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Feminist
Intersectionality
Centering the Margins in 21st-Century
Medieval Studies
Edited by
s a m a n t h a se a l
n icol e nol a n si dh u
Feminist Intersectionality
Samantha Seal • Nicole Nolan Sidhu
Editors
Feminist Intersectionality
Centering the Margins in 21st-Century
Medieval Studies
Previously published in postmedieval

Volume 10, issue 3, September 2019
Editors
Samantha Seal Nicole Nolan Sidhu
English Department, Hamilton-Smith Hall Fairport, NY, USA
University of New Hampshire
Durham, NC, USA
Spinoff from journal: “postmedieval” Volume 10, issue 3, September 2019
ISBN 978-3-031-22115-6
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
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Contents
Feminist intersectionality: Centering the margins in 21st- century medieval studies ............................... 1
Samantha Katz Seal and Nicole Nolan Sidhu: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural
studies 2019, 2019: 10: 272–278 (1, Nov 2019) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-019-00134-y
Antisemitism and female power in the medieval city ................................................................................... 9
Kathy Lavezzo: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2019, 2019:
10: 279–292 (1, Nov 2019) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-019-00137-9
Alisaundre Becket: Thomas Becket’s resilient, Muslim, Arab mother
in the South English Legendary ................................................................................................................... 23
Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2019, 2019:
‘Albyon, þat þo was an Ile’: Feminist materiality and nature in the Albina narrative ........................... 35
Heather Blatt: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2019, 2019:
By the skin of its teeth: Walrus ivory, the artisan, and other bodies ........................................................ 47
Emma Le Pouésard: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2019, 2019:
10: 316–325 (1, Nov 2019) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-019-00135-x
‘Woful womman, confortlees’: Failed maternity and maternal grief as feminist issues ......................... 57
Mary Beth Long: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2019, 2019:
Disability and consent in medieval law ........................................................................................................ 75
Eliza Buhrer: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2019, 2019:
10: 344–356 (1, Nov 2019) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-019-00136-w
Accessing the medieval: Disability and distance in Anna Gurney’s search for St Edmund ................... 89
Helen Brookman: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2019, 2019:
10: 357–375 (1, Nov 2019) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-019-00133-z
New feminisms and the unthinkable .......................................................................................................... 109
Michelle M. Sauer: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2019, 2019:
v
Editor’s Introduction
Feminist intersectionality:
Centering the margins in 21st-
century medieval studies
Samantha Katz Seala and Nicole Nolan Sidhub

a
Department of English, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, USA.
b
Independent Scholar, Fairport, NY, USA.
postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019) 10, 272–278.

https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-019-00134-y
In a 2016 blog post entitled ‘Antifeminism, Whiteness, and Medieval Studies,’

Dorothy Kim modified Falvia Dzodan’s oft-repeated phrase that ‘my feminism
will be intersectional or it will be bullshit’ for Kim’s own scholarly field, noting
that medievalists should approach their work thinking, ‘my medieval studies will
be intersectional or it will be bullshit’ (Kim, 2016). The response to Kim’s words
(and to her subsequent 2017 post on medieval studies and white nationalism) was
intense and violent. Academics dismissed Kim’s ideas; a tenured female academic
criticized the untenured Kim in a blog post, tagging a journalist with connections
to the alt-right, who subsequently wrote a piece about Kim illustrated with a
drawing of a white woman holding a spiked club. Intersectionality may be an
essential paradigm for medieval studies, but it is one to which the field – majority
white and still dominated by white men – has reacted with disproportionate
hostility. Or, perhaps, this antagonism has been rather an acknowledgement of
the fundamental power that an intersectional medieval studies wields against the
ingrained hierarchies of established medievalisms.
Chapter 1 was originally published as Seal, S. K. & Sidhu, N. N. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019) 10: 272–278.
https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-019-00134-y.
Reprinted from the journal 1

Seal and Sidhu
Medievalist feminism has a spotty record of aligning its passions for gender
equality with antiracist, anti-elitist critique. The feminism that has been a force
in medieval studies since the 1980s has been primarily a white, elite feminism,
with little hitherto invested in examining or reconfiguring medieval studies’
domination by the white and the wealthy. Medievalist feminism has likewise
maintained a somewhat tense relationship with other forms of critical analysis,
particularly those that have emerged over the succeeding decades. The move to
the study of gender and sexuality rather than the study of ‘women’ as one half of
a binary was the hard-fought battle of the 1990s, following the revolutionary
work of scholars like Judith Butler and, in medieval studies, Karma Lochrie.
And yet, as Madeline Caviness noted in her 2010 survey of the state of
medievalist feminism, the turn away from gender essentialism was eagerly
reinterpreted as a sign of feminism’s flagging energy by ‘the most prominent
male pundits who dominate cultural theory by constructing its historiography’
(Caviness, 2010, 30). In these pundits’ eyes, each new articulation of a
politically-charged, justice-centered literary criticism was not so much a new
‘turn’ for the field as it was evidence of one micro-interest group taking their
‘turn’ in the disciplinary limelight. The effect was not deemed developmental but
sequential: one trendy tempest after another.
That is certainly how many elite medievalists have treated these critiques. In
the distribution of conference panels and journal space, they have sought to
contain politically-charged scholarship to one narrow niche, employing a
‘replacement model’ of analysis, where feminism would be replaced by queer
study, to be superseded in its turn by race or postcolonial studies. The space thus
allotted never changes; the entrenched powers of privilege maintain most of the
field and ignore the visions of those who are not privileged, heterosexual, male,
and white, doling out only a sliver of the academic pie to the burgeoning
intellectual movements associated with social justice that nevertheless, in spite of
this contempt, continue to grow in popularity, particularly among the young.
A compelling recent example of the ‘replacement model’ mentality in action
can be found in the 2018 rejection, by the organizers of the International
Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, of four out of five panels
sponsored or co-sponsored by the Medievalists of Color. These included panels
entitled ‘Globalizing Medieval Pedagogy’; ‘How to be a White Ally in Medieval
Studies 101,’ and ‘Translations of Power: Race, Class, and Gender Intersec-
tionality in the Middle Ages’ I and II. By way of contrast, other organizations
received all or nearly all of their requested sessions. These included Cistercian
Studies, which proposed seven sessions and was allotted six; the Early Book
Society which proposed six and was allotted six; De Re Militari which proposed
five and was allotted five, as well as several other organizations with similarly-
successful rates of panel acceptance (Joy and van Gerven Oei, 2018). While
conference organizers cited ‘fairness’ and a desire to strike ‘a balance between
respecting tradition and encouraging innovation,’ their actions rested upon un-
2 Reprinted from the journal

Centering the margins in 21st- century medieval studies
interrogated notions of several concepts crucial to their argument. As Seeta

Chaganti has pointed out, the concept of ‘fairness’ is based on the notion,
inaccurate in this case, that we are dealing with ‘a neutral situation where all
voices have always received equal privilege and protection’ (Chaganti, 2018).
ICMS decisions regarding the conference, Chaganti noted, ‘were made without
critical thought to what a space of real academic and intellectual freedom would
look like,’ ignoring the fact that ‘[s]uch a space would acknowledge the necessity
of actively seeking out and dismantling those structures by which ‘‘tradition’’
[…] camouflages white supremacy’s particular forms of repression’ (Chaganti,
2018). The desire to ‘balance tradition with innovation,’ Chaganti noted,
‘cannot suffice to ensure academic freedom because it does not aggressively
interrogate the meanings of either ‘‘tradition’’ or ‘‘innovation’’’ (Chaganti, 2018).
These exclusionary practices are an unsustainable pattern for work in our
field. We are left in the position of the charity cases in the Hebrew Bible, the
widows and orphans who were allowed to glean the grain from the corners of
the fields, which farmers were instructed to leave untouched as pe’ah (Lev.
19:9–11). Like those widows and orphans, we are expected to bicker amongst
ourselves for what is given in ‘charity’ to the powerless, while those who cling to
exclusionary practices of race and gender reap the bounties of a privileged
harvest that never ends, its roots sowed by centuries of men planting only for
their sons.
Let us say, no more gleaning! Enough with the pe’ah! Intersectional feminism
claims the whole damn field. It recognizes that the study of race in the Middle
Ages, of the colonial practices and heritages of the Middle Ages, of queer
sexuality, of the disabled body, of the nonhuman and nonliving, and of so much
more, are all inseparable from the study of gender. And it recognizes that there is
no field of medieval studies unavailable to these modes of analysis. There is no
paleography untouched by race, no Middle English literature unhaunted by the
Jew, no legal code removed from female hands. The Middle Ages were a wild
and vibrant time, featuring the interweaving of many different cultures, ideas,
and beliefs. It is only our analysis that has narrowed and restricted our
understanding of this complex and dynamic world. To fail to be intersectional is
to fail to be just, but, even more importantly, it is to fail to be accurate. It is an
intellectual, as well as an ethical, error.
Yet privileged men continue to dominate medieval studies, and now seek even
to dominate the fields of intersectional analysis. In a recent blog post, Sierra
Lomuto notes that the editors of the Public Medievalist’s series on ‘Race,
Racism, and the Middle Ages’ are neither race scholars nor activists, nor even
scholars of color with experiential knowledge about racism. Wondering how
white scholars without expertise in race could have been tapped to edit a series
on race, Lomuto notes that while ‘[i]t seems too simplistic to point to the
patriarchal whiteness of Medieval Studies itself for an answer [yet] that is where
we can find it: white men have always held the most authority in our field; and

Seal and Sidhu
so, it seems, the field turns to them for leadership even in conversations about
race and racism’ (Lomuto, 2019). This is not the vision of justice that we
imagine. Men must participate in feminism and in intersectionality, but they
must do so not as Men, that vaulted category of authoritative privilege, but as
the peers of their marginalized colleagues. It is not enough to let intersectional
feminism spread throughout the field if women and POC are kept to the corners.
Let those who have been marginalized lead the field; recognize them as the
authorities they have always been. Let feminism find its value in feminists.
This special issue was born from a desire to represent the Middle Ages more
accurately, but also from the necessity of negotiating feminism’s place within
medieval studies. When scholars or activists treat women and gender as if they
might be divorced from the concerns of class, race, and the environment, when
they center the social constructions of the ‘female’ body as if it might be
separated from the social constructions of all those other, overlapping bodies in
the world, they sever the wholeness of the feminist epistemology and do violence
to the feminist vision of the world as it may one day be.
And yet, even as we crave a different approach, we wonder what it will look
like. How will our different theoretical and ethical commitments come together
with our feminisms? The entangled whorls of our ideas must coexist without
diminishing their complexity, a knotted skein in testimony of our belief that no
form of justice, no form of intellectual truth, can be unknown or antithetical to
another. Our special issue offers one vision of how this feminist geography can
be undertaken, although its execution remains flawed. We hope that the ‘New
Feminisms’ issues of the future, for example, will contain a much larger
proportion of work by medievalists of color.
Show us your feminist entanglements, we asked our contributors; uncover
your knotted skeins. This is an issue about overlaps and twists, about the
inseparability of multiple means of critique – ecocriticism and disability studies,
art history and race studies, legal history and modern activism – from a feminist
perspective. The feminist scholarship in this issue moves in many different
directions and examines the medieval past (and its role in the present) from
many different angles. What remains consistent throughout is the dedication to
reconfiguring medieval studies, a commitment not to be content simply with
adding women on as an extra in conventional European patriarchal accounts, or
with analyzing gender in history or literature without fundamentally re-
envisioning the intellectual foundations upon which those fields of study have
been built.
The issue begins with Kathy Lavezzo’s study of gender in English antisemitic
writings. Disturbingly, as Lavezzo reveals, antisemitic writings allow a kind of
gender liberation for Christian women, configuring praiseworthy women who
are centered as rational voices on the side of right in a culture that was elsewhere
aggressively associating the female with the subhuman, the irrational, and the
marginal. The unsettling manner in which racial, ethnic, and religious hatred

enables a kind of liberation for women of the dominant religion and culture,
Lavezzo points out, has analogues in the way that modern American racism
honors and enables white women.
Likewise concerned with the overlapping pressures of race and gender,
Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh examines the strong and willful presence of an Arab
woman refusing to conform to white Christian society within a white male
authored religious text. Drawing on feminist theory by black feminists and other
women of color, Rajabzadeh analyzes the figure of Alisaundre, the Arab mother
of Thomas Becket in the South English Legendary, noting how even though
Alisaundre converts to Christianity, adopts a Christian name, and moves to
England, she resists total assimilation into European Christian culture by
retaining a commitment to her native language. In this way, Alisaudre bears
witness to a multilingual, multicultural Christianity wherein racial and cultural
identity markers are not erased by conversion and represents one of the earliest
examples in European literature of racial identity being conceived of as distinct
from religious identity.
A feminine refusal to submit to the trajectories of patriarchal narrative is also
the subject of Heather Blatt’s essay on the story of Albina and her sisters in two
narratives of Britain’s founding in The Riming Chronicle and the prose Brut.
Although both narratives seem, on the surface, to uphold a patriarchal narrative
of domination of women and land, Blatt uses feminist materiality and ecocritical
theories to demonstrate how the descriptive detail in both texts suggests an
agential quality to the landscape that integrates with its female inhabitants to
exert nature’s own agenda in the narrative.
Feminist materiality theory and ecocriticism continue to be relevant in Emma
Le Pouésard’s examination of a walrus ivory pyx from the eleventh century.
Noting how the carving on the pyx makes reference to its animal origin, while
its nature as a vessel recalls the Virgin’s gestation of Christ, Le Pouésard argues
that the pyx becomes a site where boundaries between human and animal,
divine and earthly, masculine and feminine, are blurred and interrogated.
Mary Beth Long provides a strong critique of the lack of attention that has
hitherto been given to the emotional devastation of medieval mothers who
experienced reproductive and maternal losses, arguing that these intense and all-
too-common tragedies of motherhood permeate many of the female centered
texts of the period, including the Book of Margery Kempe. Likewise, Eliza
Buhrer looks at the historical records of medieval women’s lives to note how
gender and disability intersected and amplified one another. Her study of the
way in which medieval men could exploit false claims of female disability to
alienate property from its female holders offers a crucial exemplum of how
powerfully the body’s different social manifestations might be layered upon one
another, and betrays the limits of one form of social capital (wealth) to liberate
women from the limitations of their ‘inferior’ flesh.

Seal and Sidhu
Helen Brookman similarly delves into the complexities of the human body as
it spans the crises of flesh, time, and space. Her study of the scholarship of the
nineteenth-century medievalist Anna Gurney locates the female person within
the intellectual achievements, and contextualizes both of Gurney’s identities (as
woman and scholar) within the experience of her disability. Brookman gives us
the picture of an intersectional life, and asks us to rise to the challenge of its
multiplicities.
Finally, Michelle Sauer provides a strong overview of some of the more recent
works in medieval feminist studies, drawing our attention back to the state of
the field as it is today, and inspiring us to imagine the field as it is in the very
process of becoming. As the academic world transforms and universities enforce
austerity practices upon vulnerable and contingent faculty, as white nationalism
tries publicly to assert its strength and our colleagues find themselves to be the
targets of racial hate, we must reassess our strengths and our commitments.
Kathryn Maude reminded us in 2014 that women and POC are always in
danger of being written out of academic literature, out of the academy, out of
the history of our field (Maude, 2014, 256). So this special issue writes about
feminism now, about gender and the field of medieval studies at the close of the
second decade of the 21st century. At its best, we hope, the issue offers its
readers both a moment of reflection and a call to reenergize their commitments,
a chance to grapple with the ongoing inequities of an exclusionary past, but also
an opportunity to situate ourselves within the work that has already begun.
About the Authors
Samantha Katz Seal is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of New

Hampshire. Her first book, Father Chaucer: Generating Authority in The
Canterbury Tales, was published by Oxford University Press in September 2019.
She is a 2019–2020 ACLS Fellow, working on her second book, Chaucerian
Dynasty, a biography of the Chaucer and de la Pole families (E-mail:
Samantha.Seal@unh.edu).
Nicole Nolan Sidhu is the author of Indecent Exposure: Gender, Politics, and
Obscene Comedy in Middle English Literature (University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2016). She has also written several articles and book chapters on medieval
English and French literature and is the co-editor, with Samantha Katz Seal, of
the Chaucer Review special issue ‘‘New Chaucerian Feminisms’’ published in
July of 2019. She holds a doctorate in English from Rutgers University (E-mail:
nicolenolansidhu@gmail.com).

