Paul Giles
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691136134
- eISBN:
- 9781400836512
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691136134.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This book charts how the cartographies of American literature as an institutional category have varied radically across different times and places. Arguing that American literature was consolidated ...
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This book charts how the cartographies of American literature as an institutional category have varied radically across different times and places. Arguing that American literature was consolidated as a distinctively nationalist entity only in the wake of the American Civil War, the book identifies this formation as extending until the beginning of the Reagan presidency in 1981. It contrasts this with the more amorphous boundaries of American culture in the eighteenth century, and with ways in which conditions of globalization at the turn of the twenty-first century have reconfigured the parameters of the subject. In light of these fluctuating conceptions of space, the book suggests new ways of understanding the shifting territory of American literary history. It considers why European medievalism and the prehistory of Native Americans were crucial to classic nineteenth-century authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. It discusses how twentieth-century technological innovations, such as air travel, affected representations of the national domain in the texts of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. It also analyzes how regional projections of the South and the Pacific Northwest helped to shape the work of writers such as William Gilmore Simms, José Martí, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Gibson.Less
This book charts how the cartographies of American literature as an institutional category have varied radically across different times and places. Arguing that American literature was consolidated as a distinctively nationalist entity only in the wake of the American Civil War, the book identifies this formation as extending until the beginning of the Reagan presidency in 1981. It contrasts this with the more amorphous boundaries of American culture in the eighteenth century, and with ways in which conditions of globalization at the turn of the twenty-first century have reconfigured the parameters of the subject. In light of these fluctuating conceptions of space, the book suggests new ways of understanding the shifting territory of American literary history. It considers why European medievalism and the prehistory of Native Americans were crucial to classic nineteenth-century authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. It discusses how twentieth-century technological innovations, such as air travel, affected representations of the national domain in the texts of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. It also analyzes how regional projections of the South and the Pacific Northwest helped to shape the work of writers such as William Gilmore Simms, José Martí, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Gibson.
Barry Stephenson
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199732753
- eISBN:
- 9780199777310
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199732753.003.0006
- Subject:
- Religion, History of Christianity, Religion and Society
The focus of this chapter is the carnivalesque character of Wittenberg’s Luther festivals, especially Luther’s Wedding. The historical suppression of carnival and popular culture in the centuries ...
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The focus of this chapter is the carnivalesque character of Wittenberg’s Luther festivals, especially Luther’s Wedding. The historical suppression of carnival and popular culture in the centuries following the Reformation is presented. The chapter argues that Wittenberg’s festivals represent the reemergence of a festive popular culture. Wittenberg’s festivals are interpreted as a form of a mimesis and sympathetic magic, as individuals attempt to actualize, through performance and reenactment, a remembered convivial culture of the past associated with medieval carnival.Less
The focus of this chapter is the carnivalesque character of Wittenberg’s Luther festivals, especially Luther’s Wedding. The historical suppression of carnival and popular culture in the centuries following the Reformation is presented. The chapter argues that Wittenberg’s festivals represent the reemergence of a festive popular culture. Wittenberg’s festivals are interpreted as a form of a mimesis and sympathetic magic, as individuals attempt to actualize, through performance and reenactment, a remembered convivial culture of the past associated with medieval carnival.
Bettina Bildhauer and Chris Jones (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780197266144
- eISBN:
- 9780191860027
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197266144.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
The Middle Ages continue to provide an important touchstone for the way the modern West presents itself and its relationship with the rest of the globe. This volume brings together leading scholars ...
