Kzoo 2018 cfp: Elections before Elections

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

A call for papers for a Special Session at the 53rd International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, MI (May 10-13, 2018). E-mail 250-word abstracts to eric.weiskott@bc.edu by September 15, 2017.

Elections before Elections: Insular Political Prophecy

Inspired by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century Prophecies of Merlin, the tradition of political prophecy in Britain covered numerous centuries and languages, from the twelfth century to the seventeenth and from Welsh to English, French, Latin, and Scots. The genre of political prophecy combines conventionality and topicality in unfamiliar ways, presenting the recent political past as an imagined future and serving (sometimes simultaneously) as political propaganda and social protest. Relatively understudied, prophecies are often unedited and are to be found in large, incompletely catalogued manuscript collections. The publication of Victoria Flood’s Prophecy, Politics and Place in Medieval England (2016), a major study, marks renewed interest in this strange and urgent mode of writing. Political prophecy has obvious relevance to contemporary national politics, particularly regarding the relationship between political discourse and truth (notably, in the outrage over fake news in the wake of the 2016 U.S. presidential election) and the rhetorical use of the future for political purposes.

This session will solicit papers addressing a general scholarly audience, concerning political prophecy in Latin or any of the vernaculars of Britain, the manuscript tradition of prophecy, and medieval insular politics. Possible topics include: regnal politics and propaganda; the history and politics of individual texts; regionalism; multilingualism; the relationship between writing and medieval insular (proto-)national politics; new texts discovered in the archives; prophecy and other genres of writing; texts and manuscripts as evidence for social history; and literary form.

the problem of modernity

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

My essay, “English Political Prophecy and the Problem of Modernity,” appears in “Prophetic Futures,” edited by Katherine Walker and Joseph Bowling: a special issue of postmedieval. I thank them for including it. The essay is a version of the first chapter of my current book project. Here is the opening:

A nineteenth-century note in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 1835 (late sixteenth/early seventeenth c.), f. vr, offers a hypothesis and a censure:

It is probable that a great part of the subjects of this volume are in the hand writing of Ashmole himself copied from printed tracts – – at least, for the greater part – He was exceedingly superstitious, and beleived in phrophecies, visions, and various absurdities. Yet this man was the founder of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford –

The hypothesis is correct. Elias Ashmole (1617-1692), astrologer and antiquarian, copied some of the later items in this collection of English political prophecy (Clapinson and Rogers, 1991, 32). Ashmole’s belief in ‘absurdities’ appears here as supplementary paleographical evidence: this was the sort of material he would copy. Moving beyond the logic of scribal attribution, the conjunction Yet registers a discrepancy between political prophecy and modernity. The two cohabited in the mind of Ashmole, a collector of medieval arcana and the founder of the University of Oxford’s premier scientific institution. Many of Ashmole’s surviving manuscripts contain political prophecies. Four are organized around the genre: Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ashmole Rolls 26 (olim Ashmole 27) (late fifteenth c.) and MSS Ashmole 337, pt. V (late sixteenth/early seventeenth c.); 1386, pt. III (late sixteenth/early seventeenth c.); and 1835.

With the clarity of an obiter dictum, the note in Ashmole 1835 expresses the historical stakes of English political prophecy. The author of the note distances nineteenth-century modernity from an alchemical seventeenth century, just as Ashmole’s antiquarian activities ostensibly distance his modern present from the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. Yet, in consigning political prophecy to the past, the note joins a long line of anxious literary activity surrounding the genre, extending back beyond Ashmole’s life to the centuries that the nineteenth-century notator would recognize as ‘medieval.’ From 1150 to 1650, political prophecy was always dangerous, and it always belonged to the past. Ironically, for a twenty-first-century reader, the invocation of a defunct literary genre, like the spellings beleived and phrophecies, marks the Ashmole note itself as the product of an earlier era. Political prophecy has disappeared from the literary landscape, even as a target of derision.

the false equivalence of ‘false equivalence’

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

Comparing Trump to his predecessors doesn’t have to mean equating them

During the Wars of the Roses, English subjects were forced to pick sides in an ongoing dispute over the throne. Edward IV, the Yorkist candidate, and Henry VI, the Lancastrian candidate, each ruled England for two separate periods in the 1460s and 1470s. The Wars divided families, intensified regional rivalries, and accorded special political power to members of the nobility–such as Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, who switched allegiances twice.

The intensity of political partisanship in the 1460s in England was remarkable, but in 2017 in the United States a similar partisanship is normal. The two-party system has polarized public opinion on a wide range of issues. The laundry list of political and especially social topics on which voters must now hold fierce opinions doubtless would have struck early 20th-century Americans (not to mention 15th-century English citizens) as bizarre. There can be false equivalence between positions on either side of the partisan divide; but there can also be false equivalence between criticizing both sides and ‘false equivalence’ itself. The second point is important, because it opens space for historical analysis.

The polarization of public opinion is constantly enforcing the presumption that every issue has two sides. So people imagine an “alt-left” to mirror the (self-styled) alt-right. (There is no alt-left.) So people cling to a scientifically grounded denial of anthropogenic climate change to neutralize the scientific consensus that humans are heating up the Earth. (The very few scientists who deny climate change tend to be bankrolled by the fossil fuel industry.)

Thus, with good reason, the charge of false equivalence. Yet in other cases, the charge of false equivalence obstructs meaningful analysis.

Take, for example, Egyptian authoritarian Sisi’s visit to the White House last month and Trump’s praise for him. Liberals were horrified by the visit itself and particularly by Trump’s effusive comments. Republicans, leftists, and independents, meanwhile, recalled Obama’s sale of billions of dollars of military weapons to Egypt under Sisi, after briefly suspending the arrangement. Republicans, as I take it, made this argument cynically, to exculpate Trump. Leftists and independents, as I take it, made the argument critically, to highlight continuity in the U.S.’s hypocritical stance toward Egypt under both the Obama and Trump administrations. As Sharif Kouddous put it:

I think [Sisi’s recent visit] also begs the question of how much the actual U.S. relationship will change, because we have to realize that Obama, before him, echoed decades of U.S. policy towards Egypt, which prioritizes perceived national security interests over human rights and rule of law.

Both arguments, from the left and the right, were met with charges of false equivalence from centrists who oppose Trump. But there is no real equivalence between the Republican argument in this case, which is false equivalence, and the leftist/independent argument, which connects Obama and Trump not to equate them but to place Trump’s actions in historical context. It’s only the hyperpartisanship of public discourse in 2017 that makes criticism of Obama seem like it must entail assent to Trump.

Rather, for many observers, better than Donald Trump is too low a bar at which to set evaluation of political leaders. Between better than Donald Trump and good Kouddous and others see a vast space in which to wreak havoc at home and abroad.

This is an important argument to advance if you believe that Trump is not an alien incursion into the status quo–a belief shared by the U.S. center-left and center-right (glumly) and by the far right (joyously)–but is in fact a result of the status quo. If you believe Trump is the distilled expression of militarist impulses that have always defined U.S. foreign policy, then you will want to be able to point that out without ceding ground for dissent in less flagrant cases.

Political discourse in the comparative mode (better than…, at least s/he’s not…) will always be limited by the pieties and blind spots of partisanship. In the 1460s and 1470s, English subject whipped themselves into a fervor supporting one of two candidates for the throne (whose policies, from this historical retrospect, appear more or less interchangeable). It is urgently necessary that it remain possible to hold in the mind two analogous but different criticisms, one on each side of the aisle, simultaneously.