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Spiritual Armories on the New Suburban Landscape

Jeanne Halgren Kilde

in When Church Became Theatre: The Transformation of Evangelical Architecture and Worship in Nineteenth-Century America

After the Civil War, population growth, industrialization, and urbanization significantly affected evangelical congregations. As many established congregations decided to move away from their ... More

After the Civil War, population growth, industrialization, and urbanization significantly affected evangelical congregations. As many established congregations decided to move away from their original downtown locations and build churches in the new suburbs, church mission, location, and architectural style became intertwined. The trend toward medievalism and the widespread adoption of the Richardsonian Romanesque architectural style underscored the domestic or member‐focused internal mission of congregations while at the same time indicating their perception of the risky nature of outreach and evangelizing missions in heterogeneous urban neighborhoods. Resembling armories, these buildings articulated middle‐class ambivalence toward urban life, at once safely sheltering members yet also providing a redoubt from whence forays into the broader community could be launched. This chapter uses a case study approach to investigate congregations and their church buildings, and includes Lovely Lane Church in Baltimore, designed by architect Stanford White, and Trinity Methodist Episcopal Church in Denver, designed by Robert S. Roeschlaub among several buildings examined.Less

The Intellectual Context

Philip Gleason

in Contending with Modernity: Catholic Higher Education in the Twentieth Century

Central to the intellectual revival that dominated Catholic higher education between World War I and the Second Vatican Council was the recovery of ... More

Central to the intellectual revival that dominated Catholic higher education between World War I and the Second Vatican Council was the recovery of Scholastic philosophy and theology, particularly that of St. Thomas Aquinas. The “Scholastic Revival,” as it was called, began in the middle decades of the nineteenth century and was officially endorsed by Pope Leo XIII in 1879. Although its influence was felt earlier, especially in seminaries, it did not affect American Catholic higher education in a really pervasive way until the 1920s. By the end of that decade, however, Neoscholasticism had become a “school philosophy” that served for Catholic colleges very much the same functions that Scottish common sense philosophy and Baconianism served for Protestant colleges in the first half of the nineteenth century. To understand how this came about, we must review the earlier phases of the revival and highlight the main features of Neoscholasticism as a system of thought, before attempting to link its popularization with other events and movements of the 1920s. The term Scholasticism refers broadly to the teaching and method of the “schoolmen,” that is, the philosophers and theologians who propounded their views at the medieval universities, especially at the University of Paris. St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) is generally regarded as the outstanding figure among the Scholastics, and the revival of the nineteenth century aimed primarily at recovering his ideas and drawing upon them to establish Catholic teaching on a solid intellectual foundation. This effort involved a process of gradual clarification because the full richness of Thomas’s thought emerged only in the course of the historical investigations set off by the revival. The same is true of its relation to the thinking of other schoolmen and of later commentators, especially post-Reformation Scholastics like the Spanish Jesuit Francisco Suarez, who died in 1617. The virtually interchangeable use of the terms “Neothomism” and “Neoscholasticism” reflected the ambiguity that persisted well into the twentieth century as to the precise relationship between the thought of St. Thomas himself and that of the larger school of which he was the acknowledged master. Less

The Beginnings of the Catholic Renaissance

Philip Gleason

in Contending with Modernity: Catholic Higher Education in the Twentieth Century

The beginnings of the Catholic Renaissance in the United States were closely linked to the experience of American Catholics in the First World War. As we ... More

The beginnings of the Catholic Renaissance in the United States were closely linked to the experience of American Catholics in the First World War. As we saw in Chapter 3, mobilization of Catholic energies to meet the wartime crisis led to the creation of the National Catholic War Council. The NCWC’s success in coordinating Catholic participation in the war effort, and the recognition it gained as the representative agency of the church in matters of broad national interest persuaded Catholic leaders that it should be perpetuated after the war. That was accomplished in 1919, when the War Council was transformed into the National Catholic Welfare Council (later National Catholic Welfare Conference). The creation of a national headquarters and staff not only gave the church a more effective voice in public affairs, it also enhanced Catholic visibility and served notice that a new era of purposeful Catholic participation in American life was about to begin. These developments had a tonic effect on Catholic morale and reinforced the sense of emotional solidarity with, and responsibility to, the nation that had grown out of the shared experience of wartime mobilization. The earliest manifestations of the Catholic Revival in the United States emerged from this matrix and took the form of a new kind of Catholic Americanism. There were, of course, certain points of similarity between the Americanism of the war and postwar years and that of the 1890s. Both versions, for example, reflected intense patriotic feeling, and both urged Catholics to identify with, and participate in, American life. Moreover, Cardinal Gibbons, who presided over the creation of the War Council and its transformation into the permanent NCWC, constituted a living link between the two eras. Yet no real effort was made to portray the new Americanism as a continuation of the earlier version. Reticence on this point made good sense tactically, since in 1899 Pope Leo XIII had condemned the opinions that “some comprise under the head of Americanism.” Less

