Category: Departments & Disciplines

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The Role of Researchers in Public Protest

The fiscal year ends in a few weeks, and researchers of all stripes are worried about how Trump’s threats to cut funding will pan out. The presidential administration has proposed to slash support for a spectrum of federal agencies including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Institutes of Health. As the March for Science that took place in major cities around the world last April showed, there is a way for academics to work with the public to peacefully and effectively promote intellectual pursuits.

March for Science on April 22, 2017 in Washington, D.C.
“March for Science” by Molly Adams is licensed under CC BY 2.0

The violence that erupted last month outside the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, on the other hand, showed the new danger that humanities scholars face as their work and causes are coopted by white nationalists and white supremacists. From the defense of bigotry in terms of “respect for American history” to the misappropriation of medieval imagery to construct an imagined past of racial purity, false pretenses of scholarship pose a serious threat to contemporary arts and letters. As we seek out new ways to promote the humanities in an increasingly volatile public arena, we should consider what lessons can be learned from the gruesome history of town-gown clashes.

“Unite the Right” Rally on August 12, 2017 in Charlottesville, VA
“Charlottesville_UniteTheRightRally-0293.jpg” by Rodney Dunning is licensed under CC BY-ND-ND 2.0.

In 1355, a bar brawl between two scholars and a wine merchant in an Oxford tavern led to a free-for-all between members of the university and citizens of the town that spanned several days. It began when the two beneficed clerks, Walter de Springheuse and Roger de Chesterfield, insulted the vintner John de Croydon’s wares and, apparently, launched the wine jug at his head. Townsmen rallied to Croydon’s defense, ringing the bell at the church of St. Martin and opening fire bows and arrows on the clerks. The chancellor attempted to intervene, at which point he was attacked and forced to retreat. He returned with an army of his own and ordered the bell at St. Mary’s to be rung.

The next day, forty townspeople invaded a convent of Austin friars and ambushed a group of clerks at Beaumont Fields. As the students attempted to close the town gates, 2,000 countrymen came to the aid of the townspeople waving a black flag. The slaughter that followed was grisly: halls were sacked and clerks were imprisoned and murdered, their tonsured heads scalped in disdain. One scholar was taken down at the feet of a band of friars who were processing in protest. Severely outnumbered, the clerks were forced to flee and the university shut down.

These days of conflict, known as the St. Scholastica Day Riots, were the culmination of a century of angst between town and gown. Throughout the thirteenth century and well into the fourteenth, as Gordon Leff explains, “royal favor had given the university authorities a stranglehold on the life of the city, juridically, economically, and psychologically.” Oxford was neither the first nor the last place to see this kind of dispute. The struggle between town and gown had generated the “Great Dispersion” of 1229 in Paris, for instance, which had displaced many great minds from France to Oxford and Cambridge in the first place. During the 1381 Peasant’s Revolt, a less bloody but similarly angst-charged riot broke out at Cambridge, where the mayor, bailiffs and burgesses attacked the scholars, pillaged the halls, and confiscated the university’s and colleges’ charters of privileges and other documents, to which they then set fire in the marketplace.

Until recently, what is often called the “crisis in the humanities” felt, to me, like a hyperbole when considered alongside the all-out bloodshed of the St. Scholastica Day Riots, and the deep-seated tensions between scholars and the public that they laid bare. In light of recent events, however, it is becoming ever clearer that researchers are entering the public arena whether we choose to or not, and the stakes of that discourse are escalating.

Erica Machulak, PhD
University of Notre Dame

FURTHER READING

Bennett, J. A. W. Chaucer at Oxford and at Cambridge. Toronto; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1974.

Cobban, Alan B. The Medieval English Universities: Oxford and Cambridge to C. 1500. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

Courtenay, William J. Schools & Scholars in Fourteenth-Century England. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987.

Leff, Gordon. Paris and Oxford Universities in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries: an Institutional and Intellectual History. New York and Wiley, 1968.

Mallet, Charles Edward. A History of the University of Oxford. London: Methuen & Co, Ltd, 1924.

Rashdall, Hastings. The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages. Edited by F. M. Powicke and A. B. Emden. 2nd ed. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1942.

