Greg Nissan: This book explodes one of Chaucer’s tales—“The Wife of Bath’s Tale”—but uses Alisoun’s voice. When did that voice first catch on for you? I know you began this project ten years ago. What were some of the troubles with setting it down and picking it up again?

Caroline Bergvall: There’s a treacherous aspect to going back to a voice. I started developing it just after Meddle English. It was my fifth shorter Chaucer tale and came out in a tiny edition with Belladonna* called Alyson Singes, a totally different spelling and everything. I was never able to continue the voice—I tried on and off for years. I wasn’t happy with it. It was unclear to me why. It’s the toughest project I’ve ever written. But that voice is nearly the bully; it pushes and pushes me on. We’re in a time where we are asking questions about social living in the face of political and capitalist devastation, environmental catastrophes, intense processes of migration that can only increase. I think that begs the question: How do we speak in such a way that we can be listening as well? What is it that justifies the poetic and the literary form?

GN: I love that, as it seems to capture Alisoun’s double agency, where she is both listening to many other voices—channeling transgressive figures throughout centuries, many women—and speaking up at the same time. Were there moments where you felt particularly bullied or pushed back into the voice? I think of what you wrote about the day of Trump’s inauguration: “No peripheral point in this rounded world.”

CB: Yes, that line I recorded at the Global Women’s March. Shared anger that unlocked desperate optimism and major translocal connections. And then the whole Me Too movement and Black Lives Matter—initially how both movements had taken very bullied and undervalued identities to protect and collectivize them. I was wondering how to take up new positions within feminism, transnationalism, queer postwar traditions that had got devalued and needed re-injection. One of the necessities of collective movements is that you have to, not simplify, but become really, really clear. Through that clarity you can accumulate and bring in more people with dispersed experiences or dispersed messages.

MEDDLING IS NOT usually a good thing. There’s something threatening about it, something that suggests unwanted or unwarranted intrusions. To meddle is to com-plicate, to create, or uncover tensions that may not have been visible before. Yet such meddling becomes a necessary praxis in Meddle English, the latest book from writer and performance artist Caroline Bergvall. For Bergvall, meddling is writing. It is a writing that calls language itself into question—writing that takes apart the houses of language and reveals their jumbled insides. It is writing that combs the babble of speech for those hints of word origins, geo graphic markers, class structures, and sonic or syntactic asso-ciations that track how “languages travel as seeded forms of themselves.”

It’s writing that won’t leave language alone.

Meddle English collects a rich sampling of Bergvall’s richly innovative work from the past decade. The book brings together Bergvall’s published essays and poems alongside performance texts (like Goan Atom) that originated in her many text-based multimedia installations. These have been exhibited internationally at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, The Museum of Modern Art and Dia Art Foundation in New York, London’s Tate Modern, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp, to name just a few locations. While the context of these exhibitions may be lost, Meddle English makes it possible to encounter Bergvall’s writing for its textual qualities alone. The encounter does not dis-appoint.

Even in book-form, Bergvall’s poems make noise. They vibrate on the stutters and seams of plain talking. They bring the art of the collage and the cut-up to bear on the speaking voice, probing speech for “the voices, the languages, the pleasures, the com-plex nexus of cultural and literary motivations with their access markers, their specific narratives” (16). Bergvall, who was born in Germany in 1962 to a French mother and a Norwegian father, thinks of language as something embodied. She also thinks “of the body as always having an accent,” a mark that might be pried open to reveal language as always on the move. The result is a linguistic investigation whose goal is not mastery but dispersal. Bergvall shifts frequently between English, French, Middle English, and the muddles and middles where they collide. She blends languages together in strings of sonic or typographical associations until mere phonemes (“B ba,” “b bo”) sound with the force of words.

On 31 December 1922, Katherine Mansfield wrote what would turn out to be her last letter to her father, Harold Beauchamp, describing her life at the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at Fontainebleau-Avon, France:

As is well known and has become part of her legend, Mansfield had chosen to enter this Institute after trying, without success, numerous medical treatments for her tuberculosis. It was a move ridiculed by several of her contemporaries who thought she was misguidedly turning her back on (Western) medicine in favour of an (Eastern) charlatan, the Armenian-Greek spiritual teacher and philosopher George Gurdjieff. Wyndham Lewis, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence, for example, respectively judged Mansfield to be in the grip of a ‘psychic shark’ in a ‘retreat for maniacs’, a ‘rotten, false, self-conscious place of people playing a sickly stunt’. Even Mansfield's husband, John Middleton Murry, ‘noisily regretted’ her being taken in by ‘the spiritual quackery of Gurdjieff’. It would be easy to read Mansfield's words to her father, with their reference to the smell of cows as having healing properties, as evidence of her wrong-headed decision. In this vein, her claim that she wanted to write a book called ‘The Cowiness of the Cow’ could be dismissed either as a joke or just a silly idea.

