medievally speaking

Berns/Johnston, eds., Medievalism

2012-01-24T16:18:00.000-05:00

Berns, Ute and Andrew James Johnston, eds. Medievalism: A Special Issue of theEuropean Journal of EnglishStudies,15.2 (August 2011).

Reviewed by Amy S. Kaufman (Amy.Kaufman@mtsu.edu)

Scholars of medievalism arepainfully aware that our area of study is marginalized in the academy,perceived as the errant sibling of Medieval Studies ‘proper’ and dismissed asthe province offans (if not fanatics). Medievalism is only just beginning to get its criticaldue, in part for the appeal of its cultural studies approach and interdisciplinarynature. But as more scholars make forays into our field, it is important torecognize how much work has already been done in medievalism alongside thepromising potential that medievalism has as a theoretical approach, one thatcan enter into conversation with other critical movements and help the academytap into the latent relevance Medieval Studies has always had for scholars ofliterature, media, history, and culture.

This is the message of the August2011 Medievalismspecial issue of the EuropeanJournal of English Studies. In their introductory essay,“Medievalism: A Very Short Introduction,” guest editors Ute Berns and AndrewJames Johnston argue that despite its marginalization and supposed lack ofrigor, “medievalism looks as though it were on the brink of an intellectualtake-over of the Middle Ages as an area of research and academic discussion”(p. 97). Studies of medievalism have enabled scholars to launch challenges toperiodization itself, and through a combination of cultural studies and postcolonialtheory, to probe the temporal and geographical borders of our present and ourpast—exercises which, Berns and Johnston rightly point out, allow medievaliststo test historical, temporal, and academic boundaries.

Richard Utz's contribution to thecollection, “Coming to Terms with Medievalism,” serves as a kind of secondintroduction, one that contextualizes medievalism historically, temporally,linguistically, and theoretically. Utz argues that the term “medievalism” is akind of “...linguistic performanceresponding to particular pressures in and outside the academy as well as to thealmost coeval emergence of competing terms and practices related to the studyof the past” (p. 103-4). He describes the well-known split between academic‘Medieval Studies’ and non-academic ‘medievalism’ which, though it was inventedby nineteenth-century scholars, persists today. Utz adds an importantdistinction, however: that the boundary is temporal in nature, a divisionbetween “…academic pastistresearch of the ‘real’ Middle Ages and the variousnon-academic presentistrepresentations of the medieval past” (p. 104, originalemphasis). In other words, Utz argues, this often artificial distinction isabout perceived distance. Scholars whose ‘medievalism’ comes too close totouching a past prized for its alterity are rendered academically suspect.Utz’s essay also traces the efforts of Studies in Medievalism founder Leslie J.Workman to make medievalism “an independent academic area of study”; thishistory, one suspects, is an effort to preserve and protect Workman’s legacy inthe face of medievalism’s new popularity, for as Utz points out, previousscholars who have become enamored by the promise of a ‘New Medievalism’“...maintained their academic aloofness towards Workman's Studies in Medievalismmovement and rather attempted to operationalize the term as a weapon fortransforming academic Medieval Studies according to their own progressiveself-image” (p. 107). Despite his cautious historicization, Utz, like theeditors, ultimately is optimistic about the fact that “hundreds of scholarshave now embraced medievalism as the term that provides them with the creativespace in which scholarly rigor and enjoyment, educational experience andemotion, may bridge the rigid alterity between the two non-contiguoushistorical moments” (p. 109).

