A while back, I had the profound pleasure to be the guest on MedievalPod’s debut episode. My talk with Emily Price, the podcast’s host and creator, covers a lot of ground. Alongside discussing medieval hagiography, time, and trans sainthood, we delve into the importance of joy in our scholarship, the value of pop-culture in our personal and scholarly lives, ableism in academia, the need to call a marginalizing spade a spade, and hope as a form of resistance. I hope you enjoy reading/listening to our conversation as much I enjoyed having it! Sidenote: forgive my sometimes terrible audio; yes, I will be buying a decent mic, stat.
[Start of recording]
00:00:12 Emily Price Hello and welcome to MedievalPod, a podcast about how the medieval world influences the politics, ideas, and lives of modern people. My name is Emily Price and I’m a doctoral candidate researching medieval emotion and scientific texts at the CUNY Graduate Centre in New York City. In this podcast series, I talk to one medievalist each week, whose work bridges the medieval period and modern life. This show aims to highlight new and exciting research in the field of medieval studies and to provide a resource to those learning about particular aspects of the medieval period for the first time. To learn more about the show and to access these additional resources, you can go to https://medievalpod.newmedialab.cuny.edu/. This week I spoke with Dr Alicia Spencer-Hall, an honorary senior research fellow at the School of Languages Linguistics and Film at Queen Mary University of London, about her work on gender fluidity and medieval hagiography, the importance of paying attention to lived experience in history, and how non-normative experiences of time can give us new ways to survive and perhaps thrive in the academy.
[To ASH] Obviously, one of the reasons that I was so excited to have you on is that you have done a lot of writing. You’ve done a lot of writing generally speaking [chuckles] but you’ve done a lot of writing both of sort of 21st century cultural criticism/pop culture writing, and also a lot of writing about hagiography, 13th-century medieval, all of that stuff. Just broad strokes. Yeah. All that stuff. [laughs] And you often bring them together in your work, which is really impressive and exciting. So, I guess sort of my first broad strokes question for you is, why do you feel that it’s so important or interesting to you to put medieval and 21st-century ideas in conversation with each other?
00:02:03 Alicia Spencer-Hall Ooh, starting with a hard one!
00:02:05 EP [chuckles]
00:02:06 ASH I think that sort of almost like an embryonic, like prequel answer, is that’s literally just how I see the world. Like, everything is connected to me. Everything somehow relates to something else. So I’ve just never been like a historian in the sense of sort of teleology like, “Oh, no, then we got better and progress and the medieval is very separate to us. I think that is glorious about the Middle Ages. I mean, I began my undergrad going, “I’m just going to do modern. I’m not going to read anything before 2000.” But then I had these amazing lectures about the medieval, and it was about, like, the theory of being a human, you know, about queerness, magic, identity feminism. And the kind of fluid ways of being, which really spoke to me as sort of a person trying to be in the world myself, and thinking about critical concepts. So in a way, again, I can’t not put them together because that is just how I see everything. But then the more my research has developed, the more I have grown as a person, in kind of an Oprah-esque way, the more I see it as a kind of, it’s a political act much more.
I have much more of an intention of politicized scholarship now than ever before. Because I think that on the one hand, we have people who dismiss anything medieval as you know, barbaric, violent, white supremacist, boring, not really related to who we are today. And that I think is just wrong on all front particularly an issue right now is the white supremacist Middle Ages. Ah, fun fact. No, it wasn’t. There were people of colour, there were gay people, there were queer people, there were disabled people. And so actually, one, debunking the weaponization of Middle Ages is really important to me, but also pointing out that like, it was cool. It was weird. There’s so much fun stuff there, particularly when you look at things like saints who are zombies or see Christ everywhere. And it’s all quite psychedelic. And then there’s the idea of we need to move beyond this notion of objectivity, this idea of the historian as a cis-het white able-bodied man. And there is an objective truth. And so actually, I think you’ll find all these people in popular culture think the medieval is boring. They are wrong because popular culture is wrong and bad and low quality. And that frankly just really me pisses me off. [laughs]
I think that we are informed by our embodiments, our subjectivities, our identity positions, and that makes us better as scholars, and that makes our scholarship better. And so I am somebody who’s deeply invested in popular culture. I always have been. I mean, my blog is called Medieval, She Wrote. I love Murder, She Wrote. I mean, as a kid all we did was we’ll watch films and TV, and I find joy in that and pleasure. And so for me, staking this claim that the medieval is more modern than we think, and vice versa is a political act against gatekeeping in the academy, against this idea of the kind of neutral objectivity, which is a fallacy that oppresses marginalized identities. And also I think, frankly, that in the academy it limits our insights.
00:05:25 EP Yeah. I really like the way that you’ve put that. I had a really similar journey actually as an undergrad because I was like, “I’m going to be a modernist like Virginia Wolf all the way.” And then I took a, a really, really amazing course on medieval manuscripts, and I was like, “Oh, hang on.” [laughs]
00:05:44 ASH Right? I didn’t know. Like I was the person feeling like, “oh God, it’s going to be all like reenactments and sort of really bad ‘Ye Olde Englishe-y.’” And then I was like, “Wait a minute.” You know, talking about the Marie de France, I did French and German. Maria de France’s Bisclavret is about werewolves who are people but are not people. About magic fairies who fix things, but they also don’t fix. I mean, Marie de France and medieval literature, in a way, for me, in a way in so much of it was quite soapy. So, you know, I’m like, this is a bit like Coronation Street, actually. I mean, this is, you know, family dramas. And it goes on and on. And again, like I said, I just, I find joy in it. And I think that is, again, is a very important thing in the sense that in the academy, and this, again, this idea of neutral intellectualism is very abstracted from joy, from your embodied existence. And I think actually reclaiming that, that is a site of power is just better for the academy, better for people, and just better for scholarship.
