performance of immaturity that my next example uses. However, in response to another positive comment, bravecows writes, “I really enjoyed sticking my characters into Star Trek (they can leave us out, but they can’t keep us out! >:) )”.637 Her description makes her fanfiction seem an aggressive, even violent action, “sticking” her characters “into Star Trek” like a pin, while her emoticon (an ‘evil smiley’ or ‘little devil’) conveys her glee at her fanfiction’s resistance to the source text. She performs here, in this moment of identification, something closer to the bad reading of which the anonymous reader accuses her, a joyful violation of the textual boundaries of Star Trek.
As I discussed in the previous chapter, the critics of RPF (real person fanfiction, also RPS, real person slash) imagine the act of writing a celebrity into an unwanted homosexual orientation and relationship as an act with potential to cause distress, anger, or harm, or even as an act of violence, such as when bravecows’ readers experience her story as a “sucker punch.” Fans of RPF, while maintaining that their work is a loving act, tend to nonetheless avoid and fear their work falling into the hands of the people they write about. Fanfiction that imagines homosexual relationships between canonically heterosexual fictional characters, known as ‘slash’ fanfiction, originally (that is, from its origin in the 1960s until its proliferation on the internet in the mid-1990s, which coincided with a growing shift in the representation of homosexuality in public discourse and media in many countries) had a similar level of secrecy
637 Bravecows, comment, http://bravecows.dreamwidth.org/7595.html?thread=384427#cmt384427 271 and anxiety surrounding it, and sometimes provoked similarly negative reactions from authors and actors. However, slash has moved far more into the mainstream as homosexuality has become a more acceptable public identity; at the same time, digital social media has brought celebrities in closer contact with their fans, with the result that most celebrities and showrunners are now fully aware of their slash-writing fanbases, and even go out of their way to acknowledge or celebrate them (although this attention is not always welcomed by the fanbase). But slash, named for the / sign that designates the relationship between the characters in story metadata (e.g. Kirk/Spock), still seems to suggest a violent, penetrative act, especially in its verb form (e.g. ‘in this story I slash Kirk and Spock’), not unlike Bravecows’ metaphor for her own fanfiction, “sticking [her] characters into Star Trek.” In cases where writers know that slash is unwanted by the creators/actors/owners, slash can become a joyfully subversive act that embraces the genre’s potential to itself become a form of sexual violence.
Violent slash (that is, not slash fiction containing violence – that is common – but slash fiction presented as a violent act against the characters or people who star in it) rarely happens within fandom. However, one example that shows the importance of the potential of the ‘bad encounter’ in RPF is Fridgepunk’s 2009 story “In Fandom, slashfic writers poll you.”638 The context of this story requires some explanation. Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, two researchers based in the US, approached several groups of fans in August 2009 to ask that they participate in research on fandom for a project on fanfiction and female sexuality from an evolutionary psychology standpoint (preliminarily titled Rule 34: What Netporn Teaches Us About The Brain). As a rule, many fans are not unwilling to participate in research projects on fandom. However, many fans who initially took Ogas and Gaddam’s survey condemned it as reductive, essentialist, ethically dubious, and offensive, and after Ogas and Gaddam proved unwilling to modify the survey in response to criticism or to engage in respectful dialogue with the community to address their concerns, fans investigated the researchers’ claims to be affiliated with the University of Boston and discovered that they were neither currently affiliated with the school, nor had the researchers gone through the necessary processes to obtain approval for the
638 “Fridgepunk | Neurochemistry Compels Me!,” accessed March 31, 2014, http://fridgepunk.dreamwidth.org/4002.html. 272 ethics of their work including human subjects. At this point the community reported the researchers to the US research ethics board, and responded to subsequent overtures by Ogas and Gaddam with derision, criticism, and humiliating attacks.639 Fridgepunk’s story appeared in that context. The story’s metadata states its genre as “Real-person slash, for great justice.” The prose is clunky, parodying poorly written fanfiction, with many intentional misspellings, and poor punctuation. The author’s notes in the story’s metadata state, “My puny female brain chemistry acknowledges only a neurological imperative to slash!” and the story reflects this assumed persona of the idiotic, immature fangirl subsuming her primal sexual needs into pornography about fictional characters, the subject position into which the author felt Ogas and Gaddam’s survey has forced her.
Sai then retracted his hands from Ogi’s body and walked around Ogi’s chair until he stood before Ogi. Once there he ripped off his shirt in a single manly motion, making Ogi flinch as a button wizzed past his ear, and then knelt down before Ogi and undid his trousers, and then, with Ogi’s participation, slipped them off and down to Ogi’s ankles revealing Ogi’s stiff micropenis.640
The frequent references in the story to Ogi’s small genitalia (the story’s disclaimer states, in parodic legalese, that, “I would need to see Ogi Ogas’ penis for special journalistic reasons before I could take any claim or slanderous accusation that the people represented herein are in fact the people represented herein at all seriously”) and the story’s suggestion that Sai fantasizes about Heathcliff and wears wizard robes while fucking Ogi, are obviously intended to sexually humiliate the researchers; moreover, the story forces them both to occupy the essentialized, feminized subject position of the fan under their “scientific” gaze. The story was written with, if
639 “SurveyFail - Fanlore,” accessed March 31, 2014, http://fanlore.org/wiki/Surveyfail. 640 “Fridgepunk | Neurochemistry Compels Me!,” accessed March 31, 2014, http://fridgepunk.dreamwidth.org/4002.html. All spellings sic. 273 not the intention, at least the possibility of the survey authors seeing it in mind, since a number of debates had taken place with the researchers in fannish spaces, on fans’ personal livejournals, and this story was posted within that context. Most RPF, as I discussed in the previous chapter, happens within a community that maintains a strict sense of separation or secrecy from the people it writes about.641 This story, on the other hand, embraces the possibility of humiliating, upsetting, or repulsing the people about whom it writes, “for great justice”. The possible “bad encounter” here between the right (or, rather, the wrong) reader and text becomes a source of vindictive pleasure for author and audience, and, moreover, a potential weapon. The story’s title, “In Fandom, slashwriters poll you,”642 conveys the story’s ethos of reversing the objectifying gaze between the researchers and fandom, scientists/ethnographers and their objects of study, performing and weaponizing immature reading.
Another example of performative, weaponized immature reading, occurring this time outside the fannish community but appropriating fannish generic forms and language, was an online fanfiction festival hosted by comics commentator and blogger Josh Fruhlinger in the weeks approaching the 2012 U.S.A. presidential election. Fruhlinger invited his readers to submit “Presidential slash fiction” to be published on his site. The rules for the contest do not expect literacy with fannish conventions, and include a link to explain what “slash” is, as well as spelling out the generic expectations:
In [the story], there (a) has to be sex, or at least intense romantic longing, (b) between two or more people of same gender, of whom (c) at least one has to be a current or former US president, vice president, prominent candidate for president or VP, or spouse of any of the preceding, and (d) the other(s) has/have to be real living or dead prominent people/historical
641 Although this is less and less true, especially in fandoms where actors or authors are in regular dialogue with fans through social media, such as with the British band One Direction. 642 This is a reference to the joke form known as the ‘Russian Reversal’, popularized by Ukrainian-American comedian Yakov Smirnoff in the 1980s, much-parodied and reborn as an internet meme in the late 2000’s. An example of the ‘Russian Reversal’ appears in his 1985 Miller Lite commercial: “In America… you always find a party. In Russia, Party always finds you.” 274 figures (and could of course be a president/VP/candidate themselves but don’t have to be). Time travel is allowed!643
Fruhlinger conceives of the project as a way of letting off steam for his readers: “You may find it depraved or insulting to great American statesmen; I consider it the only rational response to American political absurdity.”644 Although the invitation included all historical American presidential and VP candidates, inevitably much of the fanfiction starring present-day candidates contained political commentary, and encourages laughter at the expense of the characters involved. The short story Dressage imagines Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan engaging in heavy ponyplay (horse/rider roleplay):
A meaty neigh came out of the man before him, stark naked and on all fours. He wore a mohawk of a wig, a $20,000 polished leather saddle over his back, and a plug stuffed into his backside that gave him a beautiful arching tail.
This satirical erotica works on multiple levels: the homosexual coupling is at odds with Ryan and Romney’s political, religious and personal stances; the marginalized sexual practice puts them in a humiliating and potentially ridiculous position; while the expensive trappings of an elite sport suggests their privileged social statuses and lack of connection with the less privileged majority of America. The story makes this element of its political commentary more explicit when Mitt Romney cries out in ecstasy, “Screw me like we’ll screw the poor!” Sexual caricatures of politicians have, of course, existed since long before fanfiction emerged into the mainstream, but this particular set of stories turns the tropes and positioning of fanfiction to satirical purpose,
643 Josh Fruhlinger, “Submit Your Presidential Smut,” accessed March 31, 2014, http://hailtotheslash.com/submit. 644 Josh Fruhlinger, “Why Does This Exist and Who Is Responsible?,” accessed March 31, 2014, http://hailtotheslash.com/about. (Site discontinued as of March 19, 2015.) 275 turning the marginalized, immature, feminized, fannish gaze upon the agents of its marginalization.
Fandom thus offers several affective positions to occupy when performing criticism of a text: gleeful immaturity, as in the scurrilous “RPF for great justice,” or exploring anger with a beloved text within a community of friends, as in postcolonial fanfiction. It also suggests ways in which reading immaturely can also be reading critically. Occupying and performing an overinvested, immature reading can enable fanfiction writers to reveal the ways in which texts deny them, or to resist marginalizing discourses, whether this be misogynist pseudo-science or the media coverage of the US presidential election. These fannish ‘bad readings’ are formed in part in response to external constructions of fanfiction reading as immature, over-invested and excessive. In the second half of this chapter, I argue that Chaucer performs his own immature reading of Petrarch, in response to Petrarch’s portrayal of the vernacular as immature. I also explore the consequences of reading Chaucer as a ‘bad reader’ of the Italians for the academy, and particularly the humanistic foundation of literature pedagogy.
As I shall describe below, scholarship on Chaucer’s ‘Italian’ texts has been dominated by questions about the extent of Chaucer’s contact with Italian literature - how much had he read, which writers, and when? I examine the affective significance of these lines of questioning below; however, it seems to me more productive to follow Warren Ginsberg’s approach in his Chaucer’s Italian Traditions, which suggests that rather than searching for a partial version of our own Italian literary tradition in Chaucer, we should read the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde as evidence of Chaucer’s own interpretations of Italian texts, and of the questions he asked of them. Chaucer’s choices in the framing of the Clerk’s Prologue and Tale explicitly invite us to read it as Chaucer’s reading of Petrarch’s text, rather than Boccaccio’s, or the anonymous French translator. If the Clerk, then, is “the product of Chaucer’s intellectual encounter with Petrarch,”645 what might it do to the text if we imagine it as a bad encounter? The final part of my chapter argues that Chaucer’s response to Petrarch can be read in terms of the bad readerly encounters between Boccaccio and Petrarch, Petrarch and Chaucer. Moreover, I
645 Warren Ginsberg, Chaucer’s Italian Tradition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 244. 276 argue that “the Clerk’s Tale,” within its context in The Canterbury Tales, represents a resistant, willfully ‘naughty’ reading of Petrarch’s reading of Boccaccio, creating a series of youthful narrators who present resistant or subversive ‘immature’ narratives in response to Petrarch’s characterization of the vernacular as itself immature. The next section of this chapter, however, begins with the Griselda story as it appears in Petrarch, in order to lay the foundations for exploring Chaucer’s reading of the story.
6.4 Petrarch’s Griselda
One of his most popular Latin writings, Petrarch’s “Griselda” appears in a letter to Boccaccio, the original author of the story, with a short preface explaining why Petrarch has translated the tale, the last story in the Decameron, from Italian into Latin. This letter appears in the collection of the “Letters of Old Age”, Sen. XVII.3, but also was circulated separately. In this letter, Petrarch dismisses most of the Decameron in a few short lines: “If I were to say I have read it, I would be lying, since it is very big, having been written for the common herd and in prose, and I was too busy and time was short”. He frames his encounter with the Decameron as the encounter of maturity and immaturity, old age and extreme youth. Although like Petrarch with his Canzoniere, Boccaccio continued to edit and polish his vernacular works into his old age (he was now in his sixties), Petrarch distances the present Boccaccio from “the book you produced in our mother tongue long ago, I believe, as a young man.” This helps justify Petrarch’s treatment of the book; he leafs through it like a “hurried traveller who looks around from side to side without halting,” an image which resonates with the recurring images of haste and worry in this letter collection as the ageing Petrarch feels himself running out of time.646 Much of the Decameron he finds too racy, but Boccaccio’s intended audience and “your age at the time of writing excused it.”
Petrarch’s thus dismisses the Decameron as juvenalia, written in “nostro materno eloquio” - our mother tongue - and “rewrites Boccaccio as an adolescent who knew no better
646 See especially Sen. XVII.2. 277 than to write in Italian.”647 In Boccaccio’s authorial digression in the Decameron in which he describes his interactions with his female audience, Boccaccio writes that his devotion to women has been thought inappropriate for a man of his mature years;648 by rewriting him as young, Petrarch thus both excuses his error and agrees with his critics about the undesirability of choosing women as one’s primary readership. The implicit rebuke is especially strong as Petrarch obliquely refers to Boccaccio’s digression, “animadverti alicubi librum ipsum canum dentibus lacessitum, tuo tamen baculo egregie tuaque voce defensum” (“I noticed somewhere that the book itself had been attacked by dog’s teeth, but admirably defended by your walking stick and your yells”).649 Although Petrarch praises his friend’s vigour, Boccaccio’s defense of the vernacular and a female audience is reduced to incoherent noise, his critics’ attacks to the barking of dogs; when not complaining about things they do not approve of, Petrarch writes, the critics are the kind of men who are “otherwise speechless.” Here Petrarch not only suggests that the vernacular is unsuitable for ‘grown up’ writers, but seems to group the vernacular with the barking of dogs in the class of sounds that medieval grammarians, following Priscian, called the “vox inarticulata” - not merely baby-talk, but not language at all. Petrarch’s characterisation of the Decameron as young, foolish, and inappropriate for old men’s attention sets up a tension around his own interest in it that reflects his ambivalent relationship with immature reading - and the vernacular - throughout his letter collections.650
The principal change that Petrarch makes to Boccaccio’s story is in removing the tale from its dialogic frame, in which the young men and women of the Decameron tell each other stories and debate their meaning and moral afterwards. Petrarch replaces this with a set of overlapping narrative frames: the epistolary exchange between himself and Boccaccio, the author, within which he tells the story; the implied audience of elite, Latinate, male friends who
647 Leah Schwebel, “Redressing Griselda: Restoration through Translation in the Clerk’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 47, no. 3 (2013): 277–283. 648 “Alla mia età non sta bene l’andare omai dietro a queste cose, cioè a ragionar di donne o a compiacer loro.” ([Some have thought that it is] not good for a man of my age to engage in such pursuits as discussing the ways of women and providing for their pleasure.) Decameron, IV Giornata - Introduzione. 649 Bernardo, Sen. 650; Seniles XVII.3.2. 650 Amy Goodwin, “The Griselda Game,” The Chaucer Review 39 (2004): 52. 278 will read these letters when they are circulated more widely; and the friends from among this audience to whom Petrarch has told the story in person, and whose various reactions to the story Petrarch describes in the letter’s sequel (Sen. XVII.4). Petrarch explains his choice to translate a section of Boccaccio’s text as the natural result of his pleasure in the story, which was such that he wished to memorize it “so that I might repeat it to myself… whenever I wished, and to retell it, when the occasion arose, to my friends.”651 The translation is part of his dissemination effort, as he writes, aimed at “those who do not know our language.” However, he imagines the story in the context of his conversations with his friends, “chatting, as we do,” suggesting that he has in mind the all-male intellectual elite network that has been built up over the course of his letters.
