Front cover of Medieval Twitter, by Alicia Spencer-Hall
They said it couldn’t be done. Correction: I said it couldn’t be done. But I was wrong, and it is—miraculously, thrillingly—done. Friends, Medieval Twitter is finally out in the world.
Let’s rewind for a second. It was the summer of 2015. I was at the IMC, and chatting to publishers about my PhD thesis-turned-monograph, scouting for supporters. I must have been high on life or something, as I, amidst all the serious schmoozing, enthusiastically (and accidentally) pitched a short, snappy book all about Twitter: how medievalists use Twitter, and why, plus the ways in which Twitter (as it seemed somewhat obvious to me) replicated certain medieval textual modes. This was back of the napkin stuff. And—much to my suprise, and joy—Simon Forde of Arc Humanities Press was interested. He got the project, and he got me, as a scholar and communicator. In short order, I wrote up a proposal and signed a contract.
Screenshot of box from book proposal
In the box labelled “definitive date for delivery of the manuscript” on the proposal form, I’d written—confidently, I might add—March 2017. To which my only response, some seven years later, is: LOL. I had based my authorial timeline on the tacit, even subconscious, assumption that even though the post-doctoral job market was nightmarish, I would get something—and something decent, maybe not permanent but at least a contract of a decent length. Yeah, no. I had a couple of short-term contracts; two lasted a year apiece, hardly enough time to get established, to get shit done. After that, I found myself in the academic employment borderlands, with endless—and endlessly time-consuming—applications and nothing to show for it. I transitioned, I was forced to transition, into freelance work to get paid, which functionally subsidizes the research I do. That’s where I find myself today: for some six or seven years now, I’ve been honorarily affiliated with but, crucially, not employed (i.e. paid) by academic institutions.
I’d forgotten too, the golden rule of crip-chronic life: you can’t control your bodymind, not with willpower, not with a pressing schedule, not even with desperation. There was all the usual chronic life stuff, the flares that come without warning or reason. The meds changes that fuck you up. The new stuff that crops up because your bodymind will, seemingly, never just calm down. There was the shingles, that left me with permanent nerve damage, and massively limited by ability to use my dominant arm and hand. (Not great when you need to be typing up a book.) Then there was the pandemic, the “medically complicated” pregnancy (read: horror-show) and its ever-unfurling aftermath, the realities of new-baby and toddler life, and on and on and on.
Archaeological layers of a project
My laptop bears witness to the downright epochal nature of my work on Medieval Twitter. I’ve got three “master” folders with my works-in-progress, archaeological layers documenting the eras of the past lives that have come and gone through this project. That I’ve finished it, that there's no need for a fourth folder (or a fifth, or a six, …) feels nigh-on unbelievable. Holding Medieval Twitter in my hands feels downright surreal, not least because Twitter itself is now dead and gone. Suffice it to say, I did not prophesy that when I embarked upon this writerly marathon. In the end—at the end of Twitter—I’ve written a different book than I’d intended to. It’s longer, sure, but it’s also, I think, better: analytically richer, more complex, more political and politicized.
Some things take their time to come into being, take their time to come into their own. Not just books, but people—thinkers—too. I’m proud of this book. I’m proud of its arguments, its point of view, its praxis. I’m proud that it exists, and it exists because I kept existing, kept persisting, despite the manifold horrors, both banal and baroque. Medieval Twitter is a testament to the fact that life happens, history happens according to its own temporal compulsions—and that keeping on keeping on, taking the time even when there’s no time, is more than enough. Put otherwise: fuck neo-liberal ableist metrics of productivity and pace. Survival comes first.
So what’s Medieval Twitter about? Here’s the blurb:
This pioneering monograph provocatively explodes current research paradigms for the modern and the medieval by showing that Twitter shares key similarities with medieval literary forms, texts, and narrative techniques. Analyzing tweets with medieval texts, and vice versa, Spencer-Hall initiates readers into an innovative methodology of interdisciplinary literary criticism, posing vital questions about the politics of medievalism today. Chapters include brand-new readings of The Owl and the Nightingale, the Chastelaine de Vergi, and Marie de France’s Laüstic, and arresting insights into troubadour style, Margery Kempe, and #MedievalTwitter. The book culminates in a medieval(ist) reading of Twitter’s premature demise, and Elon Musk’s medievalism. Throughout, points of contact and divergence are dissected, re-contextualizing the socio-cultural meaning of communication and texts across the temporal divide.
At the end of January, I had the profound delight of officially (for real, forever) launching Medieval Twitter at UCL’s Institute of Advanced Studies. With MC’ing by Jane Gilbert, Vicki Blud and I talked through the book’s main themes, alongside why and how I wrote it, and its rather depressing relevance in today’s Musk-MAGA world. Questions from audience members IRL and online expanded our conversation to delve into the importance of offline networks, liminality, medieval literacy, and more. Below, you’ll find a recording of the Zoom stream and an edited transcript for your viewing, listening and reading pleasure(s).
The Medieval Twitter collection of stickers and postcards from Sticker Church
And if you’re more into vibes right now—*gestures broadly at the political landscape*—then I’ve got you covered too. (I get it, I’m rewatching Stargate SG-1 out of a sort of 90s dissociative impulse.) Check out the official Medieval Twitter playlist on Spotify, and soothe your soul with stickers and postcards from Sticker Church.
Medieval Twitter: The Launch
Jane Gilbert: Hello, everybody! Welcome to this book launch, which I’m sure you will agree, is the most stylish book launch that has possibly ever been seen at UCL, and so my name is Jane Gilbert. I’m in the French Department, I’m a medievalist in the French department. I was once upon a time the supervisor of Alicia’s thesis. I had that pleasure, so it is particularly nice to be able to do this now. I have to tell you a few, few sort of technical things.
Firstly, we are recording this through the Zoom thing. I think there’s also we, we are being filmed. You are not being filmed. If your voices are recorded for the Q&A, the plan is to put this on a website, so if you don’t want your voice recorded, your your name won’t be recorded, but if you don’t want your voice recorded, then just don’t say anything. Go on [inaudible] Feel free to pass me a sheet of paper, oh analogue style, and I can read things out.
I have to tell you that in case of fire, the way out of here is to go to the end of the corridor that you came in by, and turn left and go out into the main quad, where there will be fire marshals, who will direct you to wherever you need to go. I’m obliged to tell you all of those, all right, and also toilets for a different kind of emergency. Again, the end of the corridor. But turn right and go downstairs, and just sort of keep going straight in front of you. Past the UCL Shop is where all the toilets are. Okay, I think that’s everything.
So how this is going to work, hopefully—checking time—I’m sorry we’re a bit late, that’s London for you. I’m going to do introductions, quite substantial introductions, especially for Alicia, to help to give some context. Alicia and Vicki will talk for 20 to 30 minutes, and we’ll have a Q&A, questions from you and questions online. I’ll moderate if you’re online and you have a question, please type it in the chat, and Sara will pick it up, and we can work from that, and after that, hopefully some drinks will arrive, and also some cups. And there will be book selling, book signing, merchandise, sparkly things
Alicia Spencer-Hall: Stickers, there’s going to be stickers, guys
JG: Stickers: And Alicia’s nails are a work of art which need to be seen. So we will continue in this kind of way. Okay, so introductions. I’m going to start with Vicki, because your introduction is shorter. [ASH and VB laugh] So Vicki Blud is a research associate at the University of York and an editor at Amsterdam University Press. Her research focuses on liminality, animality, embodiment, cognition, emotion, medieval pop culture, and the queerness of all these things. Vicki’s the author of a monograph called The Unspeakable: Gender and Sexuality in Medieval English Literature, which came out in 2017, and she’s the co-editor of 2 collected volumes, Gender in Medieval Places, Spaces and Thresholds came out in 2019, and Cognitive Sciences and Medieval Studies in 2020. She’s a series editor with Diane Heath of the University of Wales Press series, Medieval Animals, and the commissioning editor for Amsterdam University Press for the series, Hagiography beyond Tradition, where Alicia’s co-edited volume with Blake Gut is the flagship volume. Although Vicki says this is not actually, she can’t take credit for
Vicki Blud: I didn’t commission it!
