Episode 16 Transcript
Elise:
Welcome, Everyone! My guest today is Shannon Gayk. Shannon is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Medieval Studies Institute at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. Shannon is a scholar of late medieval religious culture and writing, and her first book, Image Text and Religious Reform in 15th century England, examines the intersections of visual, literary, and religious artifacts and culture in order to trace a more complicated narrative of reformation in the Church. Two new projects deepen and extend her interdisciplinary work: the first digs into the material culture surrounding representations of the arma Christi, which are the instruments associated with Christ's passion. Her second project pushes ideas of the passion into the environment, attending to late medieval representations of the apocalypse and how human witness to the suffering natural world participates in Christ's passion and encourages charitable action in the present. She's written essays for The Christian Century, and she's completing a book of personal essays on visiting medieval pilgrimage sites in our modern world. So, we have so much to discuss, and I'm really looking forward to it! Thank you, Shannon, for being here!
Shannon:
Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted.
Elise:
Great! So you and I have known each other for a while. As I said you're a professor at Indiana University, which is where I did my graduate work. And the thing I've really always appreciated about your scholarship and your teaching is your ability to fuse serious scholarly rigor with tenderness. And when I say tenderness I don't mean sentimentality but real care for your subject matter, and I think you do this by being so precise in your work with manuscripts and material artifacts from the medieval period and also with the care that you take with your language. So, I want to start big and ask you what brought you into the medieval world? How did you get started studying this field?
Shannon:
So first of all, that's such a lovely thing for you to say. Thank you for that. Probably, like most people, I became a medievalist because of the teacher that I had. I thought I was going to study Romantic literature because as a young person I read Wordsworth and Thoreau and the American as well as the British Romanticist Transcendentalists. And I thought they were my people, their love of the natural world in particular. But then my sophomore year in college I wandered into a classroom based solely on the title of the class. It was called Church Ethics and Society, and it was a graduate class and the professor let me stay, which was a remarkable thing. Now, looking back on it, I don't know that I would have done that if a student would have wandered into one of my classes. But as it turned out it was Medieval literature. We read Piers Plowman, which is one of the great medieval poems from the 14th century, but it is a profoundly ethical and theological poem. And at that point in my life I was very interested in questions of poverty and homelessness, and one of the things I realized over the course of that semester is that medieval literature was equally interested in those questions on the one hand but approached them from such a radically different angle, that the assumptions they were making, the very questions they were asking you were just different from what was happening in our public discourse around the poor and those experiencing homelessness. And so I thought this this is worth thinking a little bit more about, but of course it was the teacher's approach to that piece of literature that really made that ethical engagement possible. So I became a student of Piers Plowman, which is strangely one of the texts I'd never really written on but have always deeply loved.
Elise:
That seems to happen a lot. The thing that most engages us, maybe because it's so close, is the thing that we can't quite bring into our writing and our scholarship, maybe, like I said, because it is so close. You mentioned that you're really interested in issues of poverty and homelessness, and ethics and aesthetics, and I see that across all of your work that's an interest that you've maintained. How do you bring those two things into conversation with one another?
Shannon:
So one of the things I've realized recently is that one of major areas of interest is how do we get from the images and texts and art that we consume to a transformed life, and that that basically is the question of aesthetics to ethics. So how does arts lead to action in the world? And then the other side of that of course is how does art move us? What is art itself do to move us to action? So in some ways when I look across the writing I've done over the last couple of years, what I've noticed, as you have it seems as well, is that I'm approaching that from all sorts of different angles, thinking especially about how what we imagine, how the very act of imagining, envisioning, creating, representing is to take a first step toward ethics, toward doing. So the relationship between aesthetics and ethics, of course, is never necessarily an easy one or an uncomplicated one. Um but that's precisely the relationship that I want to mine to better understand in all of its variety and diversity.
Elise:
Right. We hear so much about studying literature, studying art produces empathy, that we can feel for other people. But sometimes what's missing from that conversation, I think, is that next step that you articulated, which is action. How do we move from feeling something toward doing something about our feelings? And that's the ethical component. And I think that you really highlight this in your work by questions of form, and the way that literature takes on different forms. But as you said there are formal structures to our feelings, and we have a form of life. So, what are some of the forms that you like to engage in most in medieval literature and art? And how do you see those making that leap to important action in the world?
Shannon:
That's a fantastic question and not an easy one…
Elise:
Yeah!
