Books

Animal, Mineral, Vegetable: Ethics and Objects  (Oliphaunt / punctum press, 2012). Editor.

Animal, Vegetable, Mineral examines what happens when we cease to assume that only humans exert agency. Through a careful examination of medieval, early modern and contemporary lifeworlds, these essays collectively argue against ecological anthropocentricity. Sheep, wolves, camels, flowers, chairs, magnets, landscapes, refuse and gems are more than mere objects. They act; they withdraw; they make demands; they connect within lively networks that might foster a new humanism, or that might proceed with indifference towards human affairs. Through what ethics do we respond to these activities and forces? To what futures do these creatures and objects invite us, especially when they appear within the texts and cultures of the “distant” past?

Contents: Jeffrey J. Cohen (George Washington University): “Introduction: All Things” – Karl Steel (Brooklyn College): “With the World, or Bound to Face the Sky: The Postures of the Wolf-Child of Hesse” – Sharon Kinoshita (University of California, Santa Cruz): “Animals and the Medieval Culture of Empire” – Peggy McCracken (University of Michigan): “The Floral and the Human” – Kellie Robertson (University of Wisconsin-Madison): “Exemplary Rocks” – Valerie Allen (John Jay College of Criminal Justice): “Mineral Virtue”   –  Eileen Joy (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville): “You Are Here: A Manifesto” – Julian Yates (University of Delaware): “Sheep Tracks: Multi-Species Impressions” – Julia Reinhard Lupton (University of California, Irvine): “The Renaissance Res Publica of Things” – Jane Bennett (Johns Hopkins University): “Powers of the Hoard: Further Notes on Material Agency”
Response essays: Lowell Duckert, “Speaking Stones, John Muir, and a Slower (Non)humanities” –  Nedda Mehdizadeh, “‘Ruinous Monument’: Transporting Objects in Herbert’s Persepolis” – Jonathan Gil Harris,“Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Twenty Questions” 

 

Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages: Archipelago, Island, England. Palgrave Macmillan, New Middle Ages series, 2008. Editor.
Through close readings of both familiar and obscure medieval texts, the contributors to this volume attempt to read England as a singularly powerful entity within a vast geopolitical network. This capacious world can be glimpsed in the cultural flows connecting the Normans of Sicily with the rulers of England, or Chaucer with legends arriving from Bohemia. It can also be seen in surprising places in literature, as when green children are discovered in twelfth-century Yorkshire or when Welsh animals begin to speak of the long history of their land’s colonization. The contributors to this volume seek moments of cultural admixture and heterogeneity within texts that have often been assumed to belong to a single, national canon, discovering moments when familiar and bounded space erupt into unexpected diversity and infinite realms.
Introduction: Infinite Realms--Jeffrey Jerome Cohen * Between Diaspora and Conquest: Norman Assimilation in Marie de France’s Esope and Petrus Alfonsi’s Disciplina Clericalis--Suzanne Conklin Akbari * Reliquia: Writing Relics in Anglo-Norman Durham--Heather Blurton * Cultural Difference and the Meaning of Latinity in Asser’s Life of King Alfred--David Townsend * Green Children from Another World, or The Archipelago in England--Jeffrey Jerome Cohen * Beyond British Boundaries in the Historia regum Britanniae--Michael Wenthe * Arthur’s Two Bodies and the Bare Life of the Archives--Kathleen Biddick * The Instructive Other Within: Secularized Jews in The Siege of Jerusalem--Randy P. Schiff * Subversive Histories: Strategies of Identity in Scottish Historiography--Katherine Terrell * Sleeping with an Elephant: Wales and England in the Mabinogion--Jon Kenneth Williams* Chaucer and the War of the Maidens--John Ganim * The Signs and Location of a Flight (or Return?) of Time: The Old English Wonders of the East and the Gujarat Massacre--Eileen Joy

 

Hybridity, Identity and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain examines an island made turbulent by conquest and civil war. Focusing upon history writing, ethnography, and saints' lives, this book details how community was imagined in the twelfth century; what role the monsterization of the Welsh, Irish and Jews played in bringing about English unity; and how writers who found the blood of two peoples mixed in their bodies struggled to find a vocabulary to express their identity. Its chapters explores the function and origin of myths like the unity and separateness of the English, the barbarism of the Celtic Fringe, the innate desire of Jews to murder Christian children as part of their Pesach ritual. Populated by wonders like a tempest formed of blood, a Saracen pope, strange creatures suspended between the animal and the human, and corpses animated with uncanny life, Hybridity, Identity and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain maps how collective identities form through violent exclusions, and details the price paid by those who find themselves denied the possibility of belonging.