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The Colors of the Pearl-Gawain Manuscript: The Questions that Launched a Scientific Analysis

For this school year’s exciting inaugural post, Maidie Hilmo shares her request for a scientific analysis of the Pearl-Gawain manuscript (British Library, MS Cotton Nero A.x), containing the unique copy of the Middle English poems: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It shows the kind of questions that help gain access to the viewing of original manuscripts and can result in a technological investigation of specific details. Bringing together science and art history, Hilmo has uncovered evidence that “the scribe was also the draftsperson of the underdrawings. It appears that the painted layers of the miniatures were added by one or more colorists, while the large flourished initials beginning the text of the poems were executed by someone with a different pigment not used in the miniatures.” The results of this request to the British Library—comprising the detailed report on the pigments by Dr. Paul Garside and a set of enhanced images by Dr. Christina Duffy, the Imaging Scientist — will become available on the Cotton Nero A.x Project website and, selectively, in publications by Hilmo, including: “Did the Scribe Draw the Miniatures in British Library, MS Cotton Nero A.x (The Pearl-Gawain Manuscript)?,” forthcoming in the Journal of the Early Book Society; and “Re-conceptualizing the Poems of the Pearl-Gawain Manuscript,” forthcoming in Manuscript Studies. To learn more, check out her special project here on our site.

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The Art of Imprecise, Imperfect Interpretation: Using the Manuscript Annotations of Piers Plowman as Evidence for the History of Reading

In grade school, I was never one to resist the advice of a teacher. So, when told that successful study habits included taking notes, underlining, and starring right in the book itself, that is precisely what I did. Those teachers were right, of course, and I find myself often repeating the same advice to my own students despite their frequent resistance to marring the pristine pages of their soon to be resold copies of Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. What I did not know in grade school, however, was that writing in my books meant participating in an ancient tradition of responding to and even interpreting texts, and that one day I would write an entire dissertation about how medieval readers read by studying the evidence left behind by the medieval and early modern readers of a famously unstable text called Piers Plowman by William Langland.

The truth is that people have pretty much always written in their books and, sometimes, books belonging to others as well—rubricating, annotating, bracketing, scribbling, doodling, and more. Whether those readers responded in sparse intervals, limiting their voice on the page to vague marks, or, in contrast, wrote intensely, vociferously inscribing their presence irrevocably onto the page and into the text itself, these voices often remain the best extant evidence available for scholars attempting to understand the reception history of an author whose earliest readers have long since passed.

One example of a vocal, reform-minded reader can be found in an early modern household manuscript copied by Sir Adrian Fortescue, a distant relative of Anne Boleyn executed by Henry VIII for some unknown act of treason.[1] His manuscript, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Digby 145, contains a personalized, conflated copy of what we now call the A and C versions of Piers Plowman alongside a political treatise written by Adrian’s uncle, John Fortescue, called The Governance of England. Filled with annotations in the hands of at least three readers, this book documents a series of responses made over time by Adrian, his wife Anne (who signs her name in Latin!), and the unknown Hand B.[2] The conversations among these readers make this record of reader responses particularly special, but it is Hand B, the subject of this post, that becomes the most reactionary to some of Langland’s biting criticisms of the Church.[3]

Hand B’s responses become increasingly inflammatory in the poem’s apocalyptic final few Passūs. In fact, he goes so far as to conflate the pope and the Antichrist in two of his annotations. The first annotation appears next to a passage in which Langland criticizes the schismatic pope for his role in the spilling of Christian blood:

Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Digby 145, fol. 121v. By permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

þe poppa/                  And god amend the pope that pelith holy chirche

                                                   And claymyth before the kyng • to be kepar ouer crysten

                                         And countith not though cristen be kyllid & robbid

ô very Antechrist             And fyndith folk to fight & cristene blode to spylle.[4]

The annotation, “O Very Antichrist,” transforms Langland’s corrupt pope into the face of the Apocalypse itself, an even more extreme condemnation of immoral papal behavior than Langland’s. This annotation also lays the groundwork for his second conflation in which he identifies Langland’s Antichrist as the pope, writing “puppa [sic]” next to the line, “And a fals fend antecriste ouer al folke reynyd.”[5] Here Hand B reads the Antichrist’s extensive and increasing worldly authority as the same as that belonging to the pope. In both instances, the annotator melds the Antichrist and pope, two separate entities in the poem, into a single figure responsible for an eschatological catastrophe. In some ways, Hand B’s sixteenth-century reactions to this medieval poem make sense amidst a backdrop of increasing religious instability in Henry VIII’s England. Perhaps Hand B saw in the unstable papal seat produced by the Schism a parallel with the splintering of religious power between Rome and Henry leading up to and during the English Reformation.