Shannon:
I do think so. My thinking on form has actually been really influenced by Giorgio Agamben's work on form-of-life. So, he returns to the medieval monastery in his book The Highest Poverty to think about the way in which the monastic rule gives shape to a life. And that's a kind of ethical way of being in the world. So I'm really interested in the way in which particular literary forms reflect larger lived experiences. So one of the forms that I've been thinking a lot about lately has been the list, and we can talk maybe a little bit more about that…
Elise:
Sure, I'd love to.
Shannon:
The list is a really important one, as is just repetition in any form. So when you think about the ruled monastic liturgy praying the hours, central to that is this repeated entering into the Psalms, for example, that gives shape to time, it gives shape to a life. And so when I'm reading medieval poetry one of the things that I'm most interested in actually is often repetition. Most poetry, early poetry at least, that rhymes has the repetition at the end of the line, the sonic repetition, but then there's also anaphora, the repetitions at the beginning, that bring you in, that give you this sense of ritual. Actually, I think of litany, of chanting that make you feel as if you're there's a kind of refrain to it a kind of coming home as well. So I'm interested in those types of moves in poetry but also the larger ethical and theological significance of that. How does form contribute to theological thinking, for example ? So I've written a little bit on different types of styles, so high style and low style in medieval texts, and the ways in which medieval texts use low style and the vernacular language, English usually in the cases that I study, to think about kenosis, to think about the Incarnation, for example. So thinking about those types of relationships, as well.
Elise:
So you said so much that I want to follow up on. So I'll say first that, yes, we should come back to lists and repetition and we will, but your last point about kenosis, this emptying out and the incarnational move, I think for some people that leap from the theological understanding of incarnation and how we might travel from that understanding to literary representation might be a tough road to walk. So how are you seeing this in sermons, in literature in the vernacular period? What does an incarnational literature look like?
Shannon:
So part of that I think is putting profound theological truths in the mouths of characters that speak very low language. So we see this a lot actually in the medieval drama. So The Second Shepherds' Play, for example, which is one of the most famous of medieval plays. It's a story about the shepherds—it's actually an incarnational story—it's set at the nativity scene. So the shepherds are waiting and they sing songs, they try to imitate the high beautiful songs and discourse of the angels that they've heard, but they simply can't. They're incapable of doing it but so all the same their low vernacular language by the end of the play becomes this still homely, still simple, but beautiful poetic song of praise. So there's a melding there of the high content with the low form that scholars have talked about before. Erich Auerbach talked about the sermo humilis, which he says is characteristic of a kind of incarnational style. And so I think that's one of the ways in which we see it. I think the turn to the vernacular in this period as well is also incarnational. It's the mother tongue, it's the language of the people. When the clerics are reading and speaking and praying and preaching oftentimes in Latin, where the nobility are also reading Latin, to speak in English, to write in English is a profound thing. It's very lowly thing, though, at this point.
Elise:
Right. And there's something so bodily about it too, as you said, "so homely" in the best sense. It brings you home and back to yourself, your mother tongue, that very evocative space of home, motherhood, womb. All of those things seem to be really embodied very much in the vernacular. So you mentioned the high and low and, issues of exemplarity and issues of imitation, and the things that we can't actually imitate, that Christ, for example, is inimitable yet we are called to imitate. So what are some of the ways that you think medieval sermons, let's say, or discourses on the Passion, negotiate this problem of exemplarity?
Shannon:
Yeah, so this is something that I've been thinking a lot about because of course the call in so many of these medieval sermons is to first of all to meditate on the suffering and the passion of Christ, and late medieval poetry, in particular, is very actively oriented, calling its readers or listeners to imagine the Passion in all of its gore, gruesomeness, and pain and suffering, and to feel pity. But in that, of course, Christ remains an object, in some ways, an object that can be identified with, an object that can be loved and mourned, but some of the sermons—sermons of course are calls to action a lot of times—and so some of them try to create meditation in that way but others of them also call their readers to think about what it would mean to model one's life after Christ or model one's life after Christ's Passion in particular. And that's tricky in some ways because as sermons often indicate, what that means is suffering, in the end. If you're going to be like Christ, you must expect to suffer, to be martyred like Christ, and sermons note that this is this is uncomfortable—it's not something that that many people want. So the call to imitation is actually more rare than one would expect, because Christ is thought to be inimitable because he's God. So there's that tension, but of course, Christ is kind of the middle, the middle ground in some ways, as well. And we're back to the Incarnation here. So from the early days of the Church when people were talking about representation, for example, they would say: you know representation in art is legitimized by the fact of the Incarnation, by the fact that Jesus is God but also human. Therefore we can represent the human and likewise in terms of ethics because we can't necessarily imitate God—God is Transcendent—but Christ has imminence Christ is as humans here, and so there are things that can be imitated. And so I think that they're constantly drawing the sermons are constantly drawing us back to Christ's humanity um when it comes to imitations and imitation because the divinity of Christ be something that would be a little bit trickier for them.
