Introduction: Neighbors, Neighborhoods, Neighboring

This special issue, “Neighbors, Neighborhoods, Neighboring,” engages some of the ways the ethical concept of the neighbor — in both its early articulations and contemporary theorizations — is currently being productively marshaled to analyze medieval and early modern literature. The emerging field of “neighbor theory” takes Freud’s influential reading of the biblical injunction to “Love your neighbor as yourself” as its point of departure. The term “neighbor” here indexes a proximity that is, in the first instance, spatial rather than affective. The figure of the “neighbor” is by definition neither friend nor enemy: it introduces a third term into these binary relationships. However, the command that one must love the neighbor, and, moreover, that one must love her as oneself, frames the moment of greeting the neighbor as an act of interpretation: who is the neighbor? Who am I? What does it mean to love? Central to theoretical inquiries into the neighbor, then, is this very “apparent” self-reflexivity within the commandment: “the call to love the neighbor as yourself,” and what it implies “about the nature of self-love and, by extension, about subjectivity” (Žižek, Santner, and Reinhard 2005, 6). The injunction to “love your neighbor as yourself” has a long history, but it is Freud’s reading of this text that has sparked interest more recently, and been taken up by a wide range of theorists — from Derrida to Deleuze, Agamben to Žižek — and together these discussions constitute an emerging locus of literary interpretation. We see the utility of neighbor theory for current disciplinary trends along a broad range, as the articles in this collection illustrate, but particularly in its capacity to elucidate and dismantle the binarism inherent in many discussions of subjectivity and alterity in the context of the ethical, and now the affective, turn in literary studies.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all identify the neighbor as a site of ethical responsibility — that is, all three of these major world religions propose that their adherents owe love to the neighbor. The Christian context, with its famous Parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:25–37, spurred a significant amount of exegesis and moral commentary among the early Church Fathers, much of which was influential into the Middle Ages. Augustine and Origen, among others, formulated allegories of salvation and moral exegesis based on this parable that became standard ways of interpreting it in the Christian Middle Ages (influencing English literary, scholastic, and liturgical writing).¹ The Middle English Mirror, for instance, a lectionary and collection of associated prose sermons, draws upon such exegesis in its sermon for Luke 10:25–37. Aside from this focus on the Parable of the Good Samaritan, other ethical discourses of the neighbor gained traction in the medieval period: especially the perspective that behaving ethically toward the neighbor — a defining feature of charity (caritas) — constituted a remedy for envy, an idea found in treatises and sermons on the vices and virtues (Newhauser 2008). This strain of thinking the neighbor also influenced literary production in the late Middle Ages, as Jessica Rosenfeld has shown (2012, 2014). In parallel to these exegetical and doctrinal readings, of course, lived relations among neighbors were important in various ways in the Middle Ages. As Susan McDonough’s recent survey of scholarship on the subject concludes, “When medieval people called someone a ‘neighbor,’ the label conveyed a set of obligations, behaviors, and expectations, rooted in the idea that neighbors were among the group of people who were privy to the intimacies of each other’s lives, at times both monumental and mundane” (2017, 2). These relations were as ubiquitous, especially in urban environments, as they were complicated: “medieval neighborliness was neither uncomplicated nor understood as unequivocally positive,” as “[o]ne has only to think about important recent studies of medieval religious communities, legal communities, and linguistic communities to name just a few, to recognize the potency of community as a frame for thinking about the connections that united, and often divided, medieval people” (McDonough 2017, 5, 2).

