Cultural studies (general & theoretical)
More general subjects:
Writing Holiness
Genre and Reception across Medieval Hagiography
Writing Holiness contributes to exciting new critical conversations in the study of medieval hagiography in Western Christianity. Recent years have seen innovative approaches to the literatures of sanctity through emergent theoretical discourses such as disability studies and trans theory. At the same time traditional methodologies such as manuscript studies and reception history continue to generate new perspectives on the production circulation and reception of the sacred textual canon.
Through ten unique contributions that draw from both new and established theories and methodologies this volume charts the development movement and reception of Christian hagiographic texts in localities ranging from the Iberian Peninsula to the Scandinavian Archipelago from the early to the late Middle Ages. Each chapter traces hagiographic development over generic temporal cultural and linguistic boundaries and considers the broader contours of the sacred imaginary that come into view as a result of such critically intersectional inquiry.
What is Medieval?
Decoding Approaches to the Medieval and Medievalism in the 21st Century
The Middle Ages and Medievalism have been used and abused throughout history–and this continues. This narrative deserves a reassessment. But what is Medieval? This is the central question that unifies the contributions in this volume.
‘Medievalism’ or the study of the Middle Ages in its broadest sense refers to the perception conceptualisation and movement towards the era post the fifteenth century. Its study is therefore not about the period otherwise referred to as the ‘Middle Ages’ but rather the myriad ways it has since been conceived. And the field of medievalism is still in its relative infancy which has led to the emergence of various existential questions about its scope remit theoretico-methodological and pedagogical underpinnings interpretation periodization and its relationship to established disciplines and more emerging subdisciplines and specialised fields—both within and without the academy.
In turn neomedievalism has allowed insight into and a response to the medieval often dominated by the modern. This has provoked debate over the nature of neomedievalism as a discipline subdiscipline genre field or offshoot in direct or contrasting relation to the more traditional medievalism.
Featuring interdisciplinary contributions from academics educational practitioners as well as museum digital and heritage professionals this volume provides a fresh reflection on past methods to emerging pedagogies as well as new avenues of enquiry into the ways we think about the medieval. It is by reconciling these seemingly disparate forms that we can better understand the continual interconnected and often politicised reinvention of the Middle Ages throughout cultures and study.
Marginal Figures in the Global Middle Ages and the Renaissance
The essays in this collection explore the motives and methods of marginalization throughout pre-modern Europe Japan the Ottoman Empire and areas that are now Mexico Iran Peru Syria and Costa Rica. The authors offer a rich variety of perspectives on precarity and privilege resistance and hybridity they unpack the intersections of power tradition and difference and they examine the relationship of marginality to both violence and creativity not only in the global Middle Ages and Renaissance but also in our present moment. While deepening readers’ understanding of our antecedents the collection illuminates the contemporary urgency of being 'ethically awake to the needs sufferings sorrows and dignity of others around the globe'.
Medieval Stories and Storytelling
Multimedia and Multi-Temporal Perspectives
The shaping and sharing of narrative has always been key to the negotiation and recreation of reality for individuals and cultural groups. Some stories indeed seem to possess a life of their own: claiming a peculiar agency and taking on distinct voices which speak across time and space. How for example do objects manuscripts and other artefacts communicate alternative or complementary narratives that transcend textual and linguistic boundaries? How are stories created reshaped and re-experienced and how do these shifting contexts and media change meaning?
This volume of essays explores these questions about meaning and identity in a range of ways. As a collection it demonstrates the importance of interdisciplinary and context-focused enquiry when approaching key issues of activity and identity in the medieval period. Ultimately the process of making meaning through shaping narrative is shown to be as vital and varied in the medieval world as it is today.
With a wide range of different disciplinary approaches from leading scholars in their respective fields chapters include considerations of art architecture metalwork linguistics and literature. Alongside examinations of medieval cultural productions are explorations of the representation and adaptation of medieval storytelling in graphic novels classroom teaching and computer gaming. This volume thus offers an interdisciplinary exploration of how stories from across the medieval world were shaped transformed and transmitted.
