scholarly journals I.—Mediaeval Fortresses

1906 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 259-276 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ramsay Traquair

The troubled state of the Peloponnesus during the Middle Ages left its mark on no buildings more evidently than on its castles. Each successive owner obtained his title at the cost of some part of the building, and his first thought on gaining possession was either to strengthen the fortress he had just captured, or to dismantle it utterly and leave behind him a useless pile of ruins. Military architecture too, is little influenced by respect for the past and the more important castles must have been frequently modernised, so but little is left of their original structure. The lack of those ornamental details which are the main clue to the age of more elaborate buildings renders a classification of the different types of plan and of masonry of some importance; where mouldings or other details are found their evidence is usually conclusive, but in their absence we must be guided by the form of the plan and by the masonry.

Author(s):  
TIKHONOV S. ◽  

The paper examines the possibilities of using materials stored in state and departmental archives in archaeological research. Over the past three centuries, scientists, travelers, service people have collected a wealth ofinformation on archaeology, ethnography, geography, statistics of the Asian part of Russia and adjacent territories in general and Western Siberia in particular. Unfortunately, archaeologists rarely use this information, which contradicts the methodology requiring the use of different types of sources. At the same time, the source base of works is getting narrow. This is due to the fact that information about a number of objects of antiquity and the Middle Ages was completely or partially destroyed or forgotten, therefore information about them was preserved only in the archives. The documents stored in these institutions in terms of territorial coverage and chronological depth significantly exceed the volume of cases collected in archaeological museums of Siberian universities. Unfortunately, researchers rarely turn to such materials. Keywords: archaeological sites, ARCHIVAL materials, completeness of research


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-31
Author(s):  
Anna McKay

Over the past two decades, medieval feminist scholarship has increasingly turned to the literary representation of textiles as a means of exploring the oftensilenced experiences of women in the Middle Ages. This article uses fabric as a lens through which to consider the world of the female recluse, exploring the ways in which clothing operates as a tether to patriarchal, secular values in Paul the Deacon’s eighthcentury Life of Mary of Egypt and the twelfth-century Life of Christina of Markyate. In rejecting worldly garb as recluses, these holy women seek out and achieve lives of spiritual autonomy and independence.


1980 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 129-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary Jann

Critical attention to the dominant tradition of Victorian medievalism has stressed its essentially conservative tendencies. For representative proponents of this tradition – Carlyle, Ruskin, Young England – the imaginative value of the Middle Ages lay in their contrast with the political and social disorder of the present. The antidote to those modern poisons – laissez faire capitalism, Utilitarian ethics, Liberal individualism – lay in a resuscitation of medieval hierarchy, one which called on the Captains of Industry to form a new aristocracy, and the state to assume control over the economy and social welfare. For such thinkers, the spiritual health and organic order of medieval society depended upon its essentially undemocratic structure. The prominence of this analysis has unfortunately overshadowed the importance of two alternative treatments of Victorian medievalism, the Whig and the Socialist. While opposed in fundamental ways to one another, these interpretations are opposed in more significant ways to that dominant conservative tradition in that they created alternative myths of the Middle Ages to justify a more – not less – democratic society in the present and future. Such myths assisted the development of class consciousness by using the authority of history to sanction a social order which drew its moral and political strengths not from the ideals of the aristocracy, but from those of the middle and working classes, respectively. However, the following demonstration of the way similar historical points of departure can lead investigators to radically different conclusions ultimately reinforces the central characteristic of Victorian medievalism: that it represented less an attempt to recapture the past “as it really was” than a projection of current ideals back into time.


Author(s):  
Thomas A. Prendergast ◽  
Stephanie Trigg

As a disciplinary formation, Medieval Studies has long been structured by authoritative hierarchies and conservative scholarly decorums; the associated fear of error in medieval studies dates back to the Renaissance and the Protestant reformation. In contrast, medievalism increasingly celebrates creative play and imaginative invention. Such invention inevitably produces anxiety about historical accuracy. Popular scholarship and journalism in turn are often attracted to the abject otherness of the Middle Ages, especially the torture practices associated with its judicial systems. Such practices are designed to solicit the truth, and so, like illness, mortality and death, they are a useful double trope through which to analyse the relationship between medieval and medievalist approaches to the past.