When read in full, however, there is little in Mansfield's letter to support the notion that she had lost her senses and given up on her health, while there are also hints that her projected bovine book was more than a passing fancy. She opens with sober commentary on her ‘very tame semi-existence’ at the Institute, with emphasis not on dramatic spiritual revelation but on everyday bodily (dis)comfort: ‘My heart’, she writes, ‘under this new treatment, which is one of graduated efforts and exercise, feels decidedly stronger, and my lungs in consequence feel quieter too.

WHEN POET CAROLINE Bergvall first read reports of what became known as the “Left-to-Die Boat” in 2011, she had little idea this maritime tragedy would feature as the passionate core of a live performance and book project called Drift. She was translating a tenth-century, anonymous, Old English poem called The Seafarer but found that, when neither her native Norwegian nor modern English could source meaning, the word–roots and syllabic stems led to the rich, associative play and sonic experimentation of a new version. What starts as a pulsating invocation to sail north and beyond north, beyond peril, using the medieval “true tale” or “soþgiedd” as a template, becomes a multi-genre, elastic, athletic and magnificent sound poem, accompanied by the screen visuals of Swiss artist Thomas Köppel and live percussion by Norwegian musician Ingar Zach.

In an hour-long performance, Bergvall navigates the vastness, the lure, the connectivity and the dangers of the sea, moving through maritime chronology and topography with great intimacy and awe. She hacks into the Old English vaults, borrowing suffixes like “ge” and grafting them onto contemporary English, adapting, adopting, and ghosting words to create coupled meanings: “gewacked by / seachops gave up all parts of me on gebattered ship…hail hagl hard nothing else geheard gehurt but / sky butting sea.” Her neologistic verve is exuberant, enchanting and estranging. “Blow wind blow, anon am I” is whispered and droned as a tribute and a plea for change. Her allusive skaldic ballad sprays and spreads through history, evoking the women, like Gudrid Gudridur and Elizabeth Bowden, who cross-dressed to “scarper to sea” and the “hafville” (from the Viking “bewildered,” or “lost at sea”) artists who’ve guided Bergvall’s practice: from Li Bai and Rimbaud, to Jeff Buckley and Ingeborg Bachmann. Language eats itself as physical and/or spiritual fug sets in: “The f og was sodense that they l ost all s ense of dirrrtion.” The syllables shatter on the screen behind Bergvall, vowels sinking away as consonance emerges battered and bettered by the storm. “Show me the wave … Where will the wind come from?” Then the image slips and sways with multiple “t”s swimming in and out of view: “t” for interminable tossing and the “tick tick tick” of waiting for the fear of “sea fodder” and “gust ghosts” “sucking everything in” to pass.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, sales surged of The Enchanted April, the popular 1922 novel about English tourists in Italy. So one learns from The Countess from Kirribilli, the vibrant new biography of The Enchanted April's author, Elizabeth von Arnim, Katherine Mansfield's cousin and friend. Why this novel during the pandemic? Was it because it is a book about feeling housebound and wanting to travel, or because it is a book about being ill? Because it is both, and thus apt for these times. How are its characters ill? They grieve losses, they suffer depression, they feel frustrated, they are bored. These are common illnesses, and modernist literature more often than not offers readers companionship in such states, and even guidance. It may not hurt to remind ourselves that suffering is neither a virtue nor a necessity. The books under review provide many angles on how to alleviate it: on various sorts of recuperation in Mansfield's life, work and orbit.

Elizabeth von Arnim has found the right biographer in Joyce Morgan, whose lively account of Elizabeth's peripatetic, energetic life is extremely good company. (I will follow Morgan's lead in referring to the author by her chosen first name; she was born Mary Beauchamp in Sydney, and chose for her pen name Elizabeth von Arnim, the aristocratic surname a product of her marriage to Prussian landed gentry and of her life in Pomerania.) Morgan's biography is true to her subject, who was remembered as ‘enchanting company’ by the writer Frank Swinnerton; ‘What a devil she was, but what good company!’ exclaimed the novelist Gladys B. Stern in a letter to fellow author Hugh Walpole after Elizabeth's death (p. 304). Morgan too has found her so; as she writes in her ‘Acknowledgements’, she spent two months immersed in the Huntington Library's archive of Elizabeth's papers, and found there ‘the feeling of intimacy’ as she read handwriting that became ‘as familiar as the sound of a friend's voice’ (p. 314). Morgan is a virtuoso when it comes to bringing that feeling of intimacy and friendship into her own writing of Elizabeth's story: she brings Elizabeth to life on the page, charming the reader throughout with a sharp, selective eye for detail and anecdote that refrains from overwhelming us with minutiae, biography's biggest drawback as a genre.

