Afterword: Migrations

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Davies
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Middle Ages

The Afterword is framed by a reading of Caroline Bergvall’s text and performance Drift (2013) and explores ideas of migration across time and space. Using Thomas Nail’s recent work on the figure of the migrant and Paul Zumthor’s celebrated work on ‘mouvance’ the Afterword asks, following Sara Ahmed’s work on orientation, what cultural possibilities emerge if we celebrate the diversity, multiplicity and untimeliness of ideas of the Middle Ages, rather than attempt to limit or define it. It suggest that medievalist acts of cultural memory often rely on an idea of the Middles Ages as singular, closed-off and stable, but nevertheless demonstrate its multiplicity, openness and indeterminacy.

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.

Choirboys and Choirgirls in the Victorian Church of England

1994 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 447-460
Author(s):  
Walter Hillsman
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Church Music ◽  
Performance Standards ◽  
Musical Composition ◽  
Conspicuous Feature ◽  
Women And Girls ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Middle Ages

Although the roles played by children in recent centuries in English church music have varied enormously, it is probably fair to say that choirs with at least some boys’ or girls’ voices have proven more important in musical, ecclesiastical, and social developments than those with none. The most obvious example of this is the choir of men and boys, which has constituted a conspicuous feature of cathedral and some collegiate music since the Middle Ages, except, of course, during the Commonwealth. As women and girls have until very recently been regarded as inappropriate in such music, it is difficult to imagine that the breadth of achievement in musical composition and performance standards associated with these choirs would have been possible if they had contained only men and no boys.

Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Creative Industries ◽  
Raw Material ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Theatre Companies ◽  
Performance Traditions ◽  
Experimental Theatre ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Creative Artists ◽  
The Middle Ages

Graeco-Roman epic poetry was the staple of the early operatic repertoire and it continues to provide a rich storehouse of themes for contemporary creative artists working in divergent traditions. Since Tim Supple and Simon Reade’s stage adaptation of Ted Hughes’s Tales from Ovid for the RSC (1999), versions of Greek and Roman epics have routinely provided raw material for the performance repertoire both within major cultural institutions and from emergent, experimental theatre companies. The chapters in this volume range widely across time (the Middle Ages to the present), place (Europe, Asia, and the Americas), and genres (lyric, film, dance, opera) in their searches for ‘epic’ content and form in diverse performance arenas. The anxieties about the ability to write epic in the early modern world in some way explain, together with the precedent of Greek tragedy’s reworking of epic material, this migration to the theatre. Yet equally, with this migration, epic encountered the barriers imposed by neoclassicists, who sought to restrict serious theatre to a narrowly defined reality that precluded epic’s broad sweeps across time and place. In many instances in recent years, the fact that the Homeric epics were composed orally makes reinvention not only legitimate but also deeply appropriate. With specialists from Classics, Music, English, Modern Languages, Dance, Theatre and Performance Studies, and from the creative industries, this volume is the first systematic attempt to chart the afterlife of epic in modern performance traditions.

The Medieval Fortunes of ‘Theatrica’

Traditio ◽  
1986 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
pp. 265-286 ◽  
Author(s):  
Glending Olson
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Liberal Arts ◽  
Medieval History ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Mechanical Arts ◽  
The Middle Ages

Early in the twelfth century, Hugh of St. Victor in his Didascalicon divided philosophical knowledge into four areas: theoretical, practical (i.e., moral), mechanical, and logical. He further divided mechanical knowledge into seven arts, parallel to the liberal arts, giving last place to theatrica, which he defined briefly as ‘scientia ludorum.’ It proved to be the most controversial of his seven categories. Some twenty years ago W. Tatarkiewicz studied Hugh's idea, its sources, and its appearance in a few subsequent texts from the Middle Ages and Renaissance; later Nancy Howe added a reference from Petrarch. Since then, the concept of theatrics has seldom been treated in itself, although we now have substantially more evidence of its pervasiveness in medieval thinking, as a result of further scholarship on the Didascalicon and on the history of the mechanical arts. Drawing on these sources and on previously unreported material, this study attempts to describe in some detail the progress of theatrica during roughly the first three hundred years after its appearance in the works of Hugh. The medieval history of this idea does not tell us much about the theater, but it does tell us quite a lot about medieval attitudes toward play, entertainment, and performance, topics that learned circles did not often discuss extensively or dispassionately.

A Short Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Marjorie Curry Woods
Keyword(s):  
Young Woman ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Short Introduction ◽  
Women's Voices ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Waking Up ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Middle Ages

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book discusses a project based on the E. H. Gombrich Lectures given at the Warburg Institute in 2014. The author had become fascinated with the tradition of boys performing emotional speeches in women's voices in schools and the evidence from manuscripts indicating that this tradition persisted during the Middle Ages, as well as before and after. The three chapters in this book begin with a boy: the historical Augustine who weeps for the suicide of a fictional queen; young Achilles waking up in a strange new land where he will be asked to pretend to be a young woman; and an anonymous boy in a medieval lyric poem who performs a woman's lament for her dead lover. Each provides a different window into three interrelated aspects of medieval teaching: emotion, gender, and performance, with special emphasis on emotion.

Music and Instruments of the Middle Ages: Studies on Texts and Performance

1999 ◽  
Vol 52 ◽  
pp. 372
Author(s):  
Jeremy Montagu ◽  
Christopher Page
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Middle Ages

Ruins and wonders: The poetics of cultural memory in and of early medieval England

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Davies
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Old English ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Reception History ◽  
First Century ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Extended Study ◽  
English Poem ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Middle Ages

The Old English poem known as The Ruin meditates on the material remains of a long-passed civilisation and has often been read as typical of the nostalgic poetry of the Anglo-Saxons, but its reception history reveals how cultural memories of the Anglo-Saxons have been rewritten in the modern world and the importance of the idea of ruination to modern conceptions of the Middle Ages. This chapter constitutes the first extended study of the disciplinary and translation histories of The Ruin, traces the history of the poem from 1826 to the twenty-first century and explores the meanings of ruins in the Middle Ages and modernity.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document