About an Article by Paul Strohm

It seems the new year is off to a slow start...

On 24 January 2014, the online version of The Guardian published Paul Strohm's "Who Was Chaucer?" In the article, Strohm offers a brief biography of the Well of English Undefiled, one tailored for public consumption, partly as a way to advertise his more comprehensive treatment of the poet's life and partly as a way to discuss the interaction of life experience and artistic performance. The biography provided in the article is a useful summary of Chaucer's life, and the commentaries embedded alongside it do well to point out not only the context in which the poet worked and in which his work has been studies, but also the enduring relevance of the poet and his work.

Seeing such commentary, and in a major public venue such as The Guardian, is a comfort, particularly when the study of the medieval is under attack. Recently, the Modern Language Association of America proposed to collapse several of the early English units into one, coalescing them into an amorphous mass stretching across at least a millennium and multiple languages in its treatment. While the proposal was rejected (at least in the short term), it bespeaks a prevailing lack either of understanding of or consideration for the complexities of the slippery and difficult thing that is the medieval. (It also touches upon other concerns noted as of particular interest to individual members of the Society, about which more in another post.) If one of the major scholarly bodies seeks to act against detailed and specific study of the medieval, it bodes ill for those of use who make that study our own--as well as for those who are scholars of the medievalist rather than the medieval, proper, since medievalist study relies on accurate understandings of the antecedent medieval.

For Strohm, then, to highlight the multiplicity of voice and genre in Chaucer, as well as the resonance his works still carry for twenty-first century readership, serves as a corrective. It functions to remind the public--from which academia all too often and all too unfortunately seeks to distance itself, as scholars noted earlier suggest--that what has been done is still being done, so that what has been written is still relevant, still applicable. It still offers readers an image of how things might be improved though its distillation of what is less than desirable--and if there are problems in its depictions, there are certainly problems not only in current depictions that seek to coalesce or elide broad swaths of peoples and histories or in the all-too-real interactions of people with people in the world now.

About _The Year's Work in Medievalism_ 28

On 15 December 2014, the International Society for the Study of Medievalism released Volume 28 of its journal The Year's Work in Medievalism online.* The volume is a special issue, Medievalism Now, one that seeks, in the words of editor E.L. Risden as he introduces the volume, to bring "marginalized medievalism into the center of our [scholarly] vision." In doing so, it deploys articles from Valerie B. Johnson, Amy S. Kaufman, Elena Levy-Navarro, Nickolas Haydock, Kevin Moberly and Brent Moberly, E.L. Risden, Karl Fugelso, Carol L. Robinson, Jesse G. Swan, Helen Young, and Richard Utz to argue for an expansion of medievalism's formal concerns and the body of scholars, professional and amateur, who contribute to the still-burgeoning field.

Valerie B. Johnson's "Ecomedievalism: Medievalism's Potential Futures in Ecocriticism and Ecomaterialsim" argues convincingly that medievalist study will benefit from deploying the tools common to ecocritical approaches. The article offers a useful list of readings that engage intersections that can be termed "ecomedieval," helping ease entry into their study and pointing out the contested nature of both ecocritical approaches and medievalism. The reminder that the environment is a long-standing socio-cultural concern is useful.

Amy S. Kaufman's "Lowering the Drawbridge" lays out (again) the tensions between the academic humanities and the "useful" world and between proximal disciplines. The article posits that medievalism itself remains a marginal, liminal space, partaking of multiple disciplines but welcomed by none, and finding itself marginalized in part because it is liminal not only within academic but also between it and the "regular" world. That it is one of the few disciplines in which amateurs are welcomed and even embraced vitiates against it for those who occupy the more traditional ivory tower. Medievalist studies are optimally poised to break down the barriers surrounding that tower, or at least to open additional gates in them through the resurgence of the medieval in entertainment culture and social structures.

Elena Levy-Navarro's "A Long Parenthesis Begins" argues that medievalist study needs to be more open to and accepting of non-professional scholars as a means to keep itself fresh and identify and explicate the connections--sometimes seemingly tenuous--upon which it depends. Opening up medievalist inquiry to more minds also allows for a richer historiography, one that rejects the absolutes of periodic and disciplinary boundaries to create a living understanding of how the world continues to use what it has used before.

