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  • Montréal, Québec, Canada

Stephen M Yeager

This essay describes a plan for Indigenizing medieval studies that has two elements. The first is an area of research inquiry, "The Global Far North, 500-1500 CE," which moves past the written records of the Vinland sagas to privilege... more
This essay describes a plan for Indigenizing medieval studies that has two elements. The first is an area of research inquiry, "The Global Far North, 500-1500 CE," which moves past the written records of the Vinland sagas to privilege alternative forms of evidence about cultural contact in the defined period, particularly the oral traditional evidence of Indigenous communities. The project's investigations will apply the emerging protocols for research ethics and for reciprocity with Indigenous communities, and they will aim to historicize and challenge settler notions of legality that rely on written documents. The essay concludes by arguing that teaching, service, and community outreach must be prioritized over publication as modes of professional activity more conducive to Indigenization's political goals. Decolonizing medieval studies will require not only that we engage with Indigenous communities but also that we actively center their concerns and contributions at every step.
The first-edition preface to Walpole's novel The Castle of Otranto contains a description of an imagined incunabulum, ostensibly witnessing the novel's text, which is attributed to an imagined translator, William Marshall. The incunabulum... more
The first-edition preface to Walpole's novel The Castle of Otranto contains a description of an imagined incunabulum, ostensibly witnessing the novel's text, which is attributed to an imagined translator, William Marshall. The incunabulum is said by Marshall to be printed in a 'black letter' typeface, a term which was already in this period a synonym for 'gothic' letterforms. This essay briefly summarizes the history of this classificatory term 'gothic' as it is applied to script, in order to provide further context for Walpole's parody of antiquarianism in the first edition preface and its relation to his use of the term 'gothic' in the subtitle to the novel's second edition.
Protocols are strategies designed to anticipate and manage emergent contingencies, which originate in the key transitional period in the institutional literacy of post-Roman Europe that took place in the twelfth century. This essay aims... more
Protocols are strategies designed to anticipate and manage emergent contingencies, which originate in the key transitional period in the institutional literacy of post-Roman Europe that took place in the twelfth century. This essay aims to account for that crucial but rarely discussed attribute of protocols, which is that they contain within them processes of critical self-historicization that are fundamental to their basic authorizing procedures. It is both the primary obstacle to and the primary motive for the analysis of protocols, that any comment on the history of a protocol must either defend or critique its current configuration. Protocols are techniques, latent in the nature of things, and so their authority is constantly expiring. This means that when one criticizes protocols relentlessly and even rewrites them drastically, one will not only fail to subvert their original authority but will serve on the contrary as a defender of their principles and a mechanism of their persistence. This fact about protocols is enormously important for their analysis and for thinking about the ways in which protocols have shaped the evolution of societies and cultures in the past and in the present.
The alliterative Brut by Laæamon survives in two manuscripts, Cotton Caligula A.IX and Cotton Otho C.XIII. The scribes who transmitted the Caligula text treated it as an historical record, preserving and embellishing the formal attributes... more
The alliterative Brut by Laæamon survives in two manuscripts, Cotton Caligula A.IX and Cotton Otho C.XIII. The scribes who transmitted the Caligula text treated it as an historical record, preserving and embellishing the formal attributes of the text that made it seem old.
The character Prudence in Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee prudently explains to her husband Melibee that he ought to be merciful, interpreting the text’s events for him as they unfold. However, her interpretive methodology poses many problems... more
The character Prudence in Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee prudently explains to
her husband Melibee that he ought to be merciful, interpreting the text’s events for him
as they unfold. However, her interpretive methodology poses many problems to the
reader. Prudence confuses her twin roles as human wife and allegorical virtue; both the
content and manner of her speech can sometimes contradict her own advice, and it is
far from clear at the end of the story that her husband has actually learned anything. The
implication of this incoherence is that interpretive methodologies themselves are the
problem. It is Melibee’s strict, moralizing adherence to the precise words used by Prudence
and his counselors that leads him towards violence and revenge, while Prudence’s
looser and somewhat contradictory interpretations of proverbial wisdom nonetheless
culminate in a clear, consistent notion of charitable mercy
Many scholars believe that the anti-fraternal and overall anticlerical thrust of Mum and the Sothsegger indicates sympathies with Lollardy or Wycliffism, but this article argues that the poem’s anticlericalism is best explained with... more
Many scholars believe that the anti-fraternal and overall anticlerical thrust of Mum and the Sothsegger indicates sympathies with Lollardy or Wycliffism, but this article argues that the poem’s anticlericalism is best explained with reference to alliterative Anglo-Saxon homilies and the Anglo-Saxon charters of ancient Benedictine monastic houses. Mum and the Sothsegger nostalgically draws from the Anglo-Saxon anticlerical critique in order to argue both for a return to older institutional arrangements, and for the rights of (Anglo-Saxon) kings to confer properties and privileges.
Research Interests:
The reappearance of alliterative verse in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries remains one of the most puzzling issues in the literary history of medieval England. In From Lawmen to Plowmen, Stephen M. Yeager offers a fresh,... more
The reappearance of alliterative verse in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries remains one of the most puzzling issues in the literary history of medieval England. In From Lawmen to Plowmen, Stephen M. Yeager offers a fresh, insightful explanation for the alliterative structure of William Langland’s Piers Plowman and the flourishing of alliterative verse satires in late medieval England by observing the similarities between these satires and the legal-homiletical literature of the Anglo-Saxon era.

Unlike Old English alliterative poetry, Anglo-Saxon legal texts and documents continued to be studied long after the Norman Conquest. By comparing Anglo-Saxon charters, sermons, and law codes with Langland’s Piers Plowman and similar poems, Yeager demonstrates that this legal and homiletical literature had an influential afterlife in the fourteenth-century poetry of William Langland and his imitators. His conclusions establish a new genealogy for medieval England’s vernacular literary tradition and offer a new way of approaching one of Middle English’s literary classics.
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