Professor Stephanie Trigg is a member of the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, Australia. The author of several books - most recently Shame and Honour: A Vulgar History of the Order of the Garter (2012), she is on the editorial boards of multiple journals and is a Chief Investigator in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History fo Emotions, She was interviewed for Medievally Speaking by Helen Young.
HY: Thank you for taking the time to talk Stephanie. Can we start with how you first became interested in the Middle Ages?
ST: I first encountered the Middle Ages
through books like Michael Alexander's translations from Old English, The Earliest English Poems, which I
loved. I also remember reading Sir Gawain
and the Green Knight in translation and as an adolescent, thinking it was
one of the most highly charged, erotic pieces of writing I'd ever read. I now
look back at that reading and wonder what was all that about? I also remember The Gentle Falcon, a wonderful children’s
book by Hilda Lewis, which is about a young English girl who is appointed as
one of the handmaidens of Isabella of France, Richard II's second wife. It's
about another girl called Isabella, who is a French cross-dressing spy.
So that was my first introduction to
historical fiction. At university I started doing English subjects because I
loved them and in second year I did a wonderful subject called from “From Epic
to Romance” and my tutor was James Simpson, now at Harvard. That was a
wonderful introduction to Norse mythology, to Troilus and Criseyde, to Dante, to Chrétien de Troyes. I think once
I began to see medieval literature I stopped seeing other things and it became
so clear that that was what I wanted to do. So I started doing all the history
of English language subjects that I could and Old English, and I did an Old
Norse elective. Once I'd found that area, I stopped seeing other possibilities.
I don't think I ever made any smart
choices about career development. I think I just stopped doing things that weren’t
medieval. So it was really almost a negative choice in some ways but I was
fortunate to be able to just go ahead and study what I really had come to love.
And then I was able to go and research and teach the texts I love. So it's
really about passion.
Students sometimes ask what will be a
good way to get into that field. It's really hard to give advice because I
think that the conditions for young scholars are now so very difficult and very
different from what they were when I was going through, but on the other hand,
that is the best advice: if you aren’t doing something that you really love
then what's the point?
Medieval Studies is only going to have a
future if it's populated by people who really, really want to be there. You
wouldn't go into medieval studies because you wanted to have a highly paid academic
job. That would not be the obvious route, would it?
HY: No, no, that is very true, it is
something of a niche market.
ST: And yet it's one of the most
theoretical and sophisticated areas of literary studies.
HY: Now you work on both Medieval Studies
and on Medievalism, at times that’s within one project. You began mainly with
Medieval Studies – I'm thinking about your edition of Wynnere and Wastoure (1990) –
and that more traditional approach. What turned your interest towards
Medievalism?
ST: Again, I don't think I ever thought:
“now it's time to do Medievalism.” Wynnere
and Wastoure was my PhD thesis and when that was published, my thinking was
why shouldn't I work on Chaucer? Why should I not have that pleasure now, of
working on Chaucer? So the Chaucer book, Congenial
Souls (2002), became the next project.
I thought of it as a reception study but then my other interests, that
are much more sociologically and politically motivated and oriented, made it so
clear that it wasn't going to be an intellectual history, it was going to be a
political, ideological, sociological history. It became a form of medievalism
because it became such a long duree kind of history. It tapped into
patterns of Medievalism, especially because the 19th century was such an
important period for Chaucer studies, as it was also, of course, for
Medievalism. It was always written with an eye to the longer implications of
medieval studies: what sense we make of Chaucer now and why do we read Chaucer
the way we do? Through what patterns of historical readership and reception? So
that's where reception studies and medievalism studies came together.
HY: Do you then see Medieval Studies and
studies of medievalism as being inherently connected?
ST: Yes, I think they have to be. It's
very hard to untangle them even though in disciplinary and institutional terms,
there are a lot of vested interests at stake in keeping them quite separate. I
would think that the two things are very closely related, partly in subject
matter, partly in institutional terms. They
also have a lot in common in the methodologies that we use and, in fact, it's
getting harder and harder to distinguish them for a number of reasons.
So, for example, if you look at say,
contemporary historical fiction writers, fiction writers often want to research
the Middle Ages. They’ll go to the library and use the books that Medieval,
Literary or Historical Studies students would use or they will go on the web
and search things online. Increasingly, the materials that it's possible to
find online are the materials that are either shared by Medievalism – say re-creation
groups [like the Society for Creative Anachronism] – and Medieval Studies or the
lines have become so confused that it's actually very hard to tell the
difference.