Nickolas Haydock's "Medievalism and Anamorphosis: Curious Perspectives on the Middle Ages" points out how recapitulations of medieval figures and tropes in succession serve to highlight the unattainability of medieval ideals and of the ambiguous nature of those ideals themselves. In the article, refigurings serve to obscure, not only among receptions of the medieval but in the medieval itself. It is a useful reminder of the continuity of cultural fixtures, although the fixtures themselves are perhaps not ideal for continuation.

Kevin Moberly and Brent Moberly contribute "There Is No Word for Work in the Dragon Tongue," which explicates the manner in which The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim reinscribes the removal of medievalist treatments from the material conditions of the medieval. It also likens that removal to current first-world concerns of removal from production. Manual labor is distinctly non-privileged in the game as in the cultures of which it ostensibly partakes and among which its intended player-base is. It, along with other medievalist popular works, reflects the tension between nostalgia for "good, honest work" and the non-desire to actually do that work, and it calls for a better reflection of the actuality of that work in future medievalist works. (Notably, the Moberlys' article can be read against Johnson's to good effect.)

E.L. Risden's "Miyazaki's Medieval World: Japanese Medievalism and the Rise of Anime" notes that medievalism in Asia is insufficiently examined by scholars of medievalism. Miyazaki's 1997 film Princess Mononoke is used as a case study for how Japanese medievalism might function and be explicated; other works are suggested for further study. Risden's comments speak to something that this webspace has also addressed, and they could well serve as an impetus for treatments of other works entirely.

Karl Fugelso's "Embracing Our Marginalism: Mitigating the Tyranny of a Central Paradigm" reminds readers that any kind of centering motion necessarily implies a fluidity of categorization that vitiates against the effectiveness of categorization. The article highlights the liminality of medievalist study that derives from its disciplinary heterodoxy, but notes that even within the field, there is a centralizing push that unfortunately excludes too many. Some is structural; Fugelso makes the telling comment that "There is simply not enough time, space, energy, and money to air everyone's work, much less give it equal billing, much less make it easily accessible" to highlight that structural limit. Some, though, is merely the result of habit--and that habit is a dangerous thing to maintain for medievalism as a field.

Carol L. Robinson, a valued Tales after Tolkien Society member, contributes "The Quest for a Deaf Lesbian Dwarf (or Anyone Else that Might Have Been Excluded) in Medievalist Video Games: A Response to Karl Fugelso's Manifesto." In it, she argues that the exclusionary and oppressive practices seen in medievalist video games parallel and reinscribe those in medievalist studies as a whole, and that redress of them needs to be "radical, dramatic, abrupt, and thus acutely innovative." The reinscription derives from earlier receipt of benefits from the inscription, and the duty incumbent on medievalists is to reclaim those benefits in the service of a greater inclusivity and diversity of treatment.

Jesse Swan's "Relazation and Amateur Medievalism for Early Modernity: Seeing Sir Henry Yelverton as a Woman in Love and a Bureaucrat Threatened in the 1621 Parliament" takes the uncommon approach of explicating earlier medievalisms, likening the treatment of Yelverton to the treatment of Spencer and Gaveston in then-popular media. Although an elided preposition distracts, the explication of an earlier medievalism is of interest and serves as a reminder that the Middle Ages have long served as a lens through which to examine current culture. The article's early comments about relaxation enabling inquiry are also helpful, recalling Asimov's "The Eureka Phenomenon."

Tales after Tolkien Society founder Helen Young's "Place and Time: Medievalism and Making Race" continues her project of explicating the multiracial nature of medieval Europe and arguing in favor of reflecting that multiracial nature in medievalist works. The article references the common assertion of the Middle Ages as a generative time for racial and national identities, marking nation-building as an iteration of medievalist practice, and argues that the purported lack of a medieval, or of an interesting medieval, among non-European peoples accounts in part for the drive to subjugate them. The implication is one Young has made explicit before (here and elsewhere): medievalist scholars have a duty to correct the abuses perpetuated by medievalist materials.

