I eagerly joined this conversation when invited by Dilip Gaonkar and Neilesh Bose, because for some fifty years I have practiced literary studies—specifically, literary history—while closely attentive to dialogue with historians, both through reading and through colleagueship. As my work in this new millennium has increasingly turned to world literature, I have looked to important works of world history with which to develop this dialogue, and I have not found the resources as rewarding as I had in my earlier focus on English and American literatures and cultures. Therefore, I begin this paper by stating simply my longstanding expectations for the relationships between the disciplines of history and literature. These expectations have not controlled but certainly have guided my work for many years. Do they remain at all persuasive? I turn then to exemplify my dissatisfactions in looking to recent world historiography. Finally, I conclude with more extended discussion of Sheldon Pollock's The Language of the Gods in the World of Men, a work far from my immediate area of study in which I find great promise for better relations between historical and literary scholarship.

I start with a paragraph from The Communist Manifesto, which I consider the warrant for our topic of relations between World History and World Literature. The Manifesto sets its political goal within a powerfully influential conception of world history, within which resides world literature.

In this essay I would like to introduce Neoplatonism as a new category in global intellectual history. The term Neoplatonism was coined in the eighteenth century to make a distinction between Platonic thought and the ideas of a group of philosophers who followed the lead of the third-century philosopher Plotinus; the group included his student and biographer Porphyry, Iamblichus and Proclus, to name only its four main representatives. More than the earlier Platonists, and even more so than the great philosopher himself, these late-Hellenic followers of Plato commented on his thinking, further systemised it, and aligned it to mystical cults oriented towards Pythagoras, Orpheus and Hermes Trismegistus. From the third to the fifth century, all these elements together generated a seething Neoplatonic juncture which was to have a tremendous impact on the post-Classical world of Europe, the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic world. Although an almost Alexandrian library has been written on Neoplatonism, so far, no comprehensive connective or comparative analysis has been made of these three geographical branches. In this essay, I will pinpoint one particular moment in time when, after centuries of more hidden influences, Neoplatonism once again, and for about one long sixteenth century, became the cutting-edge, avant-garde intellectual force in both the Latinate West and the Persianate East.

Entering a conversation after everyone else has spoken is a daunting task. The predicament to add another layer of richness and complexity to the subject becomes even more challenging when the conversation is as ambitious as the one undertaken in this volume, led by not one, but two historians of note: Patrick Manning and Neilesh Bose. Not to mention the stunning gallery of scholars who have presented multi-perspectival examinations of several keywords that comprise the subtitle of the volume: literature, comparison, and approaches to globalization. Manning's short and succinct “Foreword” provides an excellent overview of multiple conceptualizations of “World” and “World History” that the volume offers. Bose's conceptually rich and argumentatively compelling introductory essay locates the terms “World Literature,” “World History,” and “Global History,” in a longer history of ideas, illuminating differences, but also intersections between lines of inquiry across Euro-American and Indian scholarly landscapes, historically and in the contemporary period.

This chapter is an attempt to reflect on questions I buried in the footnotes of my monograph, World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth. This reflection took place over the course of a year following its publication, and in the context of finishing an anthology of political theory from the Global South in the twentieth century. This is an indulgent and scattered exercise, but I hope it also demonstrates an attempt to revisit (or foreground, or perhaps unearth) some persistent concerns that haunt the projects of writing world literature and world history. First: how might scholars of world literature and world history offer accounts of thinkers and writers who envisioned or theorized world literature and world history in their own times? Second: what have been the uses of theorising world literature and world history, especially as political projects?

In her essay “The Realist Impulse and the Future of Postcoloniality”, literary critic Ulka Anjaria writes of the emergence of a new trend in contemporary Indian writing. She terms such a trend “realist impulse.” The “realist impulse”, Anjaria comments, “is a transition in representational mode, and/or medium that entails a new textual engagement with the contemporary world, as evident in gestures such as stories set in the present rather than the past and the trimming of modernist, metaphorical and metafictional language for a more stripped-down and less ostensibly self-conscious aesthetic. The impulse signals a new political urgency in both nonfiction and fiction writing alike.”

