Personhood From Below
Alexis Becker (Ithaca College) and Taylor Cowdery (UNC Chapel Hill)

 

In his essay “The Poetics of History from Below,” Marcus Rediker writes, “Poetry written by workers may be rare, but poetry to be found in action, in resistance by workers, is plentiful; it can be found most everywhere.” This kind of metaphorical formulation of poetry resonates with the poet Layli Long Soldier’s ambiguous claim that “‘real’ poems do not ‘really’ require words.” But can these kinds of “poetry” invite literary criticism? Taking inspiration from the project of “history from below,” which has often involved the reconstruction of the lives and mentalités of the disenfranchised from fragments and fragmentary evidence, this thread solicits papers or panels that explore or re-imagine the histories, literary and otherwise, of disenfranchised, marginalized, or resistant “personhood” in the Middle Ages. We seek to explore how scholars of medieval texts and cultural productions might understand or imagine the category of the “person” with regard to subjects or characters who are not imagined as readers or writers of texts, or as cultural producers. Papers considering the role that social class played in the formation of medieval “persons” would be very welcome, as would papers invested in the more specific social, religious, and/or socio-economic structures that structured the lives of individuals who were marked as “other” by traditional society, whether in terms of culture, ethnicity, race, class, gender, and/or sexual identity.

Some topics and concerns that panelists might consider could include the following: paratextual constructions of personhood; characters (such as Langland’s Hawkyn) or strategies of characterization (such as Chaucer’s anonymous guildsmen) that speak to the way that class and social formations shaped literary production during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and vice versa; non-traditional genres of writing or non-traditional social taxonomies that speak to changes in the social organization and hierarchy of later medieval Europe; experiments with filling in archival absences à la Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (or, indeed, its medieval forebear in the work of Eileen Power and other critical fabulists); the writings and manuscripts associated with non-noble people; the influence of new economic formations, such as the marketplace, on the self-understanding and “personhood” of late-medieval people; intersections and conflicts between the different categories of social life, especially categories indexed with racial and gender identity in the later Middle Ages; and new methods or heuristics for thinking about the poetries of medieval workers. 

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