IRRECOVERY
By Seeta Chaganti
Archival and critical projects referred to as ‘recovery’ allow scholars to make heard the voices of those historically inaudible and marginalized. When discourses of representation, centers and margins, and intersectionality inform the amplification of previously disregarded or suppressed perspectives, these discourses can indicate a recovery project’s espousal of a liberal ideology. In medieval studies, these acts of recovery in fact tend both to reflect and enhance the field’s general political liberalism. Medieval studies need instead to move politically to a place of radicality, one that would, unlike liberalism, align itself coherently with the work of dismantling the violent and unjust structures in which we think, work, and live. I suggest that one step toward this goal would involve recognizing the limits of recovery so that we turn instead to what I call irrecovery. Resonant with, yet distinct from, Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation method, irrecovery does not refocus the point of agency in a historical narrative.[1] It instead recognizes the necessity of leaving the agents of certain collective actions undetectable as part of ensuring the futurity of liberation struggle.
Like liberalism itself, recovery projects, on their unexamined own, impose troubling and problematic limits upon the field’s political potential. The feminist recovery projects of the last fin de siècle do not always acknowledge how the medieval white women platformed in no way encompass all feminism.[2] Racial recovery, often involving medievalists from well-resourced PWIs scouring manuscript images, art, and textual imagery for the presence of Black and brown people in the Middle Ages, does not solve this problem. Even as such scholarship calls on the rhetoric of rescue and recuperation, it also evokes the anxious atmosphere of the chase, smoking out those hidden, which reminds me of nothing so much as the white settler deployment of surveillance techniques upon Black or Indigenous people, with the goal of recapture into immiserating and carceral environments. In many cases, furthermore, recovery projects focusing on race and gender fall short of the most trenchant possible critique of power because often their subjects—abbesses, diplomats, traders, courtiers—perforce have sufficient proximity to power themselves to achieve textual and material memorialization.
There have always been those, however, who do not wish for their identities to be recovered, often because they risk punishment for performing actions that materially compromise structures or institutions of power. In a modern American context, historians recognize that racial minorities and other dispossessed people in the US would often engage in resistance through quotidian modes that did not make an imprint on the historical record in the manner of, say, a speech, but nonetheless did serious political work. James C. Scott offers the phrase ‘hidden transcript’ to describe ubiquitous, culturally expressed forms of resistance on the part of an oppressed group, from conversation to pop cultural idiom to subtly refusing domination by bosses.
“Deny, Defend, Depose” (possibly seen in Denver) posted by @GraffitiRadical on Twitter/X
These instances make up an everyday but ‘circumspect struggle’, simultaneously creating awareness of power imbalance and using their unmarked nature to protect against some of the consequences of that imbalance.[3] Robin D. G. Kelley extends this argument to suggest that such hidden transcripts can in turn ‘inform public, collective action.’[4] In some cases, those working-class Black actionists of Kelley’s analysis needed to preserve their anonymity to protect themselves from state retaliation. Their expressions of resistance could produce material disruption outside institutional regulations, rather than acting as bids for reform occurring within legal processes. Hence the concern about revealing such actors’ identities to lethal engines of regulation, like the police. Such forms of disruptive resistance need to exist as deliberately anonymous, and have probably always done so, with strategies of collectivity obscuring not only actors’ identities but also the details of the action itself. If the irruptions visible to history depend upon a momentum sustained by other acts that are necessarily sub rosa, how do we speak of those latter acts?
To begin answering this question, I look to the medieval outlaw narrative as a genre that generates and sites untraceable dissidence. Racially and socially coded very differently from the Black working-class resisters that Kelley discusses, medieval outlaws would necessarily engage in acts of resistance that likewise significantly differ. At the same time, however, an analytical structure that discerns radical resistance in anonymity and collectivity is applicable to the medieval example. Critics comment upon the conservativism of medieval outlaw narratives, specifically in their positive sentiment towards the person of the king (even as they mock his officials). Maurice Keen notes this feature of The Tale of Gamelyn.[5] In this anonymous fourteenth-century poem, the hero, youngest son of three, is menaced and exploited by his eldest brother after their father’s death, ends up on the wrong side of the law defending himself, and so becomes an outlaw. Gamelyn enters the greenwood, where he meets an outlaw king and his band, eventually replacing the outlaw king himself until Gamelyn’s return to his family lands and his reinstatement by the king of England into legal legitimacy.[6] While most of the outlaws remain in the story’s background, they exist as a low thrum throughout the text, a collective that by and large wordlessly helps to shape the action.
