Shaping Our (Medieval) Future through Nomadic Insurgency: A Radical Reading of Ywain and Gawain

“Medieval futures” connotes not necessarily the next move for medieval studies but the reshaping of our future with the medieval in mind. Medieval texts can inform and offer novel approaches to direct action, social justice, as well as social libertarian, anticapitalist, anti-Statist movements. To this end, I advocate decontextualizing medieval literary texts so that their radical possibility can inform our own spaces and movement, particularly in terms of social justice, dissent, and protest. By decontextualizing the text, I mean the removal of the literary text from its temporal and regional political context in order to allow the text to reflect the radical possibilities applicable to our current and future political environments. Reading the late medieval English text Ywain and Gawain through a lens of contemporary radical politics demonstrates how a medieval literary artifact can help us better understand—and ultimately transform—our own political realities.

The occupation of physical space has been and continues to be a tried and tested means of voicing opposition against oppressive power structures. In many cases, people take to the streets and inhabit a particular place with symbolic value in order to make their dissent visible. Although the general constitution of space appears static and unchanging, redefining space allows for the resistance to the status quo. Theorists such as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja, and David Harvey, among others, discuss the ways in which social spaces (i.e., public squares, buildings, rooms, etc.) undergo change through use and social desire. Space is malleable and plastic; it never has a set use or meaning. Lefebvre puts a finer point on this idea: “There is no sense in which space can be treated solely as an a priori condition of these institutions and the state which presides over them.”¹ Space and the people who occupy space can change not only the perception and use of a particular location, but, more importantly, can shift dominant discourses, affect “law” and the enforcement of it, and destabilize dominant power structures that are corrupt or oppressive.² Couple this idea of space with the more radical, direct-action concept of insurgency, and the results can undermine or even dismantle dominant forms of governance, hegemonic power structures, and repressive institutions.

Space is often, for medievalists, a means to a historical end. In other words, an analysis of space or the language of space provides insight into the sociopolitical moment of a text’s authorship. Consider Megan Cassidy-Welch’s comment that “space gives meaning to the organization and perception of historical knowledge more generally.”³ Admittedly, Cassidy-Welch is a historian, so there is already an implied “look backward” in her research. In his article “Gower, Liminality, and the Politics of Space,” John Ganim offers a close reading of the Confessio Amantis and highlights Gower’s desire to “map what we now call ‘landscapes of power’” as a means to “integrate moral, natural, literal and psychological spaces.”⁴ Ganim’s piece reconstructs the medieval spatial past to better analyze the ways in which space constructed medieval identities, controlled populations, and informed both secular and religious practices. Robert Rouse makes a similarly compelling argument about Guy of Warwick and the developing reading practices of the expanding gentry and mercantile classes based on geographical awareness and expectations.⁵ Randy Schiff, in his excellent reading of Ywain as an exile and an example of the “ban” of homo sacer, argues that the “Ywain-poet systematically alters markers of species and class, refashioning the text for a fourteenth-century English North whose militarist elites faced increasing socioeconomic anxiety.”⁶ These articles stress the historicity of texts and culture. I, on the other hand, want to use texts as tools to better inform political resistance in the present. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the “nomad,” I highlight how the nomadic qualities of Ywain allow him to become an insurgent who transforms the dominant culture. The knight’s nomadic, insurgent identity is realized in part through Ywain’s reliance upon anonymity. The nomad’s spatial disruption speaks to our contemporary...