From first appearances, Tulubaikaporia: a ritual is a novel about the rural village (or small town) Tulubaika, located somewhere at the fringes of European Russia, akin to (at least as far as I have gleaned from interviews and substack notes) the birth/growing-up-place of its author, vanechka. Tulubaika is the subject of each of the book’s 23 chapters, each one a rather short story (none exceed 50 pages) and yet, the village itself is more of an absent presence than a real character. In fact, we are told very early that Tulubaika is “asymptotically unreachable”, to travel there is to travel a curve infinitely tending towards y=0, but never touching it.

We find many of the book’s characters in the midst of travelling the asymptotes - trying, failing, to arrive in Tulubaika. Their journeys are often a return - not unlike Odysseus’ nostos to Ithaca - from foreign lands where they have been living in quasi-exile. A man waits for what seems like days at a bus stop under the blinding sun as he strives to remain out of (separate from, and therefore ‘above’) the messy tangle of the other people, mostly Tulubaikans, waiting for that same bus. Two pages (87-88) pass of “we wait and wait [etc.]” and “time and time [etc.]”, as the sun (rendered as the delightful, affectionate diminutive ‘Sollie’) beats down mercilessly. In the meantime, conspiracies are discussed, a biker is murdered by a babushka, oat withers, turning bone-white in the fields. Similarly, “abysmal weather conditions” of the polar opposite variety see planes forestalled by blizzards, weary travellers trudge through the snow drifts on foot, ushankas pulled tight over their ears, samogón bubbling warmly in their tummies.1 To them, and to us, Tulubaika is definitively the most unreachable point on the planet.

And fuck, yeah man! I’ve spent a lot of time waiting for buses that never appeared, and Tulubaikaporia ruminates on the ontology of waiting, the odd places that waiting around forces you into, the odder shapes that into which boredom molds your mind, the people you wait with, odder still. Such meditations (themselves produced by waiting), beg the question of whether growing up in a small town inhers waiting to leave it. Tulubaikaporia goes one step further with all these various nostoses. Paired with waiting to leave is the greater part of waiting; the waiting to return to it, even if that return, the dream that animates the nostalghia,2 is striving to reach an impossible 0.

If this implies an inevitability, then be assured that such characters are far from wayward objects, unaware of why they are flinging themselves upstream in time’s river like horny salmon. The drive to reach that 0 is similarly paired with its equal and opposite desire to instead turn the asymptote upwards to escape, forever. One of my favourite chapters (no. 17) finds its hero preoccupied with his inability to overcome the hold Tulubaika has on him, desperate for his journey there to mean little but powerless to stop the tide of memory, emotion, and nostalghia from washing over him. All this is dramatised with great skill and precision by a um…difficult relationship with his authoritarian grandfather. A single, brilliant paragraph hardens all these themes, and many of those across the whole novel, with a gemlike clarity:

“Oh how painful it is to return to that homeland, that home, that street (or a house), after so many years of being away. One who is not who he was comes to a place that is not what it was, and two entities, the character and the place, meet each other again, as if for the first time, a complete and total jamais vu but with a hint of déjà vu, a bit toxic déjà vu — two either idealised or despised images sprouted from the imperfection of memory. All everything does is seeming. It’s never a full circle. It cannot be. One never comes back to the same point. One doesn’t have to disguise oneself as a beggar or someone else to do the nostos, for one is already disguised by time.” (279)

He hates it, it hurts but he cannot sever himself from it forever. He is no longer the same person when he lived there and so is no longer the same person who decided to leave, who was sick of everything Tulubaika and enamoured with everything outside, so the feelings of return are an agonising morass of tension, despair, and love. This is the knot we see very many characters try and fail to untie.

Others, chatting at the very start of the novel, when asked when they’ll return to Tulubaika, shrug and say “Every year I plan to but never quite manage it…Work…” (3). How would you respond if somewhere were to ask about when you’re going visit your grandparents, now living far away and feeling more distant each year? The curve does not touch y=0. This first chapter, where we are first introduced to many concepts that fill this book (asymptotes, Tulubaika’s disappearance, déjà vu and nostalghia) may be the best. It is such a warm, friendly, exuberant first impression that practically bounces off the page with fun and pure enjoyment in showing off its artfulness. Old friends, including the wonderfully named Slavoslav Slavoslavovich, sit around a table in a kitchen, drinking and chatting, at a party, talking about home, about mathematics, about cars, while the best music ever thrums in from the other room.3 A cat called Meowbius tumbles into a pot of borscht. When was the last time I talked with my oldest friends at a house party? Shortly after I finished reading this chapter for the first time I called them up to arrange one. It’s happening soon. Fittingly for a book subtitled ‘a ritual’, Tulubaikaporia works a curious magic on the readers’ mind from the very start, chrysopoeiasing base memory into a slippery, angelic substance that makes time slide easily from past to present, through imperceptible boundaries, vanechka’s excellent prose the alchemical medium.

The particular shape of this magic emerges from the combination of the setting’s specificity and its universality. Tulubaika is a village with a history of Tartar inhabitation with a river, a big birch forest, and lots of old people, somewhere in Vyatka Oblast, Russia. The footnotes bulge the pages to oh-so-helpfully explain the intricacies of Russian idioms, to let us in on the various translation games that the book plays with itself, and to gloss the filigree details of Russian memes with its obscure message board in-jokes and shibboleths. The scars of history from the Russian Civil War, to World War Two, to the transformations of the Soviet Union and its downfall add to Tulubaika’s ‘emplacedness’. It seems deeply personal, or as personal as you can be with multiple viewpoints, narrators, and aspects, and rooted in a certain time or generation of writer/reader, born circa 1990-2000.

But I could not shake the feeling that despite all this context, vanechka was conducting a literary masquerade. Is Tulubaika in fact located somewhere in southern England? The birches seem codes for oaks and willows, the various escapes of Tulubaikan youth to cities and overseas mask the realities of flight from small southern towns into London, the endless fields of oat in fact the gentle undulations of the Lea Valley. How was it that vanechka managed to write a book about my home, where I grew up, the nostalghia I feel living far from my birthplace? Did I also grow up in Tulubaika?4 And that element of time that I mentioned above only adds to this odd illusion - is vanechka also my age, old enough to remember the older internet (and Elder Scrolls III & IV), but hitting (relative) maturity precisely at the right time to midwife the age of hyper-ironised meme culture?

The clue is in the name. Tulubaikaporia: a ritual. Tulubaika is reminiscent of the balalaika (to foreign ears at least) combined with the Greek aporia - denoting, variously, a feigned, rhetorical doubt or, the essence of a conundrum, the feeling of being stuck on an idea that you cannot make sense of, appearing most prominently in Socratic dialogues. The book presents us with many aporia, conundra to weave and unweave, but vanechka leaves us clues, threads to wend our way out of the labyrinth of time, place and memory. One such clue is that the old(er) people of Tulubaika speak in a form of Yorkshire or North-East English dialect. Whole chapters take place in this voice. Episode Twelve (about meeting strange cats in birch groves) for example:

“So there tha is, walkinn among t’birches, leaves above and below shimmerinn like gold; tha’s ponderinn life, t’past, lost in nostalghia, a bit of regret, always with a smile, mind thee…See, she’s daft ‘bout all that Eastern malarkey, talks ‘bout wantinn to be reborn as a bloom, a lil’pink orchid”. (216)5

And so on. I live in Yorkshire so I clung to this choice on my first reading as one of some significance, so I messaged vanechka about it and he helpfully responded thusly:

“I just love Yorkshire accent, it has a warm slightly rural feel for me in the best way, plus it has thou/you thingy, which I miss in English. however in the book I think it’s more of a mix of Northern English dialects. I picked it over just making it sound archaic because it has other connotations like biblical/shakespearean etc. Russian accents are less prominent within the country, they aren’t as vivid as English ones and you’d mostly hear it from old people. In a place like Tulubaika, people just talk a bit differently and use some non-standard words. I had to render that feel somehow but I didn’t want to pick e.g. Irish or Scottish or some other one, and tried to avoid Americanisms as well, because that would signal something too ethnically particular, unlike Northern English dialects/accents e.g. Yorkshire, which would be a subset of English, like e.g. people in Vyatka region where Tulubaika is speak normal Russian with a slight twist, but if it was e.g. another ethnic region that wouldn’t work for me, but I have to say Russian village speech is rather a bit archaic / rural Russian than a separate dialect, the problem with rendering it to English for me is there’s not exact alternative because English actually have vivid regional accents — that combined with my love for it, somewhat made it a natural choice for me... I was thinking of doing the audiobook by a reader with Yorkshire accent as well”.

This struck me as the essence of translation and the key to understanding the balance between universality and specificity in Tulubaikaporia (and nostalgia/nostalghia more broadly). See, our author is really two authors, or two aspects of one author arranged around the act of writing, one aspect taking over from the other. This fact greets us from the title page. Tulubaikaporia: a ritual is written by vanechka with “Translation and commentary by Vanya Bagaev”. Based on this, and supporting information on the nova·nevédoma website, we see, first, vanechka as the writer-writer who takes pure, unalloyed pleasure in language and creation. Second is Vanya Bagaev, known otherwise for his novel Deleted Scenes from the Bestselling Utopian Novel, who plays translator, compiler, and glosser. It is he who has provided such obliging footnotes for the curious outsider and is responsible for the choice to render the speech of Tulubaikans as Yorkshire-accented English. vanechka has stated elsewhere that he often, but not always, writes in Russian but translates this to English as he goes. Sundering the authoring-self into the writing and the translating part fits this particular authorial practice.

Consider this split in light of one of Vanya/vanechka’s heroes - James Joyce.6 Joyce spent years, collectively, toiling over each sentence in Ulysses, famously 8 hours alone on the superhot “The heaventree of stars hung with humid, nightblue fruit”, and at the same time he is the man who made the very silly jokes like Leopold Bloom’s name being misheard at Paddy Dignam’s funeral causing his name to be rendered ‘Leopold Boom’ in that evening’s paper.7 That these elements are mutually reinforcing, that the work of the author to re-create (or re-dramatise) life through art means that it ought to give equal weight to both the silliest and most serious parts of it, and this necessitates such authors to take on multiple guises (dis-guises?) is a wonderful artistic insight embodied by the vanechka/Vanya Bagaev split.8 These persona games bear real fruit, rather than only being simple gestures at the complexities of ‘being known online’, or something similarly banal.

Through reading Tulubaikaporia, I came to realise that sundering the process of authoring a novel into these two elements, or poles, of creation, interrelated but distinct, is a masterstroke. It invites interrogation on the nature of fiction (or literature) compared to imagination. All literature is fundamentally translation between the inner world (of memory, of emotion, of dreams) and the outer world (of speech, of gesture, of action). This occurs through the characters of a given book - both if their actions are an accurate representation of the interior world or if we are invited to delight in the ironies of actions contradictory to the feelings and desires of the character.9 Tulubaikaporia elevates this play to correspond both to the act of writing and the act of reading. To write is to translate the inner to outer and to discipline imaginative exuberance into narrative, plot, and character. Similarly, to read that book is to dramatise and narrativise, to observe as if it were happening to oneself, the same processes filtered through experiences all of one’s own. In short, to translate. Thus the Yorkshire dialect can stand in so perfectly for the Russian Rural. Because Tulubaikaporia makes nostalghia its primary focus speaks to its achievement as a work of modern(ist) literature, for what better example do we have of the particular being made universal?

On the blurb, vanechka implores the reader to ‘save’ Tulubaika from vanishing into the fog of forgetting. The penultimate chapter of Tulubaikaporia follows a group of four Tulubaikans at an anti-nostalghist support group (probably overseas) who are forbidden from talking about Tulubaika. They stress and strain at this prohibition, trying to tell jokes or talk about the weather but always returning, elliptically, to speaking about Tulubaika in some way or another. I see this like the rhetorical device of preterition, to speak of something by explicitly and distractingly not speaking of it.10 At the end of the chapter, a headline declares that Tulubaika has finally vanished, forever, an ending foretold in the very first chapter. Thus, as vanechka has since glossed, to save Tulubaika is to transform it into a literary artifact - a setting - that can then be dispersed via Tulubaikaporia and preserved forever.

Ada, or Ardor by the greatest of the Russian exile novelists, Vladimir Nabokov, comes to mind as a point of comparison. Nabokov dreamed into existence a parallel world of Russian exile, the Russo-Franco-Anglo Canada/America of the novel forming a sort of dream-Europe, a pre-Russian Revolution consensus of aristocratic refinement, immune to the chaos of our world’s political disturbances. The actual Russia takes on the guise of ‘Tartary’ and is the novel’s barbaric other, a literal Tartarus to safely imprison the historical ugliness of Russian history, leaving only that which is sophisticated and cosmopolitan in Russian émigré existence for Nabokov’s characters to cavort in. The effect of this choice is that the world of Ada or Ardor that which Nabokov, or perhaps the generic, cultured Russian exile of the 20th Century, wished to reside in. However, from clues to the Real World that pervade the novel, it is equally a Hell akin to that conjured by the Cartesian demon, a sphere of dreams and ghosts that is trapped purgatorially in the minds of men and the pages of a book. Is this the destiny of Tulubaika? Is the ritual more of a curse, or an abjuration to banish nostalghia from the Real World to be entombed forever in the novel?

I don’t believe that vanechka is quite such a pessimist about fiction, imagination and storytelling. For one, I believe his titular ritual to be an unqualified success. Much like the imaginary worlds of ‘Tlön, Uqbar, and Orbus Tertius’ in Jorge Luis Borges’ story of the same name, Tulubaika is a more perfect world for those who have left home. At the end of ‘Tlön, Uqbar, and Orbus Tertius’, teased by my epigraph for this essay, the Real World, the here and now, is utterly taken over by Tlön, Uqbar, and Orbus Tertius (philosophically alterior worlds constructed by a secretive cadre of geniuses and distributed by various objects and encyclopedias scattered across the globe). Within a few years, Spanish and English are doomed to obsolescence, academic departments are revolutionised forever by the entrancing epistemologies of these artificial lands, as we are attracted, moths to a flame, by the promise of a world organised by orderly intelligences. So perfect is Tulubaika a metaphor for nostalghia, it too threatens to intrude into the messy, phenomenal world of perceptible reality and occlude it with its dreams of mushrooms, birch, and pure gold. In our times, the lotus eating of nostalghia has become an almost universal pastime, consuming popular culture and movies, music, sartorial fashions, with the busywork of endless repetition. We all seem to want to live not so much in another place as in another time. Is this the essence of Tulubaikaporia’s ritual? Tulubaika has disappeared because it is everywhere, dispersed like an aerosol into the hearts and minds of all humans who have, in some way or another, left home.

And the world is sufficiently suffused, so we can move on. Now having reached that elusive 0, we can stop talking about Tulubaika and, much like the characters in this penultimate chapter, instead chat about more important things, like the weather.

Thanks for reading! This took a lot of gestating and turned more into a literary essay than a review. Tulubaikaporia is a book that invites speculation and analysis, while also being very fun and funny, but the difficulty in getting this ready can partly be explained by vanechka’s own eagerness to explain his work himself, leaving such little room for the eternally suffering class of essayists. So, despite this essay’s failings as a review, I’ve found literary essays far more convincing than reviews when it comes to getting me to read books. So much so that I almost wrote a parallel essay about Tulubaika’s disappearance in relation to other disappearing characters/places. You can see the stub of it with the references to Borges and Nabokov but I almost wrote another 300-500 words about Pynchon’s vanishing/dissolving protagonists in Gravity’s Rainbow and Shadow Ticket and I thought it such a swell idea, if not a good essay, that I had to mention it in this postscript which, as we all know, does not count. Even the asymptote, never reaching 0, idea has strange affinities to GR’s whole ‘beyond the 0’ concepts. Maybe one day this will all come together, but probably not unless I decide to ruin my life by writing at length about Pynchon. Who knows! See you this summer in Tulubaika, it promises to be a scorcher <3

As acceptance towards and tolerance of queer folks is in retreat the world over, it seems impossible for us to avoid looking back, even five or ten years, and think, dreamily, “oh, to be X back then!”. The good times, especially to us queers under 30, can appear the ‘tipping point’ years, our brief tryst with the mainstream when marriage equality was the progressive victory of the day, Hollywood’s tastemakers seemed to champion gay cinema, and world leaders bragged about being at Pride.

Cringe or not, such displays of public acceptance feel close to impossible now, as the British and American governments have become actively hostile towards trans people and the manosphere goons have waged an ideological crusade against any form of gender non-conformity to great acclaim and popularity. It is hard not to see this rhythm of progress and reaction as something perennial, a suprahistorical dialectic as natural to society as breathing. Queer culture in particular has conditioned itself to accept and reproduce these patterns of freedom and repression. We feel in every new repressive measure an impulse to blame ourselves for living too large, trusting too many, and being too visible. Far from being limited to only the ‘tipping point’ years (c. 2008-2021?) and the current ‘vibeshift’, I argue that this awareness of an oscillating relationship with straight culture and society at large is a key feature of queer, and especially gay, literature from at least the late nineteenth century, through the AIDS epidemic, and up to today.

Many of us have heard the sentiment from Fran Lebowitz that the impact of AIDS on American arts was that it eliminated a generation with taste, as artists and their erudite audiences bore the brunt of the epidemic in the US. It’s a great quote, both very humbling and very flattering. What I didn’t realise is that she had this comparison to make an interview in 2016 about her writing about AIDS in the late 80s (emphasis mine):
“AIDS completely changed American culture. People always say “pop culture”. As if we have some high culture to distinguish it from. The effect of AIDS was like a war in a minute country. Like, in World War I, a whole generation of Englishmen died all at once. And with AIDS, a whole generation of gay men died practically all at once, within a couple of years…The knowing audience also died and no longer exists in a real way.”

Lebowitz’s historical comparison touches on something very true about how we, queers, see in history a dialectic that spirals, progressively, around utopia and disaster. It seems every crisis in the queer world is a “war in a minute country”, news of attacks on queer folks and our access to life-saving medical treatments trickling through our networks like dispatches from some forgotten front. Yet her phrase referring to the “whole generation of Englishmen” gestures to a historical resonance with these experiences, suggesting connections between the contemporary period of reaction and the travails of queer people (for this essay, mostly cis gay men) living during the years building to the First World War. The gay artists working in this period were the children of Whitman, Wilde, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Symonds and Pater. To simply gesture at the enormous artistic scope of this queer period (c.1890-1920), we find E.M Forster, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, André Gide, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, Osbert Sitwell, C.K. Scott Moncrieff (also the foremost translator of Proust into English), Robert Graves, Edward Carpenter, the biographer Lytton Strachey, T.E. Lawrence (as in Lawrence of Arabia), and even D.H. Lawrence (see his 1914 novel, The Prussian Officer).

To focus simply on those authors who wrote on what we could consider homoerotic or queer themes in the years prior to the First World War, I was struck by their temporal density. Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice was published in 1912, Andre Gide’s The Immoralist appeared in 1902 and the first parts of his defense of pederasty, Corydon later in 1911, E.M. Forster’s Maurice was finished by 1914 (although it was revised in the early ‘60s and not published until after Forster’s death in 1971) and the first volume in Marcel Proust’s enormous In Search of Lost Time, Swann’s Way,1 was also published in 1914. Naturally, the connections run deeper than their dates of publication or composition. In this particular clutch of texts, their heroes ruminate on Nietzsche and atheism, they are gripped by fears of discovery or of being perceived (and often turn their gaze outwards in response, voyeurs as much as surveilled subjects), they feel the passionate intensities of erotic desire and combine these feelings with questions on the nature of art and the process of its making, and they linger, at times obsessively, on health and beauty in ontological and spiritual opposition to sickness, decay, and death.

All of this art came pouring out, brilliant and built to last, in the months and years before the onset of the First World War. Can we say that this is the art of premonition? Each of our authors would have known men, lovers and fellow travellers, killed, missing, or wounded over the four years of hellish conflict across Europe, Africa and Asia. Did they see it coming at all? Was there something twitching in the aether that pushed them towards this kind of art, to consider whether it would all amount to anything, whether it would be worth risking life, limb and freedom for love and lust, to (in E.M. Forster’s words from Howard’s End) ‘only connect’? If there is an art of premonition on display here, it is only right that it is the Queer Art of Premonition.

While we cannot say that E.M. Forster was able to predict the disaster of the First World War, disaster is never far away from the mind of his Maurice Hall, the hero of Maurice. While Gide’s titular Immoralist hardly cares who knows his business, sick as he is of French polite society in a typically Nietzschean fashion, outing hangs like death over Maurice. When Maurice, finds that he is ‘incurable’, after attempting a form of hypnotic conversion therapy, it is resolved that: “[b]y pleasuring the body Maurice had confirmed — that very word was used in the final verdict — he had confirmed his spirit in its perversion, and cut himself off from the congregation of normal man”.2 He has no one to turn to, even his lover from Cambridge cuts him off emotionally and physically to pursue a career in politics, and Maurice finds himself an exiled creature, utterly alone and everywhere fearing judgement, discovery and disgrace. To him, London is transformed into the trenches of northern France and Belgium, death stalking every shadowy corner, somewhere a bullet waits with his name on it. His fate is always uncertain. Maurice may lose himself chasing hope, as if ordered by some unseen commander to march over no-man’s-land, dodging the police like landmines, trying to survive the uncertainty of cruising in the age of criminalisation, as one of many doomed young men facing death before their time.

Maurice is a more extreme articulation of this anxiety, the novel takes Maurice’s ‘exile’ very seriously compared to Forster’s contemporaries, but this does not mean the subject is absent from the other texts in this group. While the love in Death in Venice is one that dares not speak its name, Gustav von Aschenbach dreads that someone might discover his secret infatuation with the adolescent beauty, Tadzio. It is stressed from the beginning of the story that von Aschenbach is a very serious and respectable bourgeois artist who has lived his life in the very strict boundaries of properness and discipline. While his most famous book is a historical novel on the legendarily gay Frederick II of Prussia, Mann makes it sound dutiful and dry. A weighty tome on weighty topics. The tension between von Aschenbach’s subject and his artistic methodology suggests he is able to study queer desire but he has to make it grand and historical. This is a way for him to sublimate his gay desires, to keep them lying dormant and passive so that he neither has to address nor disavow them. In his early encounters with Tadzio, bourgeois tact takes over. He looks away in a “kind of delicacy or apprehension, something akin to deference or modesty” at the sight of the youth’s exposed legs.3 He writes a few pages, influenced by Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, on Tadzio’s beauty and feels “exhausted and, yes, spent, as if his conscience were reproaching him after a debauch.”4 Yet the story is the story of his loss of control, his surrender to desire and the strange, deep feelings that roil beneath the surface of taste and civilisation. And so much of the fifth part of the story is taken up with von Aschenbach trying to follow Tadzio and his family around Venice, by foot and by gondola, himself slightly ashamed at his conduct but unable to stop, his actions unveiling that which he has himself hidden even from himself for all his life.

Even in Swann’s Way sexuality is haunted by accidental or unintentional revealing. In scenes of the narrator’s youth, he is turned voyeur in one memorable passage, trapped hiding in a shrub to watch the young Mlle Vinteuil and her ‘friend’ through an open window as the couple insult and degrade the memory of the deceased M. Vinteuil before (possibly) having lesbian sex. Earlier in the story, he is also exposed to the open secret of his uncle’s relationships with ‘actresses’ (read: courtesans), having met one of them when calling on his uncle on a whim. It is only when he mentions this to his parents does this open secret get blown up into a family scandal, alienating him forever from his colourful, if improper, uncle and cutting off a route whereby he would depart from the bourgeois world for the arts and, implicitly, freer sexual mores.

Beyond all this play between revealing and concealing is the threat of social death. Social death being exile from polite society and, with it, the worlds of mainstream culture, business, and politics. In Britain, until 1961, this social death was accompanied by the very real threat of arrest and imprisonment. The example made of Oscar Wilde, who was prosecuted for ‘gross indecency’ and sentenced to two years hard labour in 1895, had an enormous impact on the generation of gay artists who followed him, E.M. Forster included.

Of this group of novels, Maurice is the only one that dares to speak clearly of being separated from the “congregation of normal man” because of one’s homosexual desires. But this is not the only element of gay existence that it articulates through its characters. Faced with his ‘incurability’, Maurice understands his sole recourse is to “take to the greenwood”. The ‘greenwood’ is Forster’s conception of ‘Merrie England’, a traditional, bucolic idyll separate from the punitive gaze of the law where men were free to love each other according to their nature. He eventually gets there, after falling for working-class gamekeeper Scudder. Forster’s inspiration for this was Edward Carpenter and his working-class partner George Merrill who lived together in rural Surrey in, what appeared to Forster at least, a classless socialist dream of gay harmony. It is in separation from civilised, modern society that Maurice (and Forster) could imagine refuge and safety, far away from the cities that would become the queer refuges after homosexuality was decriminalised. Utopia, that no-place, for Maurice is somewhere in the past, the countryside, rather than the city, the place of the future. Scudder and Maurice find refuge in the country and, in doing so, travel back in time to the rose-tinted before, both men made safe from the Great War. The ‘greenwood’ is a Utopia and exists, rightly, in both the past and the future.

There is something queer about Utopia and something utopian about queerness, at least according to José Esteban Muñoz, whose Cruising Utopia (2009) has become canonical queer theory. Both are a rejection of the present insofar as they reject normative, pragmatic patterns of thought and of being by throwing oneself at a future that is not only unreal but also at least partially unimaginable. We do not yet have all the options, these can only come to us through survival and struggle through the present, and we may only hope that they appear to us. All we have to hope for is the future and the hope that it will truly be a better place than today. In these oscillations between hope and despair, temporalised as utopic future and present disaster, we see one nestling within the other; latent within the experience of disaster is the hope of utopia; the light of utopia is only visible through the shadows of disaster. This is also what makes their relationship dialectical - the conditions for disaster somewhere in the freer, better world while the conditions of this better world are somewhere in the repressive reaction. The utopic “greenwood” is a place free from the fear of discovery and outing but is only available to our hero once he has stared the terror of discovery full in the face and felt the force of rejection from straight society. Both Swann’s Way, with the narrator’s understanding of the arts as both a place of freer sexual expression because it is an exile from the bourgeois family, and Death in Venice, where the upright von Aschenbach begins to lose himself in the mania of pursuing Tadzio’s Platonic beauty, express something of the ‘greenwood’ in these moments, when rejection from straight society is in fact the very thing needed to set one free. These are glimpses at a queer futurity.

The terror of discovery, however, can be temporalised as the realm of the present, the world of subjection and repression that queer subjects exist in now. The way out is also temporalised as Muñoz argues that it is through understanding our past that the possibilities for queer futurity emerge. Maurice enacts this in literature; Maurice Hall and Scudder escape into the past, the pseudo-Medieval ‘greenwood’, to build a future together. Von Aschenbach finds a way to understand his own latent homosexuality in the pages of Plato, specifically the dialogue Phaedrus where he imagines himself as the wise, elder Socrates and Tadzio as titular youth. Yet backwards is not the only way these texts and characters look.

Taking from Ernst Bloch, Muñoz, proposes an understanding of the “anticipatory illumination of art, which can be characterized as the process of identifying certain properties that can be detected in representational practices helping us to see the not-yet-conscious. This not-yet-conscious is knowable, to some extent, as a utopian feeling. When Bloch describes the anticipatory illumination of art, one can understand this illumination as a surplus of both affect and meaning within the aesthetic.”5 The “not-yet-conscious” in Maurice is represented, in part, by Maurice and Scudder escaping not just straight society, but pre-emptively dodging the First World War and its attendant disasters. Such themes appear later in the story of queer arts and literature, as new disasters are manifested in the social life of queer people in the twentieth century.

John Boswell, the greatest gay historian of the twentieth-century, argues in his much-maligned but genuinely beautiful Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality (1980) that the period between the mid-eleventh to mid-twelfth centuries saw an unusually vibrant flowering in the literary expression of homosexual love across the Christian and Islamic worlds. To twin the above list of modernist gay authors with the distant past, Boswell allows to draw eleventh and twelfth centuries the poets Abbot Baudri of Bourgeuil (1046-1130),6 Marbod of Rennes (c.1035-1123),7 Hilary the Englishman (fl. 1125),8 the churchmen Lanfranc (1005x1010-1089), St Anselm of Bec (c. 1033-1109),9 St Aelred of Rievaulx (1110-1167),10 and a host of Jewish and Muslim poets; Boswell lists that “Moshe ibn Ezra, Ibn Sahl, Ibn Ghayyath, Ibn Sheshet, Ibn Barzel and Abraham Ibn Ezra all wrote love poetry to youths”.11 His scholarship strains at times, over-concerned as he was with reconciling his own Catholicism with his gayness by demonstrating that the Catholic Church, especially in this period, was tolerant and even celebratory of homosexuality, and so, theologically speaking, should continue that tradition in the 1980s. But these identifications with the gay artists of a past are a way for Boswell to intellectually reconcile his own homosexuality in his Catholic milieu while also being a bold academic project of redefining what historians considered possible in medieval society.

A common point of criticism at Boswell’s works is that he so easily projected his own experiences of the gay avant-garde of pre-AIDS New York and New England to the middle ages. Equipped with the understanding of queer premonition however, Boswell was constructing his own “greenwood” in his intoxicating, almost romantic, arguments, painting an alluring picture of a flourishing gay subculture in the schools, monasteries and cities of Paris, England and Al-Andalus. So too Walter Pater, the gay Oxford Don and reluctant leader of Aestheticism whose Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) was a polestar for Oscar Wilde and legions of other aesthetic decadents. Pater works a similar magic on the Renaissance, creating, with his philosophy of Diaphaneite, a historical communion of body and spirit that connects the homoerotics of Platonic Greece to Epicurean & Hadrian’s Rome, to Da Vinci & Michelangelo, to Winckelmann & Whitman, and to his own relationship with students and academics at Oxford.

It is striking that Boswell’s book appeared in the same year that Robert Glück’s seminal Jack the Modernist (1985) is set. Jack the Modernist is a rarer thing than Boswell’s exuberant identification with an idyllic gay past. Glück instead wrote a book of remembering the time before, written and published during the present that the before is contrasted to. The freedom of those times, the cruising, bathhouses, the openness of homosexuality, the free associations of bodies and cocks and cum, how bloody clever and wonderful everyone in the book is (by and large) is an intoxication, a glimpse at a Utopia that is only so because it is gone. AIDS, by comparison, seems like a time of eternal present, a tartarus of constant loss and death, a seemingly endless hollowing (this appears at least as the effect Lebowitz wanted to achieve by invoking the First World War). Glück even manages to tap into the ‘not-yet-conscious’ evoked by Munoz. While appearing as an autofictional memoir, Bob Glück does not ‘see’ into the future, hints of AIDS appear throughout the novel. Contamination lurks in the background of Jack the Modernist, with one memorable, pivotal scene seeing Bob Glück cringing away from a potential partner’s anal warts in a bathhouse. Similarly, sickness is something loathsome in the modernist gay canon, all that is good is healthy and hale, all that is evil is sickly and death-like. This creates a sophisticated temporal knot of past, present, and future (future from the perspective of 1980), comparable to Boswell’s historical project on medieval gay subculture.

This is so much so that Glück and Boswell seem to be writing about the same thing, even if their subjects are separated by the better part of a millennium; a before that could become an after, and a hope for a queer Utopia constructed from the bones and bricks of the past. Theirs is a historical, or memorial, project based on the past but directed towards the future. Boswell, far from being a nostalgist or antiquarian for the twelfth century, wanted to enact intellectual and theological changes in the Catholic church in his present day. Pater too. His aesthetic philosophy was a guide for young men to construct a meaningful and beautiful life in the modern city, rather than simply viewing the past as an escape route from the confusion of Victorian industrial cities. This was more of a reality for Glück, even as he memorialised the gay world, because it was an entire, little world, before AIDS in San Francisco, and his book is a testament to both this gone-away place AND its continued survival - Bob Glück is still alive, after all. The ‘greenwood’ for Forster is only a dream for two men, so isolated is Maurice Hall, and therein lies its limitation.

While re-criminilisation has not yet raised its ugly head for gay men, many trans and queer foax are facing legal and medical discrimination in ways that we’d hoped had been banished forever. Where next? It is heartening to remember that even after criminalisation gave way to the sort of intellectual and sexual cavorting so celebrated by Bob Glück and that world itself was devastated by the AIDS crisis, it was not destroyed, but transformed yet again. Throughout writing this essay, I’ve been listening to the Pet Shop Boys singles systematically for the first time. I particularly love their 1993 cover of the YMCA classic “Go West” (not just because the chorus became the classic Arsenal chant, “one-nil to the Arsenal”). The Pet Shop Boys selected the song in 1992 for a performance at an AIDS charity event at the Haçienda nightclub in Manchester when asked to perform by legendary gay filmmaker Derek Jarman. What better song to contain all those hopes for the future, all that utopian energy?

(Go west) we will do just fine
(Go west) where the skies are blue
Go west, this is what we’re gonna do
There where the air is free
we’ll be what we want to be
Now if we make a stand
we’ll find our promised land

Pet Shop Boys - Go West (Official Video) [HD REMASTERED] - YouTube

This time it’s January 2026-Early February 2026. Seven (7) books!

Gilgamesh, (transl. Sophus Helle)

Some of you may have noticed that I adapted some lines from Gilgamesh in the story that I posted last on Giraldus, Head - specifically these lines:

“I must return home with him where young men are girt with waistbands and taking him thence, we make and in the making door-jambs are shook and the walls do shudder in those early days when the world was young.”

I took them from the account of the wrestling match between Gilgamesh and Enkidu, with some reshaping. The place where the “young men are girt with waistbands” (I, 225) is the city of Ur and the shaking of the door-jambs comes when Enkidu blocks the door to the home of a young bride who Gilgamesh wants to have sex with before her wedding. Enkidu physically blocking Gilgamesh from consummating a heterosexual sex act is electric with queer potential. I took the homoeroticism of Gilgamesh very seriously, it is not important to me whether Gilgamesh and Enkidu had sex as they are not and were likely never real people, because it was important to me that their wrestling was deeply sexual and erotic in content and, therefore, ripe as a reference point for my story.

I took the lines from Andrew George’s 2003 translation and I was excited to see how the newest version, translated by Danish scholar Sophus Helle, would render the same phrases. I was disappointed. Instead of “where the young men are girt with waistbands” we find the alliterative, but nondescript, “where the men are dazzingly dressed” and rather than “the door jambs shook, the walls shudder”, Helle renders it more simply as “the doors broke, the walls shook”. I don’t necessarily mind directness in translations of ancient literature, but something goes missing when simplicity of language is held up as a core virtue in translation. I prefer the knotty specificity of “girt with waistbands” which also serves to place the poem temporally in a time where ‘to gird’ was a common practice before battle - consider the girding of loins in the Old Testament.

The problem persists throughout Helle’s translation, but without familiarity with other translations, I was only nagged by a vague doubt that something was missing in his telling. It is, however, not going to be my last Gilgamesh so I appreciated its clarity as an introduction. I will also admit that if I had read this as a teenager, nothing except my own shitness with foreign languages would have stopped me from becoming an Assyriologist. The essays in it are very fine, especially the introduction.

Pairing notes - For music, something suitably epic in style, Mendelssohn or Summoning’s Tolkien-infused atmospheric black metal were my choices. Aubergine and lentils seasoned with za’atar and pomegranate molasses with mint tea to serve.

A Month in the Country, J.L. Carr

An excellent short novel, A Month in the Country came to me like a burst of summer sunshine in the depths of winter. I have great fondness for the post-First World War subgenre of literature where the war is an ever-presence, rarely spoken of but unavoidable - The Magic Mountain, To the Lighthouse, Brideshead Revisited. A Month in the Country is not out of place in this esteemed company. The book follows a traumatised artist as he spends the summer of 1920 restoring a medieval wall-painting in a rural Yorkshire church. He moves north to escape London, (where his wife has left him for another man) poverty, (this job saves him from destitution) and the War (which has left him with a disfiguring facial spasm), but the sojourn cannot give him true deliverance. He leaves the village of Oxgodby with as many regrets as he brought, but perhaps more insight into them.

Carr luxuriates in touching the past. Written sixty years after its events, set in a kind of North Yorkshire that has truly disappeared, A Month in the Country is the teasing out of the repressed memories of our beleaguered hero as his work gradually uncovers a forgotten, anonymous masterpiece of the highest quality. The book doesn’t simply ask what will remain of us when we are dead and buried but spends the time exploring how the people who find those remains will interpret and relive what we have left behind for the future.

Pairing notes - Picnic food: sandwiches, berries, hot tea, cold cider. North Yorkshire ales like Old Peculiar or Black Sheep. Bird song, Vaughan Williams’ ‘Lark Ascending’, or The Glass Trunk by Richard Dawson.

Shadow Ticket, Thomas Pynchon

A superlative book. I would say more, but I already wrote a review/essay on this for my friends at Rat Depot (Leeds’ premier indie film screening and arts collective) so at the risk of being cheeky, this entry is now an advertisement for the Rat Depot newsletter. You can read all my thoughts on Shadow Ticket AND receive 4(!) pieces of either fiction or non-fiction for just £1 per month.

Pairing notes - You can have this one for free. Cold lager, either Pabst Blue Ribbon or Miller’s High Life for the first half and Budvar or Pravha for the second. Hot dogs with mustard and sauerkraut. Music - the Bird is a must for all Pynchon but as this is set pre-bebop, Count Basie and Duke Ellington instead.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, John Le Carre

Who knew that this Spy Book for Dads was really about a small, unassuming man sitting down, occasionally reading some files, and remembering things? I saw someone on Substack say that literature centred on the question ‘how well can you really know another person?’ is a trope invented, or popularised, by Bret Easton Ellis in the 1980s. This person has clearly never read Le Carre.

In a profession where your worth is determined by how well you keep secrets and lie to those closest to you, how can you know who someone really is and what they really want? This question is the core of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and George Smiley’s quest to uncover a Soviet mole somewhere in the upper echelons of British intelligence. I found Smiley’s lengthy reveries oddly akin to Proust, but the force of memory in Le Carre is not an involuntary unfolding but a logical process forming a battle of the remember’s will against inertia, age and the eroding force of time. The most exciting bits in the book are not those where spies are shot in the back, but these examinations and reexaminations of memory. More than fighting against the hubris of his superiors and the mole’s cunning, Smiley struggles against his own mind, struggling to discover what has been hiding under his very nose. TTSS also has one of the most melancholy endings of a conventionally plotted novel that I have read. When Smiley does eventually uncover the mole, any sense of triumph is replaced by the recognition that the whole affair represents another step along the long path of decline for the British Empire, and perhaps a terminal one. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is, more than anything else, Le Carre’s eulogy for the last generation who dreamt of running that empire upon which the sun never set.

Pairing notes - Single malt scotch, neat with a drop of water. For music, TTSS is set in 1973 so try some surprising music set at the same time to heighten the novel’s sense of internal anachronism - Can’s Future Days, Gentleman by Fela Kuti, Head Hunters by Herbie Hancock, The Stooges’ Raw Power, John Cale’s Paris 1919, Countdown to Ecstasy by Steely Dan, and Roxy Music’s self-titled album and For Your Pleasure.

Beyond a Boundary, CLR James

For someone who is a very big fan of sports, but especially football, it grieves me that there are not very many great books on the subject. CLR James’ 1963 classic on cricket is the notable exception. Universally lauded for its insight into Trinidadian politics, post-coloniality, post-Windrush England, and the game of cricket itself, Beyond a Boundary should be read by anyone and everyone, especially those who think that sports and games are a waste of time.