Through these anonymous outlaws, my quest both to address the problem of medieval studies’ liberalism and to speak of unrecorded sabotage arrives at the concept of irrecovery. Rather than platforming the identities of those engaging in acts of resistance, we might instead analyze historical dissidence in a way that honors the deliberate irrecoverability of its practitioners. To be sure, Gamelyn’s ‘wolfeshede’ (l. 696) status, meaning that as an outlaw his life is worth no more than a wolf’s, ultimately transforms, as intimated above, and the king appoints him a forest justice. In advance of this collaboration with carceral power, however, Gamelyn affirms his loyalty to the outlaw band. Before he returns to his home to save his middle brother, whom the eldest has detained—‘fetred ful fast’ (l. 805)—and threatened to execute, Gamelyn declares his intention ‘To loke howe my yonge men leden her liff, / Whedere thei lyven in joie or ellis in striff.’ (ll. 753-754) [to see how my young men lead their lives, whether they live in joy or else in strife]. The length of time he spends with his outlaw band, ‘under the wode-ris’ (l. 767) [under the forest branches] and ‘under wode boughe’ (l. 770) [under the forest bough] elevates the risk to his own captured brother. Indeed, this second brother sounds nothing less than irritated at Gamelyn’s tardiness— ‘Thow haddest almost, Gamelyn, dwelled to longe’ (l. 835) [you had almost stayed away too long, Gamelyn]—when the latter finally swashbuckles in. Gamelyn’s sojourn with the band must have substance and duration, though, because they need this time together to reinforce not only fellowship but also, and more specifically, solidarity and praxis:
Gamelyn and his men talkeden in fere,
And thei hadde good game her maister to here;
His men tolde him of aventures that they had founde,
And Gamelyn tolde hem agein howe he was fast bounde. (ll. 771-774)[Gamelyn and his men talked together, and they had good enjoyment to hear their master. His men told him of the ventures they had encountered, and Gamelyn told them in turn how was bound fast.]
In a reading that experiments with irrecovery, this scene describes group of people who have built trust together to perform actions that exceed legal constraints. They offer each other reports on recent actions reciprocally, learning from each other’s experiences what has succeeded, how they have evaded consequences, what they need to watch out for, when they need to dress in green bloc, what to bring and what to leave behind. And in their space, the muffling shadows of twig and bough defend them against surveillance.
To think of them as irrecoverable is to posit an approach to historical actors—particularly those who in different ways inhabit the outskirts—as needing not to be showcased but to be honored both for transgressing laws and for eluding identification. The culture and politics of the outlaw could have contributed—perhaps in attenuated and unexpected ways—to the ideological and strategic conditions for well-known acts of revolt and uprising in late-medieval England. Thomas Shippey notes that while the medieval yeomanry, a population represented in Gamelyn’s outlaw band, were not thought to have comprised the rebels of 1381, they might well have asked themselves Which side are you on? regarding the interests of their noble employers as well as their own precarity.[7] The complexity of medieval class relative to modernity makes no war but class war a difficult pronouncement to apply to this period, but this complexity also raises possibilities regarding the conduits and collaborations involved in the illicit and disruptive direct actions of that political moment. But only in the invisibility, anonymity, and collectivity of outlaws and those with whom they interacted can we accommodate such possibilities. Shannon McSheffrey argues that Robin Hood himself did not represent a radical actionist.[8] In a sense he could not: the hooded figures around him conjure those who protected their anonymity precisely so they could enact that militancy.
“No war but class war” (in Montreal) posted by @GraffitiRadical on Twitter/X
Irrecovery makes itself possible in both space and time, and while one cannot hammer the royalist Gamelyn into a shape of militancy or carceral abolition, irrecovery as a temporal phenomenon can still allow this text to radicalize its readers past and present. When Gamelyn becomes a legal official,
Alle his wight yonge men the king foryaf her gilt,
And sithen in good office the king hath hem pilt…. (ll. 889-90)[The king forgave all (Gamelyn’s) bold young men of their guilt, and afterwards the king placed them in good offices]
Such capitulation to reformist institutionality and inclusion inevitably disappoints, and the violent resonances of the verb pilten speak to the nature of reform itself. But we might still see the representation of these erstwhile outlaws otherwise. Characteristic of the outlaw ballad, Gamelyn, with its scraps of alliteration and its archaized aesthetic, generates a long leap of time between itself and its readers. If Gamelyn’s outlaws acknowledge their guilt in order to be exonerated of it, they nonetheless remain obscure in their namelessness compared to Gamelyn himself as well as obscure in their exact and various social positionings. Receding into the past as their readers move forward in time, the outlaws do not simply maintain their comparative anonymity: they deepen it. In this way, time restores the outlaws’ irrecoverability. Time functions like the forest, returning them to the strategic obscurity that allowed them to pave a still-existing road toward the freer, more communal world they might once have imagined. That past moment in the greenwood thus evokes an invisible but necessary layer in the ongoing project of destroying what our ruling class has decided will be normal.
