Corvus Corax: medieval rock, the minstrel, and cosmopolitanism as anti-nationalism

This article explores the German band Corvus Corax and their reinterpretion of the Middle Ages as a creative answer to Germany's problematic history of nationalism. Invoking the community ideals and ideological values of the 1960s and 1970s, which, in the context of the GDR took on even more significance, Corvus Corax borrowed ‘authentic’ medieval texts and melodies, rendering them in acoustic arrangements inspired by medieval performance practices. In short, German ‘folk’ bands invented ‘medieval’ rock to sidestep Nazi connotations with the word ‘folk’. Besides invoking the semantic shift from ‘folk’ to ‘medieval’, I argue that the band adopts the figure of the medieval minstrel and asserts that his multilingual texts, ‘foreign’ instruments and colourful performance practices speak to an inclusive, diverse and cosmopolitan community. Paradoxically, they do so by first positioning the medieval minstrel as a punked-up, marginalised ‘outcast’. The cultural capital of this outcast status helps medieval rock bands like Corvus Corax carve out a space for marginalised voices who, in their new privileged positions, offer a form of retribution for politics of exclusion, racism and authoritarianism.

Conclusion: The Ministry of Culture

Considers the book’s findings on medieval literary culture by considering modern re-enactments of the Middle Ages. The conclusion inspects Baathist Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and the medieval nostalgia the Iraqi government ministries tried to promote. The book surveys the political uses for nostalgia, especially statements of longing for a functional, competitive court. From Dante’s anguished praise of past kings to modern military dictatorships’ cultural festivals, the spectacle of medieval performance animates our ideas and institutions.

Off-stage

This chapter examines the dynamic construction of the off-stage space and the ways in which it renders the stage radically incomplete. More specifically, it considers how early modern performance replaces the absolute, sacred, and cosmic space of medieval performance with a newly secularized space of representation that could become fictional in a way that the medieval stage could not. To highlight the moment when the stage is empty and the audience is listening to an off-stage sound effect, the chapter offers a reading of the tragedyThe Insatiate Countess. It shows that the playhouse stage is not an ‘absolute space’, but is irreducibly relational: a space-between, a threshold. It explains how this threshold might work in theatrical practice through an analysis ofRichard III. It also discussesArden of Favershamto demonstrate that the domestic version of ‘within’ has one spatial signification in particular: it is the woman’s place. Finally, it looks at the tiring-house as domestic chamber to illustrate the doctrine that certain things are withdrawn from view because they are forbidden.

The Medieval Fate of the Cantigas de Santa Maria: Iberian Politics Meets Song

This article reviews the evidence for the medieval performance of the Cantigas de Santa Maria (CSM) and discusses King Alfonso's intentions for the work, including the intended audience. The CSM were conceived as an ambitious cultural enterprise with both religious and political objectives, but were doomed to failure by the steep political decline of their creator. The only surviving evidence for the CSM's presence in any court outside Alfonso's is the Barbieri MS, an eighteenth-century descendant of a lost original, plausibly transmitted to the Portuguese court before 1270. Other traces of performative use are rubrics and marginal notes in an appendix to manuscript To and their corresponding reworking in manuscript E, which point to short-lived ritual use. Internal iconographical, literary, and compositional evidence suggests that Alfonso did intend the CSM to circulate among a broad range of social classes. He manipulated poetic and metrical forms from the troubadour tradition to highlight the dignity of the Virgin Mary, but he privileged forms directly inspired by the Andalusian zajal familiar to popular audiences and among the minstrels, to encourage the penetration of his songs beyond his courtly circle. The CSM were meant to consolidate Christian restoration in the recently conquered southern territories, but also to serve as personal and dynastic propaganda, asserting their author's royal supremacy over Castilian lords, his preeminence among Iberian kings, and his status as the Christian monarch most worthy of the office of Holy Roman emperor.