Peeps on the Edge

It's not really seasonally appropriate — more of an Easter thing than a Christmastime one — but I was talking with one of my civilian (i.e., non-medievalist) friends about her plans to put some oddly anthropomorphized marshmallows in the microwave, armed with tiny toothpicks to see which can overtake the other when the heat causes them to inflate and expand: Peeps jousting. And I started doodling while we were talking, a picture of two classic bird-shaped marshmallow Peeps approaching a movie-franchise Minion Peep, all brandishing their toothpick lances. I drew it on whatever happened to be on my desk while we were talking, and what happened to be on my desk was an essay on medieval war poetry.

The total coincidence got me to thinking about what a book like Image on the Edge — lauded for its breakthrough in relating the goofy, whimsical, weird marginalia in medieval manuscripts to the texts with which they appear to have nothing in common — would do with this scrap of paper.  This marginal drawing and its juxtaposition against a discussion of literary representations of war, and even of the weapons of war, has nothing to do with my being a medievalist or reading about medieval war poetry and instead has everything to do with the fact that I am a medievalist who happens coincidentally to live in a culture that has a pervasive fetish for neo-medieval kitsch. An art historian of the future who found this page might pick it up and, a la Michael Camille, come up with a playful, innovative reading of what she would be seeing on the page, namely some silly looking characters brandishing weapons next to a serious text about weapons of war. And yes, it would be a sound interpretation of what was left on the page, but it would also have absolutely no connection to the historical, cultural, or personal context in which the artifact was made.

It's not a totally idle or solipsistic exercise — reproducing pages, documents, texts or drawing parallels with modern modes of production is not evidence but can offer some insight into medieval modes of production or at least, in this case, serve as a caution against the dangers of over-interpreting. (I have colleagues who work on paleography who practice calligraphy in their spare time and are grateful for the insights it provides them in their professional lives, for example.)

Or it's pointless and just some doodles on a page. Which is kind of the (circular) point.

Academic Blogging Etiquette Question

This has only happened to me once before. I'm having one of those "someone is wrong on the internet!" moments.

The fact that I'm even casting it in these terms tells me that I should just step away from the keyboard. But instead — oh, academic training!* — I'll turn it into a quandary: How and to what extent does someone jump into a conversation on a blog where she has some expertise in a related area, and clearly more expertise in it than the people who are blogging, whose expertise is ostensibly a) in the field of the blog topic but not in the ancillary cultures, and b) masters' and early-PhD level?

It was kind of a running joke in graduate school that I was "Capital-N, Capital-A, Not an Art Historian." After my qualifying examinations (all of which I passed easily, a caveat that is worth making given where this anecdote is about to go), one of which was in Islamic art history, the examining professor commented that it was as though I was doing art history by deliberately sidestepping as much of art history as possible.

With my art history issues disclosed, I pose the quandary again, this time in more concrete terms: A blog has been advertised on one of the list-serves that I'm on; specifically, they were calling for guest posts. It's a medieval art history blog written by what looks to be a group of students mostly at the University of Edinburgh. Don't get me wrong. I'm not picking on students. I think that what they're doing is pretty cool and a great way for them to write in a low-stakes forum but for a public audience while still in grad school, something I definitely wish I'd had as a student. The kinds of questions they're asking when they write about Islamic art are definitely not the sorts of questions I'd ask, but then again, there's room for all sorts of questions in this world, and plus,  I'm a Not an Art Historian.

There's one post, though, that sort of alarmed me, but I'm not sure what the etiquette would be in commenting on it. It's funny. I'm not quite but almost part of the digital native generation, a perch that gives me the unique perspective of being totally comfortable with technology like the natives but also actually understanding pretty well how it works rather than just expecting it to work, like the non-natives, especially those who used, say, early DOS machines. In spite of this, digital etiquette is something I still struggle with. I'm as unclear on protocol for academia.edu as I was when I wrote this post a little more than a year ago. And in this situation, I'm not sure whether it would be okay to just randomly comment on this blog. It's a students' forum, so I'm inclined to say I don't really belong. Plus I'm not sure whether one can just start commenting on a blog to which she has no prior connection.

And yet... there's this post about teaching Islamic art to high school students in the American south, a region where I think it's particularly important to reduce some of the "othering" of Islam and Muslims that often happens in American discourse about the faith and its practitioners, particularly in more conservative and less diverse circles. I would really want to encourage this person not to, even implicitly, teach her students that Muslims worship a god called Allah, which just happens to be the Arabic word for God and is used by Arabic-speaking Christians as well as by Arabic-speaking Muslims. I'd want to encourage her not to use dictionary.com to define technical terms in Islam and point her, perhaps, instead, to the Encyclopaedia of Islam and to some specific scholarship that was written less than 100 years ago.

So. I'd love to hear from some of you who write and/or comment on academic blogs: Do I weigh in or let it go?

*Well, it's being an academic combined with the fact that I'm up in the middle of the night combined with the fact that I just haven't had all that much to say here of late that's turning this into the subject of a full-on post.

Medievalism and the Monsters of Modernity: Ahmed the Gargoyle’s Mudéjar Challenge to Contemporary Islamophobia

This is what I meant to write last year. I originally composed it in response to a call for papers that was framed in such a way that would let me explore some of the ideas that I was trying to get to then. This was the result:

***

I spent the morning of September 11, 2001 in a darkened auditorium in a university art gallery building listening to a long-planned lecture on architectural modernism that Vincent Scully, the preeminent theorist and historian of American architecture, was almost frantically ad-libbing and revising after the sudden and violent destruction of the buildings that would have been the centerpiece of that morning’s discussion but that had only an hour before become the symbols not of the civil, internal, aesthetic destruction of the skyline and the character of the American city but of their literal decimation by sinister, outside forces. In the space of half a morning, the whole history of art, the humanities, humane letters — all the things that make us human — had been thrown into chaos, perhaps even sundered. At the time we couldn’t tell what would become of us.

In the days that followed, little happened to restore that humanity that a few terrorists had attempted to take; we were complicitous, though only by being scared and remaining ignorant. We were told to shop, rather than to read or to learn or to reflect or to craft careful strategy. Sikhs were beaten by ignorant thugs who thought they were Muslim. Muslims were beaten by ignorant thugs who believed they were doing the right thing. Even the rousing, briefly reassuring bipartisan chorus of “God Bless America” sung out from the steps of the Capitol was, in retrospect, only a portent of all the ways in which people of every faith would take God’s name in vain in the ensuing years. The Crusades were evoked. At the kind of cursory glance that we are all guilty of giving the world as we are absorbed in the leaden minutiae our own day-to-day routines, and especially to those of us young enough to remember few meaning-rich details of the world as it used to be, the monsters of modernity have always been made out to be Muslim. Euphonically, alliteratively, though, it is medievalism that can help to draw down that equivalency.

Almost fully a decade after the fateful blue-sky morning that was no darker inside the old art gallery auditorium than it would become outside, a news item from the BBC caught my eye, once again drawing together the history of art with questions about the contemporary practices of Islam. The proverbially curious case of a French gargoyle nicknamed Ahmed is almost too perfect a study in the ways in which grappling with a thorny problem of medieval cultural history can produce, as a side effect, a more sensible way to understand situations that are presented by the fact of modernity. And likewise, sometimes an example from modernity can appear as a diachronic cipher to clarify the tangled mess of a little-understood problem of an earlier period. As much as medieval monsters can solve modernity, modern monsters talk back loudly and speak to the Middle Ages.