The volume concludes with Richard Utz's "Can We Talk about Religion, Please? Medievalism's Eschewal of Religion, and Why It Matters." The article contrasts the notable lack of religious discussion in medievalist scholarship with the wide range of materials it tends to cover. Utz posits that the lack stems in part from uncertainty about how to treat religion, informed by disciplinary and periodic divisions as well as an undercurrent of anti-theistic thought (evoking Michael-John DePalma's December 2011 CCC article "Re-envisioning Religious Discourses as Rhetorical Resources in Composition Teaching: A Pragmatic Response to the Challenge of Belief"). It is, in Utz's view, a lack that needs to be redressed.

The eleven articles combine to present an impressive collective call to expand medievalist studies and will certainly undergird no small number of projects that aim to answer that call. The Year's Work in Medievalism 28 (2013) presents excellent scholarship, well worth deploying in further expansion of human knowledge.

*All comments are taken from the volume as it appears online as of 27 December 2014, at which time I printed out copies of the articles for reading and comment.

About Student Papers and Anime

With apologies once again for the delay--this one imposed by end-of-semester work...

One of my undergraduate literature students from the spring has been working with me to revise and refine the conference paper I had his class write. It is flattering in itself, as having students continue to work on projects after their classes are done is a rarity and a mark of appreciation. But it is more validating that that alone, as the student's paper has been accepted for presentation in one of the Papers by Undergraduates panels at the 2015 International Congress on Medieval Studies. And it is of interest to the Society generally, as the student's paper is one explicitly concerned with the kinds of things the Society does; it examines the appropriation of a medieval source in a contemporary popular culture medium--in this case, an anime series. I do not want to tread upon my student's work by giving much specific detail, but I can note that the series he is examining is not the only one which deploys the medieval as generally understood (some discussion of which is here). I can note that I wonder along with him why that would be the case.

That anime makes use of the Western medieval is evident in a number of series; my own viewing leads me to recall Berserk, particularly, as well as some parts of Hellsing and even of Rurouni Kenshin. Cruciform swords and Gothic plate appear, as well as courts of kings and queens, mercenary bands, and the cut-stone castles familiar from history and legend instead of or, at least, in addition to katana and o-yoroi, daimyo and ronin, and shiro and kyuden. Some series even go so far as to deploy the occasional bits of language from the Western medieval, making for a somewhat jarring intrusion into the prevailing Japanese-language dialogue from time to time but marking the series in which they appear as partaking abundantly of the Western medieval.

Japan has a long feudal history of its own to deploy, however, and one that begs for reconsideration or further consideration of what is meant by "medieval." It is as heavily romanticized as the Western Middle Ages and indeed often identified as a parallel; samurai and chivalric knights largely run in tandem, as both are bound (nominally) by stringent codes of honor and fealty to military service in the name of their lord. Both exist as disparate states unified by shared language (Japanese among the samurai, Latin and perhaps French among the chivalric knights) and a centralized religious structure (veneration of the Emperor as the descendant of the Sun Goddess among the samurai, the Catholic Church among the chivalric knights). That anime--a distinctly Japanese cultural product--would partake as frequently of the Western medieval as it does thus makes sense, as the parallels lend themselves to deployment, as well as making less sense, as the parallels are not necessary. (The same is true of Western depictions of samurai culture; the parallels invite such treatments even as they would seem to argue against their necessity.)

A number of reasons for the deployment come to mind. One of them is one my student is pursuing in his own paper, so I shall set it aside so as not to tread upon him--although, for the record, I think his idea is a good one, and I look forward to addressing it more fully after he presents his paper. Another, though, seems to work in much the same way as Said's concept of Orientalism. To a Japanese audience, the Western Middle Ages is Other (although the correspondence is not entirely exact due to historical circumstances and what amounts to ongoing colonialist practice), therefore exotic to some degree and attractive therefore. At the same time, there are sufficient parallels in play to permit easy access into that exotic Other--or at least romanticized versions of it. Anime deployment of Western medieval imagery thus simultaneously facilitates Coleridgean willingness to suspend disbelief for its audience by maintaining a Tolkienian inner consistency of reality; it permits the creation of a "foreign" world that is unusual enough to allow for the uncanny while remaining accessible enough to viewers that they can immerse themselves in the narrative.

