I just wanna say welcome everyone to the library and
that was going on this time of year, particularly
today in general space. That better together really to
celebrate scholarship. That's what we're really talking about really
. That's, that's for so on brian Matthews this is
my third week started the third week here and to
say I'm really, you know, noticed posters for
this the first day I was here actually proud and
excited that we have this program is times with the
scholarship focus on the property of the article. The
conference paper. Has this been a program allows us
to really solve when the stages that go into the
reason, the effort, creativity and everything. The
research, the hard work that goes into creating.
Yeah. What? And this is a wonderful partnership
that we have with liberal arts and human sciences and
it So you think a lot about seven neighbors,
a geologist, geographer. And also I often talk
about his research was, but it's nice to sell
just steps in the process long after the grants collecting
the data writing is that it allows us to everyone
and bring in a have to talk about their work
and really kind of get behind what went into creating
management. Just let that cost piece of. So
it's better to do invite uh Rowlands was the Dean
of the Culture. Works Fine to introduce our speakers
. Thank you. Um thank you all for being
here. This is the second event of our visible
Scholars scholarship initiative. I'm a little short on voice
today, so you'll have to forgive me. I'm
actually making comments and uh our Associate Dean, this
place tom ewing is taking my place in Richmond at
a meeting place. So we sort of switch roles
, but we're very excited to be partnering with libraries
on the visible scholarship initiative. And as brian pointed
out, this is a way for us to sort
of mhm peel off the layers of the end product
, which is is hardly an end product because of
course brian britton's book will go on to be used
by other scholars to create more new knowledge. But
at least at this point in the process we can
kind of peel away some of the layers and here
, brian talked to us about how the resources represented
here and I'm sure many others went into making impossible
for him to write the book that he is with
. The library is very important to scholars working in
the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences and we
really appreciate the working partnership we have with the library
. So without further ado, let me introduce our
scholar of the day, BRian Grete, a professor
of Religion and Culture, religious studies in the Department
of Religion and Culture. Is that how you would
say? Yes, thanks very much. Thank you
all very much. Especially want to thank tom ewing
and Leslie moyo for putting this event together. I
want to thank all the people of the library and
in the college who have worked on this and made
it possible. I want to thank students and colleagues
and friends and others who are here today. I
thought I would just spend maybe about 10 minutes talking
about this project, telling the story of the project
and um and then leave some time for discussion after
that. If there is interest in that, I
started work on this project, I checked this afternoon
on this when I taught a story by flannery O'Connor
, one of my favorite american writers. One of
the last stories she wrote is a story called Revelation
. And in that story, flannery O'Connor's characters are
sitting in a waiting room in a doctor's office and
there's there are two characters we're gonna focus on particularly
. Um One is named Mary Grace and she's a
she's a college student who has just come back from
some liberal arts college in the Northeast. And then
there's mrs ruby Turpin who is a middle aged woman
in the in the waiting room and at some point
with no provocation, no warning at all, mary
Grace takes a book called Human Development and she throws
it at ruby Turpin and she says to this person
, why don't you go back to hell where you
came from, you old warthog? And it was
in the process of teaching that that I also I
noticed a couple of things uh partly by chance and
partly from discussion with students. One of them was
that this is a strange kind of thing. This
is a story about a curse and in the story
, what happens is that Mrs Turpin decides that God
was speaking to her when mary Grace threw the book
at her and insulted her and cursed her. She
, instead of thinking, as most people would that
this was an outrageous and irresponsible and rude act,
Mrs Turpin thinks that this was actually a revelation from
God and she proceeds to experience it like that at
the end of the story. So that struck me
as strange, that here's a story in which a
person utters a curse and it leads to a revelation
. The second thing that I noticed about this story
Is that it has a lot in common with a
story in the Bible in 2nd Samuel 16, where
somebody sees King David and insults him in a very
similarly profane and vulgar way, it actually throws things
at him. And instead of saying, oh,
that's just an insulting expression, David says, well
, maybe this is somehow God talking to me.