References
Caviness, M.H. 2010. Feminism, Gender Studies, and Medieval Studies. Diogenes 225:
30–45.
Chaganti, 2018. Statement Regarding ICMS Kalamazoo. Medievalists of Color, 9 July,
https://medievalistsofcolor.com/race-in-the-profession/statement-regarding-icms-
kalamazoo/.
Joy, E. and V.W.J. van Gerven Oei. 2019. A Statement of Concern Regarding Programming
for the 2019 International Congress on Medieval Studies @Kalamazoo. Punctum Books,
14 July, https://punctumbooks.com/blog/a-statement-of-concern/.
Kim, D. 2016. Feminism, Whiteness, and Medieval Studies. In the Medieval Middle, 18
January, http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2016/01/antifeminism-whiteness-and-
medieval.html.
Kim, D. 2017. Teaching Medieval Studies in a Time of White Supremacy. In the Medieval
Middle, 28 August, http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2017/08/teaching-medieval-
studies-in-time-of.html,
Lomuto, S. 2019. Public Medievalism and the Rigor of Anti-Racist Critique. In the
Medieval Middle, 4 April, http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2019/04/public-
medievalism-and-rigor-of-anti.html,
Maude, K. 2014. Citation and Marginalisation: The Ethics of Feminism in Medieval
Studies. Journal of Gender Studies 23(3): 247–61.
Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.

Original Article
Antisemitism and female power

in the medieval city
Kathy Lavezzo
Department of English, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA.
Abstract The twelfth century was pivotal for the codification of European
misogyny. Binaries of the agential, rational, and fully human male and passive,
physical, and subhuman female gained ground during this period, adumbrating later
ideas of separate spheres. I consider how English antisemitic writings strikingly, if
disturbingly, diverge from that trend. In the first written ritual murder libel, Thomas of
Monmouth portrays a woman – the mother of the purported martyr William – who
takes to the streets of Norwich and effects change in that city. I argue that Thomas’s
text merits intersectional attention as an early example of conservatism – indeed,
racism – licensing female power, similar to the offensive yoking of the New Woman
and racism in the US South and first-wave feminisms.
https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-019-00137-9
Among the many brilliant aspects of Spike Lee’s 2018 Joint, BlacKkKlansman,
is its portrayal of racist womanhood through the figure of Klansman wife,
Connie Kendrickson. Connie first appears as a perky 1970s homemaker who
offers cheese and crackers to the racist men who gather in her Colorado Springs
living room. However, Connie is no submissive housewife, but rather a ‘new’
white supremacist woman who yearns to insert herself in Klan activities.
Eventually, Connie gets her wish: she is tasked with planting a bomb at black
student activist Patrice Dumas’ home. Connie’s mission goes awry, however,
thanks to multiple snafus, above all the appearance of black undercover police
officer Ron Stallworth, who tackles the resistant Klanswoman to the ground. As
Chapter 2 was originally published as Lavezzo, K. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019) 10: 279–292. https://doi.org/
10.1057/s41280-019-00137-9.

Lavezzo
Ron vainly tries to get Connie to reveal the location of the bomb, two white
officers appear in a squad car. While Ron – dressed in plainclothes – tells the
policemen that he is a cop, it is Connie’s words that determine the men’s actions.
They place handcuffs on Ron and proceed to beat him, as she repeatedly
screams, ‘That [n-word] attacked me; he tried to rape me, arrest him!’ It is in this
last-ditch response to her recent setbacks regarding the bomb plot that Connie
finally assumes the public role and agency she has sought all along. In alleging
rape, Connie finds her voice.
With his representation of Connie Kendrickson stridently crying assault, Lee
offers a 1970s riff on a long and reprehensible historical pattern associated with
not so much the American west but the US South. From the 1880s into the
twentieth century, white southern women falsely claimed that they had been
sexually assaulted by black men, charges that often prompted the men’s
lynching by violent mobs. As historian Crystal Feimster demonstrates, allega-
tions of rape, followed by their participation in lynchings, gave white southern
women access to a disturbing version of the New Woman identity. Examples of
such moments of female empowerment in a racist milieu include Sara Bush of
Atlanta who ‘wielded the power of life and death’ in 1887 over lynching victim
Reuben Hudson, and ‘play[ed] an active role in directing the mob’s actions by
providing an initial description of Hudson, identifying him before the mob, and
insisting that he be hanged’ (Feimster, 2009, 145). As Feimster puts it, ‘white
women seized the opportunity to express a new, powerful image of southern
womanhood. They articulated their concerns about sexual violence, claimed
their right to protection, and exercised their racial and gender power’ (Feimster,
2009, 144). Connie Kendrickson’s actions reflect that effort by women to assert
their gendered authority in a racist milieu.
Such efforts by women to endow themselves with agency – that is, the power
to take action and influence others – in a conservative environment shadowed by
prejudice have a long history. In the case of medieval England, a similar blending
of female empowerment and bigotry emerges in the context of antisemitic
literature. Antisemitism is arguably the earliest form of racist thinking to emerge
in the European west, and a phenomenon that interacted with subsequent
medieval racisms centered on Muslims and other groups (Akbari, 2009,
112–54). Medieval England holds the dubious distinction of occupying the
‘vanguard’ of medieval European antisemitism (Stacey, 2000). The first
European nation to expel forcibly its Jewish residents (in 1290), and enforce
legislation demanding that Jews don a badge of infamy (in 1218), England also
gave rise, in the twelfth century, to the first recorded ritual murder libel, which
alleges that Jews torture and kill young Christian boys in contempt for the
crucifixion. The ritual murder libel intersected in complex ways with historical
anti-Jewish acts and was one of several antisemitic myths that circulated in
England and elsewhere during the middle ages and beyond. Scholarship on
gender and English antisemitic writings has revealed such insights as how: both

Antisemitism and female power in the medieval city
Jews and women (as mothers) serve as fraught origin figures for patriarchal
Christianity (Lampert-Weissig, 2004); monastic writers deploy a uniquely
female kind of memory practice to portray a child’s ‘martyrdom’ by Jews
(Bailey, 2015); gender trouble attends images of Jews converting to Christianity
(Kruger, 2006); and stereotypes about female malleability inform depictions of
the actions of Jewish women who convert (Bradbury, 2017; Kaplan, 2007). In
this essay, I explore how antisemitic literature contains striking representations
of ordinary women possessed of a public voice and communal power. Such texts
present us with a disturbing medieval English literary phenomenon in which
animosity toward a minority group licenses depictions of spectacularly emotive
and loud movements by women from the dominant group into highly public
locations.
As my stress on the ‘public’ sphere indicates, space plays a key role in those
medieval representations of women gaining agency. To return to Connie
Kendrickson, a similar stress on space informs her journey to empowerment.
Connie’s shift in identity – from ordinary homemaker to KKK warrior – is
closely tied to the different geographical settings she occupies. Apron-clad, she
first appears in the confines of her home, where she is permitted to perform no
more than domestic chores. When Connie begins to assert herself in the racist
program of the organization, her ‘empowerment’ involves getting out of the
house and driving her car to various locations in Colorado Springs to perform
covert Klan actions, all of which fail. Ultimately, though, Connie comes into her
own as a powerful woman by making a spectacle of herself in the street outside
of her target’s home. Female ‘uplift’ intertwines with an upending of the
‘separate spheres’ doctrine; not only has Connie moved from the private into the
public sphere but she has done so in an attention-getting manner.
The medieval texts I examine portray a similar movement by women from the
home into the streets. Indeed, as we shall see, those medieval women exceed
Connie’s ‘achievement’ in terms of both the public status they gain and their
capacity to influence auditors. While Connie’s actions take place in a quiet
residential neighborhood before an audience of two white policemen, the
women depicted in medieval antisemitic texts move up and down densely
populated urban spaces – both streets and common areas in medieval cities –
drawing the attention of entire groups of city dwellers. While Connie’s cry of
‘rape’ emerges as unfounded, and it is she who ends up arrested, the women of 1 Bardsley discusses
medieval antisemitic texts communicate ‘information’ that is borne out by the how the ‘hue and
larger mythic narrative in which they appear. While Connie finally is exposed as cry’ empowered
a criminal, these medieval literary women become law-women of sorts, whose and protected late
medieval English
screams and movements correlate with the ‘hue and cry,’ the legal action in women (2006,
which a public outcry is made against a wrong.1 70–7).

Lavezzo
At least three groups of medieval English antisemitic texts feature such

2 Host desecration women.2 The earliest narrative is the legend of the Jewish Boy, a myth whose
libels can also first Latin teller was Gregory of Tours (538–593), and that was told and retold
follow the pattern
in England and throughout Europe in multiple languages during the entire
I describe below
(Rubin, 1999, 75), medieval period (Rubin, 1999, 7–27). The tale of the Jewish Boy involves a
although no Jewish man who, upon learning that his son received the eucharist in a church,
women appear in throws the boy into a hot oven. When the mother of the child learns what has
the only extant
happened, she runs distraught through the streets of the city where the family
English host
desecration libel, lives and brings the crime to the attention of other townspeople, who find that
the Croxton Play the Virgin Mary has miraculously protected the boy from the flames of the oven.
of the Sacrament. While Jewish, the mother and her child are proto-Christian, insofar as she resists
her husband and he is attracted to a church. The tale ends with both mother and
son converting, while the father, who maintains his Jewishness in despite of the
Marian miracle, is himself thrown into the oven and dies. A second antisemitic
tale featuring a mother calling attention to herself in city streets is the legend of
the Boy Singer. Like the Jewish Boy, the Boy Singer legend was ‘pan-European in
iteration’ and appeared both in Latin and the vernacular (Bale, 2006, 59). In this
tale, whose first version dates to the early thirteenth century and whose most
famous ‘teller’ is Chaucer’s Prioress, a Jew kills a child for singing the Marian
antiphon the Alma Redemptoris Mater. The boy’s mother searches for the boy in
the streets of their city, locates the scene of the attack (with the aid of the Virgin
Mary, who has miraculously restored the boy’s voice), and draws the crime to
the attention of city officials. The third antisemitic text featuring a public
woman is the earliest recorded ritual murder libel. Written c. 1154–1174 in
England by Benedictine monk Thomas of Monmouth, this text relates the
pseudo-hagiography of a Norwich boy named William. According to Thomas,
‘all the communities of the Jews of England’ plot to kill the young man in
3 In what follows I contempt of Christ’s crucifixion (Thomas, 2014, 62).3 Here again, the mother of
silently modify the attacked boy draws attention to herself by screaming and running about the
Rubin’s
streets of the city. While the mother’s actions don’t save young William’s life –
translations and
cite the original he is already dead – they do manage to convince the people of Norwich that the
Latin as it appears Jews of the town are guilty of the boy’s murder.
in Rubin’s In order to begin unpacking the discomfiting dynamic whereby antisemitism
transcription
licenses such extraordinary displays of female agency in public spaces, I focus on
(Rubin, 2009).
Thomas’s account of William of Norwich’s ‘martyrdom,’ hereafter called ‘the
Life.’ Thomas’s text occupies a pivotal position with respect to both the Jewish
Boy and Boy Singer legends. Generated in the twelfth century, it looks back to
and modifies prior Jewish Boy legends dating from as early as Gregory of Tours
and as recently as the Marian miracles collections produced in England by
bishop of Norwich Herbert de Losinga (d. 1119), William of Malmesbury (c.
1095/6–c. 1143), and others. Moreover, Thomas’s revised account of female
agency inaugurates a trend that emerges in subsequent antisemitic legends. That
is, while the mother of the Jewish Boy legend is a Jewess who eventually

converts, the mother in Thomas’s text and later Boy Singer libels is Christian.
While it is impossible to draw hard and firm lines of transmission, Thomas, at
the very least, was the first to imbue a Christian mother with the kind of agency
and public persona allotted the Jewish mother of the Jewish Boy myth; more
speculatively, it is possible that Thomas’s innovation, generated some 25 to 30
years before the earliest Boy Singer legend, influenced those texts.
Rendering Thomas’s text particularly compelling is its immediacy and
precision. While many Jewish Boy and Boy Singer texts are set in anonymous
cities or at least in cities located at a considerable remove from their
narratological point of origin, the Life purports to relate events that had only
recently happened in Thomas’s city. The Life thus urges scrutiny as a text
responding to the concerns of a particular place and time. I argue that the
representation of William’s mother is an important indicator of how Thomas
wrote the Life not only to elevate a dead boy as a Christian martyr but also to
respond imaginatively to the city he inhabited. Thomas was part of a
Benedictine cathedral priory that bore an ambiguous relationship to Norwich.
As monks, the members of the priory clung to a cenobitic ideal based on
isolation from lay people of both genders as well as women of any calling. In
other words, the very city of Norwich, with its burgeoning lay population
(which may have quadrupled in size during the twelfth century), money
economy, and potential for all sorts of misrule and conflict, threatened monastic
identity. And yet monks like Thomas served Norwich, assisting residents’ needs,
promoting their faith and giving them a cathedral in which to worship.
Elsewhere I have discussed how Thomas manages his anxieties over Norwich via
his depiction of Jews in the city (Lavezzo, 2016, 64–99). Here I would like to
examine part of the role women play in Thomas’s effort to grapple with his
urban milieu.4 4 The mother is not
the only
In the remainder of this essay, I’ll first introduce the portions of the Life that
fascinating female
feature William’s mother. After describing some of the ways in which we can figure in the life.
understand why Thomas saw fit to include such episodes in his text, I’ll analyze William’s Aunt
how they serve as a means of grappling with the urban concerns of a monk like Liviva, his female
him. Concerned over the disruptive and disorderly nature of his urban cousin, and an
anonymous maid,
environment, Thomas seeks to understand his city via an equally disruptive for example,
and disorderly woman. Ultimately, I consider how the mother presents us with figure prominently
more than a stereotype of female ‘hysteria,’ even as she problematically affirms in his ritual
offensive antisemitic myths. On one hand, for all her alignment with murder libel. Like
William’s mother,
misogynistic thinking, William’s mother offers an exciting image of a woman those women
whose public and authoritative relation to Norwich shapes the city along identify Jewish
feminine lines, defying the idea of a masculine public sphere that gained misbehavior;
prominence in the twelfth century. But on the other hand, that depiction of unlike the mother,
though, the other
public feminine power, like that of Connie in BlacKkKlansman, hinges on the women act
oppression of another oppressed group. Thomas’s text thus urges an intersec- covertly as spies or
tional approach to gender in the medieval period. detectives.