As a work of social theory, or rather social theory applied to the subject of cricket, it is precise, humane and erudite in examining how cricket (or sport) and politics have never been separate entities. But this is not the limit of his analysis. The best parts of the book, for me, come when James insists that beauty in sport and beauty in art are intimately connected, if not made of the same stuff. In making this argument via ancient Greece and the classical Olympics, he lends a dignity to sports and sports’ writing that has seldom been seen before or since. From even a cursory reading, it is clear that James loves cricket more than he loves anything else, and that love, an intelligent, patient, passionate love of the heart, mind, soul and body, leaps from every page with an exuberance that makes me yearn for the time when I felt at home on a pitch with a ball at my feet. That there is no Beyond a Boundary for football breaks my heart. That I am no CLR James and my love for football is comparatively, woefully, imperfect hurts even more.

Pairing notes - the gentle plock-plock of cricket balls striking bats on a summer’s day, or the ambience of BBC radio coverage of a test match. Pimm’s for English cricket, Rum cocktails for Trinidad. Music has no place here, this is not American football.

Herzog, Saul Bellow

I came to be aware of Saul Bellow in the way I hope many people my age were - as a joke in a Simpsons episode, specifically the one where Bart and Lisa attempt to reconcile Krusty the Clown with his estranged father, Rabbi Herschel Krustofsky (voiced by Jackie Mason).

And so he remained for some years in my head simply as ‘Saul Bellow, the Nobel prize-winning Jewish novelist’. I work at an institution with a bountiful academic library that includes all the proper classics of the 20th century, and Herzog was the one I had heard of before.

I love books about failures (maybe Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel is the only great book about people who are only good at everything) and Moses Herzog was one hell of a failure, so much so that he can never grasp its enormity, only skirt around the edges. A once-highly regarded academic of Romanticism, it is ironic that his intellect has become so constipated that he can only express himself as a crank and within the crank’s medium - the letter. He writes, or more often composes in his head, dozens of letters to historical figures, politicians, loved ones, colleagues, and each one is a sort of howl of desperation and futility. As he composes, we are led with him down the pathways of memory but never any closer to any decisive actions, or even real insights into how he got where he is and whether he deserves any of it, good or bad.

For me, Herzog’s highlights came in the back half, as the wheels of his life begin to spin out of control and he approaches mania. There is the trial of the baby murdering mother that spurs Herzog into a desperate furor of all-too-late paternal fidelity towards his young daughter, currently staying with Herzog’s ex-wife who Herzog suspects (unfairly or no) of abuse and insanity (although Bellow is never that good at writing the child herself). The moment when Herzog recollects his own experience of sexual assault as a child is intense and terrible, the images that spring into his mind are rendered with a distinct horror by Bellow’s razor sharp prose. We are left to speculate on the impact of the traumatic event on the rest of Herzog’s life after our hero moves on and leaves the whole thing underexamined. Then finally, my favourite part of the book, when Herzog returns to his semi-abandoned home in Berkshires, informally dubbed Herzog’s Folly, that he bought with the last of his inheritance from his long-suffering immigrant father. He spends long, quiet days there mostly dreaming, living in a sort of harmony with the animals and creatures that have made a home there in his absence. It is here that he finally takes on the position of a wise and gentle caretaker, a teacher and a father, in exile, and can finally rest. His spirit is allowed to grow broader and deeper outside of the jealousies and money-grubbing of the American mid-century. For a man trapped within the constraints of his intellect and the life of the mind, his holiday from it all is ours too.

Pairing notes - Cool champagne or another sparkling white. Black coffee if reading in the mornings. Romantic composers like Wagner and late Beethoven.

War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy (transl. Pevear and Volkhonsky)

While War and Peace is perhaps the supreme achievement of 19th-century novel writing, it has very little faith in the prevailing ideas of its time. No one, not Napoleon, the rebellious peasants, nor the Germans, catches more flak from Tolstoy than theorists and historians. Deep into the back half of the book, when Napoleon marches on Moscow in 1812, Tolstoy regularly interrupts the course of the narrative to denigrate historians of the Great Man school and to expound on his own competing theory of history. It can be summarised very simply; there is no one driving, but the wheels turn anyway. Even Napoleon, the Great Man par excellence, is bandied around by the tides of circumstance like a wayward buoy, privileged only in that he is able to see, from his perch at the pinnacle of European society, how little influence he has over the course of events. Or rather, he would be able to see if he were not so conceited and convinced of his own world-historical genius. Only maybe Tsar Alexander I, the sovereign of all the Russias, who appears in historical scenes mainly to look upon his people and weep, overcome with feelings of grave responsibility, and Field Marshal Kutuzov, Commander-in-Chief of the Russian army who lounges patiently, beached like a great whale, while Napoleon’s hubris wins the Patriotic War for him, have both the power of men’s lives and the requisite humility before Providence to understand that they are “slaves to history”, to use Tolstoy’s famous phrase on the ultimate fate of kings and emperors, and are so empowered to act accordingly. And to act accordingly is to remain patient, to remove themselves from the theatres of activity when necessary (Tsar Alexander does this when he relinquishes command of the army, despite his fancying of himself as a general-emperor in the Napoleonic style), and to watch while those convinced of their own potency exhaust themselves thrashing against the immovable boundaries of circumstance.

The real mover of events is no person, or even a collection of people, but some unseen Providential hand that manipulates the spirit of men towards victory or doom, life or death, war or peace. Even the shape of it is obscure. We can say that it does not move in rational spirals, like Hegel’s dialectics, but it maybe has more in common with the longue duree of the Annales school of history, so that when change occurs, it does so at a glacial pace, so slow as to be moving imperceptibly. In this sense, the clash between France and Russia is between forms of historical time, where the effervescence of Napoleonism crashes against the immovable solidity of Russian agrarian, military society causing it to dissipate on contact, like water against rock.

As with Napoleon, this unmoved mover is the acts with impunity on our heroes; the noble yet distant Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, the fae and spirited Natasha Rostov, her brother, the boyish and impetuous Nikolai Rostov, and the prince of fools, and the closest character to Tolstoy himself, Pierre Bezukhov, sending the Bezukhov, Rostov, and Bolkonsky families crashing into each other like marbles and ricocheting off in unpredictable directions. The overall effect is exhilarating. The enormous size of the book (my edition runs to 1224 pages) belies its swift pace and the density of action. Each character experiences many changes of heart, varying transformations for good or ill, in such precise arrangements that when they do collide back together again, the reader is almost always surprised yet satisfied with the result.

For example, when Nikolai Rostov, once quick with passion but careless and ignorant towards others, comes into contact with the stoic, religious and kind-hearted Marya Bolkonsky we are at first shocked that they could possibly fall in love. But Nikolai is no longer a rash, irresponsible boy, now he has been matured by familial responsibility (while retaining some of that romantic, military dash) and Marya, who grieves for her recently deceased father and finds herself jealous of her brother’s romance with Natasha, appears finally ready to open her heart to other people and allow herself to be loved and to love in return. They are brought together by the circumstances of history - Nikolai, retreating with the army from Smolensk to Moscow, happens upon the Bolkonsky estate and rescues Marya from her rebellious peasants - but the impact of their interaction is deeply personal and internal. Tolstoy shows that with the right temperament, an openness of heart and mind to the beauty and wonder of the world, such individuals are given back a form of agency that cannot be overcome by the vicissitudes of history and a way to live real, grounded lives which move towards happiness and goodness. And when this does happen, and it happens more than once, coming each time amongst the despair and destruction of war, it feels almost like a miracle. Specifically, a miracle coming from what Pierre comes to have an unshakeable faith in; “a living and ever-sensed God” (1103). Even I, an atheist, cannot deny Tolstoy and his characters, who are as real as you or I, the “living and ever-sensed God” who delivers them from hatred, fear, and despair.

Pairing notes - any of the adaptations, even the BBC 2016 War and Peace will do. Rachmaninoff’s choral works (‘St John Chrysostom Liturgy’ or ‘All Night Vespers’). Bordeaux wine and classical French cuisine for the first half, ice-cold vodka and baked potatoes (seasoned with salt) for the second.

Very very many thanks to who was kind enough to beta-read this story!

1.

Light flashes on, must be automatic, and we go stepping down, my one clammy hand in another’s, and the door is pushed clang and I’m pulled into the stale ureal fugue, stepping around pools of dim reflections, and he keeps me moving through another door’s clanging lock and I barely get a look before he goes down fast, leaving me eyeing a crowd of thickly sharpied scrawls on walls and doors, and I feel my trousers fall and hear them go a-buckleclang to the floor. I look down and see him looking down with a smile, a lipturn peeking up at the corners and there waves a little whorl on his crown, an eddy in the curly blonde sea. G-, his name an old fashioned one but he doesn’t seem old-fashioned with his hair styled like that, the curl waving back and forth, back and forth, when he was bouncing down the stairs, and now crashing on the beach now pushing his hand up under my shirt, and the other? Squeeze and peel off, the waistband was pinching and I didn’t notice it until now and he smiles again-

Gasping, stubbleburn on my thigh, I look and see milkwhite on blonde along with tan and reddy pink and pale hairs from kneepoking torn jeans and I see, just the once, him looking up with eyes blue like a gap in the clouds and he takes a taste. I want to hiss, softly softly, to let him know that’s what I want, where to go, like I am saying without having to say the words Yes, just there but he doesn’t need me to because I can feel him moving like he wants to, serpentining, tasting maybe thinking as I am doing of when he grasped my hand like he is doing with me now and he pulled me like he is doing now, pulled me down (fly you out) into the belly of the beast, its dull thrumbthrumbdrumb coming through the walls (big hottub i’m gonna), and when I saw him for the first time but I am sure he saw me first as I was turning away from the dancefloor, one last sip in my drink away from leaving, and he was standing there and he looked very tall and he said ‘hello, my name is G-’ and I almost laughed at him the way he said that old old fashioned name in that northern accent but I didn’t and I bit my tongue to stop because I knew I fancied him right there and then because the night was damned from the start and I knew that it was when I left the house to meet J- because I left for one reason and that was because I was aching for it but all I saw were three exes, none of them I wanted to see, small world blues, and then G- appeared to me like a ghost solidifying and I bumped into him and felt him through his jeans, almost as he was saying ‘hello my name is’. I didn’t know him and that is a rare thing ‘mongst our lot in this town and I don’t think he even offered me a drink but he clearly wanted me as much as I. O,O. Yes, he did and he’ll do this for a bit and then we’ll swap and then we’ll get an uber and then more of this at mine and maybe breakfast I hope Jesus another go, Jesus Christ I’m hissing again, sounding struggling quiet enclosed in this small world-

2.

Reaching down, his hair is very soft, softer than mine. I can never get it to curl right after I shower, coming out odd and flat. Did I shower right did I do it all? Yea, one two peel back water in then turn one two hands apart soap in wash it all off and dry. Yes. I did it this morning, out of habit, old flames die hard. Did I eat right, not been planning on this when J- dragged me out and I have only had one two three drinks one two pints one cocktail cockntail perfect night but it was him who would would say that, J- would, not that he had any trouble with either, and he was pulling at my hand, harder than I wanted, so I would follow him in and earlier today he was also there blaring through the phone like a siren. Another taste, there he goes Jesus plucked from the tree, trunk and fruit; but the serpent beguiled me, and I did eat. Yes, O I can feel more of it now, he’s letting me in.

God, Jesus. I can’t be feeling unsteady now, only one two three drinks, the third much better than the first - a rushing warmth now that it has coursed from the innards to the parts extreme. I’ll grip a little tighter so G- knows I feel it, but not so tight, remain un-Catulline, gentle gentle and so I hope it’s alright, no faint taste of urine and gizzard, washed all properly. We can get breakfast together, two coffees and two croissants and a loaf should be just under £15, I can pay, it’s okay I’ll say.

Aghaahh, I say at the toothscrapejustgentleenough to wake me up did he just laugh did he do that on purpose? Can’t let it go. I should say Don’t talk with your mouth full.

Yes, he definitely laughed that first time and then this time again, not too loud, but I’m sure it happens like this all the time but rarely with me. Someone has lit up, tongue tastes that there acrid tang, and it shudders me from shoulder to coccyx as always when I smell it strong enough, just like F-’s car, when I was slumped in the footwell slackmouthed huffing like a beast when I’d finished-

3.

Maybe seven years ago my first one like this in a place like this and I was hardly anything then, a stray atom. He’s doing it just like they used to like I always tried, where the tongue flicks around, glimpsing flashes like a knife, flickering lickering. Another stubblescrape on the thigh, sweetburn blossoms, all changed now, beards are out again. Petals fall and we all feel this way, the turning wheel once you hit an age. What age is G-.? He can’t be older than me, no way. Knows his way around. O. Yes. The music is getting louder, this room busier. Shall we? Should we? Yes.

Yes I feel it giving me

giving me

giving me

give give give

it goes and he goes urghrk and I go quietly softly mouth agape in Teresa’s Bernini scream no one can know jesus mary and his hands are tighter on me, a finger nibble on the right and a harder one goes bite on the left, and he’s holding me like this very still and he won’t look up but I am looking down and watching and waiting for him and then he comes up for air, a [sucking out the and then sucking in of air] turn upwards with his eyes and the flood’s sudden rush a fire-light a glowing blaze shining brightly on the ceiling reflected in the blue and he takes back in again the battle-flame unbite the edge failed the man in his need and he was back in seized but not pierced in the warm-deep hold.

That warm-deep hold, handlike mouth, anuslike throat, and I am borne upwards from the depths, recovered in-recollecting. Once upon a time lying there no phoneglow with eyes clenched shut and trying to assemble that which would conjure the sight of his once-fleshy back viewed from above as it would have looked if he were above me, my hands splayed and fingers a-digging flesh ribs all a-flex genuflexing atop. I am there now the same play with a different cast and I see those curls crashing back and forth O and I crest his shoulders clutching to the mast tossing the stirring currents-oh he is kissing me as he does it-please don’t wash me ashore leave me high and inland, only a-winnowing fan. I can see it on the horizon over there stirring currents within me and I must return home with him where young men are girt with waistbands and taking him thence, we make and in the making door-jambs are shook and the walls do shudder in those early days when the world was young-

4.

He’s releasing, moving elsewhere, weaving with the silver thread on his lips. Christ his hands, thank god I did wash, taking it in his hands and he is looking up at me now, teeth bared and eyes open with dancing blue flame, lambent as the stars, and I finally get a look at him under-around flourescence.
He flatters me, a Sebastian with Pierced Hand gazes up ardent, shining head, or I flatter myself and indoingso flatter him. He has the lip of Caravaggian boys and the general pallor of a Duncan Grant (the lighting) and maybe a pair of Mishiman armpits hiding somewhere bursting with hairy thick musk like one of those stinking flowers and his wrist twisted and holding my thigh Donatello-ly, or maybe Praxiteles-y, or one of the other countless faggy Greco-Italians who flirt with me in marble and bronze, and a pair of flexing Hockney legs flashing white somewhere misterly beneath stretching, yawning, waking denim. He’s holding me there as I look at him and he looks at me, as if for the first time, and maybe I am looking golden under the light as he makes his assessments and I see it all shining back at me once again and he starts over again and I go O once loudly, surprised, but yes covered by the door slam or toilet flush or some other, obscure noise bustling in from the outer dark.

And there is the feeling of his hands, one before and another after, smooth and rough on smooth as it goes and goes and he smiles but not too hard and I make an O and breathe out hooo (quiet quiet) one more hoooo and big gulp and back under. I squeeze on his shoulders, pink bloom white, and he goes on and anon squeezing, fingers like eels to serpentine and spiralise, squidlike. Tighten and he is trying to wring it out of me pull boys pull pull me hearties, lean in close, and ask me to pull (wet breath on the skin) harder on sighting that white back bursting from the pregnant waters. A golden Moctezuma nailed to the mast for me and next to this one firm harpoon spears a drop of tar, twanging hard on wood as it finds the mark, and another firm harpoon thrown singing for that back sighted white on wine-dark, that firm harpoon to split so I roll spouting black blood.

And yet he relents, slows and slackens from fast to loose and I am back in sight. I see in his fist, one dry knuckle-cracked, and he looks up at me and I ask myself what is he looking for and has he found it-

5.

He has found it, yes, one digit fingersnake salivaslicked while I wasn’t looking to serpentine within ring, promised, yielding, down on both knees, O, slipping past and still tight around, pierced singly with a single graven spear. Push, lightly, one flex and then out, pushing my legs up and pointed arched ankles and where is he moving now o I see tongue touch all moving so fast I need to keep my legs, but push and lift and I am spun, trainer squeak and hand braced cold on white tile once again sharpie thick and stickerclad finger left brushes up against call gino 076849…brushes painted hips around a grasp gasp and pushing again, this time warm and wet speaking without words against, golden headed within touching distance of the aureole and golden mouthed, Chrysostom, holy holy holy he chants under there and I chant with him but I can only utter an o o o and biting down I silence.

He’s not letting go and he’s moving it again but my hands have nowhere to go finger splay and futile tipgrip on nothing but nailbite clean enamel pulling myself up and up towards that light and he’s moving both in one, up and down up and down, mingled in one essence and in his hands and under his tongue I am needle-like quivering hot and heated yielding pushed in and out out and out further inwit surface to enter somewhere else in schoolyard spoilage overflow and changing-room socks rolled below ankle glimpsed edges of underside shirts we sit around Lynx-smoke fire at the centre of the room sharing in ancient communion as those feet (!) frightfully obscured I turn away (cold tile turning warm under finger breath) and let them see only my back and so I turn left right glimpse glimmering underside white like ice cream lick it lick fleeting treat let it melt under your tongue in the summer sun and I held you once by the legs as I am held now and I held on and held on never letting speak its name the feeling that sprouted out of from undergrowth within the deepest dark of blooming from refuse and we both fell to the squelching sucking wet black earth and the game went on around us in happy shouts of yoretide and I go O once very loud (blush squirts hot red) as you find what you were looking for grasped somewhere at the centre of things-

6.

Pulled round surrender, facing and raised flag salute white blazoned on red, back under warm-deep hold recurrent knuckledeep throatdeep deep on both sides surrounded bucked up and I like it like this the way I am taken bridal and bridleheld I like it so much in fact I like it so he will do what thou wilt while I am tensed like a volcano, stretched like form of man splayed across unbending stone made to bend under the shaping hand and held there by the pushdown flex in gravitational patience unto the coming of-

all things are possible I am holding this cup for thee holding it here as he holds me very still but I am moving somewhere unseen the swimming magmic ocean ‘neath in reddening flows hot in hot motion thundering towards a flash of white on black behind my eyes and I flash forth white bolts in a thunderclap a new testament shed for you alone to fill thine cup to brim-

all things are possible and all the world is spinning forth born anew in this moment as he takes me in one at a time-

and I see myself through an others eyes and I am held in an others grasp I see and I am him feeling that skin made membranous veins overfull with porous affect pours through one vessel into t’other touching mine own hip-bones, a jutting point, with a strangers hand as I quivering, trilling, awaiting, watching mine own screwed shut eyes and thrusted out jaw and voided open mouth and gripped white finger bones and I am taken back to where I was seen wandering alone in a crowded room with an emptied bacardi and coke head turned down and something tickled/s me/him both in that moment and this one too and I/he reached out to pull this forlorn wanderer up and out and to dwell forever on this eternal island, dwell in the spinning loop where each action each feeling led inexorably to this one and around again in one swift motion from birth to death to birth and again death, death, death.

7.

I am let loose and he stands and looks at me with both eyes and for the first time we are truly eye-to-eye and he shuts his softly and leans into kiss and releases it all back, everything truly everything back.

I taste it, I taste the sea, the aqua aeterna wash in with all the first prokaryotes falling top over tail in the endless undifferentiatedness each spitting out a tiny little breath of oxygen in the billions and trillions and in their largesse they are smitten and poisoned by their own waste and I taste the first plate tectonics and the first fungi sprouting like cathedrals long before the first shoots of green plants but they arrive too in clustering cities birthing ozone swaddlecloth and I too taste small Cambrian combs and sponges and the fish and the ferns and the lichens and mosses and the first footprints appear scuttling across sand dunes crablike and all the great reptiles and apes quickened in the sweeping ages and the ecocides continually fluxing like a giant breathing out death taking sacrificial hecatombs and again life and we are ourselves breathed out onto the earth, the wielders of sacrificial knives, and after so much silence there is so much noise and I swallow it all in a single gulp and the taste lingers and it will linger until the stars have gone dim and the world returns to sea and to the time before we could remember anything other than its swell, its crushing bottomlessness, and the quiet of voiceless ages. In the lingering, a slick dancer across my teeth and tongue, he has poured all life and all self back into myself and (breathing out one time I have been holding my breath for hours and hours) my cheeks glow and I feel that lighted candle which he has lit within me and so I allow a little fantasy of tomorrow morning breakfast time and maybe another time after that and after that. My hand touches his chest, and he squeezes my arse and turns to go and I pull up my trousers and follow him out into the nighttime din.

8.

Through the light and dark and light and dark I, limb loosened, follow at his heels with my eyes fixing on the back of his jeans. I consider reaching out with my hand to take his but he is moving too fast through the surging waves of dancers. He turns, phone in hand, as we reach the doors and I look to find whatever light that there was in his eyes in that cubicle now faded here amongst the multitudes as he taps his screen without looking up and speaks:

“My uber is here, maybe I’ll see you around, yeah?”

“Yeah. I-”

I say, and I let him go while one hand stays outstretched, almost close enough to grasp his left one hanging lazily, and, as he pushes on the door, face still turned away, I feel the wave of cool air and a flash from headlights on rain-slick pavement, which, beaming, makes me wince, but I still lean out to watch him and he doesn’t look back as he pulls open the backdoor of a silver Toyota and, sitting down, he is taken away in a quiet woosh and glimmering light.

I will come back here, I say, maybe silently and maybe aloud, I will return to this place again and again. And then I let the doors close and the dark comes to take back what is left of the night.

Subscribe now

WHOSO PULLETH OUT THIS SWERD OF THIS STONE AND ANVYLD IS RIGHTWYS KYNGE BORNE OF ALL ENGLOND1

Somewhere in the far-off mists of time, otherwise known as July 1974, Rick Wakeman lay on his deathbed aged only 25. Wakeman, keyboard virtuoso, had recently quit playing for the prog-rock legends Yes and decided to risk everything on his solo career, headlining the Crystal Palace festival to play excerpts from both his recent sprawling concept albums; The Six Wives of Henry VIII and The Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Excessive drinking, a preposterous musical workload (he was directly involved in something like eight major releases between 1970 and 1975 for Yes, Strawbs and his solo projects) and five consecutive days without sleep before playing meant that only a heavy dose of morphine could get him onto the stage at Crystal Palace and keep him there.

The strain proved too much and Wakeman was felled by a salvo of three heart attacks. Eye-to-eye with mortality, his doctor gave him a choice; quit drinking and smoking and retire from music, or start making funeral preparations. Wakeman instead began writing a new, even more ambitious concept album from his hospital bed (with a lengthy title to match); The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.

It was an enormous task, not least because there is no single, coherent corpus of Arthurian legend that the modern adaptor can access. The first mention of King Arthur in any form, historical or legendary, is the entry for 516AD in the tenth-century Welsh chronicle Annales Cambriae which relates, in a matter-of-fact fashion, the victory of a “Rex Arturus” at the battle of Badonis. The basis of an entire mythos it was not. Some centuries later, the Anglo-Welsh cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth claimed to have discovered a manuscript written in “the British tongue” (i.e. Welsh) detailing, among other things, the entire life and deeds of this legendary great king of the Britons. He quickly translated the text into Latin, circulating it to patrons under the title The History of the Kings of Britain. The only problem with his story is that it was total horseshit. Geoffrey pulled one thousand five hundred years of myths and legends out of his arse dating from the Fall of Troy to the arrival of the Saxons.

Happily for us, the book also featured the first Arthurian legends in a recognisable form, including the wizard Merlin, Arthur’s queen Guinevere, and Arthur’s death in battle at Camlann before his body is taken away to rest in misty Avalon. Over the following centuries, a slew of imitators and innovators across medieval Europe elaborated on the bones of Geoffrey’s stories, adding other knights to the Round Table including Lancelot, Arthur’s sword Excalibur, and the all-important grail quest. These included Marie de France and Chretien de Troyes to the anonymous poet of Gawain and the Green Knight, and even Cervantes whose Don Quixote was driven to madness by his over-consumption of Arthurian-influenced romantic literature. By the late fifteenth-century, what started out as a few references to a possibly historical Welsh king had ballooned into an enormous canon, later dubbed The Matter of Britain.

This was a subject matter unlike Wakeman’s previous Journey to the Centre of the Earth, or even The Six Wives of Henry VIII, each based on a fairly clear narrative. As the story goes, he read eight books of Arthurian legends which each gave him eight different sets of stories and so he decided to write songs based only on his favourites, rather than try to summarise the whole thing. The six songs he wrote flowed narratively around three swords which symbolise the beginning, middle, and end of Arthur’s narrative: The Sword in the Stone (pertaining to his ascent to the throne of Britain), the Sword from the Lady of the Lake (symbolising the righteousness of his rule), and Galahad’s Sword (also, confusingly, pulled from a stone but representing the passing of the Round Table and Galahad’s position as the only knight virtuous enough to quest for the Holy Grail). Where did Rick Wakeman get these three swords from? The main influence, and the major influence on any Arthurian retelling since its publication in 1495, is Sir Thomas Malory’s prose epic Le Morte Darthur (The Death of Arthur). It is this version of the story that influenced, more than any other, the nineteenth-century Arthurian revival which involved pre-Raphaelite painters like John William Waterhouse and William Holman Hunt, writers like Lord Tennyson (author of the poem The Lady of Shallott) and T.H. White (author of The Once and Future King) and dozens of other subsequent retellings, trickling its way through English culture and into the mind of one Rick Wakeman.

There is a lot that connects Wakeman’s efforts to Malory’s, despite the five centuries that separates them. The Malory of Le Morte Darthur was supposedly (there is some debate) a Warwickshire minor noble, professional soldier and ne’er-do-well who wrote the bulk of the poem in 1470 while in prison for rebelling against Henry VI during the Wars of the Roses, and shortly before his death in 1471. Malory, like Wakeman, was frustrated by the confused jumble of poems, histories and lais that constituted the legends of King Arthur so he decided to codify the whole lot into a single coherent story. Like Wakeman, Malory was reckoning with his mortality, enclosed by impending redundancy, and isolated from the causes that he had dedicated his life to. Both chose to adapt the same legends by taking on King Arthur as a symbol of their struggles against death and irrelevancy with, I would argue, similar results.

But how could a 1970s progressive rock opera be anything like a late 15th-century poem written in an archaic dialect of English?

Part of the answer has to do with Rick Wakeman’s prog rock being some of the most overwrought, baroque, and indulgent that the genre has to offer. It is so overmuch that punk’s brutal simplicity must have been developed shortly afterwards to rebalance rock music’s karmic debts to the cosmos. The live studio recording required a 48-piece orchestra and a choir of 45 voices. Wakeman wrote the violin parts to be so fast that the musicians laughed at him, so he demanded that they play it twice as fast as what was in his score. After his ambition to have the live shows be played at Wembley was thwarted because the arena had been turned into a skating rink, Wakeman, instead of moving the event, changed the live show to an ‘ice-spectacular’ rock opera. It was famously a disaster.

The only fixed point in this musical maelstrom was Rick Wakeman, wrapped in his signature cape, weaving music-as-spell as if he were Merlin reborn amongst his fortress of keyboards and synthesisers. The song about Merlin on Myths and Legends is appropriately the most excessive on the album, nearly 9 minutes of preposterous keyboard soloing (the solos being so complex that Wakeman could only play them for the studio recording while drunk) and what I can only describe as cartoon magician noises, his instruments beeping and burping like a team of circus calliopes.

Compare this to Malory’s style in Morte Darthur. In an early scene, the newly crowned Arthur fights his first battle against eleven rebel kings at Bedegraine. Malory describes the combat thusly (if you’re struggling with the strange spellings, I recommend reading it aloud):

“Than kyng Lotte saw kynge Nentres on foote, he ran unto Meliot de la Roche and smote hym downe horse and man, and gaff unto kynge Nentres the horse and horsed hym agayne. Also the Kynge with the Hondred Knyghtes saw kynge Idres on foote, he ran unto Gwyaniarte de Bloy and smote hym downe horse and man, and gaff kynge Idres the horse and horsed hym agayne. Tha[n] kynge Lotte smote down Clarinaus de la Foreyste Saveage and gaff the horse unto duke Estans. And so whan they had horsed the eleven kynges, they drew hem all eleven kynges togydir, and seyde they wolde be revenged of the damage that they had takyn that day.”

The battle rages like this for pages at a time. Knights are always smote down horse and man, the fallen calling ‘gramercy!’ (grant mercy) to the victors, as kings “on foote” are rehorsed by their followers. It goes on and on and on and ON. The effect is dizzying, almost maddening. As the reader gets lost in the noise and chaos of battle, it is easy to forget who is alive, who is dead, who is on whose side. To include no less than eleven kings and describe each of their various fortunes in the battle of Bedegraine as well as the twenty-one named followers of Arthur and what they were up to and how many times they get knocked down and get up again (a la Chumbawumba) is a ridiculous, over-the-top, and even indulgent decision.

Indulgent, perhaps in the same way that Rick Wakeman using a call-and-response sequence of squelchy keyboard soloing to dramatise a duel between Sir Lancelot and the Black Knight (on the song of the same name) is indulgent. The stock phrases that Malory used, such as the repetitive ‘smote hym downe horse and man’, are monosyllabic and punchy, pushing the reader through each line to create the sense of being overwhelmed by the speed and chaos of battle. So too with the intense speed of Rick Wakeman’s music on Myths and Legends, especially on the song ‘Sir Lancelot and the Black Knight’ with its double-speed violin parts mentioned above.

Maybe, one could argue, the artist doesn’t need to hammer the audience over the head with overwhelming musical/linguistic shock and awe to properly adapt the legends of King Arthur. But this is to forget that the Arthurian mythos has always tended towards maximalism. No version of Arthur’s story was written less than four centuries after the death of the purportedly historical Arthur sometime in the 6th century AD. Even for his older adaptors, Arthur’s time would have been well over five hundred years in the past and each author had to make this glorious, legendary past truly glorious and legendary. To evoke his version of a glorious Brittonic past, Geoffrey of Monmouth had Arthur lead an army of 183,000 knights against 460,000 Romans. For Malory, Arthur couldn’t have fought just one rebel king. No, he needed three, eight, eleven rebel kings to defeat to solidify his realm, each bringing “fyve thousand men of armyes on horsebakk”. Writing as he was during the Wars of the Roses, when two kings sparred for the crown of England, Malory needed to exceed the times he lived in and the wars he fought in to make Arthur that much grander, mythical and transportative.

Centuries later, Wakeman wielded his own peculiar impulse towards artistic excess to conjure the mythic past of Arthurian Britain with similar panache. More often than not, it works. In 1975, Arthur may not be decked in graceful pre-Raphaelite plate and mail, and Merlin may appear as a portly English rocker with a bum chin, wielding a key-tair in place of a wizardly stave, but when he sings of the magnificent days of King Arthur’s court and a full male voice choir intones to buttress his unconvincing warble, you’re inclined to believe it’s the real deal. What else would do for a proper musical adaptation? What would a punk or, say, minimalist indie folk version of Arthurian legend even sound like? The same can be said for Malory; the ambition is all the more effective when it leads towards the quixotic and extravagant. The fact of Le Morte Darthur’s preeminence as a touchstone for modern adaptations of King Arthur is partly because he was the first to write Arthur’s legend in mostly recognisable English, but it is also that he decided to write the whole story in one enormous volume - the attempt alone a beautiful quotidian project to wrestle all the complexities of history into coherence. To read Malory is to digest three centuries of collected Arthuriana in a single swallow.

But all things must come to an end. Both Wakeman’s Myths and Legends and Malory’s Le Morte Darthur are contemplations of changing times. They express how it feels for the wheels of history to spin forwards without you. Wakeman wrote the final song on the album, ‘The Last Battle’, first of all, while still in his hospital bed, as he was imagining the fall of his musical kingdom and ruminating on whether he would share the fate of his musical Arthur, spirited away to the isle of Avalon maybe to never be seen again. As his lyrics go:

“Gone are the days of the knights
Of the Round Table and fights
Of the realm of King Arthur
Peace ever after
Gone are the days of the knights.”

His mind also on the last things, and on what would remain after his death, Malory’s last words in Le Morte Darthur were a plea to be remembered well when he had departed this world:

“I praye you all jentylmen and jentylwymmen that redeth this book of Arthur and his knyghtes from begynnyng to the endynge, praye for me while I am on lyve [while I am living] that God sende me good delyveraunce. And whan I am deed [dead], I praye you all praye for my soule.
For this book was ended the ninth year of the reyne of Kyng Edward the Fourth [1470], by Syr Thomas Maleore, Knyght, as Jesu helpe him for hye grete myght, as he is the servaunt of Jesu bothe day and nyght.”

This is what must come at the end of every Arthur story. He never reigns forever. In each telling, Arthur is slain by his illegitimate son Mordred and the kingdom is overrun by the Saxons, an outcome of doom foretold in his beginnings. History supersedes myth and the time of heroes is left to ruin and fading memory. All that remains is a story, and a single graven stone inscribed with the words:

It is fitting that Wakeman’s album is usually taken to represent the final days of progressive rock’s supremacy in musical culture, soon to be surpassed by punk, disco and whatever it was Steely Dan were doing. It is also fitting that Malory referred to himself as “Syr Thomas Maelore, Knyght” at the very time when the pre-eminence of military nobles was coming to an end in England.

But Arthur, as the legend goes, is not supposed to be dead forever. As the ‘Once and Future’ teases, one day he is fated to return and save Britain (or Wales, depending on which side of the River Severn you are from). And, despite their frail human forms, Rick Wakeman and Thomas Malory both endure. In Wakeman’s case, the odour of camp, of intense silliness and ridiculous excess, that hangs over all of Myths and Legends is the greater part of its charm. On the one hand, it is why Spinal Tap were able to mock grandiose and self-serious projects like Wakeman’s so effectively - their ‘Stonehenge’ seems like a direct call-out of Wakeman’s disastrous ‘King Arthur on Ice’. But the album endures because of its excesses rather than in spite of them. The very thing which condemned it to the dustbin of history has also ensured its legacy as a unique and singular cultural artifact.

As medievalism becomes cool again (see Chappell Roan’s Joan of Arc style stage outfits, or Rosalia’s Hildegard von Bingen’s inspired song ‘Berghain’ off of Lux), and musical fashion turn towards lavishness, experimentation and embellishment (from Black Midi’s avant jazz krautrock to Geese’s style of psychedelic art rock), maybe there is a place in musical history for Rick Wakeman’s Myths and Legends of King Arthur and Knights of the Round Table as more than a punchline or a dead-end in the history of music.

So does Arthur sleep in Avalon, waiting to return when we need him most.

I read 46 books this year, most of them good, and the full list will be provided below. First, I will discuss the highlights, give some honourable mentions (books that I didn’t finish or haven’t yet finished but I would like to in the near future), and dishonourable mentions (those I disliked or struggled with) along the way. As an extra note, maybe 80-90% of these books were from a library, either the library of the university I work at or my local library, so if you’re broke, like me, but want to clatter through as many pages as you can, like me, take this list as a sign to get it any way you can. I am very grateful that I am finally in a position where I can buy books again (I spent £60 in book tokens at a Waterstones recently and leaving with an armful of books gave me an MDMA-like high) but piracy is good and fun and libraries are essential parts of our basic social fabric and I will die to defend them.

With that out of the way, let’s fucking goooooooo!

Subscribe now

THE BEST

J.K. Huysmans - La-Bas, En Route, The Cathedral

Anyone who has paid attention to what I’ve been writing since joining the ‘stack in April will know that I have become obsessed with a fussy little Frenchman called Joris-Karl Huysmans. I read three of his books this year, each in his Durtal tetralogy (I am yet to read the last, L’Oblate), and I liked La-Bas the best and The Cathedral the least. The sweep of the three books is J.K. Huysmans self-insert, the novelist Durtal, slow transformation from a cynical decadent to a sincere, mystically-inclined Catholic. I am not a 19th-century French Catholic revert (yet) so his endless hang-wringing about praying correctly that was charming in En Route had become tiresome by the end of The Cathedral. Even that book, however, had its moments of genius. The debate about which plants would be symbolically appropriate to use in constructing a garden in the form of a gothic cathedral was brilliant and utterly unlike anything I think I could encounter in contemporary literature. Even at his dullest, no one writes like Huysmans.

James Joyce - Ulysses

To proceed in the vein of books I’ve already written about, Ulysses was brilliant. It moved me to write a 4000 word essay after only reading about 50 pages. It often surpassed my ability to adequately interpret (as Lillian Wang Selonick’s live-noting of her read has attested, some parts are far more confounding than others) but when it struck true, it struck very hard. Even when it eluded me, rather than being frustrated, the search for meaning became transfixing in itself. I read an essay earlier this year that argued that the process of reading a novel, the flow-state it engenders in the engaged reader, is as important as the meaning that the novel may impart. Ulysses, to me, works wonders with that flow-state. At times it is as effortless as thinking. The book also convinced me to start writing fiction again and I wrote a short story that I am very proud of, and am currently shopping around, inspired by Ulysses' imaginative scope and boldness with language. I love it!

Eric Hobsbawm - The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, The Age of Empire, The Age of Extremes Tetralogy (covering 1789-1991)

Eric Hobsbawm is one of those names that gets thrown at British history undergrads a lot and it took me until this year, some 8 years after I started university, to understand why. I did listen to each of these as audiobooks while commuting into/out of London by train and tube and, even though I missed out on Hobsbawm’s copious footnotes, I can highly recommend the experience. There was a great deal of resonance between the journey that I took across London’s green belt into the beating heart of a world city to Hobsbawm’s Dual Revolutions (one political and the other industrial/economic) that he analysed with such skill and creativity. Hobsbawm wrote the first book in 1962 when the possibility of revolutionary transformations still felt possible. The subsequent books (published in 1975, 1987 and 1994), as much as they analyse the long nineteenth/short twentieth centuries, are also a testament to the changes in British leftist thought and their shrinking horizon of possibility as they considered the approaching millennium. Hobsbawm has a few key insights that really stuck with me. The one I still regularly think about is that he describes the First World War as transforming the word ‘catastrophe’. Before 1914, in the minds of European bourgeoisie, the worst catastrophe would be something like the sinking of the Titanic. Afterwards, it would become synonymous with the trenches of France and Belgium, the Holodomor, the Holocaust, Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The 20th century was when catastrophes began to be measured in millions of people, not hundreds or thousands.

THE GREAT AND THE GOOD

The below books are not necessarily my favourites of the year, but are ones that either I don’t see discussed very much on Substack or that I felt like writing a few words about. There are many books that I read this year that I loved (David Copperfield, Pere Goriot, Scarlet and Black, Satyricon, Suttree, Jack the Modernist, Confessions of a Mask, Maurice, and others) but I didn’t want to spill any ink on.

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa - The Leopard (transl. Archibald Colquhoun)

From the first page, I was swept away and swooning into its world of the Sicilian aristocracy just as their fortunes began to change and the best of Princes, the mighty Salina, finds himself outmanoeuvred by nothing more or less than the turning of the ages. Garibaldi and his Thousand are on the beaches, the bourgeois are eyeing up ancestral wealth, and the Leopard suddenly finds itself a predator trapped in a zoo. Lampedusa wrote only one novel but he made it count by penning one of the best historical novels ever written. The real deal.

Billy-Ray Belcourt - A History of My Brief Body

This is a strange pick for me. A History of My Brief Body is a work of Canadian indigiqueer poetry and memoir. Belcourt’s style, to the uncharitable reader, flies a little close to the sun of Vuong-ism, but it is never as moronic or overly indulgent as Vuong’s. It warrants a place here primarily for being so hostile towards modern Canada and so articulate in its acidity. I read this in January, shortly after I returned from a terrible 10 months trying to live in Toronto. There is a kind of propaganda fed to young people in the UK about Canada and Australia that they are some shangri-la of political harmony and economic opportunity, ripe for our Old World imperial mystique. As the wool was ripped from my eyes, the force of Belcourt’s poetics as he skewers Canadian culture and the state was a welcome balm.

