2013 Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo

Douglas Gallagher, Professor Richard Scott Nokes, Linda C. McCabe, Alexis E. Fajardo, Brandon Spars

I have a quick announcement before I give my report on the 48th International Congress on Medieval Studies:

I will be doing a reading and book signing at the English Bookshop in Milano, Italy on Monday, June 17th at 6:30 pm. The address is 12 Via Mascheroni (the store opens on Via Ariosto!). Please help spread the word to anyone you know who lives in Northern Italy and might be interested in hearing me speak. Note: I do not speak Italian, so they would have to understand English. If they intend on coming, please let Peter Panton know in advance to help him determine how many chairs to set out and how many books to order. Another way to RSVP would be to send me an email or to join the event on my Facebook page.

 Okay, back to my report:

I recently returned from my first ever Medieval Congress held on the campus of Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

To give you an idea of how large this gathering is, here are a few statistics:

There are approximately 3,000 medievalists from all over the world who attend this four day annual event.

This year's program had over 250 pages

There were over 500 sessions with roughly fifty running simultaneously

The deadline to submit proposals for next year's Congress is June 1, 2013

It is so large that it not a conference, it is a congress.  I do not know at what point the classification changes from conference to congress, but perhaps it is with the sheer number of sessions offered.


If you couldn't find something you wanted to attend, you didn't look hard enough.

I grew up in the state of Michigan, but it was only after I moved to California and started reading medievalist blogs that I  learned of this annual event.

It took a fair bit of advance planning over a year ago for me to be a participant in this year's congress. Thankfully, I found some like minded people who all happen to live in Sonoma County to agree to join me in a panel. We all had adapted the legends of Charlemagne in the hopes of introducing these tales to twenty-first century audiences. I also approached a regular attendee of these congresses and asked if he would be our organizer and preside over the session.

Thankfully, Professor Awesome agreed.

Schmoozing with Professor Richard Scott Nokes AKA Professor Awesome.

We were session #402 out of 582 sessions. I think we were lucky in our schedule because it was Saturday morning at 10 am. It could have been an evening session after the wine hour or we might have had an 08:30 am Sunday morning session when people are recovering from the popular Saturday night dance.

I helped Lex Fajardo staff a table in the exhibit hall. We took turns staffing the table during meal times and when one of us wanted to attend a session.

Lex Fajardo and me at the exhibit table

There were several sessions I attended that I want to highlight. The first was "Constructions of Women Warriors in Medieval Eurasia 2.0." In particular, there were two papers that seemed appropriate to my interest in the women warriors in Carolingian legends.

Suzanne Hagedorn of the College of William and Mary gave a paper titled "The Amazon as Temptress: Thalestris in the Alexander Romance Tradition." I had never heard of Queen Thalestris and the story of her approaching Alexander the Great asking to bear his child since she regarded him as being the epitome of male strength, valor and prowess.

It was an interesting paper and it that reminded me of a portion of Orlando furioso that I did not use in my novel.  Canto XX details the history of an Amazonian tribe that warrior Queen Marfisa came across during her travels. Men were scarce in this tribe and those who were allowed to live after venturing near their shores had to pass tests of surviving combat with ten men in a single day and then satisfying ten women later that night.

(While this passage is interesting and humorous, it did not further my plot of Bradamante and Ruggiero's love story and so it was cut by me.)

The second paper from that session that I would like to mention was delivered by Diane Wright of Grand Valley State University. It was titled "Early Iberian Models of the Female Warrior: History, Myth and Legend."

I look forward to corresponding with Diane in the future about those legends.

Schmoozing with Professor Diane Wright

Another session I attended was the French Cultural Traditions in Italy: The Era of Andrea da Barberino. I do not speak or read Italian, so I was unfamiliar with the source material mentioned in the various talks. However, I met scholars interested in the Matters of France and how they were disseminated into Italy and Italian literature. I anticipate having a good correspondance with those contacts.