Lavezzo
The episode featuring William’s mother takes place in the first of the seven
books that comprise the Life. This initial book contains the ritual murder
accusation, while subsequent books aim to establish William’s sanctity by
recounting miracles associated with him and his shrine. Thomas titles the
fifteenth chapter of the first book ‘De planctu matris’ or ‘On the Mother’s
Lament’ and describes how, when rumor of William’s murder reaches his
mother Elviva, she faints, then recovers and heads to the city. Upon learning that
her son’s corpse was found buried in Thorpe Wood, just outside Norwich,
Elviva ‘at once tore at her hair, clasped her hands over and over, and ran as if
she had lost her senses, crying and wailing through the streets’ (Thomas, 2014,
30). The distraught mother eventually arrives at the home of her sister, Liviva,
where she inquires into the death, only to learn ‘he had been killed in an unusual
manner.’ The ensuing depiction of Elviva’s response, while lengthy, merits
citation in full:
Nevertheless, out of many and credible conjectural arguments she was able
to conclude that it was not Christians, but in truth Jews, who had dared to
commit the crime in that way. She accepted these speculations with a
woman’s credulity; and she at once broke forth publicly with abuse of the
Jews in word, noisy clamor and formal accusation. In this way, no doubt,
the mother was influenced by the effect of a maternal instinct; here was a
woman carried away by a rash and feminine daring. Again, whatever she
suspected in her heart she took to be certain, and whatever she imagined
she asserted, as if she had seen it with her own eyes; she conducted her
roaming through small streets and large, and, compelled by maternal
suffering, she accosted everyone with horrible cries and asserted that her
son had been seduced by fraud, kidnapped from her by cunning, and killed
by the Jews. She turned the minds of all in this matter towards the
suspicion of the truth; hence it was cried out also by the voices of all that
all the Jews should be destroyed, root and branch, as the constant enemies
of the Christian name and cult. (Thomas, 2014, 30)
To say that Elviva takes to the streets of Norwich and causes a commotion
would be an understatement. William’s mother unabashedly makes a spectacle
of herself. Importantly, Thomas closely knits Elviva’s actions to the public
spaces of Norwich. She cries ‘per plateas’ [‘through the streets’] as she moves
toward her sister’s home and later carries out ‘her roaming through small streets
and large’ [‘per uicos et plateas discursu’]. On one hand, this detail is in keeping
with the urban conventions of certain antisemitic legends, namely that of the
Jewish Boy. Gregory of Tours renders the mother a figure possessed of a distress
so complete, so utter as to become one with the anonymous eastern metropolis
in which he sets the tale. Upon seeing her child in the furnace, the mother throws
her barrette to the ground and with disheveled hair ‘wailed that she was in
misery and filled the city with her cries’ (Van Dam, 1988, 29–30, my emphasis).

Gregory portrays parallel unleashings at the scales of body and city; the mother
lets her hair loose as she sends her voice into urban space.
At the same time that Thomas’s text cites this antisemitic literary history, it
also intersects in charged and fascinating ways with his particular twelfth-
century moment and the constructions of woman and the notions of piety to
which it gave rise. To begin with gender, the depiction of Elviva supports how
ecclesiastical discourse in the twelfth-century Christian West affirmed the binary
of reason-driven, fully human male and a body-based, subhuman female.
Traditionally in modern scholarship, twelfth-century Europe has occupied a
notorious place in the history of women, thanks to such phenomena as the
system of primogeniture, the reforms initiated by Gregory VII (1015–1085), the
‘renaissance’ of classical learning, and the rise of universities. For historians such
as Joanne McNamara, such developments led to a massive shift in social
ordering in the west, from a millennial-long centering of identity on class
difference to a new one based on gender (Bennett, 1997, 74–6). Thomas’s
representation of the mother unmistakably supports negative gender stereo-
types, particularly ideas regarding woman’s emotional nature. Elviva dramat-
ically performs her distraught state by pulling her hair, emitting ‘horrendis […]
clamoribus’ [‘horrible cries’], and clasping her hands. Her reasoning process is
handicapped by a ‘muliebri ac temerario […] ausu’ or ‘feminine and reckless
daring,’ in which mere suspicion and imagination translate into the certainty of
an eye witness. In effect, the mother’s frantic, unruly body indicates a mental
disorder within.
But there is more to Elviva’s depiction than straightforward negative
stereotyping. McNamara’s sweeping claim about millennial shifts in social
organization stresses how ideas regarding woman’s inferiority resulted in her
exile from both literal spaces and theoretical concepts regarding the public and
its institutional management:
This woman-free space was inexorably expanded as clerical men monop-
olized new educational opportunities. The renaissance in classical learning
reestablished the theoretical intellectual and moral inferiority of women
and enabled men implicitly to absorb all the positive qualities of
‘mankind.’ The result was the ungendered public men who would
henceforth be equated with ‘people,’ screened by such anthropomorphized
institutions as ‘church’ and ‘crown.’ (McNamara, 1994, 5)
For McNamara, the twelfth century inaugurated nothing less than the relegation
of woman to the powerless, invisible, silent, and indeed subhuman status upon
which later ideas of separate spheres are based. And yet Elviva enacts her
emotional performance in a highly public setting, the streets of Norwich.
What licenses such public actions? One answer emerges in the role played by
highly public, female mourning in other Christian texts produced during this
period. One such group of texts is twelfth-century iterations of the Massacre of

Lavezzo
the Innocents. The massacre is a key episode in the gospel of Matthew, who
describes how Herod, after Christ’s nativity, ordered the killing in Bethlehem, of
all male babies under two. Matthew alludes to the mothers of those babies only
elliptically, through reference to the ‘great weeping and lamentation’ of Rachel
in Jeremiah. But several representations of the incident created during the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries in England and France expand dramatically on
the gospel account by giving the mothers a notably active role. Literary
examples include a Latin version of the Ordo Rachelis performed at Fleury
around 1250, in which the mothers plainchant the following line before the
soldiers poised to murder their children: ‘We pray you, spare the tender lives of
5 I have modified our babies’ (Bevington, 2012, 69).5 Visual examples include an illustration in
Bevington’s the St. Albans psalter (dated between the 1120s and early 1140s), where the
translation.
mothers not only speak but take action; as Kathleen Nolan puts it, the women
‘not only attempt to stave off the soldiers’ blows but also, in one instance, attack
a soldier by biting him in the leg’ (Nolan, 1996, 103). As Nolan and others
discuss, such images speak to medieval notions of parental affection, and more
precisely the love of mothers for their children. The distraught actions of the
mothers reflect how, in Jan Ziolkowski’s words, ‘theologians, authors, and
artists understood that the normal reaction of parents to the death of daughters
or sons was the profoundest of grief and that therefore the mothers who suffered
through the Massacre of the Innocents were permitted to evidence a violence of
grief that would not have been countenanced under other circumstances’
(Ziolkowski, 2010, 96).
I would add that such images are extraordinary in terms of not only the
‘violence of grief’ they portray but also their portrayal of grief – and militant
actions – in a public space. The images offer fascinating examples of a group of
women taking public action, speaking and even engaging in a kind of physical
urban warfare in the streets of Bethlehem. Indeed, in certain cases, the public
nature of the women’s actions is two-fold. For example, portrayals of the
massacre found in monumental sculpture located on the exterior of cathedrals in
Chartres and other locations offer a striking instance of not just public and
active women, but also public women portrayed in highly public urban
6 Nolan offers an locations.6
astute reading of The mothers in such expanded portrayals of the Massacre of the Innocents are
the spatial
part of a larger gendered and theological context for Thomas’s depiction of the
dynamics –
especially the distraught Elviva. That context indeed extends even wider and constitutes what
liminal positioning we might call a typological web or network of mothers within Christian
– of such sculpture discourse. That network encompasses the mothers of the Massacre of the
in Chartres, Le
Innocents, who, like the mothers of the Jewish Boy, Boy Singer, and Ritual
Mans, and
Toulouse. Murder legends, take action in response to threats to their sons’ wellbeing. It
also reaches back to Rachel, whom Matthew cites as a figure for the mothers of
the youths slaughtered by Herod and whom Chaucer cites as a figure for the
mother of the little schoolboy in the Prioress’s Boy Singer libel (Ziolkowski,

2010, 93–5). And, most crucially, at the center of this female network is the
mother of all mothers in Christianity, the Virgin Mary. As mothers who respond
to anti-Christian threats to their male children’s wellbeing, the women of the
Innocents episode, Elviva, and other mothers in antisemitic writings figure the
Virgin Mary, with their sons serving as types of Christ. The legends of the Jewish
Boy and the Boy Singer intensify such links between the mothers they portray
and Mary, because they feature Marian miracles.
The Marian resonance of the mothers in both antisemitic lore and Innocents
depictions reveals how underwriting depictions of public displays of female
agency and emotion in high medieval England and elsewhere was more than a
sensitivity to fact that, as Ziolkowski puts it, ‘the normal reaction of parents to
the death of daughters or sons was the profoundest of grief.’ An ever-expanding
high medieval cult of the Virgin in England also authorized those displays. Piety
– and specifically a piety routed through the most powerful woman in
Christianity – thus licensed imaginative depictions of women enjoying public
agency. To return to Thomas’s book, the representation of Elviva may have
provided medieval Christian readers with a devotional tool. Insofar as the
spectacle of a crying mother speaks to Mary’s grief during Christ’s passion, it
may have enabled readers to meditate upon, and indeed strive to suffer with, a
suffering Christ who is, as Anthony Bale puts it, ‘subject to ‘Jewish’ violence’
(Bale, 2010, 35).7 7 Despres (1998)
In spatial terms, this piety-based reading of Elviva and related depictions of offers a telling
account of the
mothers suggests how they perform a kind of urban reterritorialization. Read as
mutually
types of Mary, the women transform the streets where they wander into latter- constitutive
day versions of the road to Calvary or indeed Calvary itself. As devotional relationship
figures, these mothers transport the reader to the sites of the passion. If we shift between
antisemitic
from the imagined spaces of antisemitic texts to actual English cities, we can
stereotyping and
point to a similar dynamic at work. Medieval towns were themselves filled with Marian piety in
devotional aids – above all, churches – that in many respects were intended to medieval England.
function as virtual Calvarys. English cities like Bury St. Edmunds even followed
a grid layout that oriented all urban built environments to the form of a cross,
and more precisely the cross on which Christ suffered.
Yet affective, passion-based piety – and the constructions of Mary and ‘the
Jew’ that attend and inspire such devotion – tells us only part of the story
regarding the city as it was conceived in medieval society and culture. The urban
reach of English antisemitic texts similarly extends beyond affective devotion to
Christ and Mary. For the spectacle depicted in Thomas’s text isn’t just that of a
distraught woman but of an unruly Norwich as well. When Elviva moves her
body up and down the major and minor thoroughfares of the city, when her
voice – its cries and yells and its claims about the murder – travels throughout
the town, she publicly re-signifies the city in a feminine register. Elsewhere in
Book One of Thomas’s text, the city conforms to the monk’s religious identity:
throngs of the faithful gathered in the open spaces of the city for holy week,

Lavezzo
masses of worshipers gather for William’s funeral mass, and monks lead a
solemn procession taking William’s body to the Cathedral Priory. At such
moments, Thomas envisions how a high medieval city can be molded and
ordered into a harmonious and corporate Christian identity. But Elviva’s actions
expose the mutability of a city, its capacity to be reshaped along alternate,
disorderly, and feminine lines.
This moment exposes how Thomas understood some of his deepest anxieties
regarding the urban surroundings of his cathedral priory in a gendered manner.
The spectacular eruption of a female body and female voice within the city
effectively showcases how cenobitic worries over how the city and the monastic
rejection of women could unite. As McNamara and other scholars stress, the
twelfth century witnessed the intensification of clerical ideas regarding the threat
posed by the emotional, appetitive, and indeed polluting woman. The rise of
cities served as an additional threat, as I’ve mentioned, to such monastic values
as silence, isolation, discipline, and contemplation. Here Thomas conceives of
and imagines urban danger in a distinctly feminine vein. The dangers of the city
are one with the dangers of woman.
Those urban and gendered anxieties collide, awkwardly, in Thomas’s text
with his antisemitism. Just as, if indeed not more, crucial to Elviva’s significance
here than her Marian resonances and her disruptive femininity is her anti-Jewish
message. Elviva receives only limited knowledge regarding her son’s death, just
its ‘insolitus’ [‘strange cause’]. Nevertheless, she concludes – even though,
Thomas stresses, multiple other ‘credible’ explanations exist – that ‘it was not
Christians but in truth Jews’ who committed the crime. Elviva becomes here, in
a sense, a version of the mother of the Jewish Boy, who delivers news to other
city inhabitants about her husband’s action. But while the mother in the Jewish
Boy has first-hand knowledge of her husband’s murderous act, Elviva draws
only on mother love and a compromised feminine intellect. The mother of the
Jewish Boy is a bona fide eye witness; in contrast, ‘whatever’ Thomas’s mother
‘imagined she asserted, as if she had seen it with her own eye’ [‘quodque
ymaginabatur quasi uisu compertum asserens,’ my emphasis].
At one level, Thomas is misogynistically acknowledging in this episode the
flimsy and fantastic nature of the ritual murder libel. His stereotypical depiction
of a nearly hysterical woman and his stress on the compromised nature of
Elviva’s womanly mind suggest how the idea that Jews killed William is
groundless, the stuff of myth, not reality.
And yet Elviva’s message is persuasive. With her combination of physical
gestures of emotional upheaval, cries of distress, and strident assertions
regarding the Jews of Norwich, Elviva proves to be a potent rhetorician, who
‘turned the minds of all in this matter towards the suspicion of the truth; hence it
was cried out also by the voices of all that all the Jews should be destroyed, root
and branch, as the constant enemies of the Christian name and cult.’ Instead of a
woman who is hysterical – who effectively has lost control of her mind – Eliva

has the power to convince and change other people’s minds. In his important
work on Thomas’s text, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen stresses the divided nature of
Norwich, where Norman, Anglo-Saxon, and Viking residents uneasily cohab-
ited, and analyzes how the Life transforms division into unity as Christians
become one in their hatred of Jews and devotion to William (Cohen, 2004). In
this episode, Elviva serves as an emotional, womanly conduit for that project of
uniting an otherwise divided city.
Elviva’s persuasive powers may comprise part of the monastic discourse
regarding urban wives that Sharon Farmer has studied (Farmer, 1986). Farmer
demonstrates how, during a time when the rise of urban, market-driven societies
created new challenges for clergymen, monks such as English theologian
Thomas of Chobham (1160–1230) celebrated wives for their ability to persuade
husbands to provide funding for monastic needs. As Farmer points out, this
discourse was informed by a monastic association of woman with language and
orality, an association whose roots lay in the powers of verbal persuasion
exemplified by the first woman, Eve. The scenes of female persuasion described
by Chobham and other ecclesiastical writers share with Thomas’s account of
Elviva a stress on female verbal skills and rhetorical powers deployed in an
urban milieu.
But while Chobham and others portray a domestic and private affair between
husband and wife, Thomas depicts a highly charged public encounter between a
widow and the lay Christian members of a medieval English city. That is,
Elviva’s rhetorical power is all the more striking given its impact on multiple
persons in a public sphere. The agency enjoyed by Elviva and other mothers
portrayed in antisemitic texts sets them apart from analogous mothers of the
Massacre of the Innocents. In that tradition, however much an author,
illustrator, or sculptor might elaborate upon the women’s defiance of Herod’s
henchmen, that artist is confined by Matthew’s account of the children’s
slaughter.8 And of course, on a theological level, not only are the women 8 On the manner in
ineffectual but indeed saving the infants or getting upset about them isn’t the which the mothers
in Middle English
point; as Ziolkowski puts it, ‘the faithful were to bear in mind that those who
massacre pageants
were lost were saved through their very deaths – as well as through the ultimate disrupt through
sacrifice of Christ crucified, who is present implicitly as the provocation and obscene comedy,
resolution of the Massacre’ (Ziolkowski, 2010, 96). The Christian stress on see Sidhu (2016,
223–8).
heavenly salvation denigrates the mothers (and their figural referent, Rachel) as
wrongly upset over the very event that will save their children’s souls.
Elviva parallels the mothers of the slaughter accounts insofar as she cannot do
anything about her child’s death. But unlike those women, Elviva weds her
maternal sorrow with maternal vengeance; emotions that initially turn on
William’s loss morph into anti-Jewish feeling. The results, indeed, are profound
and deeply disturbing: not only does Elviva convince all the city dwellers around
her that Jews killed William, she prompts them to advocate a racist idea of Jews
– that all Jews possess a certain mentality (the hatred of Christianity) that calls