Adam Thorpe - Ulverton

I am very surprised that I’ve not seen anybody on Substack talk about this book. Ulverton is composed of 12 snapshots of the eponymous rural English village from 1650 up to the 1980s, each one written in a different style representing the cultural forms of the day, from first-person oral narration to a description of the subjects of early photographs to Joycean inner monologue and, finally, the script for a TV movie. Characters morph throughout the centuries and decades, turning into folk myths or forgotten, absent presences (I was distraught when an enormous oak table lovingly made by one character is thrown out centuries later by a landlord remodelling an old pub). A truly excellent novel of and for modern England.

Phillip Roth - Portnoy’s Complaint

I read this one in a single day, which I think is the ideal way to do it. I smirked and hooted my way through a nasty hangover with poor Alexander Portnoy for company, and I would not have had it any other way.

Robert Gluck - Jack the Modernist

Shoutout to Sam Bodrojan (cc: helmet girl) for turning me onto this book. Like Portnoy’s Complaint I read it in a single sitting, specifically on a train where I put a lot of effort into hiding the very gay and very phallic cover/cover flaps from the serious looking man sitting next to me. Instead of any analysis from me, I’ll link Sam Bodrojan’s essay on Jack the Modernist because she says it better than I ever could.

THE WORST

I didn’t read any ‘bad’ books this year, unlike in 2024 when Cixin Liu won my ‘shouldn’t have bothered’ award for unbearable writing.1 However, the below are the books that I found the most difficult to finish or were the most disappointing by the end.

Ottessa Moshfegh - My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Shouldn’t be a surprise. MYoRaR was sold to me as this polarising, almost dangerous book but it ended up being a rather polite and well-mannered parable about the superficiality of transformation. I didn’t dislike it, it had at least one very good joke (“Die young and leave a beautiful corpse, do you know who said that?”, “I don’t know, someone who likes fucking corpses?”) and some stylish touches but it always pulled back from twisting the knife with its satire or critique. Perhaps it suffered from me reading it around the same time as a lot of Huysmans, who could never be accused of pulling any punches. It’s sappy ending, however, was unforgivable.

Thomas de Quincey - Confessions of an English Opium Eater

Excellent in places, a drag in others. My reading of it may have suffered from my edition’s bizarre footnote placement that served more to break up the pace of de Quincey’s writing than to provide important context. I’ve never been the biggest fan of Romanticism and unfortunately these essays, including English Mail-Coach and Suspiria de Profundis, failed to convince me.

HONOURABLE MENTIONS

There were a few books that I started reading for research and never finished but would like to (The Animal That Therefore I Am by Jacques Derrida, Testojunkie by Paul B. Preciado, Erotism: Death and Sensuality by Georges Bataille, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature by Erich Auerbach) and I am currently part way through Gilgamesh (transl. Sophus Helle) and Gargantua and Pantagruel (transl. Thomas Urquhart) so you’ll have to wait to 2026 to hear my thoughts on them!

THE STATS IN FULL

January:
Terry Pratchett - The Light Fantastic

Marcel Proust - The Way By Swann’s (transl. Lydia Davis)

Billy-Ray Belcourt - A History of My Brief Body

February:
Rashid Khalidi - The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine

Kingsley Amis - Lucky Jim

March:

Eric Hobsbawm - The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848

April:

Bruce Holsinger - Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism and the War on Terror

Charles Dickens - David Copperfield

Umberto Eco - Travels in Hyperreality (transl. William Weaver)

Franz Kafka - Stories 1904-1924 (transl. J.A. Underwood)

May:

Eric Hobsbawm - The Age of Capital: 1848-1875

Honore de Balzac - Pere Goriot (transl. Burton Raffel)

June:

J.K. Huysmans - La-Bas (The Damned/Down There) (transl. Keene Wallace)

Gene Wolfe - The Shadow of the Torturer (The Book of the New Sun, vol. 1)

Eric Hobsbawm - The Age of Empire: 1875-1914

J.K. Huysmans - En Route (transl. W. Fleming)

July:

Gene Wolfe - The Claw of the Conciliator (The Book of the New Sun, vol. 2)

Eric Hobsbawm - The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991

St Augustine - Confessions (transl. Henry Chadwick)

Yanis Varoufakis - Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

Petronius - Satyricon (transl. Gareth Schmeling)

August:

Philip K. Dick - Ubik

Yukio Mishima - Confessions of a Mask (transl. Meredith Weatherby)

Becky Chambers - A Psalm for the Wild-Built

Cormac McCarthy - Suttree

Hermann Hesse - Narziss and Goldmund (transl. Geoffrey Dunlop)

September:

Byung-Chul Han - The Agony of Eros (transl. Erik Butler)

J.K. Huysmans - The Cathedral (transl. Clara Bell)

Ottessa Moshfegh - My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Cormac McCarthy - The Passenger

Umberto Eco - Misreadings (transl. William Weaver)

Beowulf: A Verse Translation (transl. Michael Alexander)

October:

James Joyce - Ulysses

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa - The Leopard (transl. Archibald Colquhoun)

Homer - The Odyssey (transl. Emily Wilson)

Thomas De Quincey - Confessions of An English Opium Eater

Phillip Roth - Portnoy’s Complaint

November:

Aristotle - The Poetics

Adam Thorpe - Ulverton

Terry Pratchett - Reaper Man

Robert Gluck - Jack the Modernist

Andre Gide - The Immoralist (transl. David Watson)

December:

Thomas Mann - Death in Venice and Other Stories (transl. Joachim Neugroschel)

E.M. Forster - Maurice

Wilkie Collins - The Moonstone

Stendhal - Scarlet and Black: A Chronicle of the Nineteenth Century (transl. Margaret B. Shaw)

Subscribe now

Thank you for reading! It has been a real joy sharing my thoughts and essays with you all on substack and I hope to give you more to chew on in 2026. You may have noticed a real dearth of medieval history or medieval sources in my 2025 reads and, as I think I’ve mentioned before, I have started to fall out of love somewhat with the middle ages. So expect some other shit from me, I’m going to get weird with it!

All love and kisses,

Ghost of Giraldus

“two men who looked like tiny Ethiopians [Aethiopes], who were sitting and laughing together on the road. He realised that they were demons [daemones] who were not allowed to inflict further harm, and who were delighted at having caused even so slight an injury. He received from God this gift of keeping demons in view from that day onward; they could not lurk hidden from him, however much they sought to do so. He used to watch them wandering about, seeking to inflict even minor damage on people, and showing delight however slight the hurt which they caused.”1

Inspired by this evidence from God that demons were both real and malicious, Ketell dedicates himself to the ascetic, Christian life, abstaining from sex, “meat and linen garments” (together at last), and becoming a servant to the local priest. Despite this, he continues to see these little demons almost everywhere. Whenever he can, he abjures them by speaking holy names, but his efforts are rewarded with a kind of notoriety within demonic circles. One sunny afternoon, Ketell falls asleep without crossing himself appropriately and wakes to find himself set upon by two large demons. They prevent him from speaking the name of God and, safe from his abjurations, started to “rehears[e] the evil which they planned to inflict on him”. But lo! Ketell is saved by a guardian angel, a “resplendent youth” who scares away the demons with the sound of his finger flicking on the head of a two-bladed axe [“He stood between them and made a loud noise, flicking the axe gently with his finger.”]. These two big bruisers are outliers, however. Most of Ketell’s demons are the small and more benignly mischievous, if nasty, kind. He sees them spit in people’s drinking glasses or set up obstacles in the road to trip up mules before running away upon hearing someone say holy words like the little bastard goblins they are.

Ketell only appears in a single text, William of Newburgh’s Historia rerum anglicarum (History of the English Affairs, c.1200), described by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as “both in substance and in fo rm ... the finest historical work left to us by an Englishman of the twelfth century”. The key question in reading the Ketell episode is why William of Newburgh included a lengthy aside in his chronicle detailing the life of a local peasant from a nearby village who fell off a mule and, to our eyes, began hallucinating? William doesn’t even think he’s that special, maybe uncommon at best, and gives only the following, rather rote assessment of his peasant piety:

“He was a rustic, it is true, but by his deserving innocence and simplicity he obtained a unique grace from the Lord. Several remarkable stories about him have become known to me through the accounts of truthful persons, and I shall recount a few of them…This man, on whom such great grace was divinely bestowed in detecting the deeds and snares of wicked spirits, lived out the years of his life in abundant innocence and purity, and slept in the Lord, being buried at Fareham.”

To approach these questions, let us first consider the context of this episode. In the text of the Historia rerum anglicarum, William narrates this incident, this slice of medieval Yorkshire weirdness, directly after an account of life and death of the hermit St. Godric of Finchale and before a lengthy treatment on the vacant see of Lincoln and Henry II’s ecclesiastical policy thereof. This placement implies that Kettel the Yorkshire peasant is, in posterity’s gaze, of an equal dignity to kings, saints and bishops.

How about genre, specifically the standards of historical writing in the 12th century? By our standards, would we consider Ketell vital to our understanding of ‘The History of the English Affairs’? Flatly, no. If I decided today to write a history of my times, from 199x to today, a baseline for it to be considered a proper, good history if I included all the events relevant to the world in 2025. The millennium, 9/11, the Iraq War, the 2008 crash, Brexit, Trump, fanfiction becoming the dominant literary form of the 21st century, that sort of thing. It would be considered a failure of my history if I mixed in, at random, stories and strange details from my life or just cool shit I heard. If I used an equal number of pages discussing someone I knew who could roll geometrically perfect joints or describing at length a creepypasta I read online on May 14th 2013, as I did about Nigel Farage, my history book would not be a good one, at least by the standard of modern aesthetics, prioritise that which is necessary etc.

If it wasn’t clear, William of Newburgh did not care about this.

So what did he care about? Understanding William’s context is where we can bring in some historians to help us. We know that he was not writing for a global, national, or even regional audience. He was wrote his chroncile for the monks of Newburgh Abbey in North Yorkshire and for his patron, Ernald, abbot of Rievaulx.2 In twelfth-century Augustinian monasteries like William’s, books (and letters) were read aloud to the monks at mealtimes so it is likely that his Historia was intended, in part, for this very narrow purpose and this very narrow audience. The monks at Newburgh may have known Ketell, or part of the story already, and may have delighted in hearing it told to them in a sophisticated Latin style. Or maybe they thought it was useless and annoying and wanted instead for William to skip to the bit about the vacant see of Lincoln. Regardless, it follows that histories of these types have a very different understanding about what should be preserved and what should be given the author’s full attention compared to what we may expect. For William, Ketell stays in.

But beware the modern historian. Modern scholars have often repeated judgments about what is ‘useful’ in medieval historical writing, regardless of how the text ought to be considered in its context. This is taken directly from my very authoritative, scholarly critical edition of William of Newburgh, the one I have cited so far:

“Thus E.A. Freeman, writing in 1878 of William’s judicious treatment of the conflict between Henry II and Thomas Becket, awarded him the accolade of ‘the father of historical criticism’, while for Richard Howlett, his editor in the Rolls series, he was ‘a man of unusual moral elevation, mental power and eloquence’ who recorded events with ‘unswerving faithfulness’. In the judgment of Kate Norgate, historian of Angevin England and author of William’s entry in The Dictionary of National Biography, he produced ‘the finest historical work left to us by an Englishman of the twelfth century’. She saw in him ‘the true historian’s instinct for ... perceiving the relative importance of things, for seizing the salient points and bringing out the significance of a story in a few simple sentences without straining after picturesqueness or dramatic effect’.”3

Which is all well and good when we’re trying to evaluate the historical reputation of Henry I, or something, but what about Ketell? Ketell and his little spitting demons, or the green children who appeared out ancient ditches in East Anglia, a story that William himself was unable to believe until he “was so overwhelmed by the weighty testimony of so many reliable people that I was compelled to believe and marvel at what I cannot grasp or investigate by any powers of the mind”,4 how do they fit into William’s apparent ability to “perceiv[e] the relative importance of things”, as Norgate puts it? I’m not sure Norgate holds these ‘asides’ in the same esteem that I do. As it turns out such concerns of historical truth, that what the historian in the medieval period is true, are of vanishing importance if we are really interested in the text itself.

I’ve not done the maths on this, but I am sure that you could read dozens of books on the twelfth-century in England which use William of Newburgh as a vital source and never encounter Ketell. If you’re writing a history on the Harrying of the North, or the political boundaries of England and Scotland, or on the prince-bishops of Durham, then Ketell is utterly ancillary, a strange appendix that, if anything, signals that medieval people were credulous to a fault. But I think Ketell and the green children are both lock and key to understanding the Historia rerum anglicarum. William of Newburgh was a highly educated cleric with a refined style and a discerning, critical eye.5 He also wanted to leave for the ages a story he heard from some locals about a guy who fell off his mule and started seeing demons.

To ask a maybe loaded question, if we believe that demons or green children are not real phenomena, does this make the chapters where William writes about them not historical? Do we bifurcate the Historia rerum anglicarum and deal on the one hand with that which is believable to us as moderns while discarding that which is ‘fictional’ or unbelievable on the other?

Once again, William did not do this. He wrote only one history and mingled it all together.

The contradiction in how he treated historical matter, a contradiction apparent to us but not to them, is the charm. The whole point. The reason we do this. We are surprised to find Ketell in amongst all this very serious political history and the surprise leads us to ask questions. What does ‘fact’ look like to a medieval author of a chronicle? Where do they get their information? What is natural and what is supernatural? How do they approach representing the boundaries between these in a historical text? What is known and what is speculative? What to them is trustworthy or authoritative? What is poetic or allegorical and what is literal? It is in the asking of questions of this nature that is the essence of true historical enquiry, and ask them enough times then before you know it you’re a medieval historian. Congratulations!

Now we’re asking the right questions, actually talking to these texts rather than talking over them, or past them, we can start looking at answers. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll have realised that historians like William of Newburgh were not simply attempting to record the past. So what were medieval historians (that is, historians in the medieval period) up to, in this place and period (England between 1100 and 1200), if they were not just trying to record the past? While it is important to investigate what I like to call ‘the historical consciousness’ of people like William, i.e. educated clerics, and I will consider one theory of what this was, I will spend the bulk of the rest of this essay exploring how they attempted to translate this consciousness into written literature.

To kick off, we can consider the common theory of the medieval period’s historical consciousness that all mortal affairs constituted the unfolding of a universal history operating under the watchful eye of God Almighty. In this way, each and every incident was a single point in the web that dramatised the eventual destiny of all Christian souls. This is St Augustine’s position and I’ve explored bits and pieces of it in The Shape of Time to Come.

If you were to write a history within this ideological framework, every historical episode would have a deep spiritual meaning which reflected or represented in some way the nature of the human soul, or the coming Apocalypse, or a divine, transcendent truth. This would be to write history that interprets the world allegorically where each event stands in for a spiritual meaning. Such an interpretation can explain why we don’t see much explanation for causality in medieval histories. For a start there was a stylistic preference for parataxis, essentially a form of syntax which prefers ‘and’ to causal connectives like ‘so that’ or ‘then’. Nancy Partner, whose Serious Entertainments is one of the greats for analysing medieval historical writing as literature/texts rather than simple repositories of data to be extracted, uses the following example of parataxis in Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia anglorum (c.1154):

“In this year the king led an army into Wales... A huge comet appeared at the end of May. The king went across to Normandy and made all the nobles of the country swear fidelity to the lord William his son, and he returned to England.”6

In Mimesis, Erich Auerbach argued that parataxis is characteristic of a certain realistic, distinctly Judeo-Christian and un-elevated rhetorical style which connected events only insofar as they were each connected to the designs of providence. The comet, the king leading his army, the swearing of the fealty of lords, they do not depend on each other and can only be considered causal via the will of God alone. In Auerbach’s words, parataxis is “a fragmentary, discrete presentation constantly seeking an interpretation from above”.7 The connections between points in a historical narrative are vertical, finding meaning in spiritual referents, rather than in other events. Partner herself does not buy this idea wholesale, arguing that it was more of a stylistic convention than some manifestation of a shift in hermeneutic consciousness.

Auerbach’s general idea, via Augustine, has trickled down from the ivory tower and has led some people to oversimplify and think that medieval writers were actually always successful at this interpretative trick. See below for an example of the worst offender (and a response from yours truly):

The erroneous simplification comes with the failure to grasp that something essential changes in the transformation of an ideal into a text. History is not something that tangibly exists outside of its organisation in texts, at least not in a way accessible to us. Ketell, to return to our original example, can be conceived of as split into two parallel ontologies. He was a real person, very probably, living sometime in the twelfth century in North Yorkshire, and at one time as flesh and blood as you or I. But he is (present tense) a textual construction, or rather a subject still existing and accessible only as an interpretable figure within William of Newburgh’s text. In these terms, the ‘real’ Ketell, the physical one, is only accessible through the act of interpreting the textual Ketell. It is this latter ontology that I am so often interested in and it is also the one that maybe people, including some professional historians, try to skip, especially when reading about more consequential historical personages, whose personness as a once-really-existing-individual is more obvious to us as we live in the wake of their actions. For the more tangential peoples of history their presence in the historical record is more obviously textual considering that such texts may be the only accessible manifestation of their lived reality. Only the textual Ketell can be said to truly exist to us now, at least in ways intelligible to our minds.

Therefore, through the act of translation between these two ontologies, it is key to understanding the textuality of all history that a convention like parataxis can be utilised correctly and still fail in its stated aim. A grand chain of human experience as it relates to the destiny of the soul sounds great, but how do you wrangle all that together with the messiness of actual human affairs? As an example, historians of the generation or so before William of Newburgh struggled terribly to combine the idea that every sign and wonder held within it a shadow of the unfolding of Divine Consciousness alongside the reality of political chaos during the Anarchy, the very destructive civil war in England between c. 1135 and 1150. Their allegories did not function properly. I will write on this at greater length in future, but if political chaos is itself reflective/imitative of a general, cosmic chaos, how does then the historian weave this profound system of disturbance into a coherent narrative, even using techniques like parataxis and allegory? He doesn’t, it isn’t possible. As Fredric Jameson says, “allegory…is always intimately related to a crisis in representation, and that the medieval period is an extraordinary laboratory in which to witness its elaborations”,8 and Bernado Hinojosa agrees, stating that allegory “promises hermeneutic simplicity and unitary meaning but delivers multiplicity and disruption”.9 To use Auerbach’s understanding of parataxis, the connection between the historical subject and God via the author has been interrupted.

By its very nature, allegory is asking one thing to stand in for another and, in asking, it is an admittance that representation, simply understood as one thing standing for itself, has failed. In this way, if we were to interpret Ketell as William of Newburgh’s attempt to have Ketell stand in for something larger than just Ketell, man who can see demons, in short as an allegory, we are also accepting that William of Newburgh is really failing to represent historical reality as it appeared to him or as it existed in his mind. If Ketell is not simply Ketell, this is because William has been unable to make him more than a representation of, say, the rational Christian’s ability to discern good from bad, or he has been reduced down to a simple didactic shadow puppet acting out a moral like ‘beware the devil for he is everywhere’, or ‘don’t drink in pubs’. This is to say that he can only be one thing, and a rather simple thing at that, and the complex interweavings of the dual historical ontologies is utterly elided. William doesn’t do this however, he does not take overly simple allegory or preachy didactism as a way out.

William of Newburgh’s opens his history with a famous takedown of Geoffrey of Monmouth, singlehandedly inventing a very modern sort of source criticism. He justifies his account of Ketell by saying “[s]everal remarkable stories about him have become known to me through the accounts of truthful persons”. He refuses to believe in the green children until overwhelmed by testimony that convinces him. William cares deeply about historical truth, but in so many of his more fantastical episodes, ones he cannot leave out, the truth eludes him. The green children narrative ends with a strange mundanity, one dies and the other becomes, to all appearances, a normal woman. Ketell is given a gift from God but what can he do about the demons that swarm him everyday? Little more than anyone else, be a good boy and say your prayers. He leaves us in discomfort, unable to close the narrative loop or explain away something disturbing or surprising. As Monika Otter says in her masterful Inventiones (an exploration of fictionality and referentiality in medieval historical writing):

“Newburgh’s policy in dealing with the otherworldliness of his material is one of compromise and containment…But he knows he cannot let it rest there: the other worlds will surface again and burden the narrative with unassimilable items (or, on the contrary, items that assimilate so well that one cannot tell them from the legitimate ones) if its system of explanation is not equipped to deal with them. So he will allow them in small doses, carefully packaged with explanations although of course the explanations eventually break down.”10

This is one way to see medieval historians, as not necessarily failures, but maybe like artists in crisis. Some, especially authors of universal history like Otto of Friesing, attempted to wend and weave the complexity of human experiences into a tapestry that made sense to them and their readers/listeners, and oversimplified in the attempt. William, and his contemporaries, did not do this. Beholden to honesty, they leave the question open, a wound still bleeding, and we are all, medieval and modern, left without answers. Through this common humanity, a common failure, we are brought to the past in a way that I would argue is possible only through a considerate and persistent engagement with the material itself. While something less than touching the past, a true noumenal object, we can at least be confounded with it in a way common to how medieval people were confounded by their present.

***

Thank you for reading! This post has been sitting for my drafts for nearly six weeks now and I needed a final push to get it ready. I am considering writing a more full 2025 round up, but we shall have to see how it goes. The period from mid-October to late-November has been one of the most productive of my life, despite only producing a relatively modest amount of work for this substack, and I have been left rather burnt out. Feeling as I do, sometimes I lose the zest for the medieval that originally motivated my first essays. Maybe 2026 will be different and the medieval stuff will recede from the foreground more than I’ve allowed in 2025. Maybe I’ll stay true to my original aims and you’ll get even deeper dives into the historical subjects I love the most. Either way, I hope you’ll join me wherever my curiosity leads and thank you to anyone who has read anything I have written for coming this far.

Much love,
Ghost of Giraldus.

During the hopeless summer of 2024, I got into the Mountain Goats. For some reason, it felt inscrutable at the time, I was living in Toronto and, as the kind of English person that thinks 25 degrees is “a bit much”, a 40 degree heatwave thrumming through the walls of the un-airconditioned basement flat I was living in was like a Hell impossible to imagine just days prior. It was a tiny, sweltering studio with almost no natural light and a cockroach infestation so staying indoors was much too much like being in a prison cell. I had to spend most of my time outside but as the only clothes in my meagre wardrobe that kept me cool under the relentless sun, I had taken to wearing an off-white linen suit and a bright orange bootlegged Holland football shirt with cherry Doc Martens (I owned no other shoes). I was also unemployed so my options for shade were the few trees which remained free from other pink, sweaty exiles in hiding from that terrible, stinking summer. I looked insane, I felt worse, but in my ears was John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats squawking about American people and American places, places and people which had been once entirely intangible, hypothetical phantasms but now seemed concrete and touchable while I was on the ‘right’ side of the Atlantic.

I eventually left Toronto, but not the Mountain Goats. They came back to the UK with me and as I spent a long lonely winter without my partner, living with my parents, still yet unemployed, I listened to almost nothing else.

***

Personally, I feel mostly beyond the concept of the ‘guilty pleasure’, but there is something very ‘millenial-Gen X/2014 tumblr/John Green/Welcome to Night Vale’ about the Mountain Goats. My (mostly?) Gen Z heart chills when someone asks what my favourite band is because I feel an icy, clammy embarrassment at the Real Answer. I usually lie and say something cooler like Big Black, Parliament-Funkadelic, Richard Dawson, Talking Heads or the Magnetic Fields, but the Real Answer is the Mountain Goats. Last.fm tells me I have listened to 1458 Mountain Goats songs since January 2025 and that is while I have been consciously trying to listen to them less. It is more than three times my next nearest most listened to artist (Weatherday). I love them so very, very much.

And yet the cringe. Maybe it is John Darnielle’s own personality, his online ebullience reminiscent of an over-enthusiastic English teacher. Or instead it could be the way that this middle-aged Catholic father, older than my parents, makes his songs about outcasts, alienated young folk, early Christians, addicts, forgiveness, and all that gooey internal stuff in a style deeply at odds with the forms of emotional expression that are considered cool for music in 2025. Cameron Winter, to use the current-It Boy example, abstracts his music and his lyrics in a way that the more direct John Darnielle would never attempt. Winter’s lyrics are Beat-influenced, soaked in Dylan and Cohen, poetic and evasive. At its chaotic heart, Nina + The Field of Cops is almost Pynchon-esque. The ‘I’ in his songs could be Cameron, might be Cameron, or it could be you or me, or anyone who feels what he does. Charli XCX and Taylor Swift, when they use ‘I’, are definitely talking about themselves, or at least their Pop Star persona. Darnielle, however, almost always uses ‘I’ to mean someone else and usually a character that he has conceived somewhere at a writing desk unseen.

If Winter is Pynchon, Darnielle is Dickens. The emotions he sings of are all true, but the personage singing them is textually fictional, and the fictionality is what brings out the truth rather than attempt to directly simulate real experiences. This is unlike modern pop’s more explicit focus on the parasocial confession about substantively real situations and emotions etc. Darnielle’s are real characters in a way comparable to classic fiction or classic country songs (consider the ‘I’ who shot a man in Reno just to watch him die in Johnny Cash’s ‘Folsom Prison Blues’). His style akin to the directness of New Sincerity, a literary movement that has been dying a death for decades now that culture has shifted back towards deep-seated irony, persona, and artifice. I don’t think this is a bad thing, necessarily, but it means that Darnielle’s particular form of lyricism is uncool. Characters from his sung stories recur, the ‘Alpha’ couple have been making each other miserable since 1994, and 2023’s Jenny from Thebes is an entire album dedicated to the subject of a song from 2002’s All Hail West Texas. It all has the unmistakable smack of fandom and fanservice. And as a fan, that makes me unc or cringe or whatever. In short, listening to the Mountain Goats in 2025 is like going to a poetry slam or thinking that Marvel movies aren’t bad things - 10 years out of date. The worst kind of retro.

***

To look at a problem directly is to exorcise a ghost. Cringe is a ghost, a phantasm of embarrassment. Ersatz shame. Cringe is a vague feeling based on words you may have read online, a vibe passing over your grave, a thin reedy nag reaching at you with limbs of blue phoneglow. It is to emotions what a ‘gotcha debate bro’ is to political philosophy. To call something cringe is to admit that you are hiding something. Inspect it closely and it disappears like a fart in a hurricane. In the here and now, the moment to moment, it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. And so-

‘Hair Match’ by the Mountain Goats is my favourite song. At least my favourite of the songs that I’ve heard, but admittedly, I’ve not listened to them all yet. A favourite song is often so for very personal reasons so I will attempt to invite you inside that reasoning.

Hair Match is the final song off of the Mountain Goats 2015 album Beat the Champ, a concept album of sorts where the concept is Pro Wrestling. It is, in Darnielle’s words, less about its avowed subject as it is “really more about death and difficult-to-navigate interior spaces than wrestling”.1 I enjoy the line of ‘difficult-to-navigate interior spaces’. What is a wrestling ring if not a ‘difficult-to-navigate interior space’? What is a rear naked choke, a figure four leg lock, or a camel clutch if not the same? And death! As a sport for Gods, what field since those of Ilium has been more littered with the broken and shattered bodies of heroes, many of whom were lost somewhere on their long journey home, if not the squared-circle of Pro Wrestling?

Over the 12 songs preceding Hair Match, Darnielle arranges his drama by packing the stage from centre to the wings with self-destructive and outwardly-destructive beefcakes, arrayed in their mundane glory and ready to sacrifice limb and life for thundering applause. Werewolf Gimmick and Heel Turn 2 are about that glorious violence spilling out of the arena and into the lives of everyone who surrounds these lonely wretched gladiators. Choked Out and Foreign Object keep it all in the ring, a bacchae of pleasure in pain at the intensity of squeezing muscles and spurting, orgiastic bloodletting in the hot, wet centre of the maelstrom. The Legend of Chavo Guerroro and The Ballad of Bull Ramos are, as the titles imply, about real wrestlers and their mythmaking - the largeness they projected on screen and in the ring versus the smallness (not a bad thing) of their lives away from it. Ramos ends with cheer, a big well-earned grin we share with a man who takes pride in his achievements even after all he has suffered, even if that pride is in something as ephemeral as a career long past, joys long spent, and applause long dissipated. It feels like an ending in itself, which is why it is a surprise that there is another song after it on the tracklist.

We are allowed into the gentle hush of Hair Match. For the uninitiated, a Hair Match is a type of wrestling bout where the loser is shaved in front of the baying crowd. I invite you to listen to it below before proceeding:
Hair Match

It is a solemn song, mostly only a murmuring guitar and a cooing voice in contrast to the tooting saxophones and booming drums of earlier tracks. It is not quiet in a way the more overtly emotional songs on the album are, such as the bittersweet opener Southwestern Territory. It is quiet like a funeral mass, filled with restrained emotion. From start to finish, it is the exploration of the process of that emotion gently, sweetly, blooming.

First, the mystery of the narrator. Who is the voice that opens ‘You’ll be maybe lunging for the bad guy’s hip, but no one anticipates the sunset flip’? As the track proceeds, it is clear that the ‘you’ is the wrestler fated to lose his hair match and so to lose his hair in this most public of places. The speaking voice though, a manager? The man who has fixed the fight? Let us consider this question again later.

Quickly, the wrestler is rendered powerless, the referee complicit in the operation, and he is dragged and beaten with a folding chair. They hold him tighter, the voice almost seductive now, like a hand pressed gently between your shoulder blades, right where it is sweatiest, and speaking like a nibble on your earlobe. Suddenly it is transgressive and non-consensual:

‘We’ll stipulate that there will be no cameras filming, but of course there are several in the building, and if by chance somebody hits record, and stands real still somewhere back behind the soundboard’ - are the words of a devil, serpentine and slippery. But who is the non-filming being stipulated to? How consensual is this humiliation, captured on celluloid, digital would never do, for all time?

We proceed to a humble electric razor, an outcast, grasped aloft like a sacrificial blade. The victim is held fast to the altar, razor buzzing and shining in the artificial suns and then! The most surprising line, a sentiment that could only emerge from the heated intensity and bursting emotion of the scene:

I loved you before I even ever knew what love was like.

We return, the crowd ashamed at what they have paid to see but still yet rapt witnesses of this spectacle of despair and degradation. Many turn their faces away at the critical moment.

Time jumps to after the show. The wrestler, lingering outside in defeat, is left in the emptiness of a fading night with only the cold, distant stars and the “cheap cars” for company. A disappointment. A meagreness. Meagre entertainment for meagre people. The song fades, we feel the cool night on a bare head, the icy puff of cigarette smoke, and the long leaden-legged journey home…

But who is the speaking voice? Darnielle himself has kept it a mystery saying:

“the question of the identity of the narrator in ‘Hair Match’ is maybe my single favorite thing about the whole album, and kept me inspired throughout the writing of it (’Hair Match’ was the first song written of the bunch)”.2 It was not just the first song he wrote for the album, but also his favourite and ALSO the most ‘Greco-Roman’ - read: homoerotic. If you don’t think this song has a kink element to it, that the loser wants to be shaved in some way, listen to it again.

But the narrator. Who could it be? At first, I was convinced it was a man who had fixed this fight and arranged for the loser to take the fall so everyone could get a nice payday. Yet something in this did not satisfy me. Why would Darnielle insist on the mystery if the answer is so obvious? I listened to it again and again and again. I listened to it alone in the mornings, alone walking alongside a dual carriageway on my way to/from Aldi, alone after a night out and my head swilling with cheap beer, and my opinion changed gradually. Who is it who fixes all fights? Who knew that he would be defeated, held down, and humiliated in public before it happened? Who is it who could love before they ever even knew what love was like?

Hair Match is about the Crucifixion of Christ.

The sunset flip is the betrayal of Judas, the referee plays Pilate, the cameras are the Gospels, the man behind the soundboard is Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the wrestlers holding him down are the Romans, the razor the Cross, the crowd are us, the Jews of Jerusalem, and all Christians since the very start, the cheap cars are the world, the stars the heavens. It is the account of a drama where everyone knows exactly what will happen and yet we are all transfixed by its enacting. Equipped with the knowledge, the sense of cosmic inevitability, we are all of us complicit in the spectacle of sacrifice.

Yet the key line:
I loved you before I even ever knew what love was like.

To me, this is the easy birth of the world, sliding frictionless and fully formed from the will of the Logos. It is Christ as a part of the Trinity, a part of God’s Being even before He could conceive of that Being, in the time before time. The love he feels is that love which can only truly be expressed in the moment of suffering, pain, questioning, forsaking and silence. As the victim is taken to his Doom, how else can we feel but love for them and their sacrifice, going as meekly as a lamb, to be shorn like a sheep. As God loves, so do we. As Darnielle says, the crowd does not applaud through the Hair Match, but sits there silently as the victim is shorn/sacrificed and the drama draws to an ugly, quiet close, filled with love and pity and maybe shame at our complicity in the suffering we have chosen to witness.

I am not a Christian, I never will be, but as a medievalist, I can understand Christian art (or I at least make a good attempt at it) and this song to me is both a peak of Christian art but one which does not need a deep knowledge of Christianity to appreciate. In my view, I could equally argue that this song is about homoerotics in wrestling (which would be a lot less controversial than me arguing that it is really about homoerotics in the Crucifixion). These two stand together. But it strikes me that when I earlier contrasted Darnielle and Winter, maybe to the detriment of Darnielle, I didn’t realise that both can talk of the same things in the same way. Maybe the sincerity is returning. After all, on 0$, Cameron Winter croons:

God is real, God is real
I’m not kidding, God is actually real
I’m not kidding this time
I think God is actually for real
God is real, God is actually real
God is real, I wouldn’t joke about this
I’m not kidding this time

It is a promise that our suffering, our pain and humiliations, mistakes and missteps, be they public or private, soluble or no, can have a redemptive power totally unexpected and undeserved. We can say ‘fuck all these people’ with one breath and say ‘God is actually real’ in another. Having your head shaved in public, the silence of the crowd and their unspoken shame, it’s all about love.

I’m not kidding this time.

Subscribe now

The term ‘the Dark Ages’ has become engagement-bait. This might sound a bit extreme but it’s true. As a tool for understanding the past, it has been utterly exhausted of potential, that is if it had any to begin with. It is a husk, an empty, spent force. So all that remains is to throw it on the heap of grist for the content mill, history content being no exception.

The Culturist, in collaboration with Evan Amato, used the phrase coyly to title their article ‘How Dark were the Dark Ages’, as if the answer could be anything other than ‘really dark!’. I can’t read the whole thing, it’s paywalled, but I can’t say I need to. The author’s argumentative techniques themselves speak volumes; the general tone of self-superiority, the deployment of Roman population statistics (look! Number go down!), and the cries of some form of academic cahooting against the ‘Dark Ages’ as a concept.1 The general gist is finger-pointing at the Middle Ages for the crime of not being civilised enough, or something in the vein of Fall of Rome lamentation, a pale homunculus of Edward Gibbon doomed to repeat the same warnings against ‘decadence’ or declining x and degrading y.

But even on the other side, the fine people who like the the Middle Ages, there the ‘Dark Ages’ has its uses. Probably the most discussed and controversial note on medieval-substack, the ‘People who built this were not motivated by profits’ one, is engaging in ‘Dark Ages’ discourse in this vein. It intentionally contrasts the culture of medieval civilisation to that of modern civilisation, but positively instead of negatively. Content like this, especially if it shows Sainte-Chappelle, wants to challenge the Culturists of the world and demonstrate that the Middle Ages were good because the period produced Sainte-Chappelle and cool castles and big manly kings like Richard ‘I definitely fucked lots of men’ the Lionheart. So they invert the trope to argue that it is the modern period which is the degraded reflection, the ghost at the civilisational feast, rather than the medieval period.

Neither side can avoid the obvious truth - to debate the ‘Dark Ages’ is to engage in historical content-slop. It is a way to prod people into getting into the comment section, debater hats on, to hash it all out, restacking, liking, subscribing, paying some coin in either love-bucks or hate-dollars. It’s irresistible! This is the nature of the social media information ecosystem of which Substack is a part. As a term, the ‘Dark Ages’ is deeply conntected to the Fall of Rome and to modern anxieties about the end times. This imbues it with eschatology, portents of doom and destruction, all that juicy Sturm und Drang. The ‘Dark Ages’ is also a term with a long(ish) history and, in invoking it, you can pretend that you’re engaging in a discussion with Petrarch, Gibbon, Tolkein, Asimov, Twain, Augustine. I can’t really blame people for trying to exploit that. I think the Fall of Rome might be the most debated, the most contested and the most over-discussed issue in historical discourse, maybe second to World War II, so it’s no surprise that the Culturist, current subscriber count 200,000, bet on it generating some tasty discourse. He was right! And I’ll be honest, the title of this essay is also engagement-bait. People pay attention when you use the term ‘the Dark Ages’. I write stupid notes about a lot of things and they usually get little attention, but I say ‘the Dark Ages’ once and suddenly the people are interested!

I’m not picking sides and this article will resist my urge to get involved in the nitty-gritty, even if the anti-medieval crowd are usually very obnoxious, so let me be clear, the term ‘the Dark Ages’ is generative of content-slop when used by people who argue that the middle ages, in whole or in part, was a time of uncivilised knuckle-draggers AND for those who argue the exact opposite, the latter group tending to use it more ironically to argue that the period was sophisticated or pious or produced incredibly beautiful works of art and poetry. It doesn’t change the fact that both sides are baiting each other, and baiting you, poor innocent reader.

Amongst all this back and forth and ballyhooing, I felt the need to put the concept to rest, to dig its grave so we can move on and try to talk about literally ANYTHING else to do with the Middle Ages. I interrupted writing 1. Something actually historical and maybe even interesting about source criticism, and 2. perverse short stories about modern homoerotics, to make my interventions, returning like Gaius Marius coming dirty and tired from the fields to rescue Rome once again. My point is simple, to use the ‘Dark Ages’ as a hermeneutic, a lens through which we can interpret the world, is stupid. It tells us very, very little about the world in 600 or 1200. It is only useful for giving us a peek into the peculiarities of the minds who feel the need to deploy it in 2025. It is also an error to pretend that it is an idea worth debating or an argument made in good faith. As the concept is ahistorical (I don’t mean that ahistorical as some sort of un-fact not belonging to the historical past but ahistorical as having very little to do with history as a system of enquiry) no one arguing about the ‘Dark Ages’ is really arguing about history or making historical arguments. But if the ‘Dark Ages’ isn’t saying anything historical, then what is it saying?

Petrarch and the Fall of Rome

A fact googlers will know, the term the ‘Dark Ages’ comes from Petrarch, the fourteenth century Italian poet and godfather of Italian humanism. When he coined the term the ‘Dark Ages’, although he doesn’t use that exact phrasing, he refitted an old metaphor for his own purposes. Medieval, usually clerical, authors constructed historical time as a contrast between an age of pagan darkness to the modern, contemporary age of light and Christian truth. Petrarch, however, was a big fan of the culture from that age of pagan darkness, so he pivoted the metaphor, secularising it, to instead refer to literature and history rather than eternal spiritual truth. Him doing so was not him engaging in ‘secularisation’ in the sense of Petrarch as a proto-atheist or proto-Protestant, he definitely was neither of those things. Instead, it’s more useful to consider Petrarch as a doomer, especially about the times he lived in.

