What I Learned on Medieval Twitter

Most of the people I follow on Twitter are medievalists, even though I’m not a medievalist myself. Far from it: my research focuses on the 20th and 21st centuries. But I’m on Twitter for fun, not profit, and from what I can see, medievalists are the academics having the most fun on the platform. Scholars who focus on new media don’t come close to the bar that medievalists set on Twitter, either by qualitative measures like inventiveness or by quantitative ones like output, likes, retweets, and the ability to set the day’s or the week’s terms of play.¹ Twitter is a medievalist’s world nowadays; the rest of us are just living in it.

As it happens, medievalists have been steadily—albeit unintentionally—preparing for this triumph for decades. Technologically, they have been the humanities’ early adopters, ever since Father Roberto Busa supervised the creation, starting in 1946, of the Index Thomisticus, a punch card concordance to the works of Thomas Aquinas.² Since then, they have led the pilgrimage into digital scholarship with the building of digital glossaries and libraries and the digitization of medieval manuscripts.

Medievalists have also benefited from a culture of conversation that long predates Twitter. In 2008, Diane Zorich noted that knowledge production suffers because digital humanities projects are too often siloed: that is, undertaken at different sites without communication between, or awareness of, each other.³ In contrast, regular interdisciplinary mingling has enabled medievalists to share information about new tools, technologies, and projects. This, in turn, helped them to avoid reinventing the wheel, which still plagues the broader practice of the digital humanities. But you aren’t here to read about siloing. You’re here to read about the penis nun.

The penis nun, for anyone who missed this breakout star of marginalia, is a figure in a marginal manuscript illustration from the 13th-century erotic allegory The Romance of the Rose: a nun who is carefully plucking phalluses from a tree and gathering them in a basket.⁴ Her image, famous on social media, graces a growing cornucopia of souvenirs and trinkets, from enamel pins to embroidery work to sew-on patches. And she is only the most famous of a seemingly infinite cast of characters from the medieval page whose situations strike modern viewers as surreal. Knights valiantly battle snails. Rabbits march about with swords and shields. A man wears a resigned expression (“Not again”) as he tries to crawl out of a giant fish.⁵

A ubiquitous trope in contemporary internet culture is what the media scholars Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner call “the presumption of the weirdness of digital content.”⁶ Comedy on the web is often existential comedy, in the term of the philosopher Agnes Heller, in which absurd events are taken as part of the natural order.⁷ The next link, the next tweet, the next viral phenomenon is always apt to show something completely different from what came before; and we tend to cope with the abruptness and contrariety of this information overload with humor that leans hard on the absurd.

Medieval content works remarkably well with this style of expression. A doctor calmly applying a sword to a patient’s head, Saint Anthony resignedly enduring an attack from fishlike devils, Saint Lucy presenting her eyes on a plate: without context, these images are surreal, and even with context, they’re often richly silly.⁸

Jokes are only the most widely shared currency of medieval Twitter. We can find more precious tokens of value in the “rich mundanity” of its conversations.

So medieval materials tend to suit the aesthetic that the “weird internet” privileges, despite their creation in an age of paint and parchment. But, just as important, medievalists bring great finesse to the joining of their research with the latest memes. They ask, in mockery of the news media’s alarmist coverage of digital culture, whether your child is “tweeting about medieval Latin scribal abbreviations.” They combine the web’s favorite sassy quote with images of the T and O map. They juxtapose images of an argument on reality television with discussions of the date of Beowulf’s composition or a scene of verbal contest from an Anglo-Saxon poem. They join the web’s sustained riff on the poem “This Is Just to Say,” by William Carlos Williams, by translating it into Old English.⁹ And accounts belonging to specific research projects have fun with role-playing, as when the Twitter account Medieval Rats, which belongs to a zooarchaeological project that uses rat bones as evidence, noted warily that it was being followed by Medieval Cats.

“Whatever the current meme is, I tend to Beowulf it and then be amused at my own humor,” says Damian Fleming, a medievalist at Purdue University Fort Wayne and one of the stars of medieval Twitter.¹⁰ Fleming joined the platform in 2010, when his institution gave its faculty free iPads on the condition that they cultivate presences on social media. Fleming obliged by posting regularly first on Facebook and then, some years later, on Twitter.

“I was quite active on Facebook with friends, quasi-friends, colleagues, the weird relationships that kind of develop on that platform,” he said. “On Twitter I’ve been active, really, since 2015. It may have been conference-related. At conferences, people are always live-tweeting sessions. When other people are at conferences that I’m not, I watch conferences on Twitter.”

Jokes are only the most widely shared currency of medieval Twitter. We can find more precious tokens of value in the political subtleties of participatory culture and what Jean Burgess and Joshua Green call the “rich mundanity” of its conversations.¹¹ Political and social ideas often circulate online under the cover of idle chatter, such as memes, selfies, mundane videos, comment chains, and reposts with new captions—a phenomenon that Melissa Harris-Perry, in a book on black public spaces that deserves to be updated for the age of Black Twitter, calls “the politics of everyday talk.”¹²

Recently, Twitter has been an important forum for scholars to discuss the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, the biggest annual event in the field, and its troubled relationship to medievalist scholarship on race.¹³ Joshua Eyler, a scholar at Rice University, started a hashtag, #thingsheardatKzoo, where Kalamazoo attendees could exchange thoughts and testimonies that “might help improve the conference, especially for MoC [medievalists of color], people with disabilities, etc.”

Dorothy Kim has argued that Twitter activity, especially during conferences, enables scholars to amplify critical insights that would normally be relegated to the margins, circulating commentary as variously exegetical, irreverent, and dissident as the marginalia in medieval manuscripts: “Twitter can be radically serious in pushing against the ‘authority and control’ of the state, the scholarly-industrial complex, and institutional power. It can also be playful, hysterically funny, irreverent, cute: an utter delight though often also still radically pushing against the ‘authority and control’ of the powers-that-be.”¹⁴

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Authorship After AI

By Sarah Allison

Valid criticisms of Twitter as a platform have abounded, especially in recent years. This is a brief word of praise for a community from an outsider who feels she has gained something complex from the simple activity of chattering, arguing, and joking online.

As a result of hanging around the boundaries of this community, I’ve started to think about citation in terms of respecting people’s labor and expertise, and to thank librarians and archivists up front in my talks and papers. I think more often about phrasing and how a passage might read to different communities of interpretation. I’ve developed, without knowing why, an indistinct admiration for Margery Kempe. I’ve felt privileged to watch a new network of forums continue the old work of sustaining a dialogue with the past. The philological record—the work, handed up through generations, of annotation, disputation, interpretation, and making silly pictures—grows and branches like a tree, from which we gather such joys as we can.

“I stop and think, ‘Oh man, the things I have learned from this community,’” says Fleming. “I think about that all the time while wasting time on Twitter.”

This article was commissioned by Sharon Marcus.