Lavezzo
for their destruction. This is, by far, one of the most offensive and upsetting
moments in Thomas’s text, a moment that horribly echoes the sentiments that
informed the atrocities of Nazi-era Germany. While we have a woman achieving
public agency, that feminine voice and power pivots on antisemitism in its most
offensive guise.
Merging the offensive with the agential, overturning received ideas of woman
even as it supports despicable ideas about Jews, Thomas’s image of a distraught
woman running through the streets of Norwich and rallying its inhabitants
against Jews disturbingly parallels the actions of New Southern Women like
Annie McIvaine of Maryland, who in 1900 led, with ‘disheveled hair flying
loosely in the driving rain, and with a pistol clutched in her right hand,’ the mass
of white southerners who lynched Lewis Harris, the man McIvain claimed tried
to rape her (Feimster, 2009, 157). While the crimes, alleged perpetrators, and
related female roles differ – in one case the rape of a young white woman by a
black man, in the other case the murder of a mother’s son by Jews – the example
of Elviva reveals how, at the very least, the imaginative works of the medieval
period present early examples of women carving out a new space for themselves
in a conservative and oppressive culture. Such examples, one historical, the
other imagined, showcase how assertions of female power and agency can
themselves be entangled with and even depend upon other forms of oppression.
It is important in this regard to recall how, if we shift our attention from the
medieval antisemitism and the New South to the history of women’s
movements, the first and second waves of feminism were by and large led by
white middle class women, many of whom were themselves racist and elitist.
The intersectional project of teasing out how assertions of female power have
been tied to other forms of oppression demands investigation of what women
get by asserting themselves in a conservative milieu, how such ‘feminisms’
benefit a conservative agenda and how feminist women at times conflict with a
conservative agenda they otherwise espouse.
But the example of the Life doesn’t merit our attention simply because it
parallels or looks toward later instances of women merging brands of feminism
or female power with racism. For the moment in which the Life emerged was
nothing less than pivotal with regard to ideas of ‘woman,’ ‘race,’ and the city.
The twelfth century first gave rise to ideas of gender that relegated women to the
private sphere and denied them autonomy and power; it witnessed the rise of an
unpredecented animosity toward non-Christians, as evinced by crusades against
Muslims and anti-Jewish pogroms; and it was a century during which cities
burgeoned as never before. In other words, Thomas’s Life, with its portrayal of
the urban authority enjoyed by a Jew-hating woman, suggests how, at their very
inception, categories of race, gender, and urban space could be morphed and
reconfigured in ways that were as disruptive as they were bigoted. The Life
shows us how the history of gender in the west, from the start, is one of
surprises, nuances, and twists. The moment of the codification of both ‘woman’

and ‘the Jew’ is never just about fixing categories and delimiting clear identities
but is rather always accompanied by surprising shifts and juxtapositions. The
medieval period beckons feminist inquiry not simply as an ‘origin’ for sexism
and racism but also for its complexity, contradictions, and messiness.
Ac knowledgem ents
Many thanks belong to Samantha Seal and Nicole Nolan Sidhu for their helpful
comments on an earlier version of this essay. Portions of this essay were pre-
sented at the 2018 meeting of the Medieval Association of the Midwest, and I
thank my interlocutors there for their helpful feedback.
About the Author
Kathy Lavezzo teaches at the University of Iowa. She is the author of Angels on
the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature and English Community,
1000–1534 (Cornell University Press) and The Accommodated Jew: English
Antisemitism from Bede to Milton (Cornell University Press), and editor of
Imagining a Medieval English Nation (Minnesota University Press). Her current
project is ‘Race in Medieval Europe: Making Whiteness Visible’ (Email: kathy-
lavezzo@uiowa.edu).
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Original Article
Alisaundre Becket: Thomas

Becket’s resilient, Muslim, Arab
mother in the South English
Legendary
Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh
Department of English, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA.
E-mail: srajabzadeh@berkeley.edu
Abstract In the South English Legendary, Thomas Becket’s mother, Alisaundre

Becket, is a resilient, non-Christian woman who speaks Arabic. Although Alisaundre
Becket eventually converts to Christianity, adopts a Christian name, and lives in England,
she never learns English. Drawing on feminist theory by black feminists and women of
color, I argue that the characteristic that racializes and marginalizes Alisaundre Becket –
her voice, perceived as foreign and strange – also empowers her, and makes it possible for
her to resist erasure as a raced woman in an oppressive space. In the process of asserting
her will, we witness one of the earliest moments of racial identity perceived, translated,
and portrayed as distinct from religious identity in the Middle Ages.
postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019) 10, 293–303. 1 I am referring to
https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-019-00132-0 Bodleian Library
MS Laud
Miscellaneous 108
as the South
English
It is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so Legendary. All
many silences to be broken. citations are from
– Audre Lorde Carl Horstmann’s
1887 EETS edition
Tucked away between the covers of the South English Legendary, framed as a and are given by
page number
short introduction to the life of Thomas Becket, rests the harrowing story of a
followed by line
nameless, fearless, and determined Muslim woman.1 This daughter of an Amiral numbers.
Chapter 3 was originally published as Rajabzadeh, S. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019) 10: 293–303. https://doi.org/
10.1057/s41280-019-00132-0.

Rajabzadeh
in Jerusalem falls in love with a Christian, English man her father has
imprisoned; visits him daily; proposes to him; when he rejects her, she travels to
London alone, knowing and speaking only a few English words; wanders the
streets calling for the man she loves while the citizens of London turn her distress
into a spectacle; conditionally converts to Christianity; demands to have a
translator rather than learn English; and then gives birth to and raises the boy
who eventually becomes one of England’s most canonical saints, Thomas
Becket.
Alisaundre Becket is fictional. Thomas Becket’s real mother was Matilda, an
Anglo-Norman woman – not a nameless, Arab, Muslim whose life mirrors a
character in a chanson de geste, as the late-thirteenth-century South English
Legendary (Bodleian Library MS Laud Miscellaneous 108) wants its readers to
believe. As the child of Alisaundre Becket, the Thomas Becket of the SEL is not
only ‘less Anglo-Norman than he would be otherwise’ (Lankin, 2011, 48), but
also less Christian than he would be otherwise.
To reconcile Alisaundre Becket’s non-Christian, non-English heritage with
Thomas Becket’s sainthood, scholars have looked at the ways in which the SEL
narrative ‘eradicate[s]’ the markers that set her apart as ‘differen[t]’ from other
citizens of England (Mills, 2010, 220): bishops replace her ‘heuþe[n]’ faith with
Christianity; her Muslim name (which we never learn) is replaced with a
Christian one; and she restricts herself to a domestic life in England, never
returning to Jerusalem. Most readings of Alisaundre Becket have been informed
by an underlying assumption that medieval England was racially homogenous
for the most part, and as a result, they’ve focused on the differences that the
narrative erases rather than the ones it maintains. Readings have overlooked
Alisaundre Becket’s ‘willfulness’ (Ahmed, 2017, 66) and how intensely she
negotiates and even resists erasure through the use of her voice. Like all other
aspects of her identity, her ‘language [was] susceptible to death, erasure’
(Morrison, 1993); citizens and Christian power structures exert social pressure
and power on her to forget Arabic and to speak English, marginalizing her
because she speaks a language ‘no Man ne couþe’ (108.67), and yet no one is
ever able to silence her successfully or force her to speak English. While that
voice racializes and marginalizes, it also empowers her. She uses that voice,
which Englishmen hear as foreign and incomprehensible, to carry herself from
Jerusalem over land and sea to England. She uses her voice to withstand public
ridicule and to negotiate her place in English society. She uses that voice to
endure the helplessness that accompanies being a raced woman in an oppressive
space.
Drawing on feminist theory by black feminists and women of color, I follow
Alisaundre Becket’s voice and argue that although Alisaundre converts to
Christianity, adopts a Christian name, and moves to and lives in England, she
does not ‘mov[e] from a place of untranslatability to one of complete

Alisaundre Becket
assimilation’ (Mills, 2011, 384). Instead, she uses that voice ‘to identify [her]
marginality as much more than a site of deprivation’ (hooks, 1990, 341). She
‘salvage[s]’ her language ‘by an effort of the will’ (Morrison, 1993), and
transforms her domestic life, her ‘marginality […. into] a site of radical
possibility, a space of resistance’ (hooks, 1990, 341). In this essay, I put into
practice the feminist methodologies I draw on and center Alisaundre Becket’s
voice and story. While academically unconventional, I’ve situated Thomas
Becket and the South English Legendary on the margins, and I only consider
how Alisaundre Becket’s biography serves them near the end of the essay. I
believe that we can best understand how patriarchal structures operate when we
take the time and space to see and hear women, like Alisaundre Becket, for their
own sake, and not in service of anyone or anything else.
We meet Alisaundre Becket for the first time in the ‘holie lond’ (106.7) as she
is articulating her feminine desires to Gilbert Becket, a Christian Englishman
from London held in her father’s prison. After repeatedly visiting Gilbert Becket,
she suggests that she will convert to Christianity if Gilbert marries her: ‘Cristine-
dom ichulle onder-fonge: for þe loue of þe, / And þou a-non aftur-ward:
treweliche weddi me’ (33.38–9). But these words stir up neither evangelical,
Christian values in Gilbert, nor love. In fact, her direct proposal for marriage
and conversion makes Gilbert so ‘ful a-drad’ (107.40) that Alisaundre will
betray him, that he somehow figures out how to do something he hasn’t been
able to do for two and a half years – escape from prison ‘riȝt þulke dai’ (107.46).
In other words, Gilbert does not just reject her agency as the subject of desire but
reads her ‘wilfulness [… as] imply[ing] a problem of character’ (Ahmed, 2017,
66). Once she proposes, Gilbert no longer trusts her. And yet, this does not deter
Alisaundre, who considers her own desires as more important than Gilbert’s and
does something few Muslim princesses in romances do: she ventures into her
2 I deliberately do
lover’s homeland, travelling to London to find Gilbert.
not refer to
It is as Alisaundre moves that we realize we only have access to her from the Alisaundre as a
viewpoint of those who possess power in the community she is participating in ‘Saracen,’ since the
at any given time. While in the ‘holie lond,’ we inhabit the gaze of Jerusalem’s text does not label
leadership, which includes Alisaundre, who is the Amiral’s daughter, and we do her as such. While
the specific
not register her as foreign or her language as different. Even when Alisaundre language she
repeatedly visits Gilbert Becket, the SEL does not labor over the language she speaks does not
speaks. Her Arabic and her voice are as equally accessible to us as the English affect my
the text is written in. In fact, the text not only passes over Alisaundre’s language, argument, for the
sake of clarity I’ve
it passes over Gilbert’s as well. It isn’t until much later in the narrative, when described it as
Alisaundre is in England, that we learn that in the opening scenes we glided Arabic, since this
over, the man who introduced himself as a ‘cristine Man’ ‘of engelonde’ was the language
(107.33) was speaking Arabic fluently.2 the majority
would have
The further she moves away from her homeland’s center and the closer she spoken in
moves towards England, the more she loses power. She becomes increasingly thirteenth-century
more foreign the more language barriers arise. We realize that she had not been Jerusalem.

Rajabzadeh
speaking to Gilbert in English only when she’s at the margins of her homeland,
at the port where people, systems, and structures negotiate her foreign language.
Because she finds other multilingual travelers, pilgrims, and ‘men þat onder-
stoden hire langage’ (108.54), she is able to travel into England. When in
England, we see her from the viewpoint of Christian, English structures of
power. She is no longer the woman who effortlessly moved in and out of prison,
conversing with Gilbert. She is a foreigner. The text fixates on her inability to
communicate effectively. Her sentences, which were long and full in Jerusalem,
become broken, single words; her body, unfamiliar; her affect, strange.
heo ne couþe no-þing conteini hire: ne speken no-þe-mo;
Ake euere heo axede In hire langage: to londone for-to go.
Mid pilegrimes and þoru grace of god: to londone heo cam.
And þo heo was þudere i-come: þare ne knev heo no man,
Ne heo ne couþe speke ne hire bi-seo: bote ase a best þat a-strayed were.
Þare-fore on hire gapede alday: swyþe muche fol[c] þere,

boþe Men and wommen: and children suyþe fale –
for hire continaunce was wonderful: and hire speche no Man ne couþe
þare.
(108.60–7)
These stanzas, which are at the core of her biography, do not just capture the
experience of any marginalized person, but of a marginalized woman of color in
particular. They portray her confusion, alienation, estrangement, misplacement,
and deep yearning for belonging as an embodied experience – gendered and raced.
We can only see Alisaundre through the gaze of the citizens of London, and they
notice her body as they hear her voice. It is as they hear her calling out for help and
direction in a ‘speche no Man ne couþe þare’ that they notice that ‘hire continaunce
[is both] wonderful’ and ‘ase a best þat a-strayed were.’ There is nothing about her
that belongs to this community: her language is foreign; her beautiful face eroticizes
her, and yet her beast-like body, presence, and affect render her femininity illegible.
‘Feminism is understood as a problem of will: a way of going one’s own way,
a way of going the wrong way’ (Ahmed, 2017, 65), and the repeated emphasis
on what Alisaundre cannot do in this passage – speak, be understood, navigate –
suggests errors in her subjectivity. She misused her agency. She does not belong
here. No one will listen to her here. Her difference invites those around her to
stare, to gawk, to experience, rather than to try to understand and help. This
social pressure – of forcibly transforming her experience into a performance—
isolates her. She becomes isolated spatially as she moves in the streets always far
enough away from people so that she can continue being on display; she is
isolated sexually and racially as she becomes a strange woman, comparable to a
beast. Her gendered and raced body, her yearning for Gilbert, for familiarity,
transforms her struggle of communication into an embodied struggle of

Alisaundre Becket
placement. It is this isolation, this marginalization, and this yearning that

demands Alisaundre to negotiate her sense of self with positions of power
around her and it is the way she negotiates her place in Christian, English society
in the rest of the biography that makes her such an admirable force.
Despite everything that is working against her – the language barrier, her
foreignness, the lack of compassion in those surrounding her – as she moves in
and out of English space, among English people, she manages it! It’s crucial that
we do not discount or undervalue this achievement. She uses the momentum
that is operating against her to her advantage by participating in the uproar,
calling out for Gilbert so loudly ‘þat bi-fore gilbertes house: þe Noyse was
onder-ȝite’ (108.69). The page who accompanied Gilbert to the holy land ‘to þe
dore he orn swyþe: þe dune for-to i-seo’ (108.71), recognizes Alisaundre, and
informs Gilbert about her arrival. He is now forced to confront Alisaundre and
respond to her marriage proposal.
But it isn’t until Alisaundre Becket’s conversion that we understand how she
can exercise power from the margins without having any ‘domination or control
over others’ (hooks, 1984, 87). Alisaundre arrives for baptism the day after six
bishops and Gilbert have discussed her situation in her absence:
Þat hit was al þoruȝ godes grace: þat heo was so fer i-come,
Out of hire owene londe so fer: þat heo þoru miseise ne hadde i-be nome;
For heo ne couþe language non: with men for-to speke. (109.110–2)
The only explanation the bishops have for how a woman without English could
travel ‘so fer […] out of hire owene londe’ is that it is a miracle. They decide that
‘god hathþ i-porueid so’ (110.112) that she become Christian. Their repeated
emphasis on the will of God suggests that Alisaundre is a passive agent of God’s
work. His divine control mutes Alisaundre’s agency. She has no control. All of
this is an effort on behalf of the bishops to tame Alisaundre’s will, to
domesticate her feminism by ascribing her ‘obstina[ncy],’ her ‘unyielding nature’
(Ahmed, 2017, 66), her willingness to ‘b[e] out of tune with others’ (Ahmed,
2017, 40) to a predetermined part of God’s plan.
Although we expect this rhetoric in a Christian narrative, it becomes
oppressive as the bishops use it to characterize Alisaundre as a helpless, nameless
wanderer. They do not name her or her homeland. They only discuss her journey
in her absence. By denying her the opportunity to speak, they silence her. As an
authority on Christian matters, these bishops assume that Alisaundre has no
knowledge of the role that God and fate have played in her journey. Alisaundre,
they suggest, arrived in spite of who she was – a non-Christian woman speaking
a foreign language – not because of it.
The day of her baptism, Alisaundre stands before the same six bishops and
Gilbert. She is spatially isolated – the only non-Christian in the space; structures
of Christian conversion surround her. When the bishops ‘axeden hire wel sone /
ȝif heo wolde i-cristned beo: ase lawe was for-to done’ (110.128–9), she uses the