Boccaccio depicts the audience of the Decameron as predominantly female, a position he takes up not necessarily to reflect the actual intended readership of the Decameron, but as part of his authorial persona. In the digression in Day Four in which Boccaccio puts himself on mock trial in order to defend his text from his detractors, Boccaccio depicts himself as an old man at the mercy of his women readers, who require him to write in Italian since they cannot read Latin; this is a humorous way of distancing himself from the frivolity of his choice in material, his refusal to write ‘serious’ literature (as Petrarch would have preferred). Petrarch’s audience, therefore, is the opposite of Boccaccio’s supposed audience of the unlatinate “common herd” and women. Petrarch seeks to restrict the readership rather than expand it, placing it within the “high walls of Latinity.”652 As Dinshaw points out, he also dehistoricizes the letter by divorcing it from temporal and geographical specificity, translating it into the transtemporal epistolary network of Latinate, male friends.653
651 Bernardo, Sen. 656; Sen. XVII, 3. 652 David Wallace, “Letters of Old Age: Love Between Men, Griselda, and Farewell to Letters (Rerum Senilium Libri),” in Petrarch - A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, ed. Victoria Kirkham and Armando Maggi (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 324. 653 Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 149. 279
Petrarch thus replaces Boccaccio’s frame tale, within which “competing interpretations reflect the [Griselda] story’s profound moral and aesthetic complexity,”654 with his own dialogic frame of male friends, with the ultimate effect of narrowing the range of possible meanings to a tale about a tyrant’s tests of his lower-born wife’s constancy. However, Petrarch reinforces this by rewriting Boccaccio’s story in a more narrowly allegorical mode. Petrarch’s moralizing epilogue reads “Griselda” for us; now more about Christian souls and less about women, the tale becomes an allegorical tale of constancy for heavenly reward rather than a story of domestic abuse: “Abunde ego constantibus viris ascripserim, quisquis is fuerit, qui pro Deo suo sine murmure patiatur quod pro suo mortali coniuge rusticana hec muliercula passa est” (“I would number among the men overflowing with constancy whoever would suffer without a murmur for his God what this little peasant woman suffered for her mortal husband”).655 Indeed, Petrarch explicitly refuses to allow that the story can have a moral for women about marriage, unlike most other compilations and translations of this story, which specifically direct it towards women as a model for wifely patience and obedience, even including it in marriage guides for women.656 Petrarch’s stated reason for refocusing the story’s ethical message is that Griselda’s behaviour as a wife “seems hardly imitable” for “the married women of our day”; Petrarch thus locates a potential female readership in a particular time and place, while the Christian (male) audience is transhistorical, even detached from history altogether. Dinshaw suggests that this is a reflection of the embodiedness of women in Petrarch’s ideology – they are physical bodies, tied to the physical world and mundane domesticity, and hence to geographical and temporal specificity.657 However, given the wider relationship between immaturity and historicity in Petrarch’s letters, I would argue for paying greater attention to Petrarch’s efforts to ‘mature’ the Griselda text, and how these relate to his view of the story’s relationship to history.
654 Robert R. Edwards, “‘The Sclaundre of Walter’: The Clerk’s Tale and the Problem of Hermeneutics,” in Mediaevalitas: Reading the Middle Ages, ed. Piero Boitani and Anna Torti (Perugia: D.S. Brewer, 1995), 30. 655 Sen. XVII.3.38; Jessica Harkins, “Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale and Boccaccio’s Decameron X.10,” The Chaucer Review 47, no. 3 (2013): 247–73; Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics. 656 Amy Goodwin, “The Griselda Story in France,” in Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, ed. Robert M. Correale (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002), 130–39. 657 Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 148–9. 280
Petrarch’s description of two responses to his translation in Sen. XVII, 4 suggest the ways in which his fraught relationship with the past emerges in his translation of “Griselda.” This letter forms part of Petrarch’s epistolary frame for “Griselda” along with the preface, with which he replaces the Decameron’s narrative frame (the audience of young men and women telling stories while in hiding from the plague) with a Latinate, male intellectual network. Sen XVII.4 frequently circulated with the Griselda letter, and Chaucer had very likely read it. 658 It should thus be considered part of the “Griselda” text to which Chaucer is responding in the Clerk’s Tale. The “Griselda” story has been influentially read as a story about the ethics and erotics of translation;659 however, reading the Petrarch translation within its own context in his letter collection allows us to see a different “Griselda” which, to use Warren Ginsberg’s metaphor from Chaucer’s Italian Tradition, casts different shadows upon the Clerk’s Tale. However, the epistolary framework within which Petrarch situates “Griselda” is not just the sequel letter, Sen. XVII.4, but also Fam. I.4, a little-known letter which I argue is the ‘mirror’ letter to the Griselda translation within Petrarch’s body of letters. The resonances between the two letters are in their shared concern with relationships with the past, and the uses to which stories are put in the present; placing the Clerk’s Tale in dialogue with this reading of Petrarch’s “Griselda” brings out the ways in which Chaucer responds to Petrarch’s hermeneutics on a wider scale.
658 J. Burke Severs, The Literary Relationships of Chaucer’s Clerkes Tale (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942), 41–58, 102. Severs argues, based on similarities and differences between Chaucer’s version and the sixty-five MSS he consulted that contain Petrarch’s “Griselda,” that Chaucer’s manuscript came from the families of manuscripts Severs designates ‘a’ or ‘b,’ both of which families tend to include the full text of Sen. XVII.3 (beginning “Librum tuum”) at the beginning of the tale, and the text of Sen. XVII.4 (beginning “Ursit amor”) at the end as if it were part of the same letter, with the closest approximation to Chaucer’s manuscript being Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Rome, MS. Vat. Lat. 1666. However, see Germaine Dempster, “Chaucer’s Manuscript of Petrarch’s Version of the Griselda Story, Modern Philology 41 (1943-44): 6-16 for the argument that Chaucer’s manuscript in fact more closely resembled Corpus Christi College, Cambridge MS 275 (henceforth CC2), based on the fragments of Petrarch’s letter that survive in glosses to the Hengwrt Chaucer manuscript. CC2 does not include “Ursit amor” but Severs is unclear on whether it includes “Librum tuum,” and I have not yet been able to check for myself. Meanwhile, Thomas Farrell (“The Griselda Story in Italy,” Sources and Analogues 103-106) prefers Peterhouse College MS 81, which includes the entire text of the Seniles. These differences of opinion about Chaucer’s translation text notwithstanding, Chaucer may have seen multiple manuscripts of the “Griselda” story. Given the frequency with which the Petrarchan prologue and epilogue from Sen. XVII.3 and 4 circulated with “Griselda,” and the extent with which Chaucer engages with Petrarch’s politics of translation (as I shall argue), I think it likely that Chaucer had seen them. 659 Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 132–55; Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy, 261–298. 281
The Charlemagne letter (Fam. I.4) and “Griselda” (Sen. I.3) are both embedded within epistolary mini-narratives about time and one’s relationship with the future, constructed by the letters by which they are surrounded in their place in the collections. Fam. I.2 is a consolation to a friend who is irritated at his own lack of success as a writer in which Petrarch reminds him, with gentle irony, that since most people only become famous when they die, to court glory is to seek death. Fam. I.3 is a meditation on the fleetingness of life, in which Petrarch speaks as a young man to an elderly mentor figure who has given him a “fatherly warning.” Petrarch assures him that he has not “been beguiled by the flowering of his age,” and that he is very mindful of death and how fast time flies: “Sentio me… imo vero properare, imo currere, imo… volare” (“indeed, I feel myself hastening, running, even flying”). 660 He assures his old friend that his devotion to study is not for earthly glory but for self-improvement, “quoniam paucis bene loqui, bene vivere” ( “less so that I might speak better, but so that I might be better”).661 Meanwhile, the letters preceding “Griselda” return to these themes: in Sen XVI.9, Petrarch revisits the trope from I.2 that nobody finds fame in their lifetime, wryly apologizes to a friend for praising him while he is still alive, while in Sen. XVII.2, Petrarch revisits the themes of Fam. I.3 - the value of study and of earthly fame - but this time he himself takes the role of the elderly mentor-figure writing to a younger friend and protégé. He vows to fill his remaining days with study: “michi vero… gressum ingeminare et nunc maxime, velut amissa parte lucis, sub occasum solis ad exitum properare” (“my intention is… to double my pace, especially now, and hasten to the goal at sunset as though I had lost part of the daylight”).662 These placement of these two clusters of letters, placed at the very beginning and very end of his collections, capture Petrarch’s reflections on a theme at two different moments of his life representing the continuities and changes in viewpoint, a dialogue between the young and old Petrarch.
660 Bernardo 22; Fam. I.3.9-12. 661 My translation; Fam. I.3.46-7. 662 Bernardo 647; Sen. XVII.2.8. 282
Sen. XVI.9: to Giovanni, Carthusian Fam. I.2: To Tommaso da Messina, ‘nobody Prior ‘nobody finds fame in his finds fame in his lifetime’; lifetime’;
Fam. I.3: to Raimondo Subirani (elderly attorney) Sen. XVII.2: to Giovanni Boccaccio on on the fleetingness of life; the fleetingness of life
Fam. I.4: to Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, travel Sen. XVII.3: to Giovanni Boccaccio, his along the Rhine, and the story about reading of the Decameron and Charlemagne. translation of “Griselda.”
Fam. I.5: to same; more travel along the Rhine; Sen. XVII.4: to same; more on Griselda, classical literature and culture in Germany, and the dangers of travel, of people and managing with interpreters. letters
When it is read within this epistolary mini-narrative, Petrarch’s description of his own hasty read through the Decameron “festini viatoris in morem, hinc atque hinc circumspiciens nec subsistens” (“like a hurried traveller who looks around from side to side without halting”)663 recalls Fam. I.4-5, the two letters that describe Petrarch’s long, wandering travels along the Rhine; it draws an implicit parallel with Petrarch’s youthful leisure, the sightseeing and enjoyment of pleasures for which he no longer has the time. It also suggests that the landscape of the Decameron is analogous to that of northeastern France and Germany through which Petrarch travels in these two letters. This is a vernacular landscape of commoners, full of light-hearted and occasionally erotic pleasures, more suitable to young
663 Sen. XVII.3.2.
283 people, such as the picturesque rituals that Petrarch observes in Fam. I.5: the women of Cologne participating in the festival of St John the Baptist, “girt with fragrant flowers… as they washed their white hands and arms in the water and conversed in attractive though foreign whispers.”664 The landscape of the Rhine is charged with foreign sexuality in both of Petrarch’s letters about his travels there; in his first letter, Fam. I.4, Petrarch retells a racy story he heard from a priest at the tomb of Charlemagne at Aix-la-Chapelle.665
In this story, the emperor Charlemagne falls in love with a “muliercula;”666 the diminutive lacks an equivalent in English but might equate to some diminutive terms like ‘girl’ (when used to refer to an adult woman) or even something closer to ‘common hussy,’ as the Latin diminutive suggests her inappropriate status for the attentions of a king. Charlemagne is enslaved to his passion for her (“made effeminate by her embraces”667) and completely neglects the ruling of his kingdom, so that his councillors begin to be anxious and hope for the end of the affair – or the woman’s death. But after she does indeed suddenly die, Charlemagne becomes sexually obsessed with her embalmed body, abandoning the world as his empire breaks down around him. “His madness was not slowed by death,” Petrarch says, “but was carried across (“translatus est”) into that gross and bloodless cadaver, embalmed with balsam and aromatics, encrusted with gems and wrapped in purple, which night and day he warmed in an embrace as wretched as (it was) lustful.”668 A local holy man prays for their deliverance, and receives a revelation that “the cause of the king’s madness lay under the tongue of the dead woman” (“sub extincte mulieris lingua furoris regii causam latere”).669
664 Bernardo, 29; “pars herbis odiferis incincte… candidas in gurgite manus ac brachia lavabant, nescio quid blandum peregrine murmure colloquentes” (Fam. I.5,18-19). 665 On the history of this fascinating legend, see Alison Cornish, “Embracing the Corpse: Necrophiliac Tendencies in Petrarch,” in Dead Lovers, Erotic Bonds, and the Study of Premodern Europe, ed. Basil Dufallo and Peggy McCracken (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 57–70; Susanne Hafner, “Charlemagne’s Unspeakable Sin,” Modern Language Studies 32, no. 2 (2002): 1–14. 666 Bernardo, 26 (Bernardo translates “muliercula” as “ordinary woman”); I.4, 53. 667 My translation; “blanditiis enervatum” (Fam. I.4, 54). 668 My translation; Fam. I.4, 65. 669 Fam. I.4, 91-2.
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Entering the king’s bedroom by a subterfuge, he removes a magic ring which he finds in the mouth of the dead woman. Charlemagne immediately becomes revolted by the corpse and has it removed – but transfers his unnatural affections to the priest, beginning to “love him, honor him, to embrace him daily more and more, and finally to do nothing unless it was approved by him. He also refused to be separated from him either night or day.”670 Finally, to avoid the emperor’s increasing and unwanted attentions, the priest throws the ring into a bog. Charlemagne then becomes strangely enamored of the bog, taking walks in it, so that “even the smell of the place came to please him very much.”671 At last he makes it the site of his capital, and commences the construction of his tomb there, and a cathedral to the Virgin Mary. This story turns out to be, therefore, a legend of the founding of Aix-la-Chapelle itself.672
This extraordinary story has additional structural parallels with “Griselda.” The story immediately before Boccaccio’s version (Decameron X.10) bears some striking resemblances to the story in Fam. I.4: a rich man named Torello goes to the Crusades, and his wife promises not to remarry until eight years have passed without word from him. Torello becomes a prisoner of war of Saladin in Alexandria, until Saladin recognizes him as the man who did him a good turn years before. After spending years in luxury in close friendship with Saladin, Torello suddenly realizes that his eight years are up and his wife may remarry. Saladin transports him by magic to Italy on the day of his wife’s wedding to a new husband, whom she has resisted as long as she could; dressed as an easterner, Torello attends the wedding feast unrecognized, but lets his wife know he is there by putting his ring into his mouth and spitting it into her cup, on the pretense of drinking a toast from a shared cup. When she drinks from it and finds the ring, she embraces him and they are reunited.
