14th -c. illustration from Chrétien’s Le Conte du Graal of Perceval arriving at the Grail Castle; BnF MS 12577, fol. 18v. Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

My research typically integrates literary and historical analysis to elucidate the construction of medieval religious identity. My 2019 Speculum paper on the Oxford Roland—which reads the reshaped twelfth-century poem as a multivocal text addressed to lay and learned audiences, situating it as “literary cognate” of Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis’s proto-Gothic building program, royalist historiography, and staging of pro-crusading ceremonials—exemplifies this broad interdisciplinary approach. Trauma theory, gender/queer/trans studies, antisemitism studies, and modern medievalism are also strong areas of interest.

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Current Book Project: 

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Haunted by Heresy: The Perlesvaus, Medieval Antisemitism, and the Trauma of the Albingensian Crusade

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This soon-to-be-submitted book builds on my completed thesis. It focuses on the Perlesvaus, also known as Le haut livre du Graal, an anonymous thirteenth-century Old French Grail romance renowned for its idiosyncratic departures from Arthurian traditions, its taste for the phantasmagorical and macabre, its disturbing outbreaks of hyperviolence, and its odd focus on the battle between the Old and New Law. My reading of this anomalous romance positions it as a key cultural document whose violent perturbations reflect a hitherto unrecognized crisis of religious ethics and identity tied to what R.I. Moore has famously termed “the formation of a persecuting society.”

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After analyzing the text’s distinctive spatial, temporal, and logical breakdowns and relating them to contemporary trauma theory, I tie what I term its “deranged discourse” to the massacre-prone, decades-long course of the Albigensian Crusade, the first official crusade to be directed against demonized heretics within Western Europe instead of exotic populations of schismatics or unbelievers. This experience of violent religious conflict within Western Christendom, I argue, undercut prevailing understandings of crusading and placed intolerable strain on foundational Pauline models of religious identity in which Christians viewed themselves as spiritually and ethically superior to the “superseded” Jews, eternally typecast as the cruel persecutors of Christians.

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I also trace echoes of this collective trauma across other contemporary texts, from historical chronicles to an Occitan verse epic, and one chapter delves into the disturbing discursive implications of a scene of quasi-Eucharistic ritual cannibalism in which fears of Christianity devolving into Judaism are on stark display and the romance's originating narrator and authority-figure, the shadowy Josephus,  stands revealed as a queasy amalgam of the celebrated historical first-century Romano-Jewish author and the fictional first priest to celebrate the Eucharist. A final chapter surveys the understudied cultural and literary influence of the Perlesvaus, from Malory's Morte Darthur to Tolkien's Lord of the Rings to postmodern French literary criticism.

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One important broader implication of this study is the new thread it adds to current understandings of the complex evolution of medieval antisemitism: to the already extensive roll call of phantasmic “Jews” identified as central to the construction of medieval Christian identity—from “spectral” to “racialized” to “monsterized” to “hermeneutical”—I propose adding the “doppelganger Jew,” an especially troubling representation of the superseded Old Law to which Christians feared they might be reverting. Methodologically, reading this zealous, hyperviolent text with an eye to both trauma theory and crusade history serves to highlight the benefits of combining literary and historical analysis within a synergistic interpretive dynamic.

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Beyond this, as I point out in the conclusion, my analysis of the Perlesvaus has an urgent contemporary dimension: its examination of the searing cultural costs associated with the demonization of difference—costs afflicting both demonized and demonizers, victims and perpetrators—could not be more relevant to our world today.

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Submitted Articles:

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“Wandering Christian: Ritual Cannibalism and the ‘Doppelganger Jew’ in The Book of John Mandeville” begins by examining the shifting treatment of Eastern cannibalism within a particular Middle English version of the Mandeville multitext and then gradually widens the analytic lens, exploring how fears over Jewish/Christian category collapse encoded in the Book’s  increasingly ritualized, “Judaizing” discourse of cannibalism can shed new light on longstanding issues in Mandeville criticism as well as on the ugly evolution of Western antisemitism. It concludes with the claim that the “doppelganger Jew” whose presence presides over this late-medieval pilgrimage guide-turned-world travelogue has the potential to elucidate moments of burgeoning anti-Jewish racism across a wide range of texts and historical settings.

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Articles in Preparation:

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“The Riches of Loss: Charles Williams’s Arthuriad and the Perlesvaus” explores why this dystopian Old French romance spoke so powerfully to Williams and—to a lesser extent—his fellow-Inklings C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as medievalist authors writing in the ashes of British exceptionalism and imperialism.

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“Exempla Collection Meets Grail Romance: The Dialogus miraculorum and the Deranged Cistercianism of the Perlesvaus” is an intertextual study that puts the anomalous Old French Perlesvaus into conversation with Caesarius of Heisterbach’s hugely popular Latin collection of formational exempla for Cistercian novices. The extensive overlaps between these two works both help to elucidate the disputed horizon of composition of the Perlesvaus and serve to highlight the fluid nature of medieval genre distinctions. Basically, this intertextual exercise is a case study in how medieval texts may converse across genres and share strikingly similar frames of understanding while conveying wildly divergent messages.

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Future Book Projects:

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The Nonbinary Middle Ages: Arthurian Romance and the Christological Reenvisioning of Gender

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This book, which is currently in the research and panning stages, is situated at the intersection of literary, religious, and cultural studies. Its central thesis is that the European High Middle Ages witnessed a profound cultural shift towards more fluid and performative ways of thinking about gender identity. I locate the roots of what I term the “nonbinary Middle Ages” in galvanizing developments in spiritual approaches to the divine associated with twelfth-century cultural influencer Bernard of Clairvaux and the Cistercian monastic reform movement. The main body of the book will explore this seismic cultural shift within the popular thought-space of medieval Arthurian romance while making connections to wider religious and cultural currents; its lynchpin chapter treats Chrétien de Troyes's genderfluid and religiously resonant Le chevalier de la charrette, a.k.a. the Lancelot.  Despite its medieval timeframe, this book is aimed at a broad audience across gender studies and has a very topical aim: to provide the non-binary community with a historical genealogy that promotes contemporary acceptance and affirmation.

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Arthur Meets the Avengers: Medieval and Modern Fictional Multiverses (working title)

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A book of essays that will explore the many illuminating correspondences in form, content, and cultural significance between the literary universes of medieval Arthurian romance and modern superhero film/fiction, a topic ripe for serious scholarly attention.