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From its title, doctoral candidate Elissa Hansen’s
dissertation project—“Signs of the Time: Temporality in
Fourteenth-Century English Contemplative Writing”—
doesn’t sound like it will venture into the dangerous waters of
heresy. But complicating orthodoxy is both its subject and its
method: Hansen shows how three contemplatives do an endrun
around Catholic hierarchy by herself dismantling accepted
historical theories about medieval thinking on time.
“There’s a sort of flattening narrative of the Middle Ages,”
says Hansen, interviewed this fall in Lind Hall, “which involves
the pre-Reformation idea: everybody was Catholic, and that’s
just how it was. To borrow from William James, I got interested
in the ‘varieties of religious experience’ in the Middle Ages,
book of HOURS
PhD candidate Elissa Hansen ponders medieval time
seeing what that looked like in
different writers. I’m excited
about heresy, so I started
thinking about what it means
to claim authority in different
ways as someone who is affiliated
with orthodoxy.”
Hansen argues that
medieval contemplative writers—whether
hermits or the
anchorites, mostly women,
who were walled up within a
church—claimed authority by
modeling to lay readers ways to understand and communicate
with God, particularly via ideas about time.
Hansen’s adviser, associate professor Rebecca Krug, calls
the dissertation project “a strikingly original study” which
“demonstrates the ways traditional scholars of mystical devotion
have resisted historicizing the subject of temporality.” Indeed,
the project won a 2011–12 Graduate School Dissertation Fellowship,
which allows Hansen to focus on writing.
Time became a fluid concept during the Middle Ages. “In
the fourteenth century,” explains Hansen, “you have 76 public
clocks installed in England. So there’s this huge shift in how
people think about public time.” Historicists have tended to
sum up the shift as a movement from church to mercantile
time. Meanwhile, scholarship on contemplative writing has
aligned contemplation with a linear Christian “end-of-days”
narrative and/or a sort of eternal bliss outside of time. Hansen’s
investigation uncovers more complex and nuanced narratives
which don’t necessarily fall into these binaries.
Focusing on the anchorite Julian of Norwich, the hermit
Richard Rolle, and the anonymous author of The Cloud of
Unknowing, Hansen describes how the works create a “rhetoric
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of time” to give structure to how readers think about temporality.
These writers “mold the abstract idea of time into concrete
tools with which believers can access God and gain knowledge
of their own souls,” Hansen writes, while also illustrating how
contemplative practice can act as a personal path to God.
That Hansen believes these narratives were pitched to
lay audiences as well as the monastic readership is a theory
only recently becoming less heretical. Professor Krug was a
pioneer in this area with her 2002 book Reading Families:
Women’s Literate Practice in Late Medieval England. Hansen’s
professors at the University of Wyoming, where she earned
her MA, introduced her to Krug’s work. “Becky has been an
amazing, supportive adviser,” enthuses Hansen, who is hoping
to graduate next spring, in what will be a quick five years.
Krug has also been an inspiration in terms of teaching
practice, along with another medievalist, Lianna Farber. “They
have really different teaching styles,” Hansen says, “but they
were both informative to my own teaching. Becky runs things
more like a conversation—asking what we’d be interested in and
how it informs our research. Lianna has a really great Socratic
method, where she leads people through very complicated
texts—and that kind of precision was really inspiring.”
Because her project connects intellectual and social history,
Hansen has benefited from the range of University students
involved with the Medieval & Early Modern Research Group
(MEMRG). “It’s been great to run ideas by each other,” she says.
“I feel like I’ve learned so much in the past four years here.”
A good fit goes both ways, and Hansen has played an
integral part in the graduate program at Minnesota. She served
as vice president and president of MEMRG and as president of
the Graduate Student Organization in English. She has presented
several papers locally, including an invited presentation within
the University’s Center for Medieval Studies workshop series, a
rare opportunity for a graduate student. She organized biweekly
reading groups focused on sight-translations of Latin and Old
English texts and Middle English pronunciation.
All this from a student who started out at Cal Poly as an
Economics major. One general survey course on Medieval
Literature, and she was hooked. “Often we get this narrative
about the Middle Ages as kind of backward,” she points out.
“My professor made it much more richly textured. She and the
faculty there modeled excitement about literature and about
teaching. So I got excited about being a professor.”
To that end, Hansen has contributed a chapter to a book
to be published next spring, Reading Memory and Identity
in the Texts of Medieval European Holy Women (Palgrave-
MacMillan), edited by Margaret Cotter-Lynch and Bradley
Herzog. Even while occupied with her dissertation, she has been
generating ideas for scholarship beyond its scope, for example,
modern-day “end of history” narratives. “I feel like it could be
one of those projects that opens doors for more research,” she
says with relish, exhibiting the same (in these times, heretical?)
enthusiasm about literature that led her here. p
For another take on time, see page 19
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