Elise:
Right. Do you think—we're talking about sermons and homilists speaking to lay people about how to order their lives to practice, as you said earlier a form of life that is in a way imitating Christ-- are there other genres during this period where you see people enacting Christ or enacting biblical scenes?
Shannon:
Yeah. So this is actually a commonplace of the late 14th and early 15th century where you have devotional treatises in particular. They are basically guidebooks. They're kind of self-help, devotional self-help books to um to teach people how to enter into scenes of the Passion. And Nicholas Love's Meditations on the Blessed Life of Christ is probably the best known English example. It's a translation of the Latin text but it was extraordinarily popular during this time period. And we know of at least one person who seems to have taken up this practice written about it. So, Margery Kempe, who is one of my favorite medieval characters, and she is truly a character. Everywhere she is she's so taken in and internalized this idea that the world is possibly a series of scenes of Christ and Christ's life that when she goes into a church and she sees a statue of the Virgin holding a baby she just breaks out into tears because, as she writes, she says, when I see that, I see it as if Christ and his mother are still alive to me. She tells one story in which a priest, she's crying, and a priest comes up to her and says, “Why are you crying, woman?” And she says because it's as if Christ is dying today. And he says, "Oh he died a long time ago." And she rebukes him for this and says it should be this way to you as well. You should live in a world that is resonant with spiritual possibility where everything calls you back to these memories. But that's the type of imaginative practice, imagined affective devotional practice, that was encouraged by these various guidebooks that were circulating around. She takes it to an extreme, perhaps.
Elise:
Yeah, I love your example. I mean Margery's tears sometimes get pushed to the side as too much, but in a way everything was too much at that point. And the point was that it was too much that if you really did live this way—see Christ's passion and death everywhere, if you saw salvation history playing itself out in every blade of grass growing, in every rising of the sun and setting of the sun, than what was there left for you to do as a human body but to weep, but to feel, but to emote in this really powerful way. And I like your language of the "as if," because to me that seems exactly what so many of your projects are getting at, that moment, that's the leap between the imaginative work and then what do we do with the work, the action of it. So you've written a lot about the Passion as I've said and this meditative affective piety. And I see your work, the interesting thing about it is that you move from that affective piety recognizing it into these forms of life via some of the reform that was happening in the middle ages. And one group that you tend to think about and write about are the Lollards. Who are they?
Shannon:
So “Lollard” is one of these words that scholars disagree about what it means. So I should preface this by saying that. But a Lollard basically just means heretic or dissident, but when I talk about Lollard it's like when most late middle English people talk about Lollards. What we mean are followers of John Wycliffe. And so John Wycliffe is probably best known now for advocating for the translation of the Bible into the vernacular so that people could read it, because mostly people, again, could not read Latin. His followers also did a lot of that work. They picked up and began the translation of the New Testament in particular and began circulating that. But they also took some of his ideas, maybe became a little bit more extreme after Wycliffe's death. So Wycliffe raised some concerns about transubstantiation and the Eucharist, but he left a mystery there. For some of his followers, they thought it was, you know, “Hocus Pocus” basically. That's where later the term comes from, that it was a way that the clerics were trying to maintain power and control over the lay people. But nothing was actually happening in the Eucharist. So that was one area of critique. They also tend to critique a lot of the physical practices of the Church. So the veneration of images, the devotion to relics, going on pilgrimages, all of these sorts of things. They read a lot of texts and circulated a lot of things arguing against these elements of the Church in part because they thought that these practices were particularly exploiting the poor. And this is one of the reasons I became first interested in that, because they said, “Why are you giving all of this money to guild statues in the church when there are poor people begging right outside?” And so they wrote poetry; they wrote sermons. We think that women were allowed to preach in some early Lollard communities, but they also remained fairly enmeshed in their local parishes probably. So in that way they're sometimes called proto- Protestants, but they're not really proto-Protestants. They don't really break with the Church. They probably still attend Mass. In the beginning of the 15th century, the Church did try to crack down on the circulation of Lollard texts and Lollard communities because they would gather in houses to read the Scriptures together. And that was threatening to the church at the time for all sorts of reasons. So a number of people did go to the stakes, books were burned, beginning in opening decades of century.