Beasts, Humans, and Transhumans in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
From shape-shifting Merlin to the homunculi of Paracelsus the nine fascinating essays of this collection explore the contested boundaries between human and non-human animals between the body and the spirit and between the demonic and the divine. Drawing on recent work in animal studies posthumanism and transhumanism these innovative articles show how contemporary debates about the nature and future of humanity have deep roots in the myths literature philosophy and art of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The authors of these essays demonstrate how classical stories of monsters and metamorphoses offered philosophers artists and poets a rich source for reflection on marriage resurrection and the passions of love. The ambiguous and shifting distinctions between human animal demon and angel have long been contentious. Beasts can elevate humanity: for Renaissance courtiers horsemanship defined nobility. But animals are also associated with the demonic and medieval illuminators portrayed Satan with bestial features. Divided into three sections that examine metamorphoses human-animal relations and the demonic and monstrous this volume raises intriguing questions about the ways humans have understood their kinship with animals nature and the supernatural.
Myths and Magic in the Medieval Far North
Realities and Representations of a Region on the Edge of Europe
The history of the Far North is tinged by dark fantasies. A remote location harsh climate a boundless and often mountainous wasteland complex ethnic composition and strange ways of life: all contributed to how the edge of Europe was misunderstood by outsiders. Since ancient times the North has been considered as a place that exuded evil: it was the end of the world the abode of monsters and supernatural beings of magicians and sorcerers. It was Europe’s last bastion of recalcitrant paganism. Many weird tales of the North even came from within the region itself and when newly literate Scandinavians began to re-work their oral traditions into written form after 1100 AD these myths of their past underlay newer legends and stories serving to support the development to Christian national monarchies.
The essays in this volume engage closely with these stories questioning how and why such traditions developed and exploring their meaning. Through this approach the volume also examines how historiographical traditions were shaped by authors pursuing agendas of nation-building and Christianization at the same time that myths surrounding and originating among the multi-ethnic populations of the Far North continued to dominate the perception of the region and its people and to define their place in Norwegian medieval history.
Reading the Natural World in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
Perceptions of the Environment and Ecology
The environment - together with ecology and other aspects of the way people see their world - has become a major focus of pre-modern studies. The thirteen contributions in this volume discuss topics across the millennium in Europe from the late 600s to the early 1600s. They introduce applications to older texts art works and ideas made possible by relatively new fields of discourse such as animal studies ecotheology and Material Engagement Theory. From studies of medieval land charters and epics to the canticles sung in churches the encyclopedic natural histories compiled for the learned the hunting parks described and illustrated for the aristocracy chronicles from the New World classical paintings from the Old World and the plays of Shakespeare the authors engage with the human responses to nature in times when it touched their lives more intimately than it does for people today even though this contact raised concerns that are still very much alive today.
Catastrophes and the Apocalyptic in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
In the twenty-first century insurance companies still refer to 'acts of God' for any accident or event not influenced by human beings: hurricanes floods hail tsunamis wildfires earthquakes tornados lightning strikes even falling trees. The remote origin of this concept can be traced to the Hebrew Bible. During the Second Temple period of Judaism a new literary form developed called 'apocalyptic' as a mediated revelation of heavenly secrets to a human sage concerning messages that could be cosmological speculative historical teleological or moral. The best-known development of this type of literature however came to fruition in the New Testament and is of course the Book of Revelation attributed to the apostle John and which figures prominently in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
This collection of essays the result of the 2014 ACMRS Conference treats the topic of catastrophes and their connection to apocalyptic mentalities and rhetoric in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (with particular reference to reception of the Book of Revelation) both in Europe and in the Muslim world. The twelve authors contributing to this volume use terms that are simultaneously helpful and ambiguous for a whole range of phenomena and appraisal.
Paradigm Shifts During the Global Middle Ages and Renaissance
For a long time we have naively talked about the Middle Ages the Renaissance and other periods but at closer analysis all those terms prove to be constructed models to help us understand in rough terms profound changes that affected human conditions throughout time. As the contributions to the present volume indicate paradigm shifts have occurred regularly and constituted some of the critical developments in human existence. The notion of paradigm shift as first developed by Thomas Kuhn is here considerably expanded to address also literary religious scientific and cultural-historical phenomena to deal with contrasting conceptions of various parts of the world (China versus Europe) conflicts between genders economic changes pertaining to women's roles social and political criticism models of how to explain our existence ideological positions and epistemological approaches. The study of paradigm shifts makes it possible to grasp fundamental movements both horizontally (the present world in global terms) and vertically (from the past to the present) exposing thereby central forces leading to shifts in power structures and in the mental-historical world-views. Focusing on paradigm-shifts allows us to gain deep insight into conflicting discourses throughout time and to illuminate the struggle between dominant and competing models explaining or determining reality.