The rest of the issue demonstrateshow medievalism as an interdisciplinary approach, grounded in cultural andhistorical studies but also capable of embracing transhistorical theory, canshed light on a variety of literary periods and genres. The issue includes twoarticles on Shakespearean medievalism: Felix C.H. Sprang’s, “Never Fortune DidPlay a Subtler Game: The Creation of ‘Medieval’ Narratives in Pericles and Two Noble Kinsmen”and Wolfram R. Keller’s “Shakespearean Medievalism: Conceptions of LiteraryAuthorship in RichardII and John Lydgate’s Troy Book.” Sprang argues that “Shakespeare’shistories in particular invited early modern Londoners to position themselvesas ‘modern’ vis-á-vis ancient Rome and medieval England” and that Pericles and Two Noble Kinsmen “reflecta sustained interest in explorations of ‘medieval’ modes of narration that haveresulted in creative experiments with narrative and genre” (p. 116). Sprang concludes that Shakespeare’sappropriation of a “medieval” past allowed early modern spectators to indulgein the belief that “...the ‘medieval’ characters created on stage are incapableof assuming multiple perspectives and are thus inapt to instigate a process of self-reflection,”an ideological stance Sprang identifies as defining a new, “tragicomic” genre(p. 123). Keller’s contribution, on the other hand, uses medievalism as a lensto identify one of Shakespeare’s narrative strategies. Drawing on Lydgate’s Troy Book andShakespeare’s RichardII, Keller identifies Shakespeare’s strategies ofself-concealment in the portrayal of the poet-playwright in Richard IIas an inheritance from Lydgate, whose diatribes against the fickleness of womenin Troy Book,Keller argues, are merely “a device that masks [Lydgate’s] own authorialchangeability” (p. 133). Keller concludes that Shakespeare’s allusions pairingRichard II with Helen of Troy are therefore “a conscious—and consciouslymasked—medievalism on Shakespeare’s part” (p. 135-8). Particularly refreshingis the careful qualification by both contributors that early modern innovationsin genre and narrative strategy have to do with perceived modernity,Sprang pointing out that Gower and Chaucer both contain tragicomic elements andthat “tragicomedy as a genuinely ‘modern’ invention is, of course, yet anotherfoundation myth” (p. 124-12), and Keller using his piece to help interrogate“the grand historical narrative that posits a radical rupture between themedieval and the early modern” (p. 129).

Candace Barrington’s article,“Grieving American Civil War Dead: General Hitchcock’s Hermetic Interpretationof Chaucer’s Bookof the Duchess,” is an interesting single case study ofmedievalism in the late nineteenth century that, despite its narrow focus, hasbroad implications for understanding how medievalism generates from personaland cultural experience and extends its influence into the academy. Barringtontraces the encounter Civil War general turned literary scholar Ethan AllenHitchcock had with Chaucer’s Bookof the Duchess. Though the interpretive trend contemporaneouswith Hitchcock was biographical criticism, his work insists that Chaucer’s poemis neither historical nor biographical but is instead allegorical and spiritual.Hitchcock identifies the poem as the “mental journey of the poet himself, inthe very spirit of Christianity, into what may be called the spiritual world”(p. 145). Barrington’s elegant argument develops with a dose of her ownbiographical and historical analysis: Allen’s experience with loss in the CivilWar, she argues, reflects the postbellum American “hunt for what lay outsidethe visible realm,” a search that became “more desperate with the slaughter ofover 600,000 Union and Confederate soldiers as well as 50,000 civilians” (p.151). Barrington sees American medievalism “naturally” following from thenation’s governing interest in death and what lay beyond it (p. 152). Her examination of the academic reception ofa text as a kind of medievalism reminds us that the medieval scholarship wetake for granted can and should be contextualized through medievalism’srevealing lens.

The last two articles in thecollection turn to a more ‘traditional’ landscape in medievalism studies,examinations of medievalism in television and film. Elke Koch’s “Magic, Media,and Alterity in Catweazle”surveys medievalism in the 1970s British animated television serial Catweazle, a children’sshow about a medieval wizard who accidentally transports himself to the (1970s)present. Rather than belittle the Middle Ages in favor of technology, Kochargues, Catweazleputs both magic and technology under suspicion (p. 160-1). Koch discusses themany possible connections and conflicted attitudes toward the past that youngviewers might experience with the show, but her analysis picks up speed whenshe turns from audience reception to the implications of the hero’s alterity:“Catweazle comments on the possibility of relating to history,” she concludes(p. 163). Then again, perhaps “impossibility” is a better word, for Kochultimately argues that “[i]n the personification of Catweazle, the past islovable, but impossible to keep and to integrate” (p. 164).