The general parameters of the field of study that we are referring to here as “neighbor theory” consist of a series of philosophical responses to Freud’s discussion of the biblical injunction to “love your neighbor as yourself.” In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud highlights the strangeness of the commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself,” arguing: “[m]y love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection. It imposes duties on me for whose fulfillment I must be ready to make sacrifices” ([1930] 1989, 66). “What is the point,” he concludes, “of a precept enunciated with so much solemnity if its fulfillment cannot be recommended as reasonable?” (Freud [1930] 1989, 66–7). Unreasonable, that is, because Freud doubts the neutrality of the figure of the neighbor, or even its benevolence: “the element of truth behind all this … is that men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness” ([1930] 1989, 68). For Freud, therefore, the injunction to “love your neighbor” is tantamount to the injunction to “love your enemy.” His rejection of the concept of neighbor-love is, however, not only philosophical but historical, as he points to that paradigmatic failure of Christian neighbor-love: antisemitism. Lacan, however, in Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1992), recoups from Freud’s analysis the core of this rejection, seeing it as generative: “every time Freud stops short in horror at the consequences of the commandment to love one’s neighbor, we see evoked the presence of that fundamental evil which dwells within this neighbor. But if that is the case, then it also dwells within me. And what is more neighbor to me than this heart within which is that of my jouissance and which I don’t dare go near?” (Lacan 1992, 186). The conversation set in motion between Freud and Lacan has been continued by a series of thinkers who often pick up on Lacan’s readings of the generative possibilities of what for Freud was the impasse produced by the unknowability of the figure of the neighbor. Notably, Emmanuel Levinas, in Otherwise than Being, Totality and Infinity and Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, and Jacques Derrida, in The Politics of Friendship, both invite us to re-think the friend/enemy dichotomy in favor of a third term, and both find the ethical implications of the biblical command useful to think with. And, in his inimitable style, Slavoj Žižek has emphasized the intense recoil the neighbor generates, as epitomized in articles bearing titles such as, “Neighbors and Other Monsters,” “Smashing the Neighbor’s Face,” and “The Only Good Neighbor is a Dead Neighbor!”

Across a series of articles, Kenneth Reinhard has isolated and aggregated this discussion, perhaps doing the most to articulate “theories of neighboring” as a key topic for literary criticism.² In this body of work he proposes that “the figure of the neighbor instantiates an interpretive paradigm and textual complex distinct from the genealogical initiatives for which [Freud’s] Civilization has rightly been praised” (Reinhard 1997, 165). Inasmuch as Reinhard is a scholar who has consistently and deeply theorized the religio-ethical facet of the neighbor and neighborliness, he is an interesting figure to place alongside medieval and early modern texts. In a book co-authored by Slavoj Žižek, Eric Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard (2005), The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology, the concepts that Freud had taken to be operative primarily at the level of the individual are expanded to encompass the level of the community, the political.³

For all these thinkers, greeting the neighbor always entails an act of interpretation. From its earliest scriptural instantiations in the Jewish Tanakh and the Christian Bible, the neighbor has never been self-evident.⁴ Of these scriptural invocations of the neighbor, the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37) most directly asks the question, “And who is my neighbour?” (Luke 10:29).⁵ The need to delineate the neighbor, and the difficulty of doing so that this question signals speaks to the fundamental problem of interpretation that underlies all scriptural invocations of neighboring, especially those active within the original commandment to love the neighbor: Leviticus 19:18. It is to this passage of Leviticus that Jesus and the lawyer from the Parable of the Good Samaritan refer when Jesus asks, “What is written in the Law? how readest thou?” (Luke 10:26) and the lawyer responds, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind: and your neighbour as thyself” (Luke 10:27; emphasis added). It is, therefore, this Leviticus passage’s interpretive indeterminacy that the lawyer signals when he challenges Jesus with the question, “And who is my neighbor?”

To understand how and why persistent ethical questions arise around the neighbor (the Parable merely extends those questions rather than settling them) we must look closely at Leviticus 19:18: “Thou shalt not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself: I am the LORD.”⁶ Reinhard walks through the vexed grammar and diction of this injunction to demonstrate the central role that interpretation must play in any attempt to put the commandment into practice. Nearly every Hebrew word, from the nouns to prepositions, is ambiguous either in its semantic range or its appearance in this grammatical context (Reinhard 2014, 706–12). Of central importance among these oddities, the term for “neighbor” (Hebrew re’a) appears in a wide variety of contexts elsewhere in the Tanakh, denoting at various times fellow Jews, non-Jews, and nonhuman animals. Who can be said to “count” as a neighbor, therefore, is eminently up for debate, as Jewish commentary in the Talmud and elsewhere (not to mention the lawyer’s question in Luke) make manifest. This inherent flexibility offers fruitful and varied points of entry to literary interpretation.

Because the figure of the neighbor itself signals a diverse and contradictory set of communal relations in the Leviticus commandment Reinhard theorizes outward from the indeterminacy of this foundational religio-ethical articulation to conclude that, “The call to neighbor-love enjoins us to love that which is both closest to and least affiliated with us” (Reinhard 1997, 190). The neighbor as (paradoxically) both proximate and distant creates the figure’s troubling ambiguity: “neighbors constitute a zone of indistinction between friends and enemies, the familiar and the strange, where alliances are contingent and hospitality easily slips into hostility” (Reinhard 2014, 707). Loving this figure is difficult precisely because, as Freud observes, we have no guarantees that such an ambiguous neighbor is either worthy of our love or would return it in like measure:

