Sometimes, I cannot believe my luck. I get to think big, weird thoughts, and have expansive, exciting conversations, with cool, insightful people—all part of my work life. Objectively speaking, this is bananas. Consider the transcript below as one of my, and hopefully one of your, five-a-day. I had the delightful honour of talking with Meaghan Allen and Anna Probert about all things research, on the first episode of the rebooted Modern Medieval podcast, a postgraduate project supported by the North West Medieval Studies Network. I hope you enjoy reading/listening to it as much as I enjoyed recording it.
00:00:03 Meaghan Allen Hi
00:00:04 Alicia Spencer-Hall Hello. It’s so good to see you!
00:00:07 MA Yes. It’s so exciting to have you. So, hello everyone and welcome to Modern Medieval, the podcast. I’m Meaghan.
00:00:16 Anna Probert I’m Anna.
00:00:17 MA And today we have a very wonderful special guest Alicia Spencer-Hall
00:00:23 ASH Yes, it’s me. [chuckles] Woo!
00:00:26 MA Alicia is going to be our first in the new rebooted Modern Medieval. We are so excited to have Alicia be that person. So, welcome.
00:00:36 ASH Thank you so much. I am very happy to be here. I’m very excited. I also feel a little bit like I’m in an episode of Buffy at, like, the prom court and I am somehow like the prom queen, because I’m like, “Hello everyone! It’s my debut!” My [inaudible]
00:00:52 MA I mean, Anna knows this. But so I, Meaghan, have met Alicia before we—when I first started my PhD, I actually reached out to Alicia with some questions because I was starting off and Alicia does very similar research to me, but also very different. And I was like, “Well, I’m doing Buffy and the medieval. You have done Saints and Modern Screens, you’ve looked at Twitter, you’ve talked about the Kardashians and everything—
00:01:15 ASH [laughs]
00:01:16 MA —guide me. So, Alicia knows about all my Buffy-ness and everything.
00:01:21 ASH But also, let’s face it, I’m a fellow Buffy traveller. Like, let’s be real.
00:01:25 MA She just turned twenty-seven. [inaudible].
00:01:28 ASH No. [inaudible]
00:01:30 MA Made me feel old
00:01:30 ASH Yeah. No, I’m not talking about that.
00:01:33 MA But Alicia, tell us about yourself. Who are you? What do you do?
00:01:37 ASH Ooh, I love a massive existential question to like open things.
00:01:40 MA [Laughs]
00:01:41 ASH Who am I? Alright! Should I lay down on the couch? Well, for my professional title, I’m an honorary senior research fellow at University College London. So I’m an editor, I’m a writer, a researcher. I work a lot on medieval hagiography, which just means saints’ lives, and critical theory, pop culture. Anything that kind of entangles and explodes the modern medieval together, that is my jam. And I’m also High Priestess at Sticker Church which really exists on the internet, which is an emporium for weird activist medieval stickers and postcards
00:02:15 MA Amazing. So let’s use Sticker Church?
00:02:18 ASH Church. Yeah.
00:02:19 MA As our segue in—it is a real website.
00:02:23 ASH It is.
00:02:23 MA And believe you have Instagram and everything.
00:02:27 ASH I have an Instagram and it is www.sticker.church because obviously I was going to snap that up. It was available.
00:02:33 MA Amazing. So tell us more about Sticker Church and how it came to be and what it does.
00:02:39 ASH Ah, again, another great question. It is a very random, weirdly important, I think, offshoot of my research. So Blake Gutt and I co-edited a volume called Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography, which is all about trans and genderqueer saints and for the front cover we commissioned a deeply excellent artist called Jonah Coman to do something eye catching, arresting, provocative that really kind of transmitted the message of our book, which is that trans and genderqueer people have always existed including in the Middle Ages guys. And everybody just loved these pictures, the art Jonah had done. And so I thought, “You know what? I love a sticker. This needs a sticker.” So I started producing stickers of the Trans Saints and postcards and then thought, “Why not kind of embrace even more the wonderful medium of stickers to kind of show how cool medieval stuff is, but also have more of a kind of activist bent to things to show about marginalized histories that you can have your own postcard of.” So we’ve got also coming out—I’ve got a collection on tiredness. [laughing]
00:03:48 MA Interesting.
00:03:49 ASH Really tired medieval people. I’ve got something coming up about the trans egg, with the trans egg being a person who doesn’t yet realize they’re trans, so they’re in the egg and the egg cracks, you kind of, out come to trans person. So I’ve got a collection coming out which has weirdly resonant images of people in eggs from the Middle Ages, [chuckles] and birds and stuff like that. So it’s kind of a fun thing because again, I must say this, I love a sticker, but also something that shows what we can do with the Middle Ages and how it matters and how it resonates today.
00:04:20 MA Yeah, that’s amazing. I mean, I love a sticker too and I’m realizing now that I need some to cover my laptop cover because I keep meaning to get some and I haven’t gotten any because when I got my copy of Trans and Genderqueer Subjects and Medieval Hagiography at Kalamazoo this past summer, the stickers weren’t included with
00:04:39 ASH No.
00:04:39 MA it, though I did get pieces of a saint. was that Juana de [la Cruz]?
00:04:44 ASH Yes. So Kevin Elphick has written a chapter in the book about mother Juana, the 16th century Spanish saint who was re-gendered in the womb. It’s such a cool story. And they work currently for the VA supporting LGBTQ plus veterans. And also they’re very involved in the campaign to get Juana canonized. And so Kevin got us some relics [laughs] So you could have a very bit of your own, I think—I believe it was Juana’s graveside soil.
00:05:16 MA A bit of dust.
00:05:17 ASH Yeah.
00:05:18 MA Because I remember at the room you were in with Amsterdam University Press at Kalamazoo, I like walked past and everything. I was like, “Ooh, me things,” and you weren’t there yet. Was it Shannon Cunningham? Is she—
00:05:31 ASH Yes.
00:05:31 MA —the editor that was there?
00:05:32 ASH Yeah.