Margitta Rouse’s “ ‘Hit Men onHoliday Get All Medieval’: Media Theory and Multiple Temporalities in MartinMcDonagh’s InBruges” finishes this collection with a savvy, nuanceddiscussion of McDonagh's 2008 gangster film In Bruges, which follows the misadventures ofcontemporary assassins Ken and Ray through a city that clings to its medievalpast. Rouse’s complex thesis notes that “medievalism in McDonagh's film laysbare various cinematic constructions of the medieval—e.g. the medieval as evilor as a lost ideal. Moreover, the film destabilizes the binary oppositionbetween the medieval past and the postmodern present” (p. 172). Rousehighlights the ways in which the film uses medieval iconography tounderscore the unique ability of the postmodern viewer to interpret medievalsigns. Rouse’s essay also includes a convincing challenge to Walter Benjamin’sdefinition of the “auratic” qualities of modern media against “an essentializednotion of medieval artwork” by concluding that “In Bruges addressesmedieval culture not as a multipurpose ‘distancing device’ for thecontemporary, but as a means of examining conflicting responses to the medievalheritage, which allows a dialogic relationship between the (premodern) past andthe (post)modern present” (p. 178-9). Rouse’s essay is perhaps the collection’sbest example of the critical potential medievalism has when it is applied as atheoretical approach: understanding how to determine what medievalism is, andthe many ways in which the Middle Ages can be read and received, surely is anirreplaceable key to unraveling the allusions and signs in McDonagh’s film.

A few minor errata lurk in thiscollection: “loosing” for “losing’ (p. 109), a comma error (p. 116), “with” for“to” (p. 117), and a misplaced “do” (p. 122). The major project, however, thatthe Medievalism specialissue undertakes is an important and timely intervention in the field. Eachcontributor exploresmedievalism by contextualizing it through time, genre, and literaryinheritance, all the while remaining carefully self-conscious in a decidedlyrigorous analysis of the periodization, audience reception, and historicalcontext that too many other studies take for granted.

AmyS. Kaufman

MiddleTennessee State University

Ferré, ed., Médiévalisme: Modernité du Moyen Âge

2011-10-19T20:41:00.000-04:00

French Medievalism and Its Discontents:Testimony from the Proceedings of a Conference

Vincent Ferré, ed., Médiévalisme: Modernité du Moyen Âge.Paris: L'Harmattan, 2010.

Reviewed by WilliamCalin (wcalin@ufl.edu)

Vincent Ferré,"Introduction (I). Médiévalisme et théorie: pourquoi maintenant?":7-25. This is the longest and mostimportant essay in the collection. Ferréobserves pertinently that, although work – good work – on the presence of theMiddle Ages in the post-medieval cultures has been published in France, goingback to the Poitiers La Licornecollection of 1982, the term médiévalisme,employed in our sense of "medievalism," dates from 2007. Ferrémodestly avoids a personal plaudit; nevertheless, it would appear that heintroduced the neologism into French. Heoffers a rich, five-page (21-5) bibliography of French medievalism –specifically the works cited in his essay. Ferré is fully aware of the Anglo-American origins of the field; hegives full credit to Studies inMedievalism and to leaders in the discipline: Leslie Workman, followed, inalphabetical order, by Karl Fugelso, David Metzger, Tom Shippey, ClaireSimmons, and Richard Utz. Finally, andof special importance, Ferré discusses the place of theory in medievalism. Recognizing the pride of place awarded theoryin volumes 17, 18, and 19 of Studies inMedievalism (ed. Fugelso), he calls for a similar reflection inFrance. It is that theoreticalreflection which dominates the Metz-Malbrouck colloquium of November 2009, thevolume under review being the proceedings of that conference.

