ABSTRACT
It is by now a commonplace of a certain kind of medievalism-the kind of medievalism I tend to like-that the Middle Ages touch us: that medievalism is, in fact, nothing if not a response to being touched by the past, a response that is also reciprocally (and diffusely) tactile. Carolyn Dinshaw gave the first sustained articulation of this tactile medievalism in Getting Medieval, where touching consists of “making partial connections between incommensurate entities” and where a specifically queer touch “show[s] something disjunctive within unities that are presumed unproblematic, even natural.”1 The Middle Ages have become, in the wake of Dinshaw’s account, particularly well-suited to a queerly tactile historiography because they name and comprise so much “incommensurate” stuff; because so many beginnings and endings get folded into their constitutive “middle.” The disjunctions at the heart of that historical juncture we have come, for better or worse, to call medieval provide a number of recent writers-Catherine Brown, Virginia Burrus, Carla Freccero, and Bob Mills, to name a few-with the opportunity to reflect, often eloquently, on the affects that draw some of us toward (and, occasionally, drive us away from) the Middle Ages and the periods they touch upon, “late” antiquity and “early” modernity.2 Belated, premature, or in-between, the “partial connections” envisioned by Dinshaw are, it turns out, written into the very taxonomies according to which historical and disciplinary “unities” are posited in the first place. There is, in other words, no impartial connection to the past, much less within it; no “unity” or “entity” without contingency: without, that is, the bodies and times that rub against them and mark their limits.