The fourteenth-century of Petrarch’s lifetime was not a good century, especially not for fans of Rome. The Papacy had left Rome behind for Avignon and Petrarch loathed both the excessive luxury that the Avignon Popes lived in and their domination by the French Crown. Rome was literally in ruins and its people seemed to be lost in a mire of forgetting about their own history. Mommsen’s 1942 article on Petrarch and the ‘Dark Ages’, which I referred to in footnote 1, maintains that Petrarch was a doomer because he was an idealist. He wanted the Roman Republic (to him a civilisational apex) to return, something he believed was possible “if Rome but began to know herself”. Like Gibbon gazing on ruined Rome as a young man in 1764 and decided to write his history on the empire’s decline, Petrarch believed he could uncover some deep civilisational secret by delving into those ruins. But where Gibbon’s was a cautionary tale of late antique decadence, Petrarch instead imagined the potential for resurrection and renewal, no matter how dimly he viewed his own era.

Dark Ages discoursers, however, tend to be of the Gibbonian more than the Petrarchian strand, believing more in the power of a good cautionary tale than designing any actual project cultural or social renewal. People don’t tend to click on articles about funding public libraries, but they love to bitch about the Roman empire online.

I love to bitch about history as much as the next pedant, especially at the pub but especially online, but why do we keep rehashing this one debate about the Fall of Rome? Our society looks nothing like Rome’s. If we are looking to the past for examples to apply to modern politics, we may as well be debating the collapse of the Italian banking families, or the decline of Chichen Itza or Angkor Wat, or how nomadic, steppe empires settle and fracture. But these don’t capture the imagination like Rome. We don’t claim historical, civilisational lineage from Pacal or Lorenzo de Medici or Genghis Khan, but the US Empire has a Roman eagle as its emblem. Crucially for our purposes, the ‘debate’ about the fall of Rome is deeply intertwined to the ‘debate’ about the ‘Dark Ages’, to the point where they are almost one and the same thing. The Fall of Rome robbed the light that made the Dark Ages so dark, as it goes, an opinion so baked into historical discourse that it has created this two-headed content monster that afflicts almost all study on the premodern past. A key detail is that these lines of argumentation are almost always drawn up along methodological as well as ideological lines.

How Not to Write a Historical Argument

From what I have seen from ‘the Dark Ages’ and the Fall of Rome discourses, is that you either argue with a graph or you argue with the Spirit. First the graph people. The Culturist used a graph after just a few paragraphs in his article, specifically on the population of Rome from 2nd century AD to present, and there are some spectacular schizo charts about the Fall of Rome that I’ve cited elsewhere. Even when the chart is not there, it is present in the nature of the discourse. Messrs Musk and Roman Helmet Guy above are talking about graphs. For Musk, the argument must be quantifiable to count (population statistics) and any argument which does not make numerical or data-driven claims is inadmissable.

The graph people are generally progressive, not politically, but in their view of history. Others I’ve spoken about who are historical progressives are Charles Homer Haskins, Steven Pinker, and Barack Obama. For them, the line of history points upwards, towards accumulation, even if they would violently disagree about how to keep that line moving up (or the arc of the universe bending towards justice etc.), and whether that line will forever move up without our conscious efforts to do so. The Culturist, who I have seen argue that the line must be kept moving up, belongs to this camp alongside Musk, who believes that he is the sole person keeping the line moving up. Statistics is their tool.

I don’t know too much about RHG (who reads his primary sources) as I’m not on Xitter, but he’s not talking about statistics, he’s talking about the Spirit. Even if his argument reproduces corpo-speak (“outsourcing”) he is in fact a Romantic or a degraded Hegelian. For him, Rome fell because of a decay somewhere inside the soul of individual Romans and that manifested primarily as Romans losing the will to die for Rome (unlike in the Republic/Empire’s glory days) to their doom and the doom of western civilisation at large. This is what Sam Kriss meant when he said:

“For Hegel, the fall of Rome didn’t have to do with imperial overextension or steppe migrations, it was because Rome had bad vibes. Rome was ‘chosen for the very purpose of casting the moral units into bonds, collecting all Deities and all Spirits into the Pantheon of Universal dominion, in order to make out of them an abstract universality of power,’ but once the vibe had fully shifted to the infinite and supersensuous inwardness of Christianity, that ‘finite, unhallowed order’ started to feel washed and actually the whole empire kinda fell off.”

This is contra Musk who would have it that it doesn’t really matter what Romans felt, or what their collective spirit was like, because can’t measure that. Feelings are not points of data on a chart. Only actions, like baby-making, matters and even then in quantities vast enough to tip the civilisational scales. Musk doesn’t offer an explanation why demographic collapse occurred (and I don’t want him to), the important point is that demographic collapse is common to civilisational disasters. A correlation in the data. RHG sees it another way, blaming a socio-cultural shift which worked its way into the individual hearts of Romans. To him, the past looks different, coloured in rose-tints and teary-eyes, and the motors of history are run by the human spirit expanding and retracting like the great breaths of God. Romantic and pre-Raphaelite artists, pessimist decadents (like J.K. Huysmans), retvrners, many Roman enthusiasts, bearded dudes with runes in their social media bios, and even common or garden pub-bound grumblers belong to this camp.

This is why arguments of this nature amount to people shouting past each other, or why the Culturist must argue that there is some academic cadre suppressing the concept of ‘the Dark Ages’; their arguments don’t make sense outside of these groupings because they are speaking different languages. To the Culturist, how could anybody argue that a ‘Dark Age’ didn’t occur when the graphs are showing the line going down? To someone like Memory Medieval, how could anybody argue that a ‘Dark Age’ did occur when that age gave us cathedrals, castles, men of great valour, the Deeds of the English Kings and all that, compared to us now with our comparatively stunted and unimaginative spirits.

We can also use this to explain why they insist that they have the answer, the single golden reason why Rome Fell, or why the Dark Ages were dark. Their answers have vanishingly little to do with history itself, the records, writings and material culture left behind by people from hundreds or thousands of years ago. They don’t care about people, they care about debating, about winning, about Content.

The impasse can’t be resolved, the dialectic stalls and sputters out, because no one really understands what they are arguing about. It’s not about whether the Middle Ages were ‘Dark’ or not, because no one has ever bothered to define the ‘Dark’ in ‘Dark Age’ beyond vaguely bad or ignorant2 It’s really about what you can know about history, how you can tell what happened and why, and what all the many centuries mean to us in the present. These questions are too large and too complex for Xitter or even substack. For an answer you have to read something like Capital or The Phenomenology of Spirit or one of Fernand Braudel’s breeze-blocks and no one wants to do that, or to bore their audience with 19th-century German historical philosophy. So the argument festers on in a style more becoming of nerd arguments than historical ones - Star Trek vs Star Wars, Marvel vs DC, Messi vs Ronaldo, and now Enlightenment vs Medieval.

The End Times of the End Times

Where do we go from here? My solution is simple: stop giving two shits. Leave the ‘Dark Ages’ to the people who think it’s worth discussing. For the historically or medievally minded, I beg you, no amount of fact-checking is going to change anybody’s minds because they are not arguing on the same terms as good faith historical discourse. It’s not bringing a knife to a gunfight, it’s bringing a camel to an egg-and-spoon race. The pieces don’t fit.

‘The Dark Ages’ as a discourse is so far from a sincere attempt to understand the past because it is an entirely narcissistic exercise of grappling with our own civilisational neuroses, about ‘population decline’ or ‘literacy levels’ or ‘spiritual loss’, arguments in terms utterly indifferent to what we might learn in conversation with the words of the past. They are arguments which instead belie an obsession to speak over others, dripping with the facile desperation to be heard, to the detriment of any real historical consciousness. You cannot win by engaging it, the ‘Dark Ages’ holds within it so much anxiety and metahistorical baggage that it kills any useful, productive or novel debates on arrival. After all, academic history buried the fucker 70 years ago. We can instead choose to let it lie there, mouldering in the grave, rather than digging up its bones and puppetting it around to make whatever civilisational discourse we might like.

I would like to indicate the way out of the discourse with an example, the episode in Gregory of Tours’ History of Franks of the feud between Sicharius and Chramnesindus. The whole affair is a few pages long and was discussed at length by the famous literary scholar Erich Auerbach in his book Mimesis. I’m sure you can find it free online so please use this as an opportunity to do so.3 What Auerbach finds so compelling about this short episode, essentially two Frankish nobles hating each other over the course of decades, is that Gregory of Tours relates it with language clumsy yet filled “with strange atmosphere”. Gregory shifts tenses to direct discourse at the key moment of Sicharius slaying Chramnesindus, providing affecting, profound details at every turn. In Auerbach’s words:

“In all these conversations and exclamations, brief, spontaneous passages between human beings arc dramatized in a most concrete fashion: eye to eye, statement answering statement, the actors face one another breathing and alive— a procedure which can hardly be found in antique historiography; even the dialogue of the classical stage is shaped more rationally and more rhetorically.” (88).4

Even though Auerbach cannot quite escape the spectre of the ‘Dark Ages’, his “strange atmosphere” of the Merovingian age is clearly similiar to the mud- and blood-splattered image of the ‘Dark Ages’, he does manage one thing that all the ‘Dark Ages’ discourse fails to do. He reads Gregory of Tours’s clumsy, ill-formed Latin and in reading, he stumbles through a doorway into the distant past, almost unimaginably distant, where all the shadows on the wall, arguments about rises and falls, dissipate. He can now enter the scene himself, “eye to eye, statement answering statement, the actors fac[ing] one another breathing and alive”. He has shown us a way, not perfect by any means, where we too can access the drama unfolding in that dark room fifteen centuries ago when drunken clumsiness turned two bosom companions, literal bedfellows, against each other in hot blood and emotional turmoil. It strikes like a lightning bolt. If we let the discourse fall away, all this silly bullshit, we can be rewarded with a glimpse of the past uncoloured by ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’5 and be reminded why we even bother to look backwards in the first place.

I almost didn’t write this essay, maybe you wish that I didn’t, but I was as always motivated by a genuine and sincere love for the medieval past and the words that its people left behind. This bit gets missed in all the arguing about population and cathedrals. So fuck it! My next piece is going to JUST be about reading medieval history, the work, the lovely stuff, and less about griping at people. I hope I make it there and I hope you can join me for it!

Subscribe now

The Ruin is an early medieval English poem about, broadly, how it feels to look at ruins. Written in Old English alliterative verse, it is a meditation on the Roman ruins that littered the city of Bath sometime around or just before the 10th century. It opens like this [in translation, I never studied Old English]1:

“These wall-stones are wondrous [wraetlic] —
calamities crumpled them, these city-sites crashed, the work of giants
corrupted. The roofs have rushed to earth, towers in ruins.
Ice at the joints has unroofed the barred-gates, sheared
the scarred storm-walls have disappeared—
the years have gnawed them from beneath. A grave-grip holds
the master-crafters, decrepit and departed, in the ground’s harsh
grasp, until one hundred generations of human-nations have
trod past.”

It is deeply evocative poetry, overloading the reader with a sense of loss and the enormity of what has decayed and been buried over the centuries. In its references to the past, what has been lost to the centuries, it is hard not to connect this description to the Fall of Rome:

“The halls of the city
once were bright: there were many bath-houses,
a lofty treasury of peaked roofs, many troop-roads, many mead-halls
filled with human-joys”

All brought low by “Days of misfortune”:

“death seized all those sword-stout men—their idol-fanes were laid waste —
the city-steads perished. Their maintaining multitudes fell to the earth.
For that the houses of red vaulting have drearied and shed their tiles,
these roofs of ringed wood. This place has sunk into ruin, been broken
into heaps”

We picture neglect and destruction. In post-Roman Europe, the villas and wonders had “been broken” by barbarians streaming across the old borders like Panzer divisions, an entire culture turned to ashes and ruins in a matter of years, and the peripheral parts of the Empire, Britain included, left to infighting and conquest. Is this not the “Days of misfortune”, the “city-steads perished”, the “work of giants corrupted”? Viewed in this way, The Ruin is a remarkable example of an early medieval reaction to the Fall of Rome. A gifted poet looking out at the city of Bath and thinking “where are all the people who built this?” and exploring their own feelings of decline and decay, as felt in their own time.

This is the dominant view of looking at The Ruin, or at least it is the one that leaps to the fore. We carry with us centuries of cultural baggage lamenting the loss of Rome. See, for an unhinged instance, this schizo chart that habitually does the rounds on twitter:

Most of us aren’t this stupid, but we do carry around the assumptions, true or not!, that the Fall of Rome was a bad thing and what came after was even worse. It’s in the air we breathe. Most of the artists, writers, and minds that have built the substrate of Anglophone culture, building up like sediment, either did or were likewise influenced by the idea of this lost inheritance, an idea communicated at least in part by the ruins that the Roman Empire left across Europe, Africa and Asia.2 The medieval period, as the interim between this Fall and then the Rise of modernity, is rendered the ugly outsider, the blemish, on western history. I’ve written about this at length:
The Shape of Time to Come

But there is a very important question unanswered by all this is - how did the Ruin-poet feel? They were not a modern person, burdened by the same ideologies as a viewer or artist from today. I argue that what they were trying to communicate with the Ruin is not quite so simple as loss, decline and despair. Ruins do not speak with one voice. Where else are the ruins in our historical consciousness? What do they have to say?

***

To return to the ruins of Rome, it was Edward Gibbon’s own ruminations on the ruins he saw as a young man on the Capitoline Hill inspired his monumental The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

“It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed fryars were singing Vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.”

Written some twenty-years after his visit to the city, Gibbon draws our attention to the time of year; Autumn,3 symbolic of decline, and the time of day; Vespers, the liturgical office of the evening, as the temporal counterparts to his reflections on the tragic irony of Rome’s inevitable fall. The Capitoline Hill, a metaphor for Rome itself, is captured by Christianity - a transformation which Gibbon holds at least partially responsible for the fall of Rome itself - and ‘fryars’, paragons of Catholic poverty in a distinctly un-Roman, and maybe un-British, way, sing in the old temple of Jupiter, a location both ruined (as a Pagan temple) and not (as a Catholic church). Rome, despite its fall, continues on, playing on a stage set by the distant past, unable to escape from its history but alienated in some way from the original spirit which animated its founding.

To a Protestant Englishman like Gibbon, someone who idealised the civic virtues (both classically Latinate words) extolled by Cicero, especially in the political climate following the oligarchical Glorious Revolution of 1688, the Catholic-ness of 18th-Century Rome would have felt more than slightly tragic. ‘As Absolute as the Pope in Rome’ as the common saying went at the time. For Gibbon, while Rome was the fountainhead of civilisation, in his day it was dominated by a despotism that appeared excessive, continental and distinctly Papish. In his sentence, in that moment of reflection both in 1764 and 20 years hence, the Capitoline ruins allegorise the distance of the present from the original, the heights fallen, to dramatise the fate of classical civilisation. After all, Gibbon’s England was religiously mild but vehemently anti-Catholic, unlike the late Rome which was possessed by the fervour of conversion that Gibbon saw as leading to its collapse. To him, then, the Ruins of Bath would speak with a singular voice, only about decline and fall, and only about what had been lost in the “triumph of religion and barbarism” that collapsed the last classical civilisation in Europe.

However, he was not the only Englishman to walk around the ruins of England and Europe and be inspired by the sight. After all, one of the most famous and quotable poems in the English language is about ruins. It ends like this:

“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
look upon my works ye mighty and despair;
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Contra Gibbon, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias forewarns that the English state of the 18th-century contains within it the conditions for its own decline and fall. It is mortal, so it will not last forever. Ozymandias may be certain that all the grandeur of today, the “wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command”, King George IV, Parliament etc., will fade into dust and ruin with the turning of the ages, but he is less clear about what we are to do with what remains from the past beyond reminding us of the way of all flesh. For Shelley, the ruins are a call to action. They encourage activity, the quickening of the spirit, to ward away the ruinousness of time. If even the most potent and powerful in their day succumb to ravaging history, we only have the present to act in and act on. Ironically, both Gibbon and Shelley have had the reputation as atheists, or having atheistic sympathies, but they diverge greatly in their faith (or lack thereof) in the English state. There is a perspective where ruins often evoke the eventual destiny of states and nations, kings and conquerors, rather than other abstractions - cultures, languages, economic systems, religions.

Romanticism is having a bit of a moment right now and I can see why. Everyone is talking about decline, the fall of empires, and trying to rescue big feelings, the essence of the sublime, out from postmodernity’s Waning of Affect. In the midst of react-content, aesthetics defined in the negative, it is also great to feel part of a conscious, positive artistic movement. I’ve recently discovered that I don’t really like romantic literature in an aesthetic sense (at least in its late 18th and early 19th century forms), but I cannot deny its influence on this subject. In this context, the ruin is also symbolic of a shared, national past - the foundations upon which nation-states may be raised. And now, when things are clearly changing and states like the USA appear to be stumbling towards their own obsolescence, it is tempting to sit like Edward Gibbon and look at the world and think, wow this all used to be a lot better. Momento mori, vanitas, and all that.

***

The attentive reader may have noticed that I provided the Old English original for exactly one word when supplying a translation for the Ruin - wraetlic. Wraetlic is commonly translated as ‘wondrous’ or ‘wonder’ which on the face of it is fine enough. The stones of ruins are themselves wonders to behold, their surfaces showing off centuries of wear and weathering. But wonder in the middle ages is no simple term. The middle English word, wunder, also typically translated as wonder, is often used in a religious context as a way to communicate the destabilising experience of witnessing a miracle or divine act. It is a word used only for intensity of feeling, good and bad. A sinner being smited for transgressing against a saint may just as easily experience wunder in their last moments as a pious supplicant being healed of a wound or disability. In this way, may the wonder communicated by wraetlic be the awe that the viewer feels in seeing the great works of long-dead Romans? Wraetlic, unfortunately for this interpretation, is no simple cognate for our word, ‘wonder’.

Luckily, I was able to find an entire article just about the word wraetlic and the ways it was used in old English verse by Peter Ramey.4 The etymology of wraetlic is interesting. Wraetlic comes from the proto-Germanic ‘cut’ or ‘score’, as in the process of cutting gems into jewels. It appears 48 times in old English verse, because there really are so few extant Old English poems that you can count each instance of a given word, and it is alliterated every time (paired with a word beginning with the same letter, as in the Ruin’s case with wealstan or wall-stones).

Almost always, wraetlic is used for material artifacts, but it is also used to describe animals, people, body parts, and creatures, alive or dead. It is ambiguous whether wraetlic refers to the superior craft of an object, or the effect it has on the viewer. Wraetlic is the skill of God in the act of Creation. The dragon slain by Sigismund in Beowulf is a wraetlic wyrm, awe- and terror-inspiring, and Grendel’s severed head is a “wliteseon wrætlic” giving it the connotations of a grisly, mesmerising spectacle. The words of angels and the voice of God are also wraetlic, as is the spiritual wisdom of the young Virgin Mary. It appears in old English riddle poetry to describe icebergs, a jewelled book cover, a copulating hen and rooster, a “key” (that is also a man’s erect penis as seen through his trousers) or the surprising sound of a lyre for those who have not heard the instrument before. They are surprising, awful, frightening, but always a mystery to be uncovered. It is fitting that wraetlic appears so many times in riddle verse, as a wraetlic object is almost always an enigma begging to be uncovered, a mystery that confounds the intellect of mere mortals.

I like the way wraetlic is used in The Ruin best, and I have to defer to Peter Ramey’s able analysis to make this point better than I can. This reading of wraetlic being the key, he sees the poem as the poet attempting to uncover the mystery of the ruin’s construction first by considering their current state of collapse, the genius that animated the original artisans, and then:

“it becomes clear that wrætlic is not solely the quality of the fitted stones themselves or even the ingenuity of their artificers, but also the poet’s perception of them, especially as they appear to the speaker from a vast chronological and sociocultural distance. The ruin is riddle-like—ancient, enigmatic, and ingeniously wrought—and this imbues the fallen stones with their particular, awe-inspiring wrætlic force by hinting at a greater, now concealed, meaning.”.5

It is an “imaginative portal to a deep past”, much like the hilt of the giant-sword found by Beowulf in Grendel’s Mother’s lair.

The wraetlic nature of the wall is not a faded glory, but an essential element of its present state. If it were complete, i.e. if the Ruin-poet lived in the time of its construction, it would no longer be wraetlic, but explicable in a way that a riddle cannot be. It would have a meaning more uniform than the tumbledown mystery of the ruin. Why does it make us feel at once, awe and longing, pleasure and sadness, joy and despair? That is the enigma, that is the value of the Ruin as a ruin, the “imaginative portal to a deep past”.

***

It is hard to overstate the imaginative potency of ruins when considered in this light. As an example, see the prevalence of ruins in fantasy literature. There is Gondolin, Numenor and Moria in The Lord of the Rings (Gondor is basically one big Numenorian ruin), Elric of Melnibone, one of Michael Moorcock’s eternal champions, is the last of a fallen civilisation, the incomprehensibly old/futuristic ruins in Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun, or the baroque decay of The Lands Between in FromSoftware’s Elden Ring. Each invites the reader (or player) to consider the impact of time upon place and to fill in the gaps left in the text by ourselves. We will never see in detail what ruined The Lands Between, but we can imagine it as we wander along the hulks left of cities and great roads.

In the examples I have cited so far, the ruin has a similar pull but their plurality of meanings, the fundamental polyvocity of ruined architecture, can be overcome by the rhetorical purposes to which the ruin is put to use. To Gibbon, the ruin’s “imaginative portal” may be to a world of lost grandeur and its meaning can only refer to that faded example. For Shelley, it could refer to the enormity of time and sublime affect that the contemplation of the ages can evoke in the viewing subject. But for the Ruin-poet it necessarily eludes singular meaning and can be a wondrous, terrible, saddening or inspiring thing, all at once. This need not apply just to the physical relics of the distant past.

Olive Higham’s article on the Ruin, which inspired me to write this, points out that the physical text of the Ruin is itself a ruin. A hot poker was rested across the manuscript sometime in the intervening centuries leaving swathes of the text unreadable. Some scholars have attempted to fill in those missing gaps and reconstruct from context what the Ruin-poet may well have written. If the poem is a ruin, or has been ruined, I would advance that this also applies to Old English as a language. It is fragmentary, no dictionary of Old English survives, and words like wraetlic can only be understood in an incomplete sense as a composite of its and appearances in verse, literally limited in how few countable instances of the word are extant. Unlike the dead language of Latin, which has thousands of years of continuous use and scholarship to the point where we do have a really good idea of what Virgil or Cicero meant when they said x, y, or z, Old English was, for a time, a lost language. It was supplanted as the language of secular literature by Norman French for centuries. People stopped speaking it altogether. Our imagination, much like the work to reconstruct the lines missing from The Ruin as a poem, fills in the gaps. Old English had to be uncovered, unearthed, rebuilt, and tended. It was buttressed over time by volunteers and experts. Some parts are better-preserved than others. Old English remains strange, striking, at once oddly familiar and unfamiliar; an “imaginative portal to a deep past”.

After our own “days of misfortune”, what will get left behind and how will we treat it? Remember that medieval peoples did not feel particularly uncomfortable about their ruins - they built most of their towns and cities using the stones pilfered from the ruin sites. The same happened to the great abbeys and monastic houses of England after the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Go to St Mary’s Abbey in York and you’ll see the nearby walls built from eerily similar stones as the few left standing in the Museum Gardens. This to me doesn’t scream a ‘detached reverence for the people who came before us’ or ‘melancholy contemplation on the fate of nations’. The Bath inhabited by the Ruin-poet was likely constructed in the same way. They may have lived in a house or building made from stones quarried under the rule of the Caesars. They may have even peeled out the blocks themselves and watched the old structure tumble while they pondered the distant past.

To return to my opening paragraph; what do I feel when I walk around the abbey? Loss? Yes, the Dissolution of the Monasteries was a terrible loss. The riches of English monasticism, books, art, and architecture were destroyed en masse and then neglected for centuries after. But this has not stopped the abbey from speaking. It continues to talk over itself in many voices, unwhole but wraetlic. The abbey now stands in a very pleasant park. Herons sport in the gentle river, children play carelessly, people stroll by with their smiling dogs. I usually feel lucky to even be around these ruins, stark and beautiful, even if the music and liturgies that once made the stones sing have long since fallen silent.

I want to start this analysis of Umberto Eco, the Milanese/Piedmontese author, academic, medievalist and semiotician famous for The Name of the Rose, Foucault’s Pendulum, and his theories of semiotics, in media res, as it were. A key concept in Eco’s semiotics is the Open Work, or Open Text (Opera aperta in Italian). This theory posits that modern art, music, literature etc., is characterised by an ‘openness’ to the viewer, listener, reader etc. This openness is the creation of meaning through multiplicity of interpretations separate from the founding genius of the artist and so leaving the ‘meaning’ of a given work up to the audience to determine. This approach avoids an insistence on a single, transcendent meaning which is intuited by an audience regardless of time, place, or context.1 For Eco, this goes beyond simply a change in critical posture, but a major transformation in the works of art themselves and their production. As David Ropey says in his introduction to the English translation of The Open Work:

“Traditional or "classical" art. Eco argues, was in an essential sense unambiguous. It could give rise to various responses, but its nature was such as to channel these responses in a particular direction; for readers, viewers, and listeners there was in general only one way of understanding what a text was about…Much modern art, on the other hand, is deliberately and systematically ambiguous. A text like Finnegans Wake, for Eco the exemplary modern open work, cannot be said to be about a particular subject; a great variety of potential meanings coexist in it, and none can be said to be the main or dominant one. The text presents the reader with a "field' of possibilities and leaves it in large part to him or her to decide what approach to take. The same can be said, Eco argues, of many other modern texts that are less radically avant-garde than the Wake—for instance, Symbolist poems, Brecht's plays, Kafka's novels.”2

The example of Joyce is precise. Eco had a continuing interest in James Joyce throughout his scholarly life. They shared a classical Catholic education (Jesuit for Joyce and Salesian for Eco), a keen interest in Thomas Aquinas (Eco wrote his thesis on aesthetics in Aquinas, a text he revised throughout his life, and Aquinas recurs in Joyce’s fiction as a focus of interest for his Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus, who eventually articulates his aesthetic theory as “applied Aquinas”), and a common understanding on the power of language, culture and images to utterly shape people’s minds as much as those minds shaped culture. An ideal laboratory, then, within which to explore Eco’s aesthetic or interpretative theories. However, while Finnegan’s Wake may be the opera aperta par excellence, I can’t read it. I’m too stupid. So allow me to climb one rung down the ladder of difficult literature and discuss Eco and Joyce, the Open Work, and interpretation/hermeneutics in Ulysses instead.

Ulysses is still a famously ‘difficult book’. I think that reputation is warranted. It makes uncommon demands on the reader, woven through as it is with cultural references relevant to early 20th Century Dublin (both popular and erudite, classical, historical, and comical), and communicated in Joyce’s famously idiosyncratic narrated internal monologue, typified as a stream-of-consciousness. Thankfully, Joyce had an awareness of this in his lifetime and helped to produce two schema for interpreting Ulysses, specifically its allegorical and metaphorical usage of Shakespeare and, especially, Homer.

This is immediately interesting if we consider Joyce via Eco. I can imagine Eco, king of interpretative fluidity in modernism, arching an eyebrow at this very solid interpretative structure for reading Joyce. But let’s consider its merits before summoning the spectre of Umberto. First, I would like to demonstrate the interpretive density and flexibility of Ulysses by looking at only a few passages from the first 30 or so pages of the Telemachy (those initial scenes focusing on Stephen Dedalus) alongside elements of the Gilbert schema. I will follow the schema’s priorities, at least at first, in considering the interplay of connected histories and mythologies on display in the initial interactions between Buck Mulligan, Stephen Dedalus (returning from Joyce’s previous novel, Portrait of the Artist as Young Man) and Haines, the Englishman.

To start, the Hellenic resonances. These, at face, are fairly self-evident particularly if the reader has the Gilbert or Linati schema to hand. Stephen Dedalus intentionally recalls Daedalus of the labyrinth and the father of the Icarus. Its Hellenism is remarked on by Mulligan, who also comments on the Greek inflection of his own name: “Your absurd name, an ancient Greek” and “My name is absurd too: Malachi Mulligan, two dactyls. But it has a Hellenic ring, hasn’t it?” (4). He also attempts to shame Stephen as he apparently lacks a proper classical education as he speaks of the sea: “Epi oipona ponton.3 Ah Dedalus, the Greeks. I must teach you. You must read them in the original. Thalatta! Thalatta!4” (5). All this resonates greatly with the Gilbert schema. In this Stephen is Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, Mulligan is Antinous of Ithaca, the chief suitor of Penelope, and both watch the ‘wine-dark sea’ [“epi oipona ponton”] of Dublin Bay, as their counterparts watched for Odysseus returning to Ithaca after twenty years of voyage.

This is all rather clear. But muddying the picture is the entrance of “the Saxon”, Haines, an Englishman who is staying with Dedalus and Mulligan in their tower by the sea. How can he fit into this Greek scene? The Gilbert schema strains slightly at this, but then Joyce drops us a clue when Mulligan refers to Haines as both a Saxon and “The Sassenach” (9), the Gaelic word for Saxon, or Englishman. Haines studies Irish and Celtic mythology, can speak Gaelic, and is well-meaning, if condescending to Stephen. Mulligan makes a quip about the Mabinogion, the cycle of medieval Welsh poems, shortly after Haines’ introduction, as he sits with them at breakfast. This intertwining of a Saxon amongst Celts connects to the Greek dimension via the mythical settlement of Britain by Brutus, an exile from Troy, originally mentioned in the 9th-century Historia Brittonum. The myth remained popular in Welsh and Irish tradition ever since.5 Saxon, and later French to denote the Normans, became the regular term to speak of the oppressing English in subsequent Celtic sources, in a general sense. A version of the Welsh Brut y tywysogyon (the Chronicle of the Princes) was entitled Brenhinoedd y Saeson (The Kings of the English), saeson being a clear Welsh corollary to the Irish Gaelic sassenach. From this perspective, the Saxons that first conquered the British throughout the 5th and 6th centuries were the same people to later subjugate the Irish in the 12th and the 13th centuries. This, I believe, is the manner in which Mulligan refers to Haines as the Saxon. Dedalus supports this by referring to him as the ‘conqueror’ (of Ireland by Britain, of Irish folklore by British scholarship etc.). If we continue with the thread on the conquest of Ireland by the English, or sassenach, Mulligan himself invited Haines to stay and keeps him in their lodgings against Dedalus’s protests, just as the first Anglo-Norman conqueror of Ireland, Richard ‘Strongbow’ de Clare, was invited by Diarmait mac Murchada, the deposed King of Leinster, in 1169.6

This also re-dramatises the Trojan War: the conquest of Troy by the Greeks (of which Antinous of Ithaca and Telemachus are dubious ‘beneficiaries’), through the conquest of Greece by the Romans, themselves founded by the mythical Trojan Aeneas, and again with the conquest of Britain/Ireland by the Saxons, into a cycle of mythic recurrences. Ireland is brought into this cyclical, classical tradition by Mulligan the character, who himself sees the renewal of Ireland thusly: “if you and I could only work together [speaking to Stephen] we might do something for the island. Hellenise it.” (7), and also by Joyce the author. One feature of Ulysses is the dual nature of characters who represent themselves as characters in a story while also understanding authors as themselves characters. Stephen himself theorises that King Hamlet, the Ghost, is Old Shakespeare just as Prince Hamlet is Young Shakespeare. This is given new emphasis by the understanding that Stephen himself was written as the young Joyce just as Leopold Bloom (who we haven’t even encountered yet!) was for the mature Joyce. Similarly, as Stephen thinks of himself as the main character in Hamlet, the Prince, when he is really a supporting character in the Odyssey, an unfortunately more peripheral Prince, he deepens these intense textual recursions that operate around the dyads of conqueror/conquered, prince/king, myth/history.

As Ireland is caught in this web of Hellenic-Trojan to Celtic-Saxon conflict, and as is Stephen, reenacting it through his enmities towards Haines and Mulligan, so are we, turning around and around these spirals of history, mythology and literature. As Joyce said in a letter to Linati, another beneficiary of Joyce’s schematic of Ulysses:

“My intention is not only to render the myth sub specie temporis nostri (transl. “under the aspect of our time”) but also to allow each adventure (that is, every hour, every organ, every art being interconnected and interrelated in the somatic scheme of the whole) to condition and even create its own technique. Each adventure is so to speak one person although it is composed of persons - as Aquinas relates of the heavenly hosts.”7

In one person, or a relationship of three, we have the entire heavenly host; the history of western civilisation from Troy and Ithaca to Ireland in 1904. Even Joyce’s Latin topos above, his use of sub specie temporis nostri implies an act of bringing myth out into the present from the past, that which lies beneath the aspect of our time.

All this serves to break the boundaries set by the Gilbert schema, which Joyce himself designed in to help promote Gilbert’s 1932 book James Joyce’s Ulysses. He later regretted it saying to Samuel Beckett, “I may have over-systematised Ulysses”, and then to Nabokov in 1937 that his use of Homer was a “whim”, and continuing to say of his work with Gilbert that it was a “terrible mistake…an advertisement for the book. I regret it very much.”8

It is this very interpretive density in Ulysses which resists structuring the text under a “simple” schema (not that either schema can really be called “simple”). But the attempts are not useless. As Eco said of modern structuralism and/or medieval scholasticism, the latter an interest and intellectual touchstone that he shared with Joyce,:

“a system must have a contradiction to undermine it, for a system is a structural model which arrests reality for an instant and tries to make it intelligible. But this arrest, necessary for communication, impoverishes the real instead of enriching it. The model is of value only if it stimulates an advance to a new level of understanding of reality, a level on which it then seems inadequate.”.9

Does this not apply to Gilbert and Linati? Their contradictions are overt in the very construction of the thematic boundaries. How can referring to Stephen as Telemachus make Ulysses simpler, or easier to follow? Or one of the other Gilbertian themes, say, the understanding that the ‘Technic’ of this episode is “Narrative (young)” or its ‘Art’ is “Theology”? It drags in with it so many further questions, so many deeper associations and resonances that the reader can be drowned beneath the swell. To be perfectly clear, I started writing this section after reading TWELVE pages of Ulysses. I could not resist the potential meanings, I had to pull those threads and see where they lead. The Gilbert and Linati schema led me to, as Eco put it, “a new level of understanding of reality, a level on which it then seems inadequate”. The schema made themselves useless by providing a series of tools with which to think. Joyce may have been slightly unfair by denigrating them as examples of Ulysses being “over-systematised”. They are more like wet-suits, scuba gear, flippers, so that we can survive the riptide, the initial bewildering, experience of reading Ulysses, be dragged into the deep water of Joyce’s Dublin and return, our arms laden with treasures pulled from the bottom. Thallata! Thallata!, as Mulligan cries, mother of us all.

***

Meaning, as Eco would have it, is created by the reader. If there is any pithy statement to summarise his four or five decades of work, it is this. In my case, I have come to Ulysses with the historian’s (specifically the medievalist’s) eye, so is it any wonder that the treasures which weigh down my arms are ones representing historical consciousness? The word ‘Sassenach’ rang in my mind, pealing like a bell, heaving with meaning, and I followed that word wherever it led me. This is the ‘openness’ of Ulysses in action. It did not matter for this interpretation that in the scenes with Mulligan, Stephen is haunted by his mother and his refusal to pray for her soul, even as she begged him to do so on her deathbed. The memory of this strains his relationship with Mulligan who, despite being a fellow atheist or “Hyperborean” to use his Nietzschean turn of phrase, judges Dedalus for his callous defiance. The ‘openness’ does not require me to consider this as lock and key for interpreting this section of Ulysses, a close analysis of the triangular relationship between Stephen, Mulligan, and Haines allows me to get at the roots of this tension another route, by paths more familiar to me but not so to other readers.

Pushing my boat out one more time into Dublin Bay, I want to analyse possibly Stephen Dedalus’s most famous line in Ulysses, and maybe the most famous line in the book as a whole. During a conversation with a senior teacher, and Dedalus’s paymaster, Mr Deasy, they talk about history and politics, of Ireland and of England. Deasy, an anti-semite, blames England’s current economic downturn on the Jews but states that the Jewish have already been punished by God for their wickedness.10 Stephen responds that all men have been punished in some way, doomed to wander the earth, as he speaks:

“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” (34).

In the context of my previous interpretation, about the cycles of history and myth which torment Stephen, the line takes on multiple, overlapping meanings. Stephen’s nightmare is not just the nightmare of struggle and oppression under Home Rule, of Irish fighting Irish over the games played by the English, but his personal inability to escape this struggle within his own mind and soul. Him and Deasy may “break a lance” in discussing politics, Unionist vs Fenian, but this is the only way in which either of them can relate to each other, politically. The possibility of brotherhood has been severed by thousands of years of history that operates within each of their minds, constantly driving them away from genuine connection and unity of common purpose.

Deasy’s anti-semitism works the same way as the divisions in Irish politics, it drives him apart from others - not least the Jewish hero of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom. But Dedalus himself is also trapped, unable to break free from the culture and society which birthed his mind and which fills it to the brim with sights, sounds, and memories, that stuff that makes his self his self. His “nightmare” is being forever trapped within the boundaries of ideologies which pull him this way and that, making him powerless to overcome the influence these structures have over his mind and soul. All that historical precedent holds him down, sits on his chest like an incubus or sleep paralysis. Knowledge of history does not liberate the learner but traps him in a labyrinth, perhaps not solely of his own construction, but a construction he is complicit in, with a Minotaur made of hatred at its heart.

Stephen can be Hamlet pulled towards murdering Claudius, tormented by the inevitability of his actions and the impossibility of escape, or he can be Telemachus destined to kill the suitors alongside Odysseus, but can he be just Stephen Dedalus, free to walk his own path, unburdened, and liberated from the structures which seek to hold him to a single track? The question is a matter of reading, of freedom of interpretation. This is the question that Eco asks of us as readers. Do we have the courage to take up the challenge? Can we, un/like Dedalus, awake from the nightmare?

Some people don’t like it when historians say things like this. Particularly when it is about a well-known and well-respected figure like English National Hero Richard the Lionheart, we get accused of ‘historical revisionism’. Essentially, they mean that we are taking something that was certain and true and dragging it through the mire of modern politics and ‘social justice’ until the past is distorted by present values beyond all recognition. I don’t think it is very important to justify my ‘revision’ exhaustively, but some people might want this from me. A loyal reader accused me of taking an ‘unserious approach’ to history so for him, I will attempt some Latin close reading to explain why so much is put into so few words when analysing queer potentials in historical texts. This is for you, big man. I’ll show my work.

When considering the historical data on Richard’s documented horniness for man-fuckin’, I’ve taken a lot from Hilary Rhodes’ open access article, ‘Richard the Lionheart, Contested Queerness, and Crusading Memory’ (2023). I will link it in full in the footnotes so please give it a read.1 It is well-researched and well-written with a great (much better than mine) grasp of Latin that some of these very tricky but very important texts use as her evidence. All of the gory details are there, but I’ll make a reader-friendly numbered list for the link-shy amongst you.

1. Roger of Howden (d.1202) provides the meat of the details of Richard’s life including the all-important account of his sharing of a bed with Phillip Augustus, future rival and King of France, as a youth. Again I’m taking this from Rhodes, but Roger of Howden says that the pair “every day they ate at the same table and from the same dish, and at night the bed did not separate them. On account of this vehement love [vehementem amorem] that seemed to have arisen between them”. Vehement is a bit of a false friend here (Latinist talk for a word that appears to be the same in your native language but actually has a different meaning). Vehement had meanings beyond the modern definition of ‘strong or forceful’ and, as Rhodes tells us, it had connotations of sexual excess or passionate intensity in the context of the high medieval church that Roger was writing in.2 While men sharing beds was not always sexual in the middle ages, we can infer from Roger’s use of vehement that this was not a totally hetero, bros being bros sleepover.