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The Middle Ages continue to provide an important touchstone for the way the modern West presents itself and its relationship with the rest of the globe. This volume brings together leading scholars of literature and history, together with musicians, novelists, librarians and museum curators in order to present exciting, up-to-date perspectives on how and why the Middle Ages continue to matter in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Presented here, their essays represent a unique dialogue between scholars and practitioners of ‘medievalism’. Framed by an introductory essay on the broad history of the continuing evolution of the idea of ‘The Middle Ages’ from the fourteenth century to the present day, chapters deal with subjects as diverse as: the use of Old Norse sagas by Republican deniers of climate change; the way figures like the Irish hero Cú Chulainn and St Patrick were used to give legitimacy to political affiliations during the Ulster ‘Troubles’; the use of the Middle Ages in films by Pasolini and Tarantino; the adoption of the ‘Green Man’ motif in popular culture; Lady Gaga’s manipulation of medieval iconography in her music videos; the translation of medieval poetry from manuscript to digital media; and the problem of writing national history free from the ‘toxic medievalism’ of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Less
The Middle Ages continue to provide an important touchstone for the way the modern West presents itself and its relationship with the rest of the globe. This volume brings together leading scholars of literature and history, together with musicians, novelists, librarians and museum curators in order to present exciting, up-to-date perspectives on how and why the Middle Ages continue to matter in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Presented here, their essays represent a unique dialogue between scholars and practitioners of ‘medievalism’. Framed by an introductory essay on the broad history of the continuing evolution of the idea of ‘The Middle Ages’ from the fourteenth century to the present day, chapters deal with subjects as diverse as: the use of Old Norse sagas by Republican deniers of climate change; the way figures like the Irish hero Cú Chulainn and St Patrick were used to give legitimacy to political affiliations during the Ulster ‘Troubles’; the use of the Middle Ages in films by Pasolini and Tarantino; the adoption of the ‘Green Man’ motif in popular culture; Lady Gaga’s manipulation of medieval iconography in her music videos; the translation of medieval poetry from manuscript to digital media; and the problem of writing national history free from the ‘toxic medievalism’ of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Paul Giles
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691136134
- eISBN:
- 9781400836512
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691136134.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter examines how the notion of medieval American literature not only makes a paradoxical kind of sense but might be seen as integral to the construction of the subject more generally. It ...
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This chapter examines how the notion of medieval American literature not only makes a paradoxical kind of sense but might be seen as integral to the construction of the subject more generally. It argues that antebellum narratives situate native soil on a highly charged and fraught boundary between past and present, circumference and displacement. In itself, the idea of medieval American literature is hardly more peculiar than F. O. Matthiessen's conception of an “American Renaissance.” Matthiessen sought to justify his subject by aligning nineteenth-century American writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne with seventeenth-century English forerunners such as William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. The chapter considers resonances of medievalism within nineteenth-century American culture and how many antebellum writers consciously foreground within their texts the shifting, permeable boundaries of time and space, suggesting how fiction and cartography, the writing of history and the writing of geography, are commensurate with each other.Less
This chapter examines how the notion of medieval American literature not only makes a paradoxical kind of sense but might be seen as integral to the construction of the subject more generally. It argues that antebellum narratives situate native soil on a highly charged and fraught boundary between past and present, circumference and displacement. In itself, the idea of medieval American literature is hardly more peculiar than F. O. Matthiessen's conception of an “American Renaissance.” Matthiessen sought to justify his subject by aligning nineteenth-century American writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne with seventeenth-century English forerunners such as William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. The chapter considers resonances of medievalism within nineteenth-century American culture and how many antebellum writers consciously foreground within their texts the shifting, permeable boundaries of time and space, suggesting how fiction and cartography, the writing of history and the writing of geography, are commensurate with each other.
Priya Satia
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- May 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780195331417
- eISBN:
- 9780199868070
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195331417.003.0003
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Early Modern History
This chapter explains why Britons were particularly drawn to the Ottoman Empire in this period and how intelligence agents' particular cultural motivations disposed them to epistemological ...
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This chapter explains why Britons were particularly drawn to the Ottoman Empire in this period and how intelligence agents' particular cultural motivations disposed them to epistemological experimentation. It describes the agents' central role in cultural production about the region, as famous explorers and authors intimate with Edwardian literary society, with whom they fashioned a new literary cult of the desert, in which the spy novel figured centrally. Many of them had gone to the Middle East looking for literary inspiration, a modernist aesthetic, romantic adventure, and spiritual fulfillment in a time in which social change and modern science had made many Britons anxious about their place in society and the universe. The agents saw their work in the Middle East, particularly during the war, as an opportunity to shape their own lives and Middle Eastern reality in the image of fiction.Less
This chapter explains why Britons were particularly drawn to the Ottoman Empire in this period and how intelligence agents' particular cultural motivations disposed them to epistemological experimentation. It describes the agents' central role in cultural production about the region, as famous explorers and authors intimate with Edwardian literary society, with whom they fashioned a new literary cult of the desert, in which the spy novel figured centrally. Many of them had gone to the Middle East looking for literary inspiration, a modernist aesthetic, romantic adventure, and spiritual fulfillment in a time in which social change and modern science had made many Britons anxious about their place in society and the universe. The agents saw their work in the Middle East, particularly during the war, as an opportunity to shape their own lives and Middle Eastern reality in the image of fiction.
