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In the Middle: Will Wonders Never Cease: St. Erkenwald with Claustrophilia
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2014 (91)
Howie joins other thinkers who reconceive time as embedded instead of as a sequence in which the past is
neatly and continuously swapped out for the present.5 For Howie, moments touch on one another and become
moments through this touch; moments drag others behind them; they are in networks around each other in
which no moment will ever quite be abandoned or ever simply be itself. In Erkenwald, we need not struggle
to rethink time as topographical and interfoldedto recall Michel Serresrather than geometrical.6 Its time is
piled up, mixed, all moments touching:7 it takes place not fulle longe [not very long] (1) after the
2013 (129)
2012 (156)
2011 (219)
2010 (232)
2009 (321)
crucifixion, yet somehow in the seventh century; the judge, asked when he had lived, answers enigmatically,
December (13)
interweaving dates,8 and the New Werke [New Work] (38) at St. Paul's took place in the thirteenth, not the
seventh, century. The alliterative christening of London's temples preserves as much as it converts: although
November (24)
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those of Jupiter and Juno become the churches of Jesus and James (22), the temples persist in or with the
churches poetically, through the stressed J that sustains the past as a point of contact, as an echo.9 In their
copresence and nonassimilative contact with the London of Erkenwald's day, the temples recall Howie's
metonymic understanding of poetics...in which contiguous terms come to participate, not just semantically
but also in a sense ontologically, in one another without losing their distinctness (15).
Nowhere is Erkenwald so available for Claustrophilia as in its architecture.10 First the people of London, and
then Erkenwald, penetrate into the foundations of St. Paul's. They are enclosed within a space that receives
them. In the depths of the temple, a tomb emerges into their midst, drawn up from the ground.11 Bordered
with letters whose sense will never be deciphered, enclosing and giving up a judge whose name the poem
never reveals, the tomb reserves the fullness of its own being to itself. It is paradigmatically a space that, to
quote Howie, resist[s] the gaze of its public even as it offers itself to this public (13).12
Erkenwald arrives and locks himself away to pray to kenne / e mysterie of is meruaile at men opon
wondres [to know the mystery of this marvel that men wonder upon] (12425), and, his prayer granted, he
leads a Spiritus Domini mass. His increasingly agitated questioning, however, suggests that Erkenwald has not
in fact been granted knowledge; there is a miracle here, but it is not one of knowing. The miracle is like this
one, from the Acts of the Apostles, And suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a mighty wind
coming, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them parted tongues as
it were of fire, and it sat upon every one of them: And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and they
began to speak with divers tongues, according as the Holy Ghost gave them to speak. For the Spiritus Domini
is a a Pentecost mass, or a Votive mass,13 associated with the visitation of the Holy Spirit, and the miraculous
traversal of linguistic difference. urghe sum lant goste lyfe [through some lent ghost life] (192),14 the
corpse can speak, and through the ghostly investment of Pentecost, Erkenwald can speak with the dead:
speak with, become open to, know himself in the presence of, but only in the sense of knowing himself to
have been summoned...into a more concrete, ecstatic relation to what lies not just beyond but within these
boundaries (Howie 4). This is a figure for our responsible encounter with poetry, we might say, especially as
Erkenwald, having intended to know all by absorbing more and more about the judge's life and history, is
instead stricken with more intense wonder, and finally is brought to where he hade no space to speke so
spakly he oskyd [had no space to speak so violently he sobbed] (312).