My favourite example is when I was
working on the Song of Wade that
Chaucer mentions. I was trying to find out about Wade's boat because there's a
very funny reference to it in Speght's 16th century edition of Chaucer, where
he says “oh, because the matter is long and fabulous and very familiar I'm not
going to go into it here,” but there is
no record of Wade's boat. So there's a lot of historical speculation around
this topic, asking what Chaucer is referring to? When I was researching this,
and I was using the web as one does, the more I looked at it, the more I seemed
to be on the track of something and yet once I delved into it, it was clear
that the site I was looking at was actually a Tolkien site, a site designed to
elucidate the textual historical references in The Lord of the Rings.
In fact, there was a boat in The Lord of the Rings. It wasn't Wade's
boat at all but it had become impossible to tell the difference unless you
really, really dug down into the site. So in terms of the use of sources, the
attitude toward sources that we use at the archive, Medievalism Studies and
Medieval Studies are often quite similar. I also think that medieval literature
and culture often has a medievalist component built into it. It's often looking
back on its own past. Obviously Medieval Studies doesn’t have that pre-Modern
versus Modern divide that Medievalism depends, on but I think that it's
becoming harder and harder to tell the difference between them, quite rightly,
really.
So I think that Medievalism has the Medieval
built into it and I think that the Medieval had Medievalism built into it too,
and that that intersection quite productively helps us deconstruct or undermine
that idea of the Medieval as completely Other to the Modern.
HY: Yes it’s interesting, and you see it
among students. I'm seeing a lot of graduate students now coming to Medievalism
but not from a Medieval Studies background.
ST: Yes, yes, that's right, they come
from fantasy or they come from 19th century recreation, from Dickens recreation
societies or something like that. I think that's because there is such a
crossover between Medieval Studies and medieval fantasy or medieval historical
fiction writers that reading historical medieval fiction is almost coded as
geeky, as historically other, as Medieval Studies is. The relationship between
them is very dynamic, very mobile at the moment.
HY: I wondered if you could talk a
little bit about the Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, which
you’re one of the leading investigators in. It has the Medieval Studies aspect,
and there’s potentially room for Medievalism in there too. Could you explain what
it actually is and what it does?
ST: It is the Australian Research
Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (CHE). Its historical
brief is 1100 to 1800 and the main purpose there is to look at changing social,
cultural, linguistic, literary, artistic, musical expressions and
representations of the emotions and the passions, or the affects or sentiments.
There's a lot of discussion about the terminology. “Emotion,” of course, is not even a medieval
word but we're using it in that umbrella sense. We are interested in historical
change; one of our little logos is “emotions make history.”
In terms of Medievalism, I have to say
it's not really set up as a Medievalism project. Yet, there is one of the four
research programs, the one that I'm coordinating, which is called “Shaping the
Modern,” which does allow, in the first instance, for the extension of that
historical period from 1800 into 19th and 20th century and early 21st century
history, particularly in an Australian context. The big question is what
happens to pre-Modern European emotions and emotional patterns when they are
transported, along with the settler/colonial culture, into an Australian
context and how do they interact with Indigenous cultures?. But that is more
about historical and cultural transitions rather than looking back on the
Medieval.
On the other hand, one other part of
that “Shaping the Modern” program is to think about heritage culture. There, we
are looking, especially in a nationalist context, at the emotions people evoke
when they think about the pre-Modern European past in Australia. So that will
play out very much in the performance strand. So if we are going to play
Handel's Messiah every Christmas in Australia, why, what do we feel about that?
What emotions get brought to bear on that? When we perform European Medieval
music in Australia, when we look at European art in the pre-Modern sense,
again, what emotional responses does that elicit?
Then, how do contemporary Australians
look back, emotionally, back onto the past. So that's how those things kind of
work. So it's probably not standard Medievalism in that kind of way. That is
probably a slightly separate project but you can see that they are certainly
analogous.
HY: And finally, you're starting to work
on a new project yourself?
ST: At the moment it's called “The
Speaking Face.” The Chaucer project was about the long history of Chaucer
reception, and the following big book on the Order of the Garter was about the
long history of a medieval form of ritual practice from the 14th century
through to the 21st.
This project is the cultural history of
the trope by which the face is said to speak. So the standard form of that is: “he
looked at her as if to say….” He doesn’t say anything, but his face seems to speak. I'm interested in the way that this expression
of the face is often put into a first-person direct speech expression. Chaucer
was already using that trope and I'm interested in looking at the history of
that through poetry, fiction, perhaps through drama as well.
HY: Thanks very much for your time and sharing your thoughts. Good luck with the new project.
Stephanie blogs about academic life, medievalism and more at Humanities Researcher.
