As a scholar of early modern political theory, I’ve frequently found myself returning to questions of the power of speech, as the voice of the monarch and the weight of their words become central to fears and anxieties surrounding the twisting and serpentine nature of rhetoric. Drawing on a long history of rhetoric, understood to be carefully constructed persuasive speech, dating back to Roman antiquity, European audiences have long considered the possibility that certain kinds of speech might be dangerous, as speech is used to mask intentions or manipulate audiences.

This particular line, I think, has taken on a revived relevance in contemporary American discourse. In 2017, the phrase re-entered the sphere of American politics when former FBI Director James Comey cited it directly in testimony to a congressional committee, as he discussed his relationship to the investigation of Michael Flynn. When asked if he considered President Trump’s “hope” that the matter might be dropped to serve as a command, Comey responded, “Yes. It rings in my ears as kind of ‘Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?’” The direct invocation of this line asked the country to reconsider a near nine century old question concerning the nature of rhetoric and its relationship to power.

This was a debate grounded in a question of what it means to “read between the lines” of a statement that does not include a direct address to action and whether or not powerful individuals bear responsibility for ways in which their rhetoric is interpreted. While Comey’s reference may have been little more than a historical curiosity, the scholar in me can’t help but consider the long tradition of discourses surrounding the power and dangers of rhetoric that are wrapped up in the invocation of this quote.

This question of the dangerous potential of rhetoric has sadly resurfaced once again under the Trump administration. In late October 2018, a series of explosive devices were mailed to key figures within the American Democratic party, as well as an additional bomb being found in the mailroom of CNN Center in Atlanta, GA. CNN, as a news network, had repeatedly been at the center of feuds with President Trump, who accused them repeatedly on the campaign trail of smearing his campaign and being a source of “fake news.” Between Trump and his supporters, there has been an ever-present distaste for the news media, whom he has referred to as the “enemy of the American people,” and whom he has suggested are “unpatriotic.” This has caught on with his supporters, who have on multiple occasions displayed hostility towards journalists, both directly and indirectly, as demonstrated in a repeated propensity to gleefully chant “CNN Sucks,” at rallies or events.

While there is clearly no direct incitement to violence in these accusations, these recent events have recentralized the debate concerning the degree to which this kind of abstracted, non-directed rhetorical anger is understood by at least some individuals as direct calls to action. Once again, we are tasked with asking ourselves exactly how aware the President is when he complains about the various turbulent priests that he sees as impediments to his desired agendas.

While these two cases are fairly distinct, they both speak to a worry concerning how the speech of those in a position of power, either used carefully or carelessly, might be taken as a call to action by those who support them. My series of posts this month will take up this question, both in its status as a historical and as a contemporary debate surrounding the nature of rhetoric. I will look towards literary attempts to think through this question within my own period of study and I will look towards contemporary reimaginings of this question, divorced from its context within the logic of a divinely inspired monarchy. Finally, I intend to look at the degree to which this issue is complicated by the decentralization of public speech via the internet.

The goal of this series of posts is not to resolve this question of the dangers of rhetoric, but it is instead to place it within a broader literary and historical context, ideally to demonstrate the long history of the debate concerning the true meaning and implication of Henry II’s “turbulent priest.”

* The modern version of the line, often framed as “troublesome,” or “meddlesome” priest is likely archetypal, as the few historical records of this command are quite different. The implications however, seem to be consistent across versions.

Evan Hixon is a PhD student in English at Syracuse University. His research centers on early modern British drama and political writing, with an emphasis on Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson. His dissertation examines representations of spies and informants in the works of early modern English dramatists.

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Now, as a Classics major in undergrad, I was passingly familiar with Aristotle’s works (though I will admit that I had not read Nichomachean Ethics in approximately 10 years, so obviously my recollection of it would have been rusty to say the least). However, even I felt that this was somehow a thinly-veiled attack on those in the classroom who, for whatever combination of socio-economic and educational reasons, might not have had access to that same store of shared knowledge that my colleague was referencing. Whether or not the attack was malicious is impossible to say, but there was no question that there were many in the classroom who felt alienated by this comment–and, just as importantly, by its delivery–and that a valuable moment of shared learning was therefore compromised.

What distressed me the most, however, was how built into that moment of not-so-subtle shaming was a profound sort of privilege of which my colleague seemed to be utterly unaware. It no doubt never occurred to him that some of us may have come from high schools or undergraduate institutions that did not place such an emphasis on the Western canon, or that emphasized other important works of western philosophy that were not dominated by dead white men. So embedded was my colleague in both his class and knowledge privilege that any alternative to his ways of knowing seemed to exist beyond the pale of acceptability.

Nor is this sort of privileged posturing and knowledge shaming limited to graduate students (who, it must be said, often face their own challenge. The pressure to perform one’s expertise is particularly acute in the graduate classroom). I have, on numerous occasions, heard faculty from departments from various universities and departments dismiss the level of “basic knowledge” that today’s undergraduate students possess, implying that they have somehow fallen down on the job in terms of preparing themselves for their college education. This is not to say that the faculty actually think this, mind you, only that it is often heavily implied in the way in which these critiques of students are delivered.

This is not to say that there aren’t real deficiencies in the preparation that many high school students undergo as they prepare for their academic futures in college. What troubles me is the implication that somehow the students are to blame and, relatedly, that our privilege as learners and knowers is somehow natural and that this renders us somehow superior to the students we teach. Rather than attempting to understand the unique perspectives that students bring to the classroom–including and especially their socioeconomic status–these assumptions presume that there is a standard to which everyone should be held, regardless of their background.Periodically, I will catch myself making assumptions about the body of knowledge that my students bring into the classroom. I have become so entrenched in the world of academia–in particular, I have become accustomed to being around my graduate school colleagues in a private, well-funded institution–that it sometimes doesn’t occur to me that not everyone has had the same privilege that I do. When I lose track of that privilege, when I assume that my students have a knowledge and then shame then when they don’t, I lose a valuable sharing opportunity.