On Friday I attended a panel regarding E-publishing and Medieval Studies. I wanted to show support for Professor Nokes as well as meet Peter and Sandra from the wildly popular blog Medievalists.net fame.

Peter and Sandra from Medievalists.net and Professor Nokes

Saturday was the day of our session and while I had been hoping for better attendance, those who came were enthusiastic about our topic.

I spoke about the challenges of adapting two epic poems into a novel suitable for 21st century audiences. This included correcting continuity errors with geography, culling extraneous subplots, and balancing the needs of drama vs. historical accuracy.

Lex Fajardo discussed his approach to blending the Beowulf story with heroes of other legends in a graphic novel form. In his Kid Beowulf series, Beowulf and Grendel are twelve year old twin brothers and his stories are "prequels" to the classic legends.

Lex showing images from the prologue of his first graphic novel Kid Beowulf and the Blood-Bound Oath

Doug Gallagher discussed how he and his students adapted Orlando furioso into a stage production using Pink Floyd's album The Dark Side of the Moon  as a soundtrack.

Doug showing a picture of the many visual elements of that incredible stage production.

Brandon Spars then talked about how he taught the Song of Roland to his class. It involved using a tin foil horn as a prop as he read the classic poem and then squirting ketchup on his face to simulate Roland's temples bursting. I am sure none of his students will forget that day's lesson.

Brandon Spars with "blood" on his face

After our session, I participated in a lunchtime roundtable discussion sponsored by Kalamazoo's local independent bookstore Kazoo Books. There were seven (or eight?) authors on the panel discussing writing historical fiction. Most of the authors were also professors, and I believe I was the only one whose genre extended into the fantasy realm. There was a good give and take between the presenters and the audience who asked some thoughtful questions. For the next two days I had people who recognized me from that talk and I was able to extend the conversation with them about our shared love of books.

Here are two other photos of people that I met who helped make this a special time for me.

Here I am with Medievalist blogger and grad student Jennifer Lynn Jordan

I had read Jennifer's Per Omni Saecula blog for many years and grew to appreciate her humor and love of all things medieval. It was even better meeting her in person. She's cool and I hope once her busy academic year is over that we can share a bad medieval movie mash up like she did once with Carl Pyrdum.

I had so many wonderful conversations with medievalists from all over the globe. I was thrilled to meet Italian and French medievalists so that I could talk about the legends of Charlemagne with them since it is a part of their shared heritage.

I also met a man who is descended from the Noble House of d'Este.

Yes, as I read his name badge, I asked James Estes if he was a descendant to the patrons of Boiardo and Ariosto. He admitted that he was.

This led to a spirited exchange with many laughs and this photo.

Schmoozing with James Estes, descendant of the patrons of Ariosto and Boiardo

How many times do I have the opportunity to geek out over the Noble House of d'Este?

More photos from the 48th International Congress on Medieval Studies can be found on my novel's official Facebook page with this open link. (Meaning you don't have to be a member of Facebook to see this album.)

I plan on going back to the Medieval Congress again, but perhaps in 2015 to help spur on the celebration of the 500th anniversary of the original publication of Orlando furioso. Plus by that time, I should have my sequel published.

Please let me know your experiences with the Congress and any other pages with photos, remembrances, etc.

Thank you,

Linda

http://lcmccabe.blogspot.com/2013/05/2013-medieval-congress-in-kalamazoo.html

Feminine Archetypes and Symbolism in Carolingian Legends

The following is the text of the paper I gave at the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology Conference held in San Francisco on May 11th and 12th.

Like many conferences, it was difficult to choose which session to attend because there were many topics that sounded interesting.  With that in mind, I wanted to share this online for those who were not able to hear my talk.

Deconstructing Carolingian legends to discover feminine archetypes and symbolism

Before I start, I want to get a sense of the room.  How many people here are familiar with Arthurian legends? Now, how about Carolingian legends?

