by Anneliese Ng

This semester saw a couple of new faces among our academic staff, one of which was Dr. Anya Adair.

Holding a BA & LLB from the University of Melbourne, and graduate degrees in English from Melbourne, Oxford and Yale, Dr. Adair researches medieval English literature, as well as pre-modern English law and legal culture. When a job was advertised by HKU that was in both the Faculty of Law and the School of English, it seemed perfect for Dr. Adair who was trained legally and literarily. Before joining HKU, she was teaching Old English and broad English literature subjects to undergraduates at the University of Sydney.  

Dr. Adair has always loved books, literature, history and languages, leading her to do an arts degree. She confessed she was the sort of person who would worry about what to do with an arts degree (sounds familiar), so she also did a law degree to broaden her career path. As a student, Dr. Adair found English more naturally enjoyable and fun. Now as a researcher, she finds them both fascinating, and thinks that they are more similar than we might think if we were in just one field. Often, Dr. Adair added, it was difficult to tell whether she was studying law or literature. That may elude the immediate understanding of many people, especially since the methods law and literature use and the assumptions they make about how language and texts work are so different. But Dr. Adair regards them as alternative windows into a much larger cultural vista.

In our discussion of approaching culture with a legal and literary mind, Dr. Adair gave her view of what a training in jurisprudence brings to medieval literature. While medieval literature perpetually imagines monsters, dragons and warriors, a legal focus can help ground these stories much more in the real-world politics of the time. Dr Adair’s legal training prompted her to ask how the juridical principles and assumptions in the literary text can be traced to the actual laws that existed at the time. A legal approach to medieval stories and poems which seem wild with the fantastical, helps Dr. Adair fit them into the foregone society and reality. Moreover, a legal view enables us to avoid the danger of simply focusing on fictional texts in a vacuum, and instead encourages us to see them in a larger conversation with other non-literary books which includes law books, the most common kind of books in the late Middle Ages after religious books. Moving from contextualization to the technical aspect of her research, Dr. Adair told of how law and law book production was hugely influential in the development of how we organize thought and information, and that the law was fundamental to the development of English literature. Quoting Sir Frederick Pollock, a famous legal historian: “law and literature grew up together”, Dr. Adair pointed out the parallel development of the two ways of thinking.

Dr. Adair’s research is not only interdisciplinary, it is also broad in its historical scope which covers the seventh to the sixteenth centuries. Dr. Adair is not only an eclectic, she is also a medievalist. The Middle Ages probably sound as dark, vague and alien as the night to you and me, but it is exactly that sheer alienness of the period that first drew Dr. Adair in. She naturally gravitated towards subjects which promised new things she had never heard of. To study texts so totally different to anything she had read enticed her. But in order to read the old texts, one must first master a language entirely different from modern English. And that challenge of learning a new language inside an English degree and to apply it to a new range of texts was attractive to Dr. Adair. Once she was in the medieval world, she was startled and captivated by the variety therein. She particularly liked Beowulf, one of the earliest texts written in English, and one of the earliest texts to have come out of Europe not written in Latin. She thought the long epic poem was “very long and big and rich and beautiful”.

To Dr. Adair, medieval tales are not all myth. “Truth and myth blend,” she said. Dr. Adair connects with the medieval past through the shock of discovery that the things people represented in these texts are interested in, anxious about and joyful over are exactly the same things that still intrigue us today. But Dr. Adair said that the effort to connect with the past was also a cognitive one. It involves careful, thoughtful and scientific sifting of the evidence we have, be it archaeological, historical or textual, and patching it all into a total picture of a culture whose every living mind turned to dust a thousand years ago. But when we look at all that evidence, there is one step left to make: that leap of imagination and empathy that tries to think it into reality, to clothe and give flesh to a culture to which we have no direct access. “We reconstruct the past in all its richness and variety. We reconstruct it not as a simple cliché of a knight on a horse in a dark age but as a total, complex, challenging, cultural and social moment,” said Dr. Adair. It is this imaginative leap that her work leads her to try and make.

Dr. Adair loves Hong Kong for all its little shops, markets, and people which she finds “warm, welcoming and generous”. I am glad, if not surprised, that there is nothing she dislikes about Hong Kong and that she finds its density of people energizing and exciting. She is also excited to learn Cantonese. I would like to thank Dr. Adair for showing and explaining to me her collection of (genuine) parchment manuscripts in her office. That moment is still vivid in my mind when I held the parchment up against the sunlight and saw the veins through the skin (the parchment is made of calf skin) – an evidence of life despite its being as old as time.

 

Published on: March 26, 2018 < Back >