How do we recover the voices of those throughout history who have not been in positions of power and who, therefore, have been either left out of records or only represented in partial or stigmatizing ways? Additionally, how do we include those whose stories have not been told? Could contemporary fiction set in historical times play a role in recovering those voices and stories, challenging notions of who belonged in the past and, consequently, who belongs in the present and in the future? These questions were at the center of a highly successful public humanities event that took place in Seattle on June 11, 2024: “The Queer Medieval with Nicola Griffith.” Sponsored by Humanities Washington, a non-profit organization funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and co-produced with Town Hall Seattle, a cultural center and event space, “The Queer Medieval” was intentionally scheduled during Pride month to bring the queer and the medieval together in both a celebratory and a reflective mode.

The world of man was ending, rapidly, or so it seemed to me as I sat in my lonely New Jersey apartment in late Spring of 2020. Looking out at the skyline of the city I loved, I watched my friends flee, leaving their bohemian apartments empty. As body bags filled New York City streets, I thought back to another plague, technically centuries in the past, but now, not so far away. Facing Northeast, I imagined myself opposite a Londoner from the past, experiencing the first wave of the Black Death in 1348. One account of the arrival of the plague in London states, ‘[t]he pestilence, which first began in the land inhabited by the Saracens, grew so strong that. . . it visited every place in all the kingdoms stretching from that land northwards. . . striking down the greater part of the people with the blows of sudden death’ (my emphasis).^[1] ‘Saracen’ was a bigoted, catch-all term used during the high to late Middle Ages for ‘a panorama of diverse peoples and populations [essentialized] into a single demographic entity defined by their adherence to the Islamic religion,’ as well as to refer to people of African origin.^[2] Many European nations believed the lack of Christian faith amongst immigrant populations—‘Saracens’ and Jews—either caused the disease or led to a higher chance of death. This is uncomfortably similar to the anti-Asian conspiracies and anti-Black racism that were widely shared and championed throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.^[3] This racism obscured the terrible truth that in 2020, Black Americans were more than twice as likely to die of COVID-19 than White Americans due in large part to systemic racism within healthcare. A recent study of the 1348 pandemic found that ‘at least for females, individuals with estimated African affiliation [living in London] faced higher hazards of dying of plague compared to individuals of estimated White European affiliations of similar ages.’ Thus, in more ways than one, the ills of the past were also the ills of the present.

Archival and critical projects referred to as ‘recovery’ allow scholars to make heard the voices of those historically inaudible and marginalized. When discourses of representation, centers and margins, and intersectionality inform the amplification of previously disregarded or suppressed perspectives, these discourses can indicate a recovery project’s espousal of a liberal ideology. In medieval studies, these acts of recovery in fact tend both to reflect and enhance the field’s general political liberalism. Medieval studies need instead to move politically to a place of radicality, one that would, unlike liberalism, align itself coherently with the work of dismantling the violent and unjust structures in which we think, work, and live. I suggest that one step toward this goal would involve recognizing the limits of recovery so that we turn instead to what I call irrecovery. Resonant with, yet distinct from, Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation method, irrecovery does not refocus the point of agency in a historical narrative. It instead recognizes the necessity of leaving the agents of certain collective actions undetectable as part of ensuring the futurity of liberation struggle.

It’s not easy being a historian of the early Middle Ages. Historians most commonly use primary sources to reach into the experience of people whose world was far different from our own. But the very limited nature of the records and clues they left behind, especially in the early medieval period, means that every bit of evidence must be brought to bear, requiring us to deploy both our detective abilities and our imaginations. As Rory Naismith puts it, early medievalists ‘have to cast a wide net and use a variety of archaeological, landscape and linguistic evidence,’ but unfortunately, ‘[t]exts are few.’ This scarcity of information continues throughout the early medieval period, especially in the British Isles, which was subject to so much raiding and warfare and the consequent destruction of records.

Why do we still read medieval stories?

This is the question I ask my students before my lesson on Beowulf and far-right groups. One reason, they decided, was that many medieval lessons and ideas remain relevant today. This is nowhere more apparent than in some far-right groups’ belief that Beowulf is ‘required reading’ for its valorization of a specific type of violent masculinity and white nationalism. I present below a 50-minute lesson plan that encourages students to challenge readings that flatten Beowulf into a story of violent, white masculinity and instead produce a far more nuanced reading of the complex construction of race and gender within the text.

As medievalists, we currently find ourselves with the difficult task of arguing for the importance of the past as both an archive and an analytical tool for the present and the future of humanity. It is no exaggeration to say that the field is in the midst of a disciplinary crisis. But this crisis is also an opportunity. As Anne Le optimistically remarks, crises can catalyze change and what might emerge is a medieval studies that embraces new critical directions and reaches broader audiences. Nevertheless, to make that future a possibility, we must first decide whether medieval studies should be saved.

There’s a thirteenth-century manuscript with a trans masculine hero. The Roman de Silence tells the story of a girl raised as a boy, a situation that leads to a considerable identity crisis in the protagonist, as well as numerous debates between personifications of Nature [Nature] and Nouriture [Nurture]. But despite Silence’s preference for being a knight and their fairly consistent adoption of masculine pronouns, Nature wins out over Nurture and the poem, as Simon Gaunt puts it, firmly rejects possibilities of not only gender as a cultural construct but also of indeterminacy—indeterminate gender and meaning—ultimately reinstating the misogynistic status quo and simple, binary definitions of the ‘natural order.’ In other words, the poem concludes that social hierarchies are natural hierarchies, and if Silence revels in linguistic play, much beloved by the postmodern critic, it must be remembered that puns like nature [essence] and nature [genital] finally resolve, when Silence’s false clothes are stripped off before King Ebain and his court, and their truth or essence is equated to their genitals.