I want to first give an overview of Carolingian legends for those unfamiliar with them.  The word Carolingian comes from the Latin Carolus Magnus, meaning Karl the Great, better known to us as Charlemagne. The legends of Charlemagne are just as luxurious of a source material as the legends of Arthur, but without any debate as to whether or not Charlemagne was an historical figure, he was, and the legends about him were stories created to entertain and not considered as history.

I will touch on the most popular aspect of these legends in art and drama so that you will be able have discussions with people who may only be familiar with the legends of Roland (in French) or Orlando (in Italian). The most famous of the legends of Charlemagne is the Chanson de Roland or the Song of Roland.  Written in the eleventh century by a Frenchman, it was loosely based on a real defeat of Charlemagne's army in 778 in the Roncevaux Pass in the Pyrenees.  The historical events are rendered into mythology.  There are other stories comprising the Matters of France, not all were written by Frenchmen, but they all deal with legends of Medieval France. Similarly, the Matters of Britain were not all written by British writers, but they concern Medieval Britain.

Some of the largest sources of Carolingian legend, and what I will be discussing today are two epic poems written by Italians. Orlando innamorato (Orlando in love) was written by Matteo Maria Boiardo and the first version was published in 1483 and another version with more cantos was published posthumously in 1495. He stopped writing his story when the French army invaded Italy in 1494.  He found it impossible to lionize the heroic nature of fictional Frankish warriors when real French warriors were attacking the various duchies on the Italian peninsula.

A decade or so later, Ludovico Ariosto was commissioned by the same patrons to continue Boiardo's unfinished tale.  Ariosto's Orlando furioso (Orlando enraged) became more famous than its predecessor and was first published in 1516, so we will soon be celebrating its five hundredth anniversary.

Those poems were pure fiction and written to entertain and flatter the poets' patrons the noble house of Este in the northern Italian city of Ferrara.  The stories depict wars that never took place between Christian and Muslim armies and were undoubtedly influenced by the Crusades, which occurred centuries after Charlemagne's death in 814.

The two poems follow the title character of Orlando, a famous paladin of Charlemagne, and his unrequited love for Angelica the princess of Cathay.  Once Orlando discovers that Angelica has married another, he goes insane.  The story has multiple interweaving plotlines and numerous disparate settings from Europe and North Africa to Asia.

Boiardo's epic featured an invasion of the Frankish Empire by the North African Muslim army and the war was finally finished in Ariosto’s tale.  There were brave knights, scoundrels, bloody sieges, enchanted realms, sorceresses, wizards, a flying hippogriff as well as the brave female warriors, Bradamante and Marfisa.

These stories inspired many artists such as Doré, Fragonard and Ingres. There was a special exhibit in 2009 at the Louvre in Paris featuring the art inspired by Orlando furioso. There are also at least a dozen operas that cover portions of Ariosto's masterpiece. Cervante's classic novel Don Quixote includes mentions of the poem and William Shakespeare even borrowed a dramatic set-up from the fourth canto of Orlando furioso for a scene in his famous comedy "Much Ado about Nothing."

 Most people who are somewhat familiar with these stories know of Orlando's love and madness, but they are not as familiar with Bradamante's story which began as a subplot, but wound up becoming front and center in the story at its conclusion.  In Italian, her name is pronounced Bradamanté, whereas the French pronunciation is Bradamante.  Because she is a Frankish character, I use the French variant, but both are correct.

I feel Bradamante should be as famous and as well examined a character as Guinevere, Morgan le Fay and the Lady of the Lake.

The first time I read Orlando furioso was nearly ten years ago and I was startled to discover such a strong female character in literature. I had a hard time believing that this feminist character was written centuries ago, by a man, and I wondered why I had never heard of her before.

I see Bradamante as being a blend of two similar archetypes:  Joan of Arc and Athena.  Bradamante is depicted as riding on a white horse, bearing a shield and plume of white, having cropped hair and disguising herself as a man.  She also has the nickname "The Maid."  Since Joan of Arc was killed in 1431, it is reasonable to think that Boiardo and Ariosto were inspired by this real life heroine as they were writing their fictional heroine.