Why should we do it [love the neighbor]? What good will it do us? … If I love someone, he must deserve it in some way … He deserves it [my love] if he is so like me in important ways that I can love myself in him; and he deserves it if he is so much more perfect than myself that I can love my ideal of my own self in him … But if he is a stranger to me and if he cannot attract me by any worth of his own or any significance that he may already have acquired for my emotional life, it will be hard for me to love him … On closer inspection, I find still further difficulties. Not merely is this stranger in general unworthy of my love; I must honestly confess that he has more claim to my hostility and even my hatred. (Freud [1930] 1989, 66–7)

Freud, in his purposefully “naïve” parsing of the commandment “as though we were hearing it for the first time,” takes little time to reason from the position that the neighbor is a candidate who might deserve love if he meets certain qualifications (all focused, crucially, upon the self) to an opposing perspective that he is a stranger who “honestly” deserves only hostility and hatred. Freud interprets the reflexive aspect of the commandment (love thy neighbor as thyself) as suggesting that the neighbor is somehow like the self: “if he is so like me in important ways that I can love myself in him” or “if he is so much more perfect than myself that I can love my ideal of my own self in him” (Freud [1930] 1989, 66; emphases added). But Freud finally concludes that Leviticus 19:18 intends neither of these conditions. Neighbor-love, for Freud, is not justified by any affinity the neighbor shares with the self, nor by her emotional significance for the self; instead, Freud reasons, the neighbor is fundamentally strange and therefore has no claim that would justify our love. Yet we are charged to love the neighbor nonetheless, leading to Freud’s assessment that the commandment is a truly radical ethics: we must love though we have no good reason to do so, and every reason not to.

This transition from “neighbor” to “stranger” in Freud’s analysis (and the enduring link between them that his analysis forges) likewise arises in the injunction’s scriptural roots. Accepting Freud’s conclusion that the affinity lies neither in similitude nor in emotional significance, Reinhard tracks a link between neighbor and stranger through scriptural ethics to clarify/theorize more precisely who the neighbor is in relation to the self. The scriptural injunction associates self and neighbor through the love it commands us to offer to each — “thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” (Leviticus 19:18, emphasis added). Reinhard points to a second ethical injunction in the Tanakh (this time charging us to love the stranger), which is proximate to Leviticus 19:18 in both its placement (15 verses later) and its similar diction and syntactic structure. By virtue of these associations between the two injunctions, “the category of the neighbor … retroactively unfolds to include the stranger” (Reinhard 1997, 171). Leviticus 19:33–34 reads, “And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not do him wrong. The stranger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you as the home-born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God” (emphasis added). Reinhard analyzes the crucial link between neighbor and stranger in their relation to the self across these Leviticus injunctions. He observes, “In the ethical space that opens in the nearness of Leviticus 19:18 to 19:34, the ger [stranger] dwelling among Jews is ‘like’ the Jews only insofar as they were themselves unlike someone else, ‘strangers in the land of Egypt’” (Reinhard 2005). In other words, the ethics of neighbor-love depends upon the self and the neighbor sharing nothing except “an element of essential difference, the fact that both the self and the neighbor are ‘strange,’ internally alienated from the larger group, whether that be Egypt or Israel” (Reinhard 2005). This shared strangeness is crucial for Reinhard. Paradoxically, “this structural parallel is the only absolute basis for their solidarity” (Reinhard 2005); “I am ‘like’ the neighbor only insofar as we each are not-like someone else, and the memory or fact of that alienation” makes ethics possible (Reinhard 1997, 172). That is, the theoretical basis for the ethics of the neighbor arises from this one point of affinity in the relation of self to neighbor. That sole affinity, drawn from scriptural ethics, is self-difference or internal strangeness. Loving the neighbor, by this logic, points us back toward what is strangest about ourselves.