00:06:50 EP Yeah. I completely agree. [laughs] And more interesting.
00:06:55 ASH Just by far. I mean, this is the thing that really, like, it really makes me like cry inside a little bit, but also gives me so much hope is that when I give papers on things, because at a certain point in my career I was like, well, I could just be sort of normal. [laughs] Or I could just say what I think and what I feel and what I think: actually this connection does make sense. And I do see it. And if people get it, great, but if they don’t, at least there was me in the room. And then people come up to me after like papers or whatever and they say, “do you know what? I’ve got this great idea about like Gossip Girl and this really random text that nobody’s ever read about. And I just have this, you know, I’ve written down some post-it notes, but I’ll never publish it.” And it’s just this way that again, sort of almost internalized gatekeeping as well, that we are as scholars, we are people, we are allowed to consume things that we enjoy or we can hate read, you know. But things that nourish us in way we do to make those connections. But there are so many forces kind of stopping that expression. And so I see like, kind of my role in a sense is just by being like, it’s possible” What are you into? Let’s talk about it. It’s cool.
00:08:09 EP Oh, very cool. [laughs] I guess jumping off of that into maybe a more specific discussion of what you tend to work on. So a lot of your work focuses on hagiography. And so I was wondering if, just to start off, you could give like a super brief explanation of what hagiography is to people who might not understand what that is.
00:08:31 ASH Hagiography just means biographies of saints. So saints’ lives. That’s like its most basic form. The thing you need to think about with hagiography is it’s the idea, like the text was written for a reason. So you have people like called hagiographers who are usually male and clerics writing a story of a saint’s life for a specific purpose. So like in the most sort of formalized version, it’s there for canonization. So you’re basically trying to create a narrative out of like Joe Bloggs in the street, which gets them to be Saint Joe Bloggs. So they have to form like, you know, be formalized into certain tropes. So usually, you know, you are really pious as a child, or if you get married, you might be chaste, or you have the whole genre of you know, early Christian martyrs, for example. So they’re quite repetitive from saint to saint. At the same time though, they often contain lots of really weird shit because you can’t be normcore and a saint. [laughs] It just doesn’t work. You have to have miracles, right? You have to be exceptional. There has to be a reason we’re doing this whole thing. And so you have things like Christian martyrs who will be alive for days in flames, or they’ll be able to talk to animals. They’ll see Christ everywhere. Or if you know you’re a holy woman, you’ll have sex with Christ in your head, and that’s completely good. And we’re saying this is a miracle, so of course we’re going to canonize you. So it’s about this creation of an identity for a specific purpose.
Now, in terms of like medievalism, sort of like the scholarship of hagiography, I would say that like, hagiography got a pretty bad name and still does because it’s viewed as sort of a bit low rent. Like oh, it’s just the same. It’s basically the same. You just like fed in a different person, but it’s the same tropes over and over. You know, there’s this real problem to do with like, but they’re not history, are they? Because they’re not actual biographies. Whether or not things happen as they are stated in the text, we’ll never know. But, like, I’m pretty sure like Christina Mirabilis did not in fact like die and, like, resurrect three times. But it’s about—it’s like the vibe of it is what it’s going for. Whereas yeah, this is very, like white, cishet, able-bodied male historian view is that the texts have no literary quality. There’s no historical quality. They’re boring. So they’re not really worth studying at all. And I guess I, and along with like feminists and queer scholars from like the eighties onwards, who like re-influenced my work and sort of made my work possible said, wait a minute, wait a minute. So much there, there. And started to look at things like in female saints’ lives, how do women have agency? Do they have agency? You know, what about erotic, a desire for God? How does that work? So you have the sort of the past, oh God, fifty years-ish, this real attempt to take hagiography seriously. And that’s sort of where we are right now I’d say.
00:11:36 EP That’s an interesting trajectory, because I feel like from the perspective of somebody who does like ethics studies like myself, there’s a lot of, we can’t know this thing for sure, or this is clearly not, you know, this description of somebody’s emotional state is clearly either exaggerated or like it’s not within the realm of possibility or it’s fantastical. So like, why would we even consider this as a historical document or, you know, in literary studies as an object of study? Because it’s not interesting enough or it’s not conventional enough. But that turn towards actually considering it seriously is really promising. [laughs]
00:12:17 ASH Yeah, and again, it’s sort of being more comfortable with the messiness of genre. Hagiography as a genre, there’s a lot of sort of internal talk about, it might not be like true, but it is authentic. So it’s like the events that a saint like, oh, died and came back to life might not necessarily be historically true, but they are authentic because the saint was in fact that pious that it could have been true but could have been. So there’s sort of like needle thread that issue [inaudible] interesting.
00:12:59 EP Sorry. I think you froze for a second.
