How Soon is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers and the Queerness of Time

"This book is a bit of an outlier. I chose it because the impossible task of this five-book conversation was to find five books about queer history tout court . Most of the books we’ve talked about so far, are focused on the 20th century. But there are books on the Renaissance and on ancient history , too. This one is primarily on medieval history. I really like it and find it particularly interesting. It’s good to end with this one because it brings us to very fundamental questions about history and time. It discusses the complexity of temporality, it is part of a whole debate around so-called queer temporalities. And Carolyn Dinshaw’s contribution is really the notion of the “expansive now”. It enables a spatialisation of time that kind of collapses what historians in the conventional register would consider vast temporal distances. Her text reaches across centuries, links people from the 15th and the 20th centuries, and I think it does so in a very commendable fashion, because it’s not based on identity. With a lot of queer history, you’re always kind of haunted by the question, do you presuppose an identity with the actors 50, 100, or 200 years ago, by calling all of them queer, queer as we identify ourselves. Is that kind of breaching a temporal distance? Is that based on a false anachronistic identification, and prescribing a contemporary sense of queerness and projecting it on to the past? But that’s not what Dinshaw is doing. She has this notion of a queer touch across time, where difference is a precondition for such touching across time becoming possible. And I think that has a lot to do with her—admittedly complicated, but I think, inspiring—notion of queer temporality. It tries to move away from a linear understanding of time and to think of every kind of present as expanding in a spatial sense. And that kind of expansion then creates overlaps and encounters, enables touches that may seem impossible at first. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . There are a couple of chapters here about different amateur readers of medieval texts, about Geoffrey Chaucer and others, about King James I of Scotland, about John Mandeville and the imagination of British or Indian medieval pasts. There’s a post-colonial element as well. The first chapter looks at ‘monks, kings, sleepers and other time travellers.’ The chapter that I found most interesting and I want to say a little bit more about is on Margery Kempe who was a late medieval English mystic and writer, a female person, who is read as a queer person here, but not by assuming any kind of same sex desire on the part of Margery Kempe but by simply describing her as a woman who did not live up to, or lived outside of, the gendered expectations of her day. She was a married woman who, having given birth to quite a large number of children, requested that her husband relieve her of her marriage duties. She then enters a chaste life as a mystic, as a kind of a nun. So, as I was saying before, this is not queer in our contemporary understanding, but it is kind of a life beyond late medieval expectations and norms that allows Carolyn Dinshaw to reach across time to touch Margery Kempe and vice versa. That’s what I really like about this chapter. The touching runs through one amateur reader of medieval texts, Hope Emily Allen, a medievalist in the ’20s and ’30s, and into the 1940s, who tried to write a magnum opus, a big book on Margery Kempe, and who was also involved in the first modern edition of The Book of Margery Kempe , the 15th century manuscript. And then there’s a moment in the text, where Carolyn Dinshaw, begins to realise that Hope Emily Allen, her medievalist precursor in the first half of the 20th century, could also be described in some sense, as queer. Again, not in our contemporary sense, but there is that inkling of not conforming with heteronormative expectations, a moment of recognition, a movement of desire that enables what is described here as a ‘queer touch’ across time. And I think it’s fundamental for queer history, in general, to acknowledge such queer touches across time, even if they reach as far back as, in this case, the late medieval period. Yes, I would say there are two usages of the word ‘queer’. One is an umbrella term for the whole spectrum of LGBT. You can also say ‘queer’ is a synonym for that. And that is important, but I think not the most interesting aspect. The more interesting one is a specific perspective on present day politics as well as on the past that motivates our research. It looks at questions around sexuality and gender, sexual and gender diversity, and understands those as fundamental to history. It’s similar to when gender was proposed as a fundamental category of analysis by Joan Scott. So you can also say queer history is not just about adding aspects and groups of people to the histories we already have. But it is a way to really fundamentally change our understanding of history by claiming that you cannot fully understand any period and any historical development if you do not also take into account queerness."