The Weight of the Past

The landscape of medieval Britain included, just as it does today, intrusions of the ancient past: the fossilized remains of prehistoric animals, Neolithic structures like Avebury and Stonehenge, barrows and graves. This paper explores the stories medieval and modern people dream to give meaning to such remnants of lost worlds, raising a series of related questions about the confluence of the timebound and the transhistorical. How can inhuman temporal gaps be grasped and expressed? Can a long history of material objects escape the freezing of its subject into discrete and noncommunicating moments? Can the distant past communicate in a language of its own? How do we treat time capsules like stone circles, burial mounds, or bodies recovered in bogs? As quarries for ordinary uses? As museum exhibits? As active agents in a living world? What is sacred about the past, or does reverence impede understanding? Can the past speak to us directly, or does it require a mediator, a necromancer, a Merlin? Must the past end as Merlin does: entombed forever in silent stone, the victim of his own inability to comprehend the workings of the world he changed, of the future he himself set into motion? How might the past be kept alive, possessed of something other than a graveyard existence?

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen is Professor and Chair of English at George Washington University. His recent publications include Hybridity, Identity & Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: Of Difficult Middles (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), Medieval Identity Machines (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), The Postcolonial Middle Ages (St. Martin's Press, 2000), and Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

Co-sponsored by the Medieval/Renaissance Reading Group, the Kelly Writers House, the Graduate Group in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, and the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly.