Benjamin A. Saltzman
California Institute of Technology, Humanities and Social Sciences, Weisman Postdoctoral Instructor in Medieval Literature
My research, as with my teaching, reaches outwards conceptually and historically from the early Middle Ages. Starting with literature written in Old English and Anglo-Latin between the years 600 and 1100, I am interested in studying oversized social and affective phenomena—friendship, secrecy, gesture—through fine-grained readings and archival research across a wide range of sources and objects: from laws to monastic rules, poetry to visual art, architecture to cryptography. I also try to understand the implications of these medieval cultural practices as part of a longer history of modern thought.
Biography
My first book, Bonds of Secrecy: Law, Spirituality, and the Literature of Concealment in Early Medieval England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), investigates the tensions between the medieval Christian belief in divine omniscience and the social experience of secrecy. I argue that as these tensions manifested in the legal culture and monastic life of early medieval England, they profoundly shaped the practices of literary interpretation during the period. This book was supported by several grants and fellowships, including ones from the ACLS/Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. I’ve published several related articles that exemplify the different stakes of the project. For example, in “Secrecy and the Hermeneutic Potential in Beowulf” (PMLA, 2018), I try to push the task of literary criticism in new directions by arguing that the study of a poem’s specific configurations of secrecy can allow us to employ more sensitive and, in the case of Beowulf, more humble modes of reading. Taking a more archivally-focused approach, my article “Vt hkskdkxt: Early Medieval Cryptography, Textual Errors, and Scribal Agency” (Speculum, 2018) navigates the labyrinthine world of cryptography and scribal errors in medieval manuscripts. I also wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post and was subsequently interviewed by the New York Times about how the early medieval belief in God’s omniscience can help us understand the societal consequences of today’s global data economy.
In a similar vein, I am also interested in the ways the Middle Ages has influenced the intellectual commitments of more recent eras. I recently published Thinking of the Medieval: Midcentury Intellectuals and the Middle Ages (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2022), co-edited with R. D. Perry and featuring an afterword by Martin Jay. This collection of essays illuminates the enduring and influential engagements with the Middle Ages that emerged in the twentieth century. By tracing the ways that intellectual figures of the period—such as Hannah Arendt, Erich Auerbach, W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Hans-Robert Jauss, Simone Weil—thought about medieval culture, the volume paves new avenues for understanding these thinkers in relation to one another, in light of their own contemporary moments, and in resonance with current turns in medieval studies and politics.
I’m currently working on a new book, Turning Away: Variations on an Ancient Gesture, which will be published by the University of Chicago Press in the new Thinking Literature series, edited by Nan Z. Da and Anahid Nersessian. This project has also been supported by a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. A critique of the privilege of turning from the afflictions of others, I take up five premodern scenes in which a figure looks away or covers their face: Agamemnon in Timanthes’s Sacrifice of Iphigenia, Leontius in Plato’s Republic, Alypius in Augustine’s Confessions, the onlookers to the Crucifixion in medieval and early modern art, and illustrations of Adam and Eve in their postlapsarian state. Each of these scenes opens up into an array of related examples across media and historical periods to show how the affective multivalences of these gestures invite the reader or beholder of the work of art to reflect on their own positionality in witnessing the suffering of others. The project tries to uncover what I understand to be a central feature of our engagement with the world, the act of turning away.
I am also beginning to work on a third book about the poetics of joy, but that’s for another time.
Address: Department of English Language and Literature
University of Chicago
1115 E. 58th St.
Chicago, IL 60637
Biography
My first book, Bonds of Secrecy: Law, Spirituality, and the Literature of Concealment in Early Medieval England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), investigates the tensions between the medieval Christian belief in divine omniscience and the social experience of secrecy. I argue that as these tensions manifested in the legal culture and monastic life of early medieval England, they profoundly shaped the practices of literary interpretation during the period. This book was supported by several grants and fellowships, including ones from the ACLS/Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. I’ve published several related articles that exemplify the different stakes of the project. For example, in “Secrecy and the Hermeneutic Potential in Beowulf” (PMLA, 2018), I try to push the task of literary criticism in new directions by arguing that the study of a poem’s specific configurations of secrecy can allow us to employ more sensitive and, in the case of Beowulf, more humble modes of reading. Taking a more archivally-focused approach, my article “Vt hkskdkxt: Early Medieval Cryptography, Textual Errors, and Scribal Agency” (Speculum, 2018) navigates the labyrinthine world of cryptography and scribal errors in medieval manuscripts. I also wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post and was subsequently interviewed by the New York Times about how the early medieval belief in God’s omniscience can help us understand the societal consequences of today’s global data economy.