STEFAN GOEBEL
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780197264669
- eISBN:
- 9780191753985
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197264669.003.0007
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
This chapter investigates the overlaps between the ‘cultural memory’ of the distant past and the memory of the Great War in Britain and Germany between 1914 and 1939, looking in particular at the use ...
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This chapter investigates the overlaps between the ‘cultural memory’ of the distant past and the memory of the Great War in Britain and Germany between 1914 and 1939, looking in particular at the use of medieval(ist) images in war memorials. There was a certain tension between advocates of medievalism and supporters of classicist images, but often, they reached a compromise. The chapter combines a discussion of the concept of ‘cultural memory’ with case studies on the reception of antiquity and the Middle Ages in the era of the Great War.Less
This chapter investigates the overlaps between the ‘cultural memory’ of the distant past and the memory of the Great War in Britain and Germany between 1914 and 1939, looking in particular at the use of medieval(ist) images in war memorials. There was a certain tension between advocates of medievalism and supporters of classicist images, but often, they reached a compromise. The chapter combines a discussion of the concept of ‘cultural memory’ with case studies on the reception of antiquity and the Middle Ages in the era of the Great War.
David Manning
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195182392
- eISBN:
- 9780199851485
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195182392.003.0068
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
This chapter discusses an introductory talk given at the Holst Memorial Concert, a musical tribute to the great composer, Gustav Holst. Holst was a visionary, but, at the same time, in all essentials ...
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This chapter discusses an introductory talk given at the Holst Memorial Concert, a musical tribute to the great composer, Gustav Holst. Holst was a visionary, but, at the same time, in all essentials a very practical man. He himself used to say that only second-rate artists were unbusinesslike. It is the blend of the visionary with the realist that gives his music its distinctive character. Holst's life gave the lie to the notion that a composer must shut himself away from his fellows and live in a world of dreams. However, he never allowed his dreams to become incoherent or meandering. While he was still young, Holst was strongly attracted by the ideals of William Morris and, though in later years, he discarded the medievalism of that teacher, and the ideal of comradeship remained with him throughout his life.Less
This chapter discusses an introductory talk given at the Holst Memorial Concert, a musical tribute to the great composer, Gustav Holst. Holst was a visionary, but, at the same time, in all essentials a very practical man. He himself used to say that only second-rate artists were unbusinesslike. It is the blend of the visionary with the realist that gives his music its distinctive character. Holst's life gave the lie to the notion that a composer must shut himself away from his fellows and live in a world of dreams. However, he never allowed his dreams to become incoherent or meandering. While he was still young, Holst was strongly attracted by the ideals of William Morris and, though in later years, he discarded the medievalism of that teacher, and the ideal of comradeship remained with him throughout his life.
James Kirby
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780197265871
- eISBN:
- 9780191772030
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197265871.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Early Modern History
One of the most striking features of E. A. Freeman’s life and thought is the contrast between the young Tractarian student of architecture and the mature liberal, even radical, historian. This essay ...
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One of the most striking features of E. A. Freeman’s life and thought is the contrast between the young Tractarian student of architecture and the mature liberal, even radical, historian. This essay explains that the transition from the one to the other was not a process of sudden conversion or rupture, but rather a natural development. To understand the crucial years c.1846–50, when Freeman’s thought was most in ferment, a number of his early, hitherto unidentified, publications have been tracked down, including his earliest published study of the Norman Conquest. From these sources, among others, it has been possible to reconstruct how his early medievalism and anti-Erastianism evolved into a general commitment to liberty, democracy, and republicanism, without repudiating the High Anglicanism of his youth. Though apparently idiosyncratic, this intellectual development was shared to some extent by a number of prominent Victorian liberals, not least Gladstone himself.Less
One of the most striking features of E. A. Freeman’s life and thought is the contrast between the young Tractarian student of architecture and the mature liberal, even radical, historian. This essay explains that the transition from the one to the other was not a process of sudden conversion or rupture, but rather a natural development. To understand the crucial years c.1846–50, when Freeman’s thought was most in ferment, a number of his early, hitherto unidentified, publications have been tracked down, including his earliest published study of the Norman Conquest. From these sources, among others, it has been possible to reconstruct how his early medievalism and anti-Erastianism evolved into a general commitment to liberty, democracy, and republicanism, without repudiating the High Anglicanism of his youth. Though apparently idiosyncratic, this intellectual development was shared to some extent by a number of prominent Victorian liberals, not least Gladstone himself.