Yet another might be in the relative artistic freedom the deployment permits. A work that draws from its expected audience's history and culture subjects itself to critique based upon the perceived in/accuracy of that drawing, as appears even in several comments presented in this blog (those which treat "historical authenticity" and "Game of Thrones" are particularly relevant). Unlike those posed earlier in this webspace, though, many of the comments arguing about the in/accuracy will come from those who are perhaps trained otherwise than in the histories they would purport to discuss authoritatively, based upon what they were taught--not always by the best--or what they have "researched"--again, not always from the best sources. While artists are not obliged to consider the comments of their audiences, those who will seek to earn livings from their art are, and handling such comments can be tiresome. Drawing from the history and culture of another group than the expected primary audience, though, reduces the problem substantially; the audience will likely include far fewer who consider themselves experts on the history and culture deployed, and they are more likely to be able to demonstrate actual expertise than the armchair commentators common in other circumstances. While concerns of cultural appropriation can arise (albeit to a lesser degree than might otherwise be the case, given the explicit attempts at spreading Western--specifically United States mainstream--culture that have been and are still being made; it is hard to argue that culture is stolen by a populace when it is being shoved down that populace's collective throat), they occur far less frequently than those which assail works for their inaccuracies. Artists working with other cultures than those of their anticipated audiences thus have more room to take license--which suggests itself as a good reason for anime to make use of Western medieval constructions in its own storytelling.

About "The Medieval Bishop Who Helped to Unweave the Rainbow"

With apologies for the long delay between entries...

On 27 November 2014, The Guardian posted Michael Brooks's article, "The Medieval Bishop Who Helped to Unweave the Rainbow." In it, Brooks reports that researchers have investigated the scientific works of thirteenth century bishop Robert Grosseteste and found that they in many senses anticipate later scientific understandings, particularly in regards to the behavior of light. Contextualized in an account of observing researchers at the Festival of Humanities at Durham Cathedral reproducing the bishop's experiments, the article accounts in a summary fashion for the provenance of Grosseteste's work, as well as the problems within it and the internal consistencies that, even if at odds with observed reality as currently understood by science, make for what one scientist calls a "curiously satisfying" understanding of cosmology. Brooks's article is well written and reasonably balanced, respectful of all parties concerned, and a worthwhile piece of journalism on both ongoing science and researches into history.

There are several things to note in the article. One that attracts a bit of amused attention is that the subject's name, Grosseteste, translates to "big test" or something similar from several languages, a bit of punning particularly appropriate given the association in Brooks's article between the man and science. More important, however, are the respect with which the journalist reports on the knowledge-base of the humanities scholars with whom he worked and what can be taken as the central theme of the article: the so-called Dark Ages are not so dark as commonly held.

A commonplace about those who study the humanities--the "historians, Latin scholars or theologians" [sic] Brooks notes in attendance at the Festival--is that their knowledge is irrelevant and their fields of study preclude them from having any understanding of the actual functions of the observable, material world. The commonplace fails to address those who apply humanistic methods to the sciences themselves, looking into the histories and socio-cultural contexts in which scientific understanding exists and the political entanglements that enmesh the pursuit of such knowledge. Brooks makes a nod to it in noting that for many of the humanities scholars, direct interaction with the hard sciences is a long-ago thing--but in the next paragraph, he notes that his own knowledge of the humanities pales in comparison to the scientific knowledge of those who are so far removed from scientific schooling as are those scholars. Further, he shortly afterwards notes relying heavily upon a humanities scholar for his reported understanding of some of the importance of Grosseteste's work. In doing so, he subverts the commonplace and acknowledges the hard-won knowledge of humanities scholars as being of value, as being necessary to a full understanding even of the most "scientific" of sciences: physics.