In a similar vein, I am also interested in the ways the Middle Ages has influenced the intellectual commitments of more recent eras. I recently published Thinking of the Medieval: Midcentury Intellectuals and the Middle Ages (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2022), co-edited with R. D. Perry and featuring an afterword by Martin Jay. This collection of essays illuminates the enduring and influential engagements with the Middle Ages that emerged in the twentieth century. By tracing the ways that intellectual figures of the period—such as Hannah Arendt, Erich Auerbach, W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Hans-Robert Jauss, Simone Weil—thought about medieval culture, the volume paves new avenues for understanding these thinkers in relation to one another, in light of their own contemporary moments, and in resonance with current turns in medieval studies and politics.
I’m currently working on a new book, Turning Away: Variations on an Ancient Gesture, which will be published by the University of Chicago Press in the new Thinking Literature series, edited by Nan Z. Da and Anahid Nersessian. This project has also been supported by a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. A critique of the privilege of turning from the afflictions of others, I take up five premodern scenes in which a figure looks away or covers their face: Agamemnon in Timanthes’s Sacrifice of Iphigenia, Leontius in Plato’s Republic, Alypius in Augustine’s Confessions, the onlookers to the Crucifixion in medieval and early modern art, and illustrations of Adam and Eve in their postlapsarian state. Each of these scenes opens up into an array of related examples across media and historical periods to show how the affective multivalences of these gestures invite the reader or beholder of the work of art to reflect on their own positionality in witnessing the suffering of others. The project tries to uncover what I understand to be a central feature of our engagement with the world, the act of turning away.
I am also beginning to work on a third book about the poetics of joy, but that’s for another time.
Address: Department of English Language and Literature
University of Chicago
1115 E. 58th St.
Chicago, IL 60637
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Books by Benjamin A. Saltzman
Pre-order from Penn Press: https://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/16030.html
Pre-order from Amazon: https://amzn.to/2LIe9mv
What did it mean to keep a secret in early medieval England? It was a period when the experience of secrecy was intensely bound to the belief that God knows all human secrets, yet the secrets of God remain unknowable to human beings. In Bonds of Secrecy, Benjamin A. Saltzman argues that this double-edged conception of secrecy and divinity profoundly affected the way believers acted and thought as subjects under the law, as the devout within monasteries, and as readers before books. One crucial way it did so was by forming an ethical relationship between the self and world that was fundamentally different from its modern reflex. Whereas today the bearers of secrets might be judged for the consequences of their reticence or disclosure, Saltzman observes that, in the early Middle Ages, a person attempting to conceal a secret was judged for believing he or she could conceal it from God. In other words, to attempt to hide from God was to become ensnared in a serious sin, but to hide from the world while deliberately and humbly submitting to God’s constant observation was often a hallmark of spiritual virtue.
Looking to law codes and religious architecture, hagiographies and riddles, Bonds of Secrecy shows how legal and monastic institutions harnessed the pervasive and complex belief in God’s omniscience to produce an intense culture of scrutiny and a radical ethics of secrecy founded on the individual’s belief that nothing could be hidden from God. According to Saltzman, this ethics of secrecy not only informed early medieval notions of mental activity and ideas about the mind but also profoundly shaped the practices of literary interpretation in ways that can inform our own contemporary approaches to reading texts from the past.
Now Available!
20% OFF ! Use code: PP20 -- https://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/16030.html
Pre-order from Amazon: https://amzn.to/2LIe9mv
Articles by Benjamin A. Saltzman
When we visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) and look at ‘The Love Song (Le Chant d’Amour)’ (1868–77) by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones, we instantly register an imagined medieval life. We can’t help but notice the armoured knight, enamoured with his love as she plays a portable organ with its bellows pressed by an angel. We might observe the quiet outline of a walled medieval city that recedes in the background. We might learn from a placard or exhibition book that the painting was supposedly inspired by a Breton lai: ‘Hélas! je sais un chant d'amour/ Triste ou gai, tour à tour’ (Alas! I know a love song/ Sad or happy, each in turn).Footnote 1 If the painting is located in time, its location is expressed through a distinctly medievalising temporality.
When we stand before Marc Chagall’s ‘White Crucifixion’ (1938) at the Art Institute of Chicago, our eyes are drawn to the central figure of Christ, spotlighted, as though with divine light, from above. We might think of all the crosses and bodies of Christ in the ‘Arts of Europe: Medieval and Renaissance’ exhibit at the far corner of the building. You move to or from the Modern Wing through the other spaces of the museum, as though moving through history. But if you dwell with Chagall’s Christ, you notice his waist wrapped in a tallit. You notice the scenes of chaotic pogroms, the pillaged and burning buildings, Jewish figures lamenting and refugees fleeing by foot, carrying the Torah, or fleeing by boat en masse. You notice the host of Nazi soldiers standing in for the persecutors of a distinctly Jewish Jesus. The painting thus takes us back to the medieval, only to situate us again in the contemporary urgency of the late 1930s.