Medieval Identity Machines. University of Minnesota Press, Medieval Cultures series, 2003. Available for Kindle and as a Google eBook.

In Medieval Identity Machines, Jeffrey J. Cohen examines the messiness, permeability, and perversity of medieval bodies, arguing that human identity always exceeds the limits of the flesh. Combining critical theory with a rigorous reading of medieval texts, Cohen asks if the category “human” isn’t too small to contain the multiplicity of identities. As such, this book is the first to argue for a “posthuman” Middle Ages and to make extensive use of the philosophical writings of Gilles Deleuze to rethink the medieval.

Among the topics that Cohen covers are the passionate bond between men and horses in chivalric training; the interrelation of demons, celibacy, and colonialism in an Anglo-Saxon saint’s life; Lancelot’s masochism as envisioned by Chrétien de Troyes; the voice of thunder echoing from Margery Kempe; and the fantasies that sustained some dominant conceptions of race.

This tour of identity—in all its fragility and diffusion—illustrates the centrality of the Middle Ages to theory as it enhances our understanding of self, embodiment, and temporality in the medieval world.


Thinking the Limits of the Body. State University of New York Press, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art series, 2002. Editor, with Gail Weiss.
This collection maps the very best efforts to think the body at its limits. Because the body encompasses communities (social and political bodies), territories (geographical bodies), and historical texts and ideas (a body of literature, a body of work), Cohen and Weiss seek trans-disciplinary points of resonance and divergence to examine how disciplinary metaphors materialize specific bodies, and where these bodies break down and/or refuse prescribed paths. Whereas postmodern theorizations of the body often neglect its corporeality in favor of its cultural construction, this book demonstrates the inseparability of textuality, materiality, and history in any discussion of the body.
Contributors include Debra Bergoffen, Sara Castro-Klaren, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, William A. Cohen, Laura Doyle, Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Elizabeth Grosz, Linda Kauffman, Robert McRuer, and Gail Weiss.



The Postcolonial Middle Ages. Palgrave, New Middle Ages series, 2000. Editor.
The increased importance of minority and subjugated voices has led to a new interest in the effects of colonization and displacement on medieval culture. The essays examine the establishment of colony, empire, and nationalism in order to expose the mechanisms of oppression through which “aboriginal,” “native” or simply pre-existent cultures are displaced, eradicated, or transformed.
Introduction: Midcolonial--Jeffrey Jerome Cohen * From Due East to True North: Orientalism and Orientation--Suzanne Conklin Akbari * Coming Out of Exile: Dante on the Orient Express--Kathleen Biddick * Chaucer after Smithfield: From Postcolonial Writer to Imperialist Author--John M. Bowers * Cilician Armenian Metissage and Hetoum’s La Fleur des histoires de la--Glenn Burger * Hybrids, Monsters, Borderlands: The Bodies of Gerald of Wales--Jeffrey Jerome Cohen * Time Behind the Veil: The Media, the Middle Ages and Orientalism Now--Kathleen Davis * Native Studies: Orientalism and Medievalism--John M. Ganim * The Romance of England: Richard Coer de Lyon, Saracens, Jews & the Politics of Race and Nation--Geraldine Heng * Marking Time: Branwen, Daughter of Llyr and the Colonial Refrain--Patricia Ingham * Fetishism, 1927, 1614, 1461--Steven F. Kruger * Common Language and Common Profit--Kellie Robertson * Alien Nation: London’s Aliens and Lydgate’s Mummings for the Mercers and Goldsmiths--Claire Sponsler * Postcolonial Chaucer and the Virtual Jew--Sylvia Tomasch * Imperial Fetishism: Prester John among the Natives--Michael Uebel

Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages. University of Minnesota Press, Medieval Cultures series, 1999. Google eBook.