Rajabzadeh
opportunity to contest their characterization of her and reclaim the will that the
bishops and Gilbert have denied her:
heo answerede In hire langage: wel sone heom a-ȝen:
ȝif gilbert wolde hire weddi: i-cristned heo wolde ben
And bote he hire weddi wolde: heo nolde cristinedom a-fongue,
heo seide heo wolde raþer tuyrne aȝen: In-to hire owene londe. (110.130–3)
Her conversion is conditional, she reminds Gilbert and informs the bishops.
Only ‘ȝif gilbert wolde hire weddi’ will she convert. She doesn’t have the
slightest reservations about returning to her land and forgoing Christian
conversion if Gilbert will not marry her. In fact, she prefers it.
It is not common for a character in a romance or hagiographical text to present
a rejected conversion as potentially positive. This brief speech is Alisaundre’s
resistance. Alisaundre reminds those in power and by extension those English
citizens who treated her as a spectacle that she has a land she calls her ‘owene,’
and that she can return to it without permission, that she has nothing to be afraid
of even though she’s run away. She reminds them that she is an agent, and that she
is here by choice. And she pronounces all of this ‘in hire langage,’ transforming
this experience that the bishops have designed to be alienating for her into one
that alienates the bishops who cannot understand her. As Alisaundre stands in a
3 I am theorizing room in England, not yet converted, speaking Arabic, she reminds everyone that
Alisaundre she still has power: the power to isolate, the power to be.
Becket’s When Ailsaundre converts, we expect her to follow suit with other Muslim
racialization with
princesses or knights and fully assimilate upon conversion. While parts of her
Geraldine Heng’s
new definition of identity align with Christian, English identity more closely, she remains
race from her definitively foreign, because she does not learn English and continues to only
phenomenal book, know and speak Arabic. Her language weighs on her identity in ways that her
The Invention of faith, home, and name do not, because it is the only part of her identity that is
Race in the
European Middle
neither changeable nor replaceable. Christianity erased her ‘heathen’ faith; one
Ages, in mind: ‘a faith was swapped out for the other. Her Christian name erased her ‘heathen,’
repeating tendency non-English one; one was substituted for the other. And yet, unlike most
[…] to demarcate romances, in this account, language is not substitutable. She continues to know
human beings
through
only her heritage language. Gilbert and the knave’s multilingualism prove that
differences among multiple languages can occupy one mind and one body. Alisaundre’s language
humans that are has been the defining characteristic of her difference. So, to suggest that it is not
selectively erasable is to suggest that her difference, her otherness, is permanent. Alisaundre
essentialized as
Becket’s language, her voice, racializes her.3
absolute and
fundamental, in The only other identity marker that cannot be erased in this conversion is her
order to distribute gender. Alisaundre’s racial identity intensifies the confinement to which a
positions and woman is subject. It is easy to visualize a woman who has always already been
powers
on the margins of English, Christian society in a home, isolated from society.
differentially to
human groups’ And that is where she ends up. Up until this point in the narrative, Alisaundre
(Heng, 2018, 3). has been shown outside of the confines of a gendered, feminine domestic space.

Alisaundre Becket
She moves in and out of prison freely, wanders around Jerusalem, the sea, and
the streets of London. But with her conversion and her marriage, she moves
indoors, into a domestic space where she spends the rest of her biography. We
never see her outside again. Her home is not just any domestic space, but
becomes a racialized, isolated, domestic space.
So, the end of the narrative parallels its beginnings. This time, instead of
Gilbert, Alisaundre Becket is isolated in a space. And instead of Alisaundre,
Gilbert travels in and out of the space freely. However, unlike the beginning of
the narrative, where Alisaundre was unburdened by language, language poses
the primary obstacle to Gilbert’s movement. When Gilbert Becket decides to
travel to Alisaundre’s homeland, the ‘holie lond,’ for pilgrimage he is
overwhelmed with anxiety:
ȝwat were of hire to done,
laste heo wolde mourny swyþe: ȝwane he were a-gon,
And gret deol to hire nime – : for langage ne couþe heo non
Þat ani Man couþe onder-stonde: þat heo speke to,
bote gilbert oþur [his] knaue. (111.149–53)
Although Gilbert expects Alisaundre to oppose his pilgrimage, Alisaundre
doesn’t express any concern or complaint. She supports his pilgrimage on one
4 Robert Mills has
condition: ‘Þat heo moste is knaue with hire habbe: þat hire langage couþe, / made significant
And for he scholde hire solas beo: and speke to hire with mouþe’ (111.176–7). contributions to
Gilbert’s anxiety and Alisaundre’s request regarding her language suggest that our understanding
of the way
she has not ‘implicitly […] acquired the English that eluded her before she was
difference operates
baptized’ (Mills, 2011, 390), that her native language has not been ‘consigned to in the SEL.
a hazy non-identity’ (Mills, 2010, 211).4 She can still only communicate and However, I
connect with others in ‘hire langage.’ Although Alisaundre Becket’s language disagree with
intensifies her confinement, it is also her language that makes it possible for her Mills’ arguments
about Alisaundre
to resist the confinement and isolation that accompanies domestic life as a Becket’s
racialized woman of color on the margins. Rather than submit to English social assimilated,
norms, erase, and forget her language, she insists on maintaining a structure of Christian identity.
translation in her domestic space that accommodates her difference. The knave, Mills concludes his
analysis of
like Gilbert, not only provides her comfort in her domestic space, ‘hire solas Alisaundre’s
beo,’ but he also makes it possible for her to maintain a connection with the identity with her
English world beyond her home while maintaining part of her identity. conversion and
Alisaundre’s home, like other marginal spaces, becomes ‘both [a] sit[e] of overlooks this
crucial post-
repression and […] resistance’ (hooks, 1990, 342). She may be foreign and at a
conversion
disadvantage, but if anything, she shows us over and over again that she is not a moment that
voiceless subaltern, resigned to being helpless, alone, and silent. depicts how she
Unlike stories such as The King of Tars where conversion leads to assimilation has held onto her
native language
and racial reorientation, Alisaundre’s biography in the South English Legendary
and how limited
suggests that conversion to Christianity does not automatically erase, change, or her contact with
reorient all of one’s identity markers. The identity marker that racializes Alisaundre English society is.

Rajabzadeh
remains consistent over the course of her biography, both before and after her
conversion; as a result, the compounded ‘race-religion’ marker (Heng, 2003, 204)
that is so common to Middle English narratives doesn’t apply to Alisaundre Becket’s
life. In her biography we witness one of the earliest moments of racial identity
perceived, translated, and portrayed as distinct from religious identity.
Because Alisaundre Becket remains raced even after her conversion, the effects of
her conversion are not unilateral. Her conversion changes her faith, her name, and
settles her into a new home, but she changes the Christian, English community in
London, as well. The chaos she creates while crying for Gilbert disrupts the way the
city moves and operates. Her home – raced and multilingual – diversifies the English
landscape. With her presence, the citizens can no longer claim that English is a
characteristic that Christians in London share.
Alisaundre Becket’s biography in the SEL serves as an introduction to Thomas
Becket; and as a result, who she is serves to characterize Thomas Becket. In the
SEL, Thomas Becket is born and raised in Alisaundre’s raced and multilingual
home. While his Christian education exposes him to Latin and his life in
England exposes him to English and French, his mother exposes him to Arabic.
While Arabic, English, and Latin inhabit the same narrative and are present in
relationships – between mother and son, husband and wife, wife and knave –
they eventually find a voice in a single person – Thomas Becket. The Thomas
Becket of the South English Legendary then is a mixed-raced child, part-Arab,
part-English, whose heritage language is Arabic. He is the child of a world-
traveling and multilingual father and a fiercely independent, determined, and
resilient mother who was the daughter of an Amiral in the Holy Land, a native
speaker of Arabic, and not originally Christian. He is also a great, Christian,
English saint. In sum, he is a perfect colonizer.
Anne J. Duggan’s research has shown us that Thomas Becket’s sainthood
transforms Canterbury, England into one of the busiest pilgrimage sites of
Europe. In the decades that follow his martyrdom, pilgrims flock to England,
sailing over sea and trekking over land to visit Thomas Becket’s sites, relics, and
shrines. His shrine even becomes a stopover on the crusaders’ journey from
England to Jerusalem during the Third Crusade. King Richard I, Archbishop
Baldwin of Canterbury and his soldiers, Bishop Hubert Walter of Salisbury,
among others either visited Thomas Becket themselves, took their crusading
soldiers to his shrine, or took his banner into Jerusalem (Duggan, 2010, 76).
These journeys from England to Jerusalem and from beyond England to England
recall Alisaundre’s own journey. She traveled from a central site of Christian
pilgrimage to marry an Englishman and then give birth to and raise a child
whose body and sainthood transforms England into a central site of Christian
pilgrimage.
Situating Alisaundre Becket into Thomas Becket’s narrative transforms him
into an empowering saint to consult for the colonial project of the Third
Crusade. The Thomas Becket of the South English Legendary is a strong ally for

Alisaundre Becket
the crusaders, because his mother’s story makes it possible to imagine the Holy
Land as vulnerable for colonization. His ancestry, heritage, and language give
him unique access to the holy land. In Thomas Becket, crusaders see the possible
outcome of a successful crusade – a colonized Jerusalem where every ‘heathen’
converts to Christianity, where Englishmen move back and forth freely between
London and Jerusalem, unburdened by language barriers.
Thomas Becket was already a great Christian saint by the time the SEL was
written. As a result, readers would only interpret details in his biographies as
validating his greatness and worthiness as a saint. Given that, taking a resolute
and willful woman and situating her so intimately in his narrative is a genius
strategy to further his strength and resilience. Patriarchal power translates what
is inappropriate and even shameful in women as worthy and admirable in men
by suggesting that men make better use of the same characteristics. The
characteristics that Thomas Becket are recognized for as a leader and martyr,
that lead to his canonization, are the ones we see in Thomas Becket’s mother –
his resistance, his ‘constancy’ that can be mistaken for ‘obstinacy’ (Staunton,
2001, 238), his resilience, his ‘struggl[e] to adapt himself to his changing roles
and the different challenges which he faced at every step’ (Staunton, 2001, 2),
and more than anything, the courage he displays before and during his death
(Staunton, 2001, 202). In a patriarchal society, Alisaundre Becket’s untamed
willfulness, which is a defining characteristic at every turn in the narrative,
translates into holy steadfastness and determination in Thomas Becket.
The South English Legendary suggests that what marginalizes women
promotes men: the exceptionalism which causes Alisaundre’s marginalization
and isolation translates to an exceptionalism in Thomas Becket that leads to the
formation of a widespread cult in his name (Webster and Gelin, 2016). Over the
course of her life, Alisaundre Becket uses the voice that racializes her and marks
5 While modern
her as different to change her relationship to the spaces and people around her.
scholars relegate
When her son is born, she uses that voice to ‘al day rede: and wel ofte on him Alisaundre Becket
crie / Chaste lijf and clene for-to lede: and for-sake lecherie’ (112.210–1). But as to the footnotes,
soon as Thomas Becket comes of age, her voice is silenced. Her marginalization she became a
is materialized as she fades out from the pages of the biography until we learn historical and
literary sensation
about her death (113.217). And even if many in the Middle Ages read her story in the Victorian
and knew Thomas Becket as the child of this woman, most readers now forget period. Charles
her role in his life, dismiss or marginalize her story, and execute the act she Dickens discusses
adamantly resisted over the course of her life – they erase her in their research, her in his A Child’s
History of
their writing, and their pedagogy.5 England (Dickens,
To write, to teach, to think about the Middle Ages is to create it. What kind of [1851–53] 1905).
Middle Ages do we create for our students when we introduce them to this Sir Lewis Morris
world by way of Alisaundre Becket? In her movement, they understand England writes a poem
titled ‘Gilbert
to be part of an interconnected world. In her body, they see a raced England. In Beckett and the
her experience, they learn how power isolates, suppresses, and silences women Fair Saracen’
(Morris, n.d.).

Rajabzadeh
of color and immigrants. In her voice, they hear a multilingual Christian

community; they hear her desire for belonging, her strength to resist.
About the Author
Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh is a PhD candidate at the University of California,

Berkeley. She has received an MPhil from the University of Oxford. Her
dissertation theorizes the racialization of Muslims and Islamophobia in
premodern England. She is a founding member of Medievalists of Color and
commits her time to making academia and medieval studies a more inclusive and
racially conscious space (E-mail: srajabzadeh@berkeley.edu).
References
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son and London: Chapman & Hall. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/699/699-h/699-h.
htm.
Duggan, A.J. 2010. Canterbury: The Becket Effect. In Canterbury: A Medieval City, ed.
C. Royer-Hemet, 67–91. Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Heng, G. 2003. Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Heng, G. 2018. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.
hooks, b. 1984. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Boston, MA: South End Press.
hooks, b. 1990. Marginality as Site of Resistance. In Out There: Marginalization and
Contemporary Cultures, eds. R. Ferguson, M. Gever, T.T. Minh-ha, and C. West, 341–
343. New York: MIT Press.
Horstmann, C., ed. 1887. The Early South-English Legendary or Lives of Saints. EETS o.s.
87. London: Trübner and Co.
Lankin, A.A. 2011. Shaping the World: The Geographies of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS
Laud Misc. 108. PhD Dissertation: University of California, Berkeley.
Lorde, A. 1984. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press.
Morrison, T. 1993. The Bird Is in Your Hands. Nobel Lecture, The Nobel Prize,
Stockholm, Sweden. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1993/morrison/
lecture/
Mills, R. 2010. The Early South English Legendary and Difference: Race, Place, Language,
and Belief. In The Texts and Contexts of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108:
The Shaping of English Vernacular Narrative, eds. K. Bell and J.N. Couch, 197–221.

Alisaundre Becket
Medieval and Renaissance Authors and Texts, Volume: 6. Leiden, The Netherlands:
Brill.
Mills, R. 2011. Conversion, Translation and Becket’s ‘heathen’ Mother. In Rethinking the
South English Legendaries, eds. H. Blurton and J. Wogan-Browne, 381–402.
Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.
Morris, M.L. n.d. Sir Lewis Morris’s Gilbert Beckett and the Fair Saracen. Robbins Library
Digital Projects. https://d.lib.rochester.edu/crusades/text/gilbert-beckett-and-the-fair-
saracen .
Staunton, M., ed. 2001. The Lives of Thomas Becket. Manchester, UK: Manchester
University Press.
Webster, P. and M.-P. Gelin, eds. 2016. The Cult of St. Thomas Becket in the Plantagenet
World c.1170–c.1220. Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press.
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional
affiliations.

Original Article
‘Albyon, þat þo was an Ile’:

Feminist materiality and nature
in the Albina narrative
Heather Blatt
Department of English, Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA.
Abstract The story of Albina and her sisters conventionally justifies the patriarchal
foundation of Britain by presenting it as a conflict between men and women, in which
the environment of Britain functions as a reflection and extension of the women.
Reevaluating the narrative through feminist materiality and ecocritical studies, how-
ever, facilitates a fresh approach to understanding how medieval people perceived
nature and human-nature relations. Far from functioning as a reflection of humans, the
story showcases the active work of nature that is not subordinate to humans, but
works with and alongside them, influencing them in ways that highlight the limits of
anthropocentric readings of the narrative and nature’s role in it.
https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-019-00139-7
The motto of the Canaveral National Seashore, on the east coast of central
Florida, reads, ‘The way things used to be’ (Rein, 2016). This motto comments
on the lack of development of the coast within the park, and presents such
undeveloped, unsettled nature as belonging to the past. In doing so, it suggests
that the natural history of this part of the United States is one of untrammeled
nature, empty of human presence and influence. Such perceptions of natural
space in the U. S. today have long historical roots reaching back to medieval
literature.
Chapter 4 was originally published as Blatt, H. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019) 10: 304–315. https://doi.org/
10.1057/s41280-019-00139-7.

