Dr. Henry Ravenhall is a professor in the Department of French, where he specializes in medieval French literature. Before coming to Berkeley, Professor Ravenhall earned his B.A., M.A., and PhD from King’s College London. He also served as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge. Professor Ravenhall’s research interests, which we discuss in this interview, include manuscript culture, temporality, and environmental humanities.
Firstly, can you tell us a bit about how you decided to pursue academia, and what brought you to the field of medieval French literature?
I’ve always been fascinated by medieval history and ancient history. I studied it in high school, and in college I double majored in French and History. On the history side of my degree, I was interested in the Romans and Byzantines, as well as medieval European history. On the French side, I worked mostly on modern literature, film, and thought. So, the two sides were quite distinct until my final year when I took a medieval French literature course, and I was just blown away by how rich, complex and deeply strange it was, and also how resonant it was with contemporary questions and concerns. There’s a huge strand of recent medieval French scholarship that’s thinking about medieval texts in relation to twentieth-century thought – psychoanalysis, hermeneutics, feminism, queer theory. It came across as a very lively and generative field, and really excited me.
Can you share a bit about your current research, or recent past projects?
I’m working on two main projects at the moment. They’re both connected to the question of manuscript materiality: the materiality of texts, how texts circulate, and how we deal with this materiality, given that today we approach texts as stable printed objects. One project is considering the importance of thinking about time in relation to manuscripts. What’s crucial about manuscript culture is that manuscripts are often copied long after the author originally composed their text, and this gap or time lag between when the author writes and when it’s later copied is very difficult to deal with and interpret in literary history. I’m trying to propose an approach for dealing with that time difference. I use a theoretical model, a thinking of history, called anachrony, or the anachronic. The anachronic is basically a way of questioning the desire to identify something in relation to a certain period. You will have heard of anachronism, which is what historians shouldn’t do, as it is misidentifying a historical point of time, or conflating two different points in time. A basic example would be a Roman soldier wearing a wrist watch. But there’s also lots of generative potential in thinking about what’s at stake in the conflation of different periods, and why it should be such an error for the historian. So, this project is on that: on the anachrony of manuscripts, and how manuscripts resist this desire we have to locate things at a set point in time.
Then I have another project about touch. This project is still related to manuscript materiality and thinking about the medieval book as a tactile object. My thinking about this really emerged during the pandemic, when there was a pressing conversation about the importance of touch to wellbeing and the social fabric. If you remember, there was this discourse about the loss of touch and a real worry about the replacement of physical touch with mediated forms of communication that were associated with a lack of touch. Touch seemed to be thought – or become thinkable – largely in relation to its perceived absence or loss. Tied to this were questions of community, and being together, and how there can be forms of being together that cannot be achieved through digital mediation. This connects back to the medieval because manuscripts as tactile objects provide a way for a community or group – often reading in the Middle Ages is a social, collective act – a way of coming together around a text, and a way of dealing with an ethical or political problem that the text expresses. I’m thinking about the manuscript as not just communicating or transferring, but as embodying, materializing, and affording a kind of communal being-together that allows a local, particular group to negotiate an identity. That project is looking at all the different ways readers touch books, and interact with the manuscript as physical entities. All the traces of touching we find in these books indicate the centrality of a haptic or tactile relationship to literature which we find, now, quite alien. We think of the novel or the book as an idealized object – a collection of ideas – even though we also couch their effect on readers in a language of touching. It may be that the medieval context gives physical form to, and leaves an actual trace of, what has always been at stake in reading literature.
Speaking of manuscripts, there are inherent difficulties in studying them. How can scholars deal with the ways that manuscripts change over time?
As soon as you’re dealing with the premodern past, you’re dealing with a loss of evidence and a loss of witnesses to a textual culture. Sappho is a really good example of this problem, because who Sappho is and how she relates to her poetry is a reconstruction of, and modern engagement with, the very little that remains. I think the question of change and loss is really important, partly because it’s built into the affective dimensions of medievalist scholarship. That is to say that there’s often a desire on the part of the medievalist to restore something that is lost – to search or long for something that can’t be retrieved. When we’re talking about loss and the fragmentary nature of premodern textual cultures, we’re talking about a scholarly affect and desire that often goes unacknowledged. The idea of the fragment holds huge sway over the scholarly and popular imagination, and the fantasy of something being lost to time or rediscovered is what spurs the return to the archive. Studying manuscripts always involves confronting this fantasy.
What’s crucial about medieval textual cultures is the central role of oral transmission and manuscript circulation in defining what the “text” is. When we’re looking at a manuscript, we’re looking at a fixed object, in the sense that it is one particular version that’s been recorded, but probably there were other versions we don’t have a trace of. Paul Zumthor, a Swiss medievalist and structuralist who wrote in the 1970s, coined the term “mouvance.” This concept calls into question the modern desire to try to establish the text of a particular author or a particular work. That goes against the grain of medieval textual culture, which is predicated on a plurality of versions in circulation, and only some of which we have access to today. So change, in terms of textual diversity, is really an aesthetic and material condition of medieval textual culture, and our work as literary scholars and historians is to accept that, and try to engage with the medieval on its own terms, rather than try to pin down the most authoritative, “original” version.
In my work on the traces of touch we find in manuscripts, degradation is really important there, because it’s a way of seeing the manuscript's journey through time, and how it has become meaningful to different audiences. There are complicated empirical questions involved: how do we know when this interaction took place? Do we know if it’s intentional? Is this just a manuscript that was not very well looked after? All of these concerns could stop the scholar in their tracks, but actually we should use them as a kind of invitation to think about the varied, embodied realities of medieval reading experiences.