As a result, I have begun making a conscious effort to meet my students where they are and to help them access and share the same love of knowledge and learning that I have always possessed. I encourage them to ask me if they do not understand something or if I make a reference (or even a word) that they do not grasp, because only by doing so can I ensure that we are all learning and engaging with knowledge together. Rather than ensconcing myself in my privilege, I actively work to deconstruct it.

This more nuanced understanding of socio-economic and knowledge privilege allows me, I believe, to be a more compassionate and effective educator. I can use my knowledge, accrued and developed through years of undergraduate and graduate training, to meet students on their own terms and show them new ways of thinking and engaging, even as they also educate me. Rather than viewing their lack of knowledge as a problem to be corrected, I see it instead as an opportunity.

And that, I think, benefits both myself and my students.

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The chairs were still the worst part, though.

In the classroom, I mentally conceded the probable truth of the first one. My undergrad philosophy classes taught me that we have no good definition of “human.” And the conditions people live in vary so radically that there can’t really be a universal one: the Elizabethans understood the world’s functions quite differently than do the Mosuo or a New Yorker, and attempts to demand that there is one ideal understanding usually end up serving some hegemonic understanding to the exclusion and oppression of other worldviews. That didn’t stop the statement from messing with my heart, though.

You won’t be surprised to learn that I had recently graduated from a Jesuit college, and “the human condition” is a big part of Ignatian philosophy. My best friend and I had lofty aspirations of studying “the human condition” through literature in grad school; I still amuse myself by correctly identifying Jesuit-educated students and priests by their use of the phrase in discussions and homilies, respectively; and Christ’s entering “the human condition” through the Incarnation is the foundation of Ignatian imaginative contemplation, my graduate research, and my personal aesthetic. To be told that “the human condition” is inherently meaningless was like being told that J.K. Rowling’s prose is mediocre, only worse: both statements may be true, but I still love the object that they discredit — and “the human condition” informed my life and work more deeply and for far longer than Harry Potter.

Le Moyne College on a rare snowless day in winter.

As imposter syndrome set in and I attempted to impress my professors and fit in with my classmates through mimicking their interests and ideologies, I began to darkly wonder if there was some degree of truth to the second statement, too. As I’ve gained confidence in my ideas, my professors have all been wonderfully supportive of my research, even at critical moments of doubt, but I still felt strangely disembodied from my ideas. They were necessarily available, even susceptible, to outside influences in the name of getting a job, which could range from something as benign as entering them into a critical discourse I was unenthusiastic about to something as disheartening as avoiding theories that are no longer trendy.

Not until I took a summer creative nonfiction workshop with the magnificent Minnie-Bruce Pratt did I realize that this compulsory refashioning had nothing to do with my program, but with the state of English-language literary studies. I spent two weeks reading first-hand accounts like Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, in which Morrison exposes the subtle racism of American literary tradition not in the form of a journal article, but of a personal reckoning with that history. I spent three weeks writing in the first person about the body of Christ, the woman’s body, and the queer body not in the form of a seminar paper but in the form of a series of anecdotes and meditations steeped in medieval and Renaissance mysticism. I found myself applying my research to my life in ways that made the Early Moderns come alive — in our exchange of good-byes, classmates from diverse religious backgrounds told me how fascinating and important my research was through having encountered it in this genre.

Fantastic book, by the way: accessible first-person literary criticism. Highly recommend.

Creative nonfiction enabled me to communicate my ideas — shaped by research and critical writing — with a public upon whom they had material impact. My ideas became my own again: I had a personal investment in recovering historically obscured understandings of gender and the body to not only locate the essential value of the queer and the female bodies in Catholicism but also to share old ways of embodying queerness and femininity that are relevant today. In creative nonfiction, my first-person voice had credibility, purpose, and an audience who otherwise wouldn’t or couldn’t access to this knowledge.

Radical queer and feminist scholarship is somewhat better at this, leveraging the personal narrative as a source of knowledge and an act of inquiry. To assert a self in English (and, I’d wager, biology, history, math, or information studies) is to assert that you are not the implied raceless, genderless, classless entity interested only in books, but that you instead have an investment in disrupting the status quo. This trickles down into policing how we frame our inquiries: we teach our students not to use the first-person because the personal isn’t credible, and we apply the same principle to our critical essays. Consequently, I have no idea why most of my colleagues study what they do: I assume they all love literature, but if that were their only motivation they wouldn’t still be suffering through grad school. If the English scholar speaks, it is only through the voice of their subject of study, and tentatively: papers on nuns I identify with, on devotional poems that resonate with me. Our research overwhelms our selves, and obscures its own real-life applicability. And so we get accused of navel-gazing and being out of touch with reality:

Nothing like some anti-intellectual sentiment to kick-start one’s drive to inform the public.

So maybe there isn’t a single human condition, but that doesn’t mean studying the humanities can’t improve the conditions of some humans. If my experience with creative nonfiction is any indication, one of the most meaningful ways to connect with those outside the academy is to acknowledge our own subject positions, explicitly recognizing the self in order to humanize the humanities. This is what I’ve tried to do here. But now it’s your turn:

Why do you study what you do? Why do you work where you do? Who are you?

Also, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is just objectively rad.

Ashley O’Mara (@ashleymomara | ORCID 0000-0003-0540-5376) is a PhD student and teaching assistant in the Syracuse University English program. She studies how Ignatian imagination and Catholic iconology shape representations of sacred femininity in Early Modern devotional writings. In her down time, she writes creative nonfiction and snuggles her bunny Toffee.

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