"It's very hard to untangle them": Interview with Stephanie Trigg

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.

Brackmann: The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England

Brackmann, Rebecca. The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England: Laurence Nowell, William Lambarde, and the Study of Old English. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2012.

Reviewed by:  Sharon Rhodes (Rhodes.Sharon.E@gmail.com)  

Those who have read Allen Frantzen’s Desire for Origins are familiar with the idea that the earliest students of Old English studied the language with specific political (i.e. nationalistic) aims. However, although these politically motivated figures wrote in the early modern period, Frantzen’s work is written for modern scholars of Old English, not scholars of the 16th-century. That is, in Frantzen’s book and many other treatments of the roots of Old English scholarship we look at later periods only as a means of approaching the Anglo-Saxon period and not as a means of studying the periods in which Old English scholarship began. Rebecca Brackmann’s work on the other hand, is written for early modern and Old English scholars and, as such, it in part seeks to rectify the superficial notion that the lines we have drawn between various periods of literary history are an accurate reflection of reality. In The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England, Brackmann explores the work of two early figures, Laurence Nowell and William Lambarde, both early students of Old English connected with one of Queen Elizabeth's chief advisors, William Cecil.  By studying the work and lives of these early modern scholars of Old English, Brackmann demarcates some of the flaws of our periodization and allows scholars of both Old English and early modern English to engage with her work. As she astutely points out in the beginning, “[t]he very act of separating ‘medieval’ and ‘early modern’ (or, especially, ‘Renaissance’) is agreeing to the terms of use laid down by sixteenth-century scholars” (1). Looking at these “terms of use” can tell us, as Brackmann shows, a lot about a country or nation’s relationship to languages not simply as means of communication, but as symbols in their own right.

In her introduction, Brackmann outlines the complexities of the lenses through which we view different periods and sets up her book’s overarching argument that there is not “a clear and defensible break between ‘Anglo-Saxon England’ and ‘early modern England’” (2). Brackmann argues that we take for granted the validity of the periodization laid out in our textbooks and institutional frameworks when what is more true is that even in the world of the humanities simply by looking at something – like Schrödinger’s cat – we are shaping what that thing is. In studying these divisions and their flaws, Brackmann points out another assumption that has limited past studies: that after the advent of print, works only in manuscript were no longer important. Even though “[p]rinted works had the potential to circulate widely,” Brackmann asserts that we are wrong to read manuscript works as necessarily private when in fact they did circulate. Moreover, notebooks and marginalia in printed works blur “the divisions between print and manuscript” (6). Brackmann argues that we must look past our 21st century use of Early English Books Online, which offers “nearly every book printed in England” without regard for what was sometimes a quite “limited circulation” and keep in mind that texts only in manuscript form could have as great or, sometimes, greater circulation and influence than their printed counterparts (7).  Here, it might be useful to keep in mind the changing values of our own culture. For instance, how do we weigh the importance and value of online journals like this one against printed academic journals?

Brackmann sets out to study a very specific selection of early modern writings on Old English, among them Laurence Nowell’s Abcedarium, an example of that very phenomenon of texts that blur the line between print and manuscript. Nowell’s Abcedarium is actually a hand-annotated copy of a printed English-Latin dictionary made by Richard Howlet. Nowell turns this bilingual dictionary into a trilingual dictionary by inserting “Old English equivalents next to the Modern English-Latin entries” (18). This, Brackmann points out, makes Nowell’s defacto glossary unique among Old English glossaries of the 16th-century because it translates Old English into Early Modern English rather than Latin (30). Nowell likewise translates King Alfred’s laws into Early Modern English and chooses Early Modern English for his Vocabularium Anglo-Saxonicum, a more extensive glossary that uses only Early Modern and Old English. By choosing to translate from an earlier form of English into his own English, Nowell highlights the similarities between the two languages so as to “explore the ‘heritage’ that Early Modern English had from its ancestor” (31).

As Brackmann notes, Nowell is probably best known for the Nowell Codex, aka MS Cotton Vitellius A. xv and the ‘Beowulf manuscript’ of which he was the first known owner [1]. However, his contemporary, William Lambarde, despite his work on Old English, is poorly known in part because when he translated Old English he translated into Latin and did not make dictionaries as Nowell did. However, like Nowell, Lambarde was an avid student of Old English and an influential figure in the circle of William Cecil, one of Elizabeth I’s chief advisors.

Although Brackmann does not see her work as a “narrow study of a single codex,” The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England would serve as a valuable reference work for anyone interested in studying Nowell’s Abcedarium.  In Part I, Brackmann breaks down what makes Nowell’s annotations unique and interesting. Brackmann also investigates possible sources (Brackmann asserts that many of Nowell’s entries are derived from Aelfric of Eynsham’s works) and deconstructs his methodology (he seems to have used a, ae, and e interchangeably and attempts to record all verbs in the infinitive).