670 My translation; “Inde totus in antistitem conversus, illum amare, illum colere, illum in dies arctius amplecti, denique nichil nisi ex sententia illius agere, ab illo nec diebus nec noctibus avelli,” (Fam. I.4, 100-103). 671 My translation; “illius odore veluti suavissimo delectari,” (Fam. I.4, 110-11). 672 I.4 and I.5 suggest Petrarch’s complex relationship with the classicism of German culture: although I.4 suggests that Charlemagne is an unworthy role model for the preservation of the Roman past, I.5 favourably describes the remnants of classical antiquity in rustic, pastoral Germany.
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The story bears intriguing resemblances to the story of Charlemagne, including the foreign setting, the man bewitched away from his responsibilities by an inappropriate partner, the homoerotic overtones, and the ring that ends up in a woman’s mouth. There is even a curious parallel between the richly dressed corpse of the unknown woman, and the richly dressed lord who is supposed to be dead. These parallels, which make for an interesting commentary on X.9, suggest the possibility of a deeper engagement with the Decameron on Petrarch’s part than has been suggested; regardless, this is further evidence of intertextual links between the narrative frames within which “Griselda” is embedded.
There are clear narrative as well as thematic and structural parallels with “Griselda” here. In both stories a despot’s relationship with a lower-class woman becomes the focal point of the gross misuse of power; David Wallace has argued that Petrarch’s treatment of Walter’s despotism in his adaptation of “Griselda” must be read in the context of his own relationships of patronage with a number of Italian despots, King Robert of Sicily, who crowned him poet laureate, and even with the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV. Just as the letters preceding Sen. XVII.3 offer an older man’s reflections on Fam. I.2-3, Petrarch’s “Griselda” seems a more nuanced reflection of the themes in Petrarch’s version of the Charlemagne story, suggesting an evolution of Petrarch’s relationship to despotism, foreignness, and imperial power over the course of his life and diplomatic career - however, this subject, like Petrarch’s relationship to German classicism, is outside the scope of this chapter. The common theme I wish to focus on in “Griselda” and the Charlemagne story is reception – that is, the retelling of a story from the past, and the renegotiation of its symbolic weight and cultural meaning.
I have observed that Petrarch’s “Griselda” is commonly read now as an allegory for translation, following Carolyn Dinshaw’s influential reading, in which Griselda becomes like the text which can be erased and rewritten. Petrarch takes her tale from the common vernacular context and rewrites it in Latin just as Walter removes Griselda from her farm and peasant clothing and clothes her in rich dresses. However, the Charlemagne story’s emphasis is slightly different; although the subversive potential of women’s silence that appears in Griselda is here made disturbingly concrete (“the source of the king’s madness is under the dead woman’s tongue”), here it is the desire, not the woman, that can be so easily and problematically translated. Petrarch’s account is primarily interested not in the miracle of
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God’s intercession, but in the misruling king who is ruled by his own desire for a lower-class woman, a desire which the story demonstrates is ‘bad’ through the device of the magic ring, with its undertones of sorcery or demonic activity.
Petrarch’s role in the story’s transmission is also more ambiguous than in “Griselda.” Petrarch’s version in Fam. I.4 is the first extant Latin version of the tale, suggesting that it, too, may be a translation, or that he may be motivated to help the story reach a wider audience, as with the Griselda story, although in his letter he claims no such motivations. Although it seems likely that Petrarch spoke in Latin with the clergyman who told him the story, he adds that he later read a more accurate version (“accuratius”) “in modern writers” (“apud modernos scriptores”). According to Susanne Hafner’s 2002 article on history of this legend, the story originated in the ninth-century Vita of St. Giles, where the saint perceives and absolves Charlemagne of an unconfessed “unspeakable sin.” From this point two diverging traditions develop: in the French textual tradition, the sin is explained as incest with his sister, but in the thirteenth-century Middle High German rhyming chronicle of Jans Enikel, the Weltchronik, it becomes necrophilia. The detail of the magic ring first appears in this chronicle, so it seems clear that Petrarch encountered the German tradition, and not the French, which confirms his story of hearing it at Aix-la-Chapelles; however, the German tradition attested in the Weltchronik focuses on Charlemagne’s evil wife, named Fastrada, and her determination to keep her husband’s affection through sorcery. Petrarch’s version markedly changes the emphasis of the story, eliminating the agency and legitimacy of the woman and reducing the holy man’s importance, even to the extent of leaving out their names, but putting much more emphasis on the horrific and pitiable spectacle of the king’s unnatural desire. Moreover there is no evidence that Petrarch could speak or read Middle High German (he speaks in I.5 of the “foreign whispers” of the locals, and of using Latin to communicate with interpreters), which suggests that the version that Petrarch read was perhaps a Latin version of the Life of St Giles. Therefore Petrarch’s version is probably not a translation per se; certainly the movement from vernacular to Latin is not marked nearly so much as in his letter to Boccaccio on “Griselda.” Indeed, the whole feel of the two letters describing Petrarch’s trip along the Rhine is of the universal currency of Latinity.
However, both letters contain similar remarks on Petrarch’s unease over his responsibility for the story’s relationship to history. In I.4 he writes that he repeats the story
287 only “provided that you do not seek verification of it from me but, as they say, from those authors to whom it belongs.”673 In Sen. XVII.3, he writes that he has been clear on Boccaccio’s original authorship of the story so that “Quisquis ex me queret an hec vera sint, hoc est an historiam scripserim an fabulam, respondebo illud Crispi: ‘Fides penes auctorem… sit’” (“whoever asks me whether it is true, that is, whether I have written a history or just a tale, I shall reply with the words of Crispus, ‘Let the responsibility fall on the author’”).674 The similar wording in both of these letters suggests that in both cases Petrarch has a similar unease about the liminality of the stories, both which straddle the boundary between fabulae – tales – and historiae. Petrarch rarely writes fiction; his letters fall into a wide variety of genres, including some that call for narrative, such as satirical caricatures, anecdotes from daily life, reminiscences, and travel narratives. However, these are the only two letters in the whole corpus, to my knowledge, that flirt with fictionality.
Petrarch is self-conscious of these stories’ liminality. In I.4, he initially describes the story as a “fabellam,” an ambiguous word meaning ‘fable’ or ‘story’; at the point where the holy man appears, however, Petrarch interjects that his sources – here unambiguously “fabulae” – add to the story at this point “something which I neither believe could have happened nor really think I should recount.”675 He of course then goes on to recount it. Petrarch’s disclaimer here suggests his own tongue-in-cheek approach to the story, and it pre-empts any serious treatment of the story by its reader. Indeed, Petrarch’s version of this story has a light-hearted tone throughout, written with obvious intent to amuse and titillate. He lingers on the ludicrous and grotesque image of Charlemagne’s adoration of the dead woman, uses multiple diminutives to belittle the characters (the woman is “muliercula” and, later, “corpuscula”), and puns in his reflections on the nature of love (the king is both
673 Bernardo, 26; “Ita tamen ut rei fides non apud me queratur, sed, ut aiunt, penes autores maneat,” (Fam. I.4, 50-1). 674 Bernardo, 656; Sen. XVI.3.5. 675 Bernardo, 27; “quod ego nec fieri potuisse nec narrari debere arbitror,” (Fam. I.4, 82-3). It is unclear whether Petrarch’s hesitation here is over the blasphemous story of the magic ring, or the suggestion of homosexual attachment; I am inclined to think the former, because his interjection comes before the entire ring episode, rather than between the finding of the ring and the transferral of Charlemagne’s attachment to the priest, a placement which would make more narrative sense in the former case. He may, of course, refer to both.
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“amans” and “amens”). Petrarch finally dismisses his own letter’s contents: “being unable to fill my letter properly with serious things, I have crammed it as you can see with whatever was ready at hand.”676 Towards the end of his life, in Sen. XVII.3, Petrarch would likewise dismiss the Decameron’s contents for their levity and frivolous tone; this is consistent with the contrast between the young and old writer, who no longer has time for frivolities.
However, as I have suggested, even Petrarch’s translation of “Griselda,” which he singles out as more “serious” than the other stories of the Decameron, is, as Amy Goodwin puts it, “something of a flirtation with youth.”677 In the ‘sequel’ letter to “Griselda,” Sen. XVII, 4, he is more explicit about the connection he makes between fabulae and immaturity, and his uneasiness with taking on this genre at his age:
Ursit amor tui ut scriberem senex quod iuvenis vix scripsissem, nescio an res versa an fictas, que iam non historie sed fabelle sunt… fidem rerum penes auctorem, hoc est penes te, fore sim prefatus.
My love for you has prompted me, old as I am, to write what I would scarcely have written when I was young. Whether the contents are true or fictitious I know not, since they are no longer histories but just tales…. I prefaced that the guarantee would rest with the author, that is, with you.678
Again, Petrarch refuses to take responsibility for the truth value of the stories; this has added significance, however, as an introduction to two anecdotes of readerly reception of “Griselda,” which clarify that what is at stake here is an anxiety about affective connection to fictional characters.
676 Bernardo 28; “iustum epystole modum implere seriis non valens, eam, ut vides, obviis quibusque confercio,” (Fam. I.4, 124). 677 Goodwin, “The Griselda Game,” 53. 678 Bernardo 655; Sen. XVII.4.1.
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These two moments of readerly reception both take place within Petrarch’s ideal audience of a male, cosmopolitan, intellectual friendship network, one which, he is careful to note, he shares with Boccaccio; the first reader is “a Paduan friend of ours, a man of the highest intellect and broad knowledge,” the second a common friend from Verona, “a strong and clever man.”679 Both read Petrarch’s translation of the Griselda story, and Petrarch describes their reactions. The Paduan friend is so moved that he can barely get through the story for tears, a potentially unseemly reaction about which Petrarch appears hesitant: “Quod accidens quorsum alii traherent incertum habeo; ego in optimam partem traxi mitissimumque viri animum intellexi” (“I am uncertain how others would interpret this incident, but I interpreted it in the best light and understood the man’s heart was very sensitive”).680 The Veronese friend, in contrast, is totally unmoved, and explains at the end of the reading, “Ego etiam… flessem; nam et pie res et verba rebus accomodata fletum suadebant… nisi quod ficta omnia credidi et credo” (“I too would have wept, for the touching subject and the words fit for the subject prompted weeping… but I believed, and still do, that the whole thing was made up”).681 This reader’s reason for claiming that the story is all fiction is that he cannot believe that Griselda was a real woman: “For if it were true, where is the woman anywhere, whether Roman or of any nation who could match this Griselda?”682 To this, Petrarch, somewhat archly, remarks that “there are some who consider whatever is difficult for them, impossible for everyone”, and gives some examples from history of remarkable feats.683 However, he does not question the central assumption of the Veronese reader – that affective investment in a text and empathetic response is only appropriate when the text depicts real historical events – and seems to endorse it by adding his own reading of the story as a Christian allegory, which seems to direct the reader to detach themselves from the story’s
679 My translation; “Comunis amicus patavinus, vir altissimi ingenii multiplicisque notitie;” “amicus alter noster veronensis… ingenioso et amico viro” (Sen. XVII.4.3). 680 Bernardo, 669; Sen. XVII.4.2. 681 Bernardo, 669-70; Sen. XVII.4.3. 682 My translation; “Nam si vera essent, que usquam mulier vel romana vel cuiuslibet gentis hanc Griseldim equatura sit?” (Sen. XVII.4.3). 683 Bernardo, 670; “esse nonnullos qui, quecunque difficilia eis sint, impossibilia omnibus arbitrentur,” (Sen. XVII.4.4).
290 literal sense, just as his tone of amusement and distaste suggests detachment in the Charlemagne letter.
The Veronese reader is unmoved because he cannot empathize with Griselda, and therefore cannot believe that she ever existed, or vice versa. In other words, this letter suggests that Petrarch rejects the application of his hermeneutics of empathy to fictional works. To become overly emotionally invested in fictional characters is suspect in a grown man, such as the Paduan friend, or the elderly man Petrarch meets at the party in Fam. XXIV.2, who is so attached to an untrue (and hence, fictional) version of Cicero. Furthermore, to apply the same reading habits to fiction as to history would reveal the extent of the imaginative work necessary to love the dead.
Petrarch’s rejection of reading fictional works with empathy is, I argue, a product of the close relationship between Petrarch’s hermeneutics and its roots in Christian devotional literature that I discussed in Chapter 4. The anxiety shaping the discourse around imaginative meditation on the Gospels that was arising in Petrarch’s lifetime, with its association with powerful holy women like Catherine of Siena and Bridget of Sweden, permeates Petrarch’s writings. As I argued in previous chapters, the instructional apparatus growing around imaginative meditation placed heavy restrictions on the extent of the imaginative work that could be done around the Gospels, with an ever-increasing tendency towards supervision as religious men and women negotiated the problem of the truth value and authority of these imaginative spiritual ‘fan fictions’ of the Gospels.
The anxiety about the legitimacy of empathy as a reading practice that appears in the letters to classical authors haunts the Griselda letters and, perhaps even more, Fam. I.4. This letter is part of the epistolary sequence that opens the letter collection, introducing its themes, genres, and styles. Speaking the unspeakable taboos of necrophilia and homosexuality at this formative moment of the letter collection plays a crucial role in Petrarch’s effort to legitimate his own Christian and masculine identity while being an affective reader of pagan texts. Petrarch distances himself from a perverted, carnal version of love for the dead and for other men by displacing them onto queer, foreign, feminine, and medieval bodies. Charlemagne’s desire for the dead is generated not by its object but by magic (women’s magic, a ring under a woman’s tongue, women’s speech), and it is a labile,
291 uncontrolled desire that slips easily from one object to another, doubly damaging in a man with responsibility for a kingdom. Thus Charlemagne’s necrophilia forms a dark mirror image to Petrarch’s love for Laura and for dead authors, just as his homosexual love and his passion for an anonymous bog parody Petrarch’s loving friendships and his attachment to the land of Italy.
In dialogue with Fam. 4, therefore, the “Griselda” letters appear to reflect not only on the politics (sexual and otherwise) of translation, but of reading; they continue the discussion throughout Petrarch’s letters of who can love a text, why, and how. When considered in their own context in Rerum senilium libri, the two “Griselda” letters even more clearly introduce the final iteration of this theme of the relation between reader and text, reader and author. Sen. XVII,4 closes Petrarch’s correspondence with Boccaccio, and is the last letter in the collection save the “Letter to Posterity.”684 And yet, it is a strangely disjointed letter. The first half describes the two readers’ reactions to Boccaccio’s story of Griselda, but the second half abruptly switches to a rant about the interception and inspection of letters in their journey across a war-torn landscape by border guards and spies, who copy or confiscate anything that might be relevant to their masters. Petrarch complains that this delays and even prevents his correspondence, but seems most concerned by the potential of his writings to “ad horum nebulonum manus ineptissimas… perveniant” (“fall into the idiotic hands of those rascals”), an audience ill-suited to the refined food of Petrarch’s letters, “similes iis quorum ampla et preceps gula est et lenta digestion” (“like those who have a big gaping craw and a slow digestion”).685 The theme of bad reading unites the two halves of the letter, and lead into the “Letter to Posterity”. Petrarch’s letter-writing thus comes to a close with his fear of being misconstrued or misread - of bad readers.