And so this project began and I gave a paper
on this particular story and the connection that had to
the bible In the year 2000. And then that
started this whole process uh, of, of exploring
the question of biblical curses and their after lives and
their their inheritance in our culture today. And I
don't want to tell the whole story. It's a
very long one. But I will say a couple
of things about the process of learning. I started
reading everything I could about biblical curses and contemporary curses
and the theory of curses. And when I was
doing that, I made a kind of, what
I felt like was kind of a discovery and the
discovery was that Sometime in the early modern period in
the 17th century cursing changed in a very dramatic way
it went from being, It went from being powerful
to being profane. So that cursing was no longer
something you could do to somebody else to hurt them
. It was now something that you shouldn't do because
it's not very polite. And so I tried to
learn a little bit about that process and I,
in my way, I'm not a historian. I
I see colleagues from the history department here who,
who will correctly notice that there's more to be said
about this. My guess was and still is that
in the early modern period, one of the things
that happened around the 17th century is that cursing became
vulgar rather than profane because vulgar rather than powerful because
there was too much religious power going around after the
reformation. There were too many different ways a religious
authority was being spoken about. And so there needed
to be some way to neutralize cursing. But there's
something else I noticed in the process of this research
as well. Not only was there a change from
power to profanity, but there was also a,
uh, other kinds of powerful speech. Continued blessing
, for example, is still something that you hear
all the time. Every time someone sneezes in my
class, someone else says God bless you. So
blessing is very common, but no one, no
one says God curse you. Uh, so I
was curious why certain kinds of powerful speech still exist
and other kinds of powerful speech change or go away
. And that leads to the next point. I
started to think about the next point was, and
this is part of a larger discussion. The point
was that, that there's a story we tell ourselves
in the way we talk about religious change. Uh
Normally, normally we talk about religious change as a
story called secularization, that religious institutions and religious practices
and religious beliefs slowly and gradually decline from the early
modern period until the present. We all know that
that story isn't exactly correct and we've been spending a
lot of time in the study of religion in the
last few decades trying to understand what's wrong with that
story of secularization and how to fix that problem.
In some small way, I saw this project as
a way to think about that problem because I saw
the changes that were happening as uneven blessing stays cursing
goes away or cursing changes. And I started to
try to think of a better way to talk about
this than secularization. And I started thinking of it
in terms that I borrowed from Sigmund Freud of all
people. This concept of displacement in displacement, you
take one thing away and you replace it with another
, but you do it in certain ways at certain
times for certain kinds of reasons. And you might
not be able to predict the nature of displacement and
there might be layers to it. There might be
, there might be a conscious change that goes on
, but there might be something that continues, there
might be something that continues or persists. There might
be some uh inheritance or some shadow or some some
specter of, of cursing or the religious tradition that
we still have around after we think we got rid
of it. So I used I developed in this
this project concept of displacement to talk about religious change
. And I used these changes that I observed in
the study of biblical curses as as a chance to
to apply that. So I decided to divide the
book into three parts. There are some studies of
texts in the bible curses, in the bible covenant
curses. There's also a study of some ethnic curses
in the bible that are quite interesting to me,
Curse of Canaan and the Curse of the Gibby Nights
. And then I have a second section of the
book in which I talk about this transition. I
thought I noticed in the early modern period, from
the power to the profanity, the 17th century transition
in which people were anxious about too much cursing and
the danger of cursing. And I read people like
Bunyan and defoe and many others particularly to see how
this change took place. So that's the second part
of the book, the early modern. And then
I finally finished with a piece uh in in the
book on contemporary curses. And that brings me to
a variety of other p projects that I'll again very
briefly mentioned. The first of these was a chapter
that went all the way back to the flannery O'Connor
story. I started with and I paired it with
another wonderful story by Zora Neale Hurston called Sweat.
