Is the Past a Foreign Country? Christine Chism Rutgers University Given the near millennial setting and the title of this session, I thought I could perch on the shoulders of Thomas Kuhn and his description of paradigm construction to start off my talk. The essays that make up The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature exemplify recent paradigm shifts in medieval literary studies—not only showing their richness but also gesturing at their possible restrictions—places where the paradigms elide rather than explicate. The volume is a thirtyone -ring circus of recent historicisms, philologies, textual methodologies , cultural studies, sociolinguistic analyses, colonial/national studies, and class and gender studies. I was dazzled and daunted reading it. I wondered what I had been doing all my life to learn so much that was so wonderfully new to me in one expansive volume. At the same time, the volume, like any functional paradigm, seemed settled in its ground rules. Essay after essay revealed a literary biosphere in continual transition, emerging not through conflict as much as strategic hybridization (although often with one-sided expression) to tell the story of an emerging national vernacular literature. And the kinds of stories scripted by its methodological approaches were familiar ones: foundation anxiety, colonial appropriation, antiinstitutional resistence, the ways that gender, genre, language, and literacy labor together to compound or interrogate different kinds of authority. Amid these familiar power-oriented narratives, I was missing a sense of the alterity of medieval writing—not just to modern scholars but also, continuously, to itself. Joseph Roach in Cities of the Dead describes surrogation as a mechanism for transmitting historic authority but one that approximates and appropriates the past only uneasily and with perceptible deficiency.1 In 1 Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 473 ................. 8972$$ CH15 11-01-10 12:22:30 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER a brilliant essay toward the volume’s beginning, Tom Hahn discusses the mechanics of ‘‘displacement and suture’’ (p. 76) through which early Middle English writing appropriates its past. I wondered if there were wounds that resisted suturing, literary pasts that remained other, echoing uneasily long after the Conquest and its determined appropriations. As contributors inlaid each text into a particular historic moment, an institution, an ideological enterprise, a textual or linguistic tradition, it became exemplary of movements within that describable (and often luminously described) area. Yet my experience of reading and teaching medieval writing has convinced me again and again that, to misquote J. B. S. Haldane, medieval literature, like the universe, is not only stranger than we suppose; it’s stranger than we can suppose.2 I was reading The Cambridge History of Medieval Literature and I wanted more of the Cambridge Mystery of Medieval Literature. This is an unreasonable expectation of literary history but it has at least one pedagogical function: an open-endedness that can invite not just research and investigation along paradigmatic lines but also paradigmatic rethinking. If categories exploring genre, gender, institution, language, or regime give a local habitation and a name to the social work done by writing, then how can writing that does not speak directly to those categories help us rethink them? The main genres pursued by the volume are romance and history; but by separating them both categorically and institutionally (history was chiefly a clerical production until the fourteenth and fifteenth century, and romance was defined, fascinatingly, by its recreational function) the volume makes it more difficult to talk about their many interrelationships or the many works that invoked both traditions with indiscriminate glee. Was there no separate discussion of lyric as a genre-crossing form because it was hallowed by the New Criticism, the chief instigators of the aseptic ‘‘modern critical edition’’ from whom many in the volume shudder away, reveling instead in the more historically fraught riddles of textual transmission? I wondered how much of what was strange and anomalous was slipping silently away because it didn’t fit or didn’t last. From my own small 2 ‘‘Now, my suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose but queerer than we can suppose. I suspect...