As for the crowd, they have already joined with the tomb itself. When the judge begins speaking, er
sprange in e pepulle / In al is worlde no worde, ne wakenyd no noice / Bot al as stille as e ston stoden and
listonde / Wyt meche wonder forwrast, and wepid ful mony15 [there sprang in the people in all this world no
word, nor wakened no noise, but they stood as still as stone and listened, seized with much wonder, and very
many of them wept] (21720). D. Vance Smith remarks that this apparently miraculous scene extendsand
even displacesthe crypt outwards to the site of the living, who gaze back at the judge's corpse with a
marmoreal quiescence. The work of metaphor transforms the living into memorial stone. Yes, I say, to the
crowd enclosing the tomb with their own bodies, yes, as well, to the tomb itself joining with the crowd, yes I
say to what's implicit here, namely, that it is as if the crowd lends its speech and motion to the corpse, who
in turn lends his immense stillness to them; but, pace Smith, this is not a metaphoric substitution. This is
metonymy, as Howie writes, contamination by contiguity (19), catching, in both senses: grasping even the
most rigorously exposed unlikeness, a stony and alien pagan tomb at the heart of frenetic Christian London
and a speaking, singular, and honored corpse amid a motley assemblage of Londoners. To repeat, this is
metonymy, grasping even the most rigorously exposed unlikeness and making of it, of that momentary
contact with it, a new creature: a monster or a miracle (107). Not substitution, not assimilation, but
transformative contact. The tomb has emerged into their midst, emerged, not unconcealed.16 From Howie
August (32)
again: In order for other people and things to 'emerge' we must in a sense 'merge with them: not in an
July (28)
appropriative fashion, nor in the sense of a reductio ad unum (33).17As Howie urges, drawing on the
language of Kaja Silverman, we must participate. The crowd has not only seen the tomb, marked its edges,
wondered at its being while considering how it holds its mystery to itself. They are, in the heart of St. Paul's,
within the tomb, stone themselves in the moment and space of this contact, where the tomb itself comes to
speak and move; they are, I must emphasize, within the tomb, at once with it and in it, around it and a part
of it, enclosing it and being enclosed by it.
If I could, I would freeze the poem here, stop reading, arrest its and my progress amid the crowd and the
tomb; this would be a sacred without a telos, an apocalypse without an eschaton. But the poem moves on; the
judge is baptized; and sodenly his swete chere swyndid and faylide / And all the blee of his body wos blakke
as e moldes / as rotten as e rottok at rises in powdere [and suddenly his sweet face wasted away and
failed, and all the color of his body was black as gravedirt, as rotten as decayed matter that rises in powder]
(34244). London, faced with a gap in the foundation of its civic consciousness, assimilates the threat; but the
horror of the judge's transformation suggests that London, having satisfied its desire, has arrived inevitably at
the nauseating Real. Is this what their desire wants? Perhaps, if it is a grasping desire, an explaining desire,
driven by lack. But Howie gives us another model: Between mine and not mine, what intervenes is close to
mine, neither appropriable nor wholly other: within reach, without ever being fully grasped (15). With this,
we might ask what the crowd lost by gaining its desire's object, when it ceased to remain with it, where it
might have let itself be and be had in its desire. With the judge gone, the crowd goes out, and meche
mournynge and myrthe was mellyd togeder [much mourning and mirth mingled together] (350): in closing,
we might ask what they are mourning, when, happy to believe that they know what has happened, thinking
that the past is finally shut up, they leave nothing behind in St. Paul's except an empty tomb.
June (32)
May (29)
April (34)
March (23)
February (24)
January (27)
2008 (369)
2007 (362)
2006 (312)
Contributors
Boyda Johnstone
Eileen Joy
Jeffrey Cohen
Mary Kate Hurley
Jonathan Hsy
Karl Steel
Works Cited
Bugbee, John. 2008. Sight and Sound in St. Erkenwald: On Theodicy and the Senses. Medium Aevum 77, no. 2:
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20221.
Chaganti, Seeta. 2008. The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary: Enshrinement, Inscription, Performance. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Chism, Christine. 2002. Alliterative Revivals. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1990. Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundation of Authority'. Cardozo Law Review 11: 921
1045.
. 1995. 'Eating Well,' or The Calculation of the Subject. In Points: Interviews, 19741994, ed.
Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peter Connor and Avital Ronell, 25587. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Grady, Frank. 1992. Piers Plowman, St. Erkenwald, and the Rule of Exceptional Salvations. The Yearbook of
Langland Studies 6, no. 1: 6388.
. 2000. St. Erkenwald and the Merciless Parliament. Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22: 179211.
Harris, Jonathan Gil. 2009. Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Howie, Cary. 2007. Claustrophilia: The Erotics of Enclosure. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Niss, Ruth. 1998. ' A Coroun Ful Riche': The Rule of History in St. Erkenwald. ELH 65, no. 2: 277295.
Otter, Monika. 1994. 'New Werke': St. Erkenwald, St. Albans, and The Medieval Sense of the Past. Journal of
Medieval and Renaissance Studies 24, no. 3: 387414.