JG: Okay, onto our author and star. I think Alicia has always been a star, I have to say. So Alicia Spencer Hall is an Honorary Senior Research fellow at UCL, where they also did their PhD, which, as I say, I had the pleasure of supervising. Her research interests include medieval hagiography, disability, gender, digital culture and film and media studies. Alicia’s first monograph, this is the book of the thesis, Medieval Saints and Modern Screens: Divine Visions as Cinematic Experience, was published by Amsterdam University Press in 2018, and is available open access. A collection of essays co-edited with Blake Gut, Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography was published in 2021, also open access, and it was shortlisted for the transgender nonfiction award at the 34th Lambda Literary Awards. Another volume of essays, Disability and Sanctity in the Middle Ages, co-edited with Leah Pope Parker, and Stephanie Grace-Petinos will be published this April, also with Amsterdam. And Alicia, is series editor for two academic book series, Hagiography beyond Tradition at Amsterdam UP and Premodern Transgressive Literatures at the Medieval Institute. That’s the Kalamazoo thing, Western Michigan.
So a bit more context about Alicia’s research which I hope will be helpful to bring this into focus. Alicia’s first monograph, not Medieval Twitter, the first one, brings theoretical perspectives from 21st century media film cultural studies to medieval hagiography. Hagiography is the writing of saints, lives specifically in this case the lives of visionary saints. So Medieval Saints and Modern Screens provocatively argues that these hagiographies can be productively understood as cinematic media. The book makes medieval mysticism intelligible to modern audiences, who are often, we often struggle with this through reference to the language and form, and lived experience of cinema. And this works both ways, referring our experiences of cinema to mysticism, offers a way of expressing the disconcerting physical and emotional effects of watching film. Like the medieval mystic, we today are always conjuring visions on our smartphones, on the silver screen, on our TVs and our laptops. And, like theirs, our modern visions are physically intimate, ideologically overloaded spaces that significantly orient our lives. So Alicia’s book stages theoretically informed, closely read dialogues between, on the one hand, the 13th century Latin biographies of the holy women of Liège, and on the other, contemporary pop culture media, such as the blockbuster movie The Dark Knight, Kim Kardashian West’s social media feeds and the outputs of online role players in the virtual metaverse that was Second Life—is, is Second Life, it still exists, sorry!
And Alicia’s co-edited volume on Trans and Genderqueer Subjects presents an interdisciplinary examination of that topic, and the volume really is responding to the fact that there have been many analyses of medieval literary texts in the light of queer theory. But this is usually done with a focus on sexuality rather than on gender identity. Alicia and Blake’s volume highlights how hagiography as a genre resists limiting or rigid binaristic categories, especially in this case those of gender. The emerging and established scholars that they bring together show us, among other things, how to recreate a lineage linking modern trans and genderqueer individuals to their medieval ancestors. They provide models of queer identity where a lot of scholarship has insisted that there were none. And they established the place of non-normative gender in history.
As for social media, [ASH laughs] Alicia joined Twitter in 2010, six months before starting her PhD. In retrospect, they say it “feels a little like the timeline of Twitter became inexorably entangled” with her own scholarly timeline “from pre-PhD to postdoc life, and beyond”. “Twitter and its communities became constant companions as [they] worked from home, from libraries, from anywhere”. She describes herself as a “long-time lurker and part-time participator”. The best bits about Twitter, according to Alicia, are “the memes, the community, the analytically incisive hot takes”.
I should say I have got two copies of the Glossary of the book for people like me, who, I think what on earth is that? And on here there are QR codes, if anybody needs a quick look, there is a full twitter Glossary in the book to help this with. I really needed that when I was reading it.
Anyway, as a result of Elon Musk’s takeover, Alicia stopped using the platform last year and can now be found on Bluesky at @aspencerhall.bsky.social. And this came as a bit of an afterthought: “Horrifyingly”, she said, “the last I checked. I had posted 44.9k tweets since joining Twitter”, but she promises that most of them are retweets. On that note…
ASH: [laughing] I feel like I’ve been exposed as this Twitter maniac. But I promise they were mostly retweets, I promise
VB: I haven’t checked how many tweets I’ve done, actually. But yeah, so yeah, thank you very much. And I think, if I may, it’s fallen to me to, to commence the unsavoury capitalism. So yeah, we have for this launch, we have a discount code which is a scannable QR. code, which is live until midnight tonight.
ASH: Yes, I like that my press have been very generous, but also doing like a Challenge. Anneka to buy the book. You’ve got 48 hours, go, go go!
VB: So yeah, that is, that will be, I think that is, that’s also on the the paper printouts at the front, and it will be at the end. But yeah, and yeah, we we also met kind of on Twitter, didn’t we?
ASH: We did!
VB: I remember, it was, I think it was the fanfic conference in Oxford.
ASH: Yes! I knew you were good people.
VB: Yeah, so yeah, because, yeah, you can absolutely tell that from people’s Twitter feed
ASH: You give good gif, that’s what I’m saying.
VB: So yeah, this was this was a few years back. But yes, this was something that I was kind of reminded of when reading the book, and also, you know, sort of, talking about the yeah, the community of Medieval Twitter, which we’ll, you know, we’ll get onto again in a sec. But yes, my sort of vivid memory of sort of spying you at the coffee table and being like, “I know you from Twitter!” But so yeah, just to kind of, I don’t know, take the temperature of the room. I don’t know how many people here are medievalists, and how many people are kind of Twitter users or ex-users? Yeah, I think we may have a sort of a
JG: Let’s have a show of hands. Show of hands for medievalists? Show of hands for Twitter users? Aaah, okay, there’s quite a lot of those!
VB: So my, I mean, my first question is, you know, sort of getting into Medieval Twitter, the book, which you know I I’ve been kind of, I don’t know, it’s not, you know. I feel like I’m sort of saying, “oh, I’ve been hearing about this for ages.” But I have
ASH: It is true. Yeah, it’s true. It’s been a loooong gestation
VB: It’s been underway for a long time, and it’s you know it’s, it’s been very much, you know, a labour of love. And I think you know, in the finished product you can definitely see how much, you know, how much work has been done, but also how much, you know, how much love has been poured into this project. And yeah, it’s it’s it’s a fantastic book that I’ve been kind of, you know, reading since slightly before it came out. And I yeah, and I, it’s it’s it’s a serious book. It’s a hilarious book. It’s like, you know, I kind of find myself, you know highlighting phrases, I wish I’d written all the time. It’s very annoying!