Elise:
Do you think that this emphasis on translation, on language again coming into the vernacular, on deemphasizing the rituals and the gilding and churches and raising up or raising into awareness the lived bodies in poverty, do you think that all of this is in part responsible for this shift toward a more practical and doable imitation, an imitation of Christ in the world, a kind of incarnational imitation?
Shannon:
Yeah, I think that's it. That's a fantastic way to put that. I think that they certainly thought that it was, right. The Church, I think, thought that the way that they were imitating Christ was equally relevant or important as well. The Lollards are not the first in making this type of turn and seeing it as a mode of imitati. You can think back, for example, to Francis of Assisi and the movement that he sparked um driven by so many of the same things the Lollards were, but that got incorporated into the larger church instead of pushed away. And there's all sorts of complicated historical reasons for that.
Elise:
And I think what this shows though too is that the theological motivations for social action have always been intertwined, that this history between what we might now call a social justice movement has been in Christian history in the West for quite some time. And we see it manifesting in a variety of traditions that are coming from a lot of different places and from different people. I am really excited and interested when you said that we think that some women were allowed to preach amongst the Lollards. Do we know much about them or do we know how that might've worked?
Shannon:
We don't have that much information about it but there are some scholars who've worked on that, and we also have little clues. To go back to Margery Kempe, for example. She is called a Lollard, and she's preaching, basically. And that's one of the associations that has been drawn, that she doesn't really claim she's preaching but she's preaching. She's a woman. Who did that? Lollards perhaps. Again, we just don't have as much historical evidences, we have hints throughout the corpus, but that's it.
Elise:
Right. And sometimes that's the fun thing about scholarship, and sometimes that's the frustrating thing about scholarship. It's so evocative, but we can't always draw the lines together as neatly as we might want to. But nonetheless even Margery, her speech was effective in the world. And if we're looking at these big questions of the word and then the capital "W" Word, her word is still with us. We're still talking about her, reading her, thinking about what she had to say even as we argue about what it might mean. And I'm interested in this, too, about playacting in the period and the ways in which performing roles because we know that there were morality plays, mystery plays which staged biblical dramas and staged the passion and death and resurrection. So were these sites of playacting and imitation understood to be on a kind of continuum with the form of life imitation that was put forward in sermons, or were they two different things?
Shannon:
I suspect that people in the middle ages probably would have thought of them as two different things. Scholars have been drawing them together and thinking a lot about sacred performance, which is something that I'm very interested in. We do have evidence of sort of these mini-dramas that are taking place within monastic settings, for example, where nuns will have baby-doll Jesuses that they will cradle. So it's a kind of play acting but is also an act of aspect of meditation and identification, where they become Mary holding the baby Jesus. But then of course as you know we have these massive play cycles, and several of the towns in England that are creation to doomsday all over a period of maybe a couple of days or maybe even a single day being performed. And one of the remarkable things about these plays is that they would give people the chance to step into biblical time. York, for example, would become Jerusalem for a day or the Holy land for a day, and people would play Jesus and Judas and Moses and God, even. This is long before the blasphemy laws. But these are just these are your neighbors who are playing these things. And so there was a sense that people did actually imitate in a very performative way the life of Christ and the disciples and demons as well in these. We have one sermon that gives us a perspective on this that we don't get in the play scripts themselves. So in the sermon it's talking about the imitation of Christ, and it tells the story of someone who is playing Jesus, and after a day or so, you know, he starts to identify with Jesus the language he uses. He says, “I was buffeted, I was scorned,” as if he temporarily became Jesus Himself. But then later on, we're told that he asks not to play this part anymore because it was terrible. He didn't want to have to go through this and he wants something a little bit more fun like a demon. So we don't have many examples from the middle ages like that, where we have this kind of reflection on the experience of acting out this role in a performative context, and how that might bleed into a kind of real identification with the characters that one is playing, but certainly that happens some, yeah.