Mallarmé Médiéval

R. Howard Bloch

in Revisioning French Culture

R. Howard Bloch’s text explores Mallarmé’s linguistic links to antiquity and the medieval era. With a close reading of ‘Un coup de dés n’abolira jamais le hasard’—Mallarmé’s epic final, and perhaps ... More

R. Howard Bloch’s text explores Mallarmé’s linguistic links to antiquity and the medieval era. With a close reading of ‘Un coup de dés n’abolira jamais le hasard’—Mallarmé’s epic final, and perhaps most famous, poem—Bloch attends to the publication history of the text, its typographic layout, and its medieval philological underpinnings.Less

Introduction

Helen M. Hickey, Anne McKendry, and Melissa Raine

in Contemporary Chaucer across the centuries

This chapter surveys current research, methodologies and debates in Chaucer criticism and medievalism studies as they appear in this volume, and discusses their relationship with the scholarship of ... More

This chapter surveys current research, methodologies and debates in Chaucer criticism and medievalism studies as they appear in this volume, and discusses their relationship with the scholarship of Stephanie Trigg.Less

Flesh and stone: William Morris’s News from Nowhere and Chaucer’s dream visions

John M. Ganim

in Contemporary Chaucer across the centuries

John Ganim unpacks William Morris’s eroticised but anxious politics in News from Nowhere. Ganim highlights the significance of the emotional attachment to environment in the formulation of Morris’s ... More

John Ganim unpacks William Morris’s eroticised but anxious politics in News from Nowhere. Ganim highlights the significance of the emotional attachment to environment in the formulation of Morris’s utopia. He also considers the enabling influence of the medieval dream vision, especially Chaucer’s, for promoting ‘psychological experience and fantasy’. Both themes illuminate Morris’s conflicted approach to subjects that caused him discomfort due to his perverse familial situation.Less

‘In remembrance of his persone’: transhistorical empathy and the Chaucerian face

Louise D’Arcens

in Contemporary Chaucer across the centuries

From the earliest manuscript images through to cinematic depictions, Chaucer’s ‘persone’, that is his face and body, has been a key focus in the pursuit of transhistorical intimacy with the author. ... More

From the earliest manuscript images through to cinematic depictions, Chaucer’s ‘persone’, that is his face and body, has been a key focus in the pursuit of transhistorical intimacy with the author. Chaucer’s physical self has been portrayed repeatedly across subsequent centuries in an array of media. Drawing upon the hermeneutic concept of Einfühlung (‘feeling into’) to examine the long ‘empathetic afterlife’ enjoyed by Chaucer’s ‘persone’, D’Arcens explores what Chaucer’s face and body have come to mean to post-medieval audiences; she traces how these differences intersect with the constantly changing nature of Chaucer’s legacy, especially as he and his work have been deemed to reflect national literary and comic traditions.Less

The Spanish Orient in Bello's Spanish American Occidentalism

Nadia R. Altschul

in Geographies of Philological Knowledge: Postcoloniality and the Transatlantic National Epic

This chapter introduces into an understanding of Bello's scholarship the association of Spain with the Islamic Orient that was prevalent in the nineteenth century. In particular, it charts the ... More

This chapter introduces into an understanding of Bello's scholarship the association of Spain with the Islamic Orient that was prevalent in the nineteenth century. In particular, it charts the rejection of this “internal Orient” that Bello needed to accomplish in order to construct inner continuities between Spanish America and Europe by focusing on the Venezuelan's study of Castilian assonance, considered as a peculiarity inherited from Iberian–Arabic interminglings during the Middle Ages. The book closes with a “Coda” offering a reexamination of the discussion on criollo medievalism and settler postcolonial studies.Less

Medievalist Comics and the American Century

Chris Bishop

in Medievalist Comics and the American Century

A general overview of the monograph that unpacks some of the technical apparatus, contextualises the argument, and gives a chapter-by-chapter run through.