When we take in Ellsworth Kelly’s ‘Red White’ (1962) at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, we are drawn to the colour, the shape, the space. Description and explication feel insufficient. But I’ll try: it’s a single asymmetrical abstract shape with eight slightly curved and irregular sides, filled in with solid cadmium-esque red, the crisp edges of which are set against a clean white background. Time feels uncannily absent, or at least still.
That is, until you come across the final folios of the Old English Illustrated Hexateuch, an English manuscript from around the first half of the eleventh century and currently held in the British Library under the shelf-mark Cotton Claudius B.iv. It contains an Old English translation of the first six books of the Old Testament and over 400 vibrantly coloured illustrations. Embedded in history and gracing the cover of this issue of postmedieval – the title of which already temporally frames the art in relation to the medieval and its futurity – is a close-up of one of the illustrations on folio 145v of the manuscript. Here the artist was interrupted while drawing a scene from the Book of Joshua. Remarkably, these unfinished drawings give us insight into the process itself, the way art is made over time: after the figures are roughly sketched, colour is added to form the general shapes of bodies, clothes, rivers, buildings (Johnson 2000). It becomes a kind of post-figurative abstraction.
But it also does something else. I’ve always felt an eerie attraction to the parts of manuscripts that are left blank or incomplete, awaiting a planned program of illustrations or words to come. But here, it’s all the more eerie. Time feels frozen, started then stopped, but not in an anticipatory way. It is as though the freezing of time produces a work of art that could be complete, that could stand on its own. What we are left with are pure colors and shapes that seem to draw me back, as it were, to the art of Ellsworth Kelly. In a 2015 interview, he reflected on the way he ‘made drawings of things, ideas of structure,’ and explained how his art, which appears purely abstract and almost as far from figurative as possible, was often inspired by the colours and shapes he would observe around him, emerging from shadows, stairs, furniture, plants, window frames.
‘I’d like my paintings to be in the present tense,’ remarked Kelly at the start of the same interview (2015). We might pause here to ask, what would it mean for medieval art to occupy tense in the same way? Alexander Nagel offers one way to approach defamiliarising juxtapositions between medieval and modern art – juxtapositions of ‘art out of time,’ out of ‘mere historical sequence’ – proposing that ‘the point of the comparison is not merely to find a precursor or “reference” for the modern intervention; the effect of the encounter goes in both directions’ (2012, 22-23). In light of Nagel’s suggestion, the incomplete drawings of the Old English Illustrated Hexateuch invite us not to think about how those drawings look ahead in time (whether in their immediate almost-completeness or in their anticipation of future imitations), but rather to reflect on the way they exist in the present and singular moment of recognition: that is, the moment in which I – as the viewer who happens to have seen both folio 145v of the medieval manuscript and enough of Ellesworth Kelly’s art to have made some kind of phenomenologically inexplicable connection between them – stand before one or the other, absorbing their pure colour and shape in unique constellations of consciousness.
Book Chapters by Benjamin A. Saltzman
The mid-twentieth century gave rise to a rich array of new approaches to the study of the Middle Ages by both professional medievalists and those more well-known from other pursuits, many of whom continue to exert their influence over politics, art, and history today. Attending to the work of a diverse and transnational group of intellectuals – Hannah Arendt, Erich Auerbach, W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Erwin Panofsky, Simone Weil, among others – the essays in this volume shed light on these thinkers in relation to one another and on the persistence of their legacies in our own time. This interdisciplinary collection gives us a fuller and clearer sense of how these figures made some of their most enduring contributions with medieval culture in mind. Thinking of the Medieval is a timely reminder of just how vital the Middle Ages have been in shaping modern thought.
This sequence of gestures is an unusual variant in the iconography of Adam and Eve's shame, which is almost always characterized by the couple’s postlapsarian desire to conceal their newly sexualized bodies. While the Junius artist certainly conveys this more common gesture of concealment with the careful placement of the couple's hands and accompanying foliage (indicating their desire not to be seen), Adam and Eve's repeated and mutual act of covering their eyes (indicating, in contrast, a desire not to see) illuminates the artist's multivalent and dynamic interpretation of Adam and Eve's shame, the liability of vision, and what it means to be a human observer of evil, death, and suffering after the Fall.