00:13:02 ASH Yeah, so, like, this interplay between fact and fiction and how scholars have wrestled with it, but how in the text it’s wrestled with. You know, you have hagiographers coming out and being like, “you won’t believe all this stuff! But it’s still— No, it’s definitely true because God, you know, makes everything happen. So just go with it, everyone!” Another important thing to sort of flag, I guess is that you have the idea of the old school hagiographies, which are Latin because of these are like religious texts, aiming for canonization, or for popular and local veneration. And then you have, if you’re really popular, you’ll have your texts translated or versions of your life, or sometimes a vernacular-only life as it were. And gender is extremely important because of hagiographies are most often written by men. So if you are having women and often, you know, voicing women in these texts but it’s written by a man of very specific purposes in the context of a patriarchal institution that is the church. So any sort of like basic reading in a way involved, having to negotiate with all these like, kind of big concepts and big theoretical paradigms which to me makes it, that’s why it’s so interesting.
00:14:21 EP Yeah, definitely. Do you have a favourite saint’s life?
00:14:26 ASH Oh, I mean, I feel like I have to say Christina Mirabilis because like Nick Cave wrote a song about her. And the song is actually a really good like, overview of her biography. [laughs] Which I was like, “Go, Nick. Yes. Yes.” So Christina Mirabilis again is in this corpus that I worked on for my PhD called the Holy Women of the Liège. And these are really important women because they are at the intersection of the religious and the profane. So they’re not nuns, but they’re not, not nuns. And some of them in fact are nuns, but we now call them Beguines. So again, it’s this messiness of women who are really devoted to God, but maybe don’t fit within traditional orders or traditional structures of being religious. And then you have Christina, who is just a weirdo. I mean, she— [laughs] there’s no, you know, it’s not your mother’s medievalism.
So the beginning of the text, it starts, she’s dead, and then she starts like to levitate out of her coffin. I mean, that— [laughs] right, okay. That kind of sets the tone. [laughs] You know, and in a way, she reminds me of a figure like Tank Girl or something. This kind of bigger bolder-than-life weirdor that you can’t help but root for except you’re rooting for her in the 13th century when she’s dying a lot, but being resurrected. So her big shtick is, the reason she’s astonishing, is she comes back to life because Christ says, “Ah, I can make you come back to life, but you’re basically going to have to go through purgatory on earth and you will then like live through all the purgatory suffering, but it’ll be good for everybody around you because you’ll get, like, every soul will be saved.” And she obviously goes, “Yes, yes. Next.” [… inaudible] in her community, but then she’s really weird. So she sort of like dangles on tree limbs. She lies on the bottom of the river for like five days. She hangs herself for a week, she dies again. I mean, it’s just odd. But there’s so much there there, within the text. It’s not even just sort of simple odd. [laughs] That there’s so many layers of actually, why the text works as an orthodox document in the sense that everything that’s happening to her that she’s embodying is actually canonically appropriate. It is in line with doctrine. And so whilst you’re going, What The Hell?! Actually, the point is that yeah, you do that as a medieval person, I’m sure because it’s pretty alarming, but at the same time, wow, that is purgatory though. Like, that is also real.
I’m just really, I don’t know, compelled by her and impressed just her bad self. [laughs] I mean, she just, you know, they lock her up for a while because I think she’s a demon, but like then I think it’s her breast that exudes oils and she eats that and she’s fine because of course she is and she tootles about. And at the end, you know, she dies again. But then later there’s a vision of somebody that we identify as Christina, so it’s not identified as her in the text, but it kind of makes sense that it is her. So I also love this idea of she’s just going to haunt you whenever she wants. Whenever she’s like, “No, treat my shrine better.” She’ll come back. And this sort of like eternal spectral staying power is kind of like life goals in a weird way. [laughs]
00:17:59 EP Yeah. That’s very cool. I think I remember there’s a scene with her in like a wheel, right? I think I remember that. That’s what I think of when I think of Christina. [laughs] But yeah, no, she’s very cool. Okay. Well, something else that you’ve written quite a bit about with reference to hagiography, and I think it’s sort of just automatically kind of connected to it is relics and relics in a sort of medieval context and also relics in a modern context. So I was wondering if you could also maybe discuss what relics are and how they might have been. [laughs] Yeah. That’s a very big question, but.
00:18:43 ASH Again, in a word, they are cool. I think a big step to get from like a modern or modernist point of view is you think, ah, a relic, they are inanimate, right? [inaudible] But the point of relics is they do things, they act in their world, they have power, they like radiate power. And so you have say a relic could be a bit of Christ’s body, a saint’s garment. You have various forms of like, ah, if that thing touched that thing, that’s definitely a relic now, it’s a certain order of relic. But it’s kind of just like the transmission of divinity. Usually, it’s like you know some kind of healing power basically like a blessing, but very much particularly with like contact relics will be, if you put this cloth on your face, then you’ll be able to see again, et cetera. Again, what I’m interested in to do with relics is about this idea of that, but it is inanimate, but it’s also animate. It’s both at once in a really powerful way of that mix of passive and active.
So, for example, you have things that like relics that basically get themselves stolen, excuse me, if they’re not happy with where they are. [laughs] Relics that move. The Veronica icon which turns itself upside down sometimes. You know, these are almost like impish, impish chaotic things. They also have a bit of their own personality in the sense that there’s a way they want to be treated and respected and there’s a way they operate.