00:05:33 MA She was like, “Oh, those are for people who buy things.” And I was like, “I promise.” I was like, “Well, they’re in my bag now, so I will be back to buy the book when [laughs] Alicia is here, do not fret.” So when I came back, Shannon was like, “Okay, you came back.” And I actually got Shannon’s card which made me feel like such a potentially successful researcher talking to her about Buffy.
00:05:53 ASH You don’t need a card to—for me to know that. You are a successful researcher
00:05:59 MA Thank you. But it was very validating and I was buzzing. But—yeah, so I have the relic, the piece because I also—for the audience who maybe haven’t listened to past episodes, study hagiography and whatnot and love saints. That’s why I think that Trans and Genderqueer Subjects is fantastic and we will get to that. I currently have Sticker Church up on my laptop, and I hope I’m going to pronounce M-X-C-O-M-A-N.
00:06:25 ASH Mxcoman.
00:06:26 MA Mxcoman.
00:06:26 ASH It’s Jonah Coman’s, like, artist name.
00:06:29 MA I love those like the twink—holy twink solo sticker, the [holy] daddy postcard, they’re amazing, but so is everything else. But the first time I opened Sticker Church, you had those and I thought, “Wow, that is so kind of transgressive in a great way.” Like it’s really abrupt and in your face, but in a fun way with like twink, like a—what are they label makers put on it, that kind of imagery and just kind of breaking down all these expectations of what the holy is or the divine or religious ideas and then this kind of DIY ness, but they’re not separate from one another.
00:07:06 ASH Absolutely. Yeah. So I commissioned Jonah to do his own kind of standalone collection because Jonah, again, is just a genius. And he works mainly in collage and kind of colliding things together. And so—yeah, there’s like the holy twink, holy daddy postcards and stickers. I kind of—part of I think what I love about Jonah’s work again is, it kind of cuts to the heart of what my research is kind of remixing, telling a new story about where things fit in time and culture by looking closely at individual elements.
00:07:41 MA Yeah. I just—I love it. Got to get some stickers. We will have the link for everyone. You got to get some stickers. They’re so reasonably priced too.
00:07:49 ASH Thank you! [laughs]
00:07:51 MA Which, you know, sometimes with DIY and homemade self-produced stuff like this, you want to support and then you’re like, “Oh my gosh, it’s twenty pounds for a sheet of stickers.” This is not the case, you could buy twenty pounds worth but get ten different stickers sets. It’s amazing.
00:08:06 ASH Yeah. And that was like part of the aim is that like, I’m not in it to make money guys. I mean, a little bit of money might be nice, but it is an activist undertaking. It is for me to kind of say, “Look, have all the stickers!” I love postcards, I love sending cards and basically propping up the Royal Mail in the UK with the amount of cards I send on a weekly basis, [chuckles] and just that like people can just have it almost, it’s your research or just an image that resonates, put it in the post to somebody and go, “Oh, that’s weird.” “Oh that’s cool.” And I can get that the joy of research that makes you think differently and feel differently, I think is very cool. And also like part of what we do is we sell like manicule stickers. So they’re just like they pointing fingers, which I use a lot in my WhatsApp messages. So, you know, you found some of them there are a lot of like penises in the margins. So we got them and we’ve added flowers and jewels and, you know, there’s got a sticker sheet of manicules you can use like in your own work with like dogs on and flowers. And again, just that kind of interacting with the medieval in a really accessible fun and yet still quite like analytically enjoyable, you know, and your brain goes, “Oh yeah, mhm, that feels good.” That’s kind of what I want you to feel when you use these stickers and postcards.
00:09:21 MA Well, I definitely think that they achieve that, at least for me personally [laughs] so, thank you. So yes, let’s—speaking of your research more and everything and how you kind of merge all these seemingly disparate, but again not disparate categories, subjects, disciplines, however you want to phrase it because there’s a multitude of ways. How did you kind of get into the research that you do. So you start off with hagiography, I believe.
00:09:48 ASH Yeah.
00:09:49 MA So let’s start there in your progression again, another really big question, I apologize. [chuckles]
00:09:54 ASH [laughs] No, I love it. It’s an interesting one because I think the glib answer would be, “From birth, my friend,” because it’s just the way I see the world. I mean, I can do what one might describe as more vanilla research. I can do that, I’m trained in that. But the way I see the world is of everything interconnected and how things relate, and that is what excites me about the world, and looking at the medieval. And the less glib, more traditional answer is that actually I was going to only do purely modern when I went to university. [chuckles] So I did a French and German degree and I was like, “I’m only doing like post 2000,” and I started in like 2004. So I set quite a high bar for like new for myself. And then I had the great fortune and privilege of having lectures done by Bill Burgwinkle who was so important in kind of queer studies in French in the 80s, 90s and onwards. And I think around that time he was working on his book Sanctity and Pornography with Cary Howie. So I remember just sitting in his lecture being like, “Wait, what? Wait, no, what?” Like, my mind was just blown kind of sentence to sentence about what you can do with medieval texts, what you can see in them that so many things that we take for granted now is kind of solidified and rigid were up for grabs. Like, you know, what is it to be a human, what is gender, how do I exert my power between me and God, but also I’m a fairy, like just these—wow. And at the same time, what I do enjoy is that it’s very historically delimited. So you know, I write [inaudible], but at the same time there’s a lot of things like we don’t really know, like, who wrote it? Don’t know—don’t really care. [chuckles] Who was it written for? Don’t know—don’t really care. So you could also have these quite like intimate pure relationships with texts just like as texts. And that I really enjoy as somebody who’s very into just like words and how they work and how they make you feel. So from there, I then—I did a master’s and I did a dissertation on Juliana of Mont-Cornillon and Margaret of Ypres, who are two 13th century holy women and pro-ana discourse online [chuckles] of course I did. I also—again, Bill, his study was always amazing because he used to have these stacks—towering stacks of books of just like really random theory and like codicology and whatever with often with like coffee rings on them [chuckles] it was just a vibe. And randomly it was [in] a seminar like handing out books and I got Vivian Sobchack’s book Carnal Thoughts, which is, Vivian Sobchack’s amazing set of essays on embodied spectatorship in cinema. So like how—what we see on screen makes us feel literally in our body. And then from that I wrote a dissertation that kind of then eventually turned into my PhD and in fact sort of transmogrified into a chapter in my first book.