It is easy for those writing in the twenty-first century to look back at the intellectuals of earlier centuries with scorn and derision (although neglectful of the debt owed to those same intellectuals). Their ideas are strange to contemporary readers, and they are in some cases flatly wrong--usually owing to limited observational ability. Brooks avoids the aspersive look in his article, however. Although he acknowledges the places where Grosseteste's research is in error--chiefly in incorrect assumptions prevalent at the time--he does not heap scorn upon the man for sharing the beliefs of his time (in no small part because all too many still share those beliefs despite confirmed evidence to the contrary); instead, he lauds the bishop's insight into the workings of the natural world and the potential for cross-cultural discourse through scholarship that his work embodies. Indeed, Brooks goes to some length to reference scholars who similarly praise Grosseteste and his work and to note the similarities between the bishop's situation and his own, remarking that the passage of time may well invalidate current understandings as thoroughly as current understandings undermine those held by Grosseteste and his contemporaries. His doing so is a reminder that the medieval world was as vital as the current, its thinkers as concerned with understanding the universe around them as current thinkers are theirs. It is an indication that there is still much to learn from centuries gone by, whatever the field, and that such learning is something well worth having in the forefront of public consciousness.

About _Labyrinth_

Early in October 2014, there was a great deal of online hubbub about a proposed sequel to the 1986 Jim Henson film Labyrinth. While it seems, according to Lindsey Bahr, that the excitement is unjustified, its presence suggests that the nearly-thirty-year-old film remains a current concern in mainstream popular culture. Certainly, it prompted me to re-watch the movie (a belated continuation of something I describe as begun in the summer of 2014), which my wife and I did with great joy. As we did, I was reminded that medieval, and particularly Arthurian, references appear throughout the piece; Sarah's favored bear is named Lancelot, her dog's name is Merlin, and another "character" played by that same dog is named Ambrosius (a name connected with Arthuriana through some of its older instantiations such as Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain and Gildas's De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae). And there is Sir Didymus, who rides Ambrosius (humorously, usually away from battle) and is himself much in the mold of the Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail and similarly extreme examples of the perceived trappings of later medieval chivalry. But while his behavior evokes the Arthurian, and his name sounds like something that would appear in Arthurian legend, he is not an explicit figuration of a character from Malory or other Arthurian works. Instead, the name partakes of the religious, which, although certainly embedded in the medieval, is not necessarily consistent with the medievalism other figures in the movie convey.

The disjunction is not something most moviegoers would likely notice, admittedly, although those who caught the Arthurian references might be prompted to look (case in point, this essay). Its insertion might therefore be indicative of a belief of the producers, tacit or explicit, that the audience would need nothing more than a veneer of the medieval in its fairy-tale-like entertainment--and, indeed, Labyrinth does not seem to set out to be medievalist so much as a play upon fairy-stories. The medievalism that it deploys can be read, therefore, as a nod to the conventions of the genre and the popularity of medievalist films as Labyrinth was initially released. Yet such a reading seems disingenuous; given the care which Henson and his colleagues usually take with their work (as witness, for instance, The Dark Crystal), merely making a nod to prevailing conditions (rather than making a joke of them explicitly) is out of place. It is more likely that there is another explanation for the name as applied to the character to which it is given than simply reinforcing a veneer of medievalism not strictly necessary to the movie and which would be equally well served by calling the character by another medievalist name such as Galahad or Roland.

One possibility arises in the religious resonance of the name; Didymus is another name accorded to the Doubting Thomas of Scripture. His entry in the online Catholic Encyclopedia notes that he is reputedly among the furthest-traveled of the Apostles, having been sent to India and encountering "strange adventures from dragons and wild asses" in his ministry there--not out of line with the kind of encounter typical of the chivalric figure the movie's Didymus embodies. Alternately, the Didymus being referenced could be one noted in the Reverend Alban Butler's Lives of the Saints; the Didymus of Butler's piece appears in the guise of a soldier who substitutes himself for Theodora in a successful attempt to preserve her chastity and an ultimately unsuccessful gambit to save her life. Butler claims to be working from older records and the writings of St. Ambrose, both of which would have been nearly as well known to the medieval mind (insofar as such a construction can be asserted to have existed) as Thomas the Apostle. And in that theoretical medieval mind, Didymus would have exhibited characteristics that came to typify the knight of chivalric romance: valor and extravagance in the defense of a woman's sexual integrity. As such, for its resonance with the wide-ranging, dragon-meeting, extravagantly lady-saving Didymi of medieval lore, it is an appropriate name for the hyper-chivalric caricature that is Sir Didymus of Labyrinth.