Interpretations of the Griselda story have largely ignored, or not known what to make of, the significance of Petrarch’s own relationship(s) with an unnamed lower-class woman (about whom we know almost nothing except that she was the mother of his two
684 Wallace, “Letters of Old Age: Love Between Men, Griselda, and Farewell to Letters (Rerum Senilium Libri).” 685 Bernardo, 670; Sen. XVII.4.6-7.
292 children, who he later adopted as his legitimate heirs; ‘she’ may in fact be two different women). Elsewhere in his letters and poems, Petrarch links his own youthful, frivolous vernacular writings with his love for Laura, and, in the narrative of maturation he constructs around his writing and reading, his struggle to escape that love – aided by her death – is his struggle to move on to Classical language and literature, to Latin, history, and epic. His mistress remains both invisible and silent in these narratives, a haunting presence who disrupts this smooth chronology because we do not know when she was. Petrarch’s most well-known moments of self-reflection – his agonized conversation with Augustine in the Secretum, and the meditation on the top of Mt. Ventoux in Fam. IV.1 – both centre around the idea that his failure to detach himself from love of women is of a piece with his inability to grow in his writing and reading; neither Laura nor his mistress is named in these moments, but scholars have usually interpreted them as speaking of Laura (following the tendency to read Petrarch in the most friendly possible light). Laura’s noble, untouchable purity covers the squalid reality of a long-term sexual and financial relationship with an inappropriate woman.
Petrarch metaphorically strips the woman in the story he adapted from the “Ring of Fastrada” of almost all power, just as Walter literally strips Griselda, not only demoting her from wife to “muliercula” but taking away her name and her magical powers, so that the ring becomes an inexplicable magical artifact instead of the direct result of Fastrada’s plot to keep Charlemagne’s affections. Nonetheless, the figure of the inappropriate woman with a magic ring under her tongue is a subversively powerful figure. Just as feminist scholars have read Griselda’s silence as powerful, the dead woman’s silent speech – the ring in her mouth – has immense power. This power manifests in her potential as a figure of empathy; when the reader identifies with her, as with Griselda, the structure of the story comes toppling down. As an inappropriate woman she is, in other words, a potential site of identification for the bad reader, from which point the reader can destroy the story from the inside out.
The figure of the inappropriate woman reader is the character assumed by Fridgepunk when she reads Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam badly in “In Fandom, slashfic writers poll you.” It is no coincidence that the two “Griselda” letters, with their obsession with bad reading and desire to control their readership, look back anxiously to the letter that is perhaps the most vulnerable in Petrarch’s collections to this kind of bad reading. Both David Wallace
293 and Carolyn Dinshaw have seen Walter’s translations of Griselda as a representative of Petrarch’s authorial work; as an inappropriate woman who refuses to be Petrarch’s friend, I might – indeed I have – read Charlemagne allegorically as Petrarch, and thereby crudely misread Petrarch’s love for Laura as corpse-fucking, his friendship with Cicero as gay corpse-fucking. Bravecows’ rebellious slogan for postcolonial fanfiction, “they can leave us out, but they can’t keep us out! >:)”, offers a hermeneutics of rebellious self-insertion with which to attack texts that refuse to imagine being read by diverse readers. Although I do not suggest that Chaucer knew the Charlemagne necrophilia story, finding Griselda’s shadow in that nameless dead woman with the ring in her mouth suggests new questions to ask of Petrarch’s “Griselda,” questions Chaucer may have asked of it but that have been neglected in recent scholarship. In the next section I move from Petrarch’s reception of Boccaccio to Chaucer’s reception of Petrarch, but first examine the way Chaucer’s Italian influence has been described and framed by twentieth- and twenty-first century scholars, in order to reveal the affective webs that have sustained certain narratives about Petrarch and Chaucer, and suppressed others. Critical fanfiction and the model of ‘bad reading’ it offers suggest a way to approach Chaucer’s reading of Petrarch and at the same time take a critical stance to this affective historiography.
6.5 When Chaucer Met Petrarch
Chaucer’s exposure to Italian literary culture helped shape his later, most famous works (Boccaccio’s influence in particular is stamped upon Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales). This Italian element is one of the aspects which makes Chaucer stand out so from his contemporaries to modern readers; Chaucer’s opportunities for travel on diplomatic assignments, and the cosmopolitan, international circles in which he moved, enabled him to synthesize French and Italian literary innovations into a fresh, exciting voice in his own vernacular poetry.686 Petrarch’s fame was assured in Italy at the time of
686 For some important takes on Petrarch’s relationship with Italian literary culture, see Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy; Ginsberg, Chaucer’s Italian Tradition; William Rossiter, Chaucer and Petrarch (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2010); The
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Chaucer’s first visit in 1373, a few years before Petrarch’s death, but he was as yet little known outside of Italy and southern France. Furthermore, Petrarch’s fame as a vernacular poet would be secondary to his fame as a Latin writer, moralist, and scholar in Europe until the sixteenth century.687 However, what texts exactly Chaucer consulted, acquired, or heard of is a matter of great debate. I will summarize the most recent consensus for the reader’s convenience: Chaucer certainly knew parts of Dante’s La Commedia, Boccaccio’s Filostrato, Teseida, De casibus virorum illustrium, De mulieribus claris, and Warren Ginsberg has recently argued that he knew the Filocolo.688 He almost certainly knew the Decameron.689 Of Petrarch’s writings, Chaucer knew at least Petrarch’s Latin translation of the Griselda story from Boccaccio’s Decameron X.10, which circulated with its covering letter to Boccaccio as Liber Rerum Senilium (Letters of Old Age) XVII.3, and the letter following it, Sen. XVII.4. However, since the “Griselda” letters were circulated widely and separately from the other letters in the Senilium, we cannot assume that Chaucer knew Petrarch’s other letters, although he must have known of Petrarch as a letter writer, and he certainly had encountered some of Petrarch’s Italian lyrics, as he translates the sonnet “S’amor non è” (Canzoniere 135) in Troilus and Criseyde.
In discussing Chaucer’s transformation of these Italian influences in his work, it has been difficult for scholars to escape the periodizing narrative that structures the way Petrarch, Boccaccio and Chaucer are read today. C.S. Lewis’ influential reading of Chaucer’s reception of the Filostrato argues that he “medievalizes” Boccaccio’s text in Troilus and Criseyde, and more recent discussions of Chaucer’s reception of Petrarch,
Decameron and the Canterbury Tales: New Essays on an Old Question (London: Associated University Presses, 2000). 687 Nicholas Mann, “Petrarch and Humanism,” in Francesco Petrarca: Citizen of the World, ed. Aldo S. Bernardo (Albany; Padua: State University of New York Press, Editrice Antenore, 1980), 287–97. 688 Ginsberg, Chaucer’s Italian Tradition, 184; 190–239. 689 Schwebel, “Redressing Griselda: Restoration through Translation in the Clerk’s Tale.” Helen Cooper, “The Frame,” in Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, vol. 1 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002), 7–13.
295 including David Wallace and Elizabeth Gross, continue to use periodizing language to describe the terms of Chaucer’s reception. Among the principal points of interest in the scholarly debates surrounding Chaucer’s Italian influence is that despite using two other sources for his Griselda story – Boccaccio, and the anonymous French prose translation Le Livre Griseldis690 – Chaucer singles out “Fraunceys Petrak, the lauriat poete” as the “worthy clerk” (27) from whom the Clerk has learned his tale. Why does Chaucer single Petrarch out as his interlocutor of sorts, and never mention Boccaccio, but instead attribute the source for Troilus and Criseyde to the mysterious “Lollius”?691 And why is his treatment of Petrarch so oddly curt, dismissing his “heigh stile” as “a thyng impertinent,” and introducing him as “…a worthy clerk / As preved by his wordes and his werk. / He is now deed and nayled in his cheste”?692
This question forms a focal point for the more general debate over why, and how, Chaucer rejected many of the elements of the Italian writers that most distinguished them from their contemporaries, including their use of an elevated, almost saint-like female muse figure (such as Laura or Beatrice), and their elevation of themselves to the status of auctor. Elizabeth Gross’ careful unpacking of the Italian influence on Chaucer argues rather that Chaucer refuses to take on the mantle of canonical authority not because he did not recognize authorial subjectivity, but because of currents in the volatile English literary- political scene. The backlash against the Wycliffite elevation of the vernacular in Chaucer’s England would have made Dante’s self-canonization seem off-puttingly arrogant, and a similar move by Chaucer would seem unwise to say the least. Nonetheless, Gross cannot resist suggesting that Chaucer is in fact “more modern than the Italians” in that his lack of interest in claiming spiritual authority makes his poetry more “humanistic” in the true sense of the word.693 Lee Patterson and David Wallace resist more vehemently this periodizing
690 Goodwin, “The Griselda Story in France.” 691 Gross, “Chaucer’s Silent Italy.” 692 All references to Chaucer’s works are from Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). The Canterbury Tales (henceforth CT), IV.27-31. 693 Gross, “Chaucer’s Silent Italy,” 44.
296 narrative structuring the encounter of Chaucer with Italy: “No magic curtain,” Wallace writes, “separated ‘medieval’ London and Westminster from ‘Renaissance” Florence and Milan.”694 Only in the last twenty years has scholarship come around to the idea that it was not the limitations to his medieval mindset that led Chaucer to avoid the characteristics of Italian poetry that helped shape Renaissance literature (and that later English canonical writers like Shakespeare would adopt whole-heartedly). Rather, Chaucer consciously resisted adopting these tropes for a number of cultural, political, and artistic reasons (for Wallace, Chaucer’s primary reason is his resistance to Petrarch’s despotic leanings; for Patterson, his interest in the circularity of history).
Scholars’ answers over the last fifty-odd years to the question of why Chaucer names Petrarch as he does often reveal their unexamined assumptions about the affective dimension of Chaucer’s reading. The possibility that Chaucer may have disliked the texts he encountered in Italy, or found some elements of them interesting but others repellent, seems curiously unthinkable in scholarship up to the late 1980s. Drawing out the affective elements of scholarly responses to the relationship between Chaucer and Petrarch helps to suggests the role empathy has played in the reading of Chaucer’s Italian influences, and to unpack the implications for this affective historiography of reading Chaucer as a bad reader of Petrarch.
Introductions to Chaucer’s encounter with Italy tend to imagine Chaucer as feeling the reverence and awe appropriate to a medieval subject on viewing the Renaissance for the first time, although of course these are entirely retroactively imposed identities. Donald Howard’s Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World describes Chaucer’s first entry into Italy as a turning point in his life, appropriately occurring “at about New Year’s.”695 However, for Richard West, Chaucer emerges as a bad reader of his surroundings; West seems both bewildered and irritated that he “did… not set down in verse or prose his impressions of Florence and its presiding genius” or “write a travelogue of his visits to Italy,” although he comforts himself that “perhaps Chaucer knew that Boccaccio was already writing a life and
694 Hans Baron, “Petrarch: His Inner Struggles and the Humanistic Discovery of Man’s Nature,” in Florilegium Historiale: Essays Presented to Wallace K. Ferguson, ed. J.G. Rowe and W.H. Stockdale (Toronto: University of Toronto Press in association with the University of Western Ontario, 1971), 1. 695 Donald Roy Howard, Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World (New York: Dutton, 1987).
297 critical study of Dante.” “Nevertheless,” West concludes, somewhat disapprovingly, “it has to be said that Chaucer’s work shows little awareness of the wonders of the Italian Renaissance.”696
Both Howard and West see Chaucer’s border-crossing as decisive and epochal: Howard dwells extensively on the hardships of the crossing of the Alps, and his description seems to move beyond the merely geographical to the allegorical. On nearly reaching his destination “he would have looked back at the forbidding snow-capped promontories his party had just negotiated: they seemed distant and inscrutable… this hostile world could be tamed and inhabited only by human ingenuity, by the arts of civilization.”697 This description brings to mind Petrarch’s letter describing his ascent of Mt. Ventoux, and its place within Renaissance historiography. The ascent and descent of a mountain had come to symbolize the movement from one historical period into the next, as concrete and visual a boundary as one could wish; no wonder West finds Chaucer’s failure to write a travelogue of the Renaissance frustrating.
Although both Petrarch and Boccaccio were still living when Chaucer went to Italy, Chaucer almost certainly never met them. In scholarly narratives about Chaucer in Italy, Chaucer seems to stand in for the scholar-reader who yearns for a meeting with Petrarch and the possibility of friendship, and scholars visibly struggle at fate’s refusal of this meeting. William Rossiter lingers over the theory that Chaucer may have visited Italy more than once, the hypothetical first visit being in 1368 for his patron Prince Lionel’s wedding to a daughter of the great Milanese Visconti family (a wedding Petrarch probably attended698), but ultimately concludes the unlucky outcome of this wedding not only for Lionel (who died several months later) but “for scholars hoping for an encounter between the two literary figures.”699 The very title of the Rossiter’s chapter which covers this non-meeting, “Father of
696 Richard West, Chaucer 1340-1400: The Life and Times of the First English Poet (London: Constable, 1988), 144. 697 Howard, Chaucer, 176. 698 Wilkins, Life of Petrarch, 216. 699 Rossiter, Chaucer and Petrarch, 38.
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English Poetry, Father of Humanism: When Chaucer ‘met’ Petrarch,”700 uses the title formula popularized by When Harry Met Sally (1989); the intertextual resonance between Rossiter’s chapter and the classic romantic comedy of bad encounters and failed intimacies (the last of which takes place at a wedding) suggests a romance between Chaucer and Petrarch, and also positions Rossiter amid an audience, not of disinterested scholars of history, but of affective readers willing the protagonists to get together. Rossiter ultimately accepts that the historical evidence does not support their meeting, but ends with the more emotionally appealing argument that had the two writers met, it would no doubt have been as momentous for them as for him. “It is… unlikely that Petrarch, a prolific correspondent, would have neglected the visit of a young Englishman to his house in one of his epistles,”701 Rossiter writes, although there seems little reason to think that Petrarch would have mentioned a meeting with this particular fan among all his other admirers, or that he would have thought the letter worth preserving if he did. Pearsall argues that even if Chaucer had met Petrarch or Boccaccio,
It is extremely unlikely that he… would have been well received if he had gone out of his way to do so. They were old and crotchety, and very distinguished, and did not have much time for young travellers of no rank, and from England, of all places.702
In opposition to Pearsall, Rossiter writes, “Petrarch was not entirely hostile to the English in any case.” Rossiter in fact dedicates several paragraphs to arguing that Petrarch’s acknowledged dislike of the English (whom he once described as “the most timid among all the barbarian races”703) softened over his lifetime.704 An Englishman himself, Rossiter
700 Ibid., 35–68. 701 Ibid., 39. 702 Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 104. 703 Fam. XII.14.138, 242.