And I was interested in seeing how these literary authors
were, in a way stealing the thunder of religious
tradition and religious cursing and applying it through displacements in
new ways. There's also a chapter on a particular
, a different ethnic curse. Not one I deal
with earlier, but the most powerful ethnic curse in
the Hebrew bible from Exodus 17 on the al maliki
. It's and how that plays out in a number
of literary theorists and thinkers like Jacques Derrida, and
then finally, the most perhaps user friendly chapter of
the book is one in which I talk about the
debates, contemporary debates on hate speech. Uh,
and the two cases I I looked at pretty closely
our first of all, um, the Westboro baptist
church, which unfortunately is still in the news today
, even on campus here. And secondly, uh
religious curse that has been used in the state of
Israel two to bring about the death of, of
politicians who are not popular with the people who make
those curses. It's called Tulsa Dinora and it was
used against Yitzhak rabin and it was used against Ariel
Sharon and it's been used against other Israeli politicians by
right wing, uh, Israeli religious people. And
the question was of course, is this powerful or
not? Did these words work or not? So
, one of the final conclusions of the book turned
out to be that through all of these three periods
that I look at from a from a kind of
snapshot perspective, there's a question that people share across
those periods, and the question simply is, do
words have power to hurt other people? Can words
hurt other people? It turns out that the biblical
texts also are asking that question, they're not all
sure in the biblical texts, that curses are good
or effective or powerful. And so one of the
things I see handed down through these very disparate some
secular, some religious texts is that perennial question of
whether words can hurt other people. So that's the
story of the book I'd like to close just by
saying how grateful I am to this library for being
a home that supported this research. I I also
want to thank the university for being the larger institutional
home that supported this research. It supported trips to
libraries in Israel and England. It supported me giving
papers and workshop presentations on this project over the last
10 years. Uh it supported most of all,
giving me the time and the colleagues and the students
to to make this kind of work possible. Uh
, so I'm very grateful for those opportunities and I'd
love to hear your questions or comments, the anecdote
from flannery just today, on the radio, I
heard a reference to another curse and throwing objects.
The Iraqi newsman, yes, threw his shoes at
our unlamented former president. One of the things I
one of the side questions that really fascinates me about
cursing is that they often require a physical gesture as
well, um like throwing shoes, um or in
the case of of covenant, when you make a
covenant in the bible, the language actually is to
cut a covenant, and what that means is that
you take an animal, apologies to the vegans and
vegetarians, you take an animal and you cut it
in half and you set it on two separate tables
and then you walk between the two pieces of cut
up animal. And the point of this is that
you are you are uttering are you performing a conditional
curse if I violate the terms of this agreement,
may this happen to me? Uh May I be
cut up like this? Animal is being cut up
? And so animal sacrifice, which is such an
important part of religious traditions, are actually often,
not always, but often conditional curses. And there
are a few examples in the bible where David and
others say made this happen to me or May such
and such happen to me. If we have to
imagine him doing this or this or today, it
would be this. There's a gesture that has to
go along with a curse very often. And so
one of the more abstract questions I was asking was
what happens when you take a verbal speech act,
which involves physical performance and put it down in writing
. And I think that's really what what happens in
the biblical curse situation. They're trying to somehow encode
in writing, uh, an action that's normally done
in person very often with physical gestures. Yeah,
yeah. Haven't just relate to sticks and stones may
break my bones. Thank you. Uh, this
is one of the changes I think that we we
see and somehow I date to the early modern period
. The idea that sticks and stones may break my
bones, but names can never hurt me. To
me. That's a modern idea or an enlightenment idea
that says, words are just, they're just an
instrument or a tool in the hand of the of
the individual, of the thinking, rational modern person
. And this is not the same as the pre
modern ideas of cursing that I've been talking about.