Scattergood, John. 2000. St. Erkenwald and the Custody of the Past. In The Lost Tradition: Essays on Middle
English Alliterative Poetry, 17999. Dublin: Four Courts Press.
Schwyzer, Philip. 2006. Exhumation and Ethnic Conflict: From St. Erkenwald to Spenser in Ireland.
Representations 95, no. 1: 126.
Sisk, Jennifer. 2007. The Uneasy Orthodoxy of St. Erkenwald. ELH 74, no. 1: 89115.
Smith, D. Vance. 2002. Crypt and Decryption: Erkenwald Terminable and Interminable'. New Medieval
Literatures 5: 5985.
TurvillePetre, Thorlac. 2005. St. Erkenwald and the Crafty Chronicles. In Studies in Late Medieval and Early
Renaissance Texts in honour of John Scattergood: 'The Key of all Good Remembrance', ed. Anne
D'Arcy and Alan J. Fletcher, 36274. Dublin: Four Courts Press.
Whatley, Gordon. 1985. The Middle English St. Erkenwald and Its Liturgical Context. Mediaevalia 8: 277306.
. 1986. Heathens and Saints: St. Erkenwald in Its Legendary Context. Speculum 61, no. 2: 330363.
1 MED s.v. rnish, (a) mysterious, strange. TurvillePetre 2005 at 373 ingeniously suggests that the tomb might correspond either to the St
Paul's Rune Stone, discovered in the 19th century, or some earlier find of the same sort (for image, see here); at 371, he also observes that the
in medias res
MED correctly suggests that the meanings of renish and runish have here become confused, for in these quotations the sense is that derived from
the common Middle English noun roun (from Old English run), which has a semantic range that includes 'voice, utterance, secret' as well as
'written character.
2 The better examples of such readings include Bugbee 2008; Chism 2002; Grady 1992; Grady 2000; Niss 1998; Sisk 2007; and Whatley 1986.
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Otter 1994 and Smith 2002 are rare exceptions to closed readings of Erkenwald. For example, at 408, Otter writes that The searching and
digging, the guessing, deciphering, and questioning, begin to stand all by themselves, and even for themselves: the poem, itself part of the
questioning and deciphering of the past, at one level mirrors itself.
3 Derrida 1995, 286, responsibility is excessive or it is not a responsibility. A limited, measured, calculable, rationally distributed
responsibility is already the becomingright of morality; it is at times also, in the best hypothesis, the dream of every good conscience, in the
worst hypothesis, of the petty or grand inquisitors; also Derrida 1990, 252, A decision that would not go through the test and ordeal of the
undecidable would not be a free decision; it would only be the programmable application or the continuous unfolding of a calculable process. It
might perhaps be legal; it would not be just.
4 Intensify and intensification appear frequently in Claustrophilia; for example, at 18, This ethics of intensification has distinct ontological
consequences: intervention within the compromised appearance of enclosed bodies and texts amounts to participating in these appearances
beingapparent. Interpretation, or aesthetic reception, is thus not entirely discrete from aesthetic production: it reaches across the aporia
between seer and seen, to make something more visible, contingently, approximately, and thereby also offers itself to sight. This movement also
makes something more hidden, deepening the artworks depths even as it intensifies the surface. Claustrophilia thus, beyond readerly response
and deconstructive supplementarity, makes singularity more apparent through participative intensification."
5 Among others, see especially of Harris 2009, 2, which critiques the national sovereignty model of temporality, where each moment [has] a
determining authority reminiscent of a nationstate's: that is, firmly policed borders and a shaping constitution; Harris writes against the notion
of a moment as a selfidentical unit divided from other moments that come before and after it (5) to disrupt the old binary of synchronic
versus diachronic study (10).
6 At 174, Harris 2009 quotes Michel Serres' Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time (with Bruno Latour), Classical time in related to
geometry, having nothing to do with space, as Bergson pointed out all too briefly, but with metrics. On the contrary, take your inspiration from
topology, and perhaps you will discover the rigidity of those proximities and distances you find arbitrary. And the simplicity, in the literal sense
of the word pli: it's simply the difference between topology (the handkerchief is folded, crumpled, shredded) and geometry (the same fabric is
ironed out flat).