00:12:48 MA That’s amazing. I also just resonates so much with me and in my like experience, but my person was Robert Mills at UCL.
00:12:57 ASH Oh. Yes. I love Bob.
00:12:59 MA Bob is life. Everyone in our course worshiped Bob. He—because he is just such a generous, warm human being but his research, you can just tell how much care and love he has in it. But also he brings in all these different categories and collapses and makes you rethink of things. Because my background was in—was 1850s sensational literature and language and race in New Orleans, and then it was Polish posters. And then I took Bob’s course and here I am studying Buffy and the medieval. But you—I share with you—I call it the pinball brain.
00:13:33 ASH Yes!
00:13:33 MA So something you see like is the ball, right, but then it starts hitting other things and lighting up and making sounds and it starts ricocheting around everywhere. That’s where my brain and ideas come together and I think, and sometimes—you know, it falls through and it doesn’t become anything, and other times it becomes the big bonus round or whatnot to use that metaphor.
00:13:55 ASH I love it, I love it. [chuckles] I think also I guess part of my research and kind of how I got to where I am is a certain—I would say stubbornness in the sense of being told by traditional gatekeepers that, “You can’t do research like this,” or it’s not valid methodologically or it’s—you know, if it’s pop culture, we don’t look at that in academia. That’s—you know, that’s just for the kind of the plebes” being the implicit thought. It’s not serious enough. And that really riles me because I think it’s just profoundly untrue. And also it’s often delivered to me or has been in a kind of like apolitical. I’m just—you know, this is just truth. This is a—my neutral point of view is pop culture is trash. It’s like—well actually absolutely not my friends. And so a big part of my work is very embodied political kind of dis—trying to dismantle gatekeeping in kind of research, in writing and in kind of my whole approach to things.
00:14:48 MA Which is so inspiring for me because studying Buffy and the medieval, I have that internalized gatekeeping where I am like, “Fuck it all!” But then I doubt myself. But Anna, you are much more traditional if one would say [laughs] than Alicia and I. Do you have any thoughts or responses or anything to all this?
00:15:07 AP I mean, yeah. So I’m much more traditional like 15th century person, but at the same time, like this, “Oh, we don’t study pop culture like wait two hundred years,” and it’s not pop culture anymore, it’s history.
00:15:18 ASH Thank you!
00:15:18 AP So it’s just—like, I just feel so—it seems so silly to sort of dismiss something because it’s like now or new because—and I think it speaks to this like mindset where we really see the modern day as almost removed from history as if it’s like a neutral perspective and it’s really not. It’s part of this like give it two hundred years, people will think stuff we do is profoundly weird or disturbing or just funny or whatever.
00:15:46 ASH Absolutely.
00:15:47 AP Yeah.
00:15:47 ASH You know, I think also that point is that far more people have seen Buffy or read Buffy fanfic or bought a Buffy t-shirt than will ever interact with one of my holy women. You know, when there’s one text that first was in Latin in the 13th century and it matters. It matters what “normal people” consume. It matters what shapes cultural imagination. It matters what our references are collectively. So in my forthcoming now—finally forthcoming book Medieval Twitter, which is about kind of how Twitter is integrally medieval in various ways, but it’s also about why there were so many medievalists on Twitter, RIP, for some of that, I was talking to people and reviewers and like first readers, we’re talking about the issue of accessibility. So I was told that perhaps my language in it—because I write in a very self-consciously online tone as a form of praxis and as a form of kind of giving a flavour of the experience of Twitter, et cetera. I was told that that might be too inaccessible. And I said, “Well, to who?” I’m writing in a very standard like online discourse, you know, I use the term “IRL” for example, which at this point is hardly really slang. I was told that, “Well, medievalists might not get it.” Like, well, but what about, you know, the people who aren’t medievalists who this is much more accessible to and this is a way that we can then learn more about the medieval from a pop-culture standpoint. I think there’s the architecture of gatekeeping in terms of who gets to speak and about what and in what way is really interesting and also very frustrating still.
00:17:24 MA That’s—yeah, I completely agree and that’s like fascinating. Do you think it has to do with who you are like publisher and everything will be for Medieval Twitter or?
00:17:34 ASH I think it’s—no, in the sense that my publisher ARC has been really supportive of the book and in a little sense I think knew kind of what they were getting when they signed me up. [laughs] I wasn’t going to be writing a traditionalist book. I’m not sure they were prepared for me to be adopting a kind of cocktail Twitter thread style chatty tone in my analysis. But the reason I do that is to prove the point, why, if it’s written like this, can you say—can you dismiss it as not academic or not intellectual enough? Whereas if I literally just like used a thesaurus and you like codified it into different sentence structure, you would say what? “Yeah, that’s great scholarship that really pushes things forward. Yeah, great insight.” Like why does that still exist? I think it’s just—it’s still shocking to some people to be forced to interact with that “low culture” or like non-academic—what is viewed as non-academic in something like a printed book form that it’s—you can kind of get away with it on Twitter. Not everyone can, again, this is a whole big bit of the book is saying that a lot of people said that Twitter was, you know, trash disposable. Anyone who did “Twitter scholarship” was just, you know, attention whoring blah, blah blah. But that pushing it even further when you take that style and tone, which again is much more accessible and engaging frankly and fun to write, totally fun to write, that even people who would buy into it or allow it on Twitter will not allow it in kind of the sacred space of the purity of the academic monograph. And that again really interests me and has been frustrating, but also very illustrative of kind of why I’ve written the book and why I’ve done the research in the first place.
