Events

Lecture by Adin E. Lears (VCU)

November 15, 2024, at 12:40 pm
Payne Hall 201

"Wondrous Currencies in Chaucer's Canon's Yeoman's Tale"

At the 2021 Bitcoin convention in Miami, Michael Saylor, CEO of the business intelligence company MicroStrategy, lauded Bitcoin as a force of "monetary energy," a more vital alternative to the US dollar, devalued by the banking establishment. For some of cryptocurrency's proponents, it promises nothing short of a physical and cultural revitalization, restoring nutrients to the soil, and returning humankind to a cultural golden age from a devolved, animalistic state. This conflation of economic, physical, and cultural vitality is not new. This talk describes these wondrous currencies of monetary value and life force and reveals the deep history of their entanglement, tying them to the premodern religious ideals of physical and spiritual wholeness embedded in the theory and practice of alchemy. Since its inception in ancient natural philosophy, alchemy sought to purify and vivify matter, turning base metal into gold and restoring youth with the elixir of life. Through the Middle Ages, alchemical pursuits were often informed by the promise of alchemical knowledge as a means of restoring the perfection humans had lost as a result of the biblical Fall. By dramatizing the devitalizing effects of alchemy in his Canon's Yeoman's Tale, and by gesturing toward the Yeoman's self-healing, Chaucer invites us to think critically about the processes of consumption and extraction that structure our working life.

Adin E. Lears is an Associate Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University where she teaches courses on medieval literature and critical theory and is contributing to an emerging minor in Health Humanities. Her writing includes World of Echo: Noise and Knowing in Late-Medieval England (Cornell, 2020) as well as articles and essays in Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Exemplaria, The Hedgehog Review, and other journals. Her talk stems from work she is doing for her current book project Vital Flesh: Scales of Nature and Brute Care in Later Medieval England.

All are welcome.