ASH [laughs]
VB: But I think you know, to kind of ease us into it, like in the spirit of medievalist being asked, you know, how they define the Middle Ages?. How do we, you know, how do we define Medieval Twitter? And actually, as we said, since the takeover, and since it is now no longer even Twitter, how,
ASH: Oh, good question! Twitter is dead. I’m sorry, RIP, and I think we all kind of need to get used to that, even though it’s quite familiar to refuse to refer to Musk’s platform as X. I get it. But Twitter isn’t here anymore, and #MedievalTwitter isn’t here anymore, either. So in the book, I do have this kind of like affective pull and this critical nostalgia about what it was and what it could have been. But it’s very, you know “The King is dead! Long live the King!” And kind of, Medieval Twitter can live on in a different place. It’s not necessarily dependent on Twitter, but Twitter did shape some of its kind of cultural norms, and how we built community. I would just like to shout out Anna from Arc [Humanities Press], who told me, “do you think you might want to do a glossary?” And I was quite naive, and thought like, well, no, everybody’s gonna know what these, like, things are. And then Twitter stopped existing.
And suddenly you see that the things you take for granted as kind of part of your daily life, or like tech, that’s not going to die die, is it? Actually, suddenly, I do need a glossary to figure out, you know, what, what precisely do I mean by profile, page, etc, etc. So I may have spent some time dabbling on the internet just for you lovely people: We are gonna go in!
This is obviously a very real Twitter account that I’ve not put together from the little monks on the front cover of my book, no. So in basic sense, this is a tweet. I think what’s important to think about Twitter is, it was text first and that does really shape, I think, why we have a lot medievalist scholars on there. And so here again the hashtag. That’s how you would say you’re kind of contributing to #MedievalTwitter in the most explicit sense. Also important here, these lovely monks have the little blue tick of verification, and that becomes really important when we talk about on #MedievalTwitter being ourselves. But what is ourself? How can you know with confidence you are who you say you are when you’re tweeting? Bbecause you know, on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a bird.
Then, though, we have a tweet with an image. These are big deal on #MedievalTwitter and Medieval Twitter, which is not just the hashtag, it’s kind of, it’s a bigger entity than that. And then, oh, look! A reply from Dr. Eagle. I wish I were Dr. Eagle online. So I’m just running through kind of really basic things that I’m sure most of, you know, mainly to show off, like I said, my online fake tweet generator skills.
This becomes important when we’re talking about Twitter’s medieval-ness. Because, you see here, apparently, I retweeted this banging tweet, which means I just posted it verbatim to my own followers, which again, I swear Jane is most of my twitter output. But then, look, we could also do a quote-tweet, which is kind of like a value-added retweet. So I’m citing my source, but then I’m also saying something else. I’m adding a bit of my own razzmatazz, to my own audience.
And then, the subtweet. There’s a lot of subtweeting in my book. So this is a subtweet, [it] is all about saying something out loud which not everybody is going to understand what you’re saying. It is like the mean girl bitchy technology, they are delicious. And in the book, that I’ll go into, I talk about kind of literature itself as a subtweet history as a subtweet, and the joy of medieval scholarship is in figuring out who’s subtweeting who, what your take is, because you actually know the truth.
So here—you don’t want to know how long I spent on this page—the profile page. This is kind of a basic thing you would see. And again, this is important when we’re thinking about kind of textuality online, but also to do with authenticity and identity. Because this is, you know, “we pray, so you don’t have to” is your little, your bio, and also the kind of things that it’s trying to connect you to. Funnily enough, I come up on this one, because you may also like me, and also the Duchess of Burgundy. Remember her, she’s coming back. She loves a subtweet.
Now we’ve got to talk about the algorithm. I like it kind of matrix style, the algorithm, because that’s kind of the underpinnings that make kind of historiography in a way, like a lived experience on Twitter. So the algorithm is the underlying tech that decides what you see when and what actually goes viral in many ways.
We have timelines, oooh. So the “For You” timeline versus the “Following” timeline. So “Following”, on the right hand side here, is going to be like people you follow, their tweets that are served to you, that’s great. But “For You” is the algorithmic timeline. It’s curated. It’s what the algorithm thinks you want to see. It’s serving you a certain view of what’s happening right now, what you want to see. So it’s always this, like, dialogic view of the present tense. So in the book, I delve into the ways that actually this is historiography. So every time you’re logging on and seeing these different kinds of narratives of time, of historicity that you are doing the historiographical task.
Now, if I may, Vicki, do you know this blog post?
VB: I do know this blog post.
ASH: Is it time to talk about the hashtag?
VB: Yes, I think it is
ASH: [laughs] So Dorothy Kim wrote this like blindingly good blog post in 2014 that kind of launched the hashtag into a bigger universe. And it’s important that In the Middle is known as a like intersectional sexy, pioneering blog, where, like cool things happen. And it’s a really good reflection on kind of her experience of Twitter as a medievalist, as a digital humanist like, and bridging that gap. And that really is, so the hashtag existed before this point but it wasn’t really theorized, and it wasn’t really like on the map.
ASH: Now, Vicki, is it time for me to tell you what’s in the book?
VB: I believe it is because also, you know, my head, you know, will not go round anymore. If I’m in the way, by the way, please let me know. But yeah, so yeah, so I think, yeah, kind of #MedievalTwitter is sort of where this where a lot of things started from, and the book Medieval Twitter drills down into what you’ve already started talking about here, which is kind of Medieval Twitter as a metaphor for medieval studies. So, and you know, I think, yYou’ve kind of you’ve hinted at some of the major beats of that analogy. But yeah, I mean, what, how did, you know, I think you can kind of
It starts off quite you know, in some ways quite niche, and then it expands to really quite large and capacious issues that take, I mean, it takes the the discussions in the book in all sorts of interesting directions, and looks at unlikely texts. But also it’s you know, it’s a kind of it’s a, a study of historiography as well as you’ve just been saying so. Yeah, can you sort of do a, sort of yeah, like a sort of a whistlestop tour of that expanded analogy?
ASH: Indeed I can. It only took me ten years to write. So I can pack this into, you know, a nice 45 seconds maybe. I think it’s actually important to recognize from how I’ve written the book is that I was a participant lurker of the hashtag, and so that very much informs like, why I thought about the project, what what angle the project is coming from. It’s not coming from kind of an outsider, though I wouldn’t say I was like in kind of the central clique of the hashtag.
VB: It’s almost kind of anthropological in a way, isn’t it?
ASH: Yeah, and
VB: And part of the phenomenon you’re studying?
ASH: And now, because you can’t actually access the Twitter archive, if you don’t have, like, huge amounts of money, then the only way to really talk about it and document it is if you were there and have a screenshot. So it’s also kind of the, the practical thing is you needed to be involved to have that on-the-ground documentary force. I mean, it takes, so I was just really interested—like, guys, why are medievalists all on Twitter? You know, particularly given the sort of the public reputation, so it’s not necessarily accurate, but they’re kind of fusty, you know, only interested in old things, whatever. And I would get questions from people. “What do you mean you’re on Twitter, like you’re a medievalist like, to back into an archive, what are you doing?” And I was just interested in thinking, well, what is it about Twitter that gets medievalists? And can we get kind of social on medieval studies? So it’s kind of getting medieval on Twitter and vice versa, and taking from a starting point my own experiences on there, kind of feeling it out. And then thinking, Okay, Dorothy Kim kind of started this framework, but let’s push it. Let’s, let’s see how far we can go, because while so many of us were on there, actually not much theorizing has been done, or reflecting, or kind of tying the the knots together.