IN THE ABSENCE of a more developed review culture, readers of this recent book by Caroline Bergvall might wonder about the status of its intimacy and public address. This is work which flaunts its poetic affiliations with some panache. The opening epi graph from Duchamp—“Arrhe est … art ce que merdre est … merde”—suggests the workings of a cosmopolitan wit, suspicious of the superiority of “art” over other games, and happy with a whiff of eau de toilette from the Dada urinal. The text parenthesizes a “Homage to Louise Bourgeois,” and gives succour to impressions that this is a post-Dada, post- Surrealist poetics, one that pooh-poohs the boy’s own paper heroics otherwise familiar from various admirers of Bataille and Deleuze. If the epi graph also arouses expectations that the book will play with the poetic, idiomatic, and vulgar potential of dropped con-sonants and arty franglais, then readers are in for a treat. A certain Eurolinguaphilia is needed to appreciate the verbal play: “slip on a slap on a chatte Cat upfront to sleep with broad Loot Outbroads LaBonkings.” Pleasures from what one might find on the tip of one’s multilingual tongue are much to the fore.

The italicized statement on the book’s second page indicates the exploratory prem-ise of the book: “Anybod’s body’s a Dollmine.” “Bod” evokes the abbreviations of con-temporary sexuality, “nice bod” etc. Tensions between bod, body and “corps” prompt the questions of fantasy and desire suggested by “Dollmine.” Asking whose “any” reveals more political dimensions in our collective participation in imaginary dolls:

If this locates illumination as a problem, the poems themselves use puns to illuminate lewd qualities in familiar idioms, for example “Such Heir Hair Air Errs” or “La bour La bour La bour / Wears god on a strap / Shares mickey with all your friends.” The poetic sexuality of nursery rhymes is always close to the surface, but adult retrospection moves deftly between cultural allusions and the double entendres of “fanny face” and “ex / Creme / ental / eaT / ing.”

Future parts of Goan Atom may reveal the relevance of the political geo graphy of Goa and an-atom-y.

Born in colonial Wellington in 1888, Katherine Mansfield's first encounter with disease came early, when her younger sister Gwen died of cholera in the early days of 1891. The city's poor sanitation contributed to the proliferation of infectious disease that catalysed the family's move from the city centre to more rural Karori. During her adult life in Europe, Mansfield experienced miscarriage, peritonitis, rheumatism and tuberculosis, and would take up a peripatetic existence in search of more favourable climates. The First World War of 1914–18 and the influenza pandemic of 1918–20 informed the zeitgeist of her times. This volume of essays explores the extent to which this resonant context of disease and death shaped Mansfield's literary output and her modes of thinking.

Arthur Frank has argued that ‘[s]eriously ill people […] need to become storytellers’. Illness both stimulated and limited Mansfield's creativity – she would write to fund her medical care while simultaneously limited by her poor health, writing in 1922: ‘The real point is I shall have to make as much money as I can on my next book – my path is so dotted with doctors.’ As explored in this volume, her personal writings document the increasing influence of tubercular literary predecessors such as Anton Chekhov and John Keats, while her stories function compellingly as dialogue with loved ones who have been lost – her brother, her mother, her grandmother – and endow them with life in the process.

Although D. H. Lawrence wrote unsympathetically to Mansfield: ‘you revolt me stewing in your consumption’, her own attitude towards her illness was generally positive and practical, and she sought to mitigate against its deleterious effects through various strategies. She submitted to a variety of experimental treatments such as radiation, and wrote to her doctor, Victor Sorapure, about methods she had developed for symptom management. Her notebooks also demonstrate that, rather than shying away from her disease and its associations, she had a keen interest in the body, and what might be termed a scientific imagination. Writing of the experience of illness, Mansfield recorded in 1918: ‘Tchekhov has known just EXACTLY this […].

