Julie Orlemanski

I teach and write about texts from the late Middle Ages and theoretical and methodological questions in present-day literary studies. I am co-editor, with James Simpson, of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, Eleventh Edition, Vol. A, The Middle Ages (2024). In January 2025, I begin as Book-Review Editor at the journal Exemplaria: Medieval, Early Modern, Theory, in which role I commission book-review essays. (Please reach out to pitch ideas!) Most recently I guest-edited the essay cluster “Grounds for a Trans-Regional Medieval Studies, Beyond the Global” for postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies. My editorial introduction is freely accessible here.

          My previous monograph, Symptomatic Subjects: Bodies, Medicine, and Causation in the Literature of Late Medieval England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), considers embodiment in the historical period just prior to medicine’s modernity—before Renaissance anatomy, before the centralized regulation of medical professions, before empiricism and the rationalist division of mental from physical substance. It tells the story of how bodies were interpreted and imagined between the arrival of the Black Death, in 1348, and the start of English printing in 1476. The period witnessed remarkable growth in the production of medical writings, largely for readers without university degrees. As medical paradigms mingled with other models for interpreting bodies, a growing number of readers found themselves negotiating the conflicting claims of material causation, intentional action, and divine power. Partly as a result, the later Middle Ages was, I argue, a period of etiological imagination, an age broadly fascinated with projects of explanatory invention and the tasks of narrating and arbitrating among intricate causal chains. Writers like Geoffrey Chaucer, Robert Henryson, Thomas Hoccleve, and Margery Kempe drew on the discourse of phisik—the language of humors and complexions, of leprous pustules and love sickness, of regimen and pharmacopeia—to chart new circuits of legibility between physiology and personhood. The book’s arguments unfold at the meeting of literary criticism, the history of the body, and the history of science, to chart conflicts over who had the authority to construe bodily signs and what embodiment could be made to mean.

 I am currently at work on several projects. Most immediately, I am writing Making Literary Persons: A Poetics of Voice in Chaucer. The monograph responds to the fact that now is an especially dynamic time to be writing about literary persons, when, in the still-unfolding aftermath of both New Criticism and poststructuralism, scholars have been rewriting the history and theory of character, narrator, and literary voice. Making Literary Persons brings the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer to this evolving conversation. As I show, Chaucer’s work consistently portrays literary personhood pulled taut between two poles—between artifice and liveliness, metafictional contrivance and ethical charisma, and between persons’ status as fabulations, merely imagined by author or reader, and the reality of these figures’ independent presence, “in themselves” and not just “for us.” I argue Chaucer was unusual among his contemporaries for foregrounding the hermeneutic and ethical stakes of literary persons’ unstable natures. Long a touchstone for histories of character, the Chaucerian corpus nonetheless has the ability to defamiliarize and challenge our concepts for the curious powers of literary personhood. Over six chapters, Making Literary Persons follows the arc of the poet’s career, with special attention to the ways Chaucer’s earliest works, the dream poems, set a paradigm for the later, verisimilar frame of the Canterbury Tales. Related publications include my account of the Physician’s Tale in this collection and a state-of-the-field essay forthcoming in Exemplaria 36.2, entitled “Writing, Voice, and Person-Making: Dispatches from Middle English Studies.”