00:19:19 MA Yeah. Exactly. You’re like, I’m doing this project to point this out and to, you know, call this out. And yet you are at the same time doing exactly what I’m trying to say. We shouldn’t do this anymore.
00:19:31 ASH Exactly. And asking you to question why you do have that reaction.
00:19:37 MA Yeah.
00:19:37 ASH You know, it’s completely fine. If you know you prefer a certain kind of academic text like everyone does, everyone has reading choices and preferences, whether it’s in their kind of professional reading or personal reading, that’s fine. I think you do you, but my point is why—if I phrase it in this way or put in a meme reference, why is that suddenly verboten and why is that suddenly “unscholarly.”
00:20:01 MA Exactly. I mean again, as I’m finishing out my PhD, people are asking, “What do you want to do afterwards?” Blah, blah, blah. Big scary staring into the void questions, but one thing I really would love to do is turn my PhD thesis into a book, into a monograph. But the question is my natural writing style I have been called up by my supervisor is sometimes too journalistic, at least for the sake of a thesis, right. It’s a very different kind of
00:20:28 ASH It is, yeah.
00:20:29 MA Expectation. But because of the material that I’m using, like I’m currently working on a chapter that is ecology and trans corporeality and looking at the apocalypse in the early medieval alongside the version of apocalypses and Buffy.
00:20:46 ASH Oh, wow.
00:20:46 MA And kind of the Hell Mouth, which I argue is an inherently medieval concept that no one ever talks about. Buffy as medieval, there’s like, “Oh yeah, it’s just a shortcut.” And I’m like, but that’s a very specific choice. Hell mouth has a very particular imagery, even the—you know, use of the Spanish “Boca del Infierno” is mapping on to Californian history and all of that. So I’m using these really big “academic ideas” but then I’m applying it to Buffy and making it accessible and saying, “Well, also the medieval is still here, whether we’re aware of it or not.” And the question is—was well, do I want like a general trade book that is for the non-academics or do I zhuzh it up? I’m like, “Well, why do I have to do—I don’t care”
00:21:29 ASH What do you have to make that choice in that way? I think also saying like, “Oh, it’s a trade book.” There is still, at least again, in the circles I run in or I’m exposed to rather this implicit like, “Oh trade, oh.” There is a certain—it’s a bit, gauche, “you want people to read your work? Oh,” there’s the idea that it will be less scholarly, it be less weighty, you know, not as good for the CV. And again, that is one massively problematic, but two, why can’t an academic monograph so published by university press or similar with many footnotes be written in an engaging, accessible yet highly analytical, progressive intellectual style. What is our problem here? and I mean in—for my part, that’s part of the reason I set up two book series [chuckles] is to kind of support places for this kind of scholarship. So I’m series editor for Hagiography Beyond Tradition for Amsterdam University Press, and for Premodern Transgressive Literatures at Medieval Institute, which is based in Kalamazoo, literally specifically to have spaces in quite—I say not necessarily traditional in what they publish, but traditionally “respectable” publishers You’ve got a university press and you know, Medieval Institute in Kalamazoo where the Congress is. It’s a big deal for particularly North American medievalists and fostering a supportive space that really helps often junior scholars or marginalized scholars in various ways find an outlet that says “You be you you,” like, yeah, we want rigour, we want incisive analysis, we want you to show your work, but we also want you to be you, exactly how you want to say it. Do you want to be more creative with it? You know, push what we understand today as acceptably academic.
00:23:08 MA Yeah. I—no, exactly. And have fun with it. I love it when you read research and it’s becoming a little bit more evident as, you know, we come go further into the 21st century and these kinds of questions are being—and boundaries are being pushed against. But you can tell when someone’s really having fun with their writing and their research regardless to how scholarly and elevated or “casual” and lowly it’s written. You can just tell like, “Oh, I’m doing this in the way that I want to do it.” And that’s really exciting.
00:23:39 ASH What we’re speaking to also is, though, the gradual dissolution of the notion of kind of [the] neutral historian or objective history in that I—you know, there’s this idea that if I—for example, if I stripped out all the personality from my Medieval Twitter book, then I could be producing kind of neutral, objective and thus academic work. But the point is like nothing is, you know, neutral. Everything is subjective and embodied and frankly it is important that we all claim that position and we claim it explicitly. Like all my analyses for everything are shaped from the fact that yeah, I’m white, I’m disabled, but I can pass as non-disabled. I’m queer and gender queer, but I’m married to a cis-het man. And also frankly, it’s shaped by the fact that what my Mum and I did as a kid, we just go to Blockbuster a lot. So [chuckles] we just watched a lot of films. The all of these things play into how I see history, how I understand the medieval, how I understand what we can do and be in medieval studies. And I think that’s fantastic. Like there isn’t one single answer and like newsflash guys we’re never going to know like specifically why the text was written. We’re never going to know, they died. Like sort of get over it.
00:24:57 MA Yeah. No, exactly. It’s also interesting how certain disciplines come to kind of self-reflection at different times. So history, as you were saying, this expectation of an objective bystander, which is, you know, an anthropology initially that was the objective participant, yet bystander, the person that went to the isolated island and observed what was occurring and then thought, “oh well I can objectively articulate what has happened and analyse.” And we know now that when that happened in the mid to late 19th, early 20th century by these big people such as Kroeber and Malinowski and everything, that especially as colonialist white males that went and did that, they have a very particular way of interpreting or looking at things. Or even someone like Margaret Mead who was considered, “Oh, she’s a woman and she’s doing this thing, amazing,” but over time that has become problematic in and of itself. Her work is still incredibly influential and important, but anthropologists have come to recognize that you can’t be objective. You’re going to bring your “baggage” with you whenever and wherever you go and what you do. And so it’s interesting with something like history where we think that we can get into the minds and read the cause and effect and everything that we’re not doing that from our modern and personal interpretations.
