Several caveats before I begin properly: over 120 manuscripts of the Brendan voyage survive, in a variety of languages. Ages ago, I taught a translation…
Mere calculation is the enemy! So declares the first chapter of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. To keep the Enlightenment from carrying on eating…
Alice Lamy’s 2019’s “Defining Nature in Medieval Cosmological Literature” interests itself in Nature’s contradictions. Nature in Bernard’s Cosmographia is contradictory “because she creates cohesion between…
Mel Chen’s 2012 Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect builds from the linguist Michael Silverstein’s pioneering study of what he termed “animacy hierarchies.” The…
During our first presentation, we already heard about Susan Crane’s illustration of three principles for making meaning in Bestiaries and in medieval writing about animals…
Cleanness belongs to a manuscript now known as Cotton Nero A.x/2: Cotton because it belonged to the seventeenth-century library of Robert Cotton; Nero because he…
Silence with Parents One of the chapters of Giovanni Baptista Gelli’s Circe features a conversation between Ulysses and a deer. Gelli’s sixteenth-century work, a series…
“I am afraid that we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.” – Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols[1] What is…
In 2012, my article pairing Alexander and Dindimus and Chaucer’s lament “The Former Age” appeared in the anthology Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts. My beast was “the…
I’m giving a talk at Brown on September 11th 2025, which happens to be today. Here’s a link to the announcement. And here’s the talk:…