Elise:
Well, it just also, though, shows, even though we may not have that exact evidence, how porous our bodies were understood to be. That if you could hold a baby doll and think of it as the baby Jesus, or if you could be enacting Christ being buffeted and stripped and put a crown of thorns on your head, that you could somehow get to that place where you could be Mary, where you could be Jesus, where you could be a demon. And so the range of possibilities goes from: Wow! I could really be doing something great. To: Yikes! I could really find myself in a bad position. But both speak again to this kind of porousness and openness toward the world and toward these figures, these people that were seen as to be worshipped, divine but also as mediators. And you mentioned the play cycles goes from creation till doomsday, so I'm hoping that this idea of performance and porousness and also the end of the world could maybe help us think about where your research is taking you right now, because I know that you're thinking about representations of the apocalypse in the middle ages. So, to begin with, can you say just a bit about what those representations looked like, what people thought about the end of the world?
Shannon:
Yeah, I think the most common representation of the apocalypse in the middle ages, as today, was some version of John's Apocalypse from the Bible. So in John's Apocalypse, of course, we have these strange dragons and the beast and all of these symbols that are really hard to understand. But beginning in the 12th century, and really reaching their peak in the 13th century, we had these extraordinary illustrated apocalypses that showed that people became very interested in imagining the end of the world but also saw it as extremely mysterious. As today, you know, there's a lot of sort of ongoing debate about what does this mean, if anything, for the modern world. Who is the beast? These sorts of things. These kinds of conversations are happening in the middle ages. But what I think I'm most interested in actually is a very different apocalyptic tradition that I've never heard of until a couple of years ago. And I was actually in York—to go back to York—in a parish church when I came across this window called the Prick of Conscience Window. It's a famous window. It has 15 panels or panes, and below each are two lines, a couplet, from the 14th century poem Prick of Conscience, which is one of the most popular poems of the middle ages. But I couldn't figure out what I was seeing when I looked at it, because, unlike most stain glass [where] there's lots of figures in it, this window was full of fiery reds and watery blues, scenes of trees uprooted. I just thought: What is this? So you almost had to have the text to figure out what was going on, but as it turns out it, It's just one example of this extraordinarily popular but more or less forgotten apocalyptic motif from the middle ages, which is legendary. It has no real basis in the Bible, though parts of it can be found there, but it's called the 15 signs of Judgment. And so most of my work over the last few years has really been focused on trying to understand what this motif is and what kind of response it would have asked of the people who encountered it.
Elise:
What are these 15 signs?
Shannon:
Would you like me to read you a little bit from one of the poems?
Elise:
I would love that. Yes.
Shannon:
Let me just give you a little bit of background just to get into the popularity of this again. So there were over 500 manuscript witnesses to this and thousands of texts. It appears in sermons and drama from about the 11th century onwards and then it more or less disappears after the Reformation. I think that's also really interesting. But I've been looking at it primarily in the middle English poetry, sermons, and late medieval English art. So this is from a poem that is found in a manuscript at Oxford. And I thought I would read the first couple of lines of Middle English just so you could hear what it sounded like and then I'll give you a translation.
Þe first day þe Cee schal arise & as a wal stonde,
Wel hei3er by xl feet þan any hil in þis londe.
Þat oþer dai, it schal so lowe ali3t þat vnneþe men schul it se,
Alle þe fissches þe þrid day abouen þe water schull be,
And then here is a translation, and I'll go through the first 10 days so you can get a sense of what this motif is like:
The first day the sea shall rise and stand like a wall more than 40 feet higher than any hill in this land. The second day it shall fall so low that people will not be able to see it. All the fishes on the third day shall be above the water and cry so horribly that all people will be afraid. The fourth day water shall burn as if it were coals. The fifth day every tree will bleed black drops of blood. The sixth day all the castles and houses that ever stood shall fall. The seventh day stones will fight. The eighth the earth will quake. The ninth day all the hills will disintegrate and the world become level. The 10th day human beings will run around as if they have gone mad like wild beasts seeking holes to hide in because of fear.
So that's just the first 10 days.
Elise:
Wow! Okay, what possibly could happen?
