In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies
  • Louise D’Arcens
Eileen A. Joy and Myra Seaman, eds. Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies. Vol 1.1/2 ( Spring/Summer2010): “When Did We Become Post/human?” ed. Eileen A. Joy and Craig Dionne. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Pp. 289.

It is a sign of a discipline's good health that it is not only generating, at accelerating speed, a raft of high-quality monographs and essay collections, [End Page 349]but that it has also spawned a new, strongly credentialized journal that aims not only to add to the store of knowledge but to reflect on the field's critical directions, and to foster its participation in debates beyond its disciplinary borders. Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studiesis just such a journal. Of course, it is not the only journal devoted to medievalism, which has long been served by Studies in Medievalismand The Year's Work in Medievalism,the major strength of which has been their showcasing over many years of significant and diverse case studies of the postmedieval afterlife of the Middle Ages. More recently, these have been joined by Medievally Speaking,which reviews texts relating to medievalism. Postmedievalcomplements these journals by taking a more avowedly theoretical angle that aims, as its website (www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/) states, to “bring the medieval and modern into productive critical relation.”

Postmedievalenters the scene with a hefty double issue, “When Did We Become Post/human?” It comprises twenty-nine short essays, three brief response essays, and a review essay. The journal's interest in multi-temporality is announced in the evocative cover photograph of Birmingham's built environment in which the futuristic exterior of Selfridges department store is shadowed by the nearby neo-Gothic spire of the church of St. Martin in the Bullring, which was itself built over a demolished thirteenth-century forerunner. “When Did We Become Post/human?” offers a series of medievalist engagements with the critical dismantling of the liberal humanist subject, but it also reflects the journal's stated interest in those “deep historical structures—mental, linguistic, social, cultural, aesthetic, religious, political, sexual, and the like—that underlie contemporary thought and life.”

It is only possible here to offer a sketch of the many angles from which the essays in this collection interrogate the complexity, and the instability, of medieval and early modern formulations of the “the human.” Among the categories that these essays argue have placed pressure on premodern perceptions of human subjectivity are the animal (Scott Maisano and Karl Steel), the mineral (Jeffrey Jerome Cohen), the ecological (John Moreland), the dead (Bettina Bildhauer), waste (Susan Signe Morrison), the disabled (Julie Singer), and prehistoric humanity (Daniel Lord Smail). A number of authors (E. R. Truitt and Scott Lightsey, just to name two) speak to questions of unique human volition and morality, or to questions of human embodiment (among these are Jen Boyle, Karmen McKendrick, and David Gary Shaw), while others, such as Ruth Evans, offer [End Page 350]arguments for how medieval practices created “cyborg” relations in which the architecture of the human mind was altered by its interaction with what can be regarded as assistive technologies. These essays unite in challenging the idea that notions of “posthumanism” must always point toward futurity—to emerging biotechnologies, cybernetic and information cultures, and so on. In offering a panoramic historical corrective to this assumption, Postmedieval’s inaugural issue responds to the journal's fundamental brief of “demonstrat[ing] the important value of medieval studies . . . to the ongoing development of contemporary critical and cultural theories that remain under-historicized.”

One occasionally encounters what seems like a certain belatedness of critical idiom in some of the essays, in that the theoretical vocabulary and some of the key works being addressed (Avital Ronell's Telephone Book,Bruno Latour's We Have Never Been Modern,Katherine Hayles's How We Became Posthuman,as well as Deleuze and Guattari in translation) arguably enjoyed their greatest currency within the Anglophone academy some years back. But to criticize these essays on this basis would be ungenerous, and would miss one of the central points of this collection...

pdf

Share