Comment: Animportant, path-breaking study. Bravo! Among the most activefigures in American medievalism, Ferré ought perhaps to have cited alsoGwendolyn Morgan. He did not probablybecause, in addition to her scholarly publications, he is not acquainted withthe journal The Year's Work inMedievalism, which has evolved, under the editorship of Morgan, M. JaneToswell, and now Edward Risden, into a venue of important, refereed scholarlyarticles. It is also a pity that Ferrésaid nothing about American contributions to French medievalism. Here the leading figure is Elizabeth Emery,who, scrutinizing the late nineteenth century, brought about a paradigm shiftin our understanding of the reception of the Middle Ages in France. These recommendations are not meant, in anyway, to question the quality of this superbly crafted, innovative essay.

Éric Necker, "Introduction (2). Le château deMalbrouck, un château médiéval d'aujourd'hui": 27-32. The conference took place in Metz, and inthis restored castle in Lorraine. Malbrouck itself is significant. A fortified castle built late in the fifteenth century when thefortification structures were already out-of-date, it testifies to culturalnostalgia (late-medieval medievalism?). The ruins were tastefully restored in the 1990's, so that Malbrouck nowresponds to our images of the Middle Ages, whatever they may be.

Comment: Agood contribution.

Jeff Rider, "L'utilité du Moyen Âge":35-45. Rider distinguishes between thehistoricist or scholarly representation of the Middle Ages and the popular,anachronistic, medievalist representation. In both cases the outcome is largely the same: to imagine a world whichis not ours yet one where we could have lived and which acts upon ourbeing-in-the-world today. "Forhistoricism, the Middle Ages is a historical concept; for medievalism, it is astyle" (42).

Comment: Agood, challenging essay. One can respondthat the historicist historians also partake of medievalism, and consequentlythat medievalism should not be limited to the aesthetic. I should also have liked some scholarlyreferences other than citations from Paul Ricoeur.

Gil Bartholeyns, "Le passé sans l'histoire. Vers uneanthropologie culturelle du temps": 47-60. In an intelligent, challenging essay Bartholeyns discusses thesignificant presence of the past, including the Middle Ages, in cinema. He argues that film makers do not seek toreconstitute history in a quest for "realism." Instead, they create their own world of"reality" as part of their creative, aesthetic search for a humantruth which will transcend history. Intheoretical terms, next to history and memory, he places a third domain: thepast without history, the a-historical past in antithesis to historicalreality. This would be an aesthetic pastwhich nurtures creativity and play.

Thomas Honegger,"(Heroic) Fantasy and the Middle Ages: Strange Bedfellows or an IdealCast?": 61-71. Honegger arguespersuasively and with finesse that the Middle Ages serves as a "temporalfantasy" (62) offered to modern readers by Lewis, Tolkien, and the authorof the Conan the Barbarianseries. He concentrates on the knight asthe typical medieval secular figure, combining strength and courtliness. The knight is perceived to be a figure fornon-alienated men and to be the high representative of hierarchical order. Modern fantasy then shares certain corecharacteristics of romance: wandering, obscured identity, idealization, themarvelous or supernatural, and narrative delay.

Comment: WhenHonegger gives as an example of narrative delay the interlace pattern inChrétien de Troyes (68), he should have cited instead the Lancelot-Grail Prose Cycle. Chrétien only begins the process which will be expanded and perfected bylater writers.