I think for many of us who teach the history of the language from a scholarly background in Old or Middle English literature, these World Englishes pose a daunting pedagogical challenge. And as Seth Lerer reminds us Anglo-Saxonists and Chaucerians at American universities are typically an English department's first defense against this piece of the curriculum. In Chapter 7, Lerer argues this precisely because HEL remains a narrative of origin and change, it has been left to those who specialize in origins to be its overseers." Regardless of medievalists' own increasingly diverse cultural experiences of English, a hard-won diversity that has already benefited the field of Medieval Studies, medievalists' exposure to World Englishes as a field of study is necessarily more limited than those scholars of later periods, during which English first began to spread across the world. How then are such medievalists to grapple with the task of teaching precisely that which is most distant and most different from the origins of the language that we study, especially given that the scholarship on World Englishes now comprises an established and thriving field far outside the scholarly comfort zone of most medievalists? How, in
other words, can we do justice to the global phenomenon and the particularities of English in today's world?
Encyclopedia Articles by Benjamin A. Saltzman
Pre-order from Penn Press: https://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/16030.html
Pre-order from Amazon: https://amzn.to/2LIe9mv
What did it mean to keep a secret in early medieval England? It was a period when the experience of secrecy was intensely bound to the belief that God knows all human secrets, yet the secrets of God remain unknowable to human beings. In Bonds of Secrecy, Benjamin A. Saltzman argues that this double-edged conception of secrecy and divinity profoundly affected the way believers acted and thought as subjects under the law, as the devout within monasteries, and as readers before books. One crucial way it did so was by forming an ethical relationship between the self and world that was fundamentally different from its modern reflex. Whereas today the bearers of secrets might be judged for the consequences of their reticence or disclosure, Saltzman observes that, in the early Middle Ages, a person attempting to conceal a secret was judged for believing he or she could conceal it from God. In other words, to attempt to hide from God was to become ensnared in a serious sin, but to hide from the world while deliberately and humbly submitting to God’s constant observation was often a hallmark of spiritual virtue.
Looking to law codes and religious architecture, hagiographies and riddles, Bonds of Secrecy shows how legal and monastic institutions harnessed the pervasive and complex belief in God’s omniscience to produce an intense culture of scrutiny and a radical ethics of secrecy founded on the individual’s belief that nothing could be hidden from God. According to Saltzman, this ethics of secrecy not only informed early medieval notions of mental activity and ideas about the mind but also profoundly shaped the practices of literary interpretation in ways that can inform our own contemporary approaches to reading texts from the past.
Now Available!
20% OFF ! Use code: PP20 -- https://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/16030.html
Pre-order from Amazon: https://amzn.to/2LIe9mv
When we visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) and look at ‘The Love Song (Le Chant d’Amour)’ (1868–77) by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones, we instantly register an imagined medieval life. We can’t help but notice the armoured knight, enamoured with his love as she plays a portable organ with its bellows pressed by an angel. We might observe the quiet outline of a walled medieval city that recedes in the background. We might learn from a placard or exhibition book that the painting was supposedly inspired by a Breton lai: ‘Hélas! je sais un chant d'amour/ Triste ou gai, tour à tour’ (Alas! I know a love song/ Sad or happy, each in turn).Footnote 1 If the painting is located in time, its location is expressed through a distinctly medievalising temporality.
When we stand before Marc Chagall’s ‘White Crucifixion’ (1938) at the Art Institute of Chicago, our eyes are drawn to the central figure of Christ, spotlighted, as though with divine light, from above. We might think of all the crosses and bodies of Christ in the ‘Arts of Europe: Medieval and Renaissance’ exhibit at the far corner of the building. You move to or from the Modern Wing through the other spaces of the museum, as though moving through history. But if you dwell with Chagall’s Christ, you notice his waist wrapped in a tallit. You notice the scenes of chaotic pogroms, the pillaged and burning buildings, Jewish figures lamenting and refugees fleeing by foot, carrying the Torah, or fleeing by boat en masse. You notice the host of Nazi soldiers standing in for the persecutors of a distinctly Jewish Jesus. The painting thus takes us back to the medieval, only to situate us again in the contemporary urgency of the late 1930s.
When we take in Ellsworth Kelly’s ‘Red White’ (1962) at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, we are drawn to the colour, the shape, the space. Description and explication feel insufficient. But I’ll try: it’s a single asymmetrical abstract shape with eight slightly curved and irregular sides, filled in with solid cadmium-esque red, the crisp edges of which are set against a clean white background. Time feels uncannily absent, or at least still.