A monster lurks at the heart of medieval identity, and this book seeks him out. Reading a set of medieval texts in which giants and dismemberment figure prominently, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen brings a critical psychoanalytic perspective to bear on the question of identity formation-particularly masculine identity-in narrative representation. The giant emerges here as an intimate stranger, a monster who stands at the limits of selfhood.

Arguing that in the romance tradition of late fourteenth-century England, identity is inscribed on sexed bodies only through the agency of a monster, Cohen looks at the giant as the masculine body writ large. In the giant he sees an uncanny figure, absolutely other and curiously familiar, that serves to define the boundaries of masculine embodiment. Philosophically compelling, the book is also a philologically rigorous inquiry into the phenomenon of giants and giant-slaying in various texts from the Anglo-Saxon period to late Middle English, including Beowulf, Chrétien de Troyes’s The Knight and the Lion, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, several works by Chaucer, Sir Gowther, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and more.

A significant contribution to our understanding of medieval culture, Of Giants also provides surprising insights into questions about the psychosocial work of representation in its key location for the individual: the construction of gender and the social formation of the boundaries of gender identification. It will engage students of the Middle Ages as well as those interested in discourses of the body, social identity, and the grotesque.

 

Becoming Male in the Middle Ages. Garland Publishing, New Middle Ages series, 1997. Editor, with Bonnie Wheeler.
Combining critical work in feminism, gender studies, queer theory, and cultural studies, the essays explore the relationship between Christian and masculine identity; children, penance, and sexuality; heroism, castration, and eunuchry; education; the relationship between male and animal bodies; discipline and gender; Chaucer; transvestism and knighthood; drag and blackface; contemporary identity theory; and other scholarly subjects.
Table of Contents: Body doubles : producing the masculine corpus /D. Vance Smith; Becoming Christian, becoming male? /Steven F. Kruger; Where the boys are : children and sex in the Anglo Saxon penitentials /Allen J. Fantzen; Ironic intertextuality and the reader's resistance to heroic masculinity in the Waltharius /David Townsend; Abelard and rewriting the male body : castration, identity, and remasculinization /Martin Irvine; Origenary fantasies : Abelard's castration and confession /Bonnie Wheeler; Abelard's blissful castration /Yves Ferroul; Eunuchs who keep the sabbath : becoming male and the ascetic ideal in thirteenth century Jewish mysticism /Elliot R. Wolfson; Sharing wine, women, and song : masculine identity formation and the medieval European universities /Ruth Mazo Karras; Wolf man /Leslie Dunton-Downer; Gowther among the dogs : becoming inhuman c. 1400 /Jeffrey Jerome Cohen; Erotic discipline, or "tee hee, I like my boys to be girls" : inventing with the body in Chaucer's Miller's tale /Glenn Burger; Pardoner, veiled and unveiled /Robert S. Sturges; Transvestite knights in medieval life and literature /Ad Putter; Viscious guise : effeminacy, sodomy, and mankind /Garrett P. J. Epp; Outlaw masculinities : drag, blackface, and late medieval laboring class festivities /Claire Sponsler; Normative hetersexuality in history and theory : case of Sir David Lindsay of the mount /R. James Goldstein; Becoming male /Michael Uebel.

 

Monster Theory: Reading Culture. University of Minnesota Press, Visible Evidence series, 1996. Editor. Google eBook.
We live in a time of monsters. Monsters provide a key to understanding the culture that spawned them. So argue the essays in this wide-ranging and fascinating collection that asks the question, What happens when critical theorists take the study of monsters seriously as a means of examining our culture?

In viewing the monstrous body as a metaphor for the cultural body, the contributors to Monster Theory consider beasts, demons, freaks, and fiends as symbolic expressions of cultural unease that pervade a society and shape its collective behavior. Through a historical sampling of monsters, these essays argue that our fascination for the monstrous testifies to our continued desire to explore difference and prohibition. Contributors: Mary Baine Campbell, Brandeis U; David L. Clark, McMaster U; Frank Grady, U of Missouri, St. Louis; David A. Hedrich Hirsch, U of Illinois; Lawrence D. Kritzman, Dartmouth College; Kathleen Perry Long, Cornell U; Stephen Pender; Allison Pingree, Harvard U; Anne Lake Prescott, Barnard College; John O'Neill, York U; William Sayers, George Washington U; Michael Uebel, U of Virginia; Ruth Waterhouse.