And the normal story that we would tell is the
story of secularization that says yes, in the old
days, we were primitive and we thought that words
could hurt people, but then we became modern and
rational and we discovered that words are just tools,
names can never hurt me. But the story I
want to tell is a much more complicated story in
which words still seem able to hurt people and we
don't really have a very good way to talk about
that anymore, because we've vanished some of those traditional
ways of talking about the power of words. And
so yeah, that's that's precisely what happens in the
early modern period. This idea of of of banishing
curses from, from mainstream modern, rational ways of
thinking and talking, even though we didn't banish blessings
and we didn't banish oaths. Mm Well you did
, you banished blessings as well. Mm you're now
you can always say Gazoontite. I don't know if
that's a blessing or not. Yeah, I guess
that's a blessing to we're not off the hook with
Gazoontite. Yeah. Well, brian. Yeah,
I agree that uh huh the curses are quite often
company bye movements of some type of another. As
you know, I've studied several languages and it seems
like everywhere you go, people will tell you this
when you talk about language. Well I was there
and guess what I learned, I learned this first
thing you learn, right? So people always say
that you see these movements and things like that.
I'm just wondering, you know, to give an
example, my wife is from Holland and when I
, and I'm from south texas, so I use
as colorful language, you know, as Texans I
want to do and she's quite put off watch from
quite all right. Thanks. And me part of
Holland where they keep everything clean, including their mouth
And, but now that she's been in America for
20 years, she's seen in all the movies and
you know, every other word. And I'm just
wondering how do you feel about the modern usage of
curtain of cursing words? You mean in America in
the mass media? Yeah, Well I have a
teenage daughter here, so she's gonna hear what I
have to say. So I got to be careful
about my answer. I mean we all know that
these practices change over time and what's what's considered powerful
and dangerous in one situation can seem harmless in another
. Um, I don't have uh my first response
is to to to wonder what's going on. I
think one of the things that happens in the transition
, broad transition, historic transition I'm talking about in
the early modern period is that the focus seems to
go quite a bit away from religious institutions and values
, cursing God or cursing religious things, or cursing
in the name of religion, and it tends to
go toward uh the new uh focus of sanctity or
or or authority or power, one of which is
or taboo, one of which is sexuality. Um
and so that's certainly something that others have said before
me, and I'm interested in in looking at in
describing these kinds of changes and processes and um before
coming to conclusions about them. But there's I think
there's also another problem that we have in our uh
contemporary culture, and that is um a media driven
uh market driven need for for a certain kind of
novelty and shock. And one of the things that
I think you see in the exaggerated and and excessive
use of strong language is is just one more attempt
to sell something or to grab attention and then become
uh interesting for that reason. And it doesn't matter
whether it's outrageous or or virtuous in that case,
still shows that there's power. Yes. Yeah.
Well that's right. Did you say this 17th century
that this change occurs again? That's my yeah,
that's where I charted. That's where I track the
historians are going to Shakespeare wasn't here at the beginning
of that's right. I remember looking up wounds and
blood exactly is an abbreviation of God's wounds in God's
blood. Yeah. How did that fit in?
Well, I mean, there's a wonderful reading of
Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt that I kind of share and
it is that that Shakespeare is more of a display
sir of religious power than a secularize er of it
, that in other words, he of course Greenblatt
sees a lot of catholic imagery in Shakespeare's plays and
you know, Dante and purgatory and that kind of
thing. Um So I think Shakespeare is very much
tuned into the question of his day, which is
can words hurt people? And he I give a
number of examples in the in the chapter that deals
with this uh in which Shakespeare seems to be interested
in that very debate. So it's in that 17th
century with Shakespeare near the beginning of it in England
when all this stuff is going on, that the
question of whether words can hurt people and whether words
have power is a very lively topic of debate.
and laws against profane cursing and swearing are very very
prominent during that time. Uh this as well.
So I think I think the 17th century is key
and I think Shakespeare is a great way to open
up that question. But yeah I see him as
a display sir of and inheritor of uh some of
those those vibrant ways that religion has power and he
transforms that of course into aesthetic and literary power.
Yeah. Was Mhm. Mhm. Yeah. Yes
, awkward silence. It's also true that we can
have more informal I think more informal interaction and refreshments
um as well. I'm here for any questions or
discussion you'd like to have. Thanks a lot.