Also, relics are incredibly important in terms of just the transactional economics of faith. Like, if you want to draw people to your cathedral, like pilgrims, for example, which bring money and prestige, you’ve got to have the best relics. Like, that’s why you have, you know, however many thousands of Christ’s foreskin, because everyone wants Christ’s foreskin, because obviously that’s got to be a powerful one. So it’s also this idea of money, economics, prestige, both spiritual, social. Now how do you like—if, to validate the relic, right, you need to have hagiography of some kind, you need somebody to write a story that says, this person is clearly a saint. Like witnesses to you being saintly. But then like, the end point of that is basically your death and becoming a relic. And that’s a weird position to be in as a person if you think that like your job is to be exceptional, to die and then to be like atomized and to have all your bits touched, controlled, consumed by people. But that’s great because that’s your staying power in the world.
And for me, I think, like in my book I talk about being like living relics, so kind of push this idea, so that relics that are lively as I’ve just been trying to kind of sketch. But the idea that particularly like women under patriarchy, for example, and the women in the corpus of saints that I primarily work on, they have power. There is agency, but there is also oppression, marginalisation and [inaudible]. And so I think I, the metaphor I use is like a statue that is posed in certain ways but will resist being posed in other ways. Again, it’s the mixture, the messiness of how does one live as a subject that was always already an object. And that I think is where sort of relic’s power in a modern sense comes from and why I see very much in terms of patriarchal and white supremacist and colonialist regimes, which a hope gets evermore investigated.
00:22:42 EP Yeah. That’s a really interesting sort of framing of what a relic is because I certainly tend to think of relics as like, oh, like, there’s that guy’s hand in Hungary and you go and you see it and it’s in, you know, I actually, I got to do this a while ago. It was really cool, but you know, it’s under like a little shroud and you can’t touch it at all. You can’t even really look at it. And I think it’s interesting to think about, obviously, relic’s not necessarily as, like, accessible to everybody, but as something that you would be touching or, like, ingesting even. I think you talk about that in one of your articles about somebody trying to eat I forget which saint that is, but somebody’s bone. [laughs]
00:23:20 ASH Mary Magdalene’s bone.
00:23:22 EP Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:23:24 ASH The—Hugh [of Lincoln] is just super into it and then gnaws on the bone, which again, is just a sort of monstrous—ugh! But at the same time does make logical sense. [laughs] Again in the sort of relics economy and in the context of Catholic belief which—well, it is the body and blood of Christ that you’re eating. It is literally that. And so there’s—again, it, sort of makes these moments of that are shocking or horrific in the sense of like zombie horror movies, like Christina Mirabilis, to me, are pointedly—have the power to convey so clearly to doctrine that is pretty hard to stomach in certain ways. So they sort of, again, they reveal, they’re like, “Oh, no.”
00:24:09 EP Yeah.
00:24:10 ASH What you actually, well, you have signed up for and you do believe in. What does that mean? So it’s kind of unsettling moment. “Oh God.”
00:24:19 EP Yeah. What’s the extension of that, “do I want to know?”
00:24:23 ASH Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
00:24:25 EP Huh. That’s really interesting. So I guess that’s actually kind of a good inroad into something else that you work on, which is your current and also forthcoming work on trans and genderqueer saints and their experiences. So I know that you have an edited collection, right, coming out on that.
00:24:46 ASH Yes.
00:24:47 EP So this is one of those things too that I think Trans studies in medievalism, from what I know about it, has had the same sort of struggle as, you know, other queer theory and even feminist theory in that a lot of people are like, well, that’s not a thing in the Middle Ages, or you can’t quantify that during that period. You know, same thing with like disability studies too. This is another very big question. [laughs] So interpret in the way that you want. But I guess I’m curious how when you’re researching this, how you go about locating trans history in hagiography or how you approach that.
00:25:28 ASH Well, I’d say there are two sort of preliminary points to make, and one that’s most important is that there are people who have been doing this work for years that like should be credited. So like Gabrielle M.W. Bychowski, and her blog Transliterature: Things Transform. She is on the vanguard of medieval trans studies. My co-editor of this volume, Blake Gutt, there’s Ellis Amity Light, there’s so many people actually that are working on this but have been sidelined or in very junior positions so haven’t had much kind of face time as it were. And frankly, medieval trans studies has only just begun to rise in terms of being, like, viewed as, like, a “real thing”. And I’m happy to see that it is, and I’m very proud of this collection as, you know, another moment forward in that. Blake and I put together a usage guide as part of it---which will be free on the internet, so just Google it---to help scholars work in this field, because it is such a rich area, to use terminology appropriately, to be respectful, to understand sort of the stakes in the game of language and how to deal with historical subjects and also contemporary subjects.
Now, my other point is that I think if somebody does even a cursory read of a hagiography will be able to see that obviously there are trans and genderqueer saints. It’s a bit like, duh? [laughs]. I mean, in a sense by that it is a bit like banal to me just to say that, because so much of religion is, in the Middle Ages, implicated with slipperiness of gender. You think about Jesus who’s very maternal, you know, literally nourished with his “breasts”, monks. You have the notion that Jesus was made purely of Mary’s flesh and thus had a female body. That’s kind of [basic], right? You have seminal texts like the Song of Songs talking about basically queer desire between feminized monks and Christ their beloved. And if you look at them, I mean, particularly holy women, and again, in these sort of like living saints, as it were, these are people who weren’t canonized and who lived in like shortly before or around the point that their texts were written. So again, this is like the living saint idea. I mean, they really liked to have sex with Christ. I mean, they have some very like erotic visions.