299 lingers on the obstacle that Chaucer’s Englishness presented to their friendship, and finds it imperative to dismiss it, despite the fact that he has already shown that they could not have met. The possibility of friendship between Petrarch and Chaucer is more important, ultimately, than its historical non-existence.
The possibility of a bad encounter between Chaucer and Petrarch, or Chaucer and Boccaccio, considerably occupies Donald Howard, whose work is a sharp contrast with that of Lee Patterson, his contemporary, in its almost Victorian sentimentality. He lingers on the possibility of whether Chaucer could have met Boccaccio, or even Petrarch, but ultimately rejects it, in a section worth quoting in full not only because of the affective way in which Howard imagines this meeting, but because Howard, like Pearsall, lingers on the same weaknesses of old age that so haunt Petrarch:
When we are young, our heroes stand up best at a distance. Nothing is more disappointing, when we are thirty, than watching our admired elders spill their food, wander off in their thoughts, display their aches and pains or their failing memory or drifting attention. We want our heroes to be heroes. When we meet them, we are more often than not puzzled, surprised, subtly let down – and sometimes brutally disillusioned. Suppose Chaucer had met Petrarch. Petrarch we know was in failing health, had lately suffered from scabies as well, was burdened by work and preoccupied by the nearness of death….705
Likewise, Chaucer’s possible meeting with Boccaccio seems doomed to failure:
704 Rossiter, Chaucer and Petrarch, 39. 705 Howard, Chaucer, 190–1.
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Chaucer was thirty; Boccaccio was sixty. Boccaccio was in ill health, suffered from obesity, had had a “dropsical” illness, intestinal and respiritory ailments, violent abdominal pains. From these illnessses he had partially recovered, but he was still going through stages of depression. Like Petrarch, he had had scabies a year before… it seems quite probable that if a meeting with Chaucer took place, it was not a success.706
In imagining Chaucer’s disappointment at the reduced figures of these old men, Howard slips into the first person, as if he is inhabiting the person of the young Chaucer, and experiencing his disappointment at this spectacle. He also invites the reader more explicitly to imagine themselves into this situation when he moves into the second person: “Unless you speak a foreign language very fluently, it’s dreadfully frustrating to try and carry on an intellectual conversation.”707 Ultimately, Howard decides that Chaucer probably did not meet Petrarch, because his descriptions of Petrarch in the Clerk’s Prologue suggest to Howard that this hero-worship remains intact (although I find this hard to credit); interestingly, however, Howard suggests that the lingering disappointment from such a bad encounter with Boccaccio may be behind Chaucer’s refusal to ever name him. Meetings in which our heroes do not measure up to our imaginations, Howard writes, “remain a source of discomfort that we manage to keep in the darker recesses of consciousness.” This seems a whimsical historical argument, but that Howard made it suggests the importance of this empathetic identification as a scholarly tool for his project, and, perhaps, the gravitational pull of Petrarch’s own concerns and hermeneutics on his treatment of Chaucer.
In imagining this meeting, Howard seems invested in casting Chaucer as young, impressionable, and liable to having his illusions shattered. Although thirty – Chaucer’s approximate age on his trip to Italy – may have seemed young to Howard (in his late fifties when he wrote this book), his description suggests a more exaggerated youthfulness. This extreme youth/age paradigm has a Petrarchan air, but Chaucer’s youth is perhaps also
706 Ibid., 191. 707 Ibid., 192.
301 accentuated by the medieval/Renaissance paradigm that casts the Middle Ages as immature to the mature Renaissance. We see Chaucer here as a fan whom Howard is as unwilling to expose to the rather cranky gazes of Petrarch and Boccaccio (to whom he might appear “overconfident or cheeky, or too Frenchified or courtly, or with spotty reading in the Classics”) as he is to expose Petrarch and Boccaccio to Chaucer’s. The illusions that could be shattered in this encounter seem to be as much Howard’s as Chaucer’s; how might the sharp, satirical pen of the English writer have treated a “fat, nervous, gloomy, sickly, uncommunicative” Boccaccio or Petrarch? Perhaps as sharply as Petrarch treated Cicero, when the scales fell from his eyes after reading his letters? Torn between empathizing with the older, established writer-scholar and the younger, hero-worshipping fan (who is himself an object of veneration to Howard), Howard draws his reader into empathizing with both sides, like the critics of RPF who find the possibility of a fan/idol meeting so distressing. Ultimately, Howard seems to agree with Olivia C. Breckinridge that “the last thing in the world we want is for the subjects of our subculture to look back at us.”708
The deep discomfort of this imagined bad encounter suggests that Howard, like West, feels a profound sense of identification with all three of these writers which is perhaps in conflict with Chaucer’s own cool reception of Boccaccio and Petrarch. The distress that emerges from this friction between loved ones is also evident in Zabarella’s letter to Petrarch, where he struggles to reconcile his love for both Petrarch and Cicero with Petrarch’s criticisms of Cicero. Chaucer’s aggressive, almost violent response to Petrarch (“he is now deed and nayled in his cheste”), and the changes to the Griselda story which suggest a precise and calculated rejection of many of Petrarch’s own changes, as I describe below, sit oddly with his praise and acknowledgement of Petrarch, “the lauriat poete… whos rethorike sweete / Enlumyned al Ytaille of poetrie” (31-33). Such a complex response does not fit comfortably into the models of affective relation which West and Howard bring to bear on Chaucer’s imagined reactions to Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Italy itself.
708 Breckinridge, “Holy Jesus Fuck, Or, ‘Good Call on the Stockings’: An Essay on Fandom and Celebrity Interactions.”
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6.6 “He is deed and nayled in his cheste.”
The scholarly attempts to read Chaucer as a fan of Petrarch often seem rather disconnected from Chaucer’s actual treatment of Petrarch in the Clerk’s Tale. Many of the in-depth studies of the two texts have observed Chaucer’s resistance to many of the changes Petrarch made to Boccaccio’s version of the Griselda story, a resistance which becomes more pointed and significant if Chaucer knew to some extent Boccaccio’s version of the story (as most scholars now agree he did709), because many of Chaucer’s adaptations undo Petrarch’s changes, so that he strikes a balance, as Robert R. Edwards argues, between “Boccaccian multiplicity and Petrarchan closure.”710 In contrast to Petrarch’s narrowly allegorical tale, Chaucer’s retelling of “Griselda” is polyvocal in the extreme. He restores the tale to a dialogic frame with an intratextual audience including men and women – one of whom, the Wife of Bath, is a notably bad reader of patriarchal texts, both in the sense that she makes silly mistakes, and in the sense that she resists the hegemonic meaning of texts to find alternate readings that support and sustain her own subjectivity.
In addition, multiple epilogues confuse the meaning of the story, offering multiple possible readings, none and all of which are authoritative. After repeating Petrarch’s moral, the Clerk then denies that the story is directed at wives but rather that “every wight, in his degree / Sholde be constant in adversitee / As was Grisilde.”711 The pious moral that the Clerk offers reiterates Petrarch’s reading of the tale as a Christian allegory, a lesson to suffer patiently the trials God gives us, “for oure beste is al his governaunce.”712 However, the “Lenvoy de Chaucer,” the second epilogue which the Clerk dedicates to the Wife of Bath, is an irreverent, satirical reading that advises wives not to act as Griselda did, but to “sharply
709 Harkins, “Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale and Boccaccio’s Decameron X.10”; John Finlayson, “Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale,” Studies in Philology 97 (2000): 255–75; Thomas J. Farrell, “Source or Hard Analogue? Decameron X, 10 and the Clerk’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 37 (2003): 346–64. 710 Edwards, “‘The Sclaundre of Walter’: The Clerk’s Tale and the Problem of Hermeneutics,” 30. 711 CT, IV (E) 1145-6. 712 CT, IV (E) 1181.
303 taak on yow the governaille,” and hen-peck their husbands into submission. The “Lenvoy” cheekily evokes Ovid’s advice to lovers, giving wives lessons in overbearing their husbands: “Folweth Ekko, that holdeth no silence, / But evere answereth at the countretaille.” The second half of the cheeky, funny song makes the sudden shift in tone from the sublime to the ridiculous even more extreme with its overburdened animal imagery, where the wife is at one moment a “greet camaille,” the next an “egre… tygre,” and the husband “a quaille.”713 The “Lenvoy” is a bad reading of Petrarch highly appropriate to the Wife of Bath, a parody – or a tribute – to her bad readings of patriarchal texts in her Prologue.
The “Lenvoy” is a pointed reversal of Petrarch’s intent, a refusal to read the Griselda story in the way Petrarch wants us to. The Clerk explicitly echoes his attribution to Petrarch in the prologue, twice noting his authorship of the Christian moral: “therfore Petrak writeth / This storie, which with heigh stile he enditeth.”714 The repetition of this phrase reminds us that the Clerk has already rejected Petrarch’s “heigh stile” at the beginning of the Tale at the Host’s request, who tells him in no uncertain terms to keep his tale appropriate for his audience, i.e., “pleyn”:
Telle us som murie thynge of aventures.
Youre termes, youre colours, and youre figures,
Keepe hem in stoor til so be ye endite
Heigh style, as whan that men to kynges write.715
The Clerk responds by ostentatiously skipping over (while, in a typical Chaucerian irony, describing what he is professing to leave out) Petrarch’s descriptive prologue to the Tale, which he dismisses as wordy and irrelevant:
713 CT, IV (E) 1189-90, 1196, 2000, 1206. 714 CT, IV (E) 1149, my emphasis. 715 CT, IV (E) 15-18.
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The which a long thynge were to devyse.
And trewely, as to my juggement,
Me thynketh it a thing impertinent.”716
Likewise, the Clerk conjures and then dismisses Petrarch’s authority at the prologue. The Clerk’s reference to a meeting between himself and Petrarch “at Padowe” has proved an irresistible temptation for later scholars to imagine a friendship between Chaucer and Petrarch, but the Clerk in fact does not linger on this at all, but continues briskly on, “He is now deed and nayled in his cheste.” The Clerk again echoes this dismissal at the beginning of the “Lenvoy”: “Grisilde is deed, and eek hire pacience, / And bothe atones buryed in Ytaille.”717 These two echoes serve to summon the authorial ghost of Petrarch at the end of the Tale, only to snub him. This bad reading refuses an affective connection with Petrarch, not only by reading against his moral, but by refusing the possibility of an affective connection lasting beyond death, the central principle of Petrarch’s historical hermeneutics.
The choice of the Clerk as narrator for “Griselda” also gains extra significance when we see his Tale as willful bad reading. In the Clerk, Chaucer chooses a narrator who is in many ways identified as immature. Donald Howard sees the Clerk as the counterpart of the starry-eyed, youthful Chaucer who does not quite meet Petrarch in Italy, “a young member of the international world of the medieval universities.”718 Chaucerian scholars often react with sympathy to the Clerk, seeing him as a kindred spirit,719 but the significance of his particular appeal to the graduate student as a fellow as-yet-’unbeneficed’ scholar has been overlooked. The Clerk is one of Chaucer’s immature narrators, akin in some ways to
716 CT, IV (E) 42-54. 717 CT, IV (E) 1177-8. 718 Howard, Chaucer, 189. 719 Trigg, Congenial Souls, 8.
305 the Squire. He is not necessarily physically young, but someone in an intermediary stage of their university career, a graduate student. Not poor and hollow-cheeked, neither fully committed to the church nor the heteronormative secular life (“he hadde geten hym yet no benefice / Ne was so worldly for to have office”), devoted entirely to his studies (“gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche”), and he has books in his bed instead of, as it might be, a wife.720 In the Clerk’s Prologue, the Host draws attention to the Clerk’s occupation of a transitional stage, somewhere between immaturity and maturity, so that he looks “coy and stille” like “a mayde… newe spoused.”721 Chaucer’s choice of an immature narrator in the Clerk, therefore, is highly suggestive when read within the late medieval theoretical framework of immaturity and reading that I have been exploring. The Clerk, a junior member of the scholastic set of England that Petrarch so despised, seems designed to be a reader whose friendship he would not welcome, one bound to be a bad reader of Petrarch, which is confirmed when he allies himself with the Wife of Bath at the end of his Tale.
The Clerk’s choice as translator of the Griselda story implicitly resists Petrarch’s stance on the immature language of the vernacular in his Griselda letters, which is representative of his position elsewhere in his letters, and of his general denigration of his own youthful, vernacular love poetry in his later life. However, the most marked change that the Clerk makes to Petrarch’s version – the removal-by-praeteritio of the extensive landscape description at the tale’s beginning, which the Clerk summarizes and dismisses as “a thyng impertinent” – also serves to mark the Clerk as a bad reader of Petrarch in a way peculiar to the mythos that has built up around Petrarch in the last few hundred years. Although Chaucer could not have known the significance of mountains in later historiography of the Renaissance, drawing attention to his moment of resistance to this narrative serves to reveal the importance of a consistent trope in Chaucer scholarship.
Mountains, as I have suggested in the previous two chapters, take up considerable imaginative space in Petrarch scholarship; Petrarch’s description of his ascent of Mt Ventoux in Fam. IV.1 is a seminal text for the narrative of the rise of the Renaissance. Petrarch’s
720 Chaucer, CT, I (A) 291–294, 308. 721 Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, IV (E) 2–3.
306 allegorical reading of his own and his brother’s climbs as reflections of their respective spiritual journeys has proved highly seductive to scholars’ allegorical reading, so that Petrarch’s mountain climb becomes the journey to Renaissance individualism.722 Donald Howard’s description of Chaucer’s entry into Italy lingers on his crossing of the Alps in a passage that, as David Wallace points out, illustrates the way in which Howard imagines England and Italy as occupying different temporal spaces. However, the ease with which Wallace invests this passage with allegorical weight also recalls the scholarly readings of Petrarch’s ascent. Howard draws an evocative picture of the cold, the hardships, the physical discomfort, the thin air and sharp rocks, before at last the journey over the mountain range is over:
So, as he arrived in the north of Italy at about New Year’s, Chaucer must have felt a kind of joy he had scarcely known before. The travail at a certain point was behind him. Descending slowly through the foothills of Savoy, the party at last came down into temperate lowlands where there was no snow, where the days would have seemed longer than in England.723
Petrarch’s richly symbolic treatment of his own ascent of Ventoux invites similarly allegorical readings of Chaucer’s Alpine crossing into Italy; however, the way in which Chaucer’s crossing of the Alps becomes not merely a border crossing but a moment of personal transition points to the ways in which Petrarch’s ascent of Mt Ventoux tries to be a border crossing between his old life and new, and yet the symbolic role Petrarch assigns Ventoux is undermined, as Ascoli points out, by the fact that he must come down the same mountain he ascended.724
722 Ascoli, “Petrarch’s Middle Age: Memory, Imagination, History, and the ‘Ascent of Mount Ventoux.’” 723 Howard, Chaucer, 175. 724 Ascoli, “Petrarch’s Middle Age: Memory, Imagination, History, and the ‘Ascent of Mount Ventoux,’” 28.