00:26:29 ASH Oh, totally. I mean, I say it explicitly in Medieval Twitter, history is a subtweet, act accordingly. Like—
00:26:37 MA I love that. [laughs]
00:26:38 ASH A Part of—I mean, to me part of the joy of being a medievalist is not knowing exactly, is having a text kind of be suggestive like, “Well, what can you see,” almost coquettish in a sense like, you know, the best subtweets where you’re like, “I think I know, but I’m not sure.” Or you actually do know and you’re like, “Everybody else is guessing, but I know because I have this great theory because I’ve looked into like their entire history of tweets.” You know, it’s—that is the thrill to me. It’s what you read into the text through yourself and your desire to learn and know and be part of a community based on what you all kind of agree that you’ve deciphered in the text. So that—like that is doing history to me. I think the other thing that’s really relevant to our discussion is that you can see it in sort of the waves of research on hagiography, for example, particularly on holy women. So you know, Margery Kempe’s Book was hailed as a first autobiography in English—hmmm, maybe—rediscovered in the 30s, by the 80s was on being reclaimed as a feminist masterpiece on the canon. And at the same time in the 80s, you have a lot of important scholars, you know, Caroline Walker Bynum, Barbara Newman, Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker, so many more saying we need more look at women. We need to kind of tie in the histories of these holy women into contemporary feminist struggles about recognition in the workplace, about in academia, finding our space in the world. Great. Then you have 90s-ish, maybe 00s, much more of the queer gaze to medieval hagiography. And you have more people coming through, like Bob Mills for example, Simon Gaunt, as well, Emma Campbell, kind of again, showing that you can understand these in terms of feminist or gender in the specifics of how kind of woman works. But you can also understand in terms of queerness, queer procreation, whatever. And I would say now I’m very proud that Blake and my book has helped people start to think in terms of kind of transness and gender as fluid and expansive. And also that kind of represents different scholars, who different scholars were, where they were in time in their own lives and also in culture at specific points in time, and that’s how the scholarship kind of waves. I do think it was like an ocean, like waves have come through that reveal different things on the beach, that you see different things. It doesn’t necessarily—the text hasn’t changed, but how we might perceive it has, I think that’s actually a beautiful thing. Nothing is overwriting it. Blake and I often get like, “so you’re trans-ing in the Middle Ages!” Would that we, would that we were, but frankly like, I’ve got a baby, I’m quite busy. But what we are saying is, you see what you are in these texts and that’s amazing and we should let people do that.
00:29:27 MA That’s amazing. And going through—kind of walking through what you just said, using terms like fluidity, right, that’s a big part of trans dialogue and genderqueer thinking of things. But also someone like Caroline Walker Bynum and her work talks about the fluid, if not in a different way, but it’s the reappropriation of these terms and liminality and everything and rethinking them through that different lens or perspective. And to kind of quote you at yourself from your book and introduction, I’m assuming it’s you, it might be you and Blake or Blake, but because you co-wrote the introduction together. But you say “The chapters in this volume demonstrate that non-normative gender expressions, identities and embodiments were and the medieval period, very often I implicated with religion.” And later on you talk about how these non-normative gender identities, gender expressions are stories of becoming.
00:30:27 ASH Absolutely.
00:30:29 MA And I find that personally so powerful and how there’s this deep structural connection between these categories of—some would say, you know, otherness or non-normativity and an exceptional life and you can take exceptional positively, negatively, awesomely, however you want. And I think that, that opens so many possibilities and ways of reading and that if the three of us could read an exceptional life through our different perspectives and come to something uniquely different, but that resonates and sometimes have friction with one another, and sometimes are in harmony.
00:31:07 ASH Absolutely. Yeah.
00:31:08 MA I love that. I love that potential. It feels so invigorating.
00:31:13 ASH Oh, I agree. I mean, I think part of the reason I’m drawn to hagiography, despite—again, it used to be sort of dismissed as a bit trashy because it’s repetitive and banal, and “oh, it’s about religion, so who cares now, you know, we’re beyond that”. It’s that they’re all at heart questions of like how to be a human, how do I do this thing, how do I get from here where I am to there where I want to be, merge with the divine? Like how do I be a woman who does that? How do I, like some of the holy woman I look at, how do I be a mother, but also be really into God, like just massive questions about, like you say, becoming and transition in various flavours of that term. I think what I’m also really interested in is the timeliness or temporality of transition, which I think is assumed to be a kind of quite a binary, like a before and after, one transitions. There you go, a job’s done. A bit like the idea of coming out is like, “Well, I just came out, done, that’s it.” Whereas actually it’s a process for a lot of people. I’ve been reading Tash Oakes-Monger’s book, All the Things They Said We Couldn’t Have, which is stories of trans joy and they speak really movingly about how their transition and their joy came in seasons and kind of—again, this kind of back and forth and transition as also a communal act across time periods with others, through others’ bodies. And I think that’s actually a very powerful way of thinking about saints’ lives, about what we do as scholars, how we interact with texts, how we interact with manuscripts. And there’s just so much there there.
00:32:50 MA Absolutely. And I think also I find that idea of seasons really compelling. Maybe it’s also because I just finished teaching Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, so.
00:33:00 ASH Yes! [laughs]
00:33:01 MA Seasons and everything, and as I said, ecology and my current Buffy chapter. So I’m thinking about environment and it’s all imbricated. We’re all one and we’re all together and it’s—but you know, coming out so much of society’s like, “Oh yeah, we’re always becoming, we’re always growing, we’re always developing.” But then when it comes to something that people may not understand or have very strong opinions about, they’re like, “No!” It is the one moment. It is the one thing you are either or, and yet you can always be growing in your faith or you can always be doing something else. And it’s like, well why are you choosing this one aspect or facet of another, a person’s life, not even your own to be—oh, the coin flipped or something.
00:33:44 ASH So—yeah. An imposition of rigidity suddenly and often that, you know, to make something acceptable. And that is the moment where you kind of, “Now you conform, we can move past it.” It’s like, well no, but what if you don’t want to move, move past anything? What if transition and coming out is part of who you are? Like what if the messiness of being human is the point?