2. Richard did penance at Messina, Sicily in 1190 or 1191 for “the filthiness of his life” and “the thorns of lustfulness had departed from his head [vepres enim libidinum excesserant caput illius]” following his penance and confession. No other English king was forced into public penance for a sexual sin. Henry II debased himself penitentially for the murder of Thomas Beckett, the Archbishop of Canterbury, which was rather a big deal. Henry I was a notorious womaniser, with dozens of illegitimate children, but people mostly denigrated him after his death for oppressing the church and no one dared to make him do public penance for it. Henry II, Richard’s father, similarly so. This builds a case that Richard’s “thorns of lustfulness” were rather more sinful and scandalous than simply having a mistress or twenty. Only sodomy could bring such ignominy at this time.

3. Speaking of sodomy, in 1195, “there came a hermit to king Richard, and preaching the words of eternal salvation to him, said: ‘Be mindful of the destruction of Sodom and abstain from what is unlawful, for if thou dost not, a vengeance worthy of God shall overtake thee’. The king, however, intent upon the things of this world, and not those which are of God, was not able to withdraw his mind from what was unlawful”. Richard ignored him and remained estranged from his wife. Woof. The evocation of Sodom is instructive. This was a period that saw increasing scrutiny of sexual mores, including redefinition of sodomy as a sin of homosexual sex (as well as heterosexual, non-procreative sex) carrying with it a particular ‘against nature’ sinfulness. Rhodes cites Peter the Chanter here who, for those who are not familiar, is the most significant theologian (along with Peter Lombard) between Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas Aquinas. A serious theological mind whose scholarly circle was at the cutting edge of twelfth and thirteenth century thought and philosophy. His redefinition of sodomy carried weight and people would have cared about it, is my point.

4. Richard was admonished again in 1198 for neglecting his wife and his flagrant infidelity which had become publicly known, the latter charge levelled by Hugh of Lincoln (later canonised a saint). He rebuffed the attempts to get him to renounce his ways.

5. Hugh, Duke of Burgundy penned and circulated a scandalous anti-Richard song during the Third Crusade in 1192 that included “such shameful words” that “should never have been made public”, according to the anonymous chronicle of the Third Crusade, Itinerarium Peregrinorum. Rhodes argues that the unspeakability of the content of the song and the way that the chronicler accuses the singers so intensely implies a sexual, or a shamefully sexual, component. ‘Unspeakability’ is a clear signal to the historian of queerness, especially in a medieval context, as homsexual sex was considered THE sin beyond what could be uttered. Much queer medieval history is compiling these various unspeakable utterances. Interestingly, the fact these authors refer to it as unspeakable, but still take pains to mention it, is a rhetorical device called preterition.3 By saying 'don't look at this! don't think about it!', the author is in fact calling attention to it and demanding that we think about and imagine what it is, because we are all meant to know what it is. It's the 'is he... you know' of the middle ages. My personal, very humble, opinion is that literary devices like this imply a sort of fascination/revulsion dynamic by the contemporary authors and their audience. They couldn’t bear to think or write about it in detail, but it was so compelling by dint of its transgressiveness that they wanted everyone to know about it and imagine it, picking at it like a psychosexual wound, if you will.

I again implore you to read Rhodes' article in full if you wish to engage properly with what I’m saying about Richard. There is even an argument to be made that she overstates the seriousness of sodomy at this point of middle ages. John Boswell, the single most influential historian of medieval queerness, argued of Richard’s gay tendencies that;

“On several occasions he repented of “that sin” (“peccatum illud”) and resolved to lead a holier life, but there is no indication that he regarded it as any more serious than the types of high living—from wine and women to extravagance in dress—for which all religious monarchs (and most writers) of the Middle Ages occasionally did penance.”4

I am no expert on the Third Crusade nor on Richard himself. I can, however, speak to Roger of Howden’s context more fully than I can of Richard’s. Monastic chroniclers like Roger often spoke favourably of the kings that they wrote for and wrote about, but they never completely excused the powerful when they behaved like poor Christians. They could be very forgiving about some sins, as William of Malmesbury was to Henry I’s womanising saying of him that “all his life he was completely free from fleshly lusts, indulging in the embraces of the female sex (as I have heard from those who know) from love of begetting children and not to gratify his passions”. Which, yeah sure thing bud. Also, gross! My point is that Roger was not engaging in some takedown of Richard by highlighting his homosexual preferences. Why would he? He embarked on the Third Crusade alongside Richard and was regularly employed by the Angevin monarchs as a diplomat and a royal justice. As a rule, historical writers did not make a habit of biting the hand that fed.

But, these texts are complicated, they speak with many voices as often as they speak with one. By this I mean that Roger of Howden had to contend with competing and sometimes contradictory priorities while composing his chronicle and one way to view these chronicles is as attempts to resolve these contradictions. In the process of balancing responsibilities to royal, lordly, papal and episcopal patrons as well as the standards of contemporary morality and literary style, he decided to include the more lurid incidents of Richard’s life. Perhaps Richard’s sex with other men was so well known that it would be an intolerable omission for him to ignore it. Richard himself seemed defiant about continuing with his relationships with men up to his death in 1198, refusing to repent or reconcile with his estranged wife. I sincerely think that Roger was doing his best to report the truth of Richard’s life, even if that truth was, in the end, mostly favourable to Richard. We cannot know for certain. As Ridley Scott loves to remind his detractors, we were not there.5 But we can make arguments based on what is available and, on balance, Rhodes convinces. The evidence is substantive and compelling and analysed in the proper context. Rhodes also revises some unfortunate elements of similar arguments made by historians like James Brundage that portray Richard’s homosexual preferences as a character defect. This is the good work that many, many historians do. But why do so many people dislike it?

****

So far, I’ve been speaking about revisionism as if it is a dirty word, something to avoid. However, I think it’s good and fine to revise history. We do it all the time. A lot of Victorian medieval history, the stuff that we (the girls, the gays, the various others) want to revise, is itself a product of its context and, understandably, preoccupied with very Victorian intellectual projects. I don’t want to understate its achievements. From a vast array of poorly organised medieval texts, they discovered, maintained, transcribed, studied, translated thousands of books, rolls, scrolls, and more into a coherent ‘canon’ of the middle ages.

However, just as we live with these achievements, we live with the legacy of their intellectual and moral priorities. For medievalists studying queerness, we are faced with centuries of erasure to overcome. 19th-century translators sanitised examples of medieval queerness (in our context, Rhodes states that Roger of Howden’s ‘vehementem amorem’ was previously translated as the very safe and non-descript term ‘strong attachment’)6 or simply refused to translate them if the details were deemed too lurid so scholars could continue to gatekeep their content. John Boswell detailed how Francis Gladwell would change the pronouns when translating medieval Persian homosexual narratives in 1820s to make them appear heterosexual, Thomas Fracklin excised the sections of Amores by pseudo-Lucian that involved gay love, von Scott and Swinton Bland removed details of punishments for priests caught having gay sex when transcribing Cesarius of Heisterbach’s The Dialogues on Miracles, and the editors of Loeb Classics translated scenes of Greek homosexual love into Latin instead of English (paradoxically making them much easier to find) so non-scholars could not read them. This led Boswell to make many of his own transcriptions and translations (thankfully he trained as a philologist) when writing Christianity, Sexuality and Social Tolerance. Erik Wade, writing in 2023, outlined examples where Victorian medievalists who were determined to show that Anglo-Saxon sexual morality (and therefore Victorian sexual morality) precluded same-sex desire by refusing to translate or intentionally mistranslating early medieval penitentials. This involved a prominent anthology of penitentials skipping “canons about female same-sex acts from five penitentials, excising a canon about nuns who have sex by means of a “machina” [device/dildo].”7 What are these translators and transcribers doing if not revising history for modern social mores and political goals?

These examples are also instructive and help to illustrate what sort of history was the desired norm at this time. It was a history of clean lines. Great stock was put into ethno-linguistic groupings and analysis of their histories and literature was aimed at uncovering the true spirit of an age or of a people. These constructions were rigid and dichotomising (west-east, man-woman, Christian-Muslim). Their concepts are the ones that we continue to grapple with and that, for better and for worse, define the boundaries of the discipline’s discourse. Concepts like feudalism, the nascent stirrings of nation states, unitary political sovereignty, the rise of capitalism and humanism out of Italian city-communes, the bureaucratic state emerging from expanding monarchies, and, yes, heterosexual romantic and sexual attachment as the only natural form.

These priorities can have an effect on the very way that historical discourse is structured, or what is valued as proper historical discourse. I would argue that the main idea underlying all of these intellectual priorities is that history can be instrumentalised to a single end or a limited group of ends. In other words, medieval history, and medieval people, should be and should mean just one thing. Leopold von Ranke, the founder of this style of empiricist history, aimed at demonstrating how things really happened [“wie es eigentlich gewesen”],8 but these were singularly grand, important things like the emergence of the German nation-state or the divergent destinies of the ‘Teutonic’ and ‘Latin’ nations of Europe. He wanted to be factual and correct about these lofty matters and so supported his arguments with reams and reams of historical data mined from mountains of archival material. The aim was to demonstrate how then became now. It’s the same methodology as many of the pre-Tolkein arguments about Beowulf; whether it was a Danish or a German or an English poem and what it could therefore say about the spirit of each nationality was the limits of its utility to the historian. All historical inquiry involves constraining your sources, but the idea of finding wie es eigentlich gewesen totalises all this historical material into what can be positively proven. A disadvantage of this methodology (aptly named positivism) is demonstrated in our analysis of Richard’s sexuality. We cannot absolutely prove his homosexual attraction, but is anyone ever expected to absolutely prove heterosexual attraction?

History in the Rankian, Victorian vein has many limitations as an intellectual project, not least that it is a bit of a dead end, as inquiries go. I remember a factoid from a lecturer who said that a lot of Victorian historians thought that they could complete history by like 1910 or 1920. They thought there were only a few gaps to fill in, a couple of pesky untranslated Voynich Manuscripts, and it’ll all be done, finito!

The very concept that we can run out of history, that we can show wie es eigentlich gewesen enough times to exhaust the potential of historical enquiry, is a ridiculous oversimplification of the pre-modern past. It connects to the accusation of revisionism. That accusation has lurking behind it the idea that the past was really quite simple, meaning that attempts to seek new things in the historical past must be frivolous or politically motivated. Annoyingly, Jon Dell Isola just talked about the concept of ‘revisionist history’, among other things, in an excellent piece. I’ll link it here, but I also want to copy his words directly as they are very pertinent to my argument:

“This is more pronounced by bad-faith right wing attacks on "revisionsim” [sic] that assumes there is an unbiased and "obvious" historical truth, postulating the "common sense" positivism of Ranke and others as the correct method of doing history. Often, this is about using the medieval as a foil for the modern, to contrast the supposed unaesthetic or wholesome modern world with the more enlightened and "civilized" ancient one.”.

The critics of supposed revisionisms are nebulous but I think I can attempt to group them under two banners. These are that history, or at least worthwhile history, is about 1) inspirational examples or about 2) genealogy (not necessarily meaning genetic or racial). To them, the interested student ought to study history for inspiration (moral, religious, aesthetic, literary or just for the pleasure of imagination) or they ought to study it to understand ourselves (and ourselves alone). The first element is romantic, the latter more factual and neo-Rankian.

A word for the romantics - me too! I’ve played lots of Medieval 2 Total War and Age of Empires II. I’ve watched and enjoyed The Kingdom of Heaven. I went to Tintagel over the summer and I have now started reading Thomas Malory and Chretien de Troyes to develop the feelings of Arthurian magic that calls to me distantly over the hills of space and time. I went to the Royal Armouries in Leeds recently and spent hours and hours ogling plate armour, longing to grasp various swords and maces, and dreaming about jousts and medieval siegecraft. It’s great! It’s fun! I like it a lot! However, that romanticism can drag a lot along with it, especially as it often involves a kind of hero worship. If your ideal of medieval masculinity precludes gay sex, then suddenly I’m accusing your hero, Richard the Lionheart, of being faggy and limp-wristed. This is an emotional argument, based on a totalising understanding that masculinity can only be one way. I’m not going to waste words explaining how it’s stupid except to say that it’s for adolescents and should go sit at the children’s table until the grown-ups are done talking.

For the ‘genealogists’, who want to map the destiny of nations or western civilisation, I want to first admit that I am simply uninterested in the ‘story’ or the ‘narrative’ of western culture or western civilisation. It is not important to me. It feels frivolous, politically regressive, and it instrumentalises the past as a relation to the present (how then became now) rather than attempting to understand it in its own ways and by its own terms. If we let go of the concept of the state, for example, when looking at medieval political formations, what potentials can we now find in the ways they tried to organise themselves? If we remain wedded to our concepts, on the other hand, we can only explain how states became tighter, more regular and impersonal formations, like the ones we have now. For some, this process takes on a near-mythic position. Charles Homer Haskins attached so much to the unique importance of the Norman state for understanding medieval history because he saw the modern progressive American state of the early 20th Century as its rightful political inheritor.

For both the romantics and the genealogists, medieval history can be a safe space, somewhere that makes sense in contrast to the chaos of the world out there. The internet is terrifying, politics is a fucking joke, terms for things that once felt stable now change and shift, everything that was solid melts into air as Marx once said. I get it, medieval history is a refuge for me too! Some of my friends studied modern history and it sounded like a miserable death march from one unspeakable atrocity to the next. Medieval history on the other hand, aha! That’s pretty clear and straightforward, at least for the romantics and the genealogists. Men were men, women were women, people generally thought that heterosexuality and child-rearing were good things, and the shapes of things can feel familiar. God was in his Heaven! I wrote about this with J.K. Huysmans’s medievalism and how he yearned for the time when mankind was closest to God, so unlike the degraded modernity of 1890s Paris. It’s a tale as old as the modern world and I often like some of the people who make this argument.

Despite all this narrative’s admirable supporters, for me the virtue of the medieval past is completely opposite to this homogeneity, existing as it does in the genealogical imagination only as a point of comparison or contrast to our times. I value above all the medieval period’s diversity and plurality. It is maddeningly inconsistent and incoherent. Reformers and centralisers within the medieval church wouldn’t shut up about how much this annoyed them and their project was centuries of wrangling all that specificity and regional variation into a system of rules and regulations that everyone could both understand and follow. This extends to the sources, especially histories by medieval people. Consider Roger of Howden and how difficult it is to get a straight (no pun intended) answer out of him. This is what got me into medieval history. I remember reading Monika Otter’s Inventiones as a student, which is about medieval English historical writing in the 12th-13th centuries, and my third-eye opened as she discussed how these books were playful, fictional, and literary in a way that called attention to how they felt it was impossible to have perfect knowledge of the historical past. It follows that these texts, histories and chronicles, do not have a single meaning because they were products of often complex systems of multifaceted cultures and societies that all were in the process of dissolving or cohering or syncretising with each other and on and on. They could not represent one tradition or one culture, certainly not in reference to a modern nation-state like Great Britain or a pseudo-Global one like ‘the West’. For someone like Ranke, this is a defect of the sources. They can be untrustworthy, needlessly literary, contradictory, fragmentary, and prone to diversions into fiction and fantasy. For me, the idea of this being a defect rather than the only reason why these sources are worth reading over and over again is baffling. It is clear for anyone who cares to see it that there is infinitely more for the past to say than just speaking to the political and social structures we have now.

This is where Richard the Lionheart fits in. He has taken an incredible historiographical journey since the 19th century when the Victorians raised him to the status of national hero. But if we break him out of that Victorian context, and the debates about his purported heroism, we can see him as a lot more than just that. He was a King, a rebellious Prince, a Crusader, a Great Warrior, Pious, Profane, Lusty, Honorable, Artistic, Brutish, and all sorts. He also (sorry to hedge my language here) exhibited behaviours that I would consider to be in keeping with our modern standards of ‘bisexuality’ (and I don’t mean he drank iced oat lavender lattes and had an undercut).9 He cannot be just a hero for the romantics, or a stop along the road to modernity for the genealogists. He was never that in his lifetime.

Let’s zoom out for a moment and ask the question of why is it important to us in 2025 if Richard did fuck men? Simply, it expands the horizon of possibility. Opponents of historical revisionism like to say that the practice of queer history is mostly riding roughshod over facts and accepted truths by applying modern labels to historical people and ignoring obvious anachronisms for political gains. The accusation is that queer history and queer historians can only talk about the past like this, it can only identify more and more people who liked fucking in this or that sort of way, rather than speak to something more substantive or important like the historical destiny of the Tuetonic and Latin nations. My response to this is that the beauty of history is that it allows space for ALL of this. The destiny of the Tuetonic and Latin nations was sometimes in hands of men who previously fucked each other silly. In our case, Richard probably topped as the older sexual partner (as with the Greeks) and Phillip bottomed, but who’s to say they didn’t switch sometimes? The possibilities are endless. History is now much larger, much richer for us considering all of the implications of this male on male, bare-ass, rawdog fucking. I don’t even think he was gay, that label isn’t important to me when it comes to understanding the past. He fathered an illegitimate child with a woman, he probably had sex with others. But more than this and his ability to perform great deeds of martial prowess, he could clearly love another man tenderly, vulnerably, carelessly, badly or well, top or bottom, vehemently or ‘as his own soul’.

I don’t think that Richard the Lionheart is, was, or should be a hero, queer or otherwise. The urge to find queer people in the past is the urge to historicise our existence, to prove we’ve always been here, but if we’re looking for exemplars from history, we shouldn’t. This is not even anything to do with Richard personally. I never met the man, but I didn’t get the impression from doing my research that I would like to. Richard himself has become a lightning rod for this kind of back and forth about the character of historical icons, their heroism or whatever, because he represents an old-school type of English masculinity. When men were men, they were noble and impressive and proud, unlike us, stunted soyboys. But the apparent contradiction that a man who was attracted to and slept with men could not be the same man as the chivalrous hero of the Third Crusade comes from modern assumptions of what men are capable of. Roger of Howden was certainly able to accept that truth. The Greeks too, from Alcibiades in Plato’s Symposium (later a great Athenian strategos) to the Sacred Band of Thebes (an elite group of hoplites made up entirely of homosexual pairings). Can we do the same? What ideas are in operation that stop us from accepting as true what is right before our eyes?

England is in turmoil over its symbols, its ethnic makeup, its future. It’s never great when people start feeling the overwhelming need to make lots of flags and wave them around the place at all times. I genuinely do like living here, I love the people and the landscape and I don’t want to leave it, ever. Richard the Lionheart is one of the things being contested right now as an archetypal symbol of the right sort of man, a proper Englishman who stuck it to the foreigners and defended the homeland against brown people and blah blah blah. A revision if ever there was one. Anyone who has any amount of respect for the medieval past can see that putting him on the pedestal of heroism is disastrous to free, open and honest discussion about the historical past. The only thing we have left of Richard are the words of men like Roger of Howden or Gerald of Wales, and they seldom agree even within the same text. Gerald knew Richard personally and had this to say of him:

“I would confidently say that amongst all the leaders of our time he is the most energetic, but, apart from those virtues for which he is known and the innate and acquired virtues which he demonstrates, it was decreed that he should be given three others, which I prefer not to cite, which should be suppressed rather than expressed, lest their contradictions be more apparent when placed side by side, &c. But that is enough for now: let us return to the history.”10

Anyone who has studied the history of violence knows one thing for certain; medievalists can’t fucking stand Steven Pinker. I’m sure we’re not alone. The enmity, which I am not sure is mutual, began with Pinker’s magnum opus of pop-science-cum-political-science The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) where he argues that everything is getting better because of our greater aversion to interpersonal and interstate violence. We’re all getting more tolerant, more empathetic and we, and our states, the earthly representatives or extensions of our collective spirits,1 are now all more eminently reasonable. For his historical argument to work, Pinker needs to convince us that things really have gotten so much better. He decided that the best way to do this is to make medieval Europe sound fucking horrible. This made medievalists very annoyed.

In the first and last word on the subject, Sara M. Butler, a social historian of law and gender in medieval England, took Pinker to task in her article, ‘Getting Medieval on Steven Pinker: Violence and Medieval England’.2 I’ve already covered some aspects of what irks Butler and me both in ‘On Cats’ (which if you read nothing else I’ve written, please read that), but it can be summarised rather simply in this quote:

“Pinker needs a barbaric Middle Ages. Indeed, without a violent point of departure, the book’s central argument is untenable. Thus, it is not surprising that Pinker discovers a barbaric Middle Ages when he goes looking. However…this preposterous caricature of the medieval world depends entirely on Pinker’s ignorance of the sources that inform his statistics, coupled with a meager understanding of the medieval legal system.”3

Basically, Pinker’s survey of the medieval period is a poorly researched hatchet job engineered to buttress a rather counterintuitive argument that things are only getting better and the ‘better angels of our nature’ are winning out. His medieval evidence tends to be third-hand analyses of spuriously extrapolated legal statistics, descriptions of spectacularly baroque torture devices from coffee-table books about the Inquisition or Renaissance Italy, and accounts of battles in various Arthurian romances. It is absurd that people were falling over themselves to praise his books. He is a chair at Harvard and he deserves our ire for being a shit academic. He also deserves it for being a fucking Whig.

Those who have read my previous object on the Shape of Time to Come, or who know a little bit of historiography, will be familiar with the Whigs. Named for the liberal wing of British parliament from the 17th through to the mid-19th centuries, Whig historians were proudly optimistic in their assertions that English constitutional monarchy, moderate Anglicanism, and rapacious imperial capitalism was not just the best form of politics but that it was in fact pushing humanity to the very peaks of civilisation. I quoted this last time, but it bears repeating as a great summary of the worldview, from Thomas Babington Macaulay’s (1800-1859) History of England (1848):

“The history of our country during the last hundred and sixty years is eminently the history of physical, of moral, and of intellectual improvement. Those who compare the age on which their lot has fallen with a golden age which exists only in their imagination may talk of degeneracy and decay: but no man who is correctly informed as to the past will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present.”4

It’s also very annoying, I think, to look around at the troubles of the world and be told by some smart-arse Harvard professor that everything is actually mostly fine precisely because it definitely could be (and apparently was) much worse. It’s no wonder that Bill Gates liked a book so smug and insipid. It is the ideology of self-satisfied capitalism. Whig history’s origins in the 18th and 19th century’s English parliament is no coincidence; it is the operating logic of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations as applied to history. As the all important ‘line’ (stock price, HDI, GDP, etc) goes up so does the overall ‘good’ of the world. It is not proper to ask ‘where is the end of all this?’. That doesn’t really matter, capitalism has no end in itself. All that matters is that the number is bigger than it once was.

I would advance this by saying that Pinker’s argument is inseparable from a sort of liberal-PMC reaction to the 2008 financial crisis. Faced by millions upon millions of the global immiserati who uttered the collective cry of ‘Jesus Christ can we try literally anything other than this?’ when faced with bullish US forever-war-imperialism, European austerity politics, and the insult of bank bailouts on top of the injury of mass redundancy and foreclosure, Steven Pinker wanted to slam on the brakes. His book basically begs people to slow down and take stock. Is this really so bad? Maybe we all should take a good look around and see that it could be so much worse. We’ve made so much progress already. Isn’t that nice? It doesn’t matter that the world may seem to be continually teetering on the knife’s edge of disaster and the future is as uncertain as ever. The number has gone up! Just be calm. Be reassured. Shh, shh. Watch that number, it’s very up.

***

When presented with such saccharine and superficial optimism, it pays to indulge in the haters. Maybe this is why Dostoevsky is getting so popular again. For all of his characters who represent the goodness and resilience of the righteous human spirit in the face of suffering, Prince Myshkin and Alyosha Karamazov spring to mind, he strikes me as quite the hater. For me, though, I prefer the unvarnished haters, the uncut pessimism, when the ‘let people enjoy things’ crowd turn up at my door. It tastes like a cool glass of ice water on a hot summer’s day. It’s why I read Joris-Karl Huysmans.

J.K. Huysmans (1848-1907) was a French author and critic of the decadent movement. Influenced from a young age by Schopenhauer, his most famous book is A rebours (Against the Grain or Against Nature) in which a sickly aristocrat, des Essenties, retreats from the real world outside into his elaborately constructed manor to live a solitary life devoted to sensuality and solipsism. He constructs an elaborate scent-organ that, when manipulated properly, dispenses exquisite perfumes in arrangements that des Essenties likens to orchestral music. He organises and reorganises his library of expensively and thematically bound works of decadent, symbolist literature (his favourites include Poe, Baudelaire and Petronius). He purchases a tortoise encrusted with gems that dies very soon after its arrival (this one was apparently based on a true story). It is a very funny book and one of my all-time favourites. It feels precision engineered to piss off the greatest French novelist of the era, and Huysmans’s one-time mentor, Emile Zola.

Zola had devoted his life to a literary goal that bordered on the quixotic in scope. Inspired by Balzac’s Comedie Humaine, itself a picture of post-Napoleonic France, Zola intended to portray the French Second Empire (1854-1871) in intense social detail. The epic series focused around two branches of a single family, the bourgeois, stable and successful Rougon and the disreputable, proletarian (but also capable of artistic genius) Macquart. All of this was intended with the highest ideals of social utility, to present France’s recent past back at itself and to theorise on the very deepest and most fundamental units of that society. Huysmans’s A rebours was conspicuous in its anti-utility.

Considering A rebours to be the ultimate rejection of Zola’s project of social realism, des Essenties disgusted as he is by politics, realism, decency, morals and the concept of art with a purpose, Huysmans’s next novel, La-Bas (Down There or The Damned) is then the rejection of Zola’s ethics.5 La-Bas is the first of Huysman’s books to include his (more or less) self-insert character, the novelist Durtal. Durtal has been rendered lethargic and despondent by the moribund Parisian literary scene and so begins researching the medieval French warrior, companion of Joan of Arc, satanist and child murderer, Gilles de Rais for his next novel. Inspired by Matthias Grunewald’s Crucifixion, Durtal wants to be shocked back into activity, to recover something new and unheard of from the past. Hearing from two of his friends, the agnostic but mystically inclined doctor des Hermies, and the passionate Catholic bellringer Carhaix, about satanist practices in contemporary Paris, he plunges headfirst into the occult world with the help of a would-be mistress Hyacinthe Chantelouve. The book concludes with his account of a satanic Black Mass.

All the way through, rather than be excited by what he discovers, Durtal only circles the drain of pessimism. He fails in his quest to rouse himself out of torpor, partly due to his inability to commit to believing in that which his subjects, satanist or Catholic, believe; the mark of the divine and supernatural on the material world. This failure frustrates his ability to even reach the horizon of sensual pleasures, he does not end his hermitage by becoming like des Essenties, for example. While Gilles de Rais represents the very end-point of transgression and excess, but, as a hero of hedonistic pollution, he is out of reach to Durtal as remains trapped in that dull perversity of modern Paris. Des Essenties, at the very end of A rebours, is forced to rejoin society on doctor’s orders, so great is his fear of death over all things.

The true climax of La-Bas, superior even to the scene of the Black Mass which, intentionally I would argue, goes down as a damp squib, is Gilles de Rais’ eventual contrition. He breaks down the sins he has committed before his judges and, collapsing into tears of remorse, appeals for forgiveness from the peasants he had so long tormented.6 In the courtroom, before his accusers and after recounting his tale of unspeakable debauchery and sadism:

“He fell on his knees and, shaken by terrific sobs, he cried, "O God, O my Redeemer, I beseech mercy and pardon!" Then the ferocious and haughty baron, the first of his caste no doubt, humiliated himself. He turned toward the people and said, weeping, "Ye, the parents of those whom I have so cruelly put to death, give, ah give me, the succour of your pious prayers!"
Then in its white splendour the soul of the Middle Ages burst forth radiant.”

In a genuinely moving sequence in an otherwise acidic text, the peasants themselves are moved by the flame of the Paraclete and pray for his soul. His earthly redemption is moved by that very impetus which pushed him into murderous excess:

“And with one accord everybody in the room knelt down and prayed for the assassin. When the orisons were hushed there was an instant of wild terror and commotion. Driven beyond human limits of horror and pity, the crowd tossed and surged.
…
And thunder-smitten by grace, in a cry of horror and joy, he had suddenly seen his soul overflow and sweep away the dank fen before a torrential current of prayer and ecstasy. The butcher of Sodom had destroyed himself, the companion of Jeanne d'Arc had reappeared, the mystic whose soul poured out to God, in bursts of adoration, in floods of tears.”7

Both a terrible fall and a most gracious rise. The very depths of nihilistic experience and its deliverance to the highest ecstasies. Damnation and salvation in a single man. But the age of true excess had long passed and the Waning of Affect, to use Frederic Jameson’s term about post-modernity, struck Durtal’s Paris long ago. A faded shadow remains, lurking in the gutters and the basements of fetid bawdyhouses as a puerile oppositional morality. The Black Mass is pallid occult mummery, no more than a valve to release repressed and transgressive sexuality. This is typified by Hyacinthe Chantelouve, who has so far resisted Durtal’s advances, finally lets go, disrobing and initiating sex in a state of excitement after they leave the Black Mass. The whole affair is disappointing, if horrible in a mundane sort of way, like being flashed in the street. As Durtal’s friend, des Hermies, says when hearing Durtal’s account of the satanic ritual:

“It's a veritable seraglio of hystero-epileptics and erotomaniacs that he has formed for himself. But his vices lack warmth. Certainly, in the matter of contumelious blasphemies, of sacrilegious atrocities, and sensual excitation, this priest may seem to have exceeded the limits, to be almost unique. But the bloody and investuous side of the old sabbats is wanting. Docre is, we must admit, greatly inferior to Gilles de Rais. His works are incomplete, insipid; weak, if I may say so.”

So, limited in the depths of the soul, unable to even approach the abyss of despair, Durtal languishes on the shore. He chooses neither salvation nor the greater depths of sin and, looking from a window at the masses of Paris as they announce the results of an important election, feels only a tired disgust at the degradation of the world.

"Oh, God!" murmured Durtal forlornly, "what whirlwinds of ordure I see on the horizon!"

"No," said Carhaix, "don't say that. On earth all is dead and decomposed. But in heaven! Ah, I admit that the Paraclete is keeping us waiting. But the texts announcing his coming are inspired. The future is certain. There will be light," and with bowed head he prayed fervently.

Des Hermies rose and paced the room. "All that is very well," he groaned, "but this century laughs the glorified Christ to scorn. It contaminates the supernatural and vomits on the Beyond. Well, how can we hope that in the future the offspring of the fetid tradesmen of today will be decent? Brought up as they are, what will they do in Life?"

"They will do," replied Durtal, "as their fathers and mothers do now. They will stuff their guts and crowd out their souls through their alimentary canals."

Ironically, Durtal’s place as an affectual and affecting subject, capable of emotion and humanity, is only recovered as he regresses away from the modern world and travels, so to speak, back to the medieval past. One can see the process of Huysmans's next book, En Route, the route itself, as temporal as much as spatial. Durtal, having lost his friends and spiritual bellweathers Carhaix and des Hermies to sudden illnesses, can only experience emotional release when present at the catholic mass, listening to the choirs sing in St Sulpice or St Severin, or viewing the early Christian masters at Le Louvre. Christian art, the art of faith, draws him back to the church. All other art and everything that is representative of or generated by the modern age feels degraded or, worse, mediocre, unworthy of comment or scorn. After he finds a priest who is sympathetic to his uncompromising mystical and aesthetic sensibilities, Durtal ships himself off on a retreat to La Trappe, a Trappist monastery in the French countryside. There the monastic routine and the struggle against his own wounded subjectivity, and possibly diabolical temptations, leads him to find meaning and his own sense of self-worth. As a witness to the ardour, piety, and simplicity of the lay and religious brothers at La Trappe inspires his own turning towards faith and away from the superficiality of modernity and its cult of materialism and doubt.

The aforementioned irony is that in the Whiggish histories of civilisation, the modern self, the singular cogito ergo sum, is supposed to have emerged from exactly this sort of subjectivity, namely the subjectivity of communal life and monasticism. In such narratives, the western subject is the flower that grows from the muck of medieval passivity and obedient deference to authority. With that flower comes the questioning of sacral authority (Lorenzo Valla, Pico della Mirandola, Martin Luther, the Protestant Reformation, Jansenists, Anabaptists, Levellers and Diggers), empiricist philosophy and science (Descartes himself, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and Bacon - what I saw is what happened, rather than deference to auctoritas, the medieval/classical concept of textual authority, or rather the hierarchy of texts based on their respective authoritativeness), materialist social consciousness (More’s Utopia as critique of the enclosures in England, Bruegel’s consciousness of social reality in The Procession to Calvary, The Peasant Wedding, and The Hunters in the Snow) and the subject reflecting upon itself for itself represented by the new media of the novel and the essay (Cervantes, Montaigne, and eventually Rousseau, Defoe, and Sterne). We can bring this all the way back to Steven Pinker, whose thesis rests on the understanding that the coming of the modern state of affairs, and the modern state itself in a sort-of Hegelian kind of way, is a story of this emergence. What is good for this kind of individual is good in general, and the process of leaving the middle ages behind has only been positive, additive, to the circumstances of humanity. At root, it's a progressive system of ideas. Huysmans, however, when he looks back and views all this from the perspective of three to four centuries, he sees that the fruits of that emergence have all rotted on the vine.

In fact, he makes the point that it is medieval people, basically non-subjects in the eyes of Steven Pinker or the neo-Burckhardtian Stephen Greenblatt, who rescue Durtal, this metropolitan elite literatus, from the nihilism and self-destruction fomented by inhabiting fin-de-siecle Paris. Precisely because Huysmans turns the temporal hierarchy of the medieval non-subject vs the modern supreme subject on its head, he subverts both 19th-20th century scholarship on the middle ages and the narratives that modernity tells about itself where this hierarchy is either overt or latent in inference. This irony gives his work its incisive critical power in attacking the ideological content of progressivism.8

Deepening this irony is the position that this era of Paris takes in the modern imagination. The 1880s and 1890s were the Belle Epoque, a final blooming of western culture before the bloodletting of the short twentieth century. Huysmans’s was the Paris of Proust, Zola, Manet, Renoir, van Gogh, Matisse, Gauguin, Rodin, the young Picasso, Cezanne, Monet, Guy de Maupassant, Rimbaud, Anatole France, Verlaine, Erik Satie, Debussy, Saints-Saens, Massenet, and Art Nouveau. It was an embarrassment of cultural riches. Once, Huysmans was a champion of impressionism and as an art critic, he was among the first to recognise their collective genius. Huysmans’s writing, at this time many prose poems about Paris as well as his art criticism, seemed to form a mirror to the Impressionists, working in prose as they did with paint.9 He elevated the obscure, denigrated the banal, and exercised a critical eye that endeared him to all that desired to leave behind convention and touch new aesthetic horizons.

However, all of these triumphs were not enough to keep Durtal in the correct century and he was sent spiralling into the monastery, like St Simeon retreating from the decadence of late antique Rome for his desert and spire. All of that cultivation became a barrier to his soul’s progress up Jacob’s Ladder. He spends much of En Route pacing around La Trappe, worrying about whether he is praying correctly, fussing about digestion on his secret smoke breaks, caught in a web of his mind’s own making.

Beyond just its culture, it was also the core values of 19th century progressivism, of democracy, materialism and empiricism, that appeared depleted to Huysmans. He would eventually be proven correct in his pessimism. His Durtal tetralogy (La-Bas, En Route, La cathedrale, and L’Oblate) concluded in 1903 and he wrote no other fiction before dying of cancer in 1907. A few short years later the Great War vindicated much of his antagonism towards the comfortable status quo that raised his, and Durtal’s ire, at the end of La-Bas. Many modernists, the name is another irony when viewed from this perspective, would take up only his disdain towards the old Victorian certainties. Drunk on the technologies of the ‘new’, they would formally revolutionise the arts, but did they do much to heal those wounds that Huysmans was determined could only be found at the ‘foot of the cross’?10 In the end, he was left, alone with his creature Durtal, despairing at some emptiness that all this art left in him. Even Schopenhauer, once a guiding light in his youth, could not rescue him from Christ. In some ways, we continue to live in Durtal’s world. His pessimism, the force of it and the skill with which it was articulated, is a haunting pull away from the modern world. In his upending of the narrative of progression, we are stunted, half-formed people, gazing backwards at a vanished world of splendour whose heights we can no longer see or comprehend, let alone emulate. After all, in the words of the wise Abbe Gevresin in La cathedrale, the Middle Ages was “the period when human beings lived in closest intercourse with God” and, in this view, the arrow of time is pointing downwards, not up.

Huysmans believed that modernity was a crisis that, as it unfolded, wrought terrible damage on the minds, bodies, and souls of its subjects. Many others have agreed with him. In fact, you could maybe argue that most prominent western philosophers from Huysmans day (and before it) onwards have grappled with the same problem; from Nietzsche to Heidegger, Foucault and Sartre, Mark Fisher and Byung-Chul Han. Huysmans, I think, remains somewhat unique in his stubborn insistence that the solution would not be a leap over the ever-rising line towards some new subjectivity that would create new possibilities for humanity. He was also not something so simple as a prophet of decline or merely some mega-doomer. Instead, he advocated a leap away, a retreat, if nothing else, from the world’s greater and greater intensities and horrors, back into the arms of the Cross. Only then, far away, could we rediscover what was lost.

Politically, I disagree with Huysmans’s obvious conservatism and his nostalgic medievalism. Aesthetically and emotionally, however, how can I resist when we seem to hurt in the same way? Many have theorised on the End of History, the Last Man and so on. Huysmans posits that the end of history passed long ago, long before we even knew what it was that we were losing. In this world, the Whig’s line-going-up is like a spacecraft that explodes catastrophically on the launchpad. The attempt to escape was botched in a terrible, blooming fireball. Time cannot move and we are stuck under gravity. Some watch the skies still, thinking it's soaring among the heavens. Others kick around in the ashes, looking for scraps, embers among the dust.

This short story, the Last Vision of St Guthlac, emerged from the understanding that a vision from the future, given directly to the human subject, is a terrifying thing in any context. It is an encounter with something beyond the possibilities of mortal cognition. Some historical context:
St Guthlac himself was a hermit who lived in a plundered barrow in Crowland, somewhere in the fens of Cambridgeshire, between 699 and 714. While there, he battled fever, malaria and the demons that screeched in the dark. Renowned for special holiness, he was said to give the exiled king of Mercia, Aethelbald, divine sanction to reclaim his usurped throne at a meeting just before Guthlac’s death (Guthlac subsequently appeared in a vision to Aethelbald just before Guthlac’s death). I wanted to imagine the experience of speaking to this saint, so close to his death, and whether he would really be interested in discussing the future of a monarchy. There are 3 major sources for Guthlac’s life, in both Latin and Old English. This is based, in a fashion, on each.

***

“There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair [verweilen: a reference to Goethe’s Faust], to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.”

Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, IX (translated by Denis Redmond, 2001).

To God’s eye, past, present and future must be like how the heavenly dome appears to mortals. If we perceive a line, stretching out in our minds to link cause to effect, then He would perceive a boundless plane without a horizon. The ancients knew that the world is a turning globe. Perhaps God shared some of what He saw with them. Sometimes, I consider time as a single point, like a pinprick in a sheet of fabric through which the light may shine; the cause through which effect may shine.

The night creeps inward and my time grows short. I have resisted the urge to introspect throughout my life, but if I avoid it now I shall never have another chance to indulge in the remembrance of things past. Maybe for me, my life is like a gyre, widening as it pulls apart, sometimes short and sometimes slack, until effect may seem to vanish from cause entirely. Only then, may it be hauled back in again like a fish caught on an invisible line. As I look back, I see the words ‘twas ever thus’ written in letters of burning pitch, a flame that I unknowingly lit long ago, as a youth both beardless and crownless. After I was usurped and put to flight by my cousin, Ceolred, I waited (for what?) encamped on the borders of the fenland near the Kingdom of the East Angles with a few trusted companions. It was here that I started to dig my grave, a grave I am soon to be interred in. My epitaph was written in the fen, over forty years ago, by the Prince of Hermits, St Guthlac of Crowland.