 

BOOK CHAPTERS AND JOURNAL ARTICLES

“All Things.” Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects, ed. Jeffrey J. Cohen (New York: Oliphaunt / punctum books, 2012) 1-8.

“The Promise of Monsters.” The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, ed. Asa Simon Mittman and Peter Dendle (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2012) 447-62. Published in an earlier form as “La promesa de los monstruos,” De Animales y Monstruos (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2012) 91-101.

“Preface: Losing Your Head.” Heads Will Roll: Decapitation in the Medieval and Early Modern Imagination, ed. Larissa Tracy and Jeff Massey (Leiden: Brill, 2012) vii-ix.

“Novelty.” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2 (2011): 239-41. Co-written with Cary Howie.

"Blogging the Middle Ages."Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog: Medieval Studies and New Media, ed. Brantley L. Bryant (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) 29-42.

“An Abecedarium for the Elements.” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2 (2011): 291-303.


“Stories of Stone.” postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 1 (2010): 56-63. 

“Pilgrimages, Travel Writing, and the Medieval Exotic.” The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English, ed. Elaine Treharne and Greg Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) 611-28.

“Time out of Memory.” The Post-Historical Middle Ages, ed. Sylvia Federico and Elizabeth Scala (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) 37-61.

“Introduction: Infinite Realms.” Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages: Archipelago, Island, England, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) 1-16.

“Green Children from Another World, or The Archipelago in England.” Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages: Archipelago, Island, England, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) 75-94.

“An Unfinished Conversation about Glowing Green Bunnies.” Afterword to Queering the Non/Human, ed. Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird (Ashgate, 2008) 363-75.

"Inventing with Animals in the Middle Ages." Engaging with Nature: Essays on the Natural World in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt and Lisa J. Kiser (University of Notre Dame Press, 2008) 39-62.

"Afterword: Intertemporality." Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages, ed. Eileen A. Joy, Myra J. Seaman, Kimberly K. Bell, and Mary K. Ramsey (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) 295-300.

"The Ruins of Identity." Chapter from Of Giants reprinted in The Postmodern Beowulf: A Critical Casebook, ed. Eileen A. Joy, Mary K. Ramsey and Bruce M. Gilchrist (West Virginia University Press, European Middle Ages series, 2007) 345-81.

"Pink Vectors of Deleuze: Queer Theory and Inhumanism." In "The Becoming-Deleuzoguattarian of Queer Studies," a special issue of the journal Rhizomes ed. Michael O'Rourke (Rhizomes 11/12 [2005]). Co-written with Todd Ramlow.

"Postcolonialism."  Chaucer: An Oxford Guide, ed. Steven Ellis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) 448-62.

"Kyte oute yugilment: An Introduction to Medieval Noise," Exemplaria 16.2 (2004): 267-76. "Medieval Noise" is a cluster of four essays on nonlinguistic sound that I guest edited for the journal.

"The Flow of Blood in Medieval Norwich." Speculum 78 (2004): 26-65.

"Introduction: Bodies at the Limit," Thinking the Limits of the Body, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Gail Weiss (SUNY Press, 2002), 1-10.

"The Inhuman Circuit," Thinking the Limits of the Body, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Gail Weiss (SUNY Press, 2002), 167-186.

"The Postcolonial Jew: Trauma, Race and Nation c.1144." Incontrare i Mostri: Variazoni sul tema nella letteratura e cultura inglese e angloamericana, ed. Maria Teresa Chialant (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane,  2002), 31-43.

"On Saracen Enjoyment: Some Fantasies of Race in Late Medieval France and England," Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31.1 (2001):111-44.

"Introduction:  Midcolonial," The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (St. Martin's Press, 2000), 1-17.