Yet even that explanation does not wholly suffice. The references are markedly obscure; the journey of Thomas to India is apocryphal, and Butler's commentaries were buried in older printings before the advent of the internet. How accessible they would have been to Henson and his colleagues as they put together their film is questionable; it seems to me to be fairly unlikely they would have reviewed the texts in question as they would have existed in the middle of the 1980s (although I will admit that I may be mistaken). Too, their fit to the chivalric tradition Sir Didymus seems almost to satirize (almost because he is a character of some effect in the film; a true satire would have had him bluster wholly impotently) is somewhat tenuous; they partake of the medieval chivalric, but they are not themselves medieval or chivalric in fact. The religious resonances alone cannot account for the applicability of the name to the character, although they may well influence it in some way. Something else has to be at work in the choice to name the character Didymus (perhaps a pun through the evocation of Thomas the Apostle of the Sir Thomas Malory through which readers of English typically encounter the Arthurian), although what it is likely lies outside the scope of this paper to ascertain wholly.

What is of more importance, at least for this piece as it appears in this venue, is what the context of Sir Didymus reveals. He is himself a medievalism, albeit a somewhat tangled one that calls back to the late Roman Imperial / Late Antique, and he is surrounded and accompanied by other medievalisms. Their collected popularity nearly thirty years after their appearance in film suggests that there continues to be an avid thirst for figurations of the medieval, not only among scholars who delight in seeing what they study continue to enjoy relevance (even as and if they may seethe at what they see as inaccuracies in the presentations), but also among the general public. Helping to slake that thirst offers some hope for those scholars that they can find some use in working at the wells to draw up histories that are yet beneath the present surfaces of things.

Works Cited

• Barh, Lindsey. "Labyrinth Sequel in the Works? Not Exactly." Entertainment Weekly. Entertainment Weekly, 10 October 2014. Web. 30 October 2014.
• Butler, Alban. "April 28. SS. Didymus and Theodora, Martyrs." The Lives of the Saints. Bartleby.com. Bartleby.com, 2010. Web. 30 October 2014.
• The Dark Crystal. Dir. Jim Henson and Frank Oz. Sony, 2006. DVD.
• Elliott, Geoffrey B. "About a Trope of Medievalist Movies: Empty Countrysides." Tales after Tolkien: Travels in Genre and Medievalism. Tales after Tolkien Society, 28 July 2014. Web. 30 October 2014.
• Geoffrey of Monmouth. The History of the Kings of Britain. Trans. and ed. Michael A. Faletra. Peterborough, Ontario, Canada: Broadview, 2008. Print.
• Gildas. On the Ruin of Britain. Trans. J.A. Giles. Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg, 4 February 2012. Web. 30 October 2014.
• Labyrinth. Dir. Jim Henson. Perf. David Bowie, Jennifer Connelly. Sony, 2006. DVD.
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Dir. Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones. Perf. Graham Chapman et al. Sony, 2001. DVD.
• Thurston, Herbert. "St. Thomas the Apostle." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Kevin Knight, 2012. Web. 30 October 2014.

CFP: Studies in Medievalism

Helen Young notes the following:

Studies in Medievalism, a peer-reviewed print and on-line publication, seeks 3,000-word essays on how medievalism supports, parallels, resists, complicates, disrupts, denies, or otherwise relates to modernity. How, if at all, do postmedieval responses to a middle ages intersect with the respondent’s and/or our assumptions about absolute and/or relative modernity? How have the terms “medievalism” and “modernity...” come to be defined in relationship to each other? Authors are encouraged to structure their essays around one or more examples and to consider not only whether medievalism could exist without modernity but also whether modernity could exist without medievalism. Please remember that our wide-ranging audience comprises generalists as well as specialists, and please send submissions in English and Word to Karl Fugelso (kfugelso@towson.edu) by August 1, 2015. For a style sheet, please visit the website http://www.medievalism.net/sim.html.

This seems like the kind of thing the Society and its membership would do well at. Please consider submitting.