Once she has familiarized the reader with Nowell's early work, Brackmann discusses the Inkhorn Controversy, related to both Laurence Nowell and William Lambarde through their connection to William Cecil. Previous scholars, says Brackmann, have described “three camps” of thought on word formation: Neologizers created ‘inkhorn terms’ from Latin roots, Purists coined new words only from English roots and Archaizers tried to “revive obsolete English words” (56-57). This debate, the Inkhorn Controversy, was in some ways related to religious issues, but it was also, according to Brackmann, deeply tied to the foundations of nationalism. William Cecil, Laurence Nowell and William Lambarde, among others, were concerned that Latinate and other non-native terms would corrupt or disenfranchise English as a language of power. By embracing the native language, and strengthening its vocabulary with new words coined from native roots, ‘Purists’ and ‘Archaizers’ felt they would strengthen their nation as a whole. Later in this chapter Brackmann puts forward her theory of how Nowell’s glossaries might have been used by Archaizers to create new ‘native’ words for application in law and the emerging scientific fields. Here she also traces how William Lambarde’s annotations of his copy of De Recta Scriptione suggest his own feelings on the Inkhorn Controversy; namely that, as the author Sir Thomas Smith wrote, “our ancestors, the original Anglo-Saxons looked much more closely into the nature of letters, and wrote more correctly than we do today” (75). Lambarde’s thoughts on the English language, if his heavily marked copy of De Recta Scriptione is any indication, exhibit a sort of linguistic fundamentalism.

Part II returns to Nowell’s Abcedarium to look at further modifications he made. In addition to the Old English entries, Nowell inserted pages of alphabetically arranged place-names. And here, as well, Brackmann finds a multilingual method that shows the evolution of English from before the Norman Conquest to Nowell’s own time. The modern name or Latin name is followed by Old English or Welsh as well as “historical information about the places: where the name came from, who built a town there, who fortified it, when it was sacked, what battles have happened there, what kings are buried in the site” (92). Like the glossary as a whole, Brackmann examines Nowell’s “Place-Name Index” as a part of William Cecil’s nationalizing project. The onomastic exploration of place names and the histories of those places, Brackmann argues, were meant to show the deep “English” roots as well as continuities from the past to Nowell’s present. As with her examination of the glossary, Brackmann gives a brief source study of the “Place-Name Index” after her description.

After dissecting Nowell's “Place-Name Index,” Brackmann looks at William Lambarde’s own, fairly extensive, chorographic works: his Alphabetical Description of the Chief Places in England and Wales and his Perambulation of Kent. Like Nowell’s “Index” (on which Lambarde seems to have drawn), Lambarde’s works are not merely geographical but historical in their descriptions. There are also some choice commentaries on the practice of Catholicism which he associates with non-Englishness, particularly in post-Conquest England. In the earlier Alphabetical Description, Lambarde’s scope is, as its full title suggests, broad. In the later Perambulation, he narrows to a single county although he still “set[s] his county history in a national framework” (137). However, in both, Brackmann argues that Lambarde uses geography to map the negative effects of Catholicism on England by lamenting Catholic rituals he thought smacked of paganism under entries for former monastic houses.

In Part III, Brackmann returns to the issues of law brought up in her study of Nowell and Lambarde’s work. Here she attempts to suss out the meaning and importance ascribed to law by the early Anglo-Saxonists and their patrons which is, namely, “law’s role as a focal point for English national identity” (190). Here she returns to justify and expand on what may be one of the most interesting observations made in the introduction: “[t]he English language, the English countryside, and the English legal system could serve as focal points for English identity by claiming to have deep roots in the past, and Cecil wanted exactly such identity fostered” (20).

Brackmann’s work in The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England is an excellent place to begin for background information on the earliest Anglo-Saxonists and the role of Anglo-Saxon studies in early modern England. However, the broad scope of the study makes cohesiveness challenging if not impossible, as Brackmann moves from multiple manuscript studies, source studies, lexicography, legal studies, humanistic cartography and how they all tie into the nationalizing projects of the 16th century. This criticism is not meant to denigrate Brackmann’s work, but to warn that it does traverse a great deal of territory. Nevertheless, the meandering nature of her work supports her first stated argument that our periodizations and divisions, however useful, are arbitrary and possibly misleading. The benefits of dividing English literature into periods—Old, Middle, Early Modern, and Modern—should not be underestimated; such divisions allow us to become experts by drastically narrowing the amount of material to be mastered. However, our work can benefit from a more explicit recognition that, far from being fundamental truths, these periods are a framework we have created and imposed upon history. Brackmann's work is an excellent case study of how early modern as well as modern students of literature have made boundaries where none existed before. She does not seem to argue that we abandon these boundaries, and I agree, but that scholars should approach them with a greater awareness of their arbitrary and artificial nature thereby opening their work to studies that might bridge periods we generally see as distinct. The book is clearly well researched, has an impressive bibliography and any given chapter or part could prove useful to students of many different disciplines.

Sharon Rhodes

University of Rochester

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[1] He wrote his name on this manuscript.