‘Albyon, þat þo was an Ile’
A story that functions as a largely-overlooked but critical node in this history

is the tale of Albina and her sisters. Albina’s story appears as a prologue to
popular medieval political and secular chronicles of Britain that mythologize the
origins of the British people. These histories tell of how Brutus, a descendant of
the Trojan Aeneas, came to civilize and rule over the land that would later be
named for him, Britain. The prologue to Brutus’s history, drawn from the
thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman poem Des Grantz Geantz, tells a yet earlier
story of how an uninhabited isle came to be discovered, named, and settled. In
the story, a woman, Albina, and her 32 sisters are married, but resist their
marriages, and are abused by their husbands. In response, the sisters kill the
husbands, and their father exiles his daughters by casting them to sea on a
rudderless ship. Eventually they land upon an isle empty of human habitation
and name it Albion, after the eldest sister, Albina. She and her sisters make their
home upon Albion, flourish as they eat from its abundant flora and fauna, and
are eventually succeeded by their offspring, a race of giants who are fathered by
the devil. In turn, Brutus, a descendant of the Trojan Aeneas, arrives, defeats the
giants in a genocidal sweep, and settles the island with his followers and
descendants. In his memory they rename the isle Britain. The story was later
included in Holinshed’s Chronicles. Shakespeare may have read it there and
evoked it in The Tempest through the figure of Sycorax, exiled to an unnamed
island, and her monstrous son Caliban, fathered by a devil (Forest-Hill, 2006,
245–6). The story continued to be related through the eighteenth century
(Bernau, 2007, 112), further demonstrating its long cultural purchase.
From the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, this story of Albina and her
sisters circulated in two versions. One identifies the original home of Albina and
her sisters as Greece. The other identifies that home as Syria. The story offers a
rhetorical arc that characterizes Albina and her sisters as untamed and chaotic, a
characterization that extends to include the isle itself. At the same time, the story
also proffers descriptive detail focused on the abundance and fertile presence of
nature, and situates the women and their offspring, the giants, as engaging with
and even serving the agentive force of the isle’s environment. The narrative’s
ideological investment in nature as a place where ‘there be dragons,’ a place in
need of the civilizing improvements of patriarchal order (Mills, 1997, 46),
necessitates representing the island as empty, awaiting a civilizing hand. That
hand does not belong to Albina and her sisters, as the story makes clear, but to
Brutus and his successors. Such a patriarchal, anthropocentric viewpoint
becomes central to how the Albina myth provides a violent justification for
the European male domination of nature (which becomes the white male
domination of nature). This domination relies not just upon rejection of the
women who originate from the east and come to inhabit the island, it also relies
upon rejection of the isle’s environment, and the agency nature demonstrates in
its influence on the women and its interactions with the giants.

Blatt
Critics routinely follow the narrative’s rhetorical trajectory, but ignore the
suggestions of its descriptive detail, seeing in the Albina myth three sets of binary
conflicts – conflicts between men and women, nature and civilization, and
monster and human – that explain and celebrate the patriarchal foundation of
Britain. A common element of these responses to the story emphasizes the
emptiness of the island Albina and her sisters encounter. Julia Marvin notes that
they ‘have an empty land and not so much as a bow and arrow for hunting’
(Marvin, 2001, 143). Yet such responses to the narrative fundamentally
mischaracterize its description of the island: the land is not empty; it is fruitful
and filled. The prose Brut acknowledges this environmental richness in
describing the island as ‘all wyldernes,’ in which the women find ‘neiþer man
ne woman ne child, but wylde bestes of diuers kyndes’ (Anonymous, 1906, 4).
The isle burgeons with trees and animals: cornerstones of a diverse ecosystem.
This disjointure between what the text details (an island full of nature’s things)
and how the story rhetorically frames it (empty of humankind) – and the fact
that critics have only recognized the latter meaning in the narrative –
demonstrates how the erasure of nature takes place both in the Albina myth
and in critics’ practices. Interpretations of the story that describe the island as
uninhabited, like Martin’s above, exemplify how easily this erasure of nature
can privilege an anthropocentric viewpoint.
In this article, I emphasize the other ideas contained in medieval iterations of
the Albina narrative by attending to the alternative interpretations suggested in
its descriptive detail. In so doing, I examine two iterations of this story, drawn
from mid- and late-fourteenth century England. These two iterations represent
both the Greek tradition (The Riming Chronicle in the Auchinleck Manuscript,
National Library of Scotland Adv MS 19.2.1), and the Syrian (the prose
prologue added to the prose Brut in Bodleian MS Douce 323). As Sophia Liu has
observed, the story reads differently when engaged from ecocritical perspectives
(Liu, 2016, 62). Attending to the ways that the story incorporates nature as a
nonhuman character becomes key to recognizing how nature actively con-
tributes to narrative events alongside human and supernatural characters. In this
way, the Albina myth highlights a moment when a medieval narrative opens a
view onto a gender non-conforming, non-binary imagined past of human/nature
relations not suffused by the patriarchal Christian narrative of the white
European man’s dominion over the environment. In such moments we can catch
glimpses of alternative modes of human relation to nature in ways that expand
our understanding of how medieval people understood human-nature relations
in their past, and used the past to imagine queer, non-dualistic gender relations.
In queering this gendered, ecological history, the Albina narrative also
showcases medieval representations of nature’s influence upon humans,
influence that opens new ways for conceptualizing medieval theories about
nature and nature-human interactions. Ecofeminism is helpful in allowing us to
envision these alternative nature-human interactions in their cultural and

political dimensions. Indeed, ecocritics like Val Plumwood have for more than
two decades insisted that ‘feminism must address not only the forms of
oppression which afflict humans but also those that afflict nature, [and]
illuminate problems in the concept of anthropocentrism’ (Plumwood, 1997,
327). That is, ecofeminists argue that the domination of nature is linked with
gender, class, race, and species, and these linkages can interact in ways that
oppress all involved. Ecofeminists also point out that nature and culture are not
in opposition, but function in cooperation, and that anthropocentrism is a
philosophical stance needing critique. Ecofeminism thus helps draw attention to
how the Albina story provides a foundational narrative about not simply the
British people, but also their colonialist ecopolitics. Indeed, the Albina narrative
laid the foundations for English relations with the Americas in ways that shape
attitudes towards the environment today.
Nature’s agency in Albion
Nature, at the start of events in the Albina myth, encompasses the woods and
the trees and the inhabiting plants and beasts that fill the isle. Describing the
nature of Albion at the time of the sisters’ arrival upon the isle, The Riming
Chronicle explains that, ‘In þat time in all þis land / An acre of land þei ne fond, /
Bot wode and wildernisse; / þai no fond tilþe more no lesse’ (Burnley and
Wiggins, 2003, l. 323–6). Tilþe here refers to cultivation, whose absence
indicates that the island demonstrates no signs of being worked by human
hands: implicit in the term, as will be discussed further below in connection with
the giants, is the assumption that cultivation functions as an exclusively human
practice, one immediately recognizable to humans. Yet, although empty of
people in this passage, and uncultivated by humans, the poem’s descriptive
detail imagines an isle that provides an environment plentiful in trees, herbs, and
wild beasts, reflecting a non-anthropocentric perspective at odds with the
narrative’s rhetorical trajectory.
As the story unfolds, the prose Brut prologue provides descriptive detail that
emphasizes connections among nature and Albina and her sisters. The women
directly encounter the environment of the isle as they exhaust the provisions
from their ship and begin to live off the land. As the story describes this moment,
when their food stores are depleted, ‘þei fedde hem with erbes & frutes in seson
of þe yeer, and so þey lyved as þei beste myght’ (Anonymous, 1906, 4). Albina
and her sisters consume fruits and herbs according to the season and begin to
flourish. This passage asserts a movement from separation from the environ-
ment to living within it, and further connects the environment to the bodies of
Albina and her sisters. They enter nature, unseparated and unsheltered from it.
A review of the prose Brut’s prologue through a lens shaped by both
ecofeminism and new materialisms reveals that the women do not dominate the

Blatt
landscape. Rather, the landscape – the environment of the isle, its nature –
suffuses the women, even to the point of crafting alternative genders and non-
binaristic sexual relations, as I shall discuss in more detail below. The nature-
instigated emergence of queered gender and sexual relations on the isle of Albion
are part of the history the main Brut narrative rhetorically strives to replace. In
this complex relationship between the isle of Albion and Albina and her sisters,
we witness not the simple binary of a female, wild foundation replaced by a
male, orderly foundation, but a more complex history that depicts an active,
acting nature that crafts an alternative environment neither male nor female.
The environment represented in the both the prose Brut prologue and The
Riming Chronicle possesses a capacity to act and perform agency. Although the
fate of the island remains the same, the Albina story in both iterations also
gestures to how nature continues to make its presence felt even after the seeming
civilization of the isle.
The transformative relationship between the environment and the women
becomes more explicit when the prose Brut narrative connects the causality of
three subsequent developments: the women’s consumption of meat, the increase
of their bodies, and the lustful desire they begin to experience. As the Brut
narrative puts it, the women ‘tokyn flessh of diuers beestys, and bycomen
wondir fatte, and so þei desirid mannes cumpanye and mannys kynde þat hem
faylled. And for hete þey woxen wondir coraious of kynde þat hem faylled’
(Anonymous, 1906, 4). When I have taught this text, I explain this moment to
my students through the medieval humoral discourse on which the passage
relies: the women, consuming hot meat, become hot for men. The heat of the
meat shifts the women’s naturally cold humors towards the heat of passion,
mirroring their eventual coitus. This striking moment illustrates how humoral
theory provides a framework that represents ways medieval people understood
the material environment, and natural matter – that is, nature with its herbs and
fruits and animals – to influence human bodies.
By connecting bodily change to environmental consumption and sexual
desire, the prose Brut version of the Albina myth uses the discourse of humoral
theory to foreground the material environment and showcase its effects upon
human bodies, emotions, and gender. It is because the women inhabit this place,
consuming its flora and fauna, that they become inhabited by desire. Stacy
Alaimo describes the connections between nature and human substance as
creating ‘trans-corporeal’ bodies, which help us recognize how ‘the substance of
the human is ultimately inseparable from the environment,’ and acknowledge
that the environment itself is not an ‘inert, empty space’ or ‘a resource for
human use,’ but is ‘a world of fleshly beings with their own needs, claims, and
actions’ (Alaimo, 2010, 4). In a related vein, object-oriented feminism reminds
us to take up the thing’s perspective and consider ‘how things are had’: that is,
not to evaluate only how humans have access to objects, but also to consider
humans like things, and ‘cultivat[e] posthuman solidarities’ (Behar, 2016, 29).

Ecofeminism and object-oriented feminism thus promote examination of the

interactions among Albina and her sisters and nature in ways that prompt
identifying interconnections and solidarities among them, and reorient the
audience around nature’s perspective, rather than that of humans alone. In these
ways, the transcorporeal mingling of nature with Albina and her sisters means
that they are no longer a group of sisters led by the anti-heroic, individualized
Albina. Instead, Albina and her sisters have been ‘had’ by nature. Possessed by
nature, they become part of its material, environmental network, coequal
among themselves and acting with and within the environment, rather than
sheltering from it in ship and lodges.
Consequently, it is clear from the narrative details in the Albina stories that
nature, in its impact on the women’s bodies, possesses active force. The
wilderness is not merely backdrop, and nature’s matter, its herbs and fruits and
wild beasts, are not passively surrendered for consumption. Nor are they simply
figurative parallels for the women. Rather, nature permeates the women with its
substance, and enmeshes them within its network. Yet if nature possesses
agency, what motivates its actions? Towards what ends does the nature of this
isle direct itself through and with the transcorporeal bodies of the women it co-
inhabits? What are, as Alaimo describes, its ‘needs, claims, and actions’? The
Riming Chronicle indicates that nature’s agency is directed towards growth,
plenty, and reproduction. Abounding with trees, woods, and wilderness, the isle
Albion bends its active force towards plenteousness. It burgeons with a specific
quality: fecundity. Alaimo’s points help reveal how the Albina myth invites us to
see that the women’s sexual desire and reproduction is not a result of their own
desire, but of nature’s agency and interaction with its things. In this respect, the
story seems to reflect Alaimo’s notion of nature as more than a dwelling place
for humans. It is substance: matter that mingles with its residential human
matter, shaping their orientations to match its own. In this way, the nature of
the isle intimately reorients the women’s identities and relationship to match its
own, shaping Albina and her sisters’ expression of their sexuality and driving
them towards procreation.
Queer nature in Albion
By enmeshing itself with the women, nature acts in both versions of the legend as
a conservative force that corrects the queer divergence from conventional gender
roles symbolized in the women’s resistance to the marriages arranged for them
by their father. In the preceding events of the myth, the sisters have shown
themselves resistant to their role as wives. Their resistance originates in dismay
at the thought of change, which they perceive as a degradation. The women
become angry and rebellious; they refuse to accept their gendered role as women
within the medieval institution of marriage. Their refusal means that, by

Blatt
resisting their subordinate role as wives, they also refuse the expectations and
responsibilities accorded to wives in the Middle Ages, including procreation.
The women desire to control their own transformations – as the story makes
clear, so too does nature.
In the prose Brut prologue, the sisters murder their husbands, thereby further
ungendering themselves by shifting themselves into the masculine role in the
household. In consequence, by the time of their arrival upon the isle, the sisters’
gender identity has become ambiguous: although assigned female at birth, they
have resisted and refused to occupy that identity. These sisters are additionally
queered by their material intimacy with the environment that begins to feed
them and initiates their subsequent change. This change expresses itself in lust,
the first step – from the perspective of nature – towards procreation, bringing
forth. Within the framework of medieval gender expectations, which treat
women as naturally cold-natured but easily susceptible to overwhelming lusts,
nature influences the women in ways that seem to reorient them away from
gender ambiguity and towards a bountiful womanhood epitomized in procre-
ation. Nature feminizes the women through its transcorporeal engagement with
their bodies.
In the prose Brut prologue, the devil’s copulation with the women further
emphasizes how nature influences and interacts with the bodies that inhabit it.
Describing the arrival of the devil, the prose Brut reads:
Whanne the Devyll that perceyued and wente by divers contres, & nome
bodyes of þe eyre & likyng natures shad of men, & come into þe land of
Albyon and lay by þe wymmen, and schad tho natures vpon hem, & they
conceiued, and after þei broughten forth Geauntes. (Anonymous, 1906, 4)
The devil decides to copulate with the women and does so using ‘natures shad of
men’; that is, the devil takes on shapes defined by air and nature, and ‘sheds
those natures’ upon the women. Thus, in the prose Brut, the devil becomes a
vehicle for nature, enfolded within its shape, and through this interactive
partnership the women conceive. In this respect, the prose Brut reflects
ecofeminist notions about the permeability of bodies and the environment.
The theories of Karen Barad help illuminate how the Brut version of the
Albina myth imagines nature’s agency in ways that diverge from the anthro-
pocentric vision of nature as an allegory of a human-like guiding intelligence,
imagining it instead in different, non-human terms. For Barad, intra-action
‘signifies the mutual constitution of entangled agencies’ through which distinct
agencies emerge, and notes that agencies ‘are only distinct in relation to their
mutual entanglement; they don’t exist as individual elements’ (Barad, 2007, 33).
Interpreting the relations among devil, women, and nature using Barad’s
conceptual framework, we come to understand nature’s agency as operating
through the entanglement of devil, human, vegetation, and beasts. For the
Albina myth and its ecofeminist, materially-oriented interpretations, Barad’s