That is, until you come across the final folios of the Old English Illustrated Hexateuch, an English manuscript from around the first half of the eleventh century and currently held in the British Library under the shelf-mark Cotton Claudius B.iv. It contains an Old English translation of the first six books of the Old Testament and over 400 vibrantly coloured illustrations. Embedded in history and gracing the cover of this issue of postmedieval – the title of which already temporally frames the art in relation to the medieval and its futurity – is a close-up of one of the illustrations on folio 145v of the manuscript. Here the artist was interrupted while drawing a scene from the Book of Joshua. Remarkably, these unfinished drawings give us insight into the process itself, the way art is made over time: after the figures are roughly sketched, colour is added to form the general shapes of bodies, clothes, rivers, buildings (Johnson 2000). It becomes a kind of post-figurative abstraction.
But it also does something else. I’ve always felt an eerie attraction to the parts of manuscripts that are left blank or incomplete, awaiting a planned program of illustrations or words to come. But here, it’s all the more eerie. Time feels frozen, started then stopped, but not in an anticipatory way. It is as though the freezing of time produces a work of art that could be complete, that could stand on its own. What we are left with are pure colors and shapes that seem to draw me back, as it were, to the art of Ellsworth Kelly. In a 2015 interview, he reflected on the way he ‘made drawings of things, ideas of structure,’ and explained how his art, which appears purely abstract and almost as far from figurative as possible, was often inspired by the colours and shapes he would observe around him, emerging from shadows, stairs, furniture, plants, window frames.
‘I’d like my paintings to be in the present tense,’ remarked Kelly at the start of the same interview (2015). We might pause here to ask, what would it mean for medieval art to occupy tense in the same way? Alexander Nagel offers one way to approach defamiliarising juxtapositions between medieval and modern art – juxtapositions of ‘art out of time,’ out of ‘mere historical sequence’ – proposing that ‘the point of the comparison is not merely to find a precursor or “reference” for the modern intervention; the effect of the encounter goes in both directions’ (2012, 22-23). In light of Nagel’s suggestion, the incomplete drawings of the Old English Illustrated Hexateuch invite us not to think about how those drawings look ahead in time (whether in their immediate almost-completeness or in their anticipation of future imitations), but rather to reflect on the way they exist in the present and singular moment of recognition: that is, the moment in which I – as the viewer who happens to have seen both folio 145v of the medieval manuscript and enough of Ellesworth Kelly’s art to have made some kind of phenomenologically inexplicable connection between them – stand before one or the other, absorbing their pure colour and shape in unique constellations of consciousness.
The mid-twentieth century gave rise to a rich array of new approaches to the study of the Middle Ages by both professional medievalists and those more well-known from other pursuits, many of whom continue to exert their influence over politics, art, and history today. Attending to the work of a diverse and transnational group of intellectuals – Hannah Arendt, Erich Auerbach, W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Erwin Panofsky, Simone Weil, among others – the essays in this volume shed light on these thinkers in relation to one another and on the persistence of their legacies in our own time. This interdisciplinary collection gives us a fuller and clearer sense of how these figures made some of their most enduring contributions with medieval culture in mind. Thinking of the Medieval is a timely reminder of just how vital the Middle Ages have been in shaping modern thought.
This sequence of gestures is an unusual variant in the iconography of Adam and Eve's shame, which is almost always characterized by the couple’s postlapsarian desire to conceal their newly sexualized bodies. While the Junius artist certainly conveys this more common gesture of concealment with the careful placement of the couple's hands and accompanying foliage (indicating their desire not to be seen), Adam and Eve's repeated and mutual act of covering their eyes (indicating, in contrast, a desire not to see) illuminates the artist's multivalent and dynamic interpretation of Adam and Eve's shame, the liability of vision, and what it means to be a human observer of evil, death, and suffering after the Fall.
I think for many of us who teach the history of the language from a scholarly background in Old or Middle English literature, these World Englishes pose a daunting pedagogical challenge. And as Seth Lerer reminds us Anglo-Saxonists and Chaucerians at American universities are typically an English department's first defense against this piece of the curriculum. In Chapter 7, Lerer argues this precisely because HEL remains a narrative of origin and change, it has been left to those who specialize in origins to be its overseers." Regardless of medievalists' own increasingly diverse cultural experiences of English, a hard-won diversity that has already benefited the field of Medieval Studies, medievalists' exposure to World Englishes as a field of study is necessarily more limited than those scholars of later periods, during which English first began to spread across the world. How then are such medievalists to grapple with the task of teaching precisely that which is most distant and most different from the origins of the language that we study, especially given that the scholarship on World Englishes now comprises an established and thriving field far outside the scholarly comfort zone of most medievalists? How, in
other words, can we do justice to the global phenomenon and the particularities of English in today's world?