AS CAROLINE BERGVALL first “stumbled” on what she terms the “largely incom-prehensible” Old English of the The Seafarer, she argues that she must “remind [her]self that this project is not an exercise in translation.” Similarly, in her reading of Bergvall’s “Via” as the theater of performance, Sandra Bermann states that “there is no discern-ible telos, no glimmer of Paradise and no sign of Virgil as guide. Instead, there is only repetition-with-a-difference, and a reinauguration of the pilgrim-poet’s initial predica-ment: lost. Lost in translation, we as readers and listeners are nonetheless invited to do something ourselves.” Although she is not a translator and although she clearly says that her work is not about translation, I will show that translation plays an active role in Bergvall’s work. As Bermann points out, Bergvall does not so much envisage transla-tion as a transfer from one language to another language, according to a source-target paradigm. In her multilingual writing, she considers and uses translation as an active rather than prescriptive or nostalgic activity. In “Via,” in Meddle English, as well as in Drift, translation is generative in the sense of doing something, a doing that involves the reader

Indeed, in Bergvall’s oeuvre translation is always an invitation to work, as the Franco- English slippage from “travail” to “labour” in Goan Atom makes clear: “en trav Ail Aíô€‡…e / La bour La bour La bour.” Here “travail” can never strictly be translated as “labour” because letters and syllables proliferate. As they disseminate, they can never cohere into one stable meaning. They create anglofoamic language. Indeed, “trav” is the beginning of the word “travail,” but it may also be read as the shortened word for “travesty” in French, just like “La bour” functions as the English “labour” and the French “labour,” meaning ploughing. This example shows that in Bergvall’s work translation does not travel from one point of origin to a final destination, rather it creates “trav”translation, in other words it turns it into a travesty, a performance of translation. Translation travails, or, that is, it works as a multidirectional poetics of relation(s).

As a reader of Bergvall’s writing and as a (co)translator of Meddle English and Drift, I want to look at how translation works its way into Caroline Bergvall’s texts and how this work is an invitation to invent translative processes.

C. K. STEAD

On the 4th of October 1511, a small group of Greek soldiers living in Venice, known as the capi dei stratioti, made an appeal to the Council of Ten seeking permission, on behalf of the Greek community, to create a permanent Orthodox church, now known as the Church of San Giorgio dei Greci. This group of soldiers had become increasingly concerned over what they perceived as a lack of proper respect for the Greek community from Venetian authorities, who had ignored their previous petitions for an exclusive place where they could worship in the Greek Rite. While the soldiers offer a persuasive argument for the need of a permanent Greek Orthodox Church, most compelling is their concern that the community cannot honor and properly care for the remains of their dead claiming that, “there is no place to bury the dead, as in all [other] churches. They mingle our bones with those of galleymen, porters, and other low creatures; even this would be more tolerable if the graves were not upon the public way, and those poor bodies and bones were not dug up and thrown into the water within a few days of burial.”

Continuing their appeal, the soldiers also claim that the parish priest of San Biagio, caused further dishonor by throwing the disinterred bones into the water to make room for more burials; presumably because burial of the dead served as a source of income for the church, but also, due perhaps to a general lack of space. In addition to commemorating and performing the obligatory rituals associated with the body after death, care of the soul of the dead posed a more urgent issue, as the soldiers state in their petition to the Ten, “At the Last Judgment the fishes of the sea will be hard put to it to yield up our bones and organs that our bodies may be completely restored.” The Greek soldier's plea demonstrates the significance of fixed sacred space for communities of foreigners residing in early modern Venice, not only for the performance of religious worship and ritual, but also its importance to the community and the obligations of the living in the perpetual care of the dead.

The Virtual St Paul's Cathedral Project (VSPCP) (https://vpcathedral.chass.ncsu.edu/) is a collaborative Digital Humanities Project, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, that enables us to explore the lived religion of London in the post-Reformation period. By combining visual and acoustic digital modelling technology with recreations of early modern worship using contemporary musical settings of liturgical texts provided by The Book of Common Prayer, the Cathedral Project gives us access to the experience of specific occasions of worship and preaching in St Paul's Cathedral in early modern London.

The visual models achieve accuracy in their depictions of the buildings and spaces inside Paul's Churchyard by combining data from archaeological excavations of the original foundations left by the Great Fire of London (1666) with seventeenth-century measurements of these buildings’ interior dimensions and surviving visual depictions of the cathedral and its surrounding structures. Unlike many digital recreations of lost spaces which show the structures in pristine condition, our renderings of these models incorporate data about the relative ages of different structures as well as the effects of weather, time- and season-governed angles of light, and effects of acidic coal burned for cooking and heating. Acoustic models combine basic dimensions of the visual models with the acoustic properties of the materials used in their construction. Within these models, the Project brings together literary, religious, musical, and cultural histories of that period to recreate festive and ferial worship services using the liturgies of The Book of Common Prayer and music composed by musicians working at St Paul’s, with actors using scripts in original early modern pronunciation and musicians from Jesus College, Cambridge University standing in for their seventeenth-century predecessors.