The South African writer and activist Alex La Guma (1925-85) departed Cape Town for exile in 1966, an extended period which ended with his premature death in Havana, Cuba, at the age of sixty. He never witnessed the achievement of non-racial democracy in the country of his birth. Yet his experience sheds light on the role that exile has had in shaping South Africa's literary, political, and intellectual life. La Guma shared this experience with many during the anti-apartheid struggle—thousands went abroad either temporarily or permanently—yet it remains incompletely examined as a historical phenomenon. Existing scholarship by Stephen Ellis, Hugh Macmillan and Thula Simpson, for example, has focused primarily on party organization, diplomatic efforts and life among lower-level recruits within the Frontline States and elsewhere. Though committed to this broader effort, La Guma's exile casts a different light on the complexity of this condition for individuals—the constant vulnerabilities of being a political émigré, the strength derived from common cause with other activists, and the day-to-day intellectual labor involved in building a transnational movement. Exile was a time of both political uncertainty and personal freedom, a liminal status of forcibly becoming an outsider while still retaining the commitments of an insider.

There is a certain antipathy between world literature and literary history. Both trace their origins to, or through, the early nineteenth century and the era of nationalism, each in a different way a response to that stimulus. But theories and models of World Literature have had a striking tendency to be transhistorical, or even ahistorical, in their approach, to breach chronological barriers even more readily than they have broken through geographic ones. Why is that? And does it have to be thus? My goal in this paper is to suggest that this tension can be resolved in some way, that there is some way to write a literary history of the world—or, better, multiple ways to write multiple literary histories of the world. This goal is thoroughly self-interested: I am myself in the midst of writing a book entitled A Global History of Literature, and while I suppose completing the project will constitute proof of its possibility, I have a self-evident interest in confirming the theoretical possibility, even desirability, of completing the task. In what follows, I begin with a brief discussion of the history of literary history itself, followed by a review of selected theories of world literature from the perspective of how they negotiate the historical. I then consider several extra-disciplinary possibilities, before outlining the approach I am attempting to take myself.

THIS CHAPTER DESCRIBES the origin, development, and significance of the Labyrinth—the first Medieval Studies website, as well as the first such site devoted to the Humanities—from its conception in 1992 to the present day. While the Labyrinth is still a living website as of the time of this publication (available at http://labyrinth.georgetown.edu), its story is one as old as the web itself. And, like the web itself, the story of the Labyrinth involves complex sets of connections and collaborations. There have been many, many contributors, both direct and indirect, to the success and value of the Labyrinth and its resources. The pages that follow are an attempt, admittedly incomplete, to chronicle those connections, and the complicated process by which they created a new tool for scholarly collaboration and creation. We encourage others to document the history of other electronic resources, and use this chapter to help them weave an even richer tapestry of scholarly history.

The Beginning

In the spring of 1992, Deborah Everhart had become increasingly excited about the opportunities for connecting the work of medieval scholars using the many networking technologies that were becoming more widely available, including the nascent World Wide Web. In a letter to a friend on March 4, 1992, she wrote, “I couldn't stop thinking about the networking we were discussing … professors of literature might be a key target … The time is right now.”1 The email went on to describe what this network (which she suggested naming “The Labyrinth”) might include: online journals, works in progress forums, conference listings, job lists, literature servers, image servers, music servers, a dictionary of literary terms; “the possibilities are endless,” she wrote, “and I think the profession is ripe for the switch to networking.” She was certain not only that the network could be built, but that it could be on line before the May 1994 meeting of the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo.

In October 1992, Deborah met Martin Irvine at the Medieval Academy's Committee on Centers and Regional Associations (CARA) meeting at Stanford University, where it became clear that numerous people (including Martin) were creating technology-rich projects ready for the kind of collaboration and integration that she had been envisioning.

CORPUS SYNODALIUM BEGAN, as so many research projects do, with a question that could not be answered. I had spent the previous five years exploring the spread of ideas and practices concerning mass expulsion in the later Middle Ages, a topic that had pulled me far from my earlier stomping grounds in the economic history of the high medieval Mediterranean. Instead, I found myself wading through Parisian sermon collections, Flemish settlement privileges, English administrative records, and—most fearsomely of all—the arcana of canon law. In 1274, in an attempt to halt the spread of professional Christian moneylending north of the Alps, the Second Council of Lyon had mandated the expulsion of foreign usurers. Early in my research, it occurred to me that it might be interesting to trace the dissemination of this conciliar decree in local sources, in particular the statutes that were issued at provincial councils and diocesan synods. After all, one of the primary purposes of such gatherings—as spelled out in the Fourth Lateran Council's decree Sicut olim—was to disseminate knowledge of church law among the clergy, who might then proclaim it to the faithful. I thus was curious about the role that these local ecclesiastical statutes had played in normalizing the penalty of expulsion in Christian thought and practice.