Christine Dade-Robertson
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780197265871
- eISBN:
- 9780191772030
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197265871.003.0009
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Early Modern History
E. A. Freeman maintained that he always sought the truth in his historical research. He asserted that ‘personal theories’ and ‘national prejudices’ had no place in the study of history, but did his ...
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E. A. Freeman maintained that he always sought the truth in his historical research. He asserted that ‘personal theories’ and ‘national prejudices’ had no place in the study of history, but did his actions always match the rhetoric? This essay focuses on Freeman’s hero-worship of Harold, the last Anglo Saxon king, and his quest to prove Harold’s link with Waltham Abbey. This quest became a personal obsession which was to embroil him in a controversy which, many have argued, led him to compromise his academic principles and to allow ‘romantic nationalism’ to get in the way of the objective search for truth.Less
E. A. Freeman maintained that he always sought the truth in his historical research. He asserted that ‘personal theories’ and ‘national prejudices’ had no place in the study of history, but did his actions always match the rhetoric? This essay focuses on Freeman’s hero-worship of Harold, the last Anglo Saxon king, and his quest to prove Harold’s link with Waltham Abbey. This quest became a personal obsession which was to embroil him in a controversy which, many have argued, led him to compromise his academic principles and to allow ‘romantic nationalism’ to get in the way of the objective search for truth.
Jeanne Halgren Kilde
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- November 2003
- ISBN:
- 9780195143416
- eISBN:
- 9780199834372
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195143418.003.0004
- Subject:
- Religion, History of Christianity
After the Civil War, population growth, industrialization, and urbanization significantly affected evangelical congregations. As many established congregations decided to move away from their ...
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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
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.
Thomas Prendergast and Stephanie Trigg
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781526126863
- eISBN:
- 9781526142009
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526126863.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Early and Medieval Literature
This book destabilises the customary disciplinary and epistemological oppositions between medieval studies and modern medievalism. It argues that the twinned concepts of “the medieval” and ...
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This book destabilises the customary disciplinary and epistemological oppositions between medieval studies and modern medievalism. It argues that the twinned concepts of “the medieval” and post-medieval “medievalism” are mutually though unevenly constitutive, not just in the contemporary era, but from the medieval period on. Medieval and medievalist culture share similar concerns about the nature of temporality, and the means by which we approach or “touch” the past, whether through textual or material culture, or the conceptual frames through which we approach those artefacts. Those approaches are often affective ones, often structured around love, abjection and discontent. Medieval writers offer powerful models for the ways in which contemporary desire determines the constitution of the past. This desire can not only connect us with the past but can reconnect present readers with the lost history of what we call the medievalism of the medievals. In other words, to come to terms with the history of the medieval is to understand that it already offers us a model of how to relate to the past. The book ranges across literary and historical texts, but is equally attentive to material culture and its problematic witness to the reality of the historical past.Less
This book destabilises the customary disciplinary and epistemological oppositions between medieval studies and modern medievalism. It argues that the twinned concepts of “the medieval” and post-medieval “medievalism” are mutually though unevenly constitutive, not just in the contemporary era, but from the medieval period on. Medieval and medievalist culture share similar concerns about the nature of temporality, and the means by which we approach or “touch” the past, whether through textual or material culture, or the conceptual frames through which we approach those artefacts. Those approaches are often affective ones, often structured around love, abjection and discontent. Medieval writers offer powerful models for the ways in which contemporary desire determines the constitution of the past. This desire can not only connect us with the past but can reconnect present readers with the lost history of what we call the medievalism of the medievals. In other words, to come to terms with the history of the medieval is to understand that it already offers us a model of how to relate to the past. The book ranges across literary and historical texts, but is equally attentive to material culture and its problematic witness to the reality of the historical past.
