Epilogue: What Happens Between the Covers: Writing Premodern Desire for Audiences Beyond Academia

Summary

The essays in this volume explore a range of desires as they manifested in a myriad of historical moments and social, cultural, and legal settings. If there is a single desire that connects all of them, surely it is our own: the desire that drives us, as readers and authors of these pieces, to try to understand the past and to share what we learn with others. This desire anchors our scholarship, yet it remains largely unexamined, and too often it is cordoned off by the boundaries of academia, inaccessible to broader audiences. It is thus worth considering how (and why) we might broaden our scholarly approach and redefine what we see as the potential products of our scholarly desires. Such a reflection raises two fundamental questions that cross the various disciplinary approaches, eras, and geographic locales represented in the earlier essays: What do we, as academics, wish the general public understood about premodern desire? How can we creatively disseminate our scholarly research to engage audiences beyond academia?

My exploration of these questions began with a project seemingly far removed from premodern Europe: The Secrets of Mary Bowser, a novel based on the true story of a young African American woman who became a spy for the Union during the US Civil War, by posing as a slave in the Confederate White House. I discovered Bowser's astounding espionage while researching my dissertation on African American literature and culture. Although I was already writing scholarly articles and teaching university courses about race and the anti-slavery movement, I believed Bowser's story might be of interest to a broader audience. Because the historical record didn't yield enough details of her life for a biography, I turned to fiction writing, using extensive research on African American and white communities to imagine Bowser's life in and out of slavery. Although my turn to fiction was in part a matter of necessity given the scant historical sources related directly to Bowser, I also suspected a novel might reach more readers than even a mainstream biography would.

HarperCollins, a major US publisher, released The Secrets of Mary Bowser in 2012. Since then, when speaking to audiences at libraries, museums, and even in book groups that meet in individuals’ homes, I’ve been struck by two things.