Travels in Deleuzean Time: Virtual Pilgrimage, Temporal Paradox, and the Newberry and Bicester Stacions of Rome

ABSTRACT

Extant in nine manuscripts, the fourteenth-century poem The Stacions of Rome is often relegated to the dustbin of pilgrimage propaganda. Turning to its presence in two understudied manuscripts, Newberry Case MS 32 and National Archives PRO SC 6/956/5 (known as the “Bicester” roll), this article proceeds from C. David Benson’s recent argument that the Stacions should be reconsidered within the larger tradition of medieval imaginative travel in order to explore the relationship between the manuscripts’ texts and material surfaces. Through the production of temporal paradox, created between the Stacions’ spatiotemporal details and the physical rolling action of manipulating the manuscripts, the Newberry and Bicester rolls offer their readers an experience of reality that moves the reader outside the step of typical human temporal understanding. This process is most legible when considered through the lens of Gilles Deleuze’s theory of bipartite time, as laid out in The Logic of Sense ([1969] 1990), and reveals valuable lessons for understanding the genre with respect to the relationship between imagined time and space. When read as tools for vicarious travel, in other words, the Newberry and Bicester Stacions demonstrate how the collision of dueling temporal orders can help to produce the effect of virtual pilgrimage.

KEYWORDS:

• The Stacions of Rome
• virtual pilgrimage
• Gilles Deleuze
• temporality
• time
• Middle English
• roll manuscript
• imagined pilgrimage

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

^1. This article takes Newberry Library Case MS 32 as its core manuscript, and all quotations from the poem are transcriptions from this manuscript. Where necessary for comparison or context, I have referred to Bale and Sobecki’s edition in Medieval English Travel, which is predominantly edited from Bodleian Library MS Eng. poet. a. 1 (the Vernon MS) and whose text cleaves the most closely to that of the Newberry manuscript.

^2. In her treatment of the Newberry Stacions, Jeanne Krochalis (2009) points out that the saints’ heads, noted in each of the seven relatively complete manuscripts, were said to have been rediscovered in the ruins of the old Lateran church during the reign of Pope Urban V (1362–70). Krochalis argues that the poem’s omission of a church dedicated to St Thomas of Canterbury, established in 1362, could be taken as evidence for a composition date prior to 1370, but reminds us that “an argument ex silentio is notoriously tricky” (129 fn 3).

^3. Benson refers to this additional 70-line section as “the Bicester Mirabilia” and reads it as one of only two Middle English translations of the larger Mirabilia genre. Despite this, he notes that “the poem as we now have it is not a significant version of the Mirabilia,” as it “uses only a small amount of the information from that tradition and makes little effort to remind the reader of Rome’s past splendor” (2019, 43 [AQ5]).

^4. See Scattergood (1968) for a fuller account of the manuscript’s physicality and list of textual deviations.

^5. Kathryn M. Rudy (2011, 97 fn 73) adopts Jan Pieper’s term metric relic to describe this medieval habit of gathering and conveying precise spatial information, which was widely popular in virtual travel texts as a means for not simply envisioning the space at hand, but for actually experiencing some of its spiritual benefits.

^6. To provide just a handful of examples, Carolyn Dinshaw (2012, 60–1) points out that in the twelfth century, Walter Map (1140-c. 1210) invokes Augustine’s musings on time directly to situate his own De nugis curialium, and that the fourteenth-century Book of John Mandeville follows Augustine’s City of God in its presentation of the beginnings of Time. Slightly closer to home, Matthew Champion’s recent Fullness of Time (2017, 4–5) finds kinship with the saint, admitting that “like Augustine, I do not know what time is. But Augustine’s reflections can open up ways of thinking about time through our perception of its effects — the passing of events into the past, the sense of a future to come, an experience of the present — and through an often implicitly shared language.”

^7. See also David Woodward (1985) for an illuminating discussion of mappaemundi and chronogeographic representation.

^8. As Kathryn M. Rudy reminds us, successful imaginative travel was predicated on a pilgrim’s ability to “feel part of the story both spiritually and physically” (2014, 393). Best practices for achieving imaginative travel varied widely across the Middle Ages, but in every case successful mental travel was achieved when a pilgrim was able to vividly and intentionally imagine the details of their chosen location, prompted by the text. For a longer consideration of these processes, Rudy’s Virtual Pilgrimages in the Convent (2011) is an invaluable resource.

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Notes on contributors

Logan Quigley

Logan Quigley holds a PhD from the University of Notre Dame. His research explores representations and experiences of strange spatiotemporalities in late medieval travel literature.