The challenge of loving such a strange neighbor as the self puts us, according to Slavoj Žižek, in “a stressful ‘impossible’ relationship” with the neighbor (2005, 140). Greeting the neighbor, then, is an act of interpretation that forces us to confront the ways we are “strangers to ourselves,” to borrow Julia Kristeva’s titular phrase. But because such a confrontation raises all our hackles, we tend to cringe away from the insight that the neighbor invokes. And in our interpretation of the neighbor, we tend to misrecognize our own internal alienation (in ciphered form) as the strangeness attendant upon the neighbor. In other words, the disturbing strangeness and proximity attending the neighbor tells us very little about who the neighbor actually is, or the actual state of relations between self and neighbor — they are compensatory interpretive gestures that we make in response to the stressful confrontation with our own internal alienation that the neighbor, by sharing an analogous alienation, nudges into view. We cannot, therefore, interpret the neighbor in any certain or final way — the interpretive process never loses its urgency. Yet the confrontation, however misrecognized the neighbor may be, demands an ethical response. The ethical charge of love challenges us and enjoins us to resist both misrecognition and recoil, and to accept the impossible situation that is our own inability to know the neighbor or ourselves fully — to love, in short, without any guarantees of reciprocity. Critical questions arising from this theoretical juncture have particular resonance for literary scholars: for instance, in what ways does the narrative representation of the neighbor/stranger/other make such a misrecognition of desire legible and/or resist its misdirecting impulses?

As will be obvious, like so much contemporary literary theory, these ideas emerged first in the context of continental philosophy. What remains is to think how this might pertain as a literary theory rather than a philosophy of ethics. To begin, we might echo those very questions that Freud asks about the biblical injunction: “Why would we do it? What good will it do us? But, above all, how shall we achieve it?” Reinhard explains the neighbor’s sharp and flexible critical reach when he identifies three conceptual clusters of “neighborly” intellectual activity, namely the religio-ethical, socio-political, and mathematical registers of neighboring. Firstly, the religio-ethical register insists upon the neighbor’s status as privileged and asymmetrical object of ethical obligation; thinking, in this way, of the neighbor as a theory of relation that impinges on ethics provides a way of interrogating the way characters of whatever creed or status relate to each other as neighbors within a work of literature. In literary texts such as medieval romance (where religious neighbors are often presented in credal conflict with one another, but sometimes also envisioned as allies) the strangeness of religious neighbors so often devolves also upon the narrative’s heroes. Descriptions of such alterity may say very little about the Other herself; as more than one critical tradition has taught us, representations of alterity are frequently bound up in the misrecognitions and projections of the “self” — whether that “self” be author, audience, or cultural/religious community. But this is not all: rethinking alterity from the vantage of neighbor theory asks us simultaneously to take seriously the affinities of self-difference and alienation that narratives will draw between Other and self, and to interrogate the ways that individual and communal identities are at once contingent upon and threatened by the extimacy of the neighbor (the way the neighbor is at once part of the community and excluded from it). What sort of desire — envy, for instance — might medieval texts assign to the self when confronted with such a neighbor? What sort of love might medieval texts envision as their obligation to her?

Secondly, the socio-political register, which thinks the neighbor in terms of “spatiotemporal proximity, or contiguity” considers the “problematics of the border,” as well as the physical or communal neighborhood, with its informal and reciprocal entities and/or modes of association (Reinhard 2014, 706). This spatial-temporal-communal orientation of neighboring and neighborhoods suggests interpretive avenues for attending to nationalities, political relations/conflicts, community associations, literary landscapes, geographies, or urban/rural communal spaces. Thirdly, mathematical accounts of neighboring, Reinhard explains, “strive to formalize concepts such as adjacency, connectedness, and approximation” through such approaches as set theory, topology, and systems theory (Reinhard 2014, 707). For example, in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, this mathematical neighbor “is central to a series of key oppositions” between hierarchical societies (in which “there is exactly one ‘dictator’ who coordinates the system”) and “‘rhizomatic’ systems based on neighbors” (Reinhard 2014, 711). In such rhizomatic neighborhoods, “communication runs from any neighbor to any other, the stems or channels do not preexist, and all individuals are interchangeable” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 17). The mathematical concepts attendant upon neighboring, and their implications, have been taken up (though not often through an explicit use of neighbor theory) by the trending fields of ecocriticsm, new materialism, and posthumanism in both medieval and early modern literary studies.

To these three conceptual clusters of neighbor theory, we would add a fourth, sprung from the insights of the other three — that is, textual neighboring as a new way of theorizing textual stemma, genealogies, or families. This approach was influentially pioneered in medieval literary studies by George Edmondson’s The Neighboring Text: Chaucer, Boccaccio, Henryson (2011).⁷ As Houlik-Ritchey (2016) has noted, “In The Neighboring Text, Edmondson deploys neighborliness to refer to a mode of rewriting that emerges most clearly in works with a common source: Henryson’s revision of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde in The Testament of Cresseid is a primary example” (120). Although Edmondson strategically restricts his archive in this monograph to instances of deliberate, even aggressive, source rewriting, he follows Lacan and Reinhard in envisioning a wider applicability for neighboring as a mode of reading: “[m]y aim in turning to the figure of the neighbor is thus to formulate a mode of literary history responsive to the event of reading: to the encounter with the neighboring text” (2011, 19). Reinhard, for his part, uses Lacan’s lecture “Kant avec Sade” to describe:

a comparative literature otherwise than comparison … a mode of reading logically and ethically prior to similitude, a reading in which texts are not so much grouped into “families” defined by similarity and difference, as into “neighborhoods” determined by accidental contiguity, genealogical isolation, and ethical encounter. (Reinhard 1995, 785)