Now I have become a professional sin eater, because people know like, oh, I do Medieval Twitter, people come up to me at conferences and go: “I, you know, I saw this tweet about Gossip Girl, and it is so like Gower.” And it’s like the thing that they can’t say to anyone else. But that’s why I wrote a book where we can say those things. So I guess in a, in a nutshell, this book is about kind of being medieval on Twitter and doing medievalism on Twitter and Twitter itself being medieval. So it’s kind of going all angles where we want to go. So can I give you some examples?
VB: Yes, please
ASH: Here’s some slides I prepared earlier. So one of Dorothy Kim’s kind of biggest innovations is saying, guys, you should all come to the party on Twitter because it is a medievalist and medieval medium. It’s like a manuscript, and we all are writing in the margins tweet by tweet. And so here on the right- hand side, here, you have a medieval manuscript of the Glossa ordinaria. So it’s a gloss, just, you know, people are adding comments, explanations to the side of a master text. So basically, what Dorothy Kim is saying is, we are all these glossators in the margins. That’s very cool. In the moment of kind of glossing the master text of Twitter, we meet, functionally, all of these medieval forebears.
Look at this beauty! Again, you have a similar one, kind of, these massive, overarching text on the outside, annotating the core text in the middle. What I find interesting about this is, like we said, that actually, it’s not just me who mainly retweeted, like studies have shown that over 50% of all tweets were actually retweets, and most of the output of like actual original tweets are actually very small number of power users, so the culture is much less original, as medieval authorship completely hews the same way, and it’s about kind of value, adding, commenting, adding.
And I’d like to draw your attention to the margin at bottom with some excellent snail-knight action here. Because that’s the other thing that Dorothy Kim is saying, is that the margins are powerful. The margins in the Middle Ages are where shit happens. Fun stuff, weird stuff, bad stuff, radical stuff. So she’s also talking about kind of harnessing that energy. And here I’ve got some nice examples. So you have, like, on the left we’ve got a scribe kind of pulling in a bit of a text that’s been forgotten. So he’s climbing up, he’s literally correcting the text. Then we have, like somebody drawing like Augustine, does not enjoy, no! Basically saying like, no, that, that is bullshit. And I’m writing in the margins and drawing your attention to the fact that he thinks that. Now on the bottom, somebody’s written in the margin like, “yeah, no, that was a terrible translation. This is how I would have translated that”. So again, we have already in the medieval margin, radical, playful, funny. But there’s some sense of kind of rebellious correction to the status quo, making it better in manifold and queer ways.
So if Twitter is a social manuscript, and if we are writing in the margins, what is Twitter’s master narrative? The very few people who have written about Medieval Twitter say it’s The Parliament of Fowls. So it’s Geoffrey Chaucer, because it’s got a lot of birds in it. It’s kind of the most obvious one.
VB: I did not know until reading this that the bird icon was called Larry. I didn’t know he had been called
ASH: Oh, yeah, Larry, RIP.
VB: I know. Well, he’s still on my phone.
ASH: And what is interesting here is how we can see how moderation policy works, basically in The Parliament of Fowls, and that you do need these guardrails on this bird-like space of discourse, and everybody can come on down. I also talk about again the other like superbird text called The Owl and The Nightingale. It’s technically kind of a debate poem, but it’s just a slanging match. It’s awesome. And it is so Twitter, you know, when you see this toxic discourse, you’re just having a go. Well, you find that in this debate, I think it’s the 12th century, between an owl and nightingale. So there’s something very interesting there to me again about these kind of repeating motifs of, of toxicity, given that Twitter is synonymous for a lot of people with toxic discourse and its ills, and how do you deal with it
Then we must bring in #MedievalTwitter. Thank God for the Internet Archive, because this is a section of the #MedievalTwitter feed from just before the first Trump Presidency [makes sounds of anguish] and I wanted to show you here, again, what we are doing—can you see I’m using the present tense because we are doing it, still, even though it’s the past—when you’re a medievalist on #MedievalTwitter. It’s this really interesting mix, so you have somebody saying talking about their students and what they’ve taught them. You have somebody asking for kind of research support. You’ve got somebody saying, you know, as usual, somebody saying Trump said something’s medieval, no medieval is not like that! You have at the top somebody saying, you know, offering commemorating a past former colleague. So it’s this real mishmash of kind of personal, professional, research, a bit kind of pointed political, but also sometimes a bit disposable. And here are some kind of more examples that you can see. So Erik Wade’s tweet at the bottom here was, at the time I looked at it, which I think was 2021 the most retweeted and liked tweet with the hashtag in. And it’s again, it’s very much that interesting kind of, I have cited you something, I’ve given you some interesting information, but also being a bit snarky, yet in a scholarly way. And the fact that that kind of penetrated the usual bounds is again interesting about this kind of correcting the narrative, showing also that scholars are people, too, and like, sometimes you find some really weird stuff in what you’re reading, and it’s fun to share it.
This brings us, friends, to Margery. Oh, yes. So with that last slide, I wanted to kind of draw attention to the fact that Medieval Twitter as a community in many ways was all about breaking down that distinction between personal and professional. You bring kind of your whole self to it. That’s, that’s social, right? Like,
VB: Yeah, yeah
ASH: That’s how you get play on social.
VB: This is kind of, this is one of my favourite things about it, because, you know, as much as, you know the 21st century did not invent being toxic online.
ASH: [laughs]
VB: Yeah, social media didn’t invent this kind of public private slash private public and you know, you draw the analogy between delivering letters and delivering [social-media] posts, indeed, in the Middle Ages, which would depend on a kind of a network of yeah, of various actors with individual agendas that may get in the way of how your, of how your message is received, if it’s received at all. And then it is, it is both private and public. It’s read in public, but it is meant for, you know, perhaps not everybody who’s listening to it, or everyone who’s read it along the way.
ASH: Totally, and I think that also ties into kind of the semantics of it, so on social media, is it reality, or is it authentic? Because there is a difference there that medieval hagiography, so saints’ lives, really ties into, so is a saint’s life, like really step-by-step concretely what happened, or is it an authentic tale of their holiness? Is it maybe a curated version of events to show them in a certain light? So I like to think of social media as auto-hagiography, that we are literally kind of writing our own saint’s life, curating who we are.
VB: Best version of ourselves, possibly
ASH: Exactly, and that’s why
VB: Until someone comes along and tells us why we’re wrong, and why we’re actually, you know, not checking our privilege, or, you know, ignoring
ASH: Oh, yes
VB: swathes of the people who are going to read your tweet.
ASH: Oh, obviously. And I mean, that’s why I think this is very interesting that Margery Kempe, who is a 15th century mystic, there were 15 Twitter accounts pretending to be her. Like, why? And also how cool is that? When I found this, I was just like, this, Oh, my God! Yes, yes, hook it to my veins! So in the book I use kind of looking at these—like I call it the “wailing” of Margeries—to really think through
VB: Is that the collective noun?
ASH: Yeah, exactly, she cries a lot—to think through both what social media can offer us in terms of unpicking more about how Margery Kempe’s text works, but how we can then think of ourselves as again, writing our own mystical text into being. So, in case you didn’t know, Margery, she cries a lot, a lot. It’s really annoying. I mean, she’s great, but it’s really annoying.
