Making the Middle Ages

This volume is the first close examination of the rich and diverse body of medievalist texts produced in late colonial and early Federal (ie post-1901) Australia. It examines the many ways in which early Australian novelists poets and dramatists drew on the motifs events and personages of the medieval past and places particular emphasis on how they used the European past to illuminate their sense of the Australian present. Broadly stated the book argues that a study of early Australian medievalist literature and theatre uncovers a rich and revealing drama in which the forces of cultural nostalgia and cultural amnesia sometimes contended against one another and sometimes harmonised to produce a unique and distinctive corpus. The book significantly extends current knowledge about nineteenth-century literary and theatrical medievalism by offering an exploration of how medievalist discourses and idioms came to be taken up within a major but as yet under-examined branch of Anglophone literature. It aims also to broaden the cultural ambit of nineteenth-century medievalism by offering analyses of popular and ephemeral instances alongside more ‘serious’ medievalist texts. The study balances an interest in how this medievalism responded to local conditions with an interest in its international complexion examining how Australian medievalist novels poems and plays participated in imperial and transpacific intellectual and entertainment circuits. While the emphasis of the volume is on close historically-contextualising interpretations of texts it has woven through its arguments a series of meditations on such theoretical matters as how we determine the boundaries of medievalism how we might develop an account of colonial medievalism as non-derivative whether medievalist discourses are equally amenable across gender class and ideological lines and how the premodern past is evoked as a means for formulating the present and the future.

This collection of essays examines the ‘Grimmian Revolution’ the paradigm shift in the humanities that came with the publication of Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche Grammatik. In doing so it honours T. A. Shippey who has been a leading figure in reconsidering the contributions of the Old Philology and its impact on the humanities particularly the rediscovery of the ancient languages and literatures of Northern Europe; the role this has played in the creation of national and regional identities; the attempts to extend the methods of comparative philology to comparative mythology; and the collection of folktales folk-ballads and the development of folkloristics. The sixteen essays in this collection focus on the impact made by nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century philology in the fields of medieval studies and language studies and in the construction of Northern European national identities mythologies and folklore.

This collection opens up a new field of academic and general interest: Australian medievalism. That is the heritage and continuing influence of medieval and gothic themes ideas and cultural practices. Geographically removed from Europe and distinguished by its eighteenth-century colonial settlement Australia is a fascinating testing-ground on which to explore the cultural residues of medieval and gothic tradition. These traditions take a distinctive form once they have been 'transported' to a different topographical setting and a cultural context whose relationship with Europe has always been dynamic and troubled.

Early colonists attempted to make the unfamiliar landscape of Australia familiar by inscribing it with European traditions: since then a diverse range of responses and attitudes to the medieval and gothic past have been played out in Australian culture from traditional forms of historical reconstruction through to playful postmodernist pastiche.

These essays examine the early narratives of Australian 'discovery' and the settlement of what was perceived as a hostile gothic environment; exercises of medieval revivalism and association consonant with the British nineteenth-century rediscovery of chivalric ideals and aesthetic spiritual and architectural practices and models; the conscious invocation and interrogation of medieval and gothic tropes in Australian fiction and poetry including children's literature; the transformation of those tropes in fantasy role-playing games and subcultural groups; and finally the implication of the medieval past for discussions of Australian nationalism.

Thomas Percy was the first serious translator of Old Norse-Icelandic poetry into English. He published his Five Pieces of Runic Poetry in London in 1763 and in 1770 published his translation of Mallet's very influential work on early Scandinavian literature and culture as Northern Antiquities (with extensive annotations and additions by Percy himself). In publishing Five Pieces Percy was influenced by the success of Macpherson's first volume of Ossian poetry (1760) and his own wide-ranging interest in ancient especially 'gothic' poetry. Five Pieces had a mixed reception and was never republished as a separate work but reappeared as an appendix to the second edn. of Northern Antiquities. Nevertheless it was a seminal work in the history of reception and understanding of Old Norse poetry in Britain and it also has more general significance in our understanding of the development of the discipline of Old Norse-Icelandic studies. This work makes available to the modern scholarly community the work of one of the pioneers of the discipline and produces in easily accessible format a text that is currently only available as a rare book. The study comprises a facsimile of the 1763 edition with facing-page notes to allow the modern reader to situate Percy's work in its intellectual context together with an introduction on Percy himself his work on Old Norse-Icelandic studies and the contemporary context of the reception of Old Norse poetry in Britain (and to some extent in the rest of Europe). In addition this study publishes eight other poetic translations (one from Old English and the others from Old Icelandic) that Percy completed about the same time as the translations now in Five Pieces of Runic Poetry but did not then publish due to the restrictions of contemporary tolerance for demanding or difficult 'ancient' poetry. This publication reveals his full range as a translator for the first time.

In accounts of the emergence of medieval studies in the post-medieval period the growth of the discipline of Middle English has so far not been fully charted. This study provides the principal source materials for the study of the formation of Middle English most of which are rare and difficult to obtain. It enables the detailed study of the key documents in the growth of Middle English - gathered together for the first time. It will also enable the setting of courses in this field. Each extract is preceded by a full histroical and critical introduction and bibliography; any passages in late Latin and German are translated.