But there’s also to do with gender inversion that sort of, the way one becomes holy is to be exceptional in a certain way and sort of gender is a subsidiary category almost to holiness. So there’s this idea now about are saints potentially a third gender or is holiness itself a kind of gender? Basically, most sort of simplistic generalisation is that men who are becoming holy tend to become feminized and women becoming holy become masculinized in certain kind of key ways. And again, it’s to do with this slipperiness, but also throwing off mortal embodiment in profound ways and living differently to those around you, yet being fully 100% authentic.
And so, I mean the trans and genderqueer saints’ volume came out of— I organized a series of panels at the big medieval conference in Leeds, I think in 2017. And the response was just so fantastic from scholars go, “Yes, ha-ha! Yes!” But I also think it’s really important that to talk about gender and transness and queerness in terms of saints because of transphobia, queerphobia, pathologizing ways of living, and just existence, as wrong, as morally deficient, as the opposite of sanctity. And so part of the political work that we do in the volume, and that Blake and I sketch in the introduction, is this idea of transness as sanctity. You know, we talk particularly about religiously informed transphobia, which the Vatican itself promulgates, and yet if you go back to the theological sources, they rely on, you go back to the Bible is wrong. It just, it doesn’t link up. So that’s another sort of point of our work and a methodology we’re staking through trans-hagiographical scholarship is that go back to the sources. Seriously, just go. What does the text say? And let yourself be open to what it says and how you react to that. So there’s a really beautiful chapter in the volume by Sophie Sexon who talked about— again, it’s finding yourself, let yourself touch and be touched by people in your texts, in your sources. And that is a profound moment of coming into one’s own present and creating futures for not just trans and genderqueer scholars, but for all of us actually, about how we exist authentically.
So again, I think that in a way, sort of the transphobia and the erasure of trans identities and the sort of pressure to become even more marginalized, particularly within history because of being written out of history has produced, sort of in the pushback, this glorious again, joy, again, the sense like we talk about trans lives is not just about what feels wrong, it’s about what feels right, and making space for trans euphoria. And you can do that in scholarship too. And in fact, it is a moral, ethical, intellectual obligation to do so.
00:31:47 EP Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting to think about from what you’ve said about hagiography as a genre, as being able to challenge those kinds of ideas about, like, objectivity and, like, we can’t actually know, you know, this person might’ve reported that they were feeling this way, but, like, you know, that can’t be analogous to transness, which is something that I’ve heard a lot in sort of brief discussions of this. And it’s interesting that a lot of hagiography is written by other people, right? So we’re not just getting, okay, this is my subjective experience, which would, you know, would be enough, but it’s also someone else saying like, this person, you know, changed genders or they thought of themselves as another gender, or they were feminized or they were masculinized, you know. It’s really, really interesting as a resource. And like, it sounds like a very overlooked resource.
00:32:41 ASH It really is. Or in ways that previously been negated. So there’s the idea that there was scholarship on trans hagiography. I mean, I would hesitate even to call it that because of its implicitly transphobic vibe that on “transvestite monks”, for example, because there is [a series] of monks who were assigned female at birth who lived as monks, and then usually it’s only at death they were “discovered” to have a different gender. And then how the text deals with that. Now, again, the problem with that is that yes, some medieval people probably cross-dressed, great, but this sort of enforced labelling of it, that they can’t be authentic trans people. That’s not allowed. Scholarship did not allow that. That even that possibility. And it’s also the intensely detrimental connotations of “transvestite” and “transvestite monks,” with psychoanalysis, language, sociology. And so again, part of the volume deals with, okay, so we have talked about quite about “transvestite monks” but actually we’ve not done it well, and we completely erased, but also done damage, frankly, to people by imposing these really limiting frameworks.
A thing I’m really excited about though is the openness of more senior scholars in revisiting past work. So I’m really proud to have everyone in our collection including Martha G. Newman, who wrote a piece like 20 years ago on Brother Joseph, who’s a German monk, and she’s coming back to Brother Joseph saying, “I was wrong. I did not allow him to be a trans man, and actually I want to revisit that and actually improve my scholarship.” And I think it takes a lot of guts to do that. And it’s incredibly heartening as a more junior scholar to see that that is possible, that people are doing that. So that to me is an exceptionally potent moment of allyship, not just in terms of a senior scholar being an ally, a senior cis scholar being an ally. So yeah, more of that would be good. Again, getting beyond— I keep coming back to it, but getting beyond this idea of being objective. You know, things that you weren’t aware of at the time, but you have a chance to educate yourself to learn more, blah, blah, blah. That you can then update your work to reflect that. And in fact, we should do that.
00:35:31 EP Yeah. That’s really heartening. That’s amazing. I mean, that’s nice even just as a junior scholar to know like, oh, okay, that’s actually an option. [laughs] Like you can, you know, learn and change your mind. [laughs] And then actually produce updated scholarship, like, you know.