Author(s):  
Thomas A. Prendergast ◽  
Stephanie Trigg

Conventional wisdom sees medievalism occurring “after” the Middle Ages; and indeed much medievalist practice seems to support this view, as the Middle Ages are often conceptualised in spatio-temporal terms, through the fictions of time-travel and the specific trope of “portal medievalism”. But the two formations are more accurately seen as mutually constitutive. Medieval literature offers many examples of layered or multiple temporalities. These are often structured around cultural and social difference, which is figured in powerfully affective, not just epistemological terms. Several examples from medieval English literature demonstrate how medieval culture prefigures many of medievalism’s concerns with the alterity of the past.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Louise D'Arcens

This chapter situates the book within the development of an increasingly ‘global’ conceptualization of the Middle Ages, and links this conceptualization to a rising desire to reckon with the discipline’s colonialist, nationalist, and racist legacies. Tracing this development’s main stages and debates, the chapter explores the centrality of interconnectedness and cultural exchange as motifs in the study of the global Middle Age. Through negotiating debates in the field of world literature, the chapter argues for the efficacy of the term ‘world medievalism’ rather than ‘global medievalism’, not just because world medievalism shares the inclusive ethical project of world literature, but also because it enables us to formulate medievalism itself as ‘world-disclosing’—a transhistorical encounter that enables the modern subject to apprehend the past ‘world’ opened up in medieval and medievalist texts and objects. This chapter addresses the strengths and drawbacks of viewing non-European spaces through the lens of medievalism.


Antiquity ◽  
1928 ◽  
Vol 2 (8) ◽  
pp. 443-451 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Talbot Rice

The peninsula of Athos, home of monks, resort of pilgrims and the sole surviving example of the life of the Middle Ages which exists in Europe, is the only spot in these days of hooting motor cars, roaring machinery and rushing, busy people, in which it is possible to lead a completely altered life. There only in Europe can one meet an entirely original mental outlook. Even in the remotest European village everyday life is of this age and it is only by exercising the imagination that one can transfer oneself to the past. But on arrival on Athos this earth is left behind and one begins to experience the life of a pilgrim of the Middle Ages. One sees from actual experience what that life really was, and one continues to live it until the discomforts of the thirteenth century finally persuade one that the evils of this age are amply repaid by its merits and that the romance of the Middle Ages is even excelled by the adventurous spirit of today. The medieval life is something that one likes to remember as a curiosity, something to be experienced occasionally only. But the claims of its art are more lasting and in these days of ease and luxury we can appreciate them the more fully.


2019 ◽  
Vol 79 (5) ◽  
pp. 393-401
Author(s):  
Cyril Hovorun

AbstractCan a compilation from the past be creative? Does the notion of tradition contradict the idea of innovation? The case of a Syrian theologian, who lived in the Arabic caliphate when Antiquity turned to the Middle Ages, whose name was John of Damascus, demonstrates that the answer to both questions can be positive, contrary to the common wisdom. The article explores the concepts of Tradition with capital T, traditions with lower case t, and traditionalism, through the prism of the writings of John. It argues that the best illustration to what tradition was for John, is not the famous »Black square« by Kizimir Malevich, but the Farbstudie Quadrate by Wassily Kandinsky.


1971 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 327-340 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie P. Fairfield

Sixteenth-Century Englishmen were not frequently given to self-scrutiny—at least not in writing. This was a disinclination which they shared with their medieval forbears, since autobiography was not a very common form of literary activity in the Middle Ages. Monastic self-analysis, sub specie aeternitatis and guided by the standard categories of virtues and vices—yes. Coherent study of the self, for its own sake and in all its quirks and idiosyncracies—scarcely ever. In the early sixteenth century, the murmur of new ideas from Italy did begin to touch England: a sense of distance and of difference between the present and the past, and an awakened appreciation for the discrete, the singular in human personality.


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