The Pre-Raphaelites

2020 ◽  
pp. 487-506
Author(s):  
Ayla Lepine
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Canterbury Tales ◽  
Unique Contribution ◽  
Stained Glass ◽  
Dante Gabriel Rossetti ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Morte D'arthur ◽  
Pre Raphaelites ◽  
The Middle Ages

Across media including painting, stained glass, architecture, photography, and furniture, the Pre-Raphaelites and their circle explored medievalism’s inheritances and produced new and radical responses to the Middle Ages in bold new visual culture within Britain and its empire. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Malory’s Morte d’Arthur provided stimulating springboards for emerging ideas regarding the arts in relation to narrative, memory, religion, and romance. Tropes of love, heroism, and beauty were by turns subverted and lauded in diverse Pre-Raphaelite efforts to contend with the Middle Ages and to graft their own values within its spirit. Focusing on what made the Pre-Raphaelite vision innovative, and considering the differing registers of engagement with the Middle Ages through encounter with contemporary and medieval literature across the arts, this chapter considers the unique contribution of artists including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Julia Margaret Cameron, Ford Madox Brown, John Everett Millais, and Edward Burne-Jones to the spirit of medievalism that gripped the modern Victorian imagination

Encyclopedists, medieval

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Barnish
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Liberal Arts ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Strong Influence ◽  
Arts And Sciences ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Liberal Arts And Sciences ◽  
Martianus Capella ◽  
The Middle Ages

The modern encyclopedic genre was unknown in the classical world. In the grammar-based culture of late antiquity, learned compendia, by both pagan and Christian writers, were organized around a text treated as sacred or around the canon of seven liberal arts and sciences, which were seen as preparatory to divine contemplation. Such compendia, heavily influenced by Neoplatonism, helped to unite the classical and Christian traditions and transmit learning, including Aristotelian logic, to the Middle Ages. Writers in the encyclopedic tradition include figures such as Augustine and Boethius, both of whom were extremely influential throughout the medieval period. Other important writers included Macrobius, whose Saturnalia spans a very wide range of subjects; Martianus Capella, whose De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii (The Marriage of Philology and Mercury) covers the seven liberal arts and sciences; Cassiodorus, who presents the arts as leading towards the comtemplation of the heavenly and immaterial; and Isidore, whose Etymologies became one of the most widely referred-to texts of the Middle Ages. These writers also had a strong influence which can be seen later in the period, particularly in the Carolingian Renaissance and again in the twelfth century.

The crystal reveals the whole: medieval dreamscapes and cinematic space as virtual media

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-112
Author(s):  
Alison Griffiths
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Roman De La Rose ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Cinematic Space ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Middle Ages

This article examines the rich visual culture of the medieval period in order to better understand dreaming as a kind of visual thought experiment, one in which ideas associated with cinema, such as embodied viewing, narrative sequencing, projection, and sensory engagement, are palpable in a range of visual and literary works. The author explores the theoretical connections between the oneiric qualities of cinema and the visual culture of medieval dreams, dealing in turn with the following themes: (i) media and mediation; (ii) projection and premonition; (iii) virtual spatiality; and (iv) automata and other animated objects. The wide swath of medieval literary dream texts, with their mobile perspectives, sensory plentitude, and gnostic mission, resonate with the cinematic in the structuring of the gaze. Investigating the codes of medieval culture provides us with an unusually rich episteme for thinking about how the dreamscapes of the Middle Ages evoke media dispositifs. Opening up these thought lines across distinct eras can help us extrapolate similarities around ways of imagining objects, spaces, sensations of embodied viewing or immersion, reminding us that our contemporary cinematic and digital landscapes are not divorced from earlier ways of seeing and believing. Whether stoking religious fear and veneration or providing sensual pleasure as in Le Roman de la Rose, the dreamworlds of the Middle Ages have bequeathed us a number of an extraordinarily rich creative works that are the imaginative building blocks of media worlds-in-the-making, as speculative in many ways as current discourses around new media.

Visions and ruins

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Davies
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Subject Formation ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
The Past ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Middle Ages

This book is a study of cultural memory in and of the British Middle Ages. It works with material drawn from across the medieval period – in Old English, Middle English and Latin, as well as material and visual culture – and explores modern translations, reworkings and appropriations of these texts to examine how images of the past have been created, adapted and shared. It interrogates how cultural memory formed, and was formed by, social identities in the Middle Ages and how ideas about the past intersected with ideas about the present and future. It also examines how the presence of the Middle Ages has been felt, understood and perpetuated in modernity and the cultural possibilities and transformations this has generated. The Middle Ages encountered in this book is a site of cultural potential, a means of imagining the future as well as imaging the past. The scope of this book is defined by the duration of cultural forms rather than traditional habits of historical periodization and it seeks to reveal connections across time, place and media to explore the temporal complexities of cultural production and subject formation. It reveals a transtemporal and transnational archive of the modern Middle Ages.

The Mediæval Setting of Chaucer's Monk's Tale

PMLA ◽  
1931 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 205-213
Author(s):  
R. W. Babcock
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
General Type ◽  
Canterbury Tales ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Middle Ages

The purpose of this paper is not to establish definite sources for Chaucer's Monk's Tale but to consider it as a representative of a general mediæval type. Professor Lounsbury declared that the Monk's Tale belonged to a “species of composition to which the men of Chaucer's age were exceedingly addicted.” In the Canterbury Tales, he continues, “the Monk's tale is introduced as a specimen of these collections of stories, and largely and perhaps entirely for the sake of satirizing, or at least of censuring, the taste that created and enjoyed them.” “In the Middle Ages,” writes Mr. J. E. Wells, “it was not at all uncommon to make collections of a single general type.…. These collections were.… of an encyclopædic character.” So Mr. E. Greenlaw: “It [the Monk's Tale] is.… an example of the many collections of tales having a didactic purpose which were characteristic of mediævalism.”

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