And so her text is hailed as the first autobiography in English. That is very debatable. There were, you know, three scribes helped her. Isn’t that interesting that she depends on a platform, an embodied platform, true, but other people to get her message out there. Also interesting is that everybody thinks Margery would be on social media. So when you actually like, just dig into the comments about Margery online, everybody’s been like, “Oh, she’d be great. Oh, yeah, I’d follow her. Oh, it’s great!” So then, when you have
VB: Wouldn’t people mute her a lot, though?
ASH: I would totally mute her. But I would still follow. I mean,
VB: Yeah
ASH: I would probably subtweet her, let’s face it like…
So what I’m trying to show you here is just an example of these innovative Margeries, who are kind of tying together like this modern response, like “oh, she would give good Twitter”, but then reinterpreting the book that she wrote, co-wrote, collaborated with, in a different way. So here I talk about, for example, the use of emojis to convey this embodied affective feeling which you know the book can’t do necessarily.
I must say I did fall down a rabbit hole. You would have too. It’s a very nice rabbit hole, because the most prolific Margery is @RealMargery. And so I, I have watched a lot of Murder, She Wrote, and I felt that I should track down the Real Margery, and I could just have DM’ them to begin with. But no! I, you know, I looked at kind of the use of the images, how they quoted certain things. Here I also dug into kind of how, with the kinds of language they use, the citation practice, how they reinvent again once more the Book of Margery Kempe to give it an authentic feeling. So I really like this kind of use of ASCII art, and bounded asterisks as this bodily kind of a happening, and I’m not giving anything away—got to read the book for that—but look! Oh, there seems to be a connection between the front cover of this edition of Margery’s Book and this profile page. Hmmm, what could that mean?
VB: Okay
ASH: Oh, and this one, Vicki, is one for you because we talked again about kind of letters. I send a lot of postcards. There are a lot of postcards over there for you to enjoy and take home and actually for me, because it’s like giving a—this sounds very dramatic—but a bit in my soul. It’s like me saying, “Hello! I see you”, so they feel very intimate. But here, for example, you have a medieval image of, like, a letter going all the way along from the left to the right to be delivered. I think, it gets to the heart of, Vicki, what you’re saying about, you know, one, the medieval letter depends on this chain, much like we depend on you know the people behind the apps, the platform itself, the private company. But two, this is not like an intimate scene of like, you know, Oh, I read it to myself in my bath and it’s great, you know. Medieval letters were public and private. They were often to multiple addressees. They were read aloud. So it’s again an understanding of kind of what a private text is.
VB: Some of them come with their own subtweets. They have a cedula, what is it, a cedula inclusa? A little attachment that might be, you know, for someone’s eyes only, or it might be…A friend was telling me about this, you know, absolutely sort of scandalous letter. I can’t remember who, you know—I’m very bad at remembering the specifics of these, you know these great stories that Daniel tells me. But yeah, it was this sort of absolute kind of, you know, tale of debauchery, but it had a missing cedula and which was probably, you know, the real message, and the you know, the whole kind of tale of, you know miscreant behaviour was some kind, you know, a sort of smokescreen for whatever was, you know, the real message?
ASH: Oh, totally, and that they are subtweets, right? I mean, I don’t know what exactly it means, necessarily in this medieval letter, but I’m reading it and going, “Oh, wait! If I can like cross reference that in the archive and find that, I can decipher what that means.” And again, that for me is the thrill of the chase, like that is why you I’m on Twitter going. Wait! What has Azealia Banks been saying now?
Like, also important and interesting, I think, is kind of troubadours. So troubadours sing in a courtly—again, it’s very intimate you would think. But actually, this is to a public audience, of a collective audience, but also to an audience of one, and also often to an audience of other troubadours. So you have this kind of textual performance that is at once very personal. But it’s also collective. It’s public. It’s private. Navigating those problems is like the Twitter thing.
Can I? Can I show you a little picture of a doggy now. Please? So here is the little doggy. So if we want to talk subtweet, the best subtweet in history—I am staking a claim—is in the Chastelaine de Vergi, 13th century text about a Chatelaine, the lady, who takes up with this lovely knight, but on pain of secrecy. Ah haha! And they devise a plan which involves walking a dog, and if the dog’s out they can get it on. Seems very normal. But it’s very important to the Chatelaine that nobody knows. And you know, plot happens, drama drama drama. But in fact, the Duchess finds out, and in this kind of epic—it feels very Real Housewives of the Duchy of Burgundy to me—the Chatelaine who wants to, she’s jealous of—the Duchess is jealous of the Chatelaine, and so subtweets her. So she says, “Oh, okay, you don’t have, you don’t have a boyfriend. Is that what you’re saying? But you are a past mistress of the art of training the little dog.” And everybody else is like, “what?” You know, it’s kind of passing them by. But sadly, the Chatelaine knows what that means, and then kills herself. So subtweets can be deadly friends, I mean, or, as I put it, in my fake tweet generator…
In the book, though I kind of take it one step further, because one must, one must and look at kind of a subtweet of a subtweet. So there is a 15th century version of this story, and nobody’s really figured out like, why was it rewritten. And why for this audience, and why certain things different in it. So I once more don my Jessica Fletcher raincoat, and try and connect the dots between again, what we think the meaning is, or what it could be, and why that matters, and why it doesn’t matter.
I’m really sorry that I have to inflict this one on you.
VB: Oh good God!
ASH: I’m sorry, Jane. I feel like Elon Musk is
VB: He just popped up behind me, I mean, come on!
ASH: It’s very, very praxis. I mean, that is kind of what he did to Twitter so kind of have this lovely, “oh, love subtweet!” And then the end of the book is Larry, the bird, is dead. Yeah, and Elon Musk killed him and I was fairly upset about that, to be honest. But I must say, bless his heart, it gave me a very nice opportunity to go back to a text I think Jane and I used to talk about a lot: Laüstic, Marie de France, the you know, the ultimate nightingale.
VB: I do like that Marie de France has been able to offer comfort to me in processing that.
ASH: Indeed, Yeah, it’s what she would have wanted.
VB: Yeah, oh, absolutely.
ASH: Hall: So basically, I kind of end the book looking at what we’ve lost with Larry being dead, and Larry the bird was never identified. So I say, no, he’s definitely a nightingale, because we can understand the way the Musk acquisition worked through Marie de France’s lai of Laüstic. So I read the lai through Musk and vice versa, and kind of who gets the last word, and why? And in a way, how we can process what has happened, for those of us who enjoyed Twitter, for those of us who it gave joy to and I’m really sorry, but I’m gonna have to go backwards because I can’t stand looking its face.