I find myself uncomfortably aligned with King Ebain, who strips Silence down in order to discover the truth of their body. In the previous installment, I examined a picture that has been characterized as a simple illustration of the Roman de Silence text [fig. 1]. I searched for visual evidence of its transness and found a rather obscure image that enacted gender ambiguities on the text that would not exist without it. That investigation was fruitful and concluded with the suggestion that we might read this miniature as allegory for the obscurity of all visual representation. But in scrutinizing signifiers of biological difference and understanding transness in relation to disguise, I certainly risk succumbing to a transphobic logic that assumes an equivalence of the naked body and gender identity, as well as trans and non-binary identities as unreal fabrications.[1] As Alicia Spencer-Hall and Blake Gutt warn powerfully, these are ‘pernicious’ tropes that, on one the hand, often originate with modern critics rather than medieval texts and, on the other, may inflict real harm to living trans and non-binary people today.[2] These are high-stakes interpretative problems.

In the heart of a desert, a small flower-covered field glistens with dew surrounding a solitary tomb. Beneath it rest two bodies forever entwined by a shared destiny. Their story, immortalized as one of the most captivating and celebrated love tales in literature, is that of Layla and Majnun. Originally passed down through oral tradition, it was beautifully written by Jami in the 9th century hegira (15th c. CE). It tells of a love thwarted by rivalries and the authority of Layla’s father. In this tale, love is closely linked to suffering, especially during the separation of the lovers. In the end, Layla, unable to survive Majnun’s death, finds in her own passing an eternal reunion with her beloved.

In the fourteenth century, Petrarch declared that his writing broke free from ‘darkness’ and put an end to what would later be called the ‘middle period,’ reviving instead the beauty of the Greco-Roman past. In the early-twentieth century, Norbert Elias argued that ‘civilized’ modern society, with its manners and behaviors, marked a stark departure from the medieval past. Most recently, Steven Pinker has claimed that increased empathy, morality, and reason—all of which he claims are post-medieval—have increased and violence has decreased. Despite criticism from scholars, these ideas have colored how many think of the Middle Ages. Popular media like Vikings, The Last Kingdom, or even the neo-medieval Game of Thrones reinforce views of the Middle Ages as ‘bloody and brutal,’ with ‘the two crimes that are, arguably, worse than death—rape and torture—’frequently depicted as ‘common features of the age.’

What to the contemporary medieval scholar is the historical truth of King Arthur? For better or worse, this question has galvanized academics for generations. Much like the recurrent retellings of Arthurian romance across mass media, arguments over the titular king’s historical existence refuse to die, even as academic publishers have spilled barrels of ink in an attempt to lay it to rest.

Mampato and Ogú is a Chilean adventure and science fiction comic strip originally published in a children’s magazine of the same name. Since its third installment, cartoonist Themo Lobos assumed creative direction of the comic, adding the creative elements that came to define the series. Primarily aimed at a young readership, the premise of the series is that Mampato, a young boy in possession of a time traveling device, can travel to any time and place. One narrative arc follows the journey of Mampato and his prehistoric friend Ogú to Arthurian England. Interestingly, this storyline was first serialized in the years leading to the democratic election of Salvador Allende in 1970 and republished in a compiled format a few years later during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.

At the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol, among various signs and symbols, one demonstrator held a poster that labeled Donald Trump ‘Braveheart’ and showed him screaming ‘Freedom!’ and brandishing a claymore sword in one hand and the severed head of Karl Marx in the other.[1] Earnest analysis of the poster renders something approaching farce: The poster equates Trump’s recent 2020 electoral defeat with the Wars of Scottish Independence; even more absurdly, it recasts a man who was exempted from military service in Vietnam due to ‘bone spurs’ as a military leader who literally was torn limb from limb for his commitment to Scottish freedom. Yet, the people circulating such pieces of propaganda are not concerned with accuracy or perceived histrionics, not when their strategies lie in emotionally and symbolically appealing to a political cause. Logic and particularities aside, according to this poster, we are meant to understand that Trump, like William Wallace, is a masculine, martial, and self-sacrificial icon and that we should support his equally noble (but nebulous and apparently anti-communist) cause of liberty. The past here is merely a vehicle for politics.

At Disneyland, if you are very lucky, a costumed actor dressed as Merlin might choose you from the crowd. After a few unlucky fathers get to try their strength on the iconic sword lodged into a glittering stone, a small child will inevitably have the proud moment of being worthy of this prize. The Disney movie and various children’s book adaptations, such as T.H. White’s Sword in the Stone, of the Arthurian legend, center this iconic moment. The epic pull of the sword from its stony sheath launches a young Arthur onto the throne, proving him the rightful and worthy king.  The sword-in-the-stone scene is arguably one of the most celebrated and influential moments in Arthuriana, permeating throughout popular culture as a recognizable short-hand for heroism that has in many ways become surpassed its original sources. We find heroic characters throughout Hollywood test their mettle by pulling magical swords, hammers, and even tridents.

‘Falconry will break your heart in a hundred ways.’ During my time at a falconry apprentice seminar, the master falconer repeated this mantra through tears as she held the body of a small kestrel to her chest in a futile effort to revive it after it had been attacked by another falconry bird. The tender and fragile bond between falconer and hawk is hard to understand from the outside—it might look like a simple case of human superiority and especially male desire to control the wild. Yet the actual experience of spending so many hours in the company of birds produces men and women whose consciousness is subsumed by that of their avian partners. They see things from the perspective of the bird and bend their own minds and bodies to accommodate this other species.