7 This is not an uncommon observation about the poem: Schwyzer 2006, for example, writes "Wreaking havoc with the temporal equivalent of
depth perception, the queasy fascination of the preserved body consists not only in making what is far away seem near, but also in robbing the
near of its wonted security and familiarity. Thus, the Londoners in the poem experience not simply the simultaneous failure of living and
historical memory but also a collapse of the distinction between these two modes of memory" (7).
8 Hit is to meche to any mon to make of a nombre. / After at Brutus is burgh had buggid on fyrste, Not bot fife hundred ere er aghtene
wontyd / Before at kynned our Criste by Cristen acounte: / A ousand ere and ritty mo and 3 thren aght (205210). Scattergood 2000, 196,
provides a model from 1269 shrine of Edward the Confessor in Westminster abbey, made by Peter of Rome, 'ANNO MILENO DOMINI CVM
SEPTVAGENO ET BIS CENTENO CVM COMPLETO QVASI DENO HOC OPVS EST FACTUM QUOD PETRVS.
9 Other commentators have also noticed the effect of alliteration, but have read it as either an anxious inability to suppress the past or as
metaphoric substitution. Chaganti 2008, 67, is a rare exception: Particularly in this visual and material sense, alliteration reinforces a pattern of
vestigiality: letters are repeated in pagan and Christian names, so that the past not only prefigures the present, but it also leaves behind pieces
letters, like statues and buildingswhich are adapted in the present and incorporated into newly cleansed Christian structures and words. The
poem uses the narrative capacities of material objects and the material capacities of letters and language to demonstrate the trope of
vestigiality, the reliquiae, that which is left behind. The inscriptional aspect of alliteration thus provides a defining temporality for the poem;
the recursive return to what has been left behind, so suggesting ceremonial temporality.
10 To a different end, Chaganti 2008, 69, also finds the poem interested in enclosure, At the level of the poem's explicit narrative...exist many
selfenfolding layers of enclosure, establishing the role of enshrinement in the text's imagery.
11 I echo Otter 1994, 410, where the tomb unexpectedly surfacesliterallyand is simply there, a fait accompli, 'fourmit on a flore,' as the
poem solidly puts it.
12 See also Chaganti 2008, 56, where the runes both embellish and obscure the meaning of an enshrined object. And in this capacity, their
illegibility symbolizes the mystified nature of the latemedieval shrine in English churches and cathedrals. The runes speak through their very
impenetrability, their resistance to being read as language, about the nature of ceremonial encounters with shrines as decorated objects, a
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tenthmedieval said...
I didn't know this poem but I'm very struck with how the poet seems to be inverting older
hagiographical motives. Maybe you know this, but the causing of a noble pagan corpse to confess its
damnation is in one of the Patrician livesPatrick always prays when he passes graves marked with a
cross in his wanders round Ireland, but he misses one one day and his amanuensis asks why; Patrick
says he didn't spot it and raises the occupant to find out why, hears his confession, baptises him and
puts him back, savedbut there the baptism is deliberate and canonical, here it's accidental and a
miracle itself, outside the usual operation of the sacraments even though it's in a church. The sacred
space is turned inside out by the old tomb's presence in a church.
Also, more obviously, there's the old miraculous preservation of the body; for Cuthbert or Audrey or
whoever, the preservation is because of their sanctity, but this character loses his preservation once
he becomes Christian. It's like Erkenwald is banishing the undead with his tears but the fact that he
does so by overturning that motif is really sharp, I think. This is a wrong preservation and has to be
undone. All kinds of subtexts here, and someone else has probably spotted all of those already, but
they rose unbidden and so forth...
8:36 AM
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accidental.
9:30 AM
tenthmedieval said...
I should note that I got my Patrick story off Usenet a long time ago and it was someone else's `if I
remember right...' then, so although the Patrician vitae are a mess of duplication generally, it's quite
possible that there is only the one story that you reference.
Stupidly, I hadn't made the obvious connection to 'baptism of tears'. I need more sleep. Thanks for all
the responses, I'm learning a lot from all this.
4:50 AM
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remembers my presentation only because of my ridiculous French accent....
10:09 AM
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