Myriam White-Le Goff, "Quel Moyen Âge dans l'éditionpour la jeunesse?": 73-83. In thischapter the author scrutinizes deftly and insightfully the place of medievalliterature in French children's literature. The largest segment includes chansonsde geste and courtly romance. Thereare certain publishers who aim for an accurate modern translation of themedieval texts, respecting their integrity. The majority, however, expurgate, revise, and entirely rewrite, usuallywithout notifying the reader. And, sincewe are dealing with literature meant for the schools in a resolutely seculareducational establishment, the ties with religion are cut as much as ispossible. The result is a literaturewithout savor, texture, and the power of suggestion. However, the literature inspires youngpeople's imagination anyway, especially when the heroes are youths growing upsuch as Perceval and Huon de Bordeaux. If the Middle Ages is associated with childhood, this is not a bad thing‒ for children and forcreative writers.

Comment: Theterm "family romance" comes from Freud before it was adopted byMarthe Robert (80-1).

Anne Larue, "Le médiévalisme entre hypnose numériqueet conservatisme rétro": 87-96. In this, the worst essay in the collection,Larue indulges in an early-phase feminist and populist diatribe. Against all the evil unleashed upon the worldin the 1980s by the "United Patriarchy" (88), "le backlash" against the progressiveimpulses of the preceding decade, "medievalism undertakes a hiddenstruggle on the terrain of the imaginary . . . a counter-discourse in fantasy which . . . contains a force ofdenunciation against the imposed ideology" (88, 89). "La Fantasy"offers hope and consolation. Laruedenounces high culture in all its manifestations, including the literaturepublished by Gallimard, the leading press in France. It is on the Web, on medfan sites, that true masterpieces, appreciated by a true public,will be disseminated. As Larue sees it,"meditation on the soul and on God . . . [are] retrograde religious valuesbelonging to patriarchal America" (91) and "vampires in the forest,werewolves, women, all that folklore . . . kept secret for millennia, all thisexplodes today" (90).

Comment:Explodes indeed. This contributiondemonstrates why conference proceedings have to be refereed by externalevaluators.

Jean-François Thull, "L'inspiration médiévale desPères de l'Europe contemporaine: l'exemple de Jean de Pange": 97-109. In this moving, profoundly Humanist chapter,Thull evokes the memory of a scholar and intellectual from Lorraine, whopartook of and contributed to a current of thought after the Great War, onewhich imagined an integrated, unified Europe based on the example ofCharlemagne and his Carolingian Empire. The Middle Ages was the model for this line of thinking, because ofCharlemagne and because of what was thought to be medieval Christianspirituality and unity. Just asLotharingia bridges France and Germany, so also the new Europe could bridge,and serve as a counter-example to, the United States and the Soviet Union.

Véronique Dominguez, "D'Oberammergau au Jeu d'Adam: le sacré à l'épreuve dumédiévalisme": 113-23. Shediscusses two modern translators of the twelfth-century Jeu d'Adam and how they help shape the meaning of the medieval textand of the several stagings of the play in the twentieth century. She sees an element of tragedy in thetext. Dominguez believes that, althoughthe Oberammergau passion play appears to the public to be solidly anchored inthe Middle Ages, in fact its mythology is not medieval at all. The German play dates from the seventeenthcentury and was rewritten in the nineteenth. More to the point, it relies upon the amateur status of the actors, theconfusion between the actor and the spectator and between the stage and theauditorium, and the play conceived as a ritual act, a Mass which unites theChristian community and excludes others.

Comment: Allthese Oberammergau practices which Dominguez denounces can be envisaged astypically medieval and as inherent in medieval theater, whether it be theFrench mystery plays or the English miracle plays. The performance itself as quasi-sacredliturgy uniting the spectators in a Christian community is a splendid insightwhich can be applied to medieval sacred drama. Dominguez states that, concerning Oberammergau, she relied upon threebooks: two in English and one in French, all three, in my opinion, hostile tothe Bavarian passion play. She evidentlymissed the dozen and more books in German devoted to Oberammergau. They would have given her a richer, morecomplex, and more nuanced perspective.