In exile, our camp was poor, inhabited by a few bosom companions and I and all of us unused to life outside the court. It was hard living. The fen was often covered in fog, a low-hanging miasma that spread fever and ague to all who breathed it, and at dusk the vapours split the white light of God into overlapping hues of lurid purple and livid reds. The waters stank and held few creatures of worth, save for some frog-headed fishes whose sour flesh was shot through with grit. As we only rescued a few worldly possessions in our flight, we resorted to banditry to survive.

Two days before I came to Guthlac, we robbed a fisher of his measly catch (of course, I claimed my natural right over the fruits of the land) and, as he cursed us, he revealed that we resided very close to that Holy Man. We helped ourselves to the wretch’s skiff, grinning while we flashed our blades causing the fisher to scuttle away, and cast off to find Guthlac amongst the maze of waterways and islands that constituted the great fen. I coveted Guthlac’s counsel desperately. I was sure that my claim was divinely supported, but I lay awake at night rapt with doubt. As some of my men fretted with envy that their women would take another lover in their absence, so too I dreamed that Mercia herself would be inconstant, favour passing instead to loathsome Ceolred. King and kingdom, man and wife, and let no man rend them asunder.

I hope that all men know the story of St Guthlac, but I will relate the choicest details to any ignorants. Holy Guthlac lived in the apostolic example, solitary and poor. He chose this desert of swamp and fever after a life of sinful violence, and cut a hovel from a plundered barrow to make his anchorhold. It was on St Bartholomew’s Day that he swore an oath to never leave Crowland and ever since he found special favour with that skinless apostle. As the ancient enemy, the Devil, finds no sport more tempting than the souls of those men and women who devote themselves to the religious life, hordes of fen-demons were mustered by their dreadful chief and Guthlac was assailed on all sides. He raised Crowland into a mighty palisade, an extension of his soul’s bulwark of faith, against their gnashing teeth and the poisonous belches expelled from their bloated bellies. An angel was at the hermit’s elbow always as he conquered that unholy fen and made it into a homestead of virtue and sanctity. This is to speak in spiritual metaphor. The physical effect was quite different. I remember Crowland well, although it has been many years since I last saw it. It was unimpressive and rather small, a muddy hillock that appeared out of the rushes and fog like a stone that had plopped into the waters from heaven.

After a short journey, our ere-mentioned skiff reached the isle of Crowland, hull scraping stony mud. We could see Guthlac’s hut from the shore as it squatted, frog-like, atop the low summit. My two housecarls and I, all broad-sworded and stout-hearted, climb through the sticking mud to where it stood beside a fresh-water cistern. I spied it enviously. Guthlac possessed one of the few untainted wells for miles around and I remember my followers who had recently perished from drinking the foul marsh water as if their cups were possessed with an evil all mildewed and filthy. I looked towards the setting sun and saw Guthlac there before the horizon, passing his own water into the fen below and he let out a sigh as it disappeared with a splash.

I summoned all instincts of regal command and called out, caring not whether his necessity was interrupted, my voice pealing out over the desolate marshes.

“Hark! Blessed Father Guthlac. I am Aethelbald, Mercia’s true king, rightfully named to monarchy but exiled by treacherous Ceolred. I have to come to speak with you, most holy hermit, seeking counsel so that I may strike with God’s favour against my devilish foes.”

Guthlac turned to face me. I saw rags hanging about his midriff in a slimy tangle. He had a bedraggled beard of grey flecked with spots of green which clung to a pox-pecked chin. As he spoke with a guttural croak, the beard revealed a livid, tooth-poor mouth.

“I have heard of thee, Aethelbald Crown-Seeker. Yet I see a worldly youth. Begone from my Crowland.”

Men of royal bearing must suffer the holy wild man and I, son of kings, had expected impudence. I knew then of Alexander of Macedon who was mocked by a famous tub-dweller and let jolly laughter suffice as a response. I remained firm and refused to let my authority be cowed by the hermit.

“Gentle Guthlac, most wise and holy, I hold you as my subject and Crowland is mine by royal right. It was declared so by God to Emperor Constantine of York through the generations to Alweo my father. As is lawful, I may not be bidden to leave what is mine.”

“Nay, not Crowland,” Guthlac protested, “I built this water-spring, my temple, my hill-fort. I fenced her safe, not ye, from demons and the fever and the screeching of owls and took barrow-plunder in the name of God. I am that conqueror, wielder of St Bartholomew’s flail and St Augustine’s spear. I say begone, beardless prince!”

He turned from me to crouch low on the crest of Crowland’s edge and gazed over his desolation, nighttime darkening from horizon to blood-tinged horizon. I was not deterred.

“Dear Guthlac, dear countryman! Did you not spill blood and have your blood spilled for Mercia? The land, she weeps at the crimes of false Ceolred Crow-Feeder. He is like a second Herod as he wastes and profanes Holy Mercia.”

I paused my speech momentarily as I considered the depths of my desire for my throne. It ached in my mind. I would not be shamed into obscurity and death by Ceolred. I would beat him at any cost. My resolution stiffened.

“I would swear to you, Guthlac, fealty and obedience to the Holy Mother Church, Jesus Christ and all of His saints, if you aid me now.”

He faced me again from atop his mount, his head aureate with the flames of sunset, and spoke.

“Thou swearest fealty and obedience to me? If I deliver thee, with Christ’s intervention, from thine foes?”

“I swear, by God.”

He leapt from his mount down to my level, feet sinking into the stinking mire, and clutched my hand in his, slippery with filth.

“Come,” he said, leading me to his hut, “and leave thine men behind.”

The hut was a shabby wreck of hide wrapped around straw and dry-packed mud. Pushing aside the flap of mouldering rushes that served as a door, I saw a wet fire burping smoke at its centre. I cautioned my battle-kin to remain outside unless instructed otherwise as I dared not insult my capricious host after all I had promised.

The hut stank of fish and mildew. Guthlac spat a glob of phlegm into the fire which spat back cholerically.

“I pray thou payst no mind to mine other guest, he will not disturb us.” He said, gesturing to an empty corner inhabited only by a pile of fish bones and a spear whose shaft had broken in two. His eyes darted to the door, his focus averted from my presence, and stood very still.

“Bah! He darest not send demons to my anchorhold anymore.” He spat again. “Thou hast come for my counsel. Wouldst thou like thine future foretold?”

I bowed with deference, overjoyed by the hermit’s lavish gift so readily given, even if I struggled to comprehend the depths of his saintly madness. I had expected the old man to demand some arduous service before granting my boon, as it was in the stories. I was young, after all, and expected all things offered freely to remain free for all time.

“Yes, wise Guthlac! Please tell me if I shall overcome my hated Ceolred. Will Mercia be restored to me?”

Three times Guthlac nodded before walking over to the corner where he said his guest stood and appearing to confer with some invisible presence there in inaudible whispers. Coughing loudly, he tossed some more damp sticks (perhaps taken from the plentiful rushes outside which also floored his earthen hovel) onto the fire which threw up yet more smoke in protest. Guthlac, in a manner peculiar to his own prophesying, spoke slowly and often interrupted himself with words muttered in the tongue of the fallen Britons. I relate now all that was intelligible to me then:

“God shall deliver thine kingdom unto thee. Thou shalt reclaim thine birthright, not by the sword but by the deliverance of fortune, a gift that is God’s alone to give. Ceolred will perish and thou shalt succeed him and reign for a good many years.”

“O, Guthlac the Holy!” I proclaimed in joy, “my heart is warmed greatly. So Lady Fortune shall tip her wheel for me. I will raise a shrine in your honour and obey the example of your holiness always!” I made to leave, wishing to deliver this augury to my faithful companions. I was convinced that providence would reward our forbearance.

“‘Tis not all, proud youth. Thou hast sworn fealty to me and thou shalt hear what else I have to spake. I do not expect thee to comprehend but at times the angels who see beyond the borders of broad Mercia give poor Guthlac fragments of their sightings and intentions. There is much they wish to tell thee, Aethelbald.”

I was impatient to leave. Sunset was quickly becoming twilight and I was loath to travel unsighted, easy prey to will-o’-the-wisps or death’s hound, Black Shuck. As shameful as it may seem now his memory has been made holy canon, Guthlac’s presence disgusted me and I wished to be rid of him. But the prospect of breaking an oath made to a holy man kept me there. His retribution would be more terrible than any fen-horror. I assented with a hesitant nod.

“I speaketh now the words of angels, those who sing in the tongue of winding spheres. It is as true as the word of the apostles. Thine kingdom shall be Mercia and thou shalt rule ‘till thine dotage. Yet Fortune’s wheel will not be still’d for thee and one day thy name will be dusty, distant memory. [I shudder now, hearing these words again, as clear in my mind now as they were then in speech] Even now, death comes for thee, young prince, and under cover of night thou shalt be struck down by those closest to thee. In those latter days, your triumph over Ceolred will feel as distant as the cold stars, O King-to-be.

“Thine successor shall surpass thee in all things. Offa the Great he will be and all Christendom will hear his royal name from chill’d Thule to distant Byzantium and Araby. But even he, the greatest of all Mercians, will diminish when calamity cometh from the East. The heathen in his dragon-boat will reach thine shores from across the cold seas. Ye shall all be powerless to stop their ravages and even Holy Cuthbert’s Isle will be emptied. Thine kingdom will be Ruin and no man hence will be crowned king of Mercia. One Christian King will remain and his descendants, never thine, will be King of All the English.”

As he spoke, the interruptions ceased and his gaze became ardent and unwavering. His eyes flickered and danced like fire and I began to see as he did, or must have done. Before me appeared streams like countless tapestries unfurling and I saw through the eyes of other men in ages past, present, and surely the terrible future. At the centre of the coiling streams, beyond all of this, I saw the angels spinning like a great wheel of golden flame and they sang the world, all of it, into being. Guthlac spoke as they sang and they sang as Guthlac spoke and the future he described emerged before me. The prophecy continued even though I felt that both of us wished it to stop.

“The descendants of Franks and the Heathen-Spawn and the foreigners from Wessex will come and drain my fen dry. They will haul in beasts of iron and fire akin only to those engines of the Ancient Enemy (may he writhe in perdition) and they will profane my temple. Where shall ye be Aethelbald? Who will weep for the homeless bittern and lapwing? The desert will face a bitter fate, left to the grasping hands of worldly men.”

His voice cracked. I realised that he wept, and through the vision of turning ages I saw others weeping at the future to come.

“Why did they tell me that Judgement Day will not come for so very long? Why not leave me in ignorance, blissful unknowing and simplicity? Why let me glimpse only the cruelest of fates, and never the face of my Saviour? Why would we be left like this, waiting for deliverance?”

On this last word, at the very moment where I saw this crack in the Guthlac’s armour of faith, I was ripped from my trance to find the hut empty and only the barest embers left creaking in the firepit. Guthlac was gone and so was the broken spear. I stumbled outside, rubbing my smoke-stung eyes as the sun finally disappeared beneath the horizon’s terminal thread. Silently, I led my companions back to the muddy shore where we had heaved the skiff aground. We rowed away from Crowland and into the dark fog of night.

***

It all came to pass, as was foretold. The vipers, I can hear them trying the door now. I barred it sternly enough but I know it will not hold. Guthlac never deceived me and I have spent my lifetime trying to flee his shadow. I did all I could. After he was found dead, an incorrupt corpse smelling sweeter in death than he did in life, I raised a shrine on Crowland and I supported monasteries and priests throughout Mercia. I venerated him even as I hated him. But he wouldn’t leave me alone. I began to see him in my dreams, his open red mouth like the maw of Hell. And he would show it all to me again, the wheel of fire and the unwinding ages and I would awake in a fever like I was back in that stinking fen.

I tried to escape. I waged war on that damned place. I was King Aethelbald, the greatest in the land, and cared not for avocets or redshanks or violet flowers. So I sent Mercian men to toil with pump and pail in Guthlac’s watery desert but most of them never left that bog. Their bodies succumbed to disease and demons and we left them floating, eyeless, in the brown water. They say they are still there, pickled with leathery skin. What was the point of all that struggle? I could not bid the trees to unfix their roots and bury Guthlac in verdant shade. I had no beasts of iron nor of fire. All that stern resolution that I felt, hard determination to never let Ceolred get the better of me has faded with the spiralling years. I am diminished, defeated.

They’ve brought greataxes to my door now. The castlehold sleeps and no one rises to my aid. I have little time, only a few moments. I see him in the centre of the flames. The fisherman pulls in his line and readies his spear for the kill. I see the spear again now, its point flashing bright as the sun, and its shaft is broken in twain.

Subscribe now

Similarly, Whig history, the idea that history is a progression of humanity’s ascent to greater levels of civilisational sophistication and moral properness, is a straight line. It is, specifically, the straight line of a stock that rises in price. The number-go-up theory of history.

I may be being a bit flippant with an entire tradition of Anglo-American historiography but 1) Whig history deserves it, I will stamp it out wherever I find it like the intellectual cockroach that it is, and 2) it is a cringey product of its cringey time. The Whigs for which the theory is named were the liberal wing or party of England’s ruling class during the 18th and 19th centuries and, appropriately, the wing most amenable to England’s nascent capitalist and mercantile class by promoting low taxes, free trade and a strong navy. Stock go up! Good go up! History go up! A straight line. Or as Whig historian par excellence, Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859), said in his History of England (1848):

“The history of our country during the last hundred and sixty years is eminently the history of physical, of moral, and of intellectual improvement. Those who compare the age on which their lot has fallen with a golden age which exists only in their imagination may talk of degeneracy and decay: but no man who is correctly informed as to the past will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present.”2

This, as I have argued elsewhere (The Modern Medieval: How Did We Get Here?”), is the fundamental logic of Western modernity in its appreciation of the middle ages from which it emerged. It has had…mixed results.

By contrast, Chinese history is supposedly cyclical. Rather than moving from start to finish, beginning to end, or from 0 to 100 like the Whigs argued, Chinese history is said to move as a series of rises and falls motored by the Mandate of Heaven (tian ming). The Mandate of Heaven is bestowed on the righteous emperor, who rules benevolently and well for a time until either he or one of his brainless descendants fucks up, the mandate is suddenly removed and everything goes to shit. Flood, famine, pestilence, hordes of barbarians from the steppe drinking hooch made from fermented horse milk storm across the frontier to murder your peasants. And then one day, another righteous figure emerges from obscurity, seizes the rudder of power and pilots the Middle Kingdom back to peace and prosperity. The mandate is restored, for now.

Interestingly, most scholarly discussion that I have seen in my admittedly incomplete and ad hoc searching on the Mandate of Heaven has focused rather more on its relevance in Chinese law and jurisprudence rather than its effect on historical consciousness.3 The key to this is that the mandate of heaven was supposedly developed by the Zhou people upon their conquest of the Shang in the 11th Century BCE - a much larger and internally divided kingdom whose rulers claimed divine status. To legitimate their rule, the Zhou declared that the mandate of heaven once enjoyed by the Shang had now passed onto the Zhou, a prudent move for a small but militarily potent invading force that had to rely on strategies of ideological legitimation if they were to rule as a minority over the more numerous Shang. This, the sociologist Dingxin Zhao argues, “gave China a tradition of humanism and historical rationalism” distinct from other societies as it entered into the thought of Confucius and, through him, the foundational theories of legitimation throughout Chinese history.4 It is a codified system (for example legally codified by the Ming)5 of legitimation deployed by each Chinese state structure which theoretically limits bad governance and engenders the ideological expectation in Chinese culture that rulers ought to rule justly and that the people have some recourse to rebellion if this is not being done. Hence, the cycle persists, the wheel turns as regimes change, even up to the modern day, just as the Whig stock-go-up ideology persists in western historical consciousness, however much I wish it would not.

In short, the Shape of Time for the West is a line and for China it is a cycle. That’s it everybody! Easy. Done. No need to scroll any further down. Don’t worry about the rest of it. This opening isn’t a strawman of overly simplified historical hand-waving about entire cultures. It’s the whole article! Don’t forget to subscribe on your way out. Thanks everyone!

***

Okay, if you scrolled this far, I hope you are at least a little bit annoyed about something I said. I hope you think that maybe this is all a bit simple. You’re right! These arguments are very simple. They are also boring and wrong in that vague boringly wrong way peculiar to Big History books like Guns, Germs and Steel or Sapiens. These are the bestsellers of historical writing and they looooove to take the historical past, bleed out all of the nuance, complexity and conflict until it is a pale, pathetic thing stuck to a table with pins for dissection by morons like ThinkingWest.

For our purposes, I simply don’t think that historical time has ever been understood as so simple, clean and orderly. Certainly, examples of historical consciousness run counter to what we consider as the dominant cultural paradigm are everywhere. People hated Whig history from the beginning. David Hume (1711-1776), for example, dominated English historiography by denying that English history was an uncomplicated (and therefore flatly progressive) straight line that boasted a seamless transition from the traditional rights of Alfred the Great through Magna Carta and culminating in the modern English constitution (that is until Macaulay (and later Whig-in-Chief William Stubbs (1825-1901) who Whigged the whole field out until the 1930s). Beyond Hume, the malcontents towards Whig historical consciousness who have denied that history was just ‘things getting better’ are a varied and compelling lot, encompassing ultra-pessimists like J.K. Huysmans as well as the classic prophets of modern techno-doom like H.G. Wells and Aldous Huxely. But we’ll get into them soon enough.

***

We must also consider that historical time is not a simple matter of movement towards the future, towards ever bigger number or the Christian apocalypse, but also a movement from the past. Taking a bidirectional view of time means that the past fractures from a simple site of emergence into a spectrum of differently coloured meanings which each indicate varying futures. An optimistic view of time, like the Whiggish one, would see the past as something society and culture had to escape from and therefore a necessarily worse one than whatever is currently going on. A pessimistic one, however, would look back and see only a great golden age, forgotten to the mists of time, hardly remembered, and doomed to never be recovered. Fascists (but not only fascists!) love this one. Specifically they wish to, in the words of Disco Elysium, ‘turn back the wheels of time’, performing the impossible act of resurrecting the aureate age now dead and buried. This is the historical viewpoint of that guy who made the ‘People who made this were not motivated by profits post’ with Saint-Chappelle which made lots of people a bit angry and others, like me, feel very very tired.6

Taking into account the shape and character of the past in the historical ‘chronostructure’, each Shape of Time takes on newly complex forms. You can see this even in my terrible spark notes summary of the Mandate of Heaven. A history which repeats itself travels backwards (to the golden age, when the mandate is restored) simultaneously as it travels forward (time moving forwards where a year succeeds the previous one). The same process also flattens each age's distinctive character until each appears to be more or less the same as the others. The fall of the Ming was like the fall of the Yuan was like the fall of the Song was like the fall of the Tang, and so on in a recursive loop back to the Zhou and Shang. And you can string them all together, each cycle connecting to the previous one, like a slinky until even this chain of recurrences takes on new meanings. How, for example, does one square the cyclical structure of the Mandate of Heaven with, say, the Marxist historical materialism that informs Maoism? Marxist history is itself based around a series of cycles but this series is very definitely going somewhere progressively. Even the most theoretically linear systems of time, the ones that definitely start with the beginning of all things and that definitely end with the end of everything, move in strange ways, backwards, forwards, sideways, in a loop-de-loop, with wormholes that cut through all the mucky middle bits so someone from the end can reach instantly back into the beginning.7

***

The theology of Christian historical time gets very, very knotty from even the early Christian days. St Augustine, the single most influential Christian theologian until maybe St Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther, was deeply sceptical, in a very Greek philosophy sort of way, of the concept of time itself. His Confessions (which I recommend any curious reader to start with rather than the more tomelike Civitas Dei) was written, partly, to refute Manichean heresies about the nature of God. This means that Augustine spent a lot of time considering and discussing eternity as it relates to the omnipotence of God. Manicheans argued that God was powerful, but finite and locked in constant battle with evil (evil being the nature conducive to the material world). Augustine argued against this by demonstrating that the only proper reading of Genesis reveals that God created all things, including time itself. Time, therefore, is not really real to God because he does not experience that which is finite, and time is finite because it has a beginning. Time is in the realm of human experience and so it must be subjective.

Augustine therefore decided that time is mostly an experience of memory. We remember the past and can only anticipate the future based on what we remember. Even the present is just the experience of the future becoming the past, rather than a real state of being in itself. This is a painful experience and is typical of the soul’s dislocation from God and of humanity’s disunity after the Fall of Adam. As Augustine says:

“see how my life is a distension in several directions…the Son of man who is mediator between you the One and us the many, who live in a multiplicity of distractions by many things…but I am scattered in times whose order I do not understand. The storms of incoherent events tear to pieces my thoughts, the inmost entrails of my soul, until that day when, purified and molten by the fire of your love, I flow together to merge into you.”8

One day then, at the end of all things, the soul of man will be reinterred with the essence of God and all being is unity and time will finally cease to exist.

But is this just the line once again, the one that points to the end times? Augustine would argue not. For a start, the soul can move both forward and backward along this line. By rejecting God, it can move backwards in historical time, to the abyss of formlessness before creation where the soul resides without God. Or it can move forwards, closer to that state of perfection where the soul is unified in God. In short, the soul can be further away or closer in historical time to the Apocalypse through its relationship to God. It advances through righteousness and retreats through sin. For Augustine, all of the Book of Genesis is structured like this, as an elaborate allegory for the Christian soul sui generis. If the elimination of the abyss of formlessness with the creation of light on the First Day dramatises the soul’s initial dislocation and then eventual connection to God, Augustine continues to elaborate on the further days on how they relate to the Christian experience. For example, waters created on Day 3 are sin and the Bible is the solid firmament that God raises above it (and the soul is thus raised also). It carries on like this until every aspect of God’s creation in the seven days is the journey of the Christian living the good life before death and unity with God, that being the seventh day where God finally rests.

This is not just elegant biblical exegesis, it is also an argument about the nature of time. If time is illusory in the eyes of God, then from His inscrutable perspective each soul exists at every point in human history and has already participated in the events of the biblical story. Every detail, every sign and wonder in creation, is reflective of this beginning and of the end, of God in His heaven watching over His Divine Order, for ever and ever. Amen.

That’s all well and good for God, and Augustine allows us to have a little peek through his eyes, but what of the human experience of time? We are cursed to be enmeshed within the unfolding of history, with no idea or understanding of where we are going and only a foggy memory of where we have come from. This is the real trick of Christian theology. Remember that God was also incarnated (literally ‘enfleshed’) as a man. He was a man with memories, a childhood, a mother, a bellybutton, and a circumcised penis.9 Many theologians grappled with the problem of considering where God ends and the Man begins, or vice versa. The Manicheans for their part were pretty sceptical about the whole thing, considering that the material world was more or less evil. Augustine was happy enough to leave it as a mystery, and contemplate that mixed nature as representative of the potential of men to be saved and the nature of God as omnibenevolent.

Whichever way you slice it, it’s a contradiction, but a contradiction that has inspired centuries of Christian art and thought. Aurora Mattia’s exegesis of Christ in Gethsemane in her trans-trauma memoir The Fifth Wound excellently summarises the possibilities of this contradiction for considering Christian chronotheology. Apologies in advance for the long quote, but I hope you’ll agree it's worth it:

“One of you will betray me

So said Jesus of Nazareth to the men who loved him most, because according to the mythomechanics of the Gospel of John (my first favorite space opera and/or expanded universe fanfic and/or hagiographic tellall by a celebrity’s jilted lover, who after all refers to himself namelessly as ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved,’ who names himself, coyly, for the whiff of a desire) he intermittently experienced time in the fifth dimension, and having sensed, first once and then one thousand times, the cruciform constellation of his last static pose, had decided the best he could do was to prepare the scene. So he went to the garden of Gethsemane to pray.

One has pierced me. One is driven deep within me

He prayed to his own deathless unborn mind, the triple helix of genetic code—a sliver of which had been grafted into his human body’s porous, coralluminous spine—forever preserved within the dreadful starterraforming hypnotunes of the angels, who relentlessly recycle the air of their own first insufflation, which relentlessly reanimates the technicolor pixels of their one glitchy god. Jesus prayed, waiting, until Judas—robes rippling, almost floating in a slow blur of preternaturally algal glamor as he sank into the silted dusk of the garden, attenuating the cold immolation of his gaze to the width of a humming needle—landed before him in the grass, cataclysmically amorous, to seal his so-called Redeemer within the perfect equation of a kiss.

and velvet flowers and leaves whose coolness has been stood in water:
Wash me round and sheathe me, embalming me

Knowing a kiss and a bite were both a taste, Mary’s son restaged the Fall of Man. Gethsemane played Eden, Roman centurions played blazing angels, and Judas played Eve.
The Christ was fatally ripe.”10

This is why Renaissance artists could depict Romans dressed like German Landsknechte or Milanese city guards when painting the story of Christ, or why medieval artists loved to paint the crucifixion taking place in a golden space, both everywhere and nowhere, Calvary is in Palestine and Calvary is within the suffering soul of the individual. The Crucifixion is happening now, has always happened, and will continue to do so until the end of time. Taken literally, we can understand it as Blaise Pascal did (although he can hardly be considered canonical or typical of medieval or early modern Christianity):

“Jesus will be in agony until the end of the world. There must be no sleeping during that time.”11

This is not the last instance of The Shape of Time to Come to come from on Journeys Through Medievalism. There are many other time-shapes to explore that iterate on, are inspired by, wholly reject or are totally unconnected to the schema of Augustine outlined above. As interesting as they all are, I will have to do different articles to maintain the substack essay format and avoid writing some ghastly unwieldy proto-doctoral thesis. Future installments will concern:
- Medieval historical time - how political crises in 12th century England disrupted the straight line to the apocalypse and mutated Augustine’s idea of the soul looping around to recreate the beginning and end of the universe.
- Modernity and its Discontents - the anti-number-go-up gang, what if modernity was a bad thing and what history looks like when you only look back.
- Cycles and Cycles of History - Real fucking big brain shit from Ibn Khaldun and Giambattista Vico, see how far this Mandate of Heaven thing has intellectual legs, and what’s the end of all these cycles? Maybe I look at Spengler if you’re lucky and/or I go insane.
- Deep Time - The Annales School, Gene Wolfe, and how the distant past is the same as the very, very far future.
Thank you for reading, fellow Chronotopologists, and see you Next Time!

6

Again, he is not necessarily a fascist. But fascists love talking like that. I recommend Madeleine/Empress of Byzantium’s post on the matter for more on the topic:

The Empress of Byzantium

The People Who Built This Were Motivated by Profits

I’m sure many of us have seen the post by now…

Read more

10 months ago · 129 likes · 40 comments · Madeleine, DPhil @ Oxford

Folk music is almost always the music of the past. This is nearly the definition of the genre, or rather the form, itself. Each rendition of a song builds like sediment atop the old. The lifeblood of folk music is that songs for one generation can be passed on and sung by the next. The Blackleg Miner, a song about how scabs get stabbed, works for the 1840s as it does for the 1920s and for the 1980s. Each time, variations may come in, the details are pliable, but the spirit of the song remains largely intact. Their subjects are for this very reason traditional stories or about traditional work, often using archaic or traditional language. The song may be sung for the 1 millionth time, and maybe in a slightly new way, but all this novelty does is connect the new world to the old, new people to their ancestors related as they might be by blood, by vocation, or by common circumstance.

However, this past is usually more or less indistinct. Take, for example, the Farmer’s Toast. Likely composed in the early 19th century, it is filled with references of cheery drinking, raising livestock and living the life of the free yeomanry in a way that feels sufficiently Merrie England to exist perfectly within that indistinct folk ‘time-space’, what Mikhail Bakhtin called a chronotope in a literary context, that it could be about or for people from any time between, say, 1400 and 1900. As the chorus goes:

“I have lawns, I have bowers, I have fields, I have flowers,
And the lark is my daily alarmer,
So jolly boys now, here’s God speed the plough,
Long life and success to the farmer.”

Folly Bridge - Farmer’s Toast

I heard an excellent Goblin Band & Friends performance of this song on a boat (the Theatreship) that was moored in some godawful neoliberal fun-exclusion zone in Canary Wharf. The song was so excellent, the effect so transportative to that bucolic world of the Farmer’s Toast, that I managed to forget my hateful surroundings for a bare few minutes.

It is my personal view that the best folk music affects such transportations in the listener, but I’m not alone. In the late 1950s, John Fahey responded to the mannered pretentiousness of the US folk scene by inventing America’s own Merrie self, the sound of Americana, wholesale, a chronotope ex nihilio, with American Primitivism in the late 1950s. It’s a distinct, complex style of finger-picked, steel-stringed acoustic guitar playing which combines American country music and delta blues with classical Indian raga and elements of classical minimalism. In the right hands, as American Primitive guitarist Robbie Basho said, it communicated “fire”. It’s at times pure conjuration, summoning mountains and great rivers, the music of falling snow and vast herds of buffalo.2 The intent, the connection to nature is clear from the song titles and album covers, Basho’s masterpiece Visions of the Country or Fahey’s sweeping testament, America. It becomes textual within the music too. Fahey's “A Raga Called Pat, Part 2” lets the sound of his guitar fall away to reveal of a shifting sonic tableaux of classic Americana; a steam train blows its lonesome whistle, bullfrogs croak lazily in the heat, coyotes shriek like lost souls somewhere in the distant wilderness.

John Fahey - Sunflower River Blues

Yet, the songs are usually wordless. When lyrics appear, they are general and vague in that poetic way to avoid popping the bubble of evocative atmosphere. Richard Dawson, for my money the single best folk musician operating in the English language today, substitutes vagueness for intricate scenes that, through their particularity, manage to summon this universal, the folk chronotope.

Peasant’s first proper track, Ogre, wastes no time situating the listener: “In the Kingdom of Bryneich/Verging on a muddy crook of Coquet”. Perhaps these are basically fantasy names to most listeners, Dawson may as well have said ‘Eriagor’ and ‘Anduin’, but a swift google later and we are, very specifically, in Northumberland between approximately 550 and 650AD. Every song takes place in this space and at this time.

Richard Dawson - Ogre

The average listener really knows very little of 6th-7th century Northumberland. But happily enough, it turns out that scholars do not know all that much either. Bryneich was one of those strange post-Roman polities that was not quite new, not quite old.

That ambiguity is precisely what Dawson uses as raw material to both historicise (these are people in a specific context) and situate each song in the dreaminess of folk chronotopia (for example, Dawson’s own construction, the Bog of Names, which recurs in 2022’s The Ruby Cord, is akin to the Celtic otherworld). While the past is brought forward, aided in part by Dawson’s delicacy around precise detail, inlaid like jewels in each song, we are also transported backwards, summoned into that alien world. Anachronisms and intentional jolts to historical expectations are deftly wielded as a scalpel to cleave expectations on the past from the listener; the narrator in ‘Shapeshifter’ is handed a potato, another laments how the injustice of slavery can exist “in this day and age” in ‘Prostitute’ before their flight across “the border”, and a post-literate society rejects a new contraption in ‘Scientist’ in favour of their own “seeing-device powered by waste”.3

The sight of the future itself is terrible to behold. A child dying of whooping cough is saved by a powerful fae in ‘Hob’ and starts to experience terrifying visions as he grows older. Sung from the perspective of the boy's father, we share in a sense of bemused powerlessness at a world he can hardly understand, let alone control, as that world manifests terribly in someone he loves so dearly. It opens with a guitar down-tuned to the point where the strings rattle with an unsettling resonance against the fretboard, and as the song escalates, literally tensing up, a hurdy-gurdy makes the electrifying entry of the eponymous supernatural force manifest in the song itself. It is all too much for our human characters:

“When the pictures become too real/He buries his nose in the bush of my beard/Gently pinches my earlobe between thumb and forefinger/ ‘til the present is restored”.

And then, one quiet morning, the Hob comes to collect his due, the past revenged upon the future (the fae upon the human inheritors of the earth), and takes back “what is rightfully owed”. The son is spirited away and, presumably, never seen again.

Added texture is given by Richard Dawson’s thick Geordie accented singing voice and his impressive vocal range. A delicate falsetto, crushingly sad, on ‘Prostitute’ to growling, spitting curses on ‘Masseuse’. If anything, Peasant takes it pretty easy on this front. The vocal contortions between his cover of ‘Brisk Lad’ (a bawling shepherd’s call) and ‘Joe the Quilt Maker’ (a whisper so effervescent it almost disappears with every breath) on 2013’s The Glass Trunk are peerless.

Richard Dawson - Brisk Lad (Mike Waterson Cover)

As alluded to when discussing ‘Hob’, Richard Dawson treats the guitar as both string and percussive instrument beating the hell out of the thing on ‘Scientist’ and ‘Weaver’ to bring an ever increasing intensity. Unlike his previous albums, his idiosyncratic electric-played-as-acoustic guitar is joined by a swollen cast of instrumental partners. Harps and dulcimers escalate an already ecstatic climax on ‘Ogre’ to new heights. Drums drive each song towards its close. It is clear from the sound, the vibes of his style of folk which feels ritual and communal, why Richard Dawson said he was inspired by Pieter Brueghel the Elder and his scenes of anarchic, carnivalesque peasant life.

This is all profoundly evocative historical fiction. An entire form of life is woven from the warp of words and the weft of music. All this is more than just worldbuilding or an agglomeration of overbearing details. The songs ask us to reach out and feel the past, and pay back “what is rightfully owed”. The future may come with or without us, just as it was for those who are now dead and buried. We are obliged to attempt to understand those who came before, even if we are doomed to fail in the attempt.

Richard Dawson - Hob

This effect is heightened by Richard Dawson’s two other albums in his triptych of North East England. 2020 (2019) is, as the name suggests, set tomorrow, basically. The Ruby Cord sometime in the distant future. All three in the same place. Often, across the three albums the lines that distinguish the distant past from present and from the distant future appear to vanish and each period elides into the other. Robots, or perhaps people in a vast VR experience, in ‘The Hermit’, The Ruby Cord’s opener, act like medieval people in distinctly medieval worlds. The narrator in ‘Beggar’ off of Peasant and ‘Dead Dog in an Alleyway’ off of 2020 live markedly similar lives as homeless people. But, subverting narratives of modern progressivism, the ‘Beggar’ experiences far less cold cruelty and dismissiveness, and far more companionship and warmth in the 6th century compared to his 21st counterpart. Other critics have explored at length Peasant as an exploration of a community on the brink of dissolution, a world moving towards atomisation, disconnection and despair. Comparisons with Brexit, the EU referendum occurred as the album was recorded, are irresistable. Past and future mingle, and we in the present are invited to contemplate where we are going and where we have all come from. True historical fiction ought to exhibit this creative historical consciousness but, unfortunately, it is not always the case.

Compare this to Ken Follett. Author of surely the most successful book on the 12th Century, The Pillars of the Earth, he is one of the two or three most successful active historical fiction authors. He is also terrible for forcing history into the modern age, but not with simple anachronisms which could be fact-checked back into the void. The problem is that the major heroes in his Kingsbridge series are the inventors of modernity. Seemingly out of the aether, they develop moderate, liberal Christianity or capitalist girlboss feminism in the 12th Century or pseudo-germ theory in the 14th. In doing so, they mark themselves as morally good where the villains almost always represent retrograde or historically ‘dead’ beliefs that we know have been superseded by modernity. Superstition, unrestrained violence, and misogyny are their powers. 4These are forces which are not extinct from our world, hence their inclusion, but revenants which threaten to reenter civil society. The heroes may be the weak and the humble, but history (the unseen eye of the modern reader) will judge them favourably for their part in incrementally constructing liberal democracy and the proper modern English society that Follett values. Readers are invited to see only themselves in the past, to facilitate the reader’s identification with it is the primary artistic priority. The book reinforces the modern moral order and so speaks only to the current century, and never backwards.

This is the final act of disenchantment. Not even the distant past is safe from the all-consuming narrative of secular, capitalist modernity. All there is to explore and discover is that world coming to be, more or less inevitably, through the eyes of historical people that we recognise as essentially ourselves. Far from the “vast condescension of history” that English Marxist historian E.P. Thompson diagnosed as the crime of much historical writing on ordinary people from the past, it is a denial that these people even really existed. Follett’s is a literature that flatters the modern reader, the victory of ‘identification’ culture,5 and the death of historically informed imagination.

Where much historical fiction promises to put the reader in touch with a different way of life, and instead delivers only more of the same, Richard Dawson shows us another way. His way leads into the Bog of Names, and we must follow that path wherever it may go.

“When my eyes are drawn, towards my beloved cat as by a magnet's force . . . and find I am looking into myself”
[Quand mes yeux, vers ce chat que j’aime Tirés comme par un aimant . . . Et que je regarde en moi-meme]
Charles Baudelaire, The Cat.

“Sell all you have, give it to the kittens
And pour the milk on Louis’ grave.
And Catland, sometimes call Pussydom
Opens for you, instantly.”
Current 93, The Blood Bells Chime, All the Pretty Little Horses (1996).

Is my cat, Noodle, a little person? People will say that it is terrible to anthropomorphise, that it is a fundamental misunderstanding of animals to pretend that they may be like humans. But I call her my baby on a daily basis. I want to buy her clothes. I joke with my partner that we will send her to a military academy or into the navy to learn the value of discipline and hard work. Maybe we only half-joke. Maybe she is a little baby. She can certainly be a little bit human-like at times.

For one, Noodle has crossed the Atlantic Ocean more times than I have. First, when she came with my partner to England in the Autumn of 2020 (we were yet to meet). Second, when we all went together, a happy family, into the jaws of a very middle-class kind of disaster - a failed emigration to Canada on Valentine’s Day 2024. Then the third, and hopefully the last, time in January 2025 when we all moved back from Canada to the UK. Each time she rode in a plane, travelling at speeds of up to 500-600 mph, an experience that itself is hardly comprehensible to humans. Up until the middle decades of the 20th Century, very few humans would have travelled as far as my cat. Maybe sailors accrued those miles over decades of continuous travel across the swan-roads as part of the merchant, military and whaling marines. Maybe there were cats aboard as mousers on those very ships.

Does this make cats like little people? Noodle did not have to be a cat for this to happen to her. Dogs travel. Rats travel. The spread of bubonic plague to Europe in 1347 has been attributed to rats (and the fleas they carried) stealing aboard Genoese ships fleeing the Mongols at the port of Kaffa on the Black Sea. Animals are shipped across oceans for zoos, as pets, or as livestock. Species are called invasive for a reason, either by accident or design they are part of the movements of empires. Horses are not native to the Americas, instead arriving on the mainland as the backbone of the Cortésian blitzkrieg against the Aztec Empire in 1521, after which they gradually spread north. Their introduction was like iron or gunpowder or slavery - one technology of many, machines of blood and bone. Rabbits were introduced into Britain by the Normans, displacing hares from much of the countryside.

Directed by the hand of man, the land blooms under the bodies of these animals. Hounds and horses are sinews in the arm of justice. Cows make gold spring from the dry grasses upon which they graze. They sow, we reap. This relationship between humans and animals is predominantly economic either in a productive sense (aiding production) or consumptive (as commodity for consumption), alike to the relationship between humans and machines. And while animals may no longer be the labouring machines to break up the soil and pull carts (consider the scene in The Wind Rises (2014) where Mitsubishi continued to use oxen to taxi their prototype airplanes from hangar to runway well into the 1930s), it is their bodies alone that are now deemed useful. The site of animality is no longer the forest, the field or the trackway, but the abattoir. Predation, however, is not the sole relationship between humanity and animals.

The pets fare better than the industrialised prey, even if there are far more animals bred for slaughter than there are pets in our homes. If pulled-heartstrings sound the same as the jingle of cold currency, then we can say we certainly love our pets. Some of them eat better than I do (a soft, university educated northern-demisphere decadent of the consumptive classes) let alone the majority of mankind. Some cat litter boxes are as expensive as cars. But the pampered bubble of the house cat is a gilded cage. Noodle does not labour, and hopefully she never will, but she is subject to human whims. No matter how much we may modify it for her comfort, she lives in a home built for human (rather than feline) needs. She moved with us across oceans and borders. We choose what she eats (mostly) and in what quantities. But emotionally, the relationship can be more indeterminate.