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Just as Petrarch’s own individualism and his sense of the distance between past and present are easily read into his ascent of the mountain, so scholars see Chaucer’s Italian journey as an important factor in his own historicism. Rossiter credits Petrarch (citing Thomas Greene’s ubiquitous account of Petrarch’s sense of “the past as past”) with Chaucer’s “new heightened attention toward past, present, and future,” and his sense of “the pastness of antiquity.”725 Rossiter sees Chaucer as heir to the historicism of rupture that Petrarch is supposed to have given the Renaissance, rather than to the (supposed) medieval ahistoricism. With this contextual frame to the way we read Chaucer today, the Clerk’s dismissal of Petrarch’s mountains seems irresistibly apt. Petrarch’s Griselda story opens with a mountain, “mons unus altissimus,” whose geographical and historical features he describes before he ‘pans’ down to its base, at which is the territory that Walter governs. The Clerk acknowledges the existence of “a prohemye” in which Petrarch describes “Apennyn, the hilles hye, / That been the boundes of West Lumbardye, / And of Mount Vesulus in special,” but loses patience and dismisses the whole thing as too much “heigh stile.”726 Just as Chaucer, to West’s dismay, proves a bad reader of Renaissance Italy, and fails to recognize correctly the importance of the moment at which he visited Florence and to note down his impressions, the Clerk fails to recognize the central importance of mountains to Petrarch’s imaginative legacy.
6.7 Chaucer and the dead
I argue that we can productively read the Prologue of the Clerk’s Tale as an exercise in this fannish hermeneutics of rebellion. Chaucer welcomes Petrarch into his text and then rejects him, transforms the Griselda story lovingly but in a way that rebels against Petrarch’s instructions on how his text should be read. It is, in other words, a ‘bad reading’ of Petrarch. Moreover, it also pointedly refuses to cultivate the same coercive relationship with its
725 Morton Bloomfield, “Chaucer’s Sense of History,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 51 (1952): 304; quoted in Rossiter, Chaucer and Petrarch, 54. 726 Chaucer, CT, IV (E) 41–54.
308 readers; it refuses the authorial despotism of Petrarch that David Wallace observes,727 embracing instead a pose of childish play.
As the introduction to this chapter described, in the last hundred years the professionalization and specialization of Chaucer scholarship has transformed, but not erased, the emphasis on friendship and community that characterized it in the nineteenth century. If anything, Chaucerians are ever-more invested in imagining and maintaining a friendly community as they attempt to maintain their precarious position on the priority ladder of arts funding and university job allocations.728 The Chaucerian friendship network cultivates a sense of professional identity and purpose among isolated scholars who may be the only medievalist in their institution. The benefits of imagining such a community of friends are obvious; but to read Chaucer as part of such a transhistorical community of Chaucer friends may be closer to Petrarch’s hermeneutics than Chaucer’s.
Chaucer’s rejection of Petrarch because he is “deed” is a rejection not merely of Petrarch as a living, active interlocutor and auctor, but of a hermeneutics that cultivates affective connections with the dead. This hermeneutic also sharply distinguishes between fictional characters and the textual selves that dead people have left behind them. I do not argue that Chaucer thought of this hermeneutics in those terms, or that he was as aware as Petrarch of its role in the imaginative devotional tradition. However, the immediate epistolary frame of Petrarch’s “Griselda” clearly lays out Petrarch’s sense of historical figures (or rather, their textual selves) as living sources of attachment, and fictional characters as of interest only to immature readers. It is to this attitude that Chaucer responds by re-appropriating “Griselda” for his vernacular work of fabulae, by having the Wife of Bath (both a bad reader and an inappropriate woman whose desire, like Charlemagne’s, skips
727 Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy, 262. 728 This discourse of friendship and loving community as an alternative/parallel to academia in Chaucer scholarship is particularly visible in the recent work of L. O. Aranye Fradenburg, Staying Alive: A Survival Manual for the Liberal Arts (2013), the bloggers and commenters on the blog In The Medieval Middle (which is not exclusively Chaucerian but is highly frequented by Chaucer scholars), and the conference sessions of the BABEL Working Group. See, e.g., Eileen Joy and Anna Klosowska, “Report from BABEL: Friendship as a Way of Life,” accessed January 16, 2015, http://punctumbooks.com/blog/report-from-babel-friendship-as-a-way-of-life/.
309 scandalously from object to object) become a principal interlocutor of the Clerk, and by opening up the story to a polyvocalic audience.
Chaucer’s bad reading of Petrarch is indicative of his general lack of interest either in relationships between the living and dead, or in crafting his text into a representative or extension of himself with whom his future readers may have an affective relationship. For all the intense affective connections that Trigg finds in later readers of Chaucer, she observes that for Chaucer’s immediate posterity, “Chaucer is not only dead, but markedly absent from his own work.”729 Chaucer appears in his own work as a withdrawn, curious figure who looks “evere upon the ground,” a gaze that does not encourage reciprocity. His self- deprecating discussion of himself as a round-bellied “popet” whose first attempt at storytelling (Sir Thopas) the Host cuts short with “thy drasty rhymyng is nat worth a toord!”730 encourages us to read Chaucer with the kind of humorous distance that Petrarch cultivates in Fam. I.4. Chaucer pokes fun at himself as auctor and refuses the self- commentary and self-canonization that was a hallmark of the Italian tradition.731 Indeed, his final retraction of all his works in the Parson’s Tale, which has caused great consternation among Chaucerians since, is the ultimate refusal of friendship with his readers, as Trigg writes, “if we hear Chaucer finally stepping aside from his fictional voices to speak to us more directly, it is only to hear him, in this final moment, saying good-bye.”732 By disowning his works, Chaucer refuses to grant them authenticity as an extension of himself, leaving his readers with nobody to relate to.
As I have suggested, the self-elevation to the rank of auctor in which Petrarch and Dante particularly indulge is inseparable from their hermeneutics of empathy that allows them to read classical Latin authors with intimacy and friendship, as part of a transhistorical network of like-minded friends. Chaucer, although he makes use of classical literature, does
729 Trigg, Congenial Souls, 95. 730 Chaucer, CT, VII 696, 701, 930. 731 Gross, “Chaucer’s Silent Italy,” 32–5. 732 Trigg, Congenial Souls, 67.
310 not approach classical texts in the same way as the Italian authors. As Lee Patterson has argued, Chaucer uses classicism as a way to escape his immediate social context and the tropes of romance literature, but “never pretends to recover antiquity as a self-coherent and autonomous cultural period.”733 However, it is also by no means the ‘naïve’ classicism with which so many have accused the Middle Ages (the combination of classical tropes or tags with anachronistic ideas, with no sense of historical context). Although Patterson sees Chaucer’s adaptation of the Italian authors as a “revisionary, even modernist initiative,” what ultimately results is a very different relationship with the past from Petrarch and the other Italians:
Rather than recuperate antiquity in all its otherness, an otherness that could then provide the terms by which a modern self could define itself, Chaucer was persistently aware of the affiliations that bound together past and present into a seamless and finally inescapable web.734
Chaucer does not abandon his ‘medieval ahistoricism,’ but treats history as an imaginary world comprised of textual artifacts, without ontological difference from fiction, but with a tongue-in-cheek awareness. Indeed, history is elusive in Chaucer’s writing, easily substituted with fiction; the Pardoner’s Prologue gives a disturbing vision of the tenuous connection between past and present of the false relics he carries, whose sanctity lies only in the eyes of their beholders: “Relikes been they, as wenen they echoon.”735
733 Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 21–2; For an alternative viewpoint, see A. J. Minnis, Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity (Cambridge: Brewer, 1982); Winthrop Wetherbee, Chaucer and the Poets: An Essay on Troilus and Criseyde (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984). 734 Lee Patterson, “‘What Man Artow?’: Authorial Self-Definition in The Tale of Sir Thopas and The Tale of Melibee,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 11 (1989): 119–20. 735 Chaucer, CT, VI (C) 349.
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Chaucer’s historical hermeneutics refuse an authentic connection between Chaucer and his readers across time. His appearances in his other texts further portray him as a figure more attached to books than people, an idea whose significance George Edmondson has explored in The Neighboring Text. In The House of Fame, the eagle mocks the narrator because “of thy verray neyghebores, / That dwellen almost at thy dores, / Thou herest neither that ne this,” but instead “domb as any stoon…/ Thou sittest at another boke.”736 Edmondson riffs on these lines to draw out the idea of the book as neighbour. However, Edmondson neglects the intensely practical importance of the distinction that Chaucer does not make – but Petrarch does – between the genre of book one has as one’s neighbour. Chaucer’s are largely books of fiction or “romaunce,” and that makes all the difference between him and Petrarch. His books do not lead outward, to a transhistorical intellectual network of scholars past and present, but within, to dreams and visions. Petrarch’s ideological system substitutes for the oral networks of a neighbourhood an epistolary network that reaches across time and geographical space; within such an ideology, Chaucer’s books would not make good neighbours, nor would they become good friends.
Chaucer’s historical hermeneutics is reflected in Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes in which he joins the pilgrims on their way back from Canterbury, inserting himself into Chaucer’s narrative in order to tell his own tale. At the beginning of Lydgate’s work, the pilgrims are “pursuing their own fictional lives independently of the Chaucerian presence that first gave them ‘life.’”737 Lydgate steps into Chaucer’s shoes to become the new narrator, introducing his topic with an enormous sentence of sixty-five lines, so overwhelmed and overwhelming at being in the work of Chaucer, the “floure of Poetës / thorghout al breteyne,” that it fails to close all its subclauses. His prolixity resembles the Squire’s when he opens multiple avenues of narrative at the beginning of his tale that he cannot possibly bring to conclusion; for this and other reasons, Lydgate has attracted the scorn of modern scholars. Lydgate’s immature reading – his self-insertion into The Canterbury Tales – is coupled with his immature writing, over-impassioned, uncontrolled. But whatever reverence Lydgate has for Chaucer,
736 Chaucer, House of Fame, II.649–657. 737 Trigg, Congenial Souls, 95.
312 he enters his text unsupervised, and Chaucer’s presence is neither necessary or desirable. The affective connection, in other words, is not between Lydgate and Chaucer but between Lydgate and the world of the Canterbury Tales. In this way Lydgate’s text, out of all the other medieval transformative texts I have examined in this thesis, perhaps most resembles modern fanfiction. It also is, I would argue, precisely the reading Chaucer’s work invites.
Chaucer’s own self-insertion into his text, and his tales of “Sir Thopas” and “Melibee,” suggest that he, too, shares certain characteristics of juvenile storytelling with the Squire. They also both share a certain childishness. Both are cut off from finishing their tale by other pilgrims. The Squire’s tale draws indiscriminately on romance tropes, and he is unable to keep them under control or bring them to a conclusion, marking him as an immature storyteller, while his interest in gadgets and toys suggests, as Patricia Ingham argues, an interest in exploring childish affect as a way of engaging with the world.738 Chaucer himself is toylike, a cuddly “popet,” and vaguely otherworldly, “elvyssh” (elves, as Patterson points out, were linked with children in medieval folklore, but also were temporally “other,” childlike but extremely long-lived). Geffrey’s two tales, “Sir Thopas” and “Melibee,” are both, as Patterson has argued, “immature discourses”; the diminutive Thopas, who shares many physical attributes conventionally used of women and children, stars in what modern critics have described as a “childish fantasy,” a “miniature” and a “nursery rhyme,” while Melibee is a “a pedagogic discourse that features as its narrative object an absent child.”739 Patterson also points out the thematic importance of children to the Canterbury Tales as a whole, arguing that Chaucer, in his attempt to forge a new poetic identity for himself apart from the Italians but also from the English courtly context which constrained many of his contemporaries, resolved “to adopt the identity of another socially marginalized and temporally anomalous figure: the child – but a child with a difference.”740
738 Patricia Clare Ingham, “Little Nothings: The Squire’s Tale and the Ambition of Gadgets,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 31 (2009): 53–80. 739 Patterson, “‘What Man Artow?’: Authorial Self-Definition in The Tale of Sir Thopas and The Tale of Melibee,” 163, 129, 152. 740 Ibid., 135.
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Chaucer’s investment in the figure of the child is seductive; as Patterson points out, it maps on so well to his role as the “father of English poetry” given him by Dryden.741 However, as I have shown, such a label is alien to Chaucer’s ironic and self-deprecating authorial persona. I maintain with Patterson that Chaucer’s childishness is a persona that enables a certain kind of cultural and social resistance; I see the childish vernacular and the sorts of transtemporal contact it invites as the locus of this resistance.
6.8 Conclusion
What might it mean, then, to read Chaucer in a Chaucerian rather than Petrarchan mode? The two most performative ‘immature readings’ in the Tales – the Squire’s Tale and the Tale of Sir Thopas – both are unfinished, which can suggest the infertility of their tellers, their inability to participate in a hetero-patriarchal society. However, it can also invite the queer creativity of fandom, an invitation to readers to “fill the gaps” – as does the incomplete Canterbury Tales. Like the narrative failures that fanfiction writers respond to in television shows, the narrative gaps in Chaucer’s work invite active reading. These gaps form part of the participatory, oral culture of minstrel performance, to which “obsolete and disregarded tradition” Patterson argues that Sir Thopas returns.
It is not coincidental that “Griselda,” although not unfinished, is a story whose affective gaps have invited much readerly commentary that resists the auctor-God figure of Walter. The marginal notes on one fourteenth-century manuscript of the Boccaccio version fill Griselda’s silence after Walter’s final revelation: “Go piss on your hand, Gualtieri! Who’ll give me back twelve years? The gallows?”742 The polyvocalic response within the Canterbury Tales’ frame narrative to this story opens the way for further commentary and
741 Ibid., 175. 742 “Pisciarti in mano Gualtieri! chi mi ristora di dodici anni? le forche?” Richard Firth Green, “Why Marquis Walter Treats His Wife So Badly,” The Chaucer Review 47, no. 1 (2012): 49; K. P Clarke, “Reading/writing Griselda: A Fourteenth-Century Response (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Plut. 42,1),” in On Allegory: Some Medieval Aspects and Approaches, ed. Mary; Clarke, Kenneth Patrick; Nievergelt, Marco Carr (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), 183–208.
314 discussion on “Griselda”, as well as empathetic connection with this character, whether fictional or not, the way Petrarch’s frame does not.
The tools with which Chaucer resists Petrarchan hermeneutics in his ‘bad reading’ of “Griselda” are translation, transformation, misattribution, and appropriation. The Canterbury Tales invites ‘bad reading’ that is queer, medieval, immature - exuberant reading that approaches fiction and history alike as always unfinished, always open to imaginative supplementation and elaboration. Understanding the significance of Chaucer’s performance of childish authorship within the symbolic framework imposed by Petrarch and Petrarchist narratives helps also open up a space to imagine reclaiming ‘bad reading’ of Chaucer in the classroom as a historically appropriate and valid hermeneutic. Medieval literature could thus destabilize, rather than enforce, the narrative of modern western subject formation in the university, and embrace polyvocality and diversity. The danger is that in aligning ahistorical reading with medieval literature, we reinscribe the narrative of the maturation of reading with the Renaissance. However, an examination of Chaucerian hermeneutics offers the chance to denaturalize this narrative instead.