Tracking down these statutes proved considerably more challenging than I had expected. I discovered firsthand the limitations of the early modern conciliar collections (especially Mansi's Sacrorum conciliorum); the frustrations of phantom references to long-lost manuscripts; the unpredictable hours of local diocesan archives; and (on a more positive note) the miracle-working abilities of my institution's interlibrary loan staff. By the time I finished hunting down roughly eight hundred of these statutes, it was clear that the diffusion of the Lyonese expulsion decree was patchy at best. About thirty late medieval ecclesiastical statutes mentioned it explicitly, but most episcopal lawgivers simply ignored it, while a few others reworked the decree's language and provisions so as to weaken its force. Whether because of ignorance, disinterest, discomfort, or resistance, the bishops of late medieval Europe had done little to disseminate knowledge of the decree's demands. I presented these findings to my dissertation committee, only to be asked: “Were these patterns specific to this decree? Or was such sparse local reception true of conciliar decrees in general?”

IF YOU ARE a scholar of the medieval world, a morning of research and writing might unfold in the following way. After starting up your laptop, you open a document using Microsoft Word or some other word processor. You scroll through the pages, perhaps pausing to fix an errant footnote or typo. Once the writing process begins, you might select a few .pdfs of primary or secondary source readings, open them on your computer's desktop, then search for a passage or term by using a menu or keystroke command. If the text is something you decide to quote in your article or chapter, you may be able to highlight it, press “control-c” (copy), and then press “control-v” (paste) to incorporate the relevant passages from the source material straight into the document you are writing, thereby avoiding concerns about introducing spelling or other errors into the writing process, no matter how obscure or unfamiliar the text. You’ll then note the page number from the .pdf, enter it into a footnote (the format of which has been checked and rechecked on the website of the journal or publisher to which the researcher is submitting), and move on with the writing process.

What if a file is missing from your personal laptop or Zotero library, or you’ve misplaced the details needed to cite the work or page number? This means a virtual trip to the library to consult the online catalogue, to dip into computer-based repositories like Internet Archive or HathiTrust, or even to reference a digitized manuscript so that the argument is made whole and all sources accounted for. Unfortunately, there also may be missing pieces that make such a virtual trip to the library impossible: you cannot remember the author of an article, the editor of a collection, or the shelf mark of the manuscript that would allow an easy search through the digital archives. No need to worry; there are field-and subject-specific databases and online bibliographies that collect these references and make them accessible to fellow scholars, all a click or two away. A quick Google search also may turn up the right information, and if all hope is lost, a call can be sent out to colleagues via email, Twitter, Facebook, listservs, or other forms of instant messaging.

THE STUDY OF the Middle Ages remains unapologetically materialist. It certainly seems that medievalists, more than any other historical field, will profess that the unique tactility of mesmerizing objects and the impossible dynamics of indescribable spaces drew them to their period of study. In typological fulfillment of Thomas’ doubt, we fully believe our texts must be touched to be truly perceived. And yet among humanists it is also medievalists who have been the “early adopters of the digital, and continue to play an important role in the development of a broader field, which came to be called digital humanities.” We embrace our manuscripts via codices and in pixelated UHD.

This curious but productive tension is, surprisingly, often least manifest where it might seem most relevant: the university classroom. For many medievalists standard teaching practices are still very literally by the book as most classrooms are no more digital-born than crisp lecture handouts, authentic audio recordings, and uncluttered PowerPoint presentations (Zoomification notwithstanding). Our historical, field-wide adoption of new research technai has pedagogical progeny as yet unborn.

But why? Medievalists’ long familiarity with computer-based practices means that the field is self-aware of how habits of study determine habits of thought. Conditioned perhaps by Roberto Busa's mid-century text analyses, the field enthusiastically engages in the current debates over machine learning and distance reading. In just a few short years medievalists have transitioned from trekking across Europe and ordering microfiche to accepting that we will read most of our documents digitized and online. We embrace the fact that our research practices must and will adapt, and we also know that this is a good thing. The technologies into which we invest ourselves fashion what and how we think: they structure our communications, govern our ability to organize knowledge, and determine how we re-produce or re-present past worlds.