The major difference between the Maid of Orléans and Bradamante is that the fictional character was not persecuted for her military prowess, but instead heralded and valued as a military commander.  She was the niece of Charlemagne and came from a distinguished military family. Her interest in warfare was not due to hearing divine voices, but instead military duty was in her blood.  Charlemagne had also been a powerful monarch for many years before his niece was born, so unlike King Charles VII of France, he was not threatened by this warrior maiden's influence with the people.

Similar to Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom and victory, Bradamante is depicted at the beginning to have a heart unmoved by men.  That is until Ruggiero, a Saracen warrior, performed an uncommon act of chivalry on her behalf on the battlefield.  This led to their talking to one another and experiencing Love at First Sight.  Ruggiero was descended from Hector of Troy and strove to live up to the image of his noble ancestor as the perfect knight. 

Dore's hippogriff

Bradamante and Ruggiero represent an impossible love as they are warriors on opposite sides of a holy war.  Symbolically this impossible love is represented in the story by the hippogriff, a mythical creature that is part eagle and part horse, and first described in Virgil's Ecclogues as being born of the mating of natural enemies of griffins and mares. Griffins were fierce protectors of gold and raiders rode horses in efforts to steal gold, leading to the animals' enmity of each other. Ariosto was the first author to use the hippogriff as a character in literature.

Bradamante and Ruggiero's bliss at finding one another does not last and they are soon cruelly separated.

This love story of Bradamante and Ruggiero shows an inverse on what we have come to expect with the hero cycle as described by Joseph Campbell with his thesis the Hero With a Thousand Faces.  Instead, Bradamante's story arc is more in line with the Heroine's Journey as described by Valerie Estelle Frankel.  Bradamante, a fair damsel, is given the Call to Adventure and is told she must rescue her beloved who is being held captive by a wizard in an enchanted castle.  After rescuing Ruggiero, her next task is to persuade him to be baptized as a Christian and marry her. In so doing, their union will bring forth generations of heroes who will, in time, lead to the noble house d'Este of Ferrara.

This is far different from traditional quest stories with a young man fighting evil in order to save his world from destruction.  Instead, Bradamante is told that her ultimate goal is marriage and motherhood.  There is a tragic element however, for it is also foretold that Ruggiero will be betrayed and killed before the birth of their child.

This next part is not symbolism or archetypes, but I wanted to share with you the qualitative difference in plot structure than what we have become accustomed to. While Ruggiero is the orphaned youth raised in obscurity, it differs from most stories in that there are two prophecies with divergent fates for Ruggiero.  Should he remain a Muslim, he would bring about the defeat of Charlemagne devastating Christendom. These stakes are compounded with dueling magical forces trying to influence which fate will come to pass.

There are other feminine archetypes appearing in these poems that are worth mentioning.  The character Angelica, the object of Orlando's romantic obsession, is described as the most beautiful woman in the world and caused every man to fall violently in love with her.  She is the archetype of Helen of Sparta (and later Troy) who was the catalyst for a war with multiple suitors vying to possess her.

Dore's Alcina

There is also Alcina, a sorceress who uses her magical powers to appear youthful.  After tiring of her lovers, she transforms them into trees and shrubs - retaining them as souvenirs of her conquests.  This echoes the story of Circe from Greek mythology.

Another female character you should know about is the other warrior maiden Marfisa.  She was abducted as a small girl, sold into slavery, and has a deep-rooted hatred of men in general.  She survived a rape attempt by her king by killing him.  She then slaughtered the king's guards until she was declared Queen Marfisa.  That was the first of many kingdoms she conquered.  Marfisa represents a destructive force of womanhood in that she conquers but does not govern. I see her as the archetype of Nemesis, the goddess of retribution.

Marfisa and Bradamante appear to be opposites at first.  Marfisa is a Muslim while Bradamante is a Christian, and they are both attracted to Ruggiero. Only when it is revealed that Marfisa is not a romantic rival for Ruggiero's affections, do the two women put aside their differences and become fast friends and allies.

