Transfiguring Medievalism

If you have read Cary Howie's previous books—an intersection of medieval literature, medievalism, contemporary art and poetry, Queer Studies, and spirituality—you might agree with me that his personal, unmistakable voice becomes stronger in each book. This most recent book I would characterize as “practicing theology without a license,” and it may be just what you need in our present moment, weighted with uncertainty. The premise of each chapter is serene: a contemporary English-language poet, suffusing Howie's meditation on medieval literature and medievalism with a cool, calming light. The evocative cover of the book, Adam Belt's light installation “You Seduced Me and I Was Seduced” (2014), summarizes that approach.A few words about the cover art. Belt (b. 1975) started out as a traditional landscape painter but found that contemporary art better resonated with his understanding of himself as an artist, along the lines of such well-known near-contemporaries as Olafur Eliasson (b. 1967), James Turell (b. 1943), and Robert Irwin (b. 1928). A deeply spiritual man, Belt understands his work as a contemplative religious vocation akin to the more institutionalized, religious monastic trajectory followed in the previous century by Thomas Merton (1915–68), a writer and monk both descended from and close to modern painters and poets. Both Belt and Merton, in their different ways, breathe new life into the tradition of the early Christian Desert Fathers. Howie's trajectory strikes me as quite similar to Belt's: a classically trained medievalist, he finds inspiration in equal parts in contemporary art and medieval literature, mysticism, religious practices, and theology. In Transfiguring Medievalism, Howie samples a variety of contemplative practices including poetry, art, and prayer. The book invites us to be like an (imagined) twenty-first century beauty who may sample an (imaginary) Advent calendar that would ideally include experimental music and outdoor installations, pages of medieval manuscripts and Dominican sermons, novelists and the hottest theologians, religious dissent ca. 1415 and religious leanings ca. 1968 or in the 2020s—so elegantly couched against the grain of the mainstream as to constitute dissent. Behind another numbered door would be the essence of the excitement of reading a favorite novel, and behind yet another, the essence of being noticed by a cute barista.In other words, Howie's discussions connect poetry (including recent poems by Howie), visual arts, a sensual queer poetics, and philosophical and theological readings and meditations. The emphasis is on medieval and contemporary mysticism.The metaphors—visual, poetic, queer, and bodily—enable the reader to imagine in concrete terms and in embodied, tangible ways the concepts and ideas that are sometimes challenging not only to theorize but also to share with our students. This book can help, for example, to discuss metaphysical concepts and phenomena such as transubstantiation or transfiguration, that is, the “revelation of divinity in community,” as the title and cover blurb instruct us.To follow up on that idea—transfiguration as the revelation of divinity in community—expressed in the title, it seems that Howie's book truly resonates with our times in ways that only a group that both gently belongs to and is constantly harassed by society could anticipate. If anticipating a global pandemic is “done,” it is indubitably done by queers who came of age when AIDS emerged and during the long struggle to be recognized as a national health emergency that was worthy of allocating taxpayer-funded research hours and was not, if you will excuse my reminding a new generation of that justly forgotten phrase, “gay cancer.” Likewise, it is devoutly to be hoped that in the current crisis, there will be an eventual reckoning that children, the elderly, and people living with disability are not expendable. So, I would say that Transfiguring Medievalism is a prescient and timely book, the feeling it promotes—a deep breath and a relaxed sigh—an incredibly well-timed remedy to our everyday situation.I would not say that it is very timely, canny, or mainstream of Howie to bring out a book on transfiguration, exactly. Howie understands that better than anyone. There is a bit too much of a certain kind of Christianity going around, similar to ca. 1938, that makes everyone—literally, everyone—as nervous as a shelter cat: “lest this all get too pious, I'd ask you to keep the whale in the back of your mind. Every time I say Jesus, if it makes you nervous, just picture Megaptera Novaengliae,” Howie enjoins his reader (p. 146). So, not exactly word-for-word Howie's “transfiguration,” but recently, mainstream magazines have been recalling Durkheim's theorization of collective euphoria or “effervescence”: that good feeling that is only possible when it is shared with a loosely bound collectivity such as a choir or a church, or a schul. This was in the year one and two of the plague, when we discovered humans can form Zoom choirs. Howie and the queer thinkers he summons in his readings invite us to participate in that effervescence, and you can, too, provided you picture in your mind's eye that sea dinosaur, the whale—Megaptera Novaengliae, the New England Big Thing with Feathers, or downright Emily Dickinson's “Hope”—every time you see Jesus coalesce a bit too clearly for your comfort, on the pages of Howie's book.Howie's intellectual terroir—the ground, terrain, nest, place, intellectual home—is an almost improbably specific combination, but also one that, for me personally, could only happen here, in North America or even more specifically in the Midwest. Please note that while American artists I list below have a strikingly similar rapport with the region as the Russian writer Solzhenitsyn had with Siberia, many are also among the Midwest's most enthusiastic anthropologists. The Midwest has a great tradition of local singer-songwriters and also an adjacent contemporary arts tradition. Astonishingly many best-known contemporary visual artists are from the Midwest, from Jenny Holzer to Ann Hamilton to Ryan Trecartin (A Family Finds Entertainment, 2004); adjacent to that is the local philosophy tradition, to start with Judith Butler; adjacent also, finally, is the poetry and novel tradition. I will only mention one recent example, K. J. Cerankowski's Suture (2021), rooted in the Midwest. For Howie, this constellation includes twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetic tradition, pop culture, queer poetics, 1960s-1980s French theory, and Medieval Studies. It is a transfiguring or effervescence of a midwestern Christian, working and middle class, Arab, Jewish, steel mills, elite, native, and in a million ways complex culture whose continuing crimes, including against these writers and thinkers personally as children and adolescents, all of these authors have dematerialized and transformed into a positive, incredibly kind, and surprisingly supportive art tradition and, in Howie's case, a spiritual tradition as well. That transformation is nothing short of collective magic or alchemy.I like to imagine that if Bernard of Clairvaux (that raging antisemite, alas) or the Laon school architects, poets, and writers—or French amateur medievalists of the first half of the twentieth century, the between-the-wars and immediate post-WWII era, including Bataille and young Deleuze—were alive today, this might be their book. Or Durkheim, for that matter: a secular teacher and writer, descendant of a distinguished rabbinic family, Durkheim whose compassion seems to animate all of his work, from his dreaming up an ideal society that relishes the common good, to devoting a decade of thought and writing to suicide among Catholics and Protestants so as to understand the unhappiness of a close friend (Victor Hommay, d. 1886). And as it was for Durkheim with the rabbinic tradition, I think, Howie's project here is not to break with priesthood, but to occupy the same place differently. I am thinking, too, of Howie alongside the rustic village priests in medieval Italy immortalized in the pages of Poggio Bracciolini's Facetiae, written out in his good friend Niccolò de’ Niccoli's elegant Italic hand: men who bury their dogs in the village cemetery, cleverly manage the greedy and corrupt bishop without making him lose face, forget Lent, and hopefully do some good.Howie's prose is precise and light, unpretentious. He repeatedly makes wickedly challenging concepts vivid and clear. Howie's interests—contemporary poetry, twentieth-century French philosophy, and medieval spiritual intellectual tradition—are shared with a group of philosophers and poets who include Virginia Burrus (Theology of Eros), Karmen MacKendrick (materiality and mysticism), or the fantastic poet Mary Szybist (“Hail,” “Girls Overheard While Assembling a Puzzle”) to whom Howie introduced me in this book.For anyone who is interested in queer spiritual readings of medieval texts, and who loves and wants to explore medieval and contemporary US visual arts and poetry, this book will be a delightful discovery and a fantastic read for the spring weeks

Art · Art history · Contemplation · Literature · Medievalism · Middle Ages · Mysticism · Painting · Poetry · Queer · Sociology · Theology · History · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy