ABSTRACT To introduce the major interventions of this special issue, this essay turns to Imani Perry’s theorization of witchcraft and art making in her groundbreaking book, Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation (2018). By associating witches with non-normative generation, Perry’s work attests to the feminist forms of creativity and vulnerability that a variety of literary texts imagine across the Middle Ages. While witches are reviled in many didactic examples, the case of Margery Jourdemayne, the Witch of Eye--who was burned as a witch in 1441 for her role in the downfall of Eleanor Cobham, Duchess of Gloucester--shows how women’s endangerment disrupts but also enlivens traditions of women’s knowledge associated with “natural magic.”

ABSTRACT This article argues that the ambiguity and scarcity of the evidence for the existence of the Black Madonna before the year 1500 need not prevent medievalists practicing premodern critical race studies from pursuing further study of her early history. Applying the work of Cord Whitaker on the “shimmer of blackness” in the medieval archive and of Karin Vélez on the mutability of the coloration of the Madonna across time and space, I make the case that the textual record on either side of 1500, before and after, bears witness to the Black Madonna according to discernible, coherent, and continuous rhetorical patterns, although in ways that are shimmeringly ambiguous. This record describes the Black Madonna by means of a consistent grammar of euphemism, circumlocution, negation, insinuation, and paradox that associates her darkness with materiality, mystery, and miraculous power. I trace these patterns across commentary on the Black Madonna ranging from the thirteenth to the twenty-first century, focusing in particular on the histories of Our Lady of Walsingham and Our Lady of Willesden.

ABSTRACT In this article I consider, through the example of mouvance, both Roland Barthes’s engagement with medieval culture and the contribution that medievalists can make to Barthes studies. The term mouvance was proposed by Paul Zumthor to account for textual instability in a pre-print age of often anonymous texts. Barthes uses Zumthor’s term twice, in a lecture from Comment vivre ensemble (How to Live Together) given on February 2, 1977. Focusing on these occurrences, I show how Barthesian mouvance shares with Zumthor’s definition an emphasis on instability, while also acting as a gloss on one of Barthes’s own terms: idiorrythmie (idiorrhythmy). Barthes’s use of the term mouvance is one striking example of his own engagement with contemporary medieval scholarship. Yet I also argue that mouvance, for Barthes, is a matter of form as much as content. Accordingly, I suggest that medievalists, and the notion of mouvance, can help respond to editorial challenges surrounding Barthes’s work, especially in the case of posthumously published texts with oral origins that exist in several different versions.

ABSTRACT This article brings Petrarch’s (1304–74) lyric poetry into dialogue with Barthes’s notion of “idiorrythmie” (idiorrhythmy) as outlined in his lecture course Comment vivre ensemble (How to Live Together). It explores both the idiorrhythmic aspects of Petrarchan desire and the traits of lyric utterance through which they are expressed, with a focus on canzone 126 of Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Fragments of Vernacular Things). The article begins with a study of Barthes’s exposition of idiorrhythmy: its medieval origins in the monastic communities of Mount Athos and the productively unstable and improvised character of the “living together,” and apart, that it implies. Most significant for the analysis that follows is idiorrhythmy’s relationship to eros, Barthes’s idea that idiorrhythmy preserves a space for the body’s desires in opening to interruptions, deviations, and digressions. The remainder of the article offers a close reading of Petrarch’s Rvf 126, focusing on one image in the poem that, like Barthes’s idiorrhythmy, is rooted in fantasy and embraces errancy: the image of a flower that turning and falling around the poet’s beloved seems to speak of love.

ABSTRACT This article turns to Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors (1594) in order to revise critical accounts of globalization and to propose a contrasting notion of “world” as a function of affective experience, collective narration, and virtual witnessing. Shakespeare’s play captures how a newly global imaginary was beginning to disrupt many of the foundations of personal identity and the familiar reference points of the worlds that sustained it. The Comedy of Errors acknowledges the integrative effects of a globalizing system while also emphasizing its multiply-centered, regional specificity; Shakespeare models not a single, totalizing globality but a plurality of worlds characterized by continuous rupture, reconfiguration, and an ongoing state of in-betweenness. Not only does the play illuminate a non-Eurocentric view of globalization but it explores the alienation that attends migration and displacement at a global scale and the ways these movements mark the body for violence and refigure the human relationships that bond people together. In doing so, the play reveals an experience of exclusion that is constitutive of race insofar as its somatic determinations follow a logic that is both incomprehensible and absolute. The play also demonstrates how dramatic processes of collective story-telling and mutual witnessing can re-world both subject and community alike, showing us how “globalization” is an historically-contingent iteration of “worlding” that is neither static, inevitable, nor permanent.

ABSTRACT In 1924, W. W. Greg referred to the twelve illuminations of London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero A.x. as “queer pictures.” Greg’s provocative description of these images serves as the foundation for a reconsideration of the manuscript’s much maligned visual program. By first attending to the affectively negative and highly aestheticized terms which have come to be associated with the images, such as “crude” and “amateur,” this article argues for the reconsideration of the implications of such language. In doing so, it provides a means of understanding how such language reinforces notions of aesthetic and sexual normativity. It likewise explores the role of Cleanness — one of the four poems copied into MS Cotton Nero A.x. — in establishing an aesthetic dialectic which pervades the manuscript object itself. In juxtaposing the “fayre formez” of God’s court and the “dedez vnfayre” ascribed to sexual deviancy, the poet of Cleanness fashions a dialectic which highlights the co-constitutive interplay of cleanness and filth in the medieval religious imagination. This article ultimately contends that the “crudity” of the illuminations represents a complex understanding and deliberate extension of the poet’s textual dialectic which is predicated on the careful suggestion of sin and explicit depiction of God’s judgment.

Recent calls to decolonize the curriculum have both built on work done over the past two decades in premodern studies and challenged it to go further. Particularly in light of the United States’ co...

ABSTRACT Cynewulf’s Juliana has long been the subject of feminist criticism, particularly focusing on the moments when Juliana claims power and agency in enclosure, even in her imprisonment. This article reevaluates Juliana’s claims to power and agency from the perspective of modern critical theory and pragmatics, arguing that Juliana uses place-deixis to claim her body as a sovereign space, challenging the secular and political authority imposed upon her by her pagan father, her fiancé, and the emperor. These authorities force Juliana to move physically — first from her household, then to court, and then to different locations where she is tortured and imprisoned. However, her bodily movement contrasts not only with her spiritual fixity, but with her continuing sovereignty over the space of her body. Place-deixis and spatial imagery work with references to God’s all-encompassing physical presence to redefine “power the relationship” and dwarf the limited authority that earthly authorities seem to wield.

ABSTRACTAt once omnipresent and undertheorized, genre is what nobody really believes in but everyone tacitly relies upon, whether they are writing literary criticism or consulting a pull-down menu on Netflix. Taking up the portable slogan of Jacques Rancière, that politics is itself a “distribution of the sensible” (partage du sensible), and placing it in dialogue with Rosalie Colie’s assertion that genre systems offer a “fix” upon the world, this article argues for an understanding of genre as an affective filter that enacts a politics of perception, opening and closing down avenues of recognition, feeling and allegiance, encouraging identification in some directions while discouraging it in others. Sir Philip Sidney’s discussion of the “mongrel” form of tragicomedy in the Defense of Poesy is juxtaposed with the varieties of actual dramatic practice of early modern playwrights (including Lyly, Preston, and Shakespeare, who wrote across generic boundaries) in order to assess what a Rancière-inflected genre theory might look like.