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7 Conclusion
I have mapped out the broad contours of a way of reading in the later Middle Ages that was often criticized as immature, but was explored and encouraged within mystical schools of religious thought, and within the larger virtual community of loosely connected lay religious, anchorites, monks, nuns, and hermits. Using conceptual frameworks from modern fanfiction, I have suggested that immaturity was not simply a convenient label used to dismiss these affective hermeneutics, but was fundamental to their powerful approach to temporality. My early chapters discussed two laypeople who lived in the margins of this virtual community, between the secular and religious worlds. These two authors, who are rarely discussed together, inhabited very different intellectual and cultural spheres; however, comparison between them suggests the extent to which they shared an intellectual context and a set of anxieties, questions, and desires surrounding their approaches to texts. Francesco Petrarch and Margery Kempe both resisted, for different reasons, entering into the authority of a monastic institution; both drew on a childish, imaginative, affective hermeneutics, and the texts they produced explore the ways in which they developed this hermeneutics as a mode of spiritual development and of understanding the past. The Book of Margery Kempe describes the resistance, social stigma, and shame Kempe suffers on account of the intense bodily practices that she associates with her hermeneutics; Petrarch’s writings show instead a series of rhetorical strategies and literary moves to distance himself from a shameful hermeneutics while continually returning to images of childishness.
Devotional writings circulating in late medieval England and Italy, including the Meditationes vite Christi of Pseudo-Bonaventure, Bernard of Clairvaux’s exegeses of the Song of Songs, and the De institutione inclusarum of Aelred of Rievaulx, suggested imaginative meditation on the life of Christ as a way to develop spiritually. The key to imaginative meditation was empathy or identification with (usually) Christ or Mary, and writings on the life of Christ geared towards this kind of meditation used intensely affective language to enable this empathy. Previous scholarship on affective piety has focused on the
316 gendering of various behaviours and hermeneutics as feminine, and the ways in this related to its use by real women. However, this affectivity is also emphatically coded as childish, suitable for immature readers; these readers may be actual novices or beginners in spiritual devotion, but this language also enables readers of all spiritual grades to take on a subject position of simplicity and humility to aid in their spiritual progress. Fanfiction also emphasizes affect as a point of connection between reader and fictional character, enabling identification that sometimes tends towards literal self-insertion into the world of the text. The figure of the Mary Sue - the wish-fulfilling figure of the author who enters a beloved text - helps to highlight the ways in which affective meditation also maintains a delicate balance between empathy and invasion. The Mary Sue thus becomes an anthropomorphized figure of a ‘fannish hermeneutics,’ which includes a focus on moments of high emotion in a text, active reading that ‘fills the gaps’ in a text, and happens in reading communities that are coded as immature and feminine and are excluded from the centers of interpretive authority; at the heart of these fannish hermeneutics is a tension between the power invested in imaginative identification, and anxiety over the legitimacy of the intimacies with characters or historical figures gained from these reading practices.
Through the thirteenth and fourteenth century, this mode of devotional understanding declined in prestige, particularly in England, where it became entangled with the struggle over textual authority in the church that followed John Wyclif’s translation of the Bible into English, and culminated in Thomas Arundel’s Constitutions which forbade publication of unauthorized English devotional writings. Imaginative meditation involved a certain amount of independence to elaborate on biblical passages, an independence which did not sit well in this political atmosphere. Nicholas Love’s translation of the Meditationes vite Christi clearly shows this impulse towards greater control and supervision in imaginative meditation writing. Love emphasizes the appropriateness of his subject for “symple creatures þe whiche as childryn hauen nede to be fedde with mylke of lyȝte doctrine,”743 and adapts his material to insert his own guiding presence alongside the reader who imagines herself into the scenes of the Passion.
743 Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Full Critical Edition, 10.14–15; 10.23, 27, 35; 10.26–7.
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Here the language of childishness becomes about authority and supervision, while the immature reader becomes a figure who threatens disruption to the text through their misunderstanding, ignorance, and invasion. The personification of fannish reading in the figure of a teenage girl (the Mary Sue) shows this perceived threat to the integrity of texts; censures of the Mary Sue, particularly the popular webcomic “Ensign Sue Must Die!”, represent her as a “dangerous force threatening the universe”744 where the ‘universe’ is the fictional world of Star Trek, constituted by its texts. The Book of Margery Kempe also shows the disruptive potential of immature reading. Children appear in the Book both as mnemonic keys to the humanity of Christ and as symbols of Kempe’s special empathy with Mary as mother and Christ as infant; however, they also suggest the immaturity of Kempe’s own interpretive behaviours, including her loud public weeping, and also the non-linear temporality of her narrative. Queer theory has shown the extent to which immaturity is figuratively linked to other kinds of ‘queer time’ such as backwardsness, anachronism, and the refusal to grow up. Kempe’s immature hermeneutics, which offer intense imaginative access with Christ and special intimacy with the Holy Family, also lead to censure and even violence from the ecclesiastical hierarchy, but ultimately their spiritual potential is recognized. However, the limit to which Kempe can enter the text is laid down in the “noli me tangere” episode, in which Kempe feels Christ’s rejection to Mary Magdalene as if to herself. Early essays and criticism of Mary Sue fanfiction notes that Mary Sues have a tendency to die before the end of their stories, setting another kind of limit to her invasion of the text. These built-in limits to imaginative reading suggest that despite the anxiety Love and other critics show about the destructive potential of the Mary Sue, preserving the text’s integrity is actually essential to the fannish hermeneutics.
The tradition of affective, imaginative reading that circulated in devotional circles in late medieval Europe also influenced Petrarch’s readings of Classical authors. Scholars, particularly Kathy Eden, have noted the importance of familiaritas - familiarity, or intimacy - to Petrarch’s hermeneutics, but not the extent to which he is indebted to contemporary devotional, rather than classical, discourses. Petrarch’s writings, particularly his letters to
744 Clare Moseley and Kevin Bolk, “Ensign Sue Must Die!,” Pot Luck Comics, July 2010, http://www.interrobangstudios.com/potluck/index.php?strip_id=989, Panel 20.
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Classical authors and the Secretum, show the influence of imaginative meditation in the ways in which he engages with these writers, both in his approach, and in the anxieties about immaturity that frame it. These anxieties appear in the figures of childish old men in many of Petrarch’s writings, and in the tension he describes between his wish to live an (adult) Christian life, like his brother the Carthusian monk, and his inability to give up worldly pleasures, which Petrarch often represents with his own Italian love poetry. His ambivalence regarding own early work, and the phase in his life it represents, comes not only from its subject matter - his youthful passion for Laura - but from the vernacular itself, which, Dante wrote, “we learn from imitating our wet-nurses.”745 Thus for Petrarch, immaturity becomes not only a question of poetic genre and subject, but also of one’s relationship to time, since the subject to which he turns in his ‘adult’ writing is the past, in the form of Roman antiquity.
However, Petrarch represents his transition from youth to maturity as far from simple or complete. He frames his letters to Classical authors with an anecdote of meeting an elderly man at a party whose intense, almost religious love for Cicero is “the opinion that I remembered holding as a boy;”746 this anecdote suggests that the hermeneutics with which Petrarch engages with the past are dangerously close to the affective, imaginative engagement of devotional mysticism; it also suggests that he has not, after all, completely given up his childish things. The homoeroticism of the schoolroom haunts Petrarch’s love of Classical literature and antiquity, and there is a touch of queerness to his all-male epistolary community, just as in the (almost) all-female modern fan communities. Petrarch’s laments about his own distorted body in the Secretum (both twisted backwards from admiring himself in the mirror and metaphorically twisted backwards in his adherence to childish things) suggest the backwards-looking figure of the queer in Heather Love’s Feeling Backward. This spectre of queer desire appears alongside another example of inappropriate desire for the past, in Petrarch’s recounting of a legend of Charlemagne in Fam. I.4, in which the medieval emperor, under the sway of a magic ring, falls in love with his mistress’ corpse,
745 “Vulgarem locutionem asserimus quam sine omni regula nutricem imitantes accipimus.” Dante Aligheri, De Vulgare Eloquentia I.i, ed. Steven Botterill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 746 Fam. XXIV.2.77-81.
319 a holy man, and a bog. Thus Petrarch fences around his own desire for the past with these examples which reflect back dark images of his own desire.
In the famous letter describing his ascent of Mt. Ventoux, Petrarch’s back-tracking and tardiness leads to a moment of meditation on the top of the mountain on his incomplete conversion to a better life, and he finds a moment of identification with St. Augustine as he lets the Confessions fall open to a serendipitous page. In this letter, as Alberto Ascoli has written, Petrarch invites allegorization, offering himself up as a universal figure, his journey as the transition from one time to another. Since the nineteenth century, scholars have adopted Petrarch as an allegorical figure for the dawn of modernity: the “first modern man;” however, this reading ignores the ambivalence and anxieties in Petrarch’s letter about his ability to truly change. Similarly, in his affective reading of the past, Petrarch consciously invites affective reading from the future that has supported the historiographical narrative that sets him apart from his contemporaries. However, his hermeneutics of familiaritas expect, even demand that his readers of the future approach him as friends - that is, that they read with friendliness, rather than suspicion or critique. This friendship between Petrarch and later scholars has governed his reception in the twentieth century. Two letters from humanists of the next generation to the dead Petrarch suggest a range of alternative receptions that reject this friendship, in particular Pier Paolo Vergerio, Jr., in the voice of Cicero, but Ernest Wilkins’ loving letter to Petrarch from his 1958 address to the Medieval Academy better represents the attitude of twentieth-century scholars to Petrarch. The resulting historical narrative ignores Petrarch’s relationships to ‘medieval’ forms of religiosity (not to mention his queerness) in favour of the ways in which he is ‘modern’ - that is, the aspects of his life with which members of the intellectual elite in the nineteenth and twentieth century could empathize. Reclaiming the fannish aspects of Petrarch’s reading helps intervene in the narrative of ‘modern subjectivity’ and the attendant literary canon that has been dominated by a narrow range of elite male writers. It also helps reveal the pitfalls of the hermeneutics of empathy: that is, the danger of identifying oneself in the past to the exclusion of others.
Critical fanfiction, such as bravecows’ postcolonial reading of Star Trek in her short story “The First Time,” addresses this pitfall head-on by showing how fannish reading can use the hermeneutics of empathy to identify and address “gaps” in source texts not only in
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(for example) plot but in representation. This suggests an alternative kind of fannish reading that occurs within a framework of affect and intimacy but refuses friendship. Chaucer’s Clerk’s Prologue and Tale engages with Petrarch’s ‘friendly’ translation of Boccaccio’s “Griselda” in this way, suggesting that the story is the result of a friendly encounter (the Clerk introduces the story as one “which that I lerned at Padowe of a worthy clerk… Fraunceys Petrak, the lauriat poete”747), but restoring the polyvocalic perspective that Petrarch has stripped from Boccaccio’s version by offering multiple morals, some of which contradict each other, in ‘Lenvoy.’ Chaucer’s dismissive attitude to the dead author here (“he is now deed and nayled in his cheste”) is in sharp contrast with Petrarch’s impassioned relationships with the dead. Chaucer also rejects the sharp distinction between fabula and historia that Petrarch makes in his discussion of two reader’s responses to his translation in Sen. XVII, 4. Chaucer exemplifies here the attitude to the past so often called ‘medieval’ in narratives of the rise of the Renaissance (in which Petrarch represents the transitional moment). Chaucer’s posture is, however, a conscious resistance of Petrarch’s authoritarian interpretive hermeneutics and language politics; like Kempe, Chaucer reclaims childishness as a reading quality in order to resist Petrarch’s authority but also to resist linear time, to open up his text to multiple viewpoints, commentary, and even supplementation (like John Lydgate’s ‘fanfiction’ of the Canterbury Tales).
I have suggested a reconsideration of immaturity as a performative reading position and a node of cultural ideas about queerness, femininity, temporality, authority, and desire. My readings have skipped between medieval and modern texts, sketching ways in which the idea of immaturity plays out in different texts and at different times. I believe there is a need for a comprehensive history of immaturity, although this is of course not it; such a study would have to either limit itself to a specific time period or be a decades-long project. There is also a need for a more comprehensive study of immaturity and affect in medieval ‘fanfiction’ - that is, texts that enter into and consciously engage with the imaginative world of another. Texts ripe for such consideration include Christine de Pizan’s feminist critiques of romance literature, John Lydgate’s additions to the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer’s Wife of
747 Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, IV (E) 27–31.
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Bath’s Tale, and numerous romances following Chrétien de Troyes and Marie de France in the Matter of Britain tradition. There are many more. I hope this dissertation may lay the ground for such studies, but I am more interested in how fanfiction and Fan Studies may contribute to discussions about scholarly hermeneutics in a way that is particularly useful for medievalists, and vice versa. Above all, I hope for a reconsideration of what is lost when we set aside childish things, and what may be gained by taking immature pleasures seriously.
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8 Appendix: The fourteenth-century correspondence between Petrarch and 'Cicero' (Pier Paolo Vergerio)
This appendix includes my own translation of Petrarch's letter to Cicero (Libri Rerum Familiarum XIV.3), and of Vergerio's response in the persona of Cicero. Good English translations exist for all of Petrarch's letters,748 but to my knowledge, there is no published translation of Vergerio's response, and it is impossible in any case, without translating the two together, to show in English the extent to which Vergerio mimics Ciceronian style by extensively quoting Petrarch's own letter back to him to structure his own defence against the various charges,749 as well as incorporating many more quotations from Cicero's speeches and letters. These are marked in Vergerio's letter with quotation marks. Leonardo Smith's 1934 edition of Vergerio's letters (the only one available) notes the sources of many of Vergerio's quotations from Cicero, which I shall not reproduce here except where they are necessary for the meaning. For Petrarch's letter I have followed the edition of Vittorio Rossi.
Letter from Petrarch to Cicero (Fam. XXIV.3)
Francisco Petrarca to M. Tullius Cicero, greetings.
After seeking your letters for a long time and with a great deal of effort, I found them where I least expected, and I read through them greedily: there I heard you, Marcus Tullius, say a great deal, criticize a great deal, waver back and forth a great deal, and I, who until that point had known what a teacher you were to others, now at last came to realize what kind of man
748 Letters on Familiar Matters, Aldo S. Bernardo, (Italica Press 2005) 749 This rhetorical model can be seen throughout Cicero's letters and speeches, as well as elsewhere, but perhaps the best example from the letters is the exchange between Cicero and Metellus Celer, Ad Familiares V.1 and I.2, which also happen to be the two earliest-dated letters of the collection. Vergerio does not quote these letters, however, and it seems more likely he had the format of a lawcourt speech in mind.
339 you were in private. This message, which I beg you will hear, wherever you are, arises from my sincere love for you. It cannot be advice, now, but must be a lament which wells up with the tears of one of your followers, who has always loved your name above all others.