Norse-Gaelic Contacts in a Viking World
This multi-disciplinary volume draws on the combined expertise of specialists in the history and literature of medieval Ireland Iceland Norway and Scotland to shed new light on the interplay of Norse and Gaelic literary traditions. Through four detailed case-studies which examine the Norwegian Konungs skuggsjá the Icelandic Njáls saga and Landnámabók and the Gaelic text Baile Suthach Sith Emhna the volume explores the linguistic cultural and political contacts that existed between Norse and Gaelic speakers in the High Middle Ages and examines the impetus behind these texts including oral tradition transfer of written sources and authorial adaption and invention. Crucially these texts are not only examined as literary products of the thirteenth century but also as repositories of older historical traditions and the authors seek to explore these wider historical contexts as well as analyse how and why historical and literary material was transmitted. The volume contains English translations of key extracts and also provides a detailed discussion of sources and methodologies to ensure that this milestone of scholarship is accessible to both students and subject-specialists.
‘This is a brilliant and genuinely ground-breaking book representing a significant step forward in literary and historical analysis of the Norse-Gaelic interface’. (Professor Ralph O’Connor University of Aberdeen).
Performing Emotions in Early Europe
Drawing on a range of interdisciplinary approaches and innovative methodologies this collection contributes ground-breaking new scholarship in the burgeoning field of emotions studies by examining how medieval and early modern Europeans communicated and ‘performed’ their emotions. Rejecting the notion that emotions are ‘essential’ or ‘natural’ this volume seeks to pay particular attention to cultural understandings of emotion by examining how they were expressed and conveyed in a wide range of historical situations. The contributors investigate the performance and reception of pre-modern emotions in a variety of contexts — in literature art and music as well as through various social and religious performances — and in a variety of time periods ranging from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries. These studies provide both case-studies of particular emotions and emotional negotiations and examinations of how their categorisation interpretation and meaning has changed over time.
The contributors provide new insights into the expression and performance of pre-modern emotions from a wide range of disciplinary fields including historical studies literature art history musicology gender studies religious studies and philosophy. Collectively they theorise the performativity of medieval and early modern emotions and outline a new approach that takes fuller account of the historical specificity and cultural meanings of emotions at particular points in time.
This volume forms a companion to Understanding Emotions in Early Europe edited by Michael Champion and Andrew Lynch (2015); http://www.brepols.net/Pages/ShowProduct.aspx?prod_id=IS-9782503552644-1
Supernatural Encounters in Old Norse Literature and Tradition
The Icelandic sagas have long been famous for their alleged realism and within this conventional view references to the supernatural have often been treated as anomalies. Yet as this volume demonstrates such elements were in fact an important part of Old Norse literature and tradition and their study can provide new and intriguing insights into the world-view of the medieval Icelanders.
By providing an extensive and interdisciplinary treatment of the supernatural within sagas the eleven chapters presented here seek to explore the literary and folkloric interface between the natural and the supernatural through a study of previously neglected texts (such as Bergbúa þáttr Selkollu þáttr and Illuga saga Gríðarfóstra) as well as examining genres that are sometimes overlooked (including fornaldarsögur and byskupa sögur) law codes and learned translations. Contributors including Ármann Jakobsson Margaret Cormack Jan Ragnar Hagland and Bengt af Klintberg explore how the supernatural was depicted within saga literature and how it should be understood as well as questioning the origins of such material and investigating the parallels between saga motifs and broader folkloric beliefs. In doing so this volume also raises important questions about the established boundaries between different saga genres and challenges the way these texts have traditionally been approached.
Performance and Theatricality in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
This volume is a contribution to the cross-cultural study of theater and performance in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The studies gathered here examine material from Austria England France Germany Italy the Netherlands Russia and Spain from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century. Underlying all of these essays is the understanding that performance shapes reality - that in all of the cultural contexts included here performance opened a space in which patrons rulers writers painters spectators and readers could see themselves or their societies differently and thereby could assume different identities or construct alternative communities. Addressing confession and private devotion urban theater and pageantry royal legitimacy and religious debate and a wide range of genres and media this volume offers a panoramic mosaic of theater’s world-making role in medieval and early modern European societies.
