The problem with teaching a medieval class on race and representation has been the unrelenting negativity of nearly all of the texts we’re doing: the…
I recently agreed — breaking my great period of NO — to write a book chapter on animals and disability simply because it’s been a…
A record of an inexpert surprise. The 1275 English Statute of the Jewry vainly offered England’s Jews a new opportunity. I quote from the 1810 translation…
I’ve just commented, with some befuddlement, on two classes of short papers on the Prioress’s Tale. I had introduced the Tale with, yes, a Trigger…
With much internal grumbling, I’m going to the climate march tomorrow, marching with memories of other failed marches. Too many people I respect are going…
What Geraldine Barnes called the “nineteenth-century ‘theatre’ of Vinland” began in the 1830s with the publication of Carl Christian Rafn’s Antiquitates Americanae and reached its apogee in the 1890s as a kind of counter-programming to the celebration of Columbus’s landing. The mania offered its adherents two things, a white heritage and a specifically medieval, embattled white heritage, while also, as I’ll conclude, obligating them to protect their whiteness, making them prisoners of their own concocted identity.
I’m one of several people who has been trying, for several months, to get Facebook to take down a page devoted to promoting the Ritual…
My critical animal work, and, more lately, my ecocritical and posthumanist work, has suffered from one giant fault–one you’re thinking of, I hope–namely its inconsideration of…
Cross posted to In the Middle. A couple of days ago, World News Daily gave us this: “USA: Viking Ship Discovered Near Mississippi River.” While…
Cross-posted on In The Middle. Go there to leave comments, if you want. Maybe you saw an article recently about renewed attempts to change the unpleasant name…