VB: Oh, well, yeah, that is, you know, that is, that’s you know, I said this, you know, this is one of my favourite readings, because, you know, it’s a sort of, it’s a short and you know quite, yes, it’s very, you know, it’s quite a personal reading. But so also so in kind of interpreting the way the poor crushed little nightingale of the lai is then kind of made essentially into a sort of a reliquary by, you know, this grieving knight. And I was thinking, Oh, yes, this is yeah, we’ve all kind of, you know, tried to hang on to a little bit. So you know—and you actually, you know, gave the example that is, you know, on my phone at the moment—which you know I don’t use Twitter, but I, you know, also kept the bird logo as the app container on there, because it’s just, you know. Yeah, it’s slightly less boring to look at. But yeah, it’s it’s kind of, it’s and especially, you know, sort of going back to, you know, how long this book was in development, and how, how much was changing. I mean, you know, it’s writing about social media is difficult, anyway, because it moves so fast, and that’s the nature of it. And because it can, you know, it can kind of overlap with so many different spheres. But also, you know, in the, you know, the latter stages of you writing about this, Twitter, in fact, you know ceased to be. It is a, you know, it’s an ex-parrot. So I guess you know, so you know, I sort of feel like, you know, this book is almost like a lovely reliquary for Medieval Twitter as was, but…
ASH: I think I mean, I think that’s true. I think also it’s, in a strange way, it’s a memorial to who I was and who the discipline was when the heyday of the hashtag. Because you can’t help kind of meet yourself going back and thinking, “Oh, yeah, no, I remember that or that meme!” It is, Twitter and social media is, a teleportation device through different times, timelines of your own, and who you were, and who now, now you are. You confront that. I mean, I did get some advice, which. So I say, “I’m a medievalist”—it was a research seminar, bring your questions—”I just don’t know where to stop, you know. You know, it keeps going, or whatever.” And they’re just like, “Oh, yeah, just pick a day and stop.” No, that seems, nooooo. But hopefully, I mean the Musk takeover
VB: Somebody else picked it for you
ASH: And I do think that, very selfishly, it helped me, one, draw a line under the project frankly, and just say enough now [laughs], and two, be able to start to see what Twitter was, both to me and in terms of my analysis. I think that it’s kind of always on, you’re always in the churn. It is quite hard to stop, and you always think, “oh, there’s going to be a tweet about that”, or “I’ve missed that”, or “Oh, God!” you know “what’s going to be the next biggest tweet on the hashtag that I should cite?” I would say I detached a little bit from that concern when I kind of managed to own the fact that this was going to be a very personal account. And that’s okay, and in fact, that’s quite important. And I think, as I argue in the Introduction, that any kind of antiseptic objective viewpoint on particularly the hashtag, but on Twitter is necessarily flawed it. It was, being on there was very personal at times like it sometimes it really hurt, sometimes it was really fun, you know.
And so the only way that I could write about it was to acknowledge that this is my viewpoint, and this is where I was and how I engaged. And frankly, the reason the book exists, like all of our scholarship, is because of who I am, and my intersections of identity. But also, you know, like I enjoy Murder, She Wrote, you know that all matters into how I make the connections I do and why. And I feel like owning that in our work can only be a positive thing.
VB: Hmm. And it’s and it’s also because you know what you were saying about, you know, kind of that idea of stepping back, is, you know, flawed, but also basically impossible. Because, you know, in writing about, you know, #MedievalTwitter, you know, what you—-since I have, I have, you know, I have marks in this—but so yeah, essentially, what you say at one point is that, you know, #MedievalTwitter, you know, is a community. It isn’t just a kind of an indexing device. It is, you know, it is a community that is being built textually, and that you know, so you know, as well as it being, you know, and I kind of—it’s sort of quite weird, you know, you know, as a medievalist. And also, I guess you know, just someone being alive within these, you know, interesting times. You know, it’s kind of been like reading sort of a slice of history, but also one that I remember well, and I was there, and it’s kind of, you know, in some ways it’s sort of like a turning point. In some ways, it’s like an end point. So I think I mean, was it—cause like, you know, there’s a lot of kind of challenges and privileges about writing about something that is so immediate, and a community with which you are involved, and but also just, you know the medium, you know, some of this you know, in terms of, in terms of form, as you know, as with some of the the slides that you’ve shown, and you know, sort of working out how to reproduce emoji and ASCII art and everything in a, you know, in a traditional print book. But also just how to engage with Twitter, and you know, and social media. You know, how much of it was kind of just like working out how to write about that, and what the, you know, what the ethics of it were, and what the practicalities of it were?
ASH: Oh, like a massive amount, and also I, the amount of times when I was like, I should have screenshotted that, why didn’t I, like, pdf that? And you know sometimes when you would scroll Twitter, like, the tweet would disappear, and then you can’t find it. No, no, that’s like, that’s the chapter! Oh, my God! And one, having to kind of reconcile yourself with that like, well, you know, I’ve lost it, that’s okay. But two, you know, I am used to, I like working on anonymous texts ideally. I will accept an author if I have to. I like, like, the details being a bit murky. I like meeting the text where it is, and kind of having a pure engagement with that. And so then, having all of these—like these are real people, right? Even, you know, a known, like, a brand account has a real person behind it
VB: Because you quote quite a lot of, you know, both sort of pseudonym Twitter users and you know, real real people.
ASH: Yeah. And I’m thinking, it’s one thing to cite somebody, you know, in an academic journal. But what are my ethics when I’m citing from Twitter? And yes, they posted this to the public
VB: It’s, it’s kind of a publication, I mean Chicago Manual of Style will tell you how to cite this
ASH: But the ethics feel differently and also, frankly, the people who pay attention to what marginalized people say on Twitter can be a massive vector of harassment. And so I very much didn’t want to open people up to, I mean, who’s—Alicia Spencer-Hall: anybody in the alt-right would like to read my book, please don’t. But you have to think about that. You have to think that people can weaponize the fact that you have put down in writing something. You have fixed that fly in amber for other people to then read. I mean, I came to kind of a somewhat messy conclusion in that, for example, the tweets that I showed you the three tweets that are screenshots, I reached out to each of the people individually, and said, “I would like to have these screenshots in the book. Is that okay with you?” And they explicitly signed off on that, then in the book I talk, like, extensively about one of the quote dramas on the hashtag, which is the ISXX affair. And so I spoke in depth with Mary Rambaran-Olm who had suffered huge amounts of harassment in that kind of moment.
VB: And not just on Twitter
ASH: No, I mean, and so I wanted to make sure that one, because my account obviously was only very partial kind of on the periphery, but also I wasn’t writing anything that would put her potentially in way of further harm, literal or “just” online, which is still harm. But for other people, you know, I do cite them, because it’s the public internet. I was very careful that like, if I can see it, but that the account is locked, then it’s not on the public internet, really, is it? So that’s not okay. But if it was on, you know, the public internet, and I feel like if you’re saying something kind of anodyne but funny about Margery Kempe, that is fair game. But I still think about that. I still wrestle with that, and I still think people who are cited might feel differently about the choices I’ve made. You know, I cite somebody with a username on MetaFilter, which is kind of a popular text-based forum. It is on the public internet. It’s very relevant to the book. But I think they probably weren’t expecting to end up in a medievalist book when writing that. I think it’s something anyone who works with and on social has to think about.
JG: I would really love to carry on with this, but I think, given that it’s 7 o’clock, I think maybe we should move on to the Q and A
ASH: Oh, please do!
JG: This is great, and I’m sure we would all be very happy to go on. But I wonder if I could just open it to the floor. And I’m going to stand up so that I can see Sara, who’s got online. But would anybody like to…? It’s a question.
Sorry?
I think, yeah, okay.