 I am also working on a short book entitled Who Has Fiction? Modernity, Fictionality, and the Middle Ages. Histories of fiction—tracing fictionality as idea and literary pursuit across time—are often told as narratives of epistemic progress. As modernity discovered finer distinctions between fact and fiction (so the story goes), legend and lore were gradually rationalized. The West has a long tradition of yoking fiction-properly-so-called to conditions of epistemic maturity, found lacking, variously, in women, the uneducated, or the myth-bound premoderns. The Middle Ages, or “age of faith,” has long been a foil for modernity and its arts of fiction, especially novelistic realism. Who Has Fiction? analyzes this account and seeks to tell the story of fiction otherwise. The book falls into three parts. Part I explores the historiographic, conceptual, and political questions ciphered in histories of fiction, especially of medieval fiction. Part II offers an overview of how medieval commentators theorized fiction and sets this overview in dialogue with present-day debates in narratology, philosophy, and literary studies. Part III explores how medieval literature tacitly theorized its own fictionality, particularly in its use of commonplaces. Topics discussed include biblical parables, personifications, pagan gods, the Song of Songs, Troy narratives, Passion meditations, and devotional theater. Who Has Fiction? anticipates multiple interlocutors—other medievalists but also historians of the novel, multidisciplinary scholars of fictionality, and scholars reflecting on what it means to deploy historically laden concepts (e.g., “fiction,” “queer,” “religion,” “race”) across time. My article laying out some of these ideas, together with a dossier of responses, is available from New Literary History here.

 Finally, percolating in the background is a book project on the twelfth-century abbot Bernard of Clairvaux and his masterpiece the Sermons on the Song of Songs. Bernard’s career unfolded in a period when writing and speech were being dramatically recalibrated in the organization of institutional life. He began the Sermons on the Song of Songs in 1135 and continued working on them until his death in 1153. It was during these same years that the upstart, reforming movement that Bernard helped lead, the Cistercian Order, was figuring out how to make its novel organizational structure function across an exploding international network of monasteries. I argue that Bernard wrote his Sermons on the Song of Songs under pressure to knit together the far-flung sites of Cistercian life and to distribute his own charismatic person through a web of monastic and ecclesiastic institutions. Writing was the crucial technology for doing so, particularly sermons and letters. The Sermons of the Song of Songs, in turn, gave him a literary platform for reflecting on the virtualization of embodied speech in writing, both in his exegesis of the biblical text and in the sermons’ own poetics of prosopopoeia. The project combines histories of medieval literacy, media, and monasticism with a commitment to understanding Bernard as a remarkable literary thinker. Early work from this project appears in my article “Literary Persons and Medieval Fiction in Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons on the Song of Songs.”

Photo Credit- Erielle Bakkum

• Symptomatic Subjects: Bodies, Medicine, and Causation in the Literature of Late Medieval England (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2019)
• “The ‘Physician’s Tale’ and Chaucer’s Art of Prosopopoeia,” in Literary Forms and Cultural Power in Medieval and Early Modern Literature: A Book for James Simpson (2024), ed. Nicholas Watson, Sebastian Sobecki, and Daniel Donoghue
• “What Is ‘Postmedieval’?: Embedded Reflections,” in boundary 2 50:3 (2023)
• “Fiction and Belief: Approaching Medieval Latin Christendom,” in The Routledge Handbook on Fiction and Belief (2023), ed. Alison James, Françoise Lavocat, and Akihiro Kubo
• “Literary Persons and Medieval Fiction in Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons on the Song of Songs,” in Representations 153 (2021)
• “Who Has Fiction? Modernity, Fictionality, and the Middle Ages,” in New Literary History 50.2 (2019)
• “Langland’s Poetics of Animation: Body, Soul, Personification,” in the Yearbook of Langland Studies 33 (2019)
• “Prosopopoeial Heaviness in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess,” in Chaucer and the Subversion of Form (2018), ed. Thomas A. Prendergast and Jessica Rosenfeld
• “Medieval Literary Theory,” in the Literary Encyclopedia, vol. 1.2, English Writing and Culture: Medieval and Early Modern England, 1066-1485
• “Modernity within the Middle Ages,” review essay in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology 116.3 (2017)
• “Philology and the Turn Away from the Linguistic Turn,” in Florilegium 32 (2017 for 2015)
• “Literary Genre, Medieval Studies, and the Prosthesis of Disability,” in Textual Practice 30.7 (2016)
• “Scales of Reading,” in Exemplaria 26.2-3 (2014), special issue on “Surface, Symptom, and the State of Critique”
• “Genre,” in A Handbook of Middle English Studies (2013), ed. Marion Turner, Wiley-Blackwell Critical Theory Handbooks