Shannon:
The thing that struck me when I first started discovering how widespread this was, was how modern it felt in so many ways. You think about we talk about rising seas, and earthquakes, and forest fires so many of the things that that we see on this list are things that we see of course in our modern world, but what struck me even more was the form itself. In some ways that, unlike John's Apocalypse, which always required exegesis, which was symbolic, this seems so fully rooted in the natural world. And none of the versions I've looked at except for one—there's one exception—explain it in a way that tries to moralize these signs, tries to give them any meaning other than the simple geological, environmental meaning they have in there, or not meaning but just presence, existence, they are events in the natural world. And the other thing that struck me about the form, so there's the kind of physicality of it but then there's also the sense that environmental rhetoric today takes exactly the same form, and I'm very interested in that. So if you read people who are writing about climate change, the only way that we have it seems to communicate the scale of something that is beyond our comprehension is to turn to smaller examples and to list. So there's something about the list form. Maybe once you start noticing it you see it everywhere. It's like we cannot talk about climate change without saying: fires in Australia, and rising sea levels, and melting ice caps, and look at the polar bear on the piece of glacier in the North Sea. It’s as if one thing is not sufficient. We need to be overwhelmed with the accumulation of evidence, and we see that as early as this moment, I think, the beginning of 11th century. How do you communicate? How do you make people care? Maybe one thing is not enough. You need a lot.
Elise:
Right. And that's the question; it's so excessive. And the more you hear it, the more you feel bludgeoned by it, the more you feel overwhelmed by it. And you know, you mentioned our current, our contemporary rhetoric, and I think that one conversation we're having about many issues today is how do we remain engaged and not numbed by it. And lists seem formally to sit at an interesting spot there where the enumeration of these apocalyptic events might on one hand overwhelm us to the point of action, that there's no denying it. Or it might strip away our affect, and this is where I think your work is so productive because in a way that affective move, the affective piety, can only go so far, because if we wait to feel something, I don't think anything will get done. So how do you see with this, with the 15 signs, with the listing? Are there techniques or devices that help people, because there are no people in this. That's the other big thing; it's mostly, as you said trees and water and fish screaming. It's horrible. So how do humans come into this? Is there room for meaningful human action?
Shannon:
Yeah. So, in the signs, as you note, one of the most striking things about them is that until the sixth or seventh day human beings are not even mentioned in most of the examples of it or in the artwork and the window, as well. So human beings are affected by the catastrophes in the later days. As you hear they go mad, they lose the ability to communicate with each other. So I think the social rupture that happens is really striking at the end. There's this breakdown of community, and that's one of the final signs.
So what they do, though, that is so interesting, is in so many cases the motif is paired with the corporal works of mercy. And so you see the suffering world and the wounded world, and the sermons and some of the poems make that connection between the wonders and the wounds, not exactly explicit but strongly suggestive of the two. So the idea is that the world, the macrocosm, it's sort of matched by the microcosm of Christ's suffering body and the suffering bodies of the poor and the marginalized in the world itself. So the motif says, "Look." The first thing it does is it just says witness: see this, feel this, and then it doesn't ever tell you what to do. But then it gives you another picture of people tending to the bodies of the poor, and the hungry, and the homeless, and those in jail, and the sick and the dying, the people without clothes, all of the corporal works of mercy as if to suggest what you can do in the moment of catastrophe, before the catastrophe comes, is to pay attention. And I think that it emphasizes that's the first step you have to take. You can't jump to the ethical action without having noticed that the world is wounded first. So pay attention; see the vulnerable. You have to understand that the world, the whole cosmos, as well as people, are vulnerable and suffering; and then it gives a model of how to attend to them. Look for the vulnerable and care for their bodily needs. It doesn't say to go out and care for the animals, the fish, the hills; it's a medieval text, it doesn't really have the kind of ecological vision, although it's suggested in so many ways. But its turn is ultimately to the human and seeing that the way to care for the world's wounds is to care for the your neighbor, the suffering neighbor who is proximate you. That's not going to make the end of the world not happen,but it will care for the immediate new wounds that you have.
Elise:
So proximate care, care of your neighbor. And as you say the text does suggest so many ways in which we can move these 15 signs of the apocalypse into our contemporary ecological discourse. And as you say the first step is paying attention, that we are not going to get anywhere unless we witness first and take that witnessing seriously. And the thing that fascinates me is, as you said, so many of these apocalyptic discourses offer no moralizing and no exegesis. So tell me if you think this is appropriate: But, in some ways, witnessing involves a suspension, maybe a suspension in time, but also a suspension in meaning. So that meanings that you're not anticipating can come to you, and you have room to move with more creative action. Does that seem fair?