00:35:47 ASH And I think that, frankly, it enhances my esteem for that scholar to be able to do that. And it’s important. And again, like, it’s a blueprint for how we do this and what it looks like to do ethical scholarship generally, but also ethical scholarship when we’re dealing with topics of direct interest and lived experience of marginalized communities today. So there’s a bit in our, Blake and my introduction, where we talk about trans rights today and like trans visibility because you can’t divorce trans people in the past from trans people today. That is not ethical scholarship. This is [the notion that] trans studies and the trans past is not a playground. If you are going to work on trans identity, say medieval hagiography, you have to support, uplift, actually be an active ally of trans people today, and especially your trans colleagues. And I mean, I think that is true of all work on, again, marginalized communities’ identities. So I also work on medieval disability studies and I think the same is true there. If you’re going to work on disabled people in the past, and again, it’s sort of in the language I’m using, you work “on” “them”, you know? And I, as a disabled person, I find that interesting just to hear myself talk about it in those terms.
00:37:11 ASH So it’s a big part of my research generally, and as we express it in the introduction of the trans volume, is about this idea of communion with the past, about finding oneself in the past and the past to inhabit you and to actually do justice for everyone in that fellowship.
00:37:35 EP Yeah. Yeah. I think that being really explicit about lived experience and the importance of lived experience and, like, bringing your own lived experience to scholarship is really, really important. Like, I find it really important. I also work on medieval disability, and I think that is another field, I think I said this earlier, that often gets kind of short shrift in terms of like, well, that’s not a thing in the Middle Ages. Like, they didn’t even have a framework for that. Why that doesn’t exist. Which is such a, like, limiting way of thinking. I mean, you know, you can be very literal about it and say, well, they didn’t have this word, or I’m sure with transness too, you can say they didn’t have this word to describe.
00:38:14 ASH It’s a bit of a red flag though when somebody does that to me. It’s like, “oh, thank you. Thank you for pointing that out. I didn’t know!”
00:38:21 EP Yeah. [laughs] I’ve been doing this research for years, and yet I never knew. [laughs] Yeah. But I think that emphasis on recovering— I mean, recovering maybe isn’t the right word, but paying attention to and listening to that experience is really important.
00:38:36 ASH Yeah. I think it’s both, right? I think both actions have been enacted upon marginalized identities in history in that [inaudible] like, which is just ignored or neglected or just said, yeah, no, that’s not— no, no, no. That feeling you’re getting from reading that text, that doesn’t mean anything. No, no, no, no. Be objective. But also that there’s literally people being written out of history. Do we have the sources, do we pay attention to the sources? Are they literally accessible? You know, the people as in saints, medieval saints who get most work done on them are ones that have a good addition, a good translation. It’s sort of a, again, an extremely obvious point. But so the more we actually do things like that, edit, translate, make accessible and particularly like translate, the more people get access to these like, awesome historical forebears and the better our scholarship becomes.
00:39:35 EP Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and that’s a huge part of why the collection is so exciting. [laughs] I’m so excited for it anyway, you know, because people, you know, are going to actually have access to a lot of the scholarship, which is really, really exciting. Cool. [laughs] Well, I think that connecting to that sort of concept of not only lived experience, but like doing justice to current lived experience I think is really important and I think gets lost in a lot of discussions about medieval stuff, especially. You know, it’s in the past. You know, why would we connect it to modern concerns? But something that you’ve talked a lot about in reference to both, obviously your scholarship on saints, but your, I guess, sort of ethos and thoughts around academic labour and time also. [laughs] I’m making a connection. But I noticed you’ve done a lot of blogging and writing about crip time, which is a concept from Alison Kafer, which is really, really important within disability studies. And also just about temporality in general. That seems to be a really important centre point of all of your work and including in your discussions of ableism in academia which is I think a really important topic. So there was something that you said in a recent post of yours that I hoped I could quote from if that’s okay. You say phrases like “long hours, a couple of months, crazy hours, days off the future, the next job, precarity is all about time.” I thought that was fascinating and I was wondering if you could maybe talk a little bit about, or expand on your thoughts about normative time as it relates to the academy or academia. [laughs]
00:41:32 ASH I mean, I think if you’d asked me, there was a point like I think just post-PhD where I was like, how have I become a person where I just sit and go, ”time though? What is it? Mmmm.” Because you’re right, it does actually motivate so much of my work and sort of [rejecting] linear time, the teleology of “objective” history. And also something that is deeply personal to me, as I think time in its banalities is deeply personal to everyone. You know, the time one gets to oneself, how you start the day, what your lunchtime looks like. But, I live with a chronic illness, so fibromyalgia, which is chronic pain and chronic fatigue mostly. And so I have a very different experience to normate time. You know, I have to do things like, how much energy do I have on this day? I need to ration energy. So I have to think about future me and past me in very different ways. I’m very organized, for example, when it comes to my handling of time because I need to impose some kind of narrative on my bodily chaos. So I can’t just, you know, spontaneously be like, oh yeah, no, I’ll just like go to the pub with you. I need you to give me a time, say, okay, a week from now, so I can sleep more, I can modulate my times and ways of dealing with time to have time to do the thing that’s in the diary. And that to me just became ever more pressing the more, I guess, ensconced in academia I got, in the sense that, I think the beginning of my PhD, a bit more like [enmeshed in] research, ah, you can do all the things that sort of, you know, you are told by senior scholars, “this is the time you’ll never get!” But then I started to feel like, well actually though I don’t actually have as much functional time as other people and the kind of time that is prioritized in the academy through research time, turning up to things, [filling] seats, time at conferences, my body and brain just don’t work like that. And I think we can tie this to sort of the neo-liberalisation of the academy in the sense that its productivity is like the idea of sort of a factory. And if you want to get a job, you have to publish, for example. If you—but you also have to organize your time in various ways, and you also have to teach and teaching is like rigidly structured in scheduled ways. And so there’s often a, you know, a saw about, “Oh, we’re just so overworked.” And it’s sort of like, well, everybody is, you know, under the neoliberal system, but I think it’s particularly pointed in academia because of the valorized way [it’s framed]and there’s a moral component to not working enough. And so then I think about it in terms not just of overwork because it’s true, like in your spare time you are supposed to just write another paper or just do that job application, but also hyperwork in terms of pace and productivity. And, you know, that only seems to increase, so you need to do more in less time all the time. And that’s terrible for everyone, right? I think, as Susan Wendell says, is that when pace, the demands and obligations of pace increase, that is actively disabling for everybody. Even if you are notionally able-bodied before, if you are supposed to work faster, there’s a point where you’re just, you can’t.
