by Mary Jane Kelley, Ohio University
I spoke on this topic in October, 2015 at “The Cleric’s Craft: Crossroads of Medieval Spanish Literature and Modern Critique,” an international conference organized by Matthew Desing, Clara Pascual-Argente, and Robin Bower at the University of Texas at El Paso. My talk constituted a personal challenge to articulate why this school of thirteenth-century Spanish poetry might matter to those human beings who inhabit the 21st century. My comments generated a lively dialogue about what makes medieval literature relevant, and I offer a slightly revised version here in the hopes of stimulating more conversations on the topic.
When I started planning what I might say, I alternated between thinking I was onto a good idea and thinking that maybe everyone else in the room would already have a clear answer to the question. But since for me the answer wasn’t all that obvious, nor were the parts of it that seemed obvious crystal clear, I decided to challenge myself to articulate the value of a major part of my professional career over the last 30 or so years. I admit that in part I undertook this exercise due to a cynicism that occasionally creeps into my thoughts as I read too much narrowly-focused criticism. Here I might run the risk of insulting my audience if it weren’t for the fact that a great part of my cynicism was directed at my own work. Why am I writing about this stuff? What does it matter? However, I am now convinced that the exercise helped my cynicism abate (and I’ll get back to that later).
My basic question was, “What can one gain from reading the mester de clerecia?” The context in which I believe it is critical for each of us to articulate an answer to the question is the undergraduate humanities major. Our B.A. students, for the most part, are not going to write Ph.D. dissertations on thirteenth-century Spanish poetry and later participate in the scholarly dialogue through publication of articles and books. Instead, our students are future citizens of this society, and we are charged with helping them prepare for success in their personal lives, as professionals, and as members of a larger community. In my years as a professional in this field, I have come to believe strongly in the goals of a humanities education as preparation for life after the university. (And obviously, I’m not talking about the kind of utilitarian “preparation” that threatens many of our humanities disciplines in the academy today. Can I get a job? How much will I make?)
For me, the humanities major is about similarity and difference. Through our classes, we help students gain an understanding of the collective we of which each of us forms part. That understanding is predicated on recognition of difference – not everyone on this planet behaves in the same ways. It is through the recognition of difference that students come to understand themselves as individuals, as inhabitants of a specific region of the world, as participants in different levels of community. Those of us who work in language programs are lucky. We study others, differences, and we send our students abroad so they learn to adapt to unfamiliar situations and engage effectively with people of different backgrounds. The study of the mester de clerecia can serve these same goals well: if we can help students connect with the past, that process takes them beyond the limits of their own little world. It’s a way to introduce difference – diachronically as opposed to the synchronic difference students find when studying abroad.
In my experience, it’s not hard to get students to connect to the mester de clerecia texts. The stories that Gonzalo de Berceo or the author of the Libro de Alexandre tell are fascinating. Berceo’s stories are full of personal transgressions and supernatural interventions. The Alexandre has action and wonderful digressions such as the one that explains how to hunt and kill an elephant. When I first read medieval literature as a first-semester graduate student, I connected to the richness and liveliness of the stories and I got hooked because so much about those texts was different – different from what I had expected and different from my contemporary world. Our enthusiasm for these texts is based, to a certain extent, on an appreciation of the content, and as professors we can surely pass that enthusiasm on to our students as a first step. Then, we can ask our students to look more closely at the past that’s represented and find differences related to issues of supreme importance to our students’ future roles in society. Through comprehension of what’s represented in mester de clerecia texts, students can come to an understanding of their own society.
Some of the issues or categories of difference that mester de clerecia raises include, for example, communication and communications media. How does one reach others with a message? What media are available? Who has access to those media? Who has control? How is that control exercised? Who decides what information is disseminated? These questions reflect similarity in that they are important in our society today, yet the answers to those questions in the context of the thirteenth century are very different. Thirteenth-century Spain featured clerical control of the media. However, the switch from Latin to vernacular broadened the audience for these texts. In our society, the situation is much more complicated, but the answers to those questions are important. Who controls the media? Who decides what information gets put out there? Who has access on the receiving end of information? Do we live in a society with free exchange of ideas?
Other valuable questions for citizens of our society might include what constitutes a good/deviant life or what issues related to gender affect our lives. Or one could focus on what is a book and all the implications of difference that manuscript culture implies.
In addition to the issues themselves, the process of reading the mester de clerecia for how these issues are represented offers students the opportunity to read critically. The answers offered up by these very rich and diverse texts do not always coincide. There is ambiguity, multiplicity of perspectives, and instability of meaning. An appreciation of such textual characteristics is a goal of the university humanities major, and the mester de clerecia can lead students to that goal very well.
I encountered lots of food for thought on this topic through the requisite Google search. If you search “why study mester de clerecia,” you get nothing, but a search for “why study medieval literature” yields quite a few relevant hits: several outstanding articulations of answers to the question and others less so. Among the weakest examples are those that, instead of focusing on difference, attempt to connect with students or the general public by appealing to the lowest common denominator. For example, study.com has a video that serves as an introduction and orientation to an online course called, “Introduction to Medieval Literature.” The video is chock full of condescending, patronizing descriptions in what might be called, “roman paladino” of some of the most sacred figures in our field. So Caedmon’s Hymn, which the narrator explains is considered the first Old English literary text, becomes “super old.” The smiling narrator later refers to “a guy named The Venerable Beed” and she informs us that he was “a literate guy.” In the section on versification, she talks about “the caesura thing,” and in a final effort to convert medieval texts into something students might be able to relate to, she inevitably brings up the mead hall and tells us that it’s “where they hang out and drink.” This video represents the worst kind of pandering attempt to explain why medieval literature is relevant. Hey, they’re just like us. They’re just guys who drink and hang out. This is not the approach we want to be taking to Berceo’s monje beodo.