Michèle Gally, "L'aura du Moyen Âge sur la scènecontemporaine": 125-37. In a rich,complex, and nuanced essay, Gally scrutinizes the problematic of adoptingmedieval romance to our contemporary stage, with two central questions: how totreat material from a world distant in time and reeling with alterity, and howto adapt for the stage material from vast, interlaced, multiple-character andmultiple-plot narratives. The obstaclesoffer, of course, genuine possibilities for creativity. Gally recognizes the importance of thestaging and how the director shapes in a major way the audience response. She examines these questions by way of twoFrench stagings of a play by Tankred Dorst: Merlinoder das wüste Land (Merlin ou La terre dévastée), one by Rodolphe Dana,the other by Jorge Lavelli. Gallyinsists upon the resolute modernism of Dorst and his adapters, strangelycongruent with the Middle Ages.

Corneliu Dragomirescu, "Cinéma médiéval: triosniveaux de sens d'une expression ambiguë": 139-51. In a not especially original contribution,Dragomirescu takes the side of creative directors against the scholars whoaccuse them of being anachronistic. Hediscusses films whose plots are located in the Middle ages; films set in theMiddle Ages where we see projected images, something like cinema itself; andmedieval themes and motifs in modern cinema, such as Fisher King, Knightriders,and Pulp Fiction.

Comment: Dragomirescucites the medieval poet as "Chrétien de Troie" [Chrétien of Troy],which does little to reassure us as to his command of the medieval Urstoff.

Mónica Ann Walker Vadillo, "Comic Books Featuringthe Middle Ages": 153-63. WalkerVadillo offers an overview of comic strips set in the Middle Ages. She emphasizes the fact that the protagonistsare painted as exemplars of noble chivalry, in contrast to historical reality.

Comment: Shecites a strip which treats of England in 1193, "when Christianity begandisplacing the original religions of the Isles" (154). She also cites as scholarly authority dubiousmaterial on the Web.

Gérard Chandès, "Réplicateurs visuels et sonores dumonde néo-médiéval": 167-75. In achallenging, thought-provoking, path-breaking essay, Chandès argues "thatthe Middle Ages can be visually and verbally represented by basic forms linkedto sensory perception of space and self-perception of the body"(167). Other historical periods lackthese simple forms. Among the replicatorshe cites the circle, the cross, and the crenel. He then discusses the phonology of the verbal replicator"oyez."

Comment:Chandès assumes the final grapheme "z" to be unpronounced. In the Middle Ages it was pronounced andoften still is in British and American legal proceedings.

Céline Checchetto, "Médiévalismes d'une sémiose: LeMoyen Âge en chanson": 177-88. In apenetrating study, Checchetto observes that song is or ought to be envisaged aspartaking of several different approaches, including "text, music, voice,interpretation, orchestration, iconography, and scenography" (178), thusforming a semiotic network. Thesecontribute to a new field of study: cantologie. Among the medieval intertextualities we findthe text itself, the music (early instruments, Gregorian modalities, rhythmicmodes, polyphony), and the pictorial: the medieval "look" performersmay adopt. We can consequently term themedievalisms in song as a "medieval transsemiotic" (185).

Comment: Anilluminating contribution. But do wereally need cantologie? Well . . . why not? Academics have a right to their jargon, and"cantology" is no worse than "medievalism" itself.

My conclusion: As is inevitable with non-refereed conferenceproceedings, this is a mixed bag. Theweaker papers suffer from amateurism. Indices of amateurism include inadequate footnotes or the absence offootnotes altogether. Also, the mass ofcritical work on medievalism, especially in English, demands engagement withthe preceding scholarship. Unlike Ferréhimself, the contributors are, for the most part, unacquainted with Studies in Medievalism; The Year's Work in Medievalism remains terra incognita. In addition, they can make mistakesconcerning the Middle Ages. And, as asimple matter of course, scholars have to know the relevant lingue di cultura: English, French,German, and Italian. And there can be noplace in scholarship for the crude expression of one's ideological loves andhates.