About "Avianca's Bezel"

Matthew Hughes's novelet "Avianca's Bezel" appears in the September/October 2014 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction as an example of the former; it is a fantasy piece set in a future version of Earth and follows the continuing travails of Raffalon the thief. In the text, Raffalon finds himself imprisoned for attempted breaking and entering, in debt because of expenses accrued during incarceration, auctioned off to pay the debt, and ensorcelled into attempting to retrieve the eponymous bezel. It allows him to escape his ensorcelment, but at the cost of altering his body substantially; he is able to secure assistance in undoing the damage done to him and eventually comes away with exquisite goods to sell as he makes his way away. It is an entertainingly episodic piece, and it is one that, as is typical for the fantasy genre, deploys a medievalist milieu--even if it is one so far in the future that Sol has grown orange and dim, as an earlier Raffalon story notes ("Stones" 160).

A number of features of the setting establish it as partaking of the medieval. One is its carceral practice. In the piece, Raffalon is taken into custody for "intent to commit depredacious entry" (170), a charge that evokes wording attested as far back as 1483 in works printed by Caxton ("Depredation") and thus connects back to the end of the English medieval from which much of the popular understanding of the Middle Ages derives. His being taken in "Nooses and manacles" and being held in a tower whose sanitary facilities consist of a bucket he has to empty himself also evoke stereotypical images of medieval dungeons--and his being charged for his upkeep does, as well (170). One of the features marking the late medieval prison--again familiar through association with Caxton by way of Le Morte d'Arthur and its author--is its permeability, as a number of scholars have asserted.* That permeability is largely enabled by the ability of prisoners and those who care for them to pay for such luxuries and even staples as they receive; without that payment, the late medieval prison is a dreary place indeed, but with it, it could be reasonably comfortable. That the prison into which Raffalon is cast functions similarly (170-71) marks it as aligned with medieval carceral practice, highlighting the conformity of the novelet's milieu to the expected medievalism of fantasy narrative.

Another connection of the milieu to the medieval or medievalist is in its evocation of Dante. The Florentine poet is, of course, best known for his intimately detailed biting commentaries couched as descriptions of the multi-leveled underworld (which depictions are often appropriated and refigured for comic effect as well as in the occasional interactive media production); he accords his Purgatory and his Heaven no less detail than his Hell, offering for each a nine-part division. Hughes offers what appears to be a similar cosmology in the novelet; it exists within a creation of nine planes (178), each of which exists at a higher level of intensity than that which lies "below" it. "Higher" levels are generally only accessible by the higher faculties, and that only after intensive preparation (181); the process is not unlike the atonement for sins in Dante's Purgatory. Hughes' fictional milieu operates much as the tripartite division of Dante's spiritual world--and in both cases, the world the reader occupies is the reality that stands apart from what is described in the text. One character remarks that "'Virtually anything from the Fourth Plane is valuable on the Third [the "real" world of Raffalon]. Pebbles there are gems here'" (196), and "a twig from which sprouted a blossom [taken from the Fourth Plane]....were quite the most beautiful objects Raffalon had ever held, seemingly made of polished platinum and flakes of pure gold" (208). Too, the Fourth Plane cannot safely be viewed without normally-opaque protections against being "eye-staggered" or suffering a terminally self-destructive "Euphoromania" (202). It is a region of "rarefied energies" that threaten to consume "lesser" souls that enter it (204), not unlike the increasingly bright and brilliant levels of Dante's Heaven. Approaching the Seat of the Most High entails continuously growing removal from the terrestrial and exposure to divine radiance unendurable without marked assistance--save for those who have made themselves ready for it through what can be called intensive spiritual training. In that similarity, then, is a connection between Hughes's work and the medieval ideal prevalent in English-language popular culture.

More could possibly be taken from "Avianca's Bezel" to tie it to the medievalist setting frequently adopted by fantasy literature; consideration of the series of stories featuring Raffalon would doubtlessly provide yet more to tie the stories to medieval antecedents. The appearance of the stories in the pages of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction serves to mark them as representative of quality work in the fantasy genre; the magazine has high publication standards, and its endurance in print, even if somewhat reduced from years past (with bimonthly issues having succeeded eleven issues annually a few years ago), bespeaks the regard in which it has been and continues to be held. That Hughes's story evokes medievalism in is milieu thus serves as an indicator that, despite the increasing divergence of societies and analogues of societies presented in fantasy writing, the medieval still serves as a primary, still-ever-acceptable venue for the presentation of that writing which relies upon magic for its effect.** It indicates that at least one of the dominant threads of fantasy readership still looks to the medieval, for reasons I have motioned towards yet which I know are not so thoroughly explicated as they could be or ought to be ("Thoughts"). And thus it shows that the kind of work the Society seeks to promote remains relevant, as does the work of the more traditional medievalist upon which the Society happily relies.