argument serves as a reminder that the agency of nature is perceived and

experienced in the story through its effects on matter: human matter, devilish
matter, the matter of plants and beasts of the isle.
Focusing on the role of agency in the text at this moment also emphasizes its
fluid representations of women and nature’s agency. Intra-acting with the devil’s
and nature’s substance, the women ‘bring forth,’ a phrase in the text that signals
recognition of the women’s own agency. The prose Brut prologue emphasizes
that reproductive agency belongs to all three parties working together: nature,
the devil, and the women. Representing the conception in this way does not
create a parallel between an allegorical Mother Nature and the human mothers
laboring to produce. Nor does it represent a binary coupling of male and female.
Instead, the prose Brut represents nature as reconfiguring, inhabiting, and
transforming the matter of humans and devil.
In spite of the seemingly conventional re-gendering of the women by nature,
the Brut’s representation of reproduction actually presents an intriguingly
queered collection of nontypically gendered characters: there is agendered,
polysexual nature, the devil who presents as a man but is in biblical tradition
asexual, and Albina and her gender-shifting sisters. Nature becomes a third
sexual partner and a third parent, and as this third parent it facilitates the
bringing forth of something new, something neither devil nor human, but wholly
novel to the isle’s environment: the giants. The queer assemblage that produces
the giants foregrounds a complexity of relations elided by Brutus’ later takeover.
The present of the isle of Albion in the story, the past of Britain to its readers,
presents a queer history.
In both The Riming Chronicle and the prose Brut prologue, references to the
women disappear immediately after conception of the giants. From this moment
forward the narrative in both texts focuses on the giants. Figuratively, the
women become decomposed into the island, reconstituted within the bodies of
their offspring, in a final transformation. Decomposing the human gives rise to
the posthuman. These relations, in a reading of the story informed by
ecofeminism and object-oriented feminism, showcase elements of the texts
concealed by anthropocentric readings of the story and interpretations of nature.
The disappearance of the women from the narrative has been referred to by
critics as erasure, their being ‘replaced by – subsumed within – gross corpora’
(Cohen, 1999, 49). Yet disappearance and erasure are concepts and develop-
ments in the story that need further evaluation. Just as critical interpretations of
the island as uninhabited prior to the arrival of Albina and her sisters require a
perspective that sets aside plants and animals as inhabitants, framing the
women’s state by the story’s conclusion as ‘erased’ privileges an anthropocentric
narrative and ignores how both texts recognize collective, cooperative identities.
This critical practice assumes that identifying human existence relies upon
human separation from nature. In contrast, I would suggest another interpre-
tation of the women’s status at the conclusion of the story, which pays close