CHRIS JONES
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- September 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780199278329
- eISBN:
- 9780191707889
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199278329.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
The introductory chapter considers several diverging views on the origins of what might be called an ‘English’ poetic tradition, noting that for some critics Old English is not part of such a ...
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The introductory chapter considers several diverging views on the origins of what might be called an ‘English’ poetic tradition, noting that for some critics Old English is not part of such a tradition. It is argued that while Old English is in some respects ‘other’, it is at the same time aboriginally English, and that this paradox is precisely what makes it attractive to several poets at certain moments during the 20th century. Primitivist interest in Old English is likened to other, better-known forms of modernist primitivism. The rediscovery of Old English is briefly situated within its wider historical contexts: a more general medievalism, and the rise of English studies as an academic discipline. The potential breadth of the topic is indicated by cursory mention of some of the figures not studied in depth for reasons of space: J. R. R. Tolkien, David Jones, Basil Bunting, Geoffrey Hill, and Harold Massingham.Less
The introductory chapter considers several diverging views on the origins of what might be called an ‘English’ poetic tradition, noting that for some critics Old English is not part of such a tradition. It is argued that while Old English is in some respects ‘other’, it is at the same time aboriginally English, and that this paradox is precisely what makes it attractive to several poets at certain moments during the 20th century. Primitivist interest in Old English is likened to other, better-known forms of modernist primitivism. The rediscovery of Old English is briefly situated within its wider historical contexts: a more general medievalism, and the rise of English studies as an academic discipline. The potential breadth of the topic is indicated by cursory mention of some of the figures not studied in depth for reasons of space: J. R. R. Tolkien, David Jones, Basil Bunting, Geoffrey Hill, and Harold Massingham.
Helen M. Hickey, Anne McKendry, and Melissa Raine (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781526129154
- eISBN:
- 9781526141996
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526129154.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Early and Medieval Literature
For 700 years, Geoffrey Chaucer has spoken to scholars and amateurs alike. How does his work speak to us in the twenty-first century? This volume provides a unique vantage point for responding to ...
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For 700 years, Geoffrey Chaucer has spoken to scholars and amateurs alike. How does his work speak to us in the twenty-first century? This volume provides a unique vantage point for responding to this question, furnished by the pioneering scholar of medieval literary studies, Stephanie Trigg: the symptomatic long history. While Trigg's signature methodological framework acts as a springboard for the vibrant conversation that characterises this collection, each chapter offers an inspiring extension of her scholarly insights. The varied perspectives of the outstanding contributors attest to the vibrancy and the advancement of debates in Chaucer studies: thus, formerly rigid demarcations surrounding medieval literary studies, particularly those concerned with Chaucer, yield in these essays to a fluid interplay between Chaucer within his medieval context; medievalism and ‘reception’; the rigours of scholarly research and the recognition of amateur engagement with the past; the significance of the history of emotions; and the relationship of textuality with subjectivity according to their social and ecological context. Each chapter produces a distinctive and often startling interpretation of Chaucer that broadens our understanding of the dynamic relationship between the medieval past and its ongoing re-evaluation. The inventive strategies and methodologies employed in this volume by leading thinkers in medieval literary criticism will stimulate exciting and timely insights for researchers and students of Chaucer, medievalism, medieval studies, and the history of emotions, especially those interested in the relationship between medieval literature, the intervening centuries and contemporary cultural change.Less
For 700 years, Geoffrey Chaucer has spoken to scholars and amateurs alike. How does his work speak to us in the twenty-first century? This volume provides a unique vantage point for responding to this question, furnished by the pioneering scholar of medieval literary studies, Stephanie Trigg: the symptomatic long history. While Trigg's signature methodological framework acts as a springboard for the vibrant conversation that characterises this collection, each chapter offers an inspiring extension of her scholarly insights. The varied perspectives of the outstanding contributors attest to the vibrancy and the advancement of debates in Chaucer studies: thus, formerly rigid demarcations surrounding medieval literary studies, particularly those concerned with Chaucer, yield in these essays to a fluid interplay between Chaucer within his medieval context; medievalism and ‘reception’; the rigours of scholarly research and the recognition of amateur engagement with the past; the significance of the history of emotions; and the relationship of textuality with subjectivity according to their social and ecological context. Each chapter produces a distinctive and often startling interpretation of Chaucer that broadens our understanding of the dynamic relationship between the medieval past and its ongoing re-evaluation. The inventive strategies and methodologies employed in this volume by leading thinkers in medieval literary criticism will stimulate exciting and timely insights for researchers and students of Chaucer, medievalism, medieval studies, and the history of emotions, especially those interested in the relationship between medieval literature, the intervening centuries and contemporary cultural change.