"Hybrids, Monsters, Borderlands:  The Bodies of Gerald of Wales," The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (St. Martin's Press, 2000), 85-104.

"Dwindling Masculinity in Chaucer's Tale of Sir Thopas," Masculinities in Chaucer, ed. Peter Beidler (Boydell & Brewer, 1998), 143-155.

"Masoch/Lancelotism," New Literary History  28.2 (1997): 231-60.

"Introduction:  Becoming and Unbecoming," Becoming Male in the Middle Ages , ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler (Garland Publishing, 1997), vii-xx.

"Gowther among the Dogs:  Becoming Inhuman c.1400," Becoming Male in the Middle Ages , ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler (Garland Publishing, 1997), 219-44.

"The Armour of an Alienating Identity," Arthuriana 6.4 (1996): 1-24.  Published previously in hypertext as "Medieval Masculinities: Heroism, Sanctity, and Gender," Interscripta (November-December 1993, revised October 1995)

"Preface:  In a Time of Monsters," Monster Theory:  Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (University of Minnesota Press, 1996), vii-xiii.

"Monster Culture (Seven Theses)," Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 3-25.

"The Limits of Knowing:  Monsters and the Regulation of Medieval Popular Culture," Medieval Folklore III (1994): 1-37.  Published in revised form as "The Order of Monsters:  Monster Lore and Medieval Narrative Traditions," Telling Tales: Medieval Narratives and the Folk Tradition, ed. Francesca Canadé Sautman, Diana Conchado, and Giuseppe Carlo Di Scipio (St Martin's Press, 1998), 37-58.

"Decapitation and Coming of Age:  Constructing Masculinity and the Monstrous," The Arthurian Yearbook III (1993): 171-190.

"Old English Literature and the Work of Giants," Comitatus  24 (1993): 1-32.

"The Use of Monsters and the Middle Ages," SELIM (Revista de la Sociedad Española de Lengua y Literatura Inglesa Medieval / Journal of Old and Middle English Studies of Spain), no. 2 (1992): 47-69.


BOOK REVIEWS, ENCYCLOPEDIA ENTRIES, AND LETTERS

Review of Anthony Bale, The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms, 1350-1500 in Studies in the Age of Chaucer (2008) 340-43

"Animals, sexual symbolism of." Entry for the Gale Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender, ed. Fedwa Malti-Douglas (Macmillan Reference, 2008)

"Postcolonial Theory." Entry for Women and Gender in Medieval Europe: An Encyclopedia, ed. Margaret Schaus (New York: Routledge, 2007) 660-661.

Review of Peter Haidu, The Subject Medieval/Modern: Text and Governance in the Middle Ages in L'Esprit Créatur 46.3 (2006) 114.

"Monstrous Beauty" (review of Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art), Patterns of Prejudice 39.3 (2005) 343-45.

Review of Kathryn L. Lynch, ed. Chaucer's Cultural Geography, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 26 (2004) 409-11.

Review of Mark Thornton Burnett, Constructing 'Monsters' in Shakespearean Drama and Early Modern Culture, Shakespeare Quarterly 55.1 (2004): 98-100.

"Race." Dictionary of the Middle Ages, Vol. 14: First Supplement, ed. William Chester Jordan (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2004) 515-18.

Review of Peggy McCracken, The Curse of Eve, the Wound of the Hero: Blood, Gender, and Medieval Literature, H-France Book Reviews, December 2003 (www3.uakron.edu/hfrance/reviews/cohen2.html)

Review of Charles Ross, The Custom of the Castle:  from Malory to Macbeth, Shakespeare Quarterly 50.3 (1999): 392-93.

Review of Claire Sponsler, Drama and Resistance:  Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England, Arthuriana 8.3 (1998): 100-101.

"Monstrosity, Geographical." Trade, Travel, and Exploration in the Middle Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed. John Block Friedman and Kristen Mossler Figg (Garland Publishing, 2000): 415-16.

Review of Michael J. Curley, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Speculum 73 (1998): 162-63.

Review of Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature (ed. Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury), Bryn Mawr Medieval Review 94.4.6.

Letter to the editor on “post-disciplinarity," PMLA 111.2 (1996): 83.