00:34:03 MA Exactly. And people being like, “Oh well, trauma just get over it.” And it’s like, no, you move through it and you work with it and you grow with it. Same with grief after death.
00:34:13 ASH I mean—
00:34:13 MA I think it kind of derailed us, but sorry, go.
00:34:15 ASH No, but like, arguably, the same is true of our work as scholars in the best possible way. Like I find that some of the most profound allyship of senior scholars is revisiting earlier works, their own and saying, “Now I think differently about this.” So for example, in the Trans and Genderqueer Subjects book, Martha G. Newman returns to someone that she wrote about, I think in the early 2000s, brother Joseph of Schönau and says, “actually in that piece I really—I kind of accepted the author’s, the hagiographer’s, quite gender-essentialist viewpoint. And I did accept kind of dead naming in various ways. But I’ve since thought about Brother Joseph in a very different way. I read the text in a very different way. I bring different kind of analyses and paradigms and essentially a different self to the text, and now I’m writing a different piece.” So again, it’s the same person, it’s the same, you know, same scholar as erudite as ever, as learned as ever, but willing to come back and say, “Aah, in my return I see something different.” There is another vantage point here, I have learned, but also I just—I have different perspectives. I think that’s one just very brave, actually two beautiful, and three, like I said, that is genuine allyship and I—it is my hope that more people follow Martha’s example, and also we must say Ruth Karras’ example when going back to her work on Eleanor Rykener.
00:35:42 MA Yeah. I completely agree. Before I read this, I mean I use lots of Martha Newman’s work, she’s just a great scholar. But then with this, yeah, there’s also like a humbling with that. I mean her name is one that, at least in for our field, I don’t know if you’ve encountered Martha Newman at all, Anna?
00:35:59 AP I don’t think so.
00:36:00 MA You don’t think so?
00:36:01 AP I’m in such a different field. There’s like so little. [laughs]
00:36:04 MA But yeah, for her to revisit and go, “Yes, I am someone that is, you know, potentially ‘a name’ but I have grown and I have made mistakes and we’re going to amend those.” I just, I find that—yeah, so uplifting and so much hope.
00:36:18 ASH But also again, that her analysis as ever are utterly in like, knife-sharp, of the text. You know, this isn’t like, “Oh well I discovered trans people exist, so yeah, fine.” Like she brings the full weight of her scholarly expertise, her writing skill, everything. And again, shows us what profound progressive scholarship can do and be. And also I’d say that it’s very accessibly written for saying it’s about often the minutiae of a text and reading different ways of the narrator has situated the subject and the fact that, you know, she really teases out. So if people don’t know, brother Joseph was a monk in the 12th century and was discovered, “to be a woman at death.” But Martha shows in her reading, actually that is just one suggested interpretation of “the big reveal” because the text also allows for the monk’s community to believe that the miraculous gender transformation at death was Joseph going from man to woman only at death. So Joseph lived fully as a man in a male body during life. And for again, a major scholar to be saying like, “Look at these, what the text allows, these gaps, these spaces that if you come back to work and you think differently, come through,” that’s just so awesome.
00:37:35 MA Yeah. Exactly. With all that, Alicia, I’m curious, this is a personal-ish question, but I’m curious, so you’ve written on possibly my favourite holy figure, Christina Mirabilis.
00:37:47 ASH Yes, my queen, my utter queen! [chuckles]
00:37:51 MA Have you thought of revisiting her story through queering and transness because it’s so to use the term queer as out there and different, right? That kind of old historic version, like—oh, I always think of Moby Dick and the page that says queer like eight hundred times. It’s not that many, but it’s a lot. Have you thought of revisiting her because you argue that she’s this zombie saint, which I also have questions about the use of the term zombie personally, we don’t have to discuss it [laughs] here, but.
00:38:20 ASH Well, in fact, I did many moons ago, I think in my PhD, I did do a talk about Christina as queerness kind of almost embodied in the mode of Lee Edelman’s No Future, and his evocation of saying kind of the cis-het patriarchy always saying that “Child with a big C,” everything you can get away with because “we must do it with the child with a big C,” because who’s going to argue against like children having a better life and it’s kind of looming threat of this. And you know, queerness representing the opposite of that, like no future because queer is standing against kind of reproduction and biological ways or whatever. So I look at Christina from that point of view as representing, in the same kind of structural paradigm, like Christ with the big C because actually what she’s representing is all future—the queerness of all future in the sense that she’s showing what happens to you in purgatory. She is showing what, if we obey like orthodox doctrine in the 13th century, is going to happen to you. And also like, guys, we’re going to get resurrected and we’re going to have a body and a soul, but it’s going to be really weird. And before you even get there, like purgatory is gnarly and it’s queer, it’s weird and horrible and kind of sexy in a weirdly titillating way and what do we do with that? So I do think there’s some really interesting space there to be for like a queer Christina, but I’ve just never got to writing it into an article stage yet.
00:39:46 MA Yeah, that’s very interesting. I’ll have to re-listen to what you just said and like—
00:39:50 ASH [laughs]
00:39:51 MA —because there was a lot there. But no, I was just curious because you have written on her, I use your work on her and my thesis.
00:39:59 ASH Aw, that’s nice!