You previously studied and taught in the United Kingdom. Are there differences between American and English pedagogy, and do you have advice for students who are interested in doing graduate work in England?
In terms of the differences in teaching between here and the UK, I’d point out two things. One is that classes here tend to be more interactive, more dialogic, more participatory – I’ve found students are really great at asking questions, responding to the material in inventive ways, and I’ve appreciated that. I think maybe in the UK, there’s more of a hierarchy between professor and student and a sharper distinction between whose turn it is to speak. The other thing is that when you enter an undergraduate degree in the UK, you already have a declared major. You specialize really early. That means that, here, students will come in with a wider range of academic experiences in science, in maths, in the social sciences. When you’re teaching, yes, you’re talking to a less specialized audience, but you’re also talking to an audience with a richer academic view of the world. For example, I was teaching a class about medieval bestiaries (these are the encyclopedic books that describe animal behaviors and animal characteristics, but relate them to religious significance or meaning). I was getting us to reflect on how the bestiary could be a scientific object that is trying to communicate knowledge like a chemistry textbook today. We reflected on what kind of affinities we might find with modern scientific forms of expression: the combination of text and image, the descriptive role of captions, a discourse spoken from a specific position of authority. The scientists in the room did a fantastic job of bringing insights from their majors into the discussion, which I thought really enriched the medieval-modern analogy.
As for graduate work, a major difference is that in the UK, you don’t enter a PhD in the arts and humanities without already having done a master’s degree, which usually takes one or two years. A major problem is that past and current UK governments have been cutting funding for master’s degrees, which is a massive problem for equitable access to graduate education. I would actually recommend doing graduate work here in the US, where the funding opportunities seem to be better. But I would say, if anyone does want to find out more about graduate education in the UK, they are welcome to contact me or come to my office hours.
If you have to get a master’s before the PhD, is the PhD shorter than in the US?
Yes. Often it’s three to four years. You go straight into research, rather than doing coursework beforehand.
Can you tell me about the Occitan language and some of the discourse surrounding this language?
Occitan is a Romance language, a group of dialects, that emerged out of forms of spoken Latin in late antiquity. It’s still used in Southern France, and in parts of Italy, Catalonia, and Monaco. It’s a language with a complicated past. We often forget that the history of medieval France is a history of colonization and appropriation with regards to how speakers of the northern French language – or langue d’oïl – treated the speakers of Occitan – or langue d’oc – in the south. Occitan is the language that had to be suppressed in order to make French “French”, to make it the national language. The discourses around it are necessarily about wanting to protect it as a living language, one that’s still used in communities across southern France and beyond. I think medievalists have an important role in highlighting Occitan’s continued relevance, but also its historical suppression in France. The Troubadours, who sang of love and much else in (Old) Occitan, are often held up as the origins of western European culture and poetry. That association of the Troubadours with an origin narrative does two things that are problematic. One, it overlooks the complex multilingual Mediterranean context from which the Troubadours drew inspiration. But, two, it also suggests politically today that Occitan is a language of the past – that it’s a relic, that it’s historic, and that it’s something that necessarily had to make way to allow French to be the national hegemonic language. So I think it’s important to bring Occitan into the classroom in medieval courses. Often, in colleges across the US, the people working on Occitan are medievalists, and they’re in French Departments. There’s a clear political need to address the premodern multilingualism that disappeared as a result of nationalizing forces.
Tell us a bit about the courses you teach for undergraduates.
At the moment I’m teaching a class on medieval French literature. In a way, it’s a survey of important texts, but it’s thinking about those texts in new ways, especially in relation to gender, sexuality, the limits of the human and animal, and race. I try to bring contemporary concerns into dialogue with the medieval. Next semester, I’m teaching a class on ecocriticism that will take a long historical view from the Middle Ages up to the present. I’ll also address some current trends in theorizing the environment and climate crisis, but also look at some of the political movements that are taking place in French-speaking countries. France has been a leader in climate activism on the global stage, something underlined by the 2016 Paris Agreement. I haven’t decided what I’m teaching the next semester – hopefully another medieval French undergraduate class, possibly with a stronger Occitan focus.
What book do you recommend to everyone reading this?
The book I would recommend is Matrix by Lauren Groff. It came out in 2021, and it’s a historical novel. It’s about one of my favorite medieval authors, and the person who is held up as the first woman writer of a Romance language: Marie de France. We know very very little about her as a historical figure: we know she calls herself Marie, and we know she is from France, which probably meant the area around Paris. Because she says she’s from France, she was probably not in France when she was writing, so she’s probably writing in England. Lots of scholars have tried to hypothesize who Marie de France was and to identify her with a historical figure. Lauren Groff in this novel very sensuously and vividly describes the world of Marie, who is imagined at the head of a religious community that becomes a sort of feminist utopia. Groff’s Marie is engaged in the mysticism that often fascinates modern authors, and she makes Marie into a lesbian. It’s a beautifully written book that does show a sensitivity to the medieval. I think there have been some critiques of this book for repetition of certain clichés of the medieval. However, I think those critiques miss the point that Marie is always this imagined figure, is always someone whose reality is to an extent made in a contemporary encounter with her. She is just a name, and yet she’s incredibly meaningful to people. It’s an engrossing book, and I would totally recommend it.