Northlanders (2007)

Chris Bishop

in Medievalist Comics and the American Century

The final of the comic book chapters is a study of the 21st-century series Northlanders. What makes this comic book so interesting for the purposes of this study is not its medievalism, but rather ... More

The final of the comic book chapters is a study of the 21st-century series Northlanders. What makes this comic book so interesting for the purposes of this study is not its medievalism, but rather its lack thereof. The characters in Northlanders think, behave and speak like film-noir gangsters, as the blood feuds and conquests of the northern Dark Ages mutate into barrio-style turf wars and gangland vendettas. The writer of the series made no attempt to portray the ontology of his Norse subjects or to represent historically the multifaceted culture from which they sprang—his goal was to produce a crime series based on seminal Yakuza films from the 1970s.Less

The Stories Upon Which We Agree

Chris Bishop

in Medievalist Comics and the American Century

This chapter consists of an extended meditation upon the nature and historical expression of medievalism and the historiographical links between medievalism and feudalism, a term more commonly ... More

This chapter consists of an extended meditation upon the nature and historical expression of medievalism and the historiographical links between medievalism and feudalism, a term more commonly encountered in European, especially French, commentary.Less

Queen Eleanor and her crosses: Trauma and memory, medieval and modern

Joshua Davies

in Visions and ruins: Cultural memory and the untimely Middle Ages

This chapter is the first extended study of the Eleanor Crosses. Commissioned by Edward I and built in the years immediately following Eleanor’s death in 1290, the monuments fashioned an idealised ... More

This chapter is the first extended study of the Eleanor Crosses. Commissioned by Edward I and built in the years immediately following Eleanor’s death in 1290, the monuments fashioned an idealised image of Eleanor that stands distinct from the historical record but which defined cultural memories of her. Over time, however, what were once memorials to an individual woman came to signify a more general sense of loss, melancholy and nostalgia that signified differently in particular times and places. E. M. Barry’s refashioned Charing Cross of the 1860s is but one of a number of nineteenth- and twentieth-century monuments that self-consciously repeated and reflected the medieval precedents of the Eleanor Crosses to create an idealised image of the medieval past. This chapter traces the reception, recreation and influence of the crosses in postmedieval England.Less

‘What you need is a liege lord’: Futuristic Feudalism in The Warrior’s Apprentice

Sarah Lindsay

in Biology and Manners: Essays on the Worlds and Works of Lois McMaster Bujold

This chapter looks at Lois McMaster Bujold’s use of medievalism, specifically at how Bujold uses feudalism in her Vorkosigan science fiction novel The Warrior’s Apprentice as a bridge between past ... More

This chapter looks at Lois McMaster Bujold’s use of medievalism, specifically at how Bujold uses feudalism in her Vorkosigan science fiction novel The Warrior’s Apprentice as a bridge between past and future. In constructing Barrayaran politics, Bujold simplifies feudalism by only showing us the basic chain from emperor to Vor nobility to armsman. She also presents an Imperium that, over the course of a century, has broken the power of the Vor nobility (as happened in late medieval and early modern France) and is moving towards a more parliamentary form of government (as happened in late medieval and early modern England). The chapter thus shows how Bujold’s feudalism is simplified from medieval European feudalism and, in terms of its history, is beginning to move beyond the medieval period. Nevertheless, as the chapter concludes, on Barrayar the bonds of mutual obligation created by feudalism remain crucial, as does the centrality of military protection and service.Less

Introduction

Pauline Stafford

in The Making of the Middle Ages

In this introductory chapter, Pauline Stafford attempts to establish the definition of Medievalism in terms of art, culture, history, and general worldview. She foregrounds the origins of ... More

In this introductory chapter, Pauline Stafford attempts to establish the definition of Medievalism in terms of art, culture, history, and general worldview. She foregrounds the origins of Medievalism, and outlines its dependence on the periodization which distinguishes the middle ages, while drawing attention to Medievalism’s history in Merseyside specifically. By explaining how the following essays attempt to piece together theoretical standpoints on Medievalism, Stafford asks what can we ever really know about the middle ages?Less

The Lure of Celtic Languages, 1850–1914

T. M. Charles-Edwards

in The Making of the Middle Ages

‘The Lure of Celtic Languages, 1850–1914’, written by T. M. Charles-Edwards, asks what drew Johann Caspar Zeuss and Holger Pederson to work on the Celtic and what, more importantly, kept them working ... More

‘The Lure of Celtic Languages, 1850–1914’, written by T. M. Charles-Edwards, asks what drew Johann Caspar Zeuss and Holger Pederson to work on the Celtic and what, more importantly, kept them working in this field even after, very often, their initial concerns had been satisfied.Less