These legends are also filled with symbolism. The richest symbolic scene is when Bradamante is given the Call to Adventure in a cave, recognized symbolically as the womb.  Melissa, an old enchantress, tells Bradamante of the two prophecies surrounding Ruggiero and what is expected of her.  Melissa represents the Crone.  Bradamante is a warrior maid who is being asked to become a wife and mother.  The two women together comprise the three aspects of the triple headed goddess:  Maiden, Mother, Crone.  Bradamante represents the Blade being transformed into the Chalice by the Power of Love.

National ASWM Board Member Anne R. Key and Linda C. McCabe

http://lcmccabe.blogspot.com/2012/05/feminine-archetypes-and-symbolism-in.html

Upcoming conferences

The next three months are going to be busy for me as I will be at three different conferences.

The first chronologically is the Women's Power and Strategy Conference organized by my friend Patricia V. Davis and being held on Saturday, March 24 from 9-5 pm at the San Domenico School in San Anselmo, California. I will be a vendor at this conference that is billed as "a gathering of leaders from diverse backgrounds and areas of expertise who are joining forces to educate and inspire women of all ages to believe and invest in their own talent, skills, and potential.

Speakers include keynote Malissa Feruzzi Shriver, California Arts Council Chair, Founder - Feruzzi Fine Art, Evan Bailyn, Erika Bjune, Christine Bronstein, Nancy Calef, Zoe Fitzgerald Carter, Marisa Churchill, Kaye Cloutman, Deborah Cooper, Verna Dreisbach, Deborah Grabien, Dr. Tamarah McClintock Greenberg, Jeb Harrison, Laura McHale-Holland, Joe Klocek, Dena Kouremetis, Vicki Larson, Linda Lee, Frances Lefkowitz, Monique Lessan, Ivory Madison, Gil Mansergh, Amanda McTigue, Hyla Molander, Kimberly Moore, Justin Oliver, Kim Pipkin, Laurie Berry, Rebecca Rosenberg, Jeannette Sears, Ransom Stephens, Alex Vargas, Niko Volonakis, Jody Weiner, Susanna Solomon, and Mimi Towle.

All registrations of adults at the regular rate of $100 will include a gift registration for a girl. More information and to register for the conference can be found here.

I will be a presenter at my writers club upcoming conference on Saturday, April 28th at the Santa Rosa Junior College in Santa Rosa, California. It is Redwood Writers Next Step Conference where writers are encouraged to take their "next step."

I will be moderating the luncheon panel of four industry experts: Mark Coker founder of Smashwords, Charlotte Cook principal of Adapting Sideways, Joel Friedlander proprietor of Marin Bookworks, and Laurie McLean literary agent with Larsen-Pomada Literary Agents. We will be discussing the rapid changes in the publishing industry in the 21st century and how writers can use those changes to their advantage.

The morning keynote address will be done by the marvelously talented David Corbett.

A description of the talks given by the following presenters can be found here.

Abby Lynn Bogomolny

Catherine Brady

Frances Caballo

Robert Digitale

Verna Dreisbach

Kate Farrell

Jody Gehrman

C.W. Gortner

Deborah Grabien

Suzanne Lang

Rob Loughran

Pete Masterson

Arlene Miller

Kemble Scott

Jeane Slone

Geri Spieler

Lee Stein

A special newsletter created for the conference can be found here.

There is also a banquet the night before the conference with the focus on poetry including the keynote speaker Al Young, California Poet Laureate Emeritus.

The deadline to register for the conference and the poetry night is April 13th!

And lastly, I will be presenting a paper "Deconstructing Carolingian legends to discover feminine archetypes and symbolism" at the biennial national conference of the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology being held in San Francisco from May 11-12. For more information about that conference, please see their website here.

http://lcmccabe.blogspot.com/2012/03/upcoming-conferences.html