"This is a substantial and readable volume, and it is supplied with a rich array of documentation in the notes and bibliography. It deals with a question of critical importance for current research on medieval `literature': namely, the relationship between this literature and us... This is an important collection, and one may congratulate the editors of their ambitious undertaking."--Paul Zumthor, Speculum.
Cover -- Contents -- Introduction. The New Philology Comes of Age -- 1 New Challenges for the New Medievalism -- 2 Reflections on The New Philology -- 3 Virgil's "Perhaps": Mythopoiesis and Cosmogony in Dante's Commedia (Remarks on Inf. 34, 106-26) -- 4 Dialectic of the Medieval Course -- 5 Religious Horizon and Epic Effect: Considerations on the Iliad, the Chanson de Roland, and the Nibelungenlied -- 6 The Possibility of Historical Time in the Crónica Sarracina -- 7 Good Friday Magic: Petrarch's Canzoniere and the Transformation of Medieval Vernacular Poetry -- 8 The Identity of a Text
In new readings of medieval language attitudes and identities, this book concludes that multilingualism informed masculinist discourses, which were aligned against the vernacular sentiment traditionally attributed to Langland and Chaucer.
New Medieval Literatures is an annual of work on medieval textual cultures. It provides a venue for innovative essays that deploy diverse methodologies-theoretical, archival, philological and historicist. The editors, active in three continents and supported by a distinguishedmultidisciplinary Advisory Board, aim to engage with intellectual and cultural pluralism in the Middle Ages and now.
Organised within historical, thematic, and contextual frameworks, this collection of essays examines the psychological, rhetorical, and philological complexities of sensory perception from the classical period to the late Midddle Ages.
The articles in this volume, by scholars all pursuing careers in the United States, concern the theoretical approaches and methods of early medieval studies. Most of the issues examined span the period from roughly 400 to 1000 CE and regions stretching from westernmost Eurasia to the Black Sea and the Baltic. This is the first volume of essays explicitly to reassess the heuristic structures and methodologies of research on "early medieval Europe." Because of its geographic, chronological, thematic, and methodological diversity and scope, the collection also showcases the breadth of early medieval studies currently practiced in the United States.
This collection examines the intersection of the discourses of “disability” and “monstrosity” in a timely and necessary intervention in the scholarly fields of Disability Studies and Monster Studies. Analyzing Medieval and Early Modern art and literature replete with images of non-normative bodies, these essays consider the pernicious history of defining people with distinctly non-normative bodies or non-normative cognition as monsters. In many cases throughout Western history, a figure marked by what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has termed “the extraordinary body” is labeled a “monster.” This volume explores the origins of this conflation, examines the problems and possibilities inherent in it, and casts both disability and monstrosity in light of emergent, empowering discourses of posthumanism.
Rich collisions and fresh perspectives illuminate the profound continuities of thought and practice that have marked Western art through the ages This groundbreaking study offers a radical new reading of art since the Middle Ages. Moving across the familiar period lines set out in conventional histories, Alexander Nagel explores the deep connections between modern and premodern art to reveal the underlying patterns and ideas traversing centuries of artistic practice. In a series of episodic chapters, he reconsiders from an innovative double perspective a number of key issues in the history of art, from iconoclasm and idolatry to installation and the museum as institution. He shows how the central tenets of modernism – serial production, site-specificity, collage, the readymade, and the questioning of the nature of art and authorship – were all features of earlier times before modernity, revived by recent generations. Nagel examines, among other things, the importance of medieval cathedrals to the 1920s Bauhaus movement, the parallels between Renaissance altarpieces and modern preoccupations with surface and structure; the relevance of Byzantine models to Minimalist artists; the affinities between ancient holy sites and early earthworks; and the similarities between the sacred relic and the modern readymade. Alongside the work of leading 20th-century medievalist writes such as Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan, Leo Steinberg, and Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Robert Smithson, and Damien Hirst. The effect of these encounters goes in two directions at once: each age offers new insights into the other, deepening our understanding of both past and present, and providing a new set of reference points that reframe the history of art itself.
This collection of essays asks contributors to take the capaciousness of the word "queer" to heart in order to think about what medieval queers would have looked like and how they may have existed on the margins and borders of dominant, normative sexuality and desire. The contributors work with recent trends in queer medieval studies, blending together modern concepts of sexuality and desire with the queer configurations of eroticism, desire, and materiality as they might have existed for medieval audiences.