It is also true that traces of amateurism are to beexpected in what is, after all, in France a new discipline. Especially heartening is the high quality ofthe majority of the essays: powerfully intelligent, innovative, insightful, andmaking a genuine contribution to the field. The theoretical turn called for by Ferré has been answered, and answeredbrilliantly.

Significantly, most of the essays concentrate on thetwentieth century and on popular culture. Given that American medievalism has been expanding in precisely thatdirection, it is normal that French médiévalisteswould do the same. The insights from themajority of papers in this collection are superb – innovative andthought-provoking in the best tradition of cultural criticism. However, Anglo-American medievalism, underthe aegis of Leslie Workman, began with a concentration on high culture: aboveall, literature, but also music, the fine arts, architecture, and the life ofthe mind in general. It also beganscrutinizing the past, from the Renaissance on, with special attention accordedthe nineteenth century, when the Middle Ages emerged as a counter weight toclassicism as a potential and actual norm and model. Major books by Alice Chandler, Kim Moreland,and others created a paradigm shift in English studies comparable to Emery'swork on France. It is to be hoped thatFrench equivalents will come to the fore and enrich the domain ofpre-twentieth-century literary medievalism in the way that a number of studiesin this volume have done for the popular culture of our contemporaryworld.

Brush, ed., Mapping Medievalism at the Canadian Frontier

2011-06-14T10:28:00.017-04:00

Kathryn Brush, ed., Mapping Medievalism at the Canadian Frontier. London, ON: Museum London & McIntosh Gallery, 2010.

Reviewed by Richard Utz (richard.utz@wmich.edu)

In 2012 it will be 20 years that I attended my first Medievalism conference at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Then, as a European greenhorn who thought that growing up among the remnants of medieval architecture automatically conferred authority on me to speak of the Middle Ages, I voiced some glib doubts about the location for the conference among palm trees and close to Busch Gardens. The conference participants and their papers convinced me otherwise. In fact, shortly after the conference I began looking for, and seeing, the medieval even in the most quotidian situations. Then, after that initial phase, when King Arthur Flour, Merlin’s Mufflers, and the most recent Robin Hood movie had lost their quick and easy attraction, I realized that what would, in the end, sustain my scholarly interest in medievalism had to do with some of the less immediately obvious, albeit omnipresent, traces of the medieval, those diachronic continuities that inform, more or less consciously, postmedieval language, social interaction, memory, and national, regional, and other group identities. Mapping Medievalism at the Canadian Frontier manages a full-scale investigation into such intricate questions and demonstrates the relevance of medievalism studies in new and exiting ways. I am particularly impressed by the broad range of sources – visual records, travel narratives, literary accounts, the history of ideas, gender studies – brought to bear upon the process through which the Upper Canadian frontier (or Ontario frontier) was conceptualized as a New World Middle Ages in numerous different ways. Although the editor modestly states that this collaborative project should only be seen as “an initial foray into a large and expansive topic” (p. 18), I believe the volume not only enriches existing readings of the mythology of the Canadian frontier, but also showcases an exemplary interdisciplinary methodology for future studies in medievalism.

Clare Feagan examines the castellated nature and placement (in the middle of the forest) of Upper Canada’s courthouse (London, ON; built between 1827 and 1829) and concludes that the building was meant to celebrate its planners’ European architectural and political heritage as well as the terrifying (“wild”) aspects displayed in Gothic novels. Hillary Walker Gugan extends Feagan’s observations to the ways in which artists among the British colonists used the conventions of their own European pasts to render the Canadian wilderness acceptable and accessible. Thus, city views of the New World, including the new London, ON, and its Thames River, were marketing Ontario in the first half of the nineteenth century as an idealistic mix of picturesque medieval-inspired and industrial features to attract prospective emigrants back in Britain. Similarly, as Megan Arnott intimates, scholarly medievalism and heritage/tourism medievalism in southwestern Ontario conspired to recognize early medieval Vinland in the Great Lakes Region in the second half of the nineteenth and the twentieth century.