Now this obviously really impact people, for example, with care responsibilities, if you have a life, frankly, yeah. But if you have a disabled body that requires certain things in certain ways, you do not have access to the same amount of time as people without disabilities or without care responsibilities. But the academy makes no real attempt to deal with that, right? There is no accommodation, there is no reckoning with this idea of time is actually fungible and flexible and elastic in the sense that it’s different for everybody. But you can’t make extra time. So a classic thing for early-career researchers particularly [inaudible] in the UK context is, okay, once you’re applying for a postdoc or a permanent job or whatever, just get a job—which needs to be full-time because you need to pay rent and eat—and on the side keep publishing, remember. And you have to keep going to conferences to keep, you know, to keep your name in the game. And it’s all this on the side that’s when you find time to do the professional thing and that frankly is impossible. And the only way it becomes possible is if you have certain privileges. So if you don’t need to be actually having a paid job, or if you can outsource labour of various kinds, or if you can, you are healthy enough in that moment, able-bodiedness is only a temporary state for everyone, but in that moment, if you can push it, that is a privilege. And we’re facing, thus, the loss of scores of non-normative bodies from the academy and people who have basically responsibilities of various kind that are beyond the norm, that set by the academy, which remains cis-het, white able-bodied manhood.
I mean, again, I feel like we just have to say it at this point. The jobs market is terrible. There is ever more pressure to produce more to market yourself more. The point is that that’s not actually doable. There’s a point where you do need to sleep. There’s a point where you do have to rest. And I think the lie that is pedalled in the academy is, one, that it’s a meritocratic. And two, that it, you know, it’s open to everyone. It’s accessible in a certain way, but it’s just not. And we’re never going to get beyond that unless we actually deal with that.
00:47:41 EP Yeah. No, I think that that myth of like individual exceptionalism being enough and what individual exceptionalism actually entails is really insidious. Like, I think you talked a little bit in your piece about the expectations of like, well, everybody works 60 hours a week. Of course, you should be working 60 or 70 hours a week if you want to get a job. That’s just what people do, you know? Or expectations like, well, you need to be, like, very on top of responding or very quick to respond to things, but, you know, institutions are going to take forever to respond to you.
00:48:16 ASH Or things like not being told if you have teaching. So if you are on short-term contract, and, you know, you can’t be late to that first class. [laughs] You turn up and be like, sorry kids like I’ve had twelve hours to put this together. No, yeah, that’s absolutely unacceptable, yet institutions routinely tell you very, very, very last minute. And often without a proper contract in place, so proper kind of labour regulations. This is the norm. And yet then when that happens, one has to flex one’s own life and one’s own temporality around it. Constantly. I think there’s also the idea of like, disability is a second shift. Like a job that you can never quit from my job. You have a disabled body. But as early-career researchers, every time you have a short-term contract, a huge amount of the contract has to be taken up by getting in place other work. So you apply for something, like, great. I got it. But then basically from week one, you have to be applying for things because of the institutional timescales for, we’re hiring in a year, for example. So you, again, you are always operating on these just clashing, chaotic and extremely oppressive timescales.
And then we bring it back to crip time I think the glory in a way of crip time, which is in, you know, its most simple form, it’s just the time scopes, timescapes inhabited by people with non-normative bodies. It’s just not linear. You have the calculation of time is different. And it really puts paid to again, to this notion of objective time and time is ever expandable. And if you just work hard enough, you’ll find the time and that’s okay. Crip time is more a kind of honouring, I think, the multi-layered interactive and intersectional times of living with bodies that do not obey neoliberal productivity. And in my blog post, which I think there’s a certain point you can tell I’m just like, you know, a cat bashing my piano keyboard being like, “I am angry about this! I have the statistics to back it up!” It’s that, we as academics generally, whether or not you have a disability right now, you are being ever more disabled by the temporal oppressions of the academy. And at a certain point, everybody will break too. So disabled academics are hit worse. We are [hit worse] than parity because access is still not, you know, for all. But also, you know, if you’re a disabled person of colour, for example, you are oppressed more, you are paid less. So all this additive intersectional identity oppressions.
And so it’s kind of saying like, it’s [terrible] frankly, you know, this is a very specific issue. But it’s not, crip time is not just for crip bodies and crip lives. There’s something here to talk about and think about how one exists and interacts with time in your own life, even if you have an able body right now. And that, you know, it’s the notion of, like, accessibility is better for everyone that we are just, you know, the canaries in the coal mine. You know, it’s the people who have care responsibilities, who don’t have financial support from elsewhere, who are disabled, et cetera, who are being shed evermore from the academy. And so, it’s great you’ve survived! [inaudible] Great! But, you know, the productivity and pace only increases. Everybody has a breaking point. And frankly, it is inhuman what is being asked of people.