Audience member 1: [inaudible; question about whether real-life networks, contacts were useful when researching the book, e.g. in accessing tweets]
[Inaudible]
ASH: Yes, for sure. So in 2019, pre-pandemic, I launched what I thought would be, like, three people might take a survey about the hashtag just because again, it’s quite frustrating because there was just no data like, how many people use the hashtag? Why did they? You know, what’s the vibe? And so I set up a nifty little survey which got over a hundred responses, which for me, it’s like that’s actually pretty impressive. But I think a large part of that was because of kind of the cultural networks, and that I, I don’t--I’m not saying I was known on Twitter—but like, I am posting about this on Twitter, and I have clearly used the hashtag, and also, therefore I think, people shared the link, not just on Twitter, but with kind of friends, and kind of circulated that way because I was vouched for in some way, through that way. I mean, I think I mean, it’s been a long time I’ve been writing this book, like I cannot stress that enough. So in a weird way, I’m probably the one with the screenshots. Or I’m the one that sent myself an email saying, “That’s the tweet!”. And so, for me, in some ways, yes, those cultural networks were clearly really important. But, on the other hand, most of, most of my #MedievalTwitter community was strictly online.
It’s like, even, Vicki meeting you, it was like, “Oh, hello! It’s a bit weird. You exist!”
VB: “I feel famous!”
ASH: Yeah, like, “what is your name? Because I know your @!” You know, that kind of dissonance is quite interesting.
[inaudible]
Audience member 2: I didn’t know when I when I signed up, it sounded really interesting, and I was kind of, I was kind of thinking, how would it work? But I really see it, so I think it really does work. And first of all, I wanted to make a quick comment, which was the last thing you spoke about, about, like the citation issues and like, how do you reference a tweet, can I, like that’s kind of interesting and similar to when you take a picture of a manuscript. And I’m like, “how do I now cite that?” Because there’s, you know, the copyright issue and all that is usually not really there anymore. Anyway, my question is, when you were saying these things about, you know the margins, the number of comments and stuff, and for me, I don’t really use Twitter, actually. But I used to use it in the past, and for me it’s a very visual experience, right? And like you said at the beginning, the text is really, really important, and I wonder, I wonder, in terms of medieval manuscripts, I was thinking about, does that maybe triggers, or eventually we rethink the way we think about, I don’t know, medieval literacy, or how maybe people really read, because I think it was. It’s like, there’s an emphasis on performance and oral culture. Then I feel like it doesn’t really work when people [inaudible], looked at these pages and read them again, made a comment. I don’t know. Maybe you could say something about that?
ASH: I think the manuscript is itself a performative space of the kind of, the annotation of building it out. And also, that’s why I really love the kind of the Augustine with the spear. That is very flamboyant to me, again adding that dramatic dimension. I think what I find interesting is that like that manuscript page with the gloss functions very well, visually, without knowing what the text necessarily is. So like, there’s a middle thing. Oh, it’s the Bible, right? And there’s lots of people have stuff to say about it. So you can actually have quite an important reading interpretation of the text just visually. It’s interesting, then, that Twitter initially, for example, didn’t have chain or threading capability, and the way that Twitter as a platform had to develop a visual medium for tying things together so that you can then, like, scroll your feed and see how things work, and that a lot of the innovations on Twitter in terms of, I think the first, like threading, were from Black women who were using the medium and going, this is what we need. This is how we’re going to do it. The other thing is that initially retweets, again, if you’re like a geriatric twitterer like me, like you have to put like RT at the beginning, and then paste it again, whereas now again it, it became much more visual again, and much more— just with the arrow—dynamic, performative. We’re having, there’s a kind of visual and kinetic interplay. And I think there’s a lot of that actually within manuscripts. The other thing that you’re saying about taking photos of the manuscripts and how to cite it, I talk about this in the Introduction, is that there were times where I was like, it is easier for me to find an 11th century random thing than this one tweet on the internet. And actually, I think it’s—is it Bridget Whearty?—says about, if you take like photos of a manuscript, but you don’t have any like metadata on it. It’s just a pile of like material, like it’s not anything. It may as well not exist. And actually, it’s like that for Twitter, a tweet, if like you don’t know who posted it, you don’t have a screenshot or whatever, it ceases to exist. It’s just in this kind of amorphous space that somebody has access to in theory, but you can’t necessarily get it. So I think that the political dynamics of archive and, like, your data in the archive are actually also really important and very medieval about manuscripts and access and finding stuff, like discoverability.
VB: Like the 21st century specialists in, you know, historians to come, you know—if there are any— kind of you know, they’re going to be like sort of going through people’s tweet archives and people’s Instagram feeds, and, you know, piecing together a picture of, you know, what they were doing and what their affiliations were, and what their
ASH: But I mean, this is really important and horrifyingly relevant. So when Trump actually got suspended from Twitter—eugh, the good old days!—you could no longer view his tweets, but he was conducting presidential business by tweet. So, like, I think it was just like a man who could code had a webpage where he could query the Twitter API, and have an archive of Trump’s tweets. But then, owing to the takeover by Musk, etc, that no longer works either. So if you want to actually understand like, kind of crucial things to do with, you know the rise of MAGA,
VB: Yeah, well a record of the, you know, the presidency
ASH: You can’t get it.
JG: And, also, this state of things is also standardly called a digital dark age because of the loss of material. I’ll come to you, but I think there was one online, and I don’t want to shut out people
[Question from Online audience member 1 being read out]: Arc Humanities originally commissioned this as a little Past Imperfect, but as it expanded, Arc created our new Impact series, a mid-length minigraph series, for scholars who want to write about edgy topics accessibly. Can you reflect on how you think the longer format helped the project forward?
ASH: Hi Anna! Thanks for waiting for the book! Anna and Arc have been really great in getting the project, so shout out for that, because not all publishers would go with me on this journey, and listen to me when I say “No, no, we are going to have the phrase ‘unabashed douchebaggery’, no, that is in the book.”
I think in a way, it’s longer, because I have more ideas—don’t we, always? But I think, in a way, having a longer piece is a form of praxis in showing that actually, this matters. Thinking about, working with modern stuff, social and the medieval is important. It’s exciting, and it’s incisive. And I kind of feel in a way that if I’d sort of done a, like, quick and dirty—you know, only like six years rather than a decade—little book, it can be much more easily dismissed, as like, Oh, yeah, like, you know, it’s a little thing you dashed off. But I just kept finding connections and places to go, and I think, with the Musk turn in the end, you know, I sort of weirdly feel that I’m writing about the future. So the book ends, you know, it’s now X. But it’s before Trump came back in. So I’m telling you about kind of Musk’s medievalism in terms of, kind of, the way in which the cis-het white normative supremacy is instigated on X, and then, you know, finish the book, and now what’s happening?
VB: Yeah, we’re seeing it this week now in legislation, aren’t we
ASH: Exactly. So, it’s kind of an interesting turn to go, I thought that was the past, but now it’s my present, and actually, it’s presaging the future in some really wild ways.
JG: Okay, thank you. So did you have one as well, here at the back? Okay, you next
Audience member 3: [inaudible]
ASH: I think there’s two things there, like the liminal is very much the space between Twitter and X, and there’s something to do with the draw to remain in that liminal space for some people that yes, Musk owns it, but it’s not not Twitter yet, is it? And one’s personal Rubicon, as I call it, like, when is it beyond the, like, the point of no return? When will you leave, and or accept that it’s died? Or will you stay in the liminal?
And it’s a messy space, but it’s also understandable for some people to stay in that liminal space. So I was part of, lurked in Disability Twitter. And a big thing there is, there are a lot of people who’ve stayed on Twitter, X, because not all other platforms are accessible. People don’t necessarily have the time, the energy, like, the bodymind’s resources to go somewhere else. And so, if you want to remain in fellowship with people, you have to live in this kind of horrifyingly liminal, it’s death, it’s life, it’s both.