Several other websites tackle the question of medieval literature’s relevance to undergraduate students more successfully. Arthur Bahr is a literature professor at MIT, and in his video he refers to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and C.S. Lewis’s imaginative fiction as examples of ways that medieval literature can lead students to “engage in imaginative world building.” When they come up against the “strange” world of the Middle Ages it invites them to imagine that world. In my opinion, Bahr kind of drops the ball at that point and, instead of explaining why it’s important that they imagine other worlds (my idea of “difference”) he turns to questions of beauty – the search for beauty as a motivation or quest that we can fulfill in the context of medieval lit.
Melissa Snell’s “Why bother with Beowulf?” also gets close but perhaps misses the mark slightly. She talks about literature as history, meaning a way to learn how people lived back in the middle ages. She gives the example of food and castle life as depicted in Beowulf. For her, works of medieval literature are also morality pieces and represent ideas regarding how people ought to behave, but then she says, “which, in many ways, are like our own.” This may be true, but again, for me, it is the differences that are key. She ends with her best reason for reading medieval literature, which she explains is “its atmosphere.” She muses “when I read Beowulf (or whatever text), I feel as if I know what it was like to live in those days.” Am I being too obtuse if I want her to take that thought one more step and articulate why it matters?
Professor Thorlac Turville-Petre of the University of Nottingham has an online video titled “What’s the point of studying medieval literature?” in which he talks about manuscript culture: the process of creation, circulation, and the implications of the printing press. He refers to his endeavors as “the meticulous study of manuscripts,” both detailed study of the artifact and in order to discern what the words on the pages tell us about the medieval period. His talk becomes a bit of an academic lecture, but he ends with the idea that I developed above about similarity and difference: “study of medieval literature allows us to step outside our society and look at it from a distance.”
The best online approach to the question is a post on the blog “Quod she.” Here, Dr. Virago, the pseudonym taken by a very engaged professor of medieval literature, talks about “Why I teach medieval literature.” The post is not so much about why medieval literature is a worthy subject of instruction, but instead it’s a very personal statement about pleasure. Dr. Virago loves the texts she teaches, which she describes, in a nod to Old English alliterative verse, as “weird and wonderful.” That weirdness, or difference, leads the reader to pleasure, and pleasure inspires inquiry and study. Inquiry and study take students outside of themselves and their worlds. Dr. Virago reminds us that one of the most basic lessons one learns in college is that not everyone thinks like you. That lesson is key to the formation of the self, and medieval literature is full of lives not like our own. She ends with, “medieval literature offers students a view that is both broad and deep, possibilities they might otherwise not have known, for thinking, being, connecting and living. Possibilities for pleasure in unexpected places.” Dr. Virago is articulate, passionate, and thoughtful, and we should all read her blog before we go into our next class on mester de clerecia or any other medieval literary theme.
Several other websites, cited below in my list of resources, advocate making medieval studies relevant to the general public by connecting to contemporary news cycles. Richard Utz, in the Chronicle Review, argues that it’s time to “lower the drawbridge from the ivory tower and reconnect with the public.” Medievalists.net is an online magazine that posts articles readable by the educated public that have some resonance in our society. Publicmedievalist.com takes on issues, controversial in the public sphere today, and relates them to things medieval. So, for example, in the context of the current debates over the definition of marriage, an article asks, “Was Medieval Marriage ‘Traditional’?” Or in response to Qatar’s inhumane treatment of workers having been called “medieval,” an article explores what life really was like for medieval workers.
So, based on these arguments, should all undergraduate students fulfill a curricular requirement of one semester of medieval or mester de clerecia studies? No, of course not. I see study of our field as one avenue for achieving the goals of undergraduate humanities education. Universities must offer multiple ways for students to explore similarity and difference across the curriculum. Mester de clerecia is one valuable option.
The other part of my argument today is that we scholars need to keep that value in mind. The humanities are under attack, and we need to be able to articulate to a general audience the significance mester de clerecia and the Middle Ages have to a humanities education. It can’t just be about our dialogue with each other through articles and books. There has to be some value to that detailed scholarship greater than simply illuminating the meaning of a text. We need to go one step further and comprehend why the meaning of any given text is important.
If I can return to the cynicism I mentioned above, developing my thoughts for this piece helped me ward off cynicism. I strongly believe in the need for detailed analysis: picky, narrowly-focused studies of textual minutia, for us, the scholars. Mester de clerecia scholarship leads us to a profound and comprehensive understanding of a corpus of texts and their relationship to the society that produced them, and it keeps these texts alive with new readings and more precise philological approaches. Such understanding is necessary before we can share the mester de clerecia with a more general audience such as undergraduate university students, who will go on, after college, to participate productively and critically in our society. This rich and extensive body of literature we celebrated last fall in El Paso has a lot to offer, and that’s why we study the literature of the mester de clerecia.
Resources:
Bahr, Arthur. “Why Study Medieval Literature.”
Dinshaw, Carolyn. How Soon is Now? Durham: Duke UP, 2012.
“Introduction to Medieval Literature.” study.com
Menocal, Maria Rosa. Writing Without Footnotes: The Role of the Medievalist in Contemporary Intellectual Life. Binghamton: Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies, 2001.
Snell, Melissa. “Why Bother with Beowulf?“
Turville-Petre, Thorlac. “Why Study Medieval Literature?“
Utz, Richard. “Don’t be Snobs, Medievalists.” The Chronicle Review. 24 August 2015. http://www.chronicle.com/article/Dont-Be-Snobs-Medievalists/232539/. Accessed 25 November 2016.
Workman, Leslie J., Kathleen Verduin, David D. Metzger eds. Medievalism and the Academy, I. Studies in Medievalism 9. Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1997
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