Beyond these historical inferences, however, what exactly do Hand B’s strong, reform-minded reader responses teach us about the identity of this reader and his interpretation of the poem? In fact, it tells us both a lot and not very much at all. He clearly disagrees with the ecclesiastical corruption that he sees as trickling down from the Church’s highest seat of power, and he reacts strongly, even emotionally, as he inscribes his interpretive voice onto the page. Piers Plowman’s ending evokes a passionate, rather than objective, response from this reader, who adds his own polemical lament to Langland’s verse. This reader provides just one example of the strong personal investment that Langland’s early audiences felt when reading Piers.[6] He also demonstrates how reading and interpreting literature can aid in the formation and circulation of reformist ideas, especially in precarious times.

However, to what end Hand B voices his cry for reform remains unclear. Without knowing his identity, his exact purpose is impossible to discern because he could be either a Catholic hoping for ecclesiastical reform or a Reformation era Protestant. Adrian’s manuscript stayed in his family until Bodley eventually bought it, increasing the likelihood that Hand B was a family member, or at least a close affiliate. Moreover, the Fortescues maintained their Catholic identity throughout the period, but that does not mean that every single member of the family necessarily adopted the exact same religious practices and beliefs. Without word choices that obviously indicate one camp or the other, the greater social implications of Hand B’s readerly perspectives lead to fuzzy conclusions at best. The enigma of whether he desires institutional change or seeks an altogether new institution of faith must by necessity remain unsolved, at least for now. For this reason, scholars must, with care, entertain multiple possibilities, sometimes foregoing exactness and precision when faced with limited evidence for a text’s reception history. Hand B actually teaches us a great deal more about his reading of Piers than many other annotators, but, as is the case with so many historical records of literary readership, his reader responses still require a certain level of imprecise, imperfect, and even incomplete interpretation.[7]

Karrie Fuller, Ph.D.
University of Notre Dame

[1] For Adrian’s biography, see Richard Rex, “Blessed Adrian Fortescue: A Martyr without a Cause?,” Analecta Bollandiana 115 (1997): 307-53.

[2] On Anne Fortescue, see Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, “The Women Readers in Langland’s Earliest Audience: Some Codicological Evidence,” in Learning and Literacy in Medieval England and Abroad, ed. Sarah Rees-Jones (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), 121-34. On the identification of Hand B, see Thorlac Turville-Petre, “Sir Adrian Fortescue and His Copy of Piers Plowman,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 14 (2000): 29-48.

[3] For my full analysis of these readers’ annotations, see Karrie Fuller, “Langland in the Early Modern Household: Piers Plowman in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Digby 145, and Its Scribe-Annotator Dialogues,” in New Directions in Medieval Manuscript Studies and Reading Practices: Essays in Honor of Derek Pearsall, eds. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, John J. Thompson, and Sarah Baechle (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014), 324-341.

[4] Transcription mine, fol. 121v. The equivalent lines appear in C.XXI.446-449 in A.V.C. Schmidt, Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition of the A, B, C, and Z Versions, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Kalamazoo: MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2011).

[5] Transcription mine, fol. 124r; C.22.64 in Schmidt.

[6] For another example, see Kathryn Kerby-Fulton’s transcription and discussion of the annotations in Bodleian Library MS Douce 104 in Iconography and the Professional Reader: The Politics of Book Production in the Douce “Piers Plowman” (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

[7] Examples of more terse annotations, which tend to be more characteristic of B-text manuscripts, can be found in David Benson and Lynne Blanchfield, The Manuscripts of Piers Plowman: The B-Version (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997).