Publications

Here are excerpts from my three recentish academic publications:

A chapter in The Body Unbound: Literary Approaches to the Classical Corpus (2021) called “Nothing to Lose: Logsex and Genital Injury in Peter of Cornwall’s Book of Revelations,” where I talk about a very strange story, and argue for a non-phallic framing of sexual injury, which refuses to accord the phallus the terrifying dignity that’s it’s typically granted:

My main concern here, however, is what happens to the knight’s genitals.Transformed into a twig, and pounded away at with hammers and nails, his penis suffers in a way that looks like punishment directed against the offending member. Technically speaking, this is of course a temporary genital injury,catastrophic though it may be, rather than a literal castration. It is not unexpected that he does not actually lose his penis entirely. Although genital injury is common in the classical, Jewish, and Christian infernal traditions, with women hung on hooks by their breasts and their hair (surely understood, as it is in 1 Corinthians11:6, as a secondary sexual characteristic) and with men suspended from their penises, castration itself is rare. Coded castration is also a feature of medieval narrative more generally, most famously, in the Parsifal legend, in which the wound My main concern here, however, is what happens to the knight’s genitals. Transformed into a twig, and pounded away at with hammers and nails, his penis suffers in a way that looks like punishment directed against the offending member. Technically speaking, this is of course a temporary genital injury, catastrophic though it may be, rather than a literal castration. It is not unexpected that he does not actually lose his penis entirely. Although genital injury is common in the classical, Jewish, and Christian infernal traditions, with women hung on hooks by their breasts and their hair (surely understood, as it is in 1 Corinthians 11:6, as a secondary sexual characteristic) and with men suspended from their penises, castration itself is rare. Coded castration is also a feature of medieval narrative more generally, most famously, in the Parsifal legend, in which the wound to the Fisher King’s thigh blights the surrounding land with infertility. Peter’s monastic audience could have understood the knight’s first injury, then, as sufficiently castration-like to count as castration, and given its purgatorial framing, probably understood the injury as a mortification, expiation, or warning.

Or they tried to. Without quite accusing these hypothetical monks of misreading, I suggest that they still would have had to struggle to make this text work for them, because the story as a whole neither suits Peter’s stated program for the collection nor makes much sense as record of specifically Purgatorial punishments.

The Palgrave Handbook of Animals and Literature (ed. McHugh, McKay, and Miller) is now out, with an august cast of animal scholars (Susan Crane, Erica Fudge, Nicole Shukin, Tom Tyler, and of course many others!). My chapter is “Huntings of the Hare: The Medieval and Early Modern Poetry of Imperiled Animals.” In it, I identify a genre? theme? concern? in (mostly) poetry from the late antique Testamentum Porcelli to Margaret Cavendish’s two hunting poems, in which animals lament their own deaths in their own voices. Mostly parodic — with the notable exception of Cavendish — these works nonetheless create a space that calls us on to imagine the lives of animals as mattering, independent of the uses we might want to make of them. I write:

It would be simple…to take the medieval hare-hunting poem as only an absurdity, a literary exercise, or a bit of fun for the armchair hunter anticipating his next outing, because nothing in dominant culture could imagine animal ownership of their bodies, or complaints over their fate, as anything but absurd. Yet the very existence of animal complaints betrays an ongoing interest in animals as living beings with their own, independent existence and concerns. These works, in which animals bear witness to their enforced submission, are always works in which animals, despite it all, bear witness.

A book review in the Medieval Review where I go after a bad habit in literary criticism:

Though his local readings bear repeated attention, I find myself less convinced by his overall approach. His arguments proliferate with phrases like “betrays anxiety,” or words like “reflect” and “reveal.” Because academic literary criticism in general has the same trouble, my following points are not particular to this book. One wonders who is doing the revealing or betraying here: is it the critic or the text, or the medieval reader? Where do we locate this anxiety, or is it a malaise, present only symptomatically in the text, a tincture as unlocalizable as climate itself? Richmond’s frequent use of the word “economy” is similarly vague (e.g., “the economic nature of this space” (29)): I suspect he means to indicate trade and profit, but for whom, and for whose benefit? What is the “economy” and how does it differ, say, from finding or growing something to eat? Literature does not just “reflect” things. Like any activity, it has effects on things–it draws our attention, it distracts us, and it tells us whose lives are worth our attention. And, as bears repeating, the “economy” is not a general thing, homogeneously abstracted from human activity or, especially, human struggle: as I write this, in July 2022, I’m told that “economic anxiety” pervades the United States of America, but I wonder how the economic anxiety of wage-earners differs from that of employers no longer as able to rely on cheap, highly vulnerable labor. Each is anxious, but to different ends. A relationship of “reflection,” or of “revealing anxiety,” has the flavor of historical analysis, because it places its cultural objects in a larger field of contemporary stuff, but if those relations are presented without a sense of causality, or of the conflict that defines any historical relation, the analysis is not actually historical.