We know this not only from ourselves, for our propensity to innovation even inheres in the materials we study. Both Eusebius and Accursius re-conceived the graphic possibilities of the technology of the codex with the fourth-century Chronicon, and then the thirteenth-century Glossa ordinaria, while the monks of St. Martin of Tours and St.

IN ENGLAND IN the later Middle Ages, people from a wide range of social and vocational environments authenticated and validated their documents with seals. “By the early thirteenth century,” Harvey and McGuinness argued, the seal-using group “comprised everyone who had free land or property to convey or other business to be agreed in formal writing.” The seal impressions most people appended to documents are typically small objects—a few centimetres in diameter—and single sided. Grand seals, such as those used by kings, could be larger and include text and images on two sides. Mechanically speaking, seals were, and remain, a simple technology; to create seal impressions, a type of stamp, called a seal matrix, was used. The matrix was pressed into a plastic material such as wax, and the impression could then be attached to the object to be secured. Because seals were difficult to copy, medieval document-makers relied upon them for some protection against forgery; the best way to copy a seal was to create a new matrix, a task that required considerable skill. Despite the simple technology behind these tools, the three-dimensional nature and complex combination of text and image make seal impressions difficult to record or reproduce in other media, and therefore challenging to study.

Millions of seals survive from medieval Europe, but because they are numerous and by nature hard to record, they present scholars with particular challenges. The DIGISIG project, begun in 2013, initially aimed to address a long-standing challenge for sigillographers. Hundreds of repositories in England hold medieval seals, but in 2013 there was no single resource that could tell a researcher where any particular seal was located. The first version of DIGISIG addressed this problem. But once the prototype system was in place, it proved to have further unanticipated capacities. DIGISIG enabled researchers not only to discover seals, but to analyze, compare and combine information from multiple reference works. These capacities may transform sigillography by enabling scholars to consider long-standing problems in the history of sealing practices, based on a fuller understanding of the evidence.

WHEN COMPUTER SCIENTISTS need an antonym for “digital,” they tend to avoid using the dated term “analog(ue).” Instead, they contrast discrete phenomena with a continuum, “digitally” with “continuously.” Anything digital is, at its most basic essence, a series of 1s and 0s, indivisible, with no fractional in-between. The “real world” operates on a smooth continuum, made up of building blocks that are essentially infinitely divisible. The real-world problems we want to solve exist along that continuum. Medieval manuscripts, for example, are made up of animal skin, oak gall ink, mineral and botanical pigments, all of which are, in their physical properties, infinitely complex, infinitely divisible. Digitization and data management convert our research questions into 1s and 0s, manageable and navigable pieces of binary code. That simplification sets fixed points along the continuum, transforming it into something cardinal, countable, and calculable. But the computer can't enter its own data or interpret its own results. That's where the humans, and the humanists, come in.

It is said that Medieval Studies invented the Digital Humanities in the 1950s in the form of the Index Thomisticus, developed with IBM by Father Roberto Busa and a team of female punch-card operators. Seventy years later, medievalists such as those who contributed to this volume continue to apply resourcefulness, creativity, and sheer willpower to the development and use of digital methodologies. We brainstorm, we collaborate, we innovate, we meet obstacles, and we work to overcome them. The essays in this volume all have interrogated stages of digital medieval resources, from the once-groundbreaking-but-now-obsolete to the redesigned to the shiny and new. All of these projects share a common formula: an investigator applies an algorithm to a dataset in an interface. The contributors have considered how digital resources and tools can, or did, or might, facilitate their work. These labyrinthine digital journeys are full of dead ends and backtracking, shortcuts and long delays. The lessons learned along the way are always valuable, whatever the research results, and each failed experiment leads to refinements of methodology. Thirty years ago, data was trapped in its interface. Today, best practices demand that data be easily extractable from the interface. We once expected our digital tools to be built to last forever. Now, it is now an accepted maxim that the framework of any given digital resource is destined for eventual obsolescence. It is the data within that must be preserved.