Medievalist double consciousness and the production of difference: Medieval bards, cultural memory and nationalist fantasy

This chapter interrogates the relationship between medievalist cultural memory and nationalism in Britain and Europe. Exploring work by the English poet Thomas Gray, the Welsh poet and critic Evan Evans, the Hungarian poet Janos Arany, the Icelandic scholar Grímur Jonsson Thorkelín and the Danish poet, historian and educator Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig, this chapter explores how ideas of the medieval past are used to generate ideas of community and exclude some people, ideas and traditions from the future.

Queen Eleanor and her crosses: Trauma and memory, medieval and modern

This chapter is the first extended study of the Eleanor Crosses. Commissioned by Edward I and built in the years immediately following Eleanor’s death in 1290, the monuments fashioned an idealised image of Eleanor that stands distinct from the historical record but which defined cultural memories of her. Over time, however, what were once memorials to an individual woman came to signify a more general sense of loss, melancholy and nostalgia that signified differently in particular times and places. E. M. Barry’s refashioned Charing Cross of the 1860s is but one of a number of nineteenth- and twentieth-century monuments that self-consciously repeated and reflected the medieval precedents of the Eleanor Crosses to create an idealised image of the medieval past. This chapter traces the reception, recreation and influence of the crosses in postmedieval England.

Introduction

Memory is the matrix of all human temporal perception. Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory 1 This book is a study of cultural memory in and of the British Middle Ages. It is about ways of knowing the past created by individuals and groups in medieval Britain and how those texts and images have been adapted and appropriated in the modern West. Like the medieval and modern material with which it works, this book’s methodology is associative. It traces connections – often explicit, sometimes intuitive – across time, place and media to explore the temporal complexities of cultural production and subject formation. So while the methodology of this book is defined by historicist readings of the texts with which I work, this book is also a study of untimeliness, an investigation of cultural productions bereft of their original context....

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

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.

Afterword: Migrations

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.

The language of gesture: Untimely bodies and contemporary performance

This chapter explores the medieval interests of two twenty-first century pieces of art: Elizabeth Price’s immersive video installation, The Woolworths Choir of 1979 (2012), and Michael Landy’s Saints Alive (2013). Both of these works turn to medieval culture in order to examine the untimeliness of the body and this chapter traces their sources and explores how their work speaks with, and to, medieval representations of the body. It contextualises Price and Landy’s work with explorations of medieval effigies and the Middle English poem St Erkenwald. The methodology of this chapter is informed by Aby Warburg’s work on gesture in early modern art and interrogates moments of contact and communication across time.