Irrecovery in the medieval archive offers another lesson for our own time. The apparatuses of the present render it well nigh impossible to return to a state of irrecoverability once it is lost, but this fact helps us to recognize the power of instead remaining irrecoverable. On December 4, 2024, a masked figure shot and killed United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan. One day later, as the shooter evaded identification and capture, another insurance company, Anthem, abandoned a grisly plan to abbreviate its customers’ anesthesia access during surgery. Four days after that, someone put down the boot she was licking long enough to point a finger, and the cops grabbed Luigi Mangione. But what if the real shooter’s identity is never established? What if it they remain anonymous until they become, further in the future, irrecoverable? Other insurance companies might walk back coverage cuts. Some might implode under the pressure of feared retribution. An enduringly unidentified UHC shooter’s folk heroism and evasion of capture might inspire further militant action against corporations, against the state, against this terrible system. No one knows, after all, who Roblin Hood really was, or if he was anyone at all. In Elizabeth Allen’s terms, he represents a ‘negative formation’ as a locus of social ‘indeterminacy.’[9] If his future—our present—often looks back upon him as based, rather than ambiguous, we might attribute this to his very irrecovery, his reflection of a particular praxis of resistance.
As historical practice and method, irrecovery offers a way for medievalists to attune themselves to more militant histories than some of those available through identitarian recovery projects. It offers a way for those who needed secrecy in their liberatory acts to remain hidden, allowing these acts to build momentum in larger struggles. The alliterative riddle ‘deny, defend, depose,’ engraved on bullet casings at the UHC shooting scene like anonymous runes on an ancient sword, usefully emblematizes the method. This little verse speaks not of its originator’s experience and individual identity but of their solidarity with all those immiserated, caught in the relentless white mandible of industries past and present. And it is all we need to know in a history of freedom.
Author Bio:
Seeta Chaganti joined the faculty of the UC Davis English department in 2001. She specializes in Old and Middle English poetry and its intersections with material culture. Her first book was The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Her second book, Strange Footing (Chicago, 2018) argues that to medieval audiences, poetic form was a multimedia experience shaped by encounters with dance. In this work, she proposes a new method of reenacting medieval dance that draws upon experiences of watching contemporary dance. Her current project, tentatively entitled "Carceral Angels: An Abolitionist History of the Sheriff," traces a long history of the shrieval office from pre-Conquest England to modern America. It argues that the earliest days of English law forged the triangulation of violence, whiteness, and property that obstructs liberation in Anglophone modernity.
Notes:
[1] Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” small axe 12.2 (2008): 11.
[2] Robin Norris, Renée R. Trilling, and Rebecca Stephenson articulate a related critique in ‘A Feminist Renaissance in Early Medieval English Studies,’ English Studies 101.1 (2020): 1-2.
[3] James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 183.
[4] Robin D. G. Kelley, ‘“We Are Not What We Seem”: Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South,’ The Journal of American History (June 1993): 82.
[5] Maurice Keen, The Outlaws of Medieval Legend (London: Routledge, 1961), p. 93.
[6] Anthony Mundy et al., eds., The Tale of Gamelyn, in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997). https://metseditions.org/read/ezWWPq7ru128ta6mC4ba2SK5GMPwDyZ. All line numbers indicated in-text, with translations by the author.
[7] Thomas Shippey, ‘The Tale of Gamelyn: Class Warfare and the Embarrassments of Genre,’ in The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance, ed. Ad Putter (New York: Longman: 2000), p. 86.
[8] Shannon McSheffrey, “Robin Hood: Social and Political Protest,” in Historians on Robin Hood, ed. Stephen H. Rigby (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2024), pp. 193-94.
[9] Elizabeth Allen, Uncertain Refuge: Sanctuary in the Literature of Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), p. 194.
