Medievalism (in culture)
More general subjects:
Alternative Facts and Plausible Fictions in the Northern European Past
How Politics and Culture Have Written and Rewritten History
The use of the past for contemporary purposes has been a feature of historical and archaeological investigation from ancient times. This ‘politicization of the past’ is often associated with at best an inadvertent detachment from an objective use of evidence and at worst its wilful misuse. Such use of the past is perhaps most evident in the construction of narratives of nations and ethnic groups — particularly in relation to origins or the perceived ‘golden ages’ of peoples.
This book seeks to assess the role played by different ideologies in the shaping of the past from early times up until the present day in the interpretation of the history and archaeology of Northern Europe whether in Northern Europe itself or further afield. It also considers how those who research interpret and present the Northern European past should respond to such uses. The chapters drawn together here explore key questions asking how contemporary ideologies of identity have shaped the past what measures should be taken to discourage an inaccurate understanding of the past and if scholars should draw on the past in order to counter racism and xenophobia or if this can itself lead to potentially dangerous misunderstandings of history.
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.
L’art médiéval est-il contemporain ? Is Medieval Art Contemporary?
This publication brings together essays by scholars of both medieval and contemporary art offering a cross-disciplinary approach of both periods. It investigates how contemporary artists and contemporary art historians perceive medieval art and reciprocally how medieval art historians envisage the echoes of medieval artforms and esthetics in contemporary art. The volume follows on from the symposium organized in conjunction with the exhibition "Make it New: Carte Blanche à Jan Dibbets" that was held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Paris) in 2019 and which presented side by side Hrabanus Maurus’s De Laudibus Sanctae Crucis (In Praise of the Holy Cross) a masterpiece of Carolingian art with works by artists associated with conceptual art mininimal art and land art.
How and why has medieval art and particularly early medieval art inspired contemporary artists since the 1950s? What has medieval art contributed to contemporary art? How has medieval art’s treatment of figures color space geometry and rhythm provided inspiration for contemporary artists’ experiments with form? In what way does contemporary artists’ engagement with the topics of formatting writing semiosis mimesis and ornamentation draw inspiration from medieval models? To what extent and in what sense are the notions of authorship and performativity relevant for understanding conceptions of artmaking in both periods? Rather than focusing on medievalism and citational practices or on the theory of images—both approaches having already produced an important body of comparative readings of medieval and contemporary art—the essays in this volume address the question of medieval art’s contemporaneity thematically through three trans-chronological topics: authorship semiosis and mathematics and performance. Engaging the artists’ works as well as their writings these studies conflate conceptual and esthetic perspectives.
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.
The Crusades: History and Memory
Proceedings of the Ninth Conference of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East, Odense, 27 June – 1 July 2016. Volume 2
The crusades have been remembered and commemorated in many ways from the late eleventh century until today. Soon after the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 the fate of the First Crusade inspired literary historiographical and artistic traditions. Participants in the subsequent crusades would look to the first Crusade for inspiration and spiritual guidance while playing out their own ideas of crusading. Since then the crusades have been put to use in very divers ways and for different purposes. This volume explores how the crusades have been remembered revered and ridiculed by those who participated in them and by those who in later periods made use of the crusades as an historical phenomenon. The volume thus traces the memory and legacy of the crusades by putting together essays that focus on the specific ways in which the crusades have been memorized evoked and exploited from the eleventh century until today.
Old Norse Myths as Political Ideologies
Critical Studies in the Appropriation of Medieval Narratives
The mythology of the Norse world has long been a source of fascination from the first written texts of thirteenth-century Iceland up to the modern period. Most studies however have focused on the content of the narratives themselves rather than the broader political contexts in which these myths have been explored. This volume offers a timely corrective to this broader trend by offering one of the first in-depth examinations of the political uses of Norse mythology within specific historical contexts. Tracing the changing interests and usages of Norse myths from the medieval period via the nineteenth century and the importance of ancient Norse beliefs to both the Romantic and völkisch movements up to the co-option of mythology and symbolism by political groups across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries the papers gathered here offer new and critical insights into the changing nature of historiography and the political agendas that Old Norse myths are made to serve as well as shedding new light on the way in which ‘myths’ are conceptualized.
The Pre-Christian Religions of the North: History and Structures
The product of an international interdisciplinary team the History and Structures strand of the Pre-Christian Religion of the North series aims to approach the subject by giving equal weight to archaeological and textual sources taking into consideration recent theories on religion within all the disciplines that are needed in order to gain a comprehensive view of the religious history and world view of pre-Christian Scandinavia from the perspective of the beginning of the twenty-first century. Volume I presents the basic premises of the study and a consideration of the sources: memory and oral tradition written sources religious vocabulary place names and personal names archaeology and images. Volume II treats the social geographical and historical contexts in which the religion was practiced and through which it can be understood. This volume also includes communication between worlds primarily through various ritual structures. Volume III explores conceptual frameworks: the cosmos and collective supernatural beings (notions regarding the cosmos and regarding such collective supernatural beings as the norns valkyries giants and dwarfs) and also gods and goddesses (including Þórr Óðinn Freyr Freyja and many others). Volume IV describes the process of Christianization in the Nordic region and also includes a bibliography and indices for the entire four-volume work.