Shannon:
I think that's wonderful. I wish I would have said that. It's so well put. No, I think that's exactly right. So, it when you witness something, if you're truly just being attentive to it, you're not necessarily already imposing your frame—I mean we can't help but impose in some ways our interpretive framework on something, but this motif asks us to resist that, I think, or asks its readers to resist that, because if you're really attending, then you can be taught and then moved into that sort of space of creative action and knowing.
Elise:
The idea that humans should read the book of nature is a very old trope, a very old directive, but if we're reading the book of nature, what are we learning from it? I mean are we learning to expect the end? What does that end look like? What are we learning when we read this book?
Shannon:
That's also a great question. So this is something I've been thinking a lot about because when people talk about the medieval book of nature they often think of bestiaries and this kind of symbolic interpretation of the world, or herbals. There's all sorts of sort of symbolic ways of reading the natural world. But if you go back to some of the earliest texts that are talking about reading the book of nature like Alain of Lille's book of creation, for example, the thing that the book of nature teaches is how to die. It teaches that human life is fragile, that we're vulnerable, that we are like the grass, as medieval poets often point out, we're a frail thing, which is ultimately a point that should make us humble, right? So it's when we think about reading the book of nature now scholars often assume that's asserting a kind of interpretive framework again on nature, but what the medieval texts are suggesting is that it's a reminder of our mortality. And so in the middle ages thinking about death, learning how to die, is of course really just encouraging us to think about what it means to live to live well. When we realize our fragility, our mortality, we're more likely to think of life and the world itself and everything around us as very precious. So the book of nature actually that's one of the things it teaches; I'm sure it teaches many other things, as well.
Elise:
That seems to be the most profound lesson, though, because it is a lesson that will come to all of us and that if we're there to witness it is available to us in a variety of different ways perhaps but is non-discriminatory is death, of course. And I really see a beautiful arc here to your own thinking, that what drew you into that first medieval class was a concern for the most vulnerable, for the homeless, for the poor, for what it might mean to hold a certain set of beliefs and act rightly in the world, and your scholarship continues to think through those things. That's a really lovely commitment that you've been true to. I think one of the worst things that sometimes happens when you study pre-modern literature is there is a knee-jerk assumption that "well, that happened then but this is now." And you know for those of us who are in those periods, that gets our blood boiling. But how do you see these conversations about imitation, form-of-life witnessing time, I mean we're really talking about time here, embodied time and eternal time, how can we use these to make sense of our moment here in the summer of 2020?
Shannon:
Well, I've been thinking a lot about collective flourishing and how so many of these texts, ultimately, are about the flourishing of the whole and how hard it is for us to think collectively and how that so quickly gets dismissed under all sorts of terms that don't necessarily have anything to do with it, like socialism, for example. So I do think that the models that the middle ages offer as they struggled to figure things out themselves, and as poets and writers and theologians work out these issues of what does it mean to live well and die well, and all of these different ways using different forms is ultimately what does it mean for us all to flourish in this brief time that we have. And so I think that reading medieval literature, thinking about it in this particular moment, can remind us that the collective is very important, because we're not so good at thinking that way. We have to step back and watch and listen and learn. I think especially in this particular moment that we are in, I think a lot of white people in particular are having a moment in which they realize and which we realize that, "I have not listened well enough; I need to listen and learn and watch." But the question that remains open is the question that we've been talking about, is how do you move from listening, from imagining, to an actual model of a collective flourishing in the future, to action. How do you imagine that sort of world? And will just reading and seeing be enough? So the questions are the same in some ways. So what is that middle step that we take and, as I think we've talked about today, medieval texts think about it in some different ways. There's not a single way. I think feeling is part of it but it's not enough there is that sense that action needs to be driven by imagination and conviction, but listening, attending needs to come first. So I think that speaks to our moments very directly.
Elise:
Very directly. And I can't really think of a better last word to end on than imagination and action and that sense that we need to find a way to imagine ourselves forward into form, into structures that can create collective flourishing. I love that; I'm going to use that myself now thinking about what might matter for all of us going forward. Shannon, this has been a really rich conversation; I've learned so much, and I appreciate the work that you do, and I'm grateful that you were here today. Thank you!
Shannon:
Thank you so much for having me. It was just a joy!