Thomas A. Prendergast and Stephanie Trigg
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781526126863
- eISBN:
- 9781526142009
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526126863.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Early and Medieval Literature
This chapter asks whether the mutual discontent we have diagnosed between medieval studies and medievalism is inevitable in future practice in these fields. Through its interest in recuperating the ...
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This chapter asks whether the mutual discontent we have diagnosed between medieval studies and medievalism is inevitable in future practice in these fields. Through its interest in recuperating the past, medievalism is an exemplary practice for the humanities and their understanding of history and culture. Facsimiles of medieval manuscripts further exemplify many of the similarities between medieval and medievalist study, and also our necessary discontent with most of the ways scholarship attempts to get back to and ‘touch’ the past. In the face of contemporary critiques of disciplinarity, we suggest that medieval and medievalism studies together are well placed to model new forms of academic engagement and resistance to the utilitarianism and vocationalism that increasingly dominates our universities. Productive engagement with the medieval past, from a wide range of disciplinary approaches, remains an urgent task for understanding the world around us.Less
This chapter asks whether the mutual discontent we have diagnosed between medieval studies and medievalism is inevitable in future practice in these fields. Through its interest in recuperating the past, medievalism is an exemplary practice for the humanities and their understanding of history and culture. Facsimiles of medieval manuscripts further exemplify many of the similarities between medieval and medievalist study, and also our necessary discontent with most of the ways scholarship attempts to get back to and ‘touch’ the past. In the face of contemporary critiques of disciplinarity, we suggest that medieval and medievalism studies together are well placed to model new forms of academic engagement and resistance to the utilitarianism and vocationalism that increasingly dominates our universities. Productive engagement with the medieval past, from a wide range of disciplinary approaches, remains an urgent task for understanding the world around us.
Heather Webb
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- June 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198733485
- eISBN:
- 9780191797941
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198733485.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory, Early and Medieval Literature
In Ante-Purgatory, gestures take on a primary importance in opening dialogic relations between individuals and thus building the foundations upon which personhood can be properly reconstructed. By ...
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In Ante-Purgatory, gestures take on a primary importance in opening dialogic relations between individuals and thus building the foundations upon which personhood can be properly reconstructed. By reference to cognitive literary theory, this chapter suggests ways in which the text presents description of gesture as juxtaposed with more abstract concepts in order to develop the reader’s sense of the personal presence of the character. The chapter works towards an excavation of Dante’s understanding of gesture as communicative of person, or the soul’s relation to other souls through the aerial body, by examination of some gestural encounters in Ante-Purgatory and their cultural contexts: Manfred’s revelation of his wounds and of his identity; Belacqua’s slow lift of his head; Buonconte da Montefeltro’s act of making his body into a cross; and the prayer gestures of the anonymous soul of Purgatorio 8.Less
In Ante-Purgatory, gestures take on a primary importance in opening dialogic relations between individuals and thus building the foundations upon which personhood can be properly reconstructed. By reference to cognitive literary theory, this chapter suggests ways in which the text presents description of gesture as juxtaposed with more abstract concepts in order to develop the reader’s sense of the personal presence of the character. The chapter works towards an excavation of Dante’s understanding of gesture as communicative of person, or the soul’s relation to other souls through the aerial body, by examination of some gestural encounters in Ante-Purgatory and their cultural contexts: Manfred’s revelation of his wounds and of his identity; Belacqua’s slow lift of his head; Buonconte da Montefeltro’s act of making his body into a cross; and the prayer gestures of the anonymous soul of Purgatorio 8.
