Leeds Live Blog III: Unorthodox Beings Inhabiting Liminal Moments and Spaces

Figure 1. The Swamp of Sadness

by EILEEN JOY

In yet another Twitterific installment of live-blogging sessions at the Leeds Congress, I give you my Twitter posts from yesterday [Tuesday], when I attended the second session sponsored by the Mearcstapa group [Monsters: The Experimental Association for the Research of Cryptozoology through Scholarly Theory and Practical Application] and the Glasgow Centre for Medieval & Renaissance Studies:

Unorthodox Beings II: Inhabiting Liminal Moments and Spaces
Organizer and Moderator: Asa Simon Mittman [California State University, Chico]

"Torture and Orthodoxy in Late Medieval Hagiography"
Larissa Tracy [Longwood University, Virginia]

'The door immediately gave way': Heroes, Monsters, and the 'Contested Doorway' in Beowulf and Medieval Northern Literature"
Justin Noetzel [Saint Louis University, Missouri]

Teratology and Gynecology: Menstrual Fluid and Monsters in Pseudo Albertus Magnus's De secretis mulierum"
Sarah Alison Miller [Duquesne University, Pennsylvania]

And now Kat Tracy and torture and late medieval hagiography. [about 20 hours ago from Twitterrific]

Kat [Larissa] is interested in the interest in torture in hagiography and its relation to medieval law. [about 20 hours ago from Twitterrific]

Torture may have backfired and invited dissent against the Church. [about 20 hours ago from Twitterrific]

The images of the torture of saints at the hands of pagan inquisitors was deeply embedded in the medieval psyche. [about 20 hours ago from Twitterrific]

Vernacular hagiography may have established dangerous precedents of resistance which heterodox Church dissenters could have exploited. [about 20 hours ago from Twitterrific]

In other words, these narratives of torture could have provided models of heroic resistance which might have sustained accused heretics. [about 20 hours ago from Twitterrific]

Authority of Church versus heretics therefore becomes a fluid concept. [about 20 hours ago from Twitterrific]

This extended to the sphere of civil government. From romance [hagiography] to the political sphere, so to speak. Literature provided models of resistance. [about 20 hours ago from Twitterrific]

Waldensians, and Cathars, for example, could emulate the steadfastness of the saints. [about 20 hours ago from Twitterrific]

The use of real torture against heretics only reinforced their symbolic/real connections to early martyrs that they themselves claimed. [about 20 hours ago from Twitterrific]

Abuses of the actual legal rules on torture only further emboldened the populace in its distrust of judicial authority. [about 20 hours ago from Twitterrific]

Kat is drawing upon Daniel Baraz's work on medieval cruelty, which really is excellent work. [about 20 hours ago from Twitterrific]

And now Justin Noetzel on doorways as contested spaces in Beowulf and in medieval Scandinavian literature. [about 20 hours ago from Twitterrific]

Begins by recounting a saga ghost story about a woman in the larder--a ghost--who served food to visitors who were not treated well by the hosts. [about 20 hours ago from Twitterrific]

The doorway in this literature possesses power. This is related to ancient folktales where the door represents the last line of human defense against the outside world, including monsters. [about 20 hours ago from Twitterrific]

Since both humans and monsters possess houses with doors, they serve as uncanny doubles to each other. [about 20 hours ago from Twitterrific]

Do these doorways represent a form of nostalgia for a convivial domesticity that is always an object of violence and destruction? [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

The victory of the good guy is always uncertain in these fights that take place in domestic spaces. Hence, the grappling and wrestling [intimate/extimate combat in intimate spaces]. [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

These struggles are physically intimate: Justin now narrates Grettir's fight with the troll/ghost Glaumr, and of course Beowulf's two Grendelkin fights. [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

But we should be cautious in equating all of Beowulf's fights to each other, or to Grettir's. [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

Glaumr, for example, straddles an entire house, struggling to destroy the entire human edifice and everyone inside. [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

Beowulf and Grendel, however, straddle each other on the inside of the house. [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

In Beowulf, there is great emphasis on Grendel's violence to the hall's door. [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

Grendel literally pulls open the hall's mouth, which is like a predatorial ripping apart of the jaw of human culture. [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

But Grendel also tries to get through that same door when Beowulf has Grendel's shoulder in his grip. [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

In a sense, the monster has a better fighting chance on the outside. Grettir knows that Glaumr is more powerful outside. [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

This is why the mere is a more dangerous space for Beowulf than Heorot. [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

In one saga, a man asks to be buried standing up in his kitchen doorway where he can still control entry to his house and the larder after death. [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

There are actual door-courts in some sagas, where domestic property suits could be settled, but we have no evidence of these in reality.about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific

The dead are subject to the same legal statutes as the living in door-courts, which involve disputes with ghosts [typically about entry back into the house]. [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

Here is some "doorway wisdom" from Grettir's Saga: "peril waits at a man's door, though another goes in before.... [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

.... You should consider what fate you yourself will meet in the end." [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

And now Sarah Alison Miller and teratology and gynecology. [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

Menstrual fluid and monsters in Pseudo Albertus Magnus's De secretis mulierum. [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

This and other treatises like it purported to describe women's secret body parts/areas that were technically "out of bounds" and monstrous but also peculiarly attractive. E. Grosz: women's bodies encapsulate modes of seepage. [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

Women's bodies, similar to other monstrous bodies, escaped normal boundary markers-- they could not be contained. [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

Menstrual fluid demonstrated [to these medieval medical writers] how the woman's/monster's body threatens other bodies. [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

So-called monstrous births revealed the woman's body's potential to broach territories in frightening ways. [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

Menstrual fluid was seen as something that, if retained in the body too long, threatened the supposed "balance" of women's physiology. [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

Pseudo Albertus warns men against intercourse with menstruating women. [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

Commentators A and B go further and even accuse women of sometimes mutilating themselves with iron instruments in order to bleed from the inside and thereby poison their genitals and sexual partners. [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

Okay--seriously, this is difficult to listen to. Let's pause to consider my Hermes tie. [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

Okay; breathe. [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

Pseudo Albertus appears to be more generous in his commentary than the commentators A and B. [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

Fetal deformities are associated with women's unnatural sexual practices. Again: this is Commentators A and B, not Psuedo Albertus. [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific ].

Commentator A recommends women lie 100% still during and after sex in order to not disturb the proper position of the man's seed. [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

Yay: my favorite position. Lying still, like a corpse. [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

These hysterical responses/reactions to women's bodies is a reaction to the abjection of ALL bodies and subjectivities, and maternal bodies especially threaten the splitting of the self [pace Kristeva]. [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

And therefore, in these treatises, what is most familiar [our bodies, and even our mothers' bodies] becomes, by a strange conversion, monstrous: the monster is YOU. [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

Q and A: Mary Kate Hurley asks Justin if a doorway says that, on the outside, is chaos. Invokes role of Janus on Roman doorways. [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

Mary Kate: Is the classical figure of chaos a kind of precursor to later medieval monsters? [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

Some really interesting dialogue with Sarah on abjection and whether or not we can ever say we could be BEFORE or after abjection. Likely not. [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

Julie Orlemanski asks Kat if torture was less of a problem in England than on the Continent? [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

Kat says torture in South English Legendary is horrific, likely because real torture was not allowed under English law until Henry VIII. [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]