*I discuss some of this in my dissertation (69n11).

**I have a piece under review as of this writing that works towards an effective definition of "magic" for use in fantasy literature. I realize it is an open question.

Works Cited

• "Depredation." Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford UP, 2014. Web. 7 October 2014.
• Elliott, Geoffrey B. The Establishment of Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur as the Standard Text of English-Language Arthurian Legend. Diss. U of Louisiana at Lafayette, 2012. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 2012. Print.
• ---. "Thoughts about Why We Still Look to the Medieval." Tales after Tolkien: Travels in Genre and Medievalism. Tales after Tolkien Society, 24 June 2014. Web. 7 October 2014.
• Hughes, Matthew. "Avianca's Bezel." The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction September/October 2014: 169-208. Print.
• ---. "Stones and Glass." The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction November/December 2013: 156-97. Print.

About "Race in Online Fantasy Fandom"

As has been noted, Helen Young's "Race in Online Fantasy Fandom: Whiteness on Westeros.org" was published in Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies on 12 August 2014. In the article, Young asserts that the online community at Westeros.org overwhelmingly conflates a particular "authorized" fandom (reliant upon acceptance of specific views including deliberate avoidance of racial discourse) and whiteness with varying degrees of explicitness. As she does so, she invokes treatments of the racist overtones of Tolkien and much fantasy literature and its fandom and argues that the ways in which whiteness is encoded into the Westeros.org fandom are primarily concerned with avoidance of accusations of racism on the part of Martin and his readers.

The article is, overall, convincing. Young makes excellent points and supports them well, and her reports seem to correspond with a number of other popular manifestations of racism that seeks to disguise itself as non-racism through obfuscation or avoidance. And her article is particularly relevant because of the increasing cultural cachet of Martin's fantasy series; criticism of that series and of the communities that grow up around it is tied to better understandings of the prevailing popular culture which generates and consumes it. That said, some issues do come to mind for further consideration, perhaps in a revision of the article as part of a larger collection, or perhaps in another paper altogether:

• Given the US origin of Martin's text and Young's own comments regarding the entanglement of Martin and Hollywood, the question must be asked of how much of the fanbase is in or from the US. The tactics used to construct/encode whiteness among the Westeros.org "authorized" fans seems to run parallel to those used in mainstream US culture; the parallel suggests that the fans are themselves predominantly of the US.
• The question of to what extent other largely online fanbases encode whiteness in ways parallel to that of Westeros.org also arises. The bronies offer one example, with one discussion of the fraught construction and "authorization" being discussed in Christopher Bell's Humanities Directory 1.1 article "The Ballad of Derpy Hooves: Transgressive Fandom in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic." (There is some overlap in the the demographics Young reports of fantasy fandom and what Bell identifies as those of bronies.)
• The fandom seems to take on an almost religious nature in the descriptions Young provides. The extent to which it parallels the formation of religious communities and identities may be worth consideration; putting it alongside the more evangelical/proselytizing groups suggests itself as a useful exercise.

Admittedly, an article cannot treat all avenues of inquiry, and it is not a fault that it selects one focus to pursue and not another. It is, again, a well written piece that makes solid points worth consideration and offers a lens through which to examine other medievalist works and their receptions. (The thought occurs that Martin is spawning imitators much as Tolkien did, and examining their responses to fantasy/medievalist tropes as Martin iterates them suggests itself as worth doing.) And insofar as it provokes further questions and thus, it is to be hoped, more discussion, Helen Young's "Race in Online Fantasy Fandom: Whiteness on Westeros.org" is a piece of scholarship well worth attention.

CFP Reminder

Do note that the deadlines for submissions to MAMO and Kalamazoo (notably one or two sessions) are both this Monday, 15 September 2014. It is not too late; if you've got ideas, send them in!

Three Surveys

In an attempt to get a better feel for the opinions of the Society regarding ongoing and upcoming events, we offer the following surveys:

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