J. B. BULLEN
- Published in print:
- 1994
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198128885
- eISBN:
- 9780191671722
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198128885.003.0014
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
Compared with the glorious Middle Ages, the Renaissance was thought to be dominated by the aggressive individualism of petty and unscrupulous tyrants, pedantic scholars, arrogant artists, and ...
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Compared with the glorious Middle Ages, the Renaissance was thought to be dominated by the aggressive individualism of petty and unscrupulous tyrants, pedantic scholars, arrogant artists, and self-made men. Naive though this romantic simplification of history now seems, lying behind it was a more serious consideration about the nature of power and authority. Romantic medievalism in France fed the Catholic revival, which, in its turn, took this construction of the historical past to the heart of contemporary politics. Several figures employed the Renaissance and its historiography as a vehicle for the expression of values of a much more private nature. The growth and evolution of the idea of the Renaissance provides a fascinating insight into the nature of its mythographers. We also learn something about ideas of authority in the nineteenth century, and about the Victorian sense of self. These ideas were applied in many other fields, but the diversity of responses to the Renaissance furnishes graphic examples of one culture trying to come to terms with another.Less
Compared with the glorious Middle Ages, the Renaissance was thought to be dominated by the aggressive individualism of petty and unscrupulous tyrants, pedantic scholars, arrogant artists, and self-made men. Naive though this romantic simplification of history now seems, lying behind it was a more serious consideration about the nature of power and authority. Romantic medievalism in France fed the Catholic revival, which, in its turn, took this construction of the historical past to the heart of contemporary politics. Several figures employed the Renaissance and its historiography as a vehicle for the expression of values of a much more private nature. The growth and evolution of the idea of the Renaissance provides a fascinating insight into the nature of its mythographers. We also learn something about ideas of authority in the nineteenth century, and about the Victorian sense of self. These ideas were applied in many other fields, but the diversity of responses to the Renaissance furnishes graphic examples of one culture trying to come to terms with another.
Elizabeth R. Napier
- Published in print:
- 1987
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198128601
- eISBN:
- 9780191671678
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198128601.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
This chapter discusses The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole. The Castle of Otranto is, in its exaggerated, frenzied atmosphere of medievalism, romance, and the supernatural, Walpole’s triumphant ...
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This chapter discusses The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole. The Castle of Otranto is, in its exaggerated, frenzied atmosphere of medievalism, romance, and the supernatural, Walpole’s triumphant assertion of his own privileged immunity from censure, evidence of the tenuous connectedness he had with the ‘real’ world that was a source in life of his despair, his cynicism, and his solace.Less
This chapter discusses The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole. The Castle of Otranto is, in its exaggerated, frenzied atmosphere of medievalism, romance, and the supernatural, Walpole’s triumphant assertion of his own privileged immunity from censure, evidence of the tenuous connectedness he had with the ‘real’ world that was a source in life of his despair, his cynicism, and his solace.
J. B. BULLEN
- Published in print:
- 1994
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198128885
- eISBN:
- 9780191671722
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198128885.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
In its early phases, the Renaissance was intimately dependent on the discovery of the Middle Ages. An understanding of what constituted the ‘medieval’ was crucial to the emergence of the Renaissance. ...