00:52:11 EP Yeah. Yep. [laughs] Absolutely. [laughs] I don’t have a response to that. I just know my only response is yeah.
00:52:22 ASH Yeah. I mean, I think, like I said, there is a bit, like we were talking about with the trans saints’ volume, like from the point of the negativity, or oppression that I think we have to reckon with and identify and name and explicitly push back against like the white supremacist weaponisation of the Middle Ages. You can’t just be like, oh yeah, but it wasn’t like that. We move on. But no, we have to confront with it, deal with it, push back and be actively anti-racist. In the same way, I think, with disability in the academy actually saying, this is a problem and this is a problem in this way, but there are ways to make it better and making it better makes it better for everyone. Like wouldn’t it be amazing if there was an academy where it was genuinely accessible in terms of time as well? People with care responsibilities weren’t completely [disadvantaged], for example, in terms of promotions or hiring, or you were judged on the quality of your output. Or at the very least, at the basic level, we just got rid of the lie of meritocracy. We just do that. I mean, that would be great as a starting point.
00:53:33 EP Yeah. As a starting point.
00:53:34 ASH You know, it’s like the strands of hope are there, but I think only if we actually deal with this.
00:53:44 EP Yeah, I agree. I was trying to think of a wise thing to say, but yeah, you’re right. I mean, and I think it’s very easy to get, obviously, to get sort of worn down by that process because that’s what it’s sort of designed to do. But I think that at least being able to like envision those path forward in community with other people is really important and valuable.
00:54:10 ASH Yeah. It’s about finding fellowship again. So we start like the trans volume introduction, this idea of finding yourself in history and Leslie Feinberg saying not being able to find oneself in history does damage. And how do you find yourself in the present, and even envision a future? And I think it’s a similar way in a sense of thinking about like medieval disability, medieval saints, how to be a woman in the Middle Ages. For me is about finding oneself, but also just different ways of being in the past to actually be able to come back to the present and having this communion where you have work on hagiographies. I’m like, “Communion. Yes. Coming together.”
00:54:51 EP Double meaning. [laughs]
00:54:53 ASH Yeah. And I think this kind of crip-chronic communion, as I put it in one of the chapters I wrote about it, again, that actually coming together out from bodies out of time, lives out of time coming together is a way to [live] better in future.
00:55:11 EP Yeah. Yeah. [laughs] I think that’s actually a really good sort of place to close. You got to a lot of my sort of initial last questions in your answer. I was going to be like, how do we move forward? What do we do? Answer, you know, impossible question. But I guess, was there anything that you would like to discuss that we didn’t actually get to?
00:55:37 ASH I don’t think so. I guess I would, not caveat, but sort of recognize that I am only in a position to say that and sort of like have that kind of, oh, but there could be better because of my privileges that I, you know, I’m white, I can pass as able-bodied, which still helps. Even if I’m out as disabled in the academic community, I can still pass if people don’t know me, for example. I can have [the safety that] I’m not being laid off currently from my job, for example. And so it’s the job I think of people with privilege like myself to support people who really don’t have the ability to fight right now in the sense of, you know when you are adjuncting and just trying to pay rent and it’s not really working and you have to use a food bank even though you are, you know, you’ve been fifteen years and you’re actually very educated and qualified and it’s tough. It grinds you down. It wears you down. And so I see this as, it has to be a collective and collaborative effort. And I don’t think like a hope or kind of forward propulsion as a kind of panacea is really not what I’m asking for or advocating for. It’s kind of like hope as a form of resistance.
00:57:06 EP I like that a lot. [laughs] Thank you. It’s lovely.
00:57:10 ASH You’re welcome. I feel like now I need to like, get on Oprah. Like Oprah, I’ve got a slogan for you.
00:57:16 EP Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s a good slogan. It’s a heartful slogan. Oh, important last question though. Is there anything that you would like to plug?
00:57:25 ASH Oh, I have a blog medievalshewrote.com because when I grow up I want to be Jessica Fletcher and solve mysteries. I’m on Twitter @aspencerhall. [Find me these days on BlueSky.] The volume is called Trans and Gender Queer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography, co-edited by Blake Gutt, and it’s out with Amsterdam University Press in a couple of months, hopefully. [It’s also available Open Access now!] Oh! My first book is called, wait, I need to remember this one. Medieval Saints and Modern Screens Cinematic Visions, something. Google it. And it’s Open Access. So you can read it for free on the internet right now.
00:58:07 EP I will link that under the podcast description. I’ll link all those things. [laughs]
00:58:12 ASH Thank you.
00:58:13 EP Yeah. Alright. Well, I think that that’s—
00:58:16 ASH It’s been a real pleasure. Thank you for having me.
00:58:18 EP Thank you so much for joining me. MedievalPod is produced and hosted by me, Emily Price. Our theme song is Through the City II by Crowander used under a Creative Commons BYNC non-commercial license. Our logo was designed by Kat Schneider. You can find the show notes and additional learning resources at medievalpod.newmedialab.cuny.edu. And you can follow us on Twitter @medievalpod.
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