An Odd Work of Grace

The Cathedral Project also enables us to take a fresh look at worship and preaching in the early modern period because it gives us the experience of worship and preaching scripted by The Book of Common Prayer as they unfold in real time, moment-by-moment, in models of the places in which it originally occurred. We are reminded, therefore, that the most important official documents of the English Reformation are pragmatic rather than doctrinal, concerned with enabling the organization and scripting of public worship rather than the making of dogmatic statements of belief.

Hans Holbein the Younger's Dead Christ (Fig. 1), made in Basel circa 1521–22, is the only religious painting that bears his signature. By inserting his initials and the date of 1521 in Roman numerals (“M.D. XXI/ H.H.”) (Fig. 2), Holbein indicates that he is well-versed in Renaissance artistic conventions and their references to antiquity. More critically, however, the signature suggests that Holbein is engaging with issues of metapictoriality and representation by posing inquiries about the role of painting and its ability to facilitate the spiritual meditation of the viewer. By asserting the artist's presence, the inscription confounds and deepens the viewer's reception of Christ's human corpse.

Holbein's pictorial innovations in The Dead Christ begin with the unprecedented, highly illusionistic, life-size rendering of Christ. The emaciated and stiff body, stretched thin from hanging on the cross, reveals the wounds of the Passion. Christ wears a loincloth and lies in rigor mortis on a crumpled linen shroud. His head is turned slightly to the viewer while his eyes remain fixed in an absent gaze. Christ's discolored hand and knobby finger reveal the ravages of gangrene. Much has been written in scholarship about this unflinching portrayal of Christ's decomposing body and its profound impact on viewers. The painting starkly confronts the dichotomy of Christ's humanity and divinity during the tumultuous early years of the Reformation. The impact of the painting is evident in the well-known nineteenth-century account of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's encounter with the painting, which inspired his character Prince Myshkin to exclaim in The Idiot, “That picture! That picture … Why, a man's faith might be ruined by looking at that picture!” I will propose, however, that even more radical than Holbein's rendering of Christ's putrefied flesh is his choice of this specific sacred moment for the imagining.

The exact function of The Dead Christ is unknown, but the biblical subject and physical properties of the panel imply that it could have served as part of a predella, or the base of an altarpiece. The painting is very narrow, measuring approximately one foot high but six and a half feet wide, and therefore could have served in such a capacity. The placement of the painting as a predella would materially and structurally reiterate the concept of sacred burial. This has pictorial precedents.

The 2022 Southeastern Renaissance Conference's theme of “sacred places, secular spaces” is a wonderfully rich premise. I use it here to organize some of my recent work on hell, London, and early modern print culture. I begin by considering hell's theological and cosmological status in terms of space and place. I then take up a series of aggressively intertextual pamphlets from the 1590s and 1600s to look at the ways in which their narrations of the infernal participate in one of the period's central conceptual frames for engaging with urban life: the city and/as/in proximity to hell. In addition to the many things these pamphlets accomplish, they bring the infernal to London—and London to the infernal—in print. I thus reflect on the unusually powerful intersection of hell and early modern print culture, on the capacity of print to make, quite literally, space and place for the infernal. The result is a repurposing of hell—what its foremost historian Alan Bernstein defines as “a divinely sanctioned place of eternal torment for the wicked”—for the fashioning of textual identities, communities, and values.

My efforts to connect hell and the book industry—a connection literalized in the period nickname “pressmen's devils” for the boys employed to hang printed sheets—are informed by my earlier work on Reformation disputes over the creedal statement that Christ descended into hell. Catholics understood the statement literally, believing that after his death Jesus went down to a real, material hell to combat Satan. Calvinists, in contrast, maintained that while on the cross Jesus suffered the genuine pains of a metaphorical hell in his soul. The controversy crystallizes hell's signifying potential in terms of place and space. It is either an otherworldly but decidedly situated place of punishment, or it is a worldly yet symbolic state of suffering. These spatial poles fit into longstanding Christian traditions of understanding hell literally as well as symbolically or psychologically, as both “eternal flames and … the unavailing remorse and chagrin of the damned.” Such understandings, to cite Bernstein again, always reflect a culture's shifting ideas about other concepts and problems, ideas “about death, the dead, the soul, justice, and retribution.” They also reflect, as Kristin Poole has shown so cogently, our period's “residual and emergent spatial epistemologies,” particularly ideas about the fluidity and fungibility of cosmic geography.