You neurotic and troublesome man, or, if you recognize your own words, you ‘hasty and quarrelsome old man,’750 why did you involve yourself in so many conflicts and disputes which could have no benefit whatsoever? Where did you leave that solitary contemplation appropriate to your age, your profession and your status? What lust for counterfeit glory embroiled you, an old man, in a young man's war, and dragged you through all those disasters to a death unworthy of a philosopher? Alas! You forgot your own advice to your brother, and all your improving aphorisms, and like a guide in the darkness you cast a light into the shadows and showed to your followers the path from which you yourself had sadly fallen. I could forget about Dionysius,751 I could forget about your brother and nephew, I could even, if you like, forget about Dolabella;752 one minute you were brimming with praise for them, the next, suddenly hurling curses at them. But I could perhaps tolerate all this. I can even pass over Julius Caesar, whose renowned mercy was actually his weak spot for his attackers. I can keep my silence about Pompey the Great, since with him you seem to have had the right to do whatever you liked, on account of your great friendship. But what madness turned you against Antony? I believe it was love of the republic - which you confess had already collapsed. But if purely loyalty and patriotism turned you against him, which one might indeed believe of such a man as yourself, what about your relationship with Augustus? Why did you reply to your dear Brutus as you did? ‘If’ indeed, as he said, ‘you could be happy with Octavius,’ it must seem that you were not ‘trying to escape having a master, but looking for a friendlier one.’753 He stood firm on that, and that was the last straw,
750 Quote from Cicero, Epistola ad Octavianum 6 (apocryphal), contained in the Veronese codex of Epistolae ad Atticum. Where citations give Latin quotes below, these are to mark allusions to Cicero’s letters. Here I follow Leonardo Smith, editor of the edition of Pier Paolo Vergerio’s letters (which also contains the Petrarch letter to Cicero); I have pointed towards his more detailed notes where appropriate. 751 Cicero's son's tutor and guardian, with whom Cicero fell out spectacularly. 752 Cicero's son-in-law, with whom he had a tempestuous relationship. 753 “Nam si Octavius tibi placet, a quo de nostra salute petendum sit, non dominum fugisse sed amiciorem dominum quaesisse videberis,” (Letters to Brutus I, XVI, 7).
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Cicero, that you should speak so poorly about a man you had so praised. But I would not say he spoke poorly of you, although he did not hold back your detractors.
I am sorry for your fate, my friend, and I am ashamed and grieved at your great mistakes. But now with Brutus, too, ‘I put no store in those skills in which I know’ you were ‘so well-trained.’754 Did it help at all to teach others? Did it benefit you to give speeches with all your elegant phrases about virtue, when all the while you did not listen to yourself? Oh! Wouldn’t it have been more fitting for a philosopher to grow old in the quiet countryside, meditating on ‘those eternal concerns,’755 as you said somewhere, ‘not about this fleeting life?’ Wouldn’t it have been more fitting not to have bourn the fasces, not to have panted after triumphs, not have have become swollen with pride over those Catilines of yours?
But all this is in vain. Farewell forever, my Cicero.
Written among the living, on the right shore of the Athesis, in the city of Verona in Transpadine Italy, the sixteenth Kalends of the Fifth Month, in the one thousand, three hundred and fourteenth year from the birth of our lord, whom you never knew.
754 “Ego vero iam iis artibus nihil tribuo, quibus Ciceronem scio instructissimum esse,” (Letters to Atticus I, XVII.5). See Smith, 442 n.2. 755 “De illa perpetua iam, non de hac exigua vita cogitare,” (Letters to Atticus X, VIII.8). See Smith,444 n.3.
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Letter from Vergerio to Petrarch756
Pier Paolo Vergerio in the name of Cicero to Francesco Petrarca
From Cicero to Franciscus, Greetings.
At last I received your letter, whoever you are; too late, since ‘laments’ do indeed seem now ‘no more benefit to me than advice.’ You criticized me, you reminded me of my previous life, and you recalled to my mind the ancient memory of my actions. Although perhaps there are some of these which may deservedly be condemned, there are also a great many which deserve praise and approval in the judgement of all. But you, who claim to be ‘one who has loved my name above all others,’ were able to speak most gently and to think most generously about me, seeing that both the senate and the people of Rome and the whole of Italy once splendidly esteemed me. You ought indeed to have bourn in mind that, if you yourself have any taste of fame - which your speech very much suggests to me - then whether you live or die, posterity will demand from you a reason for your actions. For we can’t freely so much as take a snack; there’s always someone at hand to take a bite out of us instead. And so now, since after so many centuries I find myself back in the public eye, I will offer these arguments, condensed as briefly as possible. For your letter, which both covered specific individual actions of mine and also generalized about my entire life, seemed to demand a fuller defense, but these alone, I think, will be a strong enough set of arguments before a fair jury.
So yes, I ‘said a great deal,’ and I ‘criticized a great deal,’ and I did ‘waver back and forth,’ both elsewhere and especially in my letters, which you have found at last after searching for so long; I wish they’d never been found, and had gone with me to my grave, since they will do nothing now for future generations but impeach their author. If this only
756 Latin text: Pietro Paolo Vergerio, Epistolario Di Pier Paolo Vergerio, ed. Leonardo Smith (Roma: Tipografia del Senato, 1934), 436–445. My translation. I am grateful to Lawrin Armstrong for his comments on this translation. Quotation marks indicate where Vergerio is alluding to a line of Cicero’s or Petrarch’s; Smith’s edition gives comprehensive notes on their sources.
342 meant the loss of the fruits of my labours, I’m not greedy: I feel I could bear it easily. I do not fear that all my many achievements might be swallowed up and disappear through the negligence of posterity. But that is your concern; I will return to my argument. Yes, I did ‘say a great deal’, but I also said a great deal that was wise; I acted firmly and bravely, no less for the republic or my friends than for those who begged for my help, and they benefited from advice and counsel. I once did battle in armour, but most often in a toga, and never, while it was possible to act for the Republic, did I shrink from working for it. Even when this was no longer possible, after the Republic fell, I shed tears for it, and frequently deplored the plight of that state which I had once nursed back to health with my own hands. For this reason it was necessary that I ‘waver back and forth’ in my opinion both in thought and aloud, for as situations change, so must men change with them.
So indeed I did ‘say a great deal,’ and I very frequently ‘wavered in my opinions.’ But you call me ‘neurotic and troublesome’, and using my own words (and anyone who uses those lightly must think too much either of themselves or too little of me), you call me a ‘hasty and quarrelsome old man’, and presume to disturb my long-since resting spirit with these fighting words! Anyone who had so attacked me while I lived would not have done so unpunished, but now I repel these attacks easily. I’m not going to say anything contentious, if I seem to you overly defensive at all in what follows. In fact I didn’t ‘stir up disputes’, and I ‘took up no conflicts’ or emnities except on behalf of my friends or, more often, the republic, for which one should not only take up quarrels, but indeed, if necessary, lay down one’s very life. I always felt thus and wished that I might have the opportunity to do so, so that, firstly, I might be dear to the republic, and, secondly, that I might be esteemed as such by the people. In fact my leisure, my age, my profession and my fortune all turned out so that I was always busy. I also wrote frequently in my books, and it always seemed to me that to rise above all others in nobility of person or actions one must apply oneself to the administration of the state and to put one’s effort into others’ wellbeing. In the course of which it was necessary, since wicked men are always plentiful, to have many enemies, many envious detractors; for perpetual war and enmity are necessary for enemies within the walls.
But, you complain, ‘what lust for counterfeit glory embroiled me, an old man, in a young man’s war’? I could perhaps have been called an ‘old man,’ when all’s said and done, although let’s not misuse the term, but they certainly weren’t ‘young,’ if your words do in
343 fact refer to Pompey and Caesar, at that time when they embroiled all the world in civil war. I did in fact what all good men did (both those who actually were and those who were considered to be), and followed them into war at the point when I was no longer able to preserve the peace which I had always striven to maintain. No lust for ‘counterfeit’ or, indeed, genuine ‘glory impelled’ me to that or to anything, but I joined the side which seemed to me most to favour justice and honour. I could not now safely deny, however, that I did wish that glory would always accompany my achievements; that is, I wished that when I acted correctly I would be judged by others as I deserved. I did cultivate zealously the powerful and those who were considered the greatest citizens, nor did the more wicked men shun me, since whatever I was able to do, I undertook for the common good. I was on very good terms with Mark Antony occasionally, Pompey always, and Caesar sometimes, and was delighted to be, as long as Caesar did not seem to seek out his power or his public role, and as long as he desired the safety of the city and civil calm. However, after his ambition won out and he abandoned all this, I never again spoke a good word of him. Or, in any event, whenever he got praise from me, it was when he had done something praiseworthy; a man who prefers that he be feared can never be loved. Nor did I like that his ‘noted mercy’ flourished increasingly in the laws or in the senate; for, as in a free state the very word ‘cruelty’ is loathsome, so is ‘mercy,’ for we cannot easily say that a man is merciful unless he can be cruel unpunished.
A sense of fairness and the memory of his good deeds compelled me to tolerate that power in Pompey with equinamity, although I had loathed it in Caesar, and on Pompey’s behalf I did and said a great deal. I adorned him with my speeches when it seemed appropriate; when it seemed the opposite, I stripped him down. Always, I wielded my speeches according to my own free choice. By By this same choice I turned against my friend Dionysus, my brother Quintus, and even my son-in-law Dolabella. Nor was it any different with Antony, or Octavian, both of whom you particularly mentioned; I treated each according to their merits. I was never one to seek more praise for himself for a good deed, or cheat anyone out of his prize, or, on the other hand, to deny anyone their deserved punishment for a transgression. I always spoke well of Octavian and cared for him, since he led the state well, stood before the rest in virtue and performed glorious feats. I shall not discuss those men you mentioned first, Dionysus, Quintus and Dolabella, with whom I had
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‘the right’ to be perhaps a little ‘free’ because of our bonds of friendship or familial ties. But, you ask, ‘what madness turned me against Antony’? Was this madness, then, against Antony? If ever madness turned man against man, against this one man it would surely seem either the highest foresight or, indeed, the most supreme justice. Was it madness to restrain and drive away this most dissolute man - who would deserve just as well to be called a raveningly beast? If the republic’s luck - luck, I say - had not managed to carry it to freedom from this pestilence, I would not have hesitated to place myself between him and it.
As for my friend Brutus, however, on whose behalf you accuse me - well, if he had been as assiduous to preserve the republic as he was keen and efficient in acquiring it, or if he had fought as well with weapons (which he easily could have done) as did I with my tongue, I would not have seen the republic fall to nothing before I died, wretched man that I am, but would have left it flourishing, or, at least, something other than it was. For while Italian liberty was being daily set aright by me only to fall crooked again, there was not a day - and I called him back to Italy every day - when he could not have fixed it permanently with his own hand or through his influence. It isn’t right that I should be condemned for other’s mistakes. As far as I can see, I acted admirably, for as long as I rightly could, and using those very ‘skills’ of mine which you, with Brutus, claim to ‘lay no store by.’ Nor am I particularly distressed by ‘what I answered to him.’ We disagreed frequently but with the greatest cordiality, not only on the arts and on philosophy, but also on politics, where I felt one way and he felt another, as is the way when men have free will. I easily conceded to him, therefore, what he imputed to me. For terrible grief for the fallen republic compelled him to speak thus, and I, on account of the strength of our relationship, seemed to him to be someone on whom he could safely vent his overwhelming rage. As it happened, I was also a safe person for him because of my memory of his deeds and my consciousness of the right thing to do - the same consciousness which led me to stand in Antony’s way, and to court Octavian’s favour, for he seemed to me worthy of favour himself. Indeed, even when he became Augustus he preserved the dignity of the senate, the freedom of the people and the favour of the commoners, since he did everything with authority counselled and sanctioned by the government. For I was not ‘looking for a friendlier master,’ but a more honest citizen. But since in fact he preferred to follow the mistakes of his age and the advice of immoral
345 men, I cursed that one whom I had so adorned with my praises, once liberty was overthrown and he became a tyrant, he who could have become the first citizen in a thriving city.
Nor did he prevent any evil from befalling me, I who had upheld liberty for the common good. For life without liberty was not more dear to me than liberty without life, nor ever did I wish, after the death of the republic, that I might outlive that calamity. I lived happily while it flourished, and I was well supplied with supporters, fame and public honours. But I did not show any unwillingness to die for the republic, when that most vicious of men ordered it, and his most ungrateful follower carried it out. Nor, indeed, was this a death unworthy of a philosopher - as you seem to think - when all kinds of death are one, although I would have wished to endure death in happier years in return for the safety of the republic. For perhaps other kinds of death would have been more useful to the republic; but it was fate that I should endure it then - indeed, when I desired it, as the republic had been suppressed. But this was after it would indeed have been most glorious for me to die, when, as consul, I conquered and drove out that pestilence Catiline, and I innoculated the empire against his virulent conspiracy. I always attributed this famous achievement not so much to my own watchfulness, although I missed nothing, as to the luck of the Roman people and of the governing class. For I ‘bore’ the consulship and ‘the fasces’ in such a way that I did not seem to ambitiously seek out glory for myself, but to take up grudgingly the burden of office imposed upon me. In the course of executing this duty I thought of nothing but my work, and, if there was any glory to be had in deeds well done, there were other rewards for the fellow citizens and the people of Rome to bestow.
But you think that I was rather unworthy of a triumph, which others deemed I deserved? To speak truthfully, I both sought and desired it, and I seemed on the brink of attaining it easily, when civil war snatched it away from me. But if I were to obtain an honour customarily reserved for military achievements abroad, what of it, when our home state had been saved? I wanted a triumph granted me for my good work, not so that I might be (or consider myself to be) a greater man, but so that I might participate in the traditions of my state, and so that a higher authority might testify to my quality of spirit - that same quality of spirit which enabled me to apply myself to philosophy and the other noble arts, which progressed through my study, done not only for my own private enjoyment, but for the common benefit. Philosophy has always seemed a fitting and excellent education to me;
346 it can dwell in the cities or flee into a solitary hermitage, it can turn its attention to personal growth, or to the common good, where it desires to benefit as many as possible and ‘meditates on eternal concerns, not this fleeting, mortal life’.
Judge now whether I lived and taught as you have described, whether I ‘forgot my own advice to my brother and all my improving aphorisms, and, like a guide through the darkness, showed others the path on which I myself had fallen’. If this is not enough of a defense, remember that while I wrote at leisure, I had to act under pressure, and in the midst of events. No man does not act in his imagination better than he ever does in the heat of the moment. Finally, if I don’t seem to you to have written with that especial elegance of language customary to me in ages past, I beg you will excuse me.
And so farewell at last, whoever you are. All this happened a long time ago, and there’s very little need now for me to concern myself with silencing my critics.
Written from the Elysian Fields, east side, on the Kalends of the Sixth Month, fifty-one years after your letter.
Petrus Paulus Vergerius Iustinopolitanus