As Michelle R. Warren has noted, such an approach carries the potential to reconceptualize how we approach and value translations as well as our perspective on source study in general (2011, 506-7).

From the point of view of literary theory, therefore, neighbor relations might be thematized within texts, across textual adaptations of source material, between texts that literally neighbor each other in their manuscript context, or as an interpretive frame that the critic might herself impose, bringing two seemingly unrelated texts into a neighboring relation. Which is to say that the “neighboring” relationship might be created by the narrative’s representation of its characters’ relationality (Cresseid or Alceste as the neighborly courtly lady); it might be created by the author or author-function (Henryson’s narrator’s attitude toward Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde in the Testament of Cresseid); it might be created by the material artifact (as in the manuscript miscellany or anthology that brings two texts into proximity outside of authorial intention or influence); or it might be created by the critic herself (Houlik-Ritchey’s bringing together of Geoffrey Chaucer’s and Pero López de Ayala’s independent memorializations of Pedro I of Castile). What all these cases have in common is that neighboring is a way of repositioning questions about the nature of the other, a mode that turns the gaze back on the self, which focuses on extimacy rather than alterity, and which insists upon the ethical valences and obligations of the encounter. It offers a useful third term to disrupt the binary of self/other, friend/enemy — and to imagine those categories (and their representation in literature) within a specific ethical context.

Finally, we suggest that neighbor theory has organic ties to medieval studies. Medieval authors routinely adapt, translate, rewrite, and otherwise incorporate the auctoritas of the past. Envisioning the relationship between reader and text as one of neighboring, and an author’s/scribe’s amplification, abbreviation, and/or exegesis of that material to be a record of such a neighborly encounter, has the potential to reconfigure not only the way we approach source study, but also the ways we attend to such gestures within any single given text. Moreover, as Fradenburg (2002) has followed Lacan in arguing, the topos of courtly love might be read as implicitly dependent on the concept of the neighbor: “In courtly literature, the figure of near distance, in time or space, repeatedly marks the strange intimacy of the Other, the element of the unknown in the subject’s desire” (185). For Fradenburg, this neighborly dimension of courtly love is bound up in what she sees as chivalric discourse’s obsessive pursuit of service and (self-)rescue, themselves ethical discourses of the Middle Ages. Edmondson, in turn, offers a neighborly reading of Henryson’s Cresseid informed by Fradenburg’s deployment of Lacanian views on neighboring and the courtly lady. The image of the lady, from a Lacanian perspective, is “itself a kind of barrier against the Thing it materializes” (Edmondson 2011, 64). Her image (something to desire and pursue) stands in for (and thus blocks) the disavowed desires and their satisfaction that we wish ever to defer. In Edmondson’s reading of Cresseid, her voice plays an analogous role to her image: “Cresseid’s words may debase her, may even condemn her. But as long as she continues to speak them, as long as she continues to occupy the privileged position of the voice as object, then the powerful desire she (dis)embodies has yet to be fully evacuated from the poem” (Edmondson 2011, 65). Edmondson’s (2011) explanation for Henryson’s repudiation of Cresseid in turn hinges on the neighborly relation between Henryson and Chaucer legible in the aggressive rewriting of Chaucer’s ending that Henryson’s Testament performs:

[Cresseid] confronts him [Henryson], in the place of the neighbor, a place occupied by Chaucer’s “quair” [that is — Troilus and Criseyde], with the embodiment of a desire that he recognizes as his own repressed desire, and from which he recoils as emphatically as he did the bitter cold of his “oratur” at the beginning of the poem. (62)

In Edmondson’s analysis, in other words, the extimacy of Henryson’s own authorial identity, expressed in his poem in relation and opposition to Chaucer’s, finds additional expression through the neighborliness of the courtly lady as Henryson (re)writes her in the Testament. There is much scope here for further interrogation of ethics, love, and self/neighbor relationality by literary scholars interested in courtly literature.