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In its early phases, the Renaissance was intimately dependent on the discovery of the Middle Ages. An understanding of what constituted the ‘medieval’ was crucial to the emergence of the Renaissance. The Gothic Revival fuelled the study of European medievalism and it was in the studies of medieval architecture that the myth of the Renaissance began to take shape. This process began in France, and particularly amongst the French Romantic writers from whom it was brought into England by the passionate polemicists of the English Gothic Revival. French historiography was very active in the 1820s, but the idea flickers and dies in François Guizot. The myth of the Renaissance was developed in the French literature of architecture. However, French Romanticism which had so taken to the aesthetics of medievalism persistently devalued the Italian Renaissance.Less
In its early phases, the Renaissance was intimately dependent on the discovery of the Middle Ages. An understanding of what constituted the ‘medieval’ was crucial to the emergence of the Renaissance. The Gothic Revival fuelled the study of European medievalism and it was in the studies of medieval architecture that the myth of the Renaissance began to take shape. This process began in France, and particularly amongst the French Romantic writers from whom it was brought into England by the passionate polemicists of the English Gothic Revival. French historiography was very active in the 1820s, but the idea flickers and dies in François Guizot. The myth of the Renaissance was developed in the French literature of architecture. However, French Romanticism which had so taken to the aesthetics of medievalism persistently devalued the Italian Renaissance.
Chris Bishop
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781496808509
- eISBN:
- 9781496808547
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496808509.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Comics Studies
The comic book has become an essential icon of the “American Century,” an era defined by optimism in the face of change and by the recognition of the intrinsic value of democracy and modernization. ...
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The comic book has become an essential icon of the “American Century,” an era defined by optimism in the face of change and by the recognition of the intrinsic value of democracy and modernization. For many, the Middle Ages stand as an antithesis to these ideals, and yet medievalist comics have emerged, endured, even thrived alongside their superhero counterparts.
Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant emerged from an America at odds with monarchy but still in love with King Arthur. Green Arrow is the continuation of a long fascination with Robin Hood that has become as central to the American identity as it has to the British. The Mighty Thor reflects the legacy of Germanic migration into the United States. The rugged individualism of Conan the Barbarian owes more to the western cowboy than it does to the continental knight-errant, and in the narrative of Red Sonja we can trace a parallel history of Feminism.
This study began as a Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress (the worlds’ largest repository of comic books). It offers a reception history of medievalist comics, contextualizing them against a greater backdrop of modern American history. It illuminates some of the ways in which we use our imagined past to navigate the present, and it plots some possible futures as we transition into the “Asian Century.”Less
The comic book has become an essential icon of the “American Century,” an era defined by optimism in the face of change and by the recognition of the intrinsic value of democracy and modernization. For many, the Middle Ages stand as an antithesis to these ideals, and yet medievalist comics have emerged, endured, even thrived alongside their superhero counterparts.
Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant emerged from an America at odds with monarchy but still in love with King Arthur. Green Arrow is the continuation of a long fascination with Robin Hood that has become as central to the American identity as it has to the British. The Mighty Thor reflects the legacy of Germanic migration into the United States. The rugged individualism of Conan the Barbarian owes more to the western cowboy than it does to the continental knight-errant, and in the narrative of Red Sonja we can trace a parallel history of Feminism.
This study began as a Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress (the worlds’ largest repository of comic books). It offers a reception history of medievalist comics, contextualizing them against a greater backdrop of modern American history. It illuminates some of the ways in which we use our imagined past to navigate the present, and it plots some possible futures as we transition into the “Asian Century.”
Joshua Davies
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781526125934
- eISBN:
- 9781526136220
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526125934.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Early and Medieval Literature
This book is a study of cultural memory in and of the British Middle Ages. It works with material drawn from across the medieval period – in Old English, Middle English and Latin, as well as material ...
