World Medievalism

World Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern Textual Culture explores the ways in which a range of modern textual cultures have continued to engage creatively with the medieval past in order to come to terms with the global present. Building its argument through four case studies—from the Middle East, France, Southeast Asia, and Indigenous Australia–it shows that to understand medievalism as a cultural idiom with global reach, we need to develop a more nuanced grasp of the different ways ‘the Middle Ages’ have come to signify beyond Europe as well as within a Europe that has been transformed by multiculturalism and the global economy. The book’s case studies are explored within a conceptual framework in which medievalism itself is formulated 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. The book analyses the cultural and material conditions under which its texts are produced, disseminated, and received and examines literature alongside films, television programs, newspapers and journals, political tracts, as well as such material and artefactual texts as photographs, paintings, statues, buildings, rock art, and fossils. While the case studies feature distinctive localized forms of medievalism, taken together they reveal how imperial and global legacies have ensured that the medieval period continues to be perceived as a commonly held past that can be retrieved, reclaimed, or revived in response to the accelerated changes and uncertainties of global modernity.

Pilgrimage and Textual Culture

Pilgrimage formed a central motif of medieval culture and shaped a defining aesthetic of early literature. Despite this centrality, research remains in a preliminary state for many of the actual texts, manuscripts, and books connected to pilgrimage and how they contributed to the exchange and translation of knowledge and ideas. This special issue considers issues of reading and writing before, during, and after medieval pilgrimages, as well as the methodological and historical issues at stake for both pilgrim writers and modern scholars. In particular, the articles address the vexed issue of where — and how much — reading and writing took place around historically attested pilgrimages. By employing insights from literature, history, bibliography, geography, and anthropology, this collection aims not only to understand the past, but also to examine how current biases might affect interpretation of that past. From this multidisciplinary perspective, deeper insight is offered into how pilgrims’ libraries shaped not only pilgrimage, but medieval culture in general.

Chinese Classical Textual Studies in the 20th and 21st Centuries

The article offers a brief outline of the history of "classical Chinese textual studies" (Zhongguo gudian wenxianxue), analyzes its content and structure, as well as its place and prospects in modern China. Classical Chinese textual studies emerged as a distinct modern academic discipline based on an ancient domestic tradition and under the influence of Western textual criticism of the 19th century. Since the 1920s, over the last hundred years, it has undergone several ups and downs but steadily continues to maintain continuity with a vast philological knowledge of imperial China, as well as to appropriate new approaches from Western humanities. The most developed areas of wenxianxue are the editing and publication of ancient texts, theoretical research in the foundations of textual studies, the creation and further exploration of subdisciplines, the analysis of research methods, and interdisciplinary perspectives, the study of the history of wenxianxue as well as various specialized problems. Overall, Chinese classical textual studies gravitate toward striving for comprehensiveness, interdisciplinary approaches, and practical issues. Currently, there is still a certain lack of innovation in exploring new areas, insufficient rigor and depth in theoretical research, the uneven development of individual areas of research and their somewhat regional character, nevertheless, textual studies manage to combine extensive practical work on "ordering ancient books" (guji zhengli) with a comprehensive study on the vast and immense Chinese textual culture.

The Upanishads and worship of the Maha Mantra in the tradition of Gaudiya Vaishnavism

The author researches the widely used practice of the so-called maha-mantra (the “great mantra”) while offering short prayers in the tradition of Gaudiya Vaishnavism, It is based on the Upanishads, such as Kali-santarana-Upanishad and Chaitanya-Upanishad. The author evaluates the existing original commentaries. As “classical” may be considered the interpretations those by Brahmayogin Ramachandrendra Sarasvati (XVIII century) and Suhotra Tapovanachari (1950–2007) on the Kali Sandarana Upanishad and those by Bhaktivinoda Thakura and Madhusudana dasa Babaji on the Chaitanya Upanishad. The article provides a translation of both texts from Sanskrit into Russian, supplied with comments and other explanations. The methodology used is based upon V. I. Rudoy concept regarding the polymorphic nature of Sanskrit textual culture.

The Unfinished Text in the Thickening Description: From Genetic Criticism to Cultural Transfer Studies (The case of Zbigniew Herbert’s Winter Tale)

On the threshold of the 1970s Zbigniew Herbert, an eminent Polish poet and writer, was working on a play entitled Baśń zimowa (Winter Tale), which can be described as a truly international, interlingual, and transcultural phenomenon of textual culture. Written in Polish and ultimately intended for publication in German translation, it was inspired by a short story by James Stevenson published in The New Yorker magazine. For a number of reasons, Herbert never completed the text and all that remains is the archival material (plans, rough drafts, a newspaper cutting). Using this case as a platform, I attempt to investigate the potential for cooperation between the disciplines of genetic criticism on the one hand and cultural transfer studies on the other. A discussion of the ontology of unfinished and abandoned work provides a backdrop to the major themes.

COLLECTION CHAGATAI COLLECTION IN BRITISH LIBRARY

The author of the article investigates the problems of cataloging and curatorship in the British Chagatai Manuscript Library. It starts with a brief overview of some of the previous work done to catalog manuscripts, and then an overview of how these collections compare to those of other institutions in Western Europe. In doing so, the author provides examples of chagatai manuscripts in the British Library from each region in which the language was used, delving deeper into the origin of the objects and the reasons why they could be found by the British Museum and the British library. They also end with reflections on how the composition of the collections signifies British interest in Turkic cultural production, and how we can go beyond this to create a more holistic view of Chaghatay literature and textual culture

Liturgy, Patristic Learning, and Christian Formation

This chapter explores the role of liturgy and chant in the bishops’ project of cultural renewal, from the perspectives of both production and reception. The author looks to the textual culture of Visigothic Iberia for clues as to why the compilers of chants reworked scripture in particular ways, exploring how scripture and patristic texts were read, understood, and disseminated by members of the clerical elite who were likely to have produced the chants. The focus then turns to Christian education and formation in Visigothic Iberia, yielding insight into the tools that monks, clergy, and laity are likely to have brought to the understanding of these chants.