Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Louise D'Arcens
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Middle Age ◽  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
The Past ◽  
Modern Subject ◽  
Ethical Project ◽  
The Middle Ages

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.

Clothing and Female Reclusion in The Life of Mary of Egypt and The Life of Christina of Markyate

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-31
Author(s):  
Anna McKay
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Feminist Scholarship ◽  
Literary Representation ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Holy Women ◽  
Experiences Of Women ◽  
Mary Of Egypt ◽  
The Middle Ages

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.

Democratic Myths in Victorian Medievalism

1980 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 129-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary Jann
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Spiritual Health ◽  
The Political ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The Past ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Central Characteristic ◽  
Liberal Individualism ◽  
The Middle Ages

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.

Fear, error and death: The abjection of the Middle Ages

2018 ◽  
pp. 70-94
Author(s):  
Thomas A. Prendergast ◽  
Stephanie Trigg
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Medieval Studies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Creative Play ◽  
Historical Accuracy ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Middle Ages ◽  
Judicial Systems

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.

The space of time and the medievalist imaginary

2018 ◽  
pp. 22-49
Author(s):  
Thomas A. Prendergast ◽  
Stephanie Trigg
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Medieval Literature ◽  
Time Travel ◽  
Conventional Wisdom ◽  
Social Difference ◽  
The Past ◽  
Medieval English Literature ◽  
Spatio Temporal ◽  
The Middle Ages

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.

The Monasteries of Mount Athos

Antiquity ◽  
1928 ◽  
Vol 2 (8) ◽  
pp. 443-451 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Talbot Rice
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
The Past ◽  
Actual Experience ◽  
The Middle Ages

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.

Die polyphone Theologie der Kirchenväter. Der Beitrag des Johnnes von Damaskus

2019 ◽  
Vol 79 (5) ◽  
pp. 393-401
Author(s):  
Cyril Hovorun
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Wassily Kandinsky ◽  
The Past ◽  
Lower Case ◽  
John Of Damascus ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Middle Ages

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.

The vocacyon of Johan Bale and Early English Autobiography

1971 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 327-340 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie P. Fairfield
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
The Self ◽  
Human Personality ◽  
The Past ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Early English ◽  
Sub Specie Aeternitatis ◽  
The Middle Ages

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.

scholarly journals Peripheral facial palsy in the past: contributions from Avicenna, Nicolaus Friedreich and Charles Bell

2008 ◽  
Vol 66 (3b) ◽  
pp. 765-769 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luiz Antonio de Lima Resende ◽  
Silke Weber
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Facial Palsy ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
Human Race ◽  
The Past ◽  
Peripheral Facial Palsy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Clinical Description ◽  
The Middle Ages

This study provides historical documents of peripheral facial palsy from Egypt, Greece and Rome, through the middle ages, and the renaissance, and into the last four centuries. We believe that the history of peripheral facial palsy parallels history of the human race itself. Emphasis is made on contributions by Avicenna and Nicolaus Friedreich. Controversies about the original clinical description by Charles Bell are also discussed.

The Staging of the Chester Cycle: An Alternate Theory

1971 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonard Powlick
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Medieval England ◽  
Religious Drama ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Middle Ages

The past fifteen years have been a period of active revisionism in the study of the stage history of medieval England. Through the efforts of Richard Southern, Martial Rose, and others, we have gained a quite different perspective on the staging of the religious drama of the Middle Ages. Now the Cornish plays are no longer considered to be an aberration, for we have seen the principle of stationary performance extended to Wakefield and Lincoln, and enough questions have been raised concerning performance in York that processional staging even there seems doubtful. More and more we are being led to the conclusion that not processional staging on pageant carts, but stationary performance was the norm in England, just as it was on the Continent.

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