00:40:00 MA And I just, I love Christina, like—
00:40:04 ASH She’s such a queen! I think the reason that—like I wrote on her as a zombie is, not knowing your feelings about the term, is that I was struck by, why would a medievalist in quite a traditional say chapter on, you know, hagiography whatever, say “zombie” in that way. Like what—why is she getting a reaction in these circles, like, you know, she’s called “just plain weird”, “zombie”, like modern scholars who have hugely—what’s the word—like articulate repertoire to talk about hagiography going.” But she’s really out there though guys [chuckles] like she’s too much!” And I just found that quite arresting, particularly for people who were writing like again, like her big hitters like Barbara Newman, et cetera, who I wouldn’t expect to use such pop-cultural language for example, that this recourse to this kind of like vernacular was just really interesting to me. Like why can’t we just call her like—yeah, she—you know, she’s weird, but like a lot of saints are weird guys. Chill out. You know, delving into that is what made me kind of work through her as a zombie, is like, “Okay, well you call her a zombie, let’s take that seriously, let’s not just make a flippant [reference]”. And I guess that’s again, another strand that I kind of work through in all my research is that there are certain moments in scholarship where you see people make these flippant, glib, “Oh yeah.” Like Bernard McGinn, who’s—you know, an amazing scholar of mysticism, has this little bit in the Flowering of Mysticism just in like book four or something [ed.: it’s book three] of what’s a massive multi-volume set, where he’s like, “Yeah, so saints vitae are something like modern film. Anyway, moving on.” And I’m like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, Bernard, my man. Like, [chuckles] okay!” And you know, a lot of my PhD was basically going—well what if we take that seriously though? Like what if we actually engage with what your kind of almost your subconscious or just your more flippant pop culture “oh yeah” text is to somebody. What if we do something with that? What if we investigate it and analyse it and again, treat it with a seriousness that we would treat hagiography.
00:42:06 MA No, I completely agree. And I get called out by a supervisor a lot for putting those kind of glib sentences in. She’s like, “Well, what are you gesturing towards?” And I’m like, “Man, I don’t know.” I know what I know, but I don’t know what I know to put it on the page. And no, I think that your use of zombies is really interesting. I just think that part of this was because delving into the history of revenants and using lots of Nancy Caciola and everything. And then just what a zombie is historically. I was like, “that’s really interesting, but also problematic, but it also works.” Anyways, yeah, so I was just curious, again, we can always discuss that at a later time.
00:43:43 ASH Bring it on.
00:43:44 MA I just—I also wanted to mention that article specifically for what you just said, because maybe something like Medieval Twitter or Trans and Genderqueer Subjects might be a bit above some people’s pay grades if they’re not involved or were not involved in Twitter or are not part of the LGBTIQI+ just conversation at all. But everyone knows what a zombie is, which is—
00:43:08 ASH Absolutely. Yeah.
00:43:09 MA —why that piece is what, you know, stands out because you’re like a zombie saint and no, everyone, she does not eat like the flesh of humans or their brain.
00:43:17 ASH No.
00:43:18 MA Except for Christ, but everyone eats Christ
00:43:20 ASH She does eat, like, bodily oils though.
00:43:22 MA Yeah. She sustains herself from the holy oil secreting from her breasts.
00:43:27 ASH But again guys, this is very normal in saints’ lives. This is not particularly wild.
00:43:31 MA That’s—yeah, very. I’m constantly the person at conferences and talks where I’m like, “Have you looked at this saint? They do that. Have you looked at this? Did you know that breast milk was just distilled blood but it’s so inferior to semen, which is another type of distilled blood, it’s alll blood, everybody.” [laughs] and people are just like, “Weirdo.” And I’m like, “It’s fascinating.”
00:43:50 ASH It is. I mean, I say—speaking of what you’re saying about Medieval Twitter, I very take the point that particularly with the title, like if you’re not on like the hashtag, like why would you pick it up. But that’s part of—again, why I’ve written the book is to say that actually there’s a lot about the social media platform that if you are interested in like how texts work or like how do you find out what a manuscript “really means” that actually Twitter weirdly has the textual modes and literal[ly] just the vernacular language to describe a lot of what we do and how the kind of thought processes we have. So it is my supreme hope that if you’re not on Twitter, again RIP, that you might actually enjoy it if nothing else because it is very accessible. And you get to talk about like, did you know there were nineteen Margery Kempe’s on Twitter? Yes. There are a lot of people pretending to be a 15th-century mystic on Twitter. How weird is that? How cool is that? What could we learn from them
00:44:50 MA Fascinating. And so I’m conscious of our time, but so you keep going “Medieval Twitter” and “Twitter RIP”.
00:44:57 ASH Yes.
00:44:58 MA So what is the future of Medieval Twitter or has it shifted to other platforms for it to continue on in a different fight?
00:45:06 ASH That’s very—it’s a very good question and a very kind of sad question. At the moment—again, I love the memes that calling the platform Twitter is the only acceptable form of deadnaming. [laughs] But I do think continuing to call the platform Twitter is a bit sad because it’s not Twitter anymore. It’s—you know, it’s Elon Musk’s X and a lot of people have left or have not necessarily closed their account but are not interacting in the same way. Well, your feed is different [coughs] excuse me, your vibe—the vibe at the place is different. So myself for example, I still have an account there and occasionally look because there are some people I only know from there, but I’m on BlueSky, that’s primarily. It seems that quite a lot of people have moved to BlueSky. And I think that is a good thing now that, you know, before it was very gate kept, you had to have an invite code, but now it’s open to all, so that’s very helpful. People have moved to Mastodon, some people on Instagram, but I’m just like, “I’m a text heavy person, guys, like I just need the text.” So it seems like there’s this massive fragmentation of medievalist community. At the same time, I think ethos, kind of the spirit of Medieval Twitter particularly as first kind of elucidated by Dorothy Kim in—I think it was a blog post about, it was like [in] 2014—about kind of an intersectionally feminist political community online of medievalists talking to various publics that—or the hope for that still exists. So I guess in my chapter on the hashtag I talk about like, you know, Medieval Twitter is dead long live #MedievalTwitter. We just need to figure out where it goes next. And it might not even be, you know, a social media platform, who knows. But I think there is still the desire, the need, the will for that kind of space. On the other hand, like the hashtag was not all like roses for everybody. And I actually did a survey of people who used the hashtag [#MedievalTwitter] in 2019, which to my knowledge is like literally the only like official “survey” of people using the hashtag and getting their responses. And what you found is that there is certainly the notion that it was quite hostile to people who didn’t have academic credentials. It seemed very American in its outlook, people were concerned about potential for bullying. There were also obviously just the problems of being particularly a medievalist of colour online and huge amounts of racism and brigading against medievalist of colour, which kind intersected with the community. So I don’t want to kind of suggest that you know, it was this beautiful utopia where everything was great on the internet, it wasn’t. And also frankly, the problem is that it can be disappeared by someone like Elon Musk, right?