The Pre-Christian Religions of the North: Research and Reception, Volume I: From the Middle Ages to c. 1850
Over more than a thousand years since pre-Christian religions were actively practised European - and later contemporary - society has developed a fascination with the beliefs of northern Europe before the arrival of Christianity which have been the subject of a huge range of popular and scholarly theories interpretations and uses. Indeed the pre-Christian religions of the North have exerted a phenomenal influence on modern culture appearing in everything from the names of days of the week to Hollywood blockbusters. Scholarly treatments have been hardly less varied. Theories - from the Middle Ages until today - have depicted these pre-Christian religious systems as dangerous illusions the works of Satan representatives of a lost proto-Indo-European religious culture a form of ‘natural’ religion and even as a system non-indigenous in origin derived from cultures outside Europe.
The Research and Reception strand of the Pre-Christian Religions of the North project establishes a definitive survey of the current and historical uses and interpretations of pre-Christian mythology and religious culture tracing the many ways in which people both within and outside Scandinavia have understood and been influenced by these religions from the Christian Middle Ages to contemporary media of all kinds. The present volume (I) traces the reception down to the early nineteenth century while Volume II takes up the story from c. 1830 down to the present day and the burgeoning of interest across a diversity of new as well as old media.
The Pre-Christian Religions of the North: Research and Reception, Volume II: From c. 1830 to the Present
Over more than a thousand years since pre-Christian religions were actively practised European – and later contemporary – society has developed a fascination with the beliefs of northern Europe before the arrival of Christianity which have been the subject of a huge range of popular and scholarly theories interpretations and uses. Indeed the pre-Christian religions of the North have exerted a phenomenal influence on modern culture appearing in everything from the names of days of the week to Hollywood blockbusters. Scholarly treatments have been hardly less varied. Theories – from the Middle Ages until today – have depicted these pre-Christian religious systems as dangerous illusions the works of Satan representatives of a lost proto-Indo-European religious culture a form of 'natural' religion and even as a system non-indigenous in origin derived from cultures outside Europe.
The Research and Reception strand of the Pre-Christian Religions of the North project establishes a definitive survey of the current and historical uses and interpretations of pre-Christian mythology and religious culture tracing the many ways in which people both within and outside Scandinavia have understood and been influenced by these religions from the Christian Middle Ages to contemporary media of all kinds. The previous volume (i) traced the reception down to the early nineteenth century while the present volume (ii) takes up the story from c. 1830 down to the present day and the burgeoning of interest across a diversity of new as well as old media.
The Idea of the Gothic Cathedral
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Meanings of the Medieval Edifice in the Modern Period
Central to many medieval ritual traditions both sacred and secular the Gothic cathedral holds a privileged place within the European cultural imagination and experience. Due to the burgeoning historical interest in the medieval past in connection with the medieval revival in literature visual arts and architecture that began in the late seventeenth century and culminated in the nineteenth the Gothic cathedral took centre stage in numerous ideological discourses. These discourses imposed contemporary political and aesthetic connotations upon the cathedral that were often far removed from its original meaning and ritual use.
This volume presents interdisciplinary perspectives on the resignification of the Gothic cathedral in the post-medieval period. Its contributors literary scholars and historians of art and architecture investigate the dynamics of national and cultural movements that turned Gothic cathedrals into symbols of the modern nation-state highlight the political uses of the edifice in literature and the arts and underscore the importance of subjectivity in literary and visual representations of Gothic architecture. Contributing to scholarship in historiography cultural history intermedial and interdisciplinary studies as well as traditional disciplines the volume resonates with wider perspectives especially relating to the reuse of artefacts to serve particular ideological ends.
Resonances
Historical Essays on Continuity and Change
Continuity and change enclose a problem field that is fundamental to the interpretation of historical material. On the one hand the notions that are necessary to perceive the historical account as a narrative: continuity tradition constancy consistency identity; on the other those that provide an impetus or drive to that account: change innovation rupture or discontinuity.
Resonances: Historical Essays on Continuity and Change explores the historiographical question of the modes of interrelation between these motifs in historical narratives. The essays in the collection attempt to realize theoretical consciousness through historical narrative ‘in practice’ by discussing selected historical topics from Western cultural history within the disciplines of history literature visual arts musicology archaeology philosophy and theology.
The title Resonances indicates the overall perspective of the book: how connotations of past meanings may resonate through time in new contexts assuming new meanings without surrendering the old.
Negotiating Heritage
Memories of the Middle Ages
A key impulse of cultural transmission is engaging with the past for the benefit of the present. In seventeen essays on subjects that range from Paschasius Radbertus to Orhan Pamuk the Regularis Concordia to Kurt Weill and from Augustine to Adorno Negotiating Heritage examines specific historical case-studies that reveal the appropriation modification or repudiation of a legacy. The overall focus of this interdisciplinary volume is memory: medieval conceptions of memory resonances of the Middle Ages in later periods and memory as a heuristic methodological device. Through tokens or other vestiges of the past - the physical memorial of a tomb the ritualized retention of past acts or structures the reverberations of a doctrinal literary musical or iconographic topos or the symbolic reminiscences of a past ideal - memory acts as the manifestation of something absent. This anthology studies such tokens in a way that provides a fruitful new perspective for the field of research into memory and explores the methodological dimension of issues of heritage genealogy and tradition. Furthermore Negotiating Heritage also probes the reception and construction of the Middle Ages in later periods; exploring the shifting territory of the meaning of the medieval itself. In its movement between medievalism and the medieval period Negotiating Heritage is an important contribution to both established and emerging trends in critical thought.