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Madrid to snatch Florida from the grasp of Spain and France. The
negotiation fell chiefly within Jefferson’s second term, upon which it
had serious results. But while Monroe, busy at Madrid with a quarrel
which could lead only to disappointment or war, thus left the legation
at London for eight months to take care of itself, events were
occurring which warned President Jefferson that the supreme test of
his principles was near at hand, and that a storm was threatening
from the shores of Great Britain compared with which all other
dangers were trivial.
CHAPTER XIV.
For eighteen years after 1783 William Pitt guided England
through peace and war with authority almost as absolute as that of
Don Carlos IV. or Napoleon himself. From him and from his country
President Jefferson had much to fear and nothing to gain beyond a
continuance of the good relations which President Washington, with
extreme difficulty, had succeeded in establishing between the two
peoples. So far as England was concerned, this understanding had
been the work of Pitt and Lord Grenville, who rather imposed it on
their party than accepted it as the result of any public will. The
extreme perils in which England then stood inspired caution; and of
this caution the treaty of 1794 was one happy result. So long as the
British government remained in a cautious spirit, America was safe;
but should Pitt or his successors throw off the self-imposed restraints
on England’s power, America could at the utmost, even by a
successful war, gain nothing materially better than a return to the
arrangements of 1794.
The War of Independence, which ended in the definitive treaty of
1783, naturally left the English people in a state of irritation and
disgust toward America; and the long interregnum of the
Confederation, from 1783 to 1789, allowed this disgust to ripen into
contempt. When at length the Constitution of 1789 restored order in
the American chaos, England felt little faith in the success of the
experiment. She waited for time to throw light on her interests.
This delay was natural; for American independence had
shattered into fragments the commercial system of Great Britain, and
powerful interests were combined to resist further concession.
Before 1776 the colonies of England stretched from the St.
Lawrence to the Mississippi, and across the Gulf of Mexico to the
coast of South America, mutually supporting and strengthening each
other. Jamaica and the other British islands of the West Indies drew
their most necessary supplies from the Delaware and the Hudson.
Boston and New York were in some respects more important to them
than London itself. The timber, live-stock, and provisions which came
from the neighboring continent were essential to the existence of the
West Indian planters and negroes. When war cut off these supplies,
famine and pestilence followed. After the peace of 1783 even the
most conservative English statesmen were obliged to admit that the
strictness of their old colonial system could not be maintained, and
that the United States, though independent, must be admitted to
some of the privileges of a British colony. The government unwillingly
conceded what could not be refused, and the West Indian colonists
compelled Parliament to relax the colonial system so far as to allow
a restricted intercourse between their islands and the ports of the
United States. The relaxation was not a favor to the United States,—
it was a condition of existence to the West Indies; not a boon, but a
right which the colonists claimed and an Act of Parliament defined.
[226]
The right was dearly paid for. The islands might buy American
timber and grain, but they were allowed to make return only in
molasses and rum. Payment in sugar would have been cheaper for
the colonists, and the planters wished for nothing more earnestly
than to be allowed this privilege; but as often as they raised the
prayer, English shipowners cried that the navigation laws were in
peril, and a chorus of familiar phrases filled the air, all carrying a
deep meaning to the English people. “Nursery of seamen” was one
favorite expression; “Neutral frauds” another; and all agreed in
assuming that at whatever cost, and by means however extravagant,
the navy must be fed and strengthened. Under the cover of
supporting the navy any absurdity could be defended; and in the
case of the West Indian trade, the British shipowner enjoyed the right
to absurdities sanctioned by a century and a half of law and custom.
The freight on British sugars belonged of right to British shippers,
who could not be expected to surrender of their own accord, in
obedience to any laws of political economy, a property which was the
source of their incomes. The colonists asked permission to refine
their own sugar; but their request not only roused strong opposition
from the shipowners who wanted the bulkier freight, but started the
home sugar-refiners to their feet, who proved by Acts of Parliament
that sugar-refining was a British and not a colonial right. The colonist
then begged a reduction of the heavy duty on sugar; but English
country gentlemen cried against a measure which might lead to an
increase of the income-tax or the imposition of some new burden on
agriculture. In this dilemma the colonists frankly said that only their
weakness, not their will, prevented them from declaring themselves
independent, like their neighbors at Charleston and Philadelphia.
Even when the qualified right of trade was conceded, the
colonists were not satisfied; and the concession itself laid the
foundation of more serious changes. From the moment that
American produce was admitted to be a necessity for the colonists, it
was clear that the Americans must be allowed a voice in the British
system. Discussion whether the Americans had or had not a right to
the colonial trade was already a long step toward revolution. One
British minister after another resented the idea that the Americans
had any rights in the matter; yet when they came to practical
arrangements the British statesmen were obliged to concede that
they were mistaken. From the necessity of the case, the Americans
had rights which never could be successfully denied. Parliament
struggled to prevent the rebel Americans from sharing in the
advantages of the colonial system from which they had rebelled; but
unreasonable as it was that the United States should be rewarded
for rebellion by retaining the privileges of subjects, this was the
inevitable result. Geography and Nature were stronger than
Parliament and the British navy.
At first Pitt hoped that the concession to the colonists might entail
no concession to the United States; while admitting a certain hiatus
in the colonial system, he tried to maintain the navigation laws in
their integrity. The admission of American produce into the West
Indies was no doubt an infraction of the protectionist principle on
which all the civilized world, except America, founded its economical
ideas; but in itself it was not serious. To allow the flour, potatoes,
tobacco, timber, and horses of the American continent to enter the
harbors of Barbadoes and Jamaica; to allow in turn the molasses
and rum of the islands to be sent directly to New York and Boston,—
harmed no one, and was advantageous to all parties, so long as
British ships were employed to carry on the trade. At first this was
the case. The Act of Parliament allowed only British subjects, in
British-built ships, to enter colonial ports with American produce.
Whether the United States government would long tolerate such
legislation without countervailing measures was a question which
remained open for a time, while the system itself had a chance to
prove its own weakness. The British shipping did not answer colonial
objects. Again and again the colonists found themselves on the
verge of starvation; and always in this emergency the colonial
governors threw open their ports by proclamation to American
shipping, while with equal regularity Parliament protected the
governors by Acts of Indemnity. To this extent the navigation system
suffered together with the colonial system, but in theory it was intact.
Ministry, Parliament, and people clung to the navigation laws as their
ark of safety; and even the colonists conceded that although they
had a right to eat American wheat and potatoes, they had no right to
eat those which came to them in the hold of a Marblehead schooner.
Such a principle, however convenient to Great Britain, was not
suited to the interests of New England shippers. In peace their
chances were comparatively few, and the chief diplomatic difficulties
between European governments and the United States had their
source in the American attempt to obtain legal recognition of trade
which America wished to maintain with the colonies; but in war the
situation changed, and more serious disputes occurred. Then the
French and Spanish West Indian ports were necessarily thrown open
to neutral commerce, because their own ships were driven from the
ocean by the superiority of the British navy. Besides the standing
controversy about the admission of American produce to British
islands, the British government found itself harassed by doubts to
what extent it might safely admit the Americans into the French or
Spanish West Indies, and allow them to carry French property, as
though their flag were competent to protect whatever was under it.
Granting that an article like French sugar might be carried in a
neutral vessel, there were still other articles, called contraband,
which ought not to be made objects of neutral commerce; and
England was obliged to define the nature of contraband. She was
also forced to make free use of the right of blockade. These delicate
questions were embittered by another and more serious quarrel. The
European belligerents claimed the right to the military service of their
subjects, and there was no doubt that their right was perfect. In
pursuance of the claim they insisted upon taking their seamen from
American merchant-vessels wherever met on the high seas. So far
as France was concerned, the annoyance was slight; but the identity
of race made the practice extremely troublesome as concerned
England.
At the outbreak of the French wars, Nov. 6, 1793, the British
government issued instructions directing all British armed vessels to
seize every neutral ship they should meet, loaded with the produce
of a French colony or carrying supplies for its use.[227] These orders
were kept secret for several weeks, until the whole American
commerce with the Antilles, and all American ships found on the
ocean, laden in whole or in part with articles of French colonial
produce or for French colonial use, were surprised and swept into
British harbors, where they were condemned by British admiralty
courts, on the ground known as the “Rule of the War of 1756,”—that
because trade between the French colonies and the United States
was illegal in peace, it was illegal in war. From the point of view in
which European Powers regarded their colonies, much could be said
in support of this rule. A colony was almost as much the property of
its home government as a dockyard or a military station. France and
Spain could hardly complain if England chose to treat the commerce
of such governmentstations as contraband; but a rule which might
perhaps be applied by European governments to each other worked
with great injustice when applied to the United States, who had no
colonies, and made no attempt to build up a navy or support an army
by such means. Taken in its broadest sense, the European colonial
system might be defined by the description which the best of British
commentators gave to that of England,[228]—a “policy pursued for
rendering the foreign trade of the whole world subservient to the
increase of her shipping and navigation.” American Independence
was a protest against this practice; and the first great task of the
United States was to overthrow and destroy the principle, in order to
substitute freedom of trade. America naturally objected to becoming
a martyr to the rules of a system which she was trying to
revolutionize.
When these British instructions of Nov. 26, 1793, became known
in the United States, the Government of President Washington
imposed an embargo, threatened retaliation, and sent Chief-Justice
Jay to London as a last chance of maintaining peace. On arriving
there, Jay found that Pitt had already voluntarily retreated from his
ground, and that new Orders, dated Jan. 8, 1794, had been issued,
exempting from seizure American vessels engaged in the direct
trade from the United States to the French West Indies. In the end,
the British government paid the value of the confiscated vessels. The
trade from the United States to Europe was not interfered with; and
thus American ships were allowed to carry French colonial produce
through an American port to France, while Russian or Danish ships
were forbidden by England to carry such produce to Europe at all,
although their flags and harbors were as neutral as those of the
United States. America became suddenly a much favored nation,
and the enemies of England attributed this unexpected kindness to
fear. In truth it was due to a natural mistake. The British Treasury
calculated that the expense and trouble of carrying sugar and coffee
from Martinique or St. Domingo to Boston, of landing it, paying
duties, re-embarking it, receiving the drawback, and then carrying it
to Bordeaux or Brest, would be such as to give ample advantages to
English vessels which could transship more conveniently at London.
The mistake soon became apparent. The Americans quickly proved
that they could under these restrictions carry West Indian produce to
Europe not only more cheaply than British ships could do it, but
almost as quickly; while it was a positive advantage on the return
voyage to make double freight by stopping at an American port. The
consequence of this discovery was seen in the sudden increase of
American shipping, and was largely due to the aid of British seamen,
who found in the new service better pay, food, and treatment than in
their own, and comparative safety from the press-gang and the lash.
At the close of the century the British flag seemed in danger of
complete exclusion from the harbors of the United States. In 1790
more than 550 British ships, with a capacity of more than 115,000
tons, had entered inward and outward, representing about half that
number of actual vessels; in 1799 the custom-house returns showed
not 100 entries, and in 1800 about 140, representing a capacity of
40,000 tons. In the three years 1790–1792, the returns showed an
average of some 280 outward and inward entries of American ships
with a capacity of 54,000 tons; in 1800 the entries were 1,057, with a
capacity of 236,000 tons. The Americans were not only beginning to
engross the direct trade between their own ports and Europe, but
were also rapidly obtaining the indirect carrying-trade between the
West Indies and the European continent, and even between one
European country and another. The British government began to feel
seriously uneasy. At a frightful cost the people of England were
striving to crush the navies and commerce of France and Spain, only
to build up the power of a dangerous rival beyond the ocean.
Doubtless the British government would have taken measures to
correct its mistake, if the political situation had not hampered its
energies. Chief-Justice Jay, in 1794, negotiated a treaty with Lord
Grenville which was in some respects very hard upon the United
States, but was inestimably valuable to them, because it tied Pitt’s
hands and gave time for the new American Constitution to acquire
strength. Ten years of steady progress were well worth any
temporary concessions, even though these concessions
exasperated France, and roused irritation between her and the
United States which in 1798 became actual hostility. The prospect
that the United States would become the ally of England was so fair
that Pitt dared not disturb it. His government was in a manner forced
to give American interests free play, and to let American shipping
gain a sudden and unnatural enlargement. His liberality was well
paid. For a moment France drove the United States to reprisals; and
as the immediate consequence, St. Domingo became practically
independent, owing to the support given by the United States to
Toussaint. Even the reconciliation of France with America effected by
Bonaparte and Talleyrand in 1800 did not at first redress the
balance. Not till the Peace of Amiens, in 1802, did France recover
her colonies; and not till a year later did Bonaparte succeed, by the
sacrifice of Louisiana, in bringing the United States back to their old
attitude of jealousy toward England.
Nevertheless, indications had not been wanting that England was
aware of the advantage she had given to American commerce, and
still better of the advantages which had been given it by Nature. All
the Acts of Parliament on the statute-book could not prevent the
West Indies from being largely dependent on the United States; yet
the United States need not be allowed the right to carry West Indian
produce to France,—a right which depended only on so-called
international law, and was worthless unless supported by the
stronger force. A new Order was issued, Jan. 25, 1798, which
admitted European neutrals to enemies’ colonies, and allowed them
to bring French colonial produce to England or to their own ports.
This Order was looked upon as a side-blow at American shipping,
which was not allowed the same privilege of sailing direct from the
Antilles to Europe. The new Order was justified on the ground that
the old rule discriminated in favor of American merchants, whose
competition might be injurious to the commercial interests of
England.[229]
Further than this the British government did not then go; on the
contrary, it officially confirmed the existing arrangement. The British
courts of admiralty conformed closely to the rules of their political
chiefs. Sir William Scott, better known as Lord Stowell, whose great
reputation as a judge was due to the remarkable series of judgments
in which he created a new system of admiralty law, announced with
his usual clearness the rules by which he meant to be guided. In the
case of the “Emmanuel,” in November, 1799, he explained the
principle on which the law permitted neutrals to carry French
produce from their own country to France. “By importation,” he said,
“the produce became part of the national stock of the neutral
country; the inconveniences of aggravated delay and expense were
a safeguard against this right becoming a special convenience to
France or a serious abridgement of belligerent rights.” Soon
afterward, in the case of the “Polly,” April 29, 1800, he took occasion
to define what he meant by importation into a neutral country. He
said it was not his business to decide what was universally the test
of a bona fide importation; but he was strongly disposed to hold that
it would be sufficient if the goods were proved to have been landed
and the duties paid; and he did accordingly rule that such proof was
sufficient to answer the fair demands of his court.
Rufus King, then American minister in London, succeeded in
obtaining from Pitt an express acceptance of this rule as binding on
the government. On the strength of a report[230] from the King’s
Advocate, dated March 16, 1801, the British Secretary of State
notified the American minister that what Great Britain considered as
the general principle of colonial trade had been relaxed in a certain
degree in consideration of the present state of commerce. Neutrals
might import French colonial produce, and convey it by re-
exportation to France. Landing the goods and paying the duties in
America legalized the trade, even though these goods were at once
re-shipped and forwarded to France on account of the same owners.
With this double guaranty Jefferson began his administration, and
the American merchants continued their profitable business. Not only
did they build and buy large numbers of vessels, and borrow all the
capital they could obtain, but doubtless some French and Spanish
merchants, besides a much greater number of English, made use of
the convenient American flag. The Yankees exulted loudly over the
decline of British shipping in their harbors; the British masters
groaned to see themselves sacrificed by their own government; and
the British admirals complained bitterly that their prize-money was
cut off, and that they were wearing out their lives in the hardest
service, in order to foster a commerce of smugglers and perjurers,
whose only protection was the flag of a country that had not a single
line-of-battle ship to fly it.
Yet President Jefferson had reason to weigh long and soberly the
pointed remark with which the King’s Advocate began his report,—
that the general principle with respect to the colonial trade had been
to a certain extent relaxed in consideration of the present state of
commerce. No doubt the British pretension, as a matter of
international law, was outrageous. The so-called rule of 1756 was
neither more nor less than a rule of force; but when was international
law itself anything more than a law of force? The moment a nation
found itself unable to show some kind of physical defence for its
protection, the wisdom of Grotius and Bynkershoek could not
prevent it from being plundered; and how could President Jefferson
complain merely because American ships were forbidden by
England to carry French sugars to France, when he looked on
without a protest while England and France committed much greater
outrages on every other country within their reach?
President Jefferson believed that the United States had ample
means to resist any British pretension. As his letters to Paine and
Logan showed, he felt that European Powers could be controlled
through the interests of commerce.[231] He was the more firmly
convinced by the extraordinary concessions which Pitt had made,
and by the steady encouragement he gave to the American
merchant. Jefferson felt sure that England could not afford to
sacrifice a trade of some forty million dollars, and that her colonies
could not exist without access to the American market. What need to
spend millions on a navy, when Congress, as Jefferson believed,
already grasped England by the throat, and could suffocate her by a
mere turn of the wrist!
This reasoning had much in its favor. To Pitt the value of the
American trade at a time of war with France and Spain was
immense; and when taken in connection with the dependence of the
West Indian colonies on America, it made a combination of British
interests centring in the United States which much exceeded the
entire value of all England’s other branches of foreign commerce. Its
prospective value was still greater if things should remain as they
were, and if England should continue to undersell all rivals in articles
of general manufacture. England could well afford to lose great sums
of money in the form of neutral freights rather than drive Congress to
a protective system which should create manufactures of cotton,
woollen, and iron. These were motives which had their share in the
civility with which England treated America; and year by year their
influence should naturally have increased.
Of all British markets the American was the most valuable; but
next to the American market was that of the West Indies. In some
respects the West Indian was of the two the better worth preserving.
From head to foot the planters and their half-million negroes were
always clad in cottons or linens made by the clothiers of Yorkshire,
Wiltshire, or Belfast. Every cask and hoop, every implement and
utensil, was supplied from the British Islands. The sailing of a West
Indian convoy was “an epoch in the diary of every shop and
warehouse throughout the Kingdom.”[232] The West Indian colonies
employed, including the fisheries, above a thousand sail of shipping
and twenty-five thousand seamen. While America might, and one
day certainly would, manufacture for herself, the West Indies could
not even dream of it; there the only profitable or practicable industry
was cultivation of the soil, and the chief article of cultivation was the
sugar-cane. Rival industries to those of Great Britain were
impossible; the only danger that threatened British control was the
loss of naval supremacy or the revolt of the negroes.
A great majority of British electors would certainly have felt no
hesitation in deciding, as between the markets of the United States
and of the West Indies, that if a choice must be made, good policy
required the government to save at all hazards the West Indies. Both
as a permanent market for manufactures and as a steady support for
shipping, the West Indian commerce held the first place in British
interests. This fact needed to be taken into account by the United
States government before relying with certainty on the extent to
which Great Britain could be controlled by the interests involved in
the American trade. At the most critical moment all Jefferson’s
calculations might be upset by the growth of a conviction in England
that the colonial system was in serious danger; and to make this
chance stronger, another anxiety was so closely connected with it as
to cause incessant alarm in the British mind.
The carrying-trade between the French West Indies and Europe
which had thus fallen into American hands, added to the natural
increase of national exports and imports, required a large amount of
additional shipping; and what was more directly hostile to English
interests, it drew great numbers of British sailors into the American
merchant-service. The desertion of British seamen and the
systematic encouragement offered to deserters in every seaport of
the Union were serious annoyances, which the American
government was unable to excuse or correct. Between 1793 and
1801 they reached the proportions of a grave danger to the British
service. Every British government packet which entered the port of
New York during the winter before Jefferson’s accession to power
lost almost every seaman in its crew; and neither people nor
magistrates often lent help to recover them. At Norfolk the crew of a
British ship deserted to an American sloop-of-war, whose
commander, while admitting the fact, refused to restore the men,
alleging his construction of official orders in his excuse.[233] In most
American harbors such protection as the British shipmaster obtained
sprang from the personal good-will of magistrates, who without strict
legal authority consented to apply, for the benefit of the foreign
master, the merchant-shipping law of the United States; but in one
serious case even this voluntary assistance was stopped by the
authority of a State government.
This interference was due to the once famous dispute over
Jonathan Robbins, which convulsed party politics in America during
the heated election of 1800. Thomas Nash, a boatswain on the
British frigate “Hermione,” having been ringleader in conspiracy and
murder on the high seas, was afterward identified in the United
States under the name and with the papers of Jonathan Robbins of
Danbury, in Connecticut. On a requisition from the British minister,
dated June 3, 1799, he was delivered under the extradition clause of
Jay’s treaty, and was hung. The Republican party, then in opposition,
declared that Robbins, or Nash, was in their belief an American
citizen whose surrender was an act of base subservience to Great
Britain. An effigy of Robbins hanging to a gibbet was a favorite
electioneering device at public meetings. The State of Virginia,
having a similar grievance of its own, went so far as to enact a
law[234] which forbade, under the severest penalties, any magistrate
who acted under authority of the State to be instrumental in
transporting any person out of its jurisdiction. As citizens of the
Union, sworn to support the Constitution, such magistrates were
equally bound with the Federal judges to grant warrants of
commitment, under the Twenty-seventh Article of Jay’s treaty,
against persons accused of specified crimes. The Virginia Act
directly contravened the treaty; while indirectly it prevented
magistrates from granting warrants against deserters and holding
them in custody, so that every English vessel which entered a
Virginia port was at once abandoned by her crew, who hastened to
enter the public or private ships of the United States.[235]
The captain of any British frigate which might happen to run into
the harbor of New York, if he went ashore, was likely to meet on his
return to the wharf some of his boat’s crew strolling about the town,
every man supplied with papers of American citizenship. This was
the more annoying, because American agents in British ports
habitually claimed and received the benefit of the British law; while
so far as American papers were concerned, no pretence was made
of concealing the fraud, but they were issued in any required
quantity, and were transferred for a few dollars from hand to hand.
Not only had the encouragement to desertion a share in the
decline of British shipping in American harbors, but it also warranted,
and seemed almost to render necessary, the only countervailing
measure the British government could employ. Whatever happened
to the merchant-service, the British navy could not be allowed to
suffer. England knew no conscription for her armies, because for
centuries she had felt no need of general military service; but at any
moment she might compel her subjects to bear arms, if
circumstances required it. Her necessities were greater on the
ocean. There, from time immemorial, a barbarous sort of
conscription, known as impressment, had been the ordinary means
of supplying the royal navy in emergencies; and every seafaring man
was liable to be dragged at any moment from his beer-cellar or
coasting-vessel to man the guns of a frigate on its way to a three-
years’ cruise in the West Indies or the Mediterranean. Mere
engagement in a foreign merchant-service did not release the British
sailor from his duty. When the captain of a British frigate overhauled
an American merchant-vessel for enemy’s property or contraband of
war, he sent an officer on board who mustered the crew, and took
out any seamen whom he believed to be British. The measure, as
the British navy regarded it, was one of self-protection. If the
American government could not or would not discourage desertion,
the naval commander would recover his men in the only way he
could. Thus a circle of grievances was established on each side.
Pitt’s concessions to the United States irritated the British navy and
merchant-marine, while they gave great profits to American shipping;
the growth of American shipping stimulated desertions from the
British service to the extent of injuring its efficiency; and these
desertions in their turn led to a rigorous exercise of the right of
impressment. To find some point at which this vicious circle could be
broken was a matter of serious consequence to both countries, but
most so to the one which avowed that it did not mean to protect its
interests by force.
Great Britain could have broken the circle by increasing the pay
and improving the condition of her seamen; but she was excessively
conservative, and the burdens already imposed on her commerce
were so great that she could afford to risk nothing. In the face of a
combined navy like that of Spain and France, her control of the seas
at any given point, such as the West Indies, was still doubtful; and in
the face of American competition, her huge convoys suffered under
great disadvantage. Conscious of her own power, she thought that
the United States should be first to give way. Had the American
government been willing to perform its neutral obligations strictly, the
circle might have been broken without much trouble; but the United
States wished to retain their advantage, and preferred to risk
whatever England might do rather than discourage desertion, or
enact and enforce a strict naturalization law, or punish fraud. The
national government was too weak to compel the States to respect
neutral obligations, even if it had been disposed to make the attempt.
The practice of impressment brought the two governments to a
deadlock on an issue of law. No one denied that every government
had the right to command the services of its native subjects, and as
yet no one ventured to maintain that a merchant-ship on the high
seas could lawfully resist the exercise of this right; but the law had
done nothing to define the rights of naturalized subjects or citizens.
The British government might, no doubt, impress its own subjects;
but almost every British sailor in the American service carried papers
of American citizenship, and although some of these were
fraudulent, many were genuine. The law of England, as declared
from time out of mind by every generation of her judges, held that
the allegiance of a subject was indefeasible, and therefore that
naturalization was worthless. The law of the United States, as
declared by Chief-Justice Ellsworth in 1799, was in effect the same;
[236] he held that no citizen could dissolve the compact of protection
and defence between himself and society without the consent or
default of the community. On both sides the law was emphatic to the
point that naturalization could not bind the government which did not
consent to it; and the United States could hardly require England to
respect naturalization papers which the Supreme Court of the United
States declared itself unable to respect in a similar case.
Nevertheless, while courts and judges declare what the law is or
ought to be, they bind only themselves, and their decisions have no
necessary effect on the co-ordinate branches of government. While
the judges laid down one doctrine in Westminster Hall, Parliament
laid down another in St. Stephen’s chapel; and no one could say
whether the law or the statute was final. The British statute-book
contained Acts of Parliament as old as the reign of Queen Anne[237]
to encourage the admission of foreign seamen into the British navy,
offering them naturalization as an inducement. American legislation
went not quite so far, but by making naturalization easy it produced
worse results. A little perjury, in no wise unsafe, was alone required
in order to transform British seamen into American citizens; and
perjury was the commonest commodity in a seaport. The British
government was forced to decide whether papers so easily obtained
and transferred should be allowed to bar its claims on the services of
its subjects, and whether it could afford to become a party to the
destruction of its own marine, even though the United States should
join with France and carry on endless war.
That there were some points which not even the loss of American
trade would bring England to concede was well known to Jefferson;
and on these points he did not mean to insist. Setting the matter of
impressment aside, the relations between England and America had
never been better than when the new President took office March 4,
1801. The British government seemed earnest in conciliation, and
lost no opportunity of showing its good-will. Under the Sixth Article of
Jay’s treaty, a commission had been appointed to settle long-
standing debts due to British subjects, but held in abeyance by State
legislation in contravention of the treaty of 1783. After long delays
the commission met at Philadelphia and set to work, but had made
little progress when the two American commissioners, with the
President’s approval, in the teeth of the treaty which created the
Board, refused to accept its decisions, and seceded. This violent
measure was not taken by the Administration without uneasiness, for
England might reasonably have resented it; but after some further
delay the British government consented to negotiate again, and at
last accepted a round sum of three million dollars in full discharge of
the British claim. This was a case in which England was the
aggrieved party; she behaved equally well in other cases where the
United States were aggrieved. Rufus King complained that her
admiralty courts in the West Indies and at Halifax were a scandal; in
deference to his remonstrances these courts were thoroughly
reformed by Act of Parliament. The vice-admiralty court at Nassau
condemned the American brigantine “Leopard,” engaged in carrying
Malaga wine from the United States to the Spanish West Indies. The
American minister complained of the decision, and within three days
the King’s Advocate reported in his favor.[238] The report was itself
founded on Sir William Scott’s favorable decision in the case of the
“Polly.” Soon afterward the American minister complained that
Captain Pellew, of the “Cleopatra,” and Admiral Parker had not
effectually restrained their subordinates on the American station;
both officers were promptly recalled. Although the Ministry had not
yet consented to make any arrangement on the practice of
impressment, Rufus King felt much hope that they might consent
even to this reform; meanwhile Lord Grenville checked the practice,
and professed a strong wish to find some expedient that should take
its place.
There was no reason to doubt the sincerity of the British Foreign
Office in wishing friendship. Its policy was well expressed in a
despatch written from Philadelphia by Robert Liston, the British
minister, shortly before he left the United States to return home:[239]
—

Feminist Intersectionality Centering The Margins in 21St Century Medieval Studies Samantha Seal Full Chapter

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Feminist Intersectionality: Centering

the Margins in 21st-century Medieval

Previously published in postmedieval

Spinoff from journal: “postmedieval” Volume 10, issue 3, September 2019

Samantha Katz Seala and Nicole Nolan Sidhub

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019) 10, 272–278.

In a 2016 blog post entitled ‘Antifeminism, Whiteness, and Medieval Studies,’

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interrogated notions of several concepts crucial to their argument. As Seeta

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About the Authors

Samantha Katz Seal is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of New

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Antisemitism and female power

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At least three groups of medieval English antisemitic texts feature such

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About the Author

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Alisaundre Becket: Thomas

Abstract In the South English Legendary, Thomas Becket’s mother, Alisaundre

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Þare-fore on hire gapede alday: swyþe muche fol[c] þere,

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placement. It is this isolation, this marginalization, and this yearning that

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of color and immigrants. In her voice, they hear a multilingual Christian

About the Author

Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh is a PhD candidate at the University of California,

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‘Albyon, þat þo was an Ile’:

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A story that functions as a largely-overlooked but critical node in this history

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Nature’s agency in Albion

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Ecofeminism and object-oriented feminism thus promote examination of the

Queer nature in Albion

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