The other thing it makes me think about is, I mean, my book could probably—oh, Christ—be considered as kind of a hagiography in itself, right? It is about the liminal space of getting medieval and getting social, and it’s sort, of I’m waiting for, I’m waiting for the hereafter, right? I’m waiting for the hereafter in the sense of what comes next for medievalist community. But I’m also waiting for the hereafter in kind of in terms of, like, the big kind of visions I offer, which is, you know, what if people accepted the work on social on, you know, non-traditional outlets of marginalized scholars as real scholarship. What if we were allowed to bring who we are and what we believe in into our work. And what if, like, we were paid for it?
VB: You’re waiting to see if your devotion will be rewarded.
ASH: Yeah. And it’s kind of in that way, it’s kind of—Oh, yeah, Jesus, I’m going down this rabbit hole—but like it’s a little prayer right? I could have—There was a point in which I could have said, “Sorry, Anna, yeah, I’m just not going to write it. It’s been too long, I’m very sorry.” But, I still have hope, and hope as resistance and writing about this, and why it’s important as that prayer, that there will be something after this liminal.
Audience member 4: Thank you so much. I mean, this has spoken to me in so many ways, and being a librarian, I’m glad that all of your images are cited with proper citations. [inaudible]
VB: Librarians are so important
Audience member 4: Very important
I’d like to turn to the digital preservation and the archive aspects. And I can see, I’m a bit of a digital humanist as well, so I can see the next project that you [inaudible]. Going in, you talked about the Internet Archive, but there’s so many different archives, and when I was working at the Royal Library in Belgium we did a lot of work on archiving of social media. So I just wondered, could you consider the next project where you could do a kind of digital archaeology of the hashtag, and see—you’d have to find scope—see how you could retrieve that from various archives, and to create this corpus. I just, I just imagined all this, and I just wondered what you thought about how your next project could maybe look at the digital archaeology of the corpus?
ASH: Hmmm, I mean, I would love that, so yes, sign me up!
I think the problem is fragmentation and interoperability and discoverability, and there’s a lot of piecemeal savings of archives, you know. People download their own Twitter archive, I have mine. Then The Verge, shortly after the Musk takeover, tried—it was called the “Great Scrollback of Alexandria”, where they selected what they thought were the best tweets as an archive, as a corpus. I think it points to the fact that archiving is editorial in some senses. It is partial, it is shaped by who you are, what your priorities are, and frankly, your cash. So I think there’s definitely something there there.
But in a large sense it comes back to money, because the way you could do that most effectively would be—if you know Musk hasn’t destroyed all the servers—is to get access to the full Twitter archive. But that I mean, it’s literally thousands of pounds a month to be able to get that data. So there could potentially be a funding opportunity, something like that where you could apply for that. I think you could. Then also again in, I’m thinking, like, when I’m 80, I’ll also add this other bit onto the project. But you could compare then to that, if you had the master archive, what other libraries, people decided to keep? What, then, is, what’s the correlation? Because that also shows a lot about what your interests are. So you know, I, anything about Margery Kempe always send it to my email, you know. A nice, a nice deep cut meme. You know, things that I’m archiving are not the same things that somebody else is archiving. And what that says about us and why, I think is very interesting about not just kind of being a medievalist or being on social media, but us as people and knowledge, and how it’s left. I mean, this is really important right now, given the Trump presidency, which is literally seeing things deleted off the internet. you know, there is a push for having your own archive. Maybe there could be something there on this as well.
JG: Another connection of that, Yanis Varoufakis’s discussions of techno-feudalism which is what he says has taken over from capitalism, in which we are all technoserfs. So you know, these medieval terms keep coming back, it’s very interesting. Sorry—
Audience member 5: I just thought that Larry might turn into a butterfly?
ASH: Yes, I, I am on Bluesky, I enjoy Bluesky. Part of the reason I enjoy Bluesky is it, for me, had the lowest barrier to entry in terms of usability. I appreciate that it has alt-text built into it from very early. That is much better for screen-reading technology. But the culture is different. It just, it just is different. And you know there’s a push now, you’ve got #MedievalSky. If you see—I’m not saying skeet, I’m just not—it’s a post on Bluesky that has #MedievalTwitter, it’s probably about my book, because it’s #MedievalSky or #Skystorians. There’s definitely an attempt to build that groundswell again. But I also think we are in a different world. Medievalism as a kind of field is in a different place, and also, frankly, the university such as it is, you know, scholarship, is in a different place. I had to revisit—sometimes, some of the kind of painful of going back to this, which is like, I was actually really much more hopeful in certain ways, or I was naive about, you know, we could all get permanent jobs, you know? We might get paid sometime, you know. Things wouldn’t get better in that way, right? Like, I could also take my time on doing this Twitter thing, because Twitter would, like, always be around, right? And it’s hard to see then how kind of Bluesky or the Medieval Sky is going to develop. I hope that we do build somewhere some kind of community reservoir, but I think, you know, Tories forever in government, you know, Trump, a pandemic. It has changed, culturally, certain ways of interacting. And frankly, we have lost a lot of scholars because of the, like, systemic marginalization in the Academy. The fact that it is ever more pay to play. People aren’t getting jobs. People aren’t getting funding. Everything’s being cut. You know, how many of you’ve seen about Cardiff university losing 400 [jobs]. You know. These are people, you know, these are real people who are no longer able to be with us in that space. So part of the job
VB: Well they might be with us in some spaces
ASH: True, but not in that, I mean the same way. And in my survey of the hashtag it showed that there’s a lot of credentialism still, even in this beautiful space, and people felt, some people felt that if they weren’t kind of actively researching, then they didn’t belong there, and that actually it was quite a hostile space. So maybe the hope for Medieval Sky is addressing those problems and is addressing, frankly, the just horrifying shedding of some of the most pioneering, coolest thinkers, and what we can do to change the field to bring them back or support them, or make it just a better place to be.
JG: I see Cardiff is going to have a School of Global Communication, but no languages.
VB: What are they communicating in?
JB: But it’ll be global. Anyway, I think on that call to action—do you think we’ve got time for one more very quickly, just on an online privilege? Go on very quickly. Yeah, but quick.
[Question from Online audience member 2 being read out]: I was really struck by what you said about having your own archive. Please can you talk a little about ownership. I’m struck that this community happens on a manuscript page someone commissioned, and that Twitter is, was also a private company.
JG: Okay, 2 minute version
ASH: I’m so great at that Jane, oh wait! Okay, yeah, the problem with having your own archive is it’s still pay to play to some extent. It also requires know how. Downloading my Twitter archive is gigabytes of data. If you only have a smartphone, what, like, what are you doing with that? So I think we still need to think about access and equity in these terms, including creating your own archive. And that ties us back into, like, who owns medieval manuscripts today, because the amount of times I cannot reproduce an image—which is like, well, okay, wait, that’s a 12th century manuscript that you took a photo of in 1997. I am not making bank out of this, guys. It talks, again—what is your personal archive? What is a corporate and professional and scholarly archive is all in these terms.
JG: Very good. Well done. On that note, and I am going to finish with the call to arms, I think we thank our speakers, and then we will proceed up that end where there are things to drink, and hopefully some crisps. I bloody love crisps!
[ASH and VB laugh]
JG: And and books and book signing, and everything. So, thank you!
[ASH and VB wave at audience]