The articles collected here extend this pioneering work. In “‘The Childe of Bristowe’ and the Limits of Neighbor Love,” Hannah R. Johnson uncovers the way in which what appears on the surface to be an unremarkable exemplum about a son attempting to make amends for the usurious behavior of his father — and thus to save his father from eternal purgation — is revealed simultaneously to be a meditation on the possibilities of neighbor love in offering respite from the relentless cycles of debt and repayment, both economic and spiritual. Considering “The Childe of Bristow” alongside its neighboring tale in British Library Harley MS 2382, Chaucer’s “Prioress’s Tale,” however, demonstrates the limits of neighbor love, and emphasizes, like Freud, the affective impossibility of its ethical demands. Moving from neighboring texts to territorial neighborhoods, David Coley’s “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Diaspora, Neighborhood, Empire,” takes a less psychoanalytic approach, turning to the insights of postcolonial theory. Coley draws the twin diasporic and imperial narratives of the Trojan story into neighborly relation through the concept of “diasporic space” — a neighborhood in which the diasporic, imperial, and indigenous territories overlap — to produce a critique of England’s imperial project in Wales. Following upon this, Richard H. Godden’s article “Neighboring Disability in Medieval Literature,” brings Critical Disability Studies into dialogue with Neighbor Theory in the context of medieval romance. This theoretical and literary conjuncture allows Godden to build upon all three discourses’ shared interest in nonnormative embodiment to propose an ethico-temporal parasynchrony as a mechanism to restore a transformed sense of reciprocity to the neighboring encounter. Finally, Joseph Taylor’s “‘When a stranger sojourns with you in your land’: Loving the Refugee as Neighbor in the Canterbury Tales and Refugee Tales” uses the tropes of neighborliness to collapse the time between the medieval and contemporary worlds. Taylor reads the contemporary collection The Refugee Tales alongside The Canterbury Tales, using it to mount a critique of Chaucer’s (unneighborly) treatment of the figure of the refugee.

As the articles collected in this issue suggest, we believe that the work of neighbor theory can be particularly invigorating to the study of medieval literature. Some key elements of its self-imagination, in fact, are envisaged around the fulcrum of the neighbor: the exempla tradition; authorial/narratorial invocations and repudiations of auctoritas; courtly love; neighboring religions; the place of Jews in Christian society; “Saracens” and the Islamic other; the way in which the potential for conversion always troubles the self/other dichotomy; the extimacy of the other writ large, whether racial, religious, gendered, or economic; and finally, miscellany compilation and practices of translation. Finally, “neighbor theory” has found its way into posthumanistic/ecological discussions in Emily Houlik-Ritchey’s article on “The Franklin’s Tale” in Studies in the Age of Chaucer (2019), as well as into the pedagogy of medieval texts in Emily Houlik-Ritchey’s and Heather Blurton and Hannah Johnson’s contributions to Miriamne Ara Krummel and Tison Pugh’s collection Jews in Medieval England: Teaching Representations of the Other (2017). As a field, if that is what it is destined to become, neighbor theory is emergent, and marked as much by disagreement and negotiation as by agreement. With these articles, we do not wish to seem to be putting a frame around what amounts to a series of points of view. Rather, we offer these articles to demonstrate what we see as the range of possibilities for this fledgling field.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Heather Blurton

Heather Blurton teaches in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author, with Hannah Johnson, of The Critics and the Prioress: Antisemitism, Criticism, and Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale.

Emily Houlik-Ritchey

Emily Houlik-Ritchey teaches in the English Department at Rice University. She is the author of several articles on the neighbor and medieval literature appearing in Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Exemplaria, and South Atlantic Review.

Notes

1. On this subject see Origen (1996), Teske (2001) and Rytting (2007).

2. See especially Reinhard (1995, 1997, 2014).

3. This approach has had its critics. For one such example, see David Nirenberg (2014, 86–8).

4. Islam, of course, likewise shares and develops a scriptural ethics of the neighbor.

5. All citations are to the Douay-Rheims Bible.

6. When citing Leviticus, we have used the same version of the Pentateuch as Reinhard (2005) in his most thorough explication of scriptural ethical injunctions to love the neighbor: see Cohen, The Soncino Chumash (1983). Interestingly, however, the Latin Vulgate renders “neighbor” as “friend,” amicus, an interpretation not repeated in Luke, which gives proximus.

7. This approach, drawn from Reinhard (1995), has great promise for literary study, as Michelle Warren (2011) has echoed. Emily Houlik-Ritchey (2016) has put this approach into action.