Unlike dogs, who seem to love and obey humans readily and with minimal cajoling, cats can be fickle, foolish, emotionally distant or cold as often as they are constant, intimate, and crafty. Dogs are often treated like surrogate children to care for, but what of cats? Sometimes I can feel more like an uncle, called in at the last minute to look after a small baby-child who does not know nor really respect me but is undoubtedly part of the family and, for now, my responsibility. I think that this for now strikes at something fundamental about cats. Even the tamest cat can sometimes feel like it is domesticated for now, while it remains most convenient for them. If being a house cat is living in a gilded cage, then it feels like they all have a key.

Cats aren't little humans, but it can certainly feel like they are. This atmosphere of independence that constructs a relationship of temporary mutual convenience (which itself masks a relationship of mutual interdependence) feels very human to me, or at least very alike to human relationships. I argue that this makes cats uniquely able to question how humans are alike to animals and animals are alike to people. But these relationships have seldom been static. Cats have not always had robot-litter boxes that analyse their shit so that I can min-max kitty nutrition. It turns out we aren't the first humans to look at cats and wonder if they might be little people. There are historical dimensions to our connections to cats in particular (and animals in general) that can be used to break down the high walls that we have built around the concept of Humanity. These high walls have allowed us to gaze out and judge the outsiders, the Animals. But when you only gaze out with a telescope, how well can you know another?

***

I could start at the very beginning of human-cat relationships, but I don’t know anything about ancient Egypt. I find it very difficult to comment on whether they really did worship cats. Some people think they did, Bastet/Bubastis was a cat-headed deity. Others are more skeptical and point to the sale of mummified cats which were clubbed to death and hastily wrapped up by shady vendors to be hawked to grasping tourists. I’m sure there is plenty to debate and discuss about it but I got distracted elsewhere. I’m sorry. I do know, however, that Romans preferred to use weasels to hunt mice and rabbits instead of cats. Finally, something for the weasel fans.

Instead, I want to jump right into the medieval period and the modern appreciation of the relationship between medieval people and animals. This is rather more useful for our purposes in historicising our own modern relationships with animals rather than attempting to determine some hidden, pseudo-eternal substrate.

Often, this history is about animal abuse. I’m sure that there is a lot that is very interesting about animal cruelty and animal abuse in early and pre-modern Europe. Predictably, however, much scholarship on it uses only a narrow range of sources, prefers spectacles of violence to analyses of violence, and deploys a view of medieval culture as a monolith of superstition and folk traditionalism. See the below from an academic scientific book on cats:

“it is not altogether surprising that cats became the objects of widespread persecution throughout Europe during the Middle Ages and the early modern period. On feast days, as a symbolic means of driving out the Devil, cats, especially black ones, were captured and tortured, tossed onto bonfires, set alight and chased through the street, impaled on spits and roasted alive, burned at the stake, plunged into boiling water, whipped to death, and hurled from the tops of tall buildings; and all, it seems, in atmosphere of extreme festive merriment. Anyone encountering a stray cat, particularly at night, also felt obliged to try and kill or maim it in the belief that it was probably a witch in disguise…By associating cats with the Devil and misfortune, the medieval Church seems to have provided the superstitious masses of Europe with a sort of universal scapegoat.”1

Much of this screed is drawn from accounts like Robert Darnton’s seminal piece on ‘Workers Revolt: The Great Cat Massacre Of The Rue Saint-Severin’, which analyses an incident where poorly-treated journeymen and apprentice printers slaughtered cats in a mock trial as an act of symbolic and ritual revenge against the master printer and his wife in mid-18th Century Paris.2 In attempting to identify the cultural substrate which informed the ritualised acts of the Great Cat Massacre Perpetrators, Darnton draws on folkloric accounts of ritual cat killing, usually in festive, carnivalesque contexts or connected to protections against witchcraft or sorcery. It is unfortunate that such scholarly work, generally nuanced, gets distorted and connected to medievalisms of pre-modern barbarity - even though almost all of Darnton’s sources are from the 17th-19th century cities.

I’ve already written about this tendency to render the medieval period into a monolith of cruel, violent spectacle in ‘Who Burned the Witches’. In both cases of witchcraft and animal cruelty, this rendering is an operation of the discourse that Foucault identified with the ideology of the Enlightenment. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault argues that pre-modern forms of ritual and spectacular violence were gradually transformed with the development of Enlightenment science and ethics into modern rational and impersonal forms. The example of this shift par excellence is the replacement of gruesome and torturous forms of execution, such as convicts being broken upon the wheel, to disciplinary, reformist state prisons, the ideal form being Bentham’s Panopticon. This change was generative and representative of a fundamental shift in the nature of subjectivity and its relationship to the state and state structures.

While there is far too much in Foucault’s historicisation of violence to go into for our purposes, for cats and cat violence the operating logic is much the same as with justice and punishment. The Great Cat Massacre is a confounding spectacle to be studied and pored over (often in lurid detail and to foreshadow the “indiscriminate slaughter” of the French Revolution and the September Massacres)3 in a way that, say, the perpetual, unsleeping machinery of animal massacre that is a modern highway/motorway is not. The former is irrational, the latter the (unfortunate but necessary) outcrop of rational processes. Compare a medieval butcher to the modern abattoir. This is not to say that sadistic cruelty is absent from modern forms of animal-human relationships, they absolutely aren’t, but rather that industrial animal cruelty is behind closed doors, pleasureless and rationalised, as it forms a dominant cultural discourse. Therefore, it cannot attract the same attention or morbid fascination as a spectacle compared to the Great Cat Massacre.

There is an irony that in searching for and identifying the barbarity of medieval people towards animals, we miss the endless, careless cruelties that we inflict upon them automatically, without ritual or thought or emotion. We also miss the ways that medieval and pre-modern peoples related to animals, and cats, that were not either informed by Christian moralising, accusations of witchcraft, or popular superstitions. The Great Cat Massacre is an example of that very modern form of social tension - the boss versus the workers - at the very turning of the ages, but it did draw on deeper cultural forms. While the above criticism of how folklore can be misused into a sort of spectacle of the past stands, there are some aspects of Darnton’s analysis that illuminate how cats in particular become lightning rods for social and cultural meaning.

Any animal that reminds us of ourselves is in hot water, so close to standing in for us and for our disagreements with other humans (as experienced by the unfortunate cats who had to stand in for the bourgeois master in the Great Cat Massacre). Cats, Darnton argues and anyone who has heard a cat scream would agree, can sound like humans. “One can sense a quasi-human intelligence behind a cat’s eyes” as he says. Cats also move between houses like gossip, or promiscuous partners, or disease. Cats are capable of mischief, they were accused of smothering babies. Cats play with their prey before killing it. In an urban environment, where animals were far fewer in number than the country, a cat straddled the line between luxury pet, pesky pest, and liminal night-creature. The association with the supernatural is therefore easy. They possess, as the Lesser Key of Solomon would say, “ways to speak without speaking” and “ways to see without seeing”. Little agents of sorcerers and witches or, more simply, little demons.

But to focus solely on the violent retribution against such demonical creatures would be to miss every other relationship that may be found between cats and humans. In some cases, cats being little people, or like little people, has been really rather lovely. An understanding of human-cat relationships based solely on the carnivalesque massacre of cats cannot account for the early medieval Irish poem, Pangur Ban.

Composed in the mid-eighth century in an Irish monastery, Pangur Ban (The White Fuller) is a Latin lyric on the similarities between the monk’s work (hunting for meaning in written texts) and that of the housecat (hunting for mice). It is also very cute and nice. Seamus Heaney, predictably, provides the best translation going:4

Pangur Bán and I at work,
Adepts, equals, cat and clerk:
His whole instinct is to hunt,
Mine to free the meaning pent.
More than loud acclaim, I love
Books, silence, thought, my alcove.
Happy for me, Pangur Bán
Child-plays round some mouse's den.
Truth to tell, just being here,
Housed alone, housed together,
Adds up to its own reward:
Concentration, stealthy art.

Next thing an unwary mouse
Bares his flank: Pangur pounces.
Next thing lines that held and held
Meaning back begin to yield.
All the while, his round bright eye
Fixes on the wall, while I
Focus my less piercing gaze
On the challenge of the page.
With his unsheathed, perfect nails
Pangur springs, exults and kills.
When the longed-for, difficult
Answers come, I too exult.
So it goes. To each his own.
No vying. No vexation.
Taking pleasure, taking pains
Kindred spirits, veterans.
Day and night, soft purr, soft pad,
Pangur Bán has learned his trade.
Day and night, my own hard work
Solves the cruxes, makes a mark.

If the Great Cat Massacre casts cats, and their human-likeness, as standing-in for such evils as to make them symbolically complicit in the exploitation of a newly precarious urban working class or participants in a sorcerer’s sabbath, Pangur Ban shows how cats could stand in for the good. Specifically, they embody what we consider deeply humanistic qualities - the conjoining of work and play, interpersonal connections between equals, the joy of discovery, and the arts of concentration and focus. These are values that are rarely even ascribed to medieval people, let alone allowed in modern receptions of their appreciation of animals. This, I believe, goes beyond mere anthropomorphisation. Cats are not only little people in these texts. A gap is always maintained. The downtrodden printers could not strike at people, so they struck at people-like (the - in -like does a lot of work) creatures. The monk who composed Pangur Ban found kinship with cats, where the printers found only class enemies and social aliens, but Pangur Ban’s catness is never occluded.

Rather than anthropomorphising, the Cat Massacre and Pangur Ban both show how cats can stand in for specific people and humanlike qualities in general by virtue of their appearance as creatures between strictly animal and strictly human. Cats are special, they say, but are not the only text to say it. The Ancrene Wisse, a middle English rulebook for anchoresses (English holy women who were walled up inside a church) instructed that “Ye, mine leove sustren, bute yef neod ow drive ant ower meistre hit reade, ne schulen habbe na beast bute cat ane”. [“My dear sisters, unless need drives you and your director advises it, you must not have any animal except a cat” (trans. Savage and Watson, p. 201)].5 Separate from other beasts, they are allowed as companions for anchoresses, holy people who were buried alive, all but dead to the world. Like the anchoresses who were both living and dead (their cells were often conceived of as the graves that they had dug for themselves), cats existed in a special, in-between space that lay across animal and human.

This specialness can be shown in how we connect to cats as pets. Rather than exchanging food and care for total obedience, control, and command (such as with trained dogs, for example),6 we receive only a cat’s ‘catness’ in return. This works with cats sui generis. That cat’s catness, what makes that cat, that cat (or Noodle, Noodle). But this catness is tied to our own understandings of humanity and what we consider the valuable features of humanity above bestial or animalistic ways of being, which cats may then, in part, embody. Let’s illustrate this point with an example.

In Kiki’s Delivery Service, the titular 13-year-old witch Kiki has a talking cat/familiar/animal companion called Jiji. As Kiki leaves home and establishes herself, and her delivery service, in a new place, Jiji acts as a mischievous conscience for Kiki, chiming in with little moral judgements. He (but it feels like the gender neutral They is more appropriate for Jiji) is a full person and character. Kiki treats him like one, feeding him full meals (often pancakes) at the table, involving him in schemes where he has to pretend to be a toy version of a cat to placate some little rich bastard child.

But then, when Jiji falls in love with another cat and Kiki begins to feel weighed down by the dull, aching pressure of living an adult life in the adult world, Jiji stops talking. He eats differently, only lapping at milk or taking small nibbles away to share with other cats. He stops being an animal companion and becomes, only, a cat. But it would be wrong to assume that this is a diminishment of Jiji. It is rather that Jiji is an independent subject now, not part of Kiki’s interior world or her internal sense of magic. Jiji individuates at the moment when Kiki must follow suit. They grow up together, each becoming social beings, relishing the pain and pleasure of independence to become parts of the rich interdependency of social life. The fact that it is a cat, both dependent and independent, that takes on this role for Kiki is no coincidence. Jiji ceases to be internal to Kiki’s life. Kiki instead receives Jiji’s catness, freely given, in exchange for her care for Jiji. It is this exchange that enables Kiki to become an adult herself. It is the first and crucial example of reciprocity, among many, that marks Kiki’s accession to adulthood. A cat can become (not just be) independent like a child can become independent.

***

There is a difficulty in schematising a distinct catness as being alike to an animalistic humanity. It can serve, rather than subvert, the whole structure that reifies Humanity as the ultimate form of Being by insisting that a cat is being itself, uniquely so, by being more like us. If cats are/aren’t little humans, what is being risked in asking the question? Let us put this another way, what even is distinct about humans that raises us above other animals?

Once upon a time in the 1990s, Jacques Derrida left his bathroom totally naked. His cat, a Siamese called Logos, saw him. In fact, Logos fixed him with a stare so incisive, a gaze so unwavering, that Derrida was shocked to his core. He just had to write a book about it. More precisely, he had to give a 10-hour(!) talk at a conference about where this experience led him, and how it made him question the entire concept of Animal. Here is a rough summary of some of his key points.

In the beginning, God created Animals, and lo! It was boring. So he also made man, Adam, to rule over these animals. He gifted Adam the techne of language, the ability to name and so the ability to determine, to distinguish and to decide. In short, to rule. This accomplished two things.
1) It separated Man from Animal, creating what Derrida designates as an ‘abyss with one edge’ around all forms of Being.
2) It surprised God. Derrida struggles to grasp why God would do this, but He allowed himself to be surprised. In Derrida’s account, Jehovah watched Adam “in order to see” what Adam may name Jehovah’s creations. The relationship between man and God and animal and man are often paralleled and connected. Adam may name animals “without allowing himself to be seen or named by them”, in the way that God may do so with humanity in general and Adam in particular. However, the “in order to see” shifted this relationship and allowed a sacred exceptionalism for mankind in the order of Creation. The process of naming:

“marks at the same time the infinite right of inspection of an all-powerful God and the finitude of a God who doesn’t know what is going to happen to him with language. And with names. In short, God doesn’t yet know what he really wants: this is the finitude of a God who doesn’t know what he wants with respect to the animal, that is to say, with respect to the life of the living as such, a God who sees something coming without seeing it coming, a God who will say ‘‘I am that I am’’ without knowing what he is going to see when a poet enters the scene to give his name to living things.”7

In the Beginning, or rather close enough to it, Prometheus stole fire from the Gods and gave it to Mankind. And lo! He was punished for it with eternal eagle torture.8 Prometheus gifted mankind the techne of fire because we were created with an innate lack. Animals may have fur, but we are naked, pink slimy things, so Promtheus pitied us and we were given the power to warm our bodies. However, we also used it build houses, develop written language, and make war. In short, ape the power of the Gods. We also used fire to roast meat. By using fire to cook, humanity paid back Olympus on Prometheus’ behalf. How many times are the thighs of heifers offered to the flames for the Olympians in Homer? Prometheus believed we were already set apart, in a bad way, by our lack. But in accounting for this cosmic injustice, he accidentally overcorrected and set humanity above animals, leaving them subject to our ability to roast their broken bodies over the very flames that he stole.

Derrida argued that it is in Genesis and Prometheus that humanity is separated irrevocably from animality, and this separation is the cornerstone of logocentrism and of Western Thought/Culture/Language at large. Prometheus gifted humanity fire, and therefore the symbol of all technology (including language) and the means to attain mastery. In Genesis, Jehovah gifted humanity the ability to name animals and, crucially for Derrida, He does so not yet knowing what names Adam will choose. We were given the power to gaze without being seen, to speak without being spoken to, to name without being named.

This, to be clear, is a bad thing for animals and humans both. It has led to us defining Animal in terms of a human-who-lacks-speech or rationality, or culture. It goes without saying that the aspects of Being that are supposedly lacking in animals have also been applied to people. Saying that certain peoples are without rationality, recognisable speech (consider the etymology of Barbarian) or worthwhile culture is the typical operation of exclusion in patriarchal and imperialist modes of definition and categorisation. Derrida clearly yearns to express how logocentric thought has failed us by forcing our hand to attempt to define Animal at all:

“‘The Animal,’’ as if all nonhuman living things could be grouped within the common sense of this ‘‘commonplace,’’ the Animal, whatever the abyssal differences and structural limits that separate, in the very essence of their being, all ‘‘animals,’’ a name that we would therefore be advised, to begin with, to keep within quotation marks. Confined within this catch-all concept, within this vast encampment of the animal, in this general singular, within the strict enclosure of this definite article (‘‘the Animal’’ and not ‘‘animals’’)...are all the living things that man does not recognize as his fellows, his neighbors, or his brothers.”9

For Derrida, to ascribe the overlapping infinity of non-ego cogito (logocentric) being to the category Animal is an unspeakable ontological crime. It is a crime that has justified the multi-genocide of animals (or as he starts to call them “animots”, a portmanteau of animal and word [mot] that calls attention to the constructed nature of this category and the role of naming/language in its construction and the hierarchy of being) and the reproduction of animals in enormous quantities seemingly for the endless repetition of industrial torture and genocide.

For Noodle, we, or rather my partner, named her (and her name was changed a couple of times). In so naming and not being named ourselves, do we possess Noodle in a way that God possesses humanity, individually and in totality, as Adam was named in the Garden? We named her Noodle (and Cat) and in doing so named her Animal. Has this made Noodle so mute and so wounded, as Walter Benjamin would put it, by the process of being named but not being able to name back? Always gazed at, but never gazing back? Derrida, for one, thought not - he wrote a book about his cat looking at him. He wasn’t the first, however, to try to show the cat gazing back.

***

The painter and illustrator Louis Wain spent most of his life looking at cats.10 His pictures of cats were sensationally popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Wain published over 200 books of cats and cat pictures as well as 16 Wain annuals for boys, postcards popular from the US to Germany and beyond, and drew comic strips for William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers.

As H.G. Wells said in 1925, “English cats that do not look and live like Louis Wain cats are ashamed of themselves.”. Anthropomorphiser-in-chief, he made little cat worlds, little cat societies filled with kittens playing cricket, waiting for their little cat dads to come home from work and get them a nice present from the shops, or bony-armed and bespectacled little cats all bruised and weepy after being flattened by the mean and rough little cats at cat school.

They played golf, drove cars, wrote letters, wore trousers, shoes, hats, dresses, jewels and pearls. Branching off from the culture of exoticism that flourished in the age of high imperialism, Wain draw cats in appropriate national and ethnic dress; indigenous cats hunting buffalo in moccasins, Japanese geisha cats with fans and kimonos, Scottish cats in kilts, and Spanish cats with castanets. Catland was Catworld, the mundane rendered into a gently ridiculous caricature in cat-form, often raucous and festive but never vulgar or crass.

Cats and cat-kitsch during the late Victorian/Edwardian cat craze made Louis Wain a modest fortune. His pictures hung in the bedrooms of countless children, good for a harmless giggle.

Then he spoiled everything by falling off the platform of a horse-drawn omnibus, suffering a severe head injury and being institutionalised at an asylum for most of the remainder of his life.11

We know little about his interior life after 1924. Plenty of money was raised by his fans to provide for his comfort, including former Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald (the quote from H.G. Wells above was part of the charity drive), and he was moved from a “pauper ward” in Tooting to Bethlem Hospital and eventually a far better institution in rural Hertfordshire. His work continued to be exhibited until 1937 (he died in 1939). I like to believe, based solely on the cat pictures that he continued to produce, that something fundamental shifted in the way that Louis decided to depict cats. He ceased to produce pictures of cats and simply began to illustrate them.

In doing so, the shift is obvious. I am far from a believer in ‘outsider art’, a term which I hold to be an uncomfortable and exploitative fascination/revulsion with and fetishisation of mental illness. But I do think that unrestrained by the need to produce images of cats for the market, and the attendant need for those pictures to be respectable and pleasurable, Louis, who had brushes with hallucination and delusion before his institutionalisation, uncovered something true about the nature of cats, and the nature of Nature.

Forgoing the drive to anthropomorphise, his later works explode the individual cat into a Becoming of multiple images, sounds, movements, colours and impressions. He depicts the feeling of Cat, the feeling of seeing Cats, the overlapping meanings and contradictions of being around animals which feel at once familiar and human but yet also capricious, wild, and mischievous. Far from the wholesome mischief of the early Wain’s Victorian schoolcats, essentially rendered in his early work as the cat fursona for a public school scamp, the late Wain’s mischief is ontological. Who can say what this cat is? What is this cat capable of?

In Louis Wain, we have a form of the liberation that Derrida was yearning for. Instead of images of cats shown like us (and therefore worth seeing), he began to show cats gazing back with eyes aflame and in forms which confounded and challenged the centrality of the human logos. Instead of being restrained by the antinomy of humanity/animality, an opposition that Derrida warns us away from as reinforcing the ontological separation of Animal (and therefore all non-western forms of being) from the ego cogito, logocentric being, Wain pushes us to consider how the abstractions, shapes and colours that he uses to construct his cats may be used to construct us. In Wain, the cat's way of Being is beyond the limited frame of animality, a frame that has been intentionally limited to justify the unidirectional mastery (and therefore gaze) of man over animal. Jiji’s independence is his own, autonomous but connected to Kiki’s.

It is the aspect of Louis Wain that is embodied in his journey from certainty, the certainty of feeling like animals (and domesticated animals in particular) are known entities towards expressing the impossibility of the mastery that mankind is supposed to have assumed at the very beginnings of time that offers the best insights into cats. It forces you to look at your cat, mine is currently sleeping soundly as I write this, and seriously ask what creature is it that I have let into my home? Is it perhaps the Gramilkin of legend, an imp? An agent of the Black Mass, the Witches’ Sabbath, a demon of the Lesser Key? It can certainly act strangely. As it acts on me, I feel drawn ever closer into its world. Contrariwise, my actions on it can feel like will-o'-the-wisps, intangible, as the cat makes my home into its home. I leave a bowl out, it eats the carpet instead. We play and the line between play fight and aggression seems to slip through my fingers and a bloody scratch on my hand is my reward. Once a s/he, at present an it. We don't speak for a day or two. I doubt, like Montaigne, whether it exists for my pleasure or I exist for its.

The wheel turns. The creature appears and, approaching my lap, begins to rest upon me. “Head of furlight, purr of bright sound”. It touches me in a way that humans do not and cannot. We rest that way for a while. Then at last there emerges joy, almost incandescent, that this creature is my silent partner, an equal in all ways, a beloved kinsman who I may rest alongside and simply be, together. She again, known and unknown.

“The moony wetmouthed cradle of bluenight
The plum’d bird, lovely voiced
The streaked cat, rooted hairshine
Head of furlight
Purr of bright sound
Lovely and noble, jewelly lords
So sparkling, glimmering spitting lights
Little houses of fire
In little towns of fire
Open and shut their fiery sandsheet eyes.”
Current 93, ‘Steven and I in the Field of Stars’, Of Ruine or Some Blazing Starre, 1994.

“Down the gangplank walked this Yankee knight errant followed by a desperate crew of college professors in horn-rimmed glasses carrying textbooks, encyclopedias, maps, charts, graphs, statistics and all sorts of literary crowbars with which to pry up the boundaries of Europe and move them around in the interests of justice as seen through the Fourteen Points.”1

Journalist William Allen White on the arrival of Woodrow Wilson and his academic advisors (The Inquiry) into France for the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.

In 1917, the American government had entered into war on a continent that it knew precious little about. Millions of Americans originated from the nations and peoples embroiled in it, and all of them would have some stake in the eventual peace. President Woodrow Wilson, however, was reported to have an “utter ignorance of facts and of geography” regarding Europe, according to the Austro-Hungarian ambassador Konstantin Dumba.2 Very quickly then, the US would have to study hard and get itself up to speed. Colonel Edward House, Wilson’s chief advisor and strategist, put together a cadre of academics and professors from the cream of the Ivy Leagues to inform and develop US foreign policy as it pertained to its new allies and enemies. Dubbed ‘the Inquiry’ and led by the philosopher Sidney Mezes, it generated copious material on Europe, South America, the Near & Middle East and China for American diplomats during and immediately following WW1. Contrary to expectations and the wishes of many in the State Department, these academics were not limited to simply informing policy; they made it themselves. On the same ship as Wilson and the State Department, twenty-three Inquiry scholars travelled to the Paris Peace Conference in the Spring of 1919. Charles Homer Haskins, a medieval historian and Professor of European History at Harvard, was their expert on Western Europe.

For those who have read Part 1 in this series on American medieval studies and the American Empire (and please do if you have not already), I concluded by indicating that Haskins' work at the Paris Peace Conference was an opportunity for him to put his historical ideas on medieval Europe into political practice. His ideas, in summary, rested on the argument that from the tenth century, the Normans were able to build and maintain stable, impersonal institutions of state which enabled their flourishing and expansion from a small patch of northern France to the borders of Scotland and as far as Sicily and the Holy Land. These structures and institutions were the very foundations of the modern West, from medieval France and England (the cradle of his other key concept, the Renaissance of the Twelfth-Century) and culminating in its logical apex, the modern USA under the leadership of Teddy Roosevelt and, especially, Woodrow Wilson. It is a genealogical view of history, and this Norman lineage was often as racial as it was legal, cultural, and political.

While he had, and still has, a vast presence in academic medieval history, in Paris Haskins was just one small part of a larger political and ideology machinery, one manifestation of a political complex. But by subordinating himself to a vastly greater whole, Haskins could utilise the power of the most financially and militarily powerful nation on earth to reshape Europe into an idealised form which better fit his ideas of what the continent should look like. Other academics made the same bargain in Paris. Haskins’ role on the Inquiry reveals how when the US academy folded itself into state operations, particularly abroad, the work of knowledge production in the arts and humanities was also implicated in the process. Europe turned from an object of study (in Haskins’ case this study was meant to reveal the true nature and destiny of the US state) to a subject of US-led global power and capital. Academic expertise itself was elevated to such a level that the tools of academic practice (precision, historicising, source analysis, argumentation, research, rationalisation, exactitude, certainty and collaboration) were machined into the scalpels that divided and reconstituted Europe after the Great War.

I had initially, and falsely, considered Joseph R. Strayer, Haskins’s academic successor and an avowed CIA consultant, to be the key figure in implicating medieval studies in the American imperial apparatus. Haskins, however, is an excellent case to demonstrate the ideological and institutional throughline which connects the American Empire in 1919 to the American Empire during the Cold War and further into the present.

Governments today are unlikely to deploy medievalists as experts, advisors, and diplomats in such pivotal roles. But Haskins and Strayer were academics who, to borrow from Marx (a comparison they would have despised), did not wish to just interpret the world but to change it. When I started this exploration of American medieval studies, I remember reading Cantor’s words on their politics:

“Their character as Wilsonians goes much deeper than that. It is an affect of their biographies and their temperaments. They were Woodrow Wilson duplicated and reincarnated. Haskins and Strayer were not just Wilsonians who happened to be medievalists. Their interest in the Middle Ages and their construction of medieval government and administration were a projection of Wilsonian ideals onto the medieval European past as well as a reliving and justification of the Wilsonian program from the lessons of the medieval origins of the modern state. The medieval political experience, as they understood it, sustained the value and exclusivity of the Wilsonian program in twentieth-century America.”3

At the time, I didn’t understand how correct Cantor was in this regard, how integrated Haskins and Strayer were within the project of US empire-building in the twentieth-century. Equally, however, I don’t think Cantor understood the depth of this truth either. By involving himself in the operations of the American state abroad, Haskins also integrated the Middle Ages into American national and international narratives and, through this, onto the post WW1 map of Europe. Cantor does discuss Haskins' role at the Peace Conference, in fact I think he inflates Haskins' importance, but he also neglects to analyse what this meant for the American academy. Like it or not, Haskins has imparted an institutional and intellectual inheritance onto all future medievalists, American or otherwise.

The Inquiry: Academia Take the Wheel

Before we get to Haskins' personal contribution, I want to explore a few of the key players who masterminded the American approach at the peace negotiations in 1919 to give the reader a better understanding of the environment that Haskins worked in, his ideological bedfellows, and the political context of the Paris Peace Conference for the USA.

First, we have America’s chief diplomat, Secretary of State Robert Lansing. The son-in-law of John W. Foster (who we mentioned last time out as a Secretary of State and a major actor in garnering US support for the Hawaiian coup d’etat in 1893 that led to the annexation of the island as America’s first overseas colony), Lansing was an arch-imperialist in the classic Monroe Doctrine mould. A zealot for American hegemony in Latin America and the Pacific, his inability to compromise in any way on this point put him on a collision course with President Woodrow Wilson.

This reached breaking point at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 on 7 points, as Lansing puts it in his apologia on the conference, The Peace Negotiations, A Personal Narrative. The common thread among these is the continuing involvement of the United States in the politics of regulating the Great Powers to ensure peace, especially in the formation and maintenance of the League of Nations.4 This is to emphasise that Lansing felt a League of Nations would restrain the United States and prevent it from being to act as it wished on the world stage. Now, it appears ridiculous to suggest that the League of Nations would have been able to restrain the US in any meaningful way, but that just goes to show the level of imperial paranoia that some of these men were working with. In his book, Lansing reproduces a communique he sent to Wilson in May 1916 about the plan for a “League to Enforce Peace” that is worth quoting from directly:

“I do not believe that it is wise to limit our independence of action, a sovereign right, to the will of other powers beyond this hemisphere. In any representative international body clothed with authority to require of the nations to employ their armies and navies to coerce one of their number, we would be in the minority…We have adopted a much modified form of this idea in the proposed Pan-American Treaty by the ‘guaranty' article. But I would not like to see its stipulations extended to the European powers so that they, with our full agreement, would have the right to cross the ocean and stop quarrels between two American Republics. Such authority would be a serious menace to the Monroe Doctrine and a greater menace to the Pan-American Doctrine.”5

In essence, Lansing believed that the USA must possess a free hand in directing the affairs of the Americas and be beyond the influence of any other powers present at the Paris Peace Conference. The League of Nations, in the form proposed by Wilson, would countermand US international exceptionalism and threaten the unchallenged spread of the American empire into the Pacific or threaten its chokehold on the Gulf of Mexico and the western Atlantic.

Lansing’s opposition to the League of Nations saw Wilson favour Colonel Edward House as his de facto chief diplomat in Paris. House, the aforementioned founder of the Inquiry, was a notorious Texan backroom politician whose advocacy and campaign support had elected four consecutive Texas governors, financed by his family fortune in the slave industries of cotton and sugar. An unapologetic racist who as a boy fired broken glass and rocks at freed black folks with a slingshot, House was the key campaign strategist to Wilson in both the 1912 and 1916 elections. As Lansing, the apogee of a Washington insider, was pushed away, House was elevated. House was a fellow southerner (Wilson hailed from Virginia), Anglophile, and an avowed Progressive who admired the then British PM, David Lloyd George. He gained Wilson's trust beyond anyone else in the cabinet as one of the President's closest, personal friends and confidants. House was also crucial in influencing Wilson’s decision to enter the war in 1917 following British intelligence leaking of the Zimmermann telegram. The telegram, sent by the German Foreign Office to the Mexican government, offered a German-Mexican alliance in the event of American intervention on the side of the Allies, and touted German support for a potential Mexican reconquest of New Mexico, Texas and Arizona. For a white supremacist Texan like Colonel House, this was an unacceptable provocation.

House was the closest thing to a power behind the throne in Wilson’s government; the smooth political operator to balance out Wilson’s bespectacled, intellectual detachment. One could even see the inclusion of the academics of the Inquiry as diplomats in addition to their role as depositories of information about Europe as a victory for the institutions of House (the Inquiry; ad hoc and independent but ideologically aligned with the President) over Lansing (the State Department; traditional and entrenched in Washington, beholden to esoteric institutional rules). It is tempting to draw a parallel between this shakeup and the current US government chaos with DOGE and Elon Musk’s coterie of obnoxious nepo babies who fetishise coding like the Inquiry, as we shall see, fetishised statistical analysis and map drawing.

Then there was the big dog himself; Woodrow Wilson. His background as a political scientist and historian (his work on the development of the US Congress became the university standard textbook by the 1920s) really informed the work of the Inquiry and the American delegation at the Paris Peace Conference. His avowed faith in the qualities of academia and of good government (one following the other in a virtuous cycle) to remake the world and ensure peace for years to come feels almost naive now. In a similar way, Wilson’s advocacy for the League of Nations appears to me, and to school curricula, to come from a sense of sincere sympathy to the peoples of Europe subjugated under the thumb of German militarism, imperialisms of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman varieties, and, later, Leninist Bolshevism. Often this was due to strong personal relationships with the leaders of the infant nations that Wilson intended to midwife into being.6

In practice, however, a lot of the work of this idealism appears to have been the reconciliation of ethnic, linguistic populations with border boundaries. Draw a line, one side Poles and the other side Germans. Draw a second to move off the Russians and Lithuanians. And another for the Ukrainians and Czechs to the south. Voila! Poland is made, ex nihilo, or at least from pen and ink and liberal good intentions. The journalist, William Allen White poked fun at this sort of academic self-confidence as it verged on clownish, nerdy arrogance in the quote that opened this essay.

It helps for me to imagine Wilson as Don Quixote followed by approximately 23 Sancho Panzas.

Any contradictions that emerged from the act of ruler and pen on the map could be rectified by the plebiscite, referenda which were put into place for the mandates on Danzig and the Saarland. This, however, was accepted to be an imperfect solution to the indeterminacy of the ethnic map as the plebiscite was open to abuse from the realpolitik of the new European order. This, I would argue, hints at the indifference to which Wilson, and his ideological comrades, treated democracy beyond the concept of self-determination for independent European states. That, unfortunately, would be one digression too far.

Haskins Himself: Duchy of Normandy or Holy Roman Empire?

So did the tail wag the dog? Was Haskins imitative of American/Wilsonian Progressivism (in the sense that he faithfully toed some ideological party line) or was he more generative (in the sense that he was equipped to shape and direct policy)? How far was Haskins allowed to wield the scalpel himself and slice the borders of Europe according to his own perspectives and opinions?

Considering the question of Haskins' power to determine policy, Wilson reportedly said to the members of the Inquiry on the evening of December 9th 1918 in a meeting that Haskins certainly attended, “Tell me what is right and I’ll fight for it” and “I want a guaranteed position”.7 Two priorities emerge from other conversations; certainty (as in academic rigour and exactitude) and justice (the principles of the Fourteen Points and the dissolution of the old, defeated empires). So long as the Inquiry members could meet these prime concerns, Wilson would back their conclusions at the negotiating table. Lansing, for example, fell at this first hurdle by refusing to support the League of Nations.

Haskins, however, is a different case. There is ample evidence that Wilson had considerable confidence in Haskins as a man and as an academic. Wilson attempted, unsuccessfully, to headhunt Haskins for a plum post at Princeton (where Wilson was Chair of Jurisprudence and Political Science) in 1896 from Wisconsin-Madison.8 They corresponded in a friendly manner from at least 1890 up until Wilson’s incapacitation from a stroke in the early 1920s. Wilson certainly received, and probably read, Haskins' Norman Institutions in 1918.9 In fact, after the Paris Peace Conference, when Wilson had fallen out with many of his diplomats over feeling like he had been sold out at the bargaining table in Paris leading (as Wilson saw it) to the failure to get the Treaty of Versailles ratified by Congress, Wilson recommended Haskins to the League of Nations to work as the American mediator between Finland and Sweden over the Åland Islands dispute in 1921.10 Haskins, busy with the Twelfth-Century Renaissance and his own Dean-ship at Harvard, politely declined.

At the big table in Paris, where Wilson discussed the new boundaries of Europe with Clemenceau, the President of France, David Lloyd George and the Italian Prime Minister, Vittorio Orlando, the medievalist Haskins was not out of place. While debating on the boundaries of the formerly German city of Danzig (now Gdansk in Poland), Wilson proposed making “Danzig a free city, somewhat like the Hanseatic cities of the Middle Ages” to which, after some debate, Lloyd George agreed stating “I do not dislike the idea of reviving the free cities. They flourished in a time when, it seems, international law was more respected than today.”. When the debate reached loggerheads over whether the League of Nations would be able to enforce Danzig’s independence from Germany, Wilson proposed, “If you really wish it, I will have Professor Haskins study this question anew.”.11 While Haskins had a purview over Western Europe (and this generously included Germany, Schleswig-Holstein, Belgium, Alsace-Lorraine, and the Saarland), his inclusion here as an expert to review Polish and German boundaries, with that notable reference to medieval free cities, does suggest that he was trusted above many others in Wilson’s camp.

The question of the Saarland, which had been a flashpoint between the French leadership and the Americans with Clemenceau storming out of a meeting on 30th March 1919 with Wilson and calling him ‘pro-German’,12 was also smoothed over by Haskins, whose memo on 6th April 1919 essentially settled the American position on the coal-rich region. By 11th April, a compromise was reached that led to the creation of the League of Nations sovereign mandate under French economic control with a plebiscite planned 15 years hence.13

All of these points build the case that Haskins was in fact trusted to divide the boundaries of nations, or at least to propose changes that would then be advocated for by Wilson at the Council of Four. It is here that some of Haskins’ professional opinions on medieval history were allowed to slip into proceedings. This is due in no small part to the appeal of Haskins’ ideas on America’s Norman inheritance for Wilson and other Progressives. He clearly did not, for example, think much of the Holy Roman Empire. In his response to German objections regarding the shrinking of its borders, he argued that the “modern world can no longer be expected to admit claims based upon the identity of the present German Empire, founded in 1870, with the loosely organized mediaeval empire, which claimed control over Switzerland, the Valley of the Rhone, and the larger part of Austria-Hungary and Italy.”14 While it is to be expected that the territorial claims of the victorious French Republic would be preferred over those of the defeated German Empire, Haskins is careful to couch his arguments as based in historical, often medieval and early modern, fact to maintain the twin Wilsonian priorities of justice and certainty when negotiating European boundaries. The same sentiments are common in Haskins’ contribution to House’s apologia on the Conference (yes! Another one!) as well as his own book with the Inquiry’s Poland expert, Robert Howard Lord.15

In Haskins’ words, and often the words of his colleagues at the Conference and in the Inquiry, it can be hard to imagine alternative actions. What I mean by this is that their writing style, the dryness of matter-of-fact, and the cool belief in their own intellectual and moral objectivity (as opposed to the fiery invective of contemporary communist authors) leads the reader to believe that these men were acting out a kind of self-evident, rational politics. But this would be to miss the ideology that coats these words in the facade of moral rectitude and self-evidence.

This is the ideology of imperialism which, rather than only desiring profit above all, deploys rationality to redraw the borders of the world into the shape they ought to be. For Haskins, France was a preferable beneficiary of the Saarland and Alsace-Lorraine because the French state in 1919 most closely resembled the French state in 1119. He found the German arguments that were based on the inheritance of the Holy Roman Empire ridiculous not because he thought arguments that established the genealogical inheritance of states and peoples over the course of centuries were ridiculous. It was because the Germans were making the wrong arguments in the wrong way for the wrong reasons. He based his entire career on the perspective that the US inherited the Norman state, after all.

And if the people did not have this inheritance, it could be built for them. The multi-ethnic states of eastern and central Europe, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia especially, could be justified and established because they were built along the lines of modern, progressive state structures. While it must be left to Joseph R. Strayer to give us the exact shape of this ideal Progressive and Haskinite European state, suffice it to say that Haskins (and the Inquiry) considered the institutions of state superior in binding a people than any cultural, linguistic or ethnic ties alone. Europe can become what it needs to be, what it ought to have always been (if not for the pesky empires of Austro-Hungary and the Ottomans), to ex post facto justify the existence and operation of the Anglo-American state structures. Hilariously, Cantor gives Haskins his flowers on this detail, arguing that while it may seem naive to have so much faith in the state these days, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia have clearly stood the test of time. Cantor was writing in 1991.

The justice vaunted by Haskins and Wilson was not blind, and certainly not colour-blind.