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This book is a study of cultural memory in and of the British Middle Ages. It works with material drawn from across the medieval period – in Old English, Middle English and Latin, as well as material and visual culture – and explores modern translations, reworkings and appropriations of these texts to examine how images of the past have been created, adapted and shared. It interrogates how cultural memory formed, and was formed by, social identities in the Middle Ages and how ideas about the past intersected with ideas about the present and future. It also examines how the presence of the Middle Ages has been felt, understood and perpetuated in modernity and the cultural possibilities and transformations this has generated. The Middle Ages encountered in this book is a site of cultural potential, a means of imagining the future as well as imaging the past. The scope of this book is defined by the duration of cultural forms rather than traditional habits of historical periodization and it seeks to reveal connections across time, place and media to explore the temporal complexities of cultural production and subject formation. It reveals a transtemporal and transnational archive of the modern Middle Ages.Less
This book is a study of cultural memory in and of the British Middle Ages. It works with material drawn from across the medieval period – in Old English, Middle English and Latin, as well as material and visual culture – and explores modern translations, reworkings and appropriations of these texts to examine how images of the past have been created, adapted and shared. It interrogates how cultural memory formed, and was formed by, social identities in the Middle Ages and how ideas about the past intersected with ideas about the present and future. It also examines how the presence of the Middle Ages has been felt, understood and perpetuated in modernity and the cultural possibilities and transformations this has generated. The Middle Ages encountered in this book is a site of cultural potential, a means of imagining the future as well as imaging the past. The scope of this book is defined by the duration of cultural forms rather than traditional habits of historical periodization and it seeks to reveal connections across time, place and media to explore the temporal complexities of cultural production and subject formation. It reveals a transtemporal and transnational archive of the modern Middle Ages.
Dom Aidan Bellenger
- Published in print:
- 1997
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198205968
- eISBN:
- 9780191676871
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198205968.003.0008
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History, History of Religion
The thinkers of the European Enlightenment were born into a Christian world and, however jaundiced the views of many of them became of the ‘ascetic, superstitious enemies of the flesh’, it is ...
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The thinkers of the European Enlightenment were born into a Christian world and, however jaundiced the views of many of them became of the ‘ascetic, superstitious enemies of the flesh’, it is remarkable how some kind of dialogue was maintained between many Church members, including monks, and those who, to use one of Peter Gay's definitions of Enlightenment, looked towards ‘the organized habit of criticism’. Both those who remained attached to the Church and those who chose to reject it shared a love of classical antiquity and a lack of appreciation for the Middle Ages. When one looks at Benedictine monasticism today, one tends to look through a neo-Gothic filter of revived medievalism.Less
The thinkers of the European Enlightenment were born into a Christian world and, however jaundiced the views of many of them became of the ‘ascetic, superstitious enemies of the flesh’, it is remarkable how some kind of dialogue was maintained between many Church members, including monks, and those who, to use one of Peter Gay's definitions of Enlightenment, looked towards ‘the organized habit of criticism’. Both those who remained attached to the Church and those who chose to reject it shared a love of classical antiquity and a lack of appreciation for the Middle Ages. When one looks at Benedictine monasticism today, one tends to look through a neo-Gothic filter of revived medievalism.
Nigel Yates
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198269892
- eISBN:
- 9780191683848
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198269892.003.0003
- Subject:
- Religion, Church History
The interest that was to emerge in the Victorian period in a revival of ceremonial in public worship was not without precedent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The view that an interest ...
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The interest that was to emerge in the Victorian period in a revival of ceremonial in public worship was not without precedent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The view that an interest in ceremonial was not part of the earliest phase of the Oxford Movement is also one that requires some careful modification. This chapter examines the relationship of Victorian ritualism to other High–Church developments in the 1830s and relates both to the wider aesthetic and antiquarian movements that were to provide the climate in which a reassessment of traditional Anglican spirituality proved such an attraction for a significant number of High–Churchmen, both clergy and laity. In addition to antiquarianism, medievalism, and romanticism, the Oxford Movement and the English Reformation are discussed, along with Tractarianism, ecclesiology, and ritualism and non-Anglican influences on Anglican ritualism.Less
The interest that was to emerge in the Victorian period in a revival of ceremonial in public worship was not without precedent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The view that an interest in ceremonial was not part of the earliest phase of the Oxford Movement is also one that requires some careful modification. This chapter examines the relationship of Victorian ritualism to other High–Church developments in the 1830s and relates both to the wider aesthetic and antiquarian movements that were to provide the climate in which a reassessment of traditional Anglican spirituality proved such an attraction for a significant number of High–Churchmen, both clergy and laity. In addition to antiquarianism, medievalism, and romanticism, the Oxford Movement and the English Reformation are discussed, along with Tractarianism, ecclesiology, and ritualism and non-Anglican influences on Anglican ritualism.