00:47:49 MA Mhm.
00:47:49 ASH But it—we depended on a platform as we all do with new social media for our space, for our visibility. So I guess the question—the answer to your question is more like, “to be continued…hopefully?”
00:48:02 MA Yeah. It’s in the process of becoming, I guess.
00:48:05 ASH Yeah, and I don’t want to underplay, there are still people who, you know, use the hashtag and kind of notable medievalists who are fighting the good fight still on the platform formerly known as Twitter. And I really respect that. And often you talk about kind of particularly, say for Disability Twitter that I was a part of as well. Like you can’t just move wholesale to another platform. Like access isn’t baked in everywhere, for example. You don’t always have the energy to rebuild from scratch. People have worked very hard to create these spaces in often, like, hostile macro-cultures and for some people the Musk takeover is just yet another iteration of that. And we all draw our sort of personal lines where we feel like enough is enough for ourselves. And I am—like I respect people’s choices, who kind of need to stay for various reasons.
00:48:54 MA Just wow. Great. All of it. No comment. But also, so many thoughts percolating. What are those like? Aaah!
00:49:00 ASH [laughs]
00:49:01 MA Well Anna, do you have any final questions?
00:49:04 AP No, I think we’ve covered all of it, I think.
00:49:08 MA Cool.
00:49:08 AP I’m the same as you of like, I’ve got no comments, just like lots of thoughts pinging right in my head right now. [laughs]
00:49:15 ASH Yay! That’s good. I like a lot of thoughts pinging around. That’s always better for me than when I’m sat here being like, “Yeah, I dunno.” [chuckles]
00:49:22 MA But per the podcast tradition, Ella and I, and Anna and I have decided to embrace this and continue it, is to have our final question before we ask you for closing notes and everything, is to share your favourite medieval fact or titbit.
00:49:38 ASH Oh, I’ve got a good one. Seriously, batten down the hatches. So Saint Brigid of Kildare. So Ireland’s only female patron saint is reported in several medieval sources to have performed a miraculous abortion on a grateful nun.
00:49:52 MA Amazing.
00:49:53 ASH And there are three other Irish male saints who have [been] documented to perform abortions in a similar, like, God-ordained fashion.
00:50:02 MA I had no idea. And that’s so timely, especially with what’s going on in the Irish constitutional votes right now. But also America, horrifying. What—Just the ruling in Alabama with the IVF and also just, you know—was it France that just said, you have a constitutional right to an abortion.
00:50:20 ASH Yeah.
00:50:20 MA So aside from all these other moments, it’s just a very timely question and debate, which shouldn’t be a debate.
00:50:25 ASH Oh. It’s true.
00:50:26 MA It’s your body, your choice. But to have God allowing or assisting, that’s fantastic.
00:50:33 ASH And if you’d like to learn more, I can name drop Maeve Callan’s book Sacred Sisters. She’s got a really great chapter on early Irish Saints and abortion and a really good introduction kind of putting out like what’s at stake when we talk about medieval saints in terms of reproductive justice. So check it out. It’s so good, it’s so good!
00:50:51 MA Yeah. I’m definitely going to be when we finish, looking and seeing if the University of Manchester has it or how I can get my hands on it. Alicia, thank you so much. I just want to keep talking, but I’m cognizant of time and you have baby and everything, but we’ll definitely maybe have you back—when is Medieval Twitter meant to be?
00:51:11 ASH Drops this autumn. I love how I’m like, “I am now like a pop star. I have things that drop.” I don’t publish things anymore. Yeah, it should be out this autumn maybe September, October.
00:51:21 MA Alright. So forthcoming but with an actual kind of within the year of 2024 rather than just percolating off in the distant.
00:51:28 ASH And there will be a special sticker and postcard collection dropping with it too. So you can make your own Medieval Twitter with some birds.
00:51:35 MA Fantastic. And do you have any final thoughts, comments, questions for us, Alicia?
00:51:42 ASH No, just what I really appreciate about this conversation is that there are so many people like us, I think, that are working in this way in—you know, every day in how we read and what we do and how we talk to each other. And it’s so cool to see like post-grads doing this and it worries me that you are concerned about your seriousness as a scholar. Because baby, you’re a serious scholar. If anyone wants to talk to me about publishing in the hagiography series I run or the Premodern Transgressive Literatures series, just like get in touch with me. If you go to my blog, medievalshewrote.com there’s a contact form. I’m here. It’s my job and my true honour to support people figuring out how they can get published, what they want to say, how to say it. So please just like drop me a note.
00:52:34 MA Yes. And I can again say from firsthand experience that Alicia is just so warm and welcoming in her time and encouragement.
00:52:45 ASH You’re going to make me cry now. No!
00:52:47 MA [laughs] And one final bit is that we will be providing a transcript of this episode. Alicia, do you want to say a little bit more about.
00:52:56 ASH Yes! Transcripts are amazing because access is better for everyone. Say it with me. So I use a company called Academic Audio Transcription, which is a company run by a disabled founder and that employs disabled freelancers and has a social-justice mission. So if you have any kind of transcription needs, they offer really specialist services, highest quality at very reasonable rates. So just check them out online.
00:53:21 MA Fantastic. And let’s all work to make history and the medieval and just life in general better, everyone.
00:53:29 ASH Yes! Let’s do it.
00:53:30 MA Let’s do it. So also we normally kind of like horn out, like “du, du, da du” [makes horn noises]. Will you do that with us as we—
00:53:37 ASH Of course! I’m living for this. I feel like I should have practised in the shower, like, hold on, let me get into the space. Right. I am one with the horn. Ready.
00:53:47 MA Alright. So that has been our episode. I’m Meaghan.
00:53:51 AP I’m Anna.
00:53:52 MA And thank you for listening.
00:53:54 ASH Thank you.
00:53:55 MA, AP, ASH [Horn noises]
[End of recording]
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