The White Man’s Burden for Wilson and Haskins

How consistent the approach of the American delegation at the Paris Peace Conference was with universal values of self-determination is doubtful. In fact, the term ‘self-determination’ was not used by Wilson himself, but instead was coined as ‘national self-determination’ by Lenin while he developed Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism and later used in his November 1917 speech, “Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia”.16 Trotsky also used the term when denouncing the Allied war aims as reinforcing the injustices of empire as he argued for the liberation of Ireland, Madagascar, Indochina and beyond. For Wilson, however, eager not to inflame the colonies of his wartime allies, Britain and France, he was careful to remove ‘national’ from the term to neuter its political explosiveness.

Despite this concession to his allies, 1919 saw considerable enthusiasm towards Wilson and his doctrine of ‘self-determination’ from intellectuals in India and China, emerging both from the connection of this term to the far more radical Leninist conception of ‘national self-determination’ as a revolutionary call to action to smash the reactionary states of Europe as well as hopes that America represented a kinder form of the West than the destructive European empires.17 They were to be sorely disappointed. As became obvious as the Conference rumbled to its ill-fated conclusion, Wilson was not just uninterested in self-determination for Europe’s colonies for the sake of political expediency at the negotiating table in Paris, it was also because he was a racist and an ardent believer in the ‘White Man’s Burden’.

There is a lot said about Woodrow Wilson on race and imperialism and some of it is quite contradictory, so I want to try to clear up some confusion. He did screen Birth of a Nation, D.W. Griffiths’s KKK fan film, at the White House in 1915 and quotes from Wilson were included in the film upon release. Griffiths was desperate to impress the first southern Democrat US President since 1848, but how far these feelings were personally reciprocated may have been lost to time (at least as far as I could find).

Wilson did, however, definitely oversee or at least allow the segregation of the American federal government, removing hundreds of black employees and undoing countless gains made for and by black men and women in Washington during Reconstruction. Rather than being the actions of one man’s personal racism, these actions were conscious, ideological and political choices that integrated white supremacy and racism into the project of American Progressivism. As it has relevance to the running of a state, there are also connections to Haskins' work on government institutions. I recommend reading Eric Yellin’s excellent book Racism in the Nation’s Service: Government Workers and the Color Line (Stanford, 2013).

The connection between Progressive politics and segregation became concrete due to the peculiar circumstances which propelled Wilson into the White House. The 1912 US Presidential Election was a mess that saw four major candidates run against each other. A split in the Republican party formed between Teddy Roosevelt and his chosen successor in 1908 and current incumbent, William Howard Taft. Taft had control of the party machinery and used this to oust Roosevelt from the primary running. Roosevelt, unperturbed, formed his own Progressive Bull Moose party, splitting the Republican vote. Further complicating matters, Eugene V. Debs’s Socialist Party of America was gaining popularity and eventually polled nearly 1 million votes.18 Wilson took advantage of the confusion by campaigning on a platform of Democrat efficiency and ‘clean’ government to contrast with years of Republican corruption, entrenchment, and ‘patronage’. I leave it to Yellin to connect this platform to racial politics:

“The coeval expansion of progressive reform, white supremacy, and Democratic power in Washington all contributed to a permanent shift in the national racial regime, one in which many progressive reformers equated African American social mobility with political corruption and social disorder. Black politicians and civil servants operated under patronage rules long ago established by white politicians, and patronage and congressional privilege continued in the progressive state. Yet as Americans moved toward a political and administrative system that aspired to efficient and centralized bureaucracy, Wilsonians used progressive critiques of patronage to malign black Republicans as corrupt and to associate egalitarian politics with dirty politics. White Democrats figured black government workers and the unsegregated capital city as unhealthy vestiges of the nineteenth-century spoils system. Through this racialization of patronage, Wilsonians began to transform clean government into white government.”19

More than the simple narrative of segregating the federal government, black social mobility was weaponised and combating it became part of the ideological toolkit of Wilsonian Progressivism. It is hard for me to read this understanding of Progressivism and not connect it to Haskins' ideas on the Norman state. Clearly in the Wilsonian context, policies of efficiency, impartiality, impersonality, and meritocracy in government staffing (the exact schema outlined by Strayer in The Medieval Origins of the Modern State as necessary for states to properly exist in the western mould) could be and were used to racist ends. This is one of the features of both Wilsonian and Haskinite Progressivism that Cantor underestimates and under-explores in Inventing the Middle Ages as he often shirks discussing race or racism directly.

Wilson’s politics towards the American imperial sphere of influence in Latin America was also interventionist, paternalistic, and often outright racist - exemplified by his infamous quote, “I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men.” He oversaw military interventions in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Guatemala, Cuba and Panama. This was the age of the Banana Wars and the Banana Republic, where the United Fruit Company spilled the blood of thousands and sent US Marines, including War Is A Racket author and decorated hero Smedley Butler, to do its dirty work. On the other side of the world, the Philippines was transformed into the ultimate form of America’s ‘White Man’s Burden’.

As Wilson said in 1902:

“We might not have seen our duty, had the Philippines not fallen to us by the willful fortune of war; but it would have been our duty, nevertheless, to play the part we now see ourselves obliged to play…It is our peculiar duty, as it is also England’s, to moderate the process in the interests of liberty: to impart to the peoples thus driven out upon the road of change, so far as we have opportunity or can make it, our own principles of self-help; teach them order and self-control in the midst of change; impart to them, if it be possible by contact and sympathy and example, the drill and habit of law and obedience which we long ago got out of the strenuous processes of English history…In China, of course, our part will be indirect, but in the Philippines it will be direct; and there in particular must the moral of our polity be set up and vindicated.”20

Plenty to unpack. Putting aside the ridiculousness of pretending that a colony won by conquest, in this case against the Spanish in 1898, had somehow fallen into America’s lap, the genealogical view of history here, from the “strenuous processes of English history” to the Progressive United States, is shockingly Haskinite. As we covered last time, the Norman state, and the English one that was built upon its bones, was the progenitor, the very seed, from which the USA emerged to achieve global primacy. While Haskins does not directly refer to the White Man’s Burden in his historical writing, his diplomatic work contains its fair share of race discourse. Firstly, he also quotes the same Atlantic article in justifying the Wilsonian position of self-determination being limited to Europe:

“But President Wilson had also said that self-government cannot be given but must be earned; that "liberty is the privilege of maturity, of self-control," that "some peoples may have it, therefore, and others may not." However just and admirable self-determination might be, it could be fully applied only to peoples who had some experience in self-government and thus some means of political self-expression. For this reason it was not applicable to the downtrodden natives of the German colonies.”21

In the context of racial pseudoscience, “maturity” and mature races means races with pale skin. From here, and the phrase “downtrodden natives” which makes it clear that the subject is Africa, he can jump to discussing race openly. Haskins makes it plain that he considers race, and the science of it, concrete facts of human existence:

“So far as it is an exact term at all, race is a physical fact, dependent upon certain elements of stature, color, and shape of the skull which occur and are transmitted in certain fixed combinations or racial types. There are three such types in Europe, the Teutonic, the Alpine, and the Mediterranean.” But, “So far as Europe is concerned, all talk of race has to be eliminated from serious international discussion.”22

This is despite Georges Clemenceau describing the Germans as a “servile race” during the Peace Conference.23 That doesn’t count. Nor, apparently, does his list of the ‘three races of Europe’ listed in a clearly hierarchical order. At the top, Teutons (English/’Anglo-Saxons’, northern French, Germans, Nordics), then Alpine (northern Italians, southern/Catholic Germans, Czechs, Poles and Serbs) and then the Mediterranean (Spanish, Portuguese, southern Italians/Sicilians, Greeks, Albanians, Bulgarians and Romanians). Jews are conspicuous by their absence in this schema of whiteness. This, unsurprisingly, was also the logic of the American, white racial hierarchy.

Yellin argues that Wilson’s often made references to white races and the Germanic and Anglo-Saxon ancestry of the white American people as determining its specific, national character. Drawing together these threads, Haskins can be seen as tracing a different, but connected inheritance - via Normans rather than the Anglo-Saxons.24 Manifest destiny becomes manifest historical teleology. Rollo and Duke William the Bastard stood on the shores of the Pacific Ocean and proclaimed ‘From Sea to Shining Sea’ with their greedy eyes (the scions of Vikings after all) landing on Hawaii, the Philippines and all the way to the coast of China. It is in this spirit that Haskins aimed to shape the borders of Europe, according to the twin principles of state and racial primacy. A warping of Wilsonian liberal ideals of exactitude and justice, or perhaps their eventual zenith. When we intellectually impoverished post-moderns, starved of certainties, discuss the restoration of the academic and non-academic humanities to their twentieth-century peaks, is this what we are harkening back to? Is this what we want more of?

After the War: Anti Communism and the American Century

There is another crucial thread to complete our tapestry and weave the warp of Haskins and Wilson to the weft of Strayer and the CIA; anti-communism. A context which is often forgotten in discourses on the Paris Peace Conference is the total exclusion of the Soviet Union, at that point just the Russian SFSR, from proceedings. Part of this is because of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in which the Soviets made peace with Imperial Germany in March 1918, with the loss of 34% of its de jure population. As a symbolic betrayal of the Allied war effort, and a legal end to the war on the part of the Soviets, their exclusion makes sense from a realpolitik and diplomatic point of view.

There were other reasons, however, for this exclusion. Between 1918 and 1919, Russia was not the only nation that had been flirting with the Red Menace. Communist revolts, uprisings, revolutions, and mutinies were sweeping central Europe. In March 1919, as the delegates were discussing peace in Paris, general strikes swept Berlin and short-lived Soviet republics emerged in Bremen and Bavaria. On 9th April 1919, the Council of Four discussed the possibility of occupying Berlin if no party could present itself as able to treat on the German side or if the defeated Germans refused to sign the final treaty. This is where Clemenceau made his comment about the servility of the German race.25

Even before this, when the American delegation was preparing itself for the Conference, Wilson was explicit about obtaining a just peace to prevent “the poison of Bolshevism” from entering the European body politic.26 This meant that the old empires, which had proven in the Romanov case to be brittle and susceptible to Bolshevik takeover in times of military defeat, must be swept away and replaced by the democratic (read: Progressive) states of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia et al.

Anti-communism and anti-Bolshevism were common in the Wilson administration. Lansing understood Soviet Communism as an existential threat to American hegemony. He was a leading voice in Washington against diplomatically recognising the Soviet government in Petrograd (and later Moscow) and advocated funding and arming whichever White Russian groups seemed best positioned to topple the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War. Lansing even went so far as to attempt American intervention in Siberia and the Russian far east to both weaken the Reds and prevent the Japanese from making the most of the political chaos.27 While Colonel House was slightly less virulent in his opposition to Soviet Communism (he wrote an odd speculative fiction book in 1912 called Phillip Dru: Administrator about a future US president with social democrat sympathies) it is clear from documents from both Inquiry and American Peace Delegation members that Bolshevism was considered the next great threat to European peace.

With the Soviets sealed away in diplomatic isolation, the diplomats of Europe, especially those from the UK and the US, left the Paris Peace Conference with the understanding that international relations were too important to be left to elected officials alone. Where the communists had their Internationale, what about the liberal capitalist nations? The response was the British Royal Institute of International Affairs (founded in 1920 and known as Chatham House) and the American Council on Foreign Relations (founded in 1921). Each are two of the world’s most influential and powerful think tanks and the nucleus of the nexus between academic study and political policy. Where the Inquiry, and Haskins’ role within it, was irregular and situational, the CFR and Chatham House would institutionalise their techniques and codify the ideologies of international, capitalistic progressivism, interventionism, and economic imperialism into the instrumental logic of western diplomatic thought.

Through this institutionalisation, the CFR was able to pass down this inheritance, in an auspiciously Haskinite manner, to the next generation of diplomats, academics and, yes, medievalists. It is this generation, from the OSS in WW2 to the Cold War CIA, of Korea and Berlin, of Eisenhower and Kennedy, that will be analysed next time. After all, it was Joseph Strayer who claimed the CIA wanted medievalists specifically because of their academic techniques. They drew conclusions from fragmentary evidence. Drew lines where they ought to be. Changed the regimes that didn’t seem right. Made order emerge from chaos.

Usually, I find this sort of thing deadly boring and reminiscent of a time on the internet when atheists thought they could pwn Christians on the internet with facts and logic. Look how that turned out. However, sometimes I find a banger in the discourse. See below:

To avoid confusion, I’m going to reproduce the text in the bottom panel of the image verbatim:

“The Catholic Church generally dealt with black magic practitioners i.e. people accused of Witchcraft through confession, repentance, and charitable work assigned as penance. A precedent was set when Pope Gregory VII intervened on behalf of some Danes who were accused of witchcraft by Harold III. When a Papal Bull was issued by Pope Innocent III to support Heinrich Kramer’s witch-hunt, the Catholic Clergy rose up in opposition, saying it contradicted scripture. And when the same Pope endorsed Kramer’s ‘Malleus Maleficarum’, the Clergy forced the Vatican to rescind the endorsement and issue a formal condemnation. The Vatican then went onto [sic] call the book “a worse crime than heresy in its notable animus against women”. Despite all this, the Catholic Church still get [sic] flak for the witch-hunts they vehemently opposed.”

I do love it when memes contain detailed and quite sophisticated historical arguments so let’s dig into it. I also want to be clear, I’m not going to fact check this meme to see, for example, if Pope Innocent III really did what the meme said he did. You are equipped with google (but for the record, the author means Innocent VIII as Heinrich Kramer lived some 300 years after Innocent III). Instead, I want to explain what argument this meme is participating in, how that argument has changed over time, and how/why witches have found themselves in the middle of it. As another disclaimer, I am not and do not consider myself to be any sort of authority on witch-hunts or witch-trials. I’ve read some short overviews of the historiography and the overwhelming impression I got is that even in western Europe (where some of the most studied witch-hunts occurred) the patterns of witch-hunting and mass panic varied massively over space and time. Rather than attempt any kind of survey of the field, I’m going to gesture at some of the main currents of scholarship over the course of decades and centuries and connect the understanding of historical witch-hunting to broader ideologies and systems of thought.

By not talking about witchcraft directly, and avoiding discussing the beliefs and practices of purported witches, I can get underneath the subject and into the assumptions that come in on the coattails of discussions of witchcraft. Witchcraft and witch-hunting have become inseparable from images of the middle ages, but why has this happened? As it turns out, it has a lot less to do with witch-burnings (not that many were burned before 1450 in comparison to the succeeding centuries) and a lot more to do with burning Protestants.

Foxe’s Book of Martyrs

In Dickens' David Copperfield, the only book owned by David’s nurse, Peggotty, is a copy of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, which should go some way to explaining its ubiquity in English protestant households from its publication in the 1560s. Officially called Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perillous Days, Touching Matters of the Church, John Foxe attempted to build a new, Protestant and anti-Catholic martyrology which connected the very first Christian martyrs of Rome to the new martyrs of Mary I’s persecution of English protestants. Because the main argument against Protestantism by Catholic writers at the time was its novelty, and therefore its counterfeit and flimsy nature, Foxe historicised the Protestant denomination as a continuation of the true spirit of apostolic and early Christianity. His argument also served to portray the Catholic Church as a bastardised and corrupt iteration (the very Whore of Babylon and the Seat of the Antichrist if you prefer apocalyptic terms) to which the Protestant faith must struggle against for the good of all souls.

Notably, Foxe also included non-Protestant English heretics in his Actes and Monuments. This included the Lollards, a group of 14th and 15th century heretics located around eastern England (but with strongholds in Bristol and around London) and inspired (largely but not wholly) by the writings of radical theologian John Wyclif. Including Lollards amongst the elect of Protestant martyrs has been, putting it lightly, controversial among historians who doubt any substantive connection, theological or actual, between Lollardy and later Protestant schism in England. Lollardy was violently suppressed by the English crown and church after the Oldcastle rebellion in 1414 which saw an uprising by radical, anticlerical aristocrats incensed by the arrest of the Lollard lord Sir John Oldcastle for heresy and high treason.1

For Foxe the connection was irresistible. By making Lollards into proto-Protestants, he argued that the Catholic Church had a long history of suppressing dissent by punishing differences of theological opinion with torture and death. In his hands, the Catholic Church became a repressive, superstitious and brutally violent organisation that imposed its own views over those of the individual conscience or, more importantly, the national conscience. The Church was in his hands a foreign institution, stuffed with Spaniards, Italians and (worse!) Frenchmen thirsty for honest English blood and who had been suppressing England’s glorious religious traditions for centuries.

To summarise the historical arguments about the Catholic Church which, I argue, have been deeply influential in shaping Protestant historiography of religion in the middle ages, we have:

1. The Catholic Church was a corrupt and morally empty institution which suppressed, actively or passively, Christian religious conscience in the Medieval period through inquisitions, ignorance, and confessional shaming/penance.

2. The Protestant Reformation was the necessary ‘clearing away’ of a dying/dead religious tradition by returning to the true traditions of the Apostles and early Christians.

This is a crude characterisation but I think it strikes at the heart of what the above poster is attempting to rail against in their meme about witch-hunts. Regardless of the facts about witch-hunting, the image of the Catholic Church that ‘is not fair’ in the meme is how the church is characterised as an unthinking, monolithic vehicle of repression and suspicion. Friends who have taught undergraduates students medieval history, the image of the church as a sort of supranational, nigh-omniscient institution of total repression is one of the hardest to challenge. By showing the internal division within the church over witch-hunting, especially the objections of many clerics to the Malleus Maleficarium’s violent hatred of women, the poster wants us to see some more nuance about how the medieval church was a complicated institution that had a variety of responses to heterodox ways of being than just violence.

Over the course of centuries, as matters of religious conscience have waned in social importance, the argument has shifted from the Catholic Church combating heterodoxy by burning heretics and Protestants to focus more on witch-hunts and the misogynistic suppression of women. I don’t think this is a bad thing (the medieval church was a misogynistic institution), but the underlying assumptions tend towards showing the medieval church as imposing itself on traditional societies and burning all those who refused to fall in line with its dogma. It’s all not very far from Foxe.

The Persecuting Society

Not to bury the lead on this one, but I think it is worth mentioning to readers who have made it this far that the hysterical waves of witch-hunting and witch-burning occurred in Protestant AND Catholic societies and between 1450 and 1750. This has not stopped the widespread association of specifically medieval Catholicism with witch-hunting. The Malleus Maleficarum certainly doesn’t help, written as it was by a German Dominican in 1487, which all feels sufficiently medieval. Nor does the Catholic Church’s reputation as the cradle of religious inquisition. What connects these pointing fingers holding the Catholic church responsible is the popular association of witch-hunting with mass panic (akin to the mass devotion in forms of Catholic affective piety?), top-down oppressive structures (see the prosecution of witches in the courts as connected to the inquisitorial process), and misogyny; all common features of medievalist understandings of society, politics, and religion in the middle ages.2

I’m also interested in alternative explanations for the historiography of witch-hunting. For example, Ronald Hutton (probably the dominant authority on witchcraft, magic, and paganism in the English academy) finds battles over the French Enlightenment the centre for intellectual, historical explanations of the witch-hunting craze. Initially, as elites ceased to believe in the literal guilt of witches and the possibility of magic there was a:

“shift of opinion invited the verdict that they had been a huge and tragic error, for which somebody had to be blamed. This was exactly the opportunity taken by the Enlightenment philosophers, especially Voltaire and the authors of the Encyclopédie. They used the trials as a stick with which to beat traditional religious beliefs and established churches.”

This challenge was then met by reactionaries who instead argued witches were, again, not literally magic but instead “members of a persisting pagan religion…a disgusting one of sexual orgies and blood sacrifices, so that the traditional powers in church and state had been right to stamp it out.” Think a 17th Century Pizzagate.

And once again, another turn in the dialectic:

“This argument in turn required a response from the populist and anticlerical radicals of the mid-nineteenth century. The most famous was provided by the Frenchman Jules Michelet, who responded using a tactic which saved him the trouble of much actual research, by admitting the case but reversing the sympathies. He declared that witches had indeed been pagans, but that their religion had been a generally good one. It had honored women, loved the natural world, been rooted in the common people, and upheld religious and political freedoms against the repressive powers of medieval clerics and magistrates.”3

This cannot be separated from nation-building, see the Victorian/Edwardian assertion that Morris dancing is a folk tradition recovered from the medieval, pagan, and decidedly English culture that lay below the church’s dogma.

I would argue that Hutton’s depiction of the third turn proposed by Michelet is closest to the dominant one today, with possibly the substitution of witches being persecuted for practicing traditional medicine or magics rather than being part of some definite pagan substrate.4 The substrate thesis touches on a lot of other medievalist assumptions, such as the concept of a ‘pagan holdover’ religion and the ‘superficially Christianised majority’ which have persisted both within and outside the academy for decades. Even otherwise excellent scholars slip into making these sorts of arguments. Paul Preciado’s seminal trans epic, Testo Junkie, (a book I think about all the time) deploys a similar sort of argument about the invention of sex in the early modern period which leans heavily on 1970s readings of the Malleus Maleficarum. Preciado is not a medievalist so I’m not going to make silly accusations of academic laziness, but it does indicate a kind of ideology on witch-hunting that I find a bit flimsy and Victorian. More directly feminist histories of witch-hunting can also have the same pitfalls as they can fail to account for the large numbers of male witches, for example.

The kinds of arguments I find more compelling are those that connect the witch-hunting craze of the late medieval-early modern periods to other and earlier historical developments. R.I Moore’s classic The Formation of the Persecuting Society analyses the emergence of overlapping and connected persecutions against heretics, Jews, lepers, and homosexuals from the mid-tenth to the mid-thirteenth centuries as being evidence of more than just impassioned hatred of the ‘other’ (for a start the ‘other’ must first be defined by some authority in order to be ‘othered’) or the expression of a kind of reflexive, emotional barbarism. Moore himself does not argue too broadly about the causes of the Persecuting Society, so I would like to push his thesis a bit further than his intentions.

I maintain, but will argue elsewhere in more detail, that secular states and the Catholic Church in the later middle ages developed greater institutional sophistication where the law became an active, not passive, force to command the lives of the state’s peoples. As political centralisation allowed states to expand and more effectively rule over larger, more complex areas, it needed to scapegoat, persecute and repress deviants, minorities and the economically unproductive in the name of engendering social cohesion. Rather than being purely functionalist, we could also argue that the persecuting could have emerged as a result of the ‘shock’ of integration, a disgust borne of understanding that the ‘pure’ state was in fact a devilish mixture of peoples which then required a sort of social engineering to make reality match that which was ideal. This is more speculative, but these aren’t the last words I will write on such topics.

As someone with anarchistic sympathies, I want to line these ideas up with James C. Scott’s concept of Zomia. Outlined in The Art of Not Being Governed, Zomia is a region of upland Southeast Asia which has resisted state encroachment or exploitation by virtue of its impassibility and perceived lack of economic potential. Over the course of centuries, many peoples made conscious choices to flee to this area from states and the markers of its comings - literacy, tax collection, commerce, and rationalised agriculture. While my taking of Moore’s idea rests in the negative (the bad state) and Scott’s in the positive (what happens when we escape it?), each strand overturns the idea that the march of progress is only ever a good thing. For many, it is rather often the march of jackboots. Considering the vexed relationship between the medieval and modern worlds, see my first piece on this substack The Modern Medieval, we ought to take a critical stance to narratives of modernisation. In the same way, we can place past abuses within the structures and processes of past states in ways that deepen our understanding of modern injustices.

As a final thought, writing this piece has helped me understand how easy it is to accidentally launch into Catholic apologetics when writing about medieval history and its relationship to modernity. Much Protestant polemic writing has been deeply interesting in portraying the medieval Catholic church as a set of shackles that Europe had to shake off in order to achieve freedom (i.e. Protestant capitalism of course). In wanting to resist this narrative, it can be all too easy to forgive the crimes of the Catholic church both centuries ago and today. Instead, I wanted to use witches as a test case to examine how we can instead understand the state (or curia) of the medieval Catholic church as historically connected to the oppressive structures of today - that the Inquisition may not have burned witches per se, but it’s strategies and processes certainly did. It’s no coincidence that the term ‘witch-hunt’ has found common usage in modern politics. Instead of assigning blame for crimes committed centuries ago, it may be more productive to analyse how the systems we currently live in operate in similar ways for similar ends with similar results.

Founding Fathers

Two days after Christmas in 1922, the founding father of American medieval studies, Charles Homer Haskins, gave the Presidential Address to the American Historical Association. In it he argued that the American studying Europe must understand his (and at this point it is definitely ‘his’) task is to “tie Europe and America together in the popular mind”. For Haskins, the American historian intrinsically sees and writes of this connection, special in his understanding of interrelatedness of these “civilisations”. Uniquely equipped with this wisdom, American historians can see how, for example, “Karl Marx and Engels publish[es] their Communist Manifesto in… 1848, and two generations later Bolshevism appears in the lumber camps of the Pacific Northwest.”.1 Europe takes its place as an object of study for the American so that he (once again, always he) may understand his own country and, by extension, himself.

Three years earlier, in the summer of 1919, Haskins was lifted from his post as Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard to be one of three key advisers to Woodrow Wilson and his American delegation at the Paris Peace Conference. His positions, on the Commission on Belgium and Danish Affairs and of the Special Commission on Alsace-Lorraine and the Saar Valley,2 allowed him to essentially determine the American position of whether the Saarland (an especially coal-rich and industrially developed region of the Rhine valley, bordering on Luxembourg) should remain German or be given to the French mandate. Weighing the arguments of the Germans and the French regarding the ‘true’ historical, national and cultural character of the region, he decided that while the Germans had a stronger claim, the Saarland, and its coalfields, ought to be given to France as compensation for the French mines at Lens and Valenciennes that the German army deliberately flooded during the war.

At the very hinge point of US imperialism, when the transformation begun under Roosevelt of turning the Monroe Doctrine into a system of global power projection was reaching maturation, here was Haskins implementing Wilson’s Fourteen Points with pen and ruler on the boundaries of the Old World. America’s influence on the course of the Paris Peace Conference was enormous. The US was Britain’s main creditor (the British government debt reached 143% of GDP by 1918-19) and stood as the only great power untouched by the devastation that had swept Europe.

With such a strong hand, Woodrow Wilson allowed a Harvard medievalist to have an enormous influence in determining US foreign policy and the borders of America’s wartime allies and enemies.3 Haskins, a historian primarily of the Norman state and twelfth century culture and science, also felt confident enough in his position and expertise to reject the German claims to the Saarland out of hand.

The strength of this connection between the US government and the cutting edge of American scholarship only feels like a contradiction or an oddity considering their current, seemingly intractable, antagonism. Yet, for most of American history the same ideas which have motivated and directed academic study in the humanities have also directed US government policy domestically and internationally. Medieval history, as strange as it may seem, has never been immune from these developments.

-

If you will allow me, please put a pin in 1919 while we rush forward 45 years and 1 world war to 1954 and the desk of Haskin’s protege and successor, Joseph R. Strayer. Chair of the History Department at Princeton, Strayer received a short note from fellow Princeton alumnus, and current head of the CIA, Allen W. Dulles (class of 1914) asking him to write “a letter as long and as detailed as your time permits, giving your analysis of the Board of National Estimates and your suggestions as to steps that could be taken to improve it.”. Dulles assured Strayer that his letter can be divided into two parts; part one can be given to the other men who are working on “the problem” and part two will be for Dulles’ eyes only.

This was not Strayer’s only encounter with the CIA. He continued to work, fairly enthusiastically, for the agency for twenty years, from at least 1953 until the early 1970s. Strayer’s old PhD student, the prickly historian and intellectual Norman F. Cantor remembers Strayer spending “five days a week” at CIA HQ for at least five summers. During the academic year Cantor would receive phone calls at 10:00pm from Strayer asking him to give the next morning’s lecture because he was preoccupied with international crises in “Lebanon or Pakistan or wherever”. Cantor gives us one clue as to why the CIA would want to consult a Princeton medievalist for insight into international conflicts; “Allen Dulles knew medievalists were used to drawing conclusions from fragmentary evidence, and that is just what the CIA did”.4

Like Haskins, who founded the canonical American journal of medieval studies Speculum and coined the concept of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance, Strayer has had an enormous influence on subsequent scholarship. His students are legion in the US academy,5 and his book The Medieval Origins of the Modern State (1978) is a classic of historical sociology on the state and statecraft. Despite this, and as far as I could find anywhere, there is no dedicated analysis of the connections between American medieval studies’ two dads and the US intelligence and foreign affairs apparatus.

American medieval studies ventured far from the academic ivory tower and was invited into the corridors of power, from Paris to Washington DC. By following these threads, we find that American medievalists intertwined themselves in the various phases of American imperialism in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, at least up to the Nixonian schism between the academy and the US government in the late 1960s. In contrast to the contemporary scapegoating of American universities by the US government, these institutions have been historically complementary, interlinked, and mutually reinforcing (but not just for the US, clandestine connections between the British government and Oxbridge are centuries old). While we may expect such connections in legal departments or amongst political scientists and economists, what was it that made American medieval history in the 20th Century attractive for US foreign policy, intelligence, and statecraft?

The Age of Innocence

In the spring of 1893, economic panic brought the Gilded Age crashing down. 500 banks closed, unemployment hit 35% in New York and the railroad bubble which had fueled domestic investment through the 1880s finally burst. Simultaneously, Chicago held the enormous ‘World’s Columbian Exposition’ (commonly known as the Chicago World’s Fair) to herald the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s ‘discovery’ of the Americas. Somewhere within the Fair, itself a hastily assembled maze of Beaux-Arts neoclassical grandeur, an unassuming young historian named Frederick Jackson Turner presented his very first public paper to an assembly of his peers. Entitled ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’, Turner expounded his theory that the USA took its unique historical character from the centuries-long conquest of the ‘wilderness’ in the form of Manifest Destiny and westward expansion.

He saw the frontier as providing the American people with a source of continual civilisational renewal. A long tradition of historians all the way back to Ibn Khaldun in the fourteenth century (but could also include Edward Gibbon and Oswald Spengler) wrung their hands over the appearance of endemic historical cycles where 1. a people settle, 2. develop civilisation and commerce, 3. expand, conquer, then 4. turn inwards and become selfish, decadent creatures, unconcerned with matters of state or general welfare until 5. their civilisation is conquered by a rough, austere (often nomadic) people who themselves resemble the initial group pre-settlement. Thus reversion back to 1. However, America, according to Turner’s ‘Frontier Thesis’, never became trapped within this cycle by virtue of its continual renewal through the frontier. The movements of population westward engendered:

“a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character.”6

But by declaring it so, and designating it as a feature of historical development, Turner proclaimed the American frontier closed and this period which defined ‘the American character’ over. The Panic of 1893 brought a new urgency to the situation. Did the economic slump presage the beginning of a new downturn caused by the depletion of the once ‘unlimited’ supply of cheap land for new settlers to expropriate, colonise, and exploit? And would America become trapped in the cycles that had tormented the rest of civilisation from Babylon to Achaemenid Persia, Alexandrian Macedon to Rome, from the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates to the Mongols?

One answer to these existential questions came in that very same year with the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii by American imperial interests (a mix of Protestant missionaries and representatives of the Dole Fruit Company) supported by the Secretary of State John W. Foster (remember the name) and a detachment of US Marines. If the land of the continental United States was exhausted, then the rest of the world, Atlantic and Pacific basins and beyond, must be pried open to American imperial exploitation. This post-Manifest Destiny phase of the US overseas power projection should not be understood as a clean break with history. Regional and global imperialism beyond the borders of the modern United States was never far from the Republic’s origins. After all, the US Marines’ Hymn begins “From the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Tripoli”, referring to the Mexican-American War of 1846-8 and America’s first foreign intervention against the Barbary Corsairs in Libya in 1805, respectively. But the intensity and scope of US imperialism overseas in this period set the pattern for at least the next century. In 1898 the US seized the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico and Cuba from Spain. By the onset of the First World War, the US had troops stationed across Latin America, from Mexico to the Rio Plata, in China and Korea, and had just initiated a brutal 19-year occupation of Haiti. Now US companies could command even greater raw materials and productive forces safe behind the shield of Uncle Sam.

But no empire is a happy empire. The ideological challenge of American exceptionalism during the global phase of High Imperialism (when the British Empire covered ¼ of the globe) still needed facing lest the nation collapsed inwards in fits of paranoid neurosis.7 American Progressivism stepped up to provide the ideological impetus. It emerged in the late 19th century, cobbled together from bits of Rooseveltian “speak softly and carry a big stick” militarist interventionism, an unshakeable faith in American liberty, general desires to restrain unfettered capitalism (at least at home and at least when it came to obvious corruption and monopolisation), paternalistic white supremacy, and movements towards scientific and technocratic management of the state and the economy. Progressivism became the de facto ideology of the newly educated upper middle class who, weaned in the boom years after the civil war, staffed the republic’s universities, financial institutions, law firms, government offices, and industrial concerns. Their president’s were Teddy Roosevelt (1901-9), Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921) and, later, Franklin D. Roosevelt (1932-1945).

Frederick Jackson Turner belonged to the class of Progressive new men who emerged into public life as the American state turned from the Gilded Age to a new imperial phase of overseas power projection and wider participation in the global economy. Taking America into the 20th Century required matching the imperial powers of the old world in every way, from coal and iron production to advances in academia and high culture, a national striving to beat the spectre of the declining curve implied by the Frontier thesis.

Charles Homer Haskins

Charles Homer Haskins took up this Progressive challenge in a quite unexpected way. Born in 1870 in Pennsylvania, Haskins was a child prodigy, learning Latin and Greek by age 7 and receiving a PhD from Johns Hopkins aged only 20.8 He then left the US to study in Europe and became one of the first American historians to be educated in medieval history in France at the L’Ecole des Chartes in Paris. His background and his work displayed the ideological combination of early twentieth century progressivism, a Turnerist understanding of state formation and social renewal, and German historical positivism.

Haskin’s historical writings can be split into two main groups. The first (up to 1919) saw Haskins focused on the Norman state in northern France, England and Sicily, as he sought to explain the development and success of Norman legal structures and methods of government from the tenth through to the twelfth centuries. Most of his sources were court rolls, legal documents, and charters; the boring stuff of political history. Rather than attempt a close reading of his scholarship, which I desperately want to avoid because it’s really very boring, I’d rather analyse how he fit the Normans into the academic and political culture of his age.

A good example of this comes from Cantor who is very direct on why Haskins decided to study the Normans:

“Haskins was going to find how another frontier-conditioned society, medieval Europe, had developed. Specifically he was interested in administrative, governmental, and legal institutions and how they brought order and stability out of the fluid and frequently (in his eyes) chaotic conditions of a medieval society that, like the United States, long had open frontiers and cheap land for development…The Wilsonian instrumentalist ideal of the application of learned intelligence to government in a hitherto disordered society could be studied and affirmed in the medieval context…Haskins was going to use medieval history both to explain the American experience and to confirm what became the Wilsonian program for American reform and advancement.”9

In short, the Normans were the medieval model par excellence for placing the (Progressive) American state into historical context. If America was experiencing a period of imperial uncertainty at the time of Haskin’s historical work, then his analysis of the success of Norman institutions could assure the American student of history that the US would be able to drag itself out of the cycle of empires, but only if it could develop and maintain strong state institutions. After all, the Norman state was the precursor to the English state, and that was itself a precursor to the American state.10 With this historical lineage intact, so long as America worked alongside the ideals of Norman statecraft, American exceptionalism could continue unabated and undimmed. After all, like the Americans, the Normans were able to build and maintain a vigorous, expansionist and multi-ethnic state structure that Haskins was keen to emphasise lasted over a thousand years.11 These efforts to connect the Normans to the modern US are also deeply informed by Haskins’ attempts to distinguish medieval history within the American academy, to make it appealing to the young WASP elites that attended Harvard and their parents who formed its donor base.

Haskins' more famous second phase (1919-29) was informed by his understanding of the potential fruits of such structures, namely an oncoming American golden age supported by a strong, Progressive US federal government. This was his theory of the ‘Twelfth-Century Renaissance’. Specifically railing against Renaissance scholars such as the Swiss art historian Jacob Burckhardt (who had a familiarly gloomy view of the middle ages), Haskins argued that far from being a barbaric, historical backwater twelfth-century Europe was:

“The epoch of the Crusades, of the rise of towns, and of the earliest bureaucratic states of the West, saw the culmination of Romanesque art and the beginnings of Gothic art; the emergence of vernacular literatures; the revival of the Latin classics and of Latin poetry and Roman law; the recovery of Greek science, with its Arabic additions, and of much of Greek philosophy; and the origin of the first European universities. The twelfth century left its signature on higher education, on scholastic philosophy, on European systems of law, on architecture and sculpture, on the liturgical drama, on Latin and vernacular poetry.”12

Decades later, Strayer made a similar argument that stable, impersonal (as in bureaucratic) state institutions result in the flowering of culture, art, and learning in The Medieval Origins of the Modern State (more on that later), but this is an idea with strong foundations in Haskins’s work. So long as the United States could stay united, and the state stay strong and independent, anything would be possible. Even the racial tensions that wracked the United States throughout the 20th Century meant and would continue to mean very little to Haskinites. After all, Norman Sicily was a multi-ethnic state, populated with Normans, Italians and Berbers from North Africa. As good inheritors of this legacy, the US state would be able to manage these divides effectively.

What we have in Charles Homer Haskins is an explanation of a twelfth century kingdom to support the political imagination of a twentieth century empire. It is a discourse of genealogy and of origins where the distances of history could be reduced to nothing. By seeing himself and his peers in the words and deeds of long dead Normans, Haskins made the United States appear as a historical inevitability, an expression of intentions latent in the Norman mind.

In Journeys Through Medievalism, I want to take a larger view of historical ideologies like this one. Teleology often points to an end point somewhere in the future. Christian eschatology, for example, must indicate an apocalypse that is yet to come but clear enough in signs both present and historical. Conversely, historical teleologies like Haskins’s Progressivism can only imply an end to history (Fukuyama mention the second) where the present day is the climax of specific historical processes, rather than another stage which may itself be subject to the forces that have shaped the past. It sounds almost Hegelian, but Hegel was interested in the ‘why’ of history rather than just the ‘how’. The insidiousness of Haskinite history is its incuriosity about the motors of historical change and as it designates the emergence of the state as the inevitable actions of certain historical favourites. Normans were just built different, the ‘Norman Supermen’ as Cantor pithily puts it.

It is especially galling to understand this about Haskins, once again the foundation of American medieval studies, considering the excoriation of queer, feminist, critical race, Marxist, or otherwise liberatory histories as ‘political’ or ‘ideological’ in their attempt to use modern concepts when building an understanding of the past. All of the evidence that I have cited about Haskins points to a profoundly ideological and partial view of history that prioritises American exceptionalism and the primacy of the modern, bureaucratic state as the supreme form of political expression. This runs directly counter to his status as an arch-positivist, concerned only with the hardest of the hard evidence and a paragon of the rigorousness of humanities scholarship pre-1968 and the linguistic/cultural/postmodern (pick your favourite) turn. Is this the tradition that conservatives want academia to return to? Say what you will about New Historicism or the post-Foucault humanities, call it the ‘School of Resentment/Ressentiment’ all you like, it’s not using medieval history as boosterism for genocide, imperialism, and a government that considered segregation as evidence for it’s special national destiny.

These are the meanings that get smuggled into histories of medieval states which aim to glorify the nations which are constructed as their successors. To explore this in detail, next time we will take a closer look at Haskin’s work at the Paris Peace Conference to see how he decided to implement some of his concepts of medieval state building and the genealogy of the White Anglo-Saxon Race the Modern State Structure in post-WWI Europe. Remember, Haskins isn’t even the bad one! As promised in the introduction, we’ll also begin to explore his student, Joseph Strayer and connect the both of them to some of the major players in developing American foreign policy in the twentieth century. Hopefully, it won’t take us another 3000+ words to get there!