Temporality and Mediality in Late Medieval and Early Modern Culture
This interdisciplinary volume explores the ways in which time is staged at the threshold between the Middle Ages and the early modern period. Proceeding from the reality that all cultural forms are inherently and inescapably temporal it seeks to discover the significance of time in mediations and communications of all kinds.
By showing how time is displayed in diverse cultural strategies and situations the essays of this volume show how time is intrinsic to the very concept of tradition. In exploring a variety of medial forms and communicative practices they also reveal that while the beginning of the age of printing (around 1500) may mark a fundamental change in terms of reproduction and circulation artefacts and other historical traditions continue to employ earlier systems and practices relating time and space.
The volume features articles by leading researchers in their respective fields including studies on mosaics as a medium reflecting space and time; the triptych’s potential as a time machine; winged altarpieces mediating eternity; texts and images of the passion of Christ permeating past present and future; dimensions of time embedded in maps; a compendium of world knowledge organized by forms of time and temporality; the figuration of prophecy in times of crisis; the portrayal of time in architecture.
The volume thus provides a new approach to media and mediality from the perspective of cultural history.
Visions of North in Premodern Europe
The North has long attracted attention not simply as a circumpolar geographical location but also as an ideological space a place that is ‘made’ through the understanding imagination and interactions of both insiders and outsiders. The envisioning of the North brings it into being and it is from this starting point that this volume explores how the North was perceived from ancient times up to the early modern period questioning who where and what was defined as North over the course of two millennia.
Covering historical periods as diverse as Ancient Greece to eighteenth-century France and drawing on a variety of disciplines including cultural history literary studies art history environmental history and the history of science the contributions gathered here combine to shed light on one key question: how was the North constructed as a place and a people? Material such as sagas the ethnographic work of Olaus Magnus religious writing maps medical texts and illustrations are drawn on throughout the volume offering important insights into how these key sources continued to be used over time. Selected texts have been compiled into a useful appendix that will be of considerable value to scholars.
Landscape and Myth in North-Western Europe
This volume explores the intersection of landscape and myth in the context of northwestern Atlantic Europe. From the landscapes of literature to the landscape as a lived environment and from myths about supernatural beings to tales about the mythical roots of kingship the contributions gathered here each develop their own take on the meanings behind ‘landscape’ and ‘myth’ and thus provide a broad cross-section of how these widely discussed concepts might be understood.
Arising from papers delivered at the conference Landscape and Myth in North-Western Europe held in Munich in April 2016 the volume draws together a wide selection of material ranging from texts and toponyms to maps and archaeological data and it uses this diversity in method and material to explore the meaning of these terms in medieval Ireland Wales and Iceland. In doing so it provides a broadly inclusive and yet carefully focused discussion of the inescapable and productive intertwining of landscape and myth.
Emotion and Medieval Textual Media
Text is one of the most valuable and plentiful sources of information available to scholars interested in medieval emotion. The medieval world may have vanished centuries ago and its human subjects with it but a wealth of textual traces remains: sermons romances poems plays treatises songs inscriptions graffiti and much more. But how is emotion communicated and shaped by these different textual forms? That is the question at the heart of this collection of essays which aims to open up our sense of what texts can contribute to the history of emotions by considering the variety of ways that texts can function as vehicles - media - for emotion.
The essays in this volume examine how literary and dramatic texts chant manuscript annotations and material inscriptions mediate emotion - how they bring it about communicate it process it and shape it via forms that act on various senses. Ranging between the eighth and fifteenth centuries and comprising contributions from scholars of musicology Old English and Old Norse studies material culture Middle English literature drama and manuscript studies the essays contained in this volume serve as a window onto the complex relationship between emotions and different textual forms.
Pleasure in the Middle Ages
This volume explores the diverse manifestations and uses of pleasure in medieval culture. Pleasure is a sensation an affirmation a practice and is at the core of the medieval worldview no less than pain.
Applying a variety of methodological perspectives the essays collected here analyse the role of pleasure in relation to a variety of subjects such as the human body love relationships education food friendship morality devotion and mysticism. They also integrate a wide range of sources including literature (monastic to courtly) medical texts illuminated prayer books iconography and theatrical plays.
Each document each discipline and thus each essay combine to provide a complex and diversified picture of medieval joys and delights - a picture that shows the extent to which pleasure is engrained in the period’s culture. This collection shows how pleasure in the Middle Ages is at once a coveted feeling and a constant moral concern both the object and the outcome of a constant negotiation between earthly and divine imperatives.