According to Simon Bentley, medieval and colonial modes also created a fruitful combination for the construction of leadership in Upper Canada. Colonel Thomas Talbot (1771-1853), for example, displayed a particular predilection for pre-modern (feudal) leadership and a pioneer lifestyle. Talbot’s specific masculinist medievalism becomes visible in his own understanding of manly aventure, i.e., the conquest of foreign lands and the creation of vast estates. Ahlia Moussa provides a feminine counter perspective to Colonel Talbot’s, British author, activist, art historian and literary scholar Anna Jameson’s (1794-1860) travel narratives, which are also imbued with nineteenth-century medievalist sentiment. She, however, viewed the medieval chivalric traditions as the beginning of the modification and enlargement of the woman’s sphere and used her own anthropological observations on Native women and frontier women to critique the artificiality of Victorian ideals of women. In her descriptions, Euro-Canadian female settlers, who had to perform physical labor, appear as “moderately liberated, but genteel and feminine” (p. 64). If Jameson’s medievalizing travel narratives launched her literary career, the colonial fantasy of reviving an idealized medieval age had a similarly positive effect on the career of landscape painter Frederick Arthur Verner (1836-1928). As Erin Rothstein elucidates, Verner’s depictions of a Canadian medieval wilderness expose the nostalgic and conservative side of the nineteenth-century return to medievalia.

Stephani Radu and Emma Arenson both reveal how the comparative scholarly examination of the production methods, themes, and form elements of medieval and pre-contact material objects was often based on stereotypes generally governing the discourse describing these objects. Such comparisons, for example, made early European settlers apply the term “castle” to the palisaded Iroquoian settlements in an effort to speak of an unfamiliar technology of construction. Similarly, according to Rebecca Gera, the descriptions on maps and in various travel narratives (Gera calls them “Canadian Romances”) of the Canadian landscape resemble medieval European ideas of uncharted wilderness areas. Other nineteenth-century readings of the medieval wilderness (Chateaubriand, Ruskin, Scott, the Gothic novel) have all left recognizable traces in how early Canadians imaginatively filled the “empty spaces” to create a unique national geography and identity. Finally, as Kathryn Brush explains in her own essay, in the early decades of the twentieth century the visual celebrations of Canada’s “untamed” landscape by painters Tom Thomson (1877-1917) and other members of the Canadian “Group of Seven” (E.H. MacDonald, Arthur Lismer, Frederick Varley, Frank Johnston, Franklin Carmichael, A.Y. Jackson, and Lawren Harris) still carry the imprint of medievalism. However, rather than being intentional medievalists by incorporating visual references to Canada’s “real” Middle Ages, Thomson and his fellow painters continued to work with the “diverse medievalisms that had already been grafted onto Ontario’s wilderness during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries” (p. 156).

The museum exhibit catalogue genre, with its need for concise and fairly jargon-free exposition, proved an enabling obstacle for the contributors to this volume. While all of them had to condense information, especially the various contexts framing their specific projects, they did so responsibly, fully aware of seminal work on medievalism, and always with their audiences in mind. The result is a truly original achievement, one that locates medievalism across disciplinary, geographical, and cultural boundaries and teases it out of material culture as well as the realm of ideas. Not always obvious to contemporary observers of Canadian culture, the traces of medievalism revealed in these meticulously researched, expertly edited, and beautifully illustrated essays will invite others to delve deeper into the omnipresent forms of the reception of medievalia within the cultural construct now known as Ontario. Kathryn Brush’s valuable volume certainly has renewed my enthusiasm about identifying and investigating medievalisms in my own surroundings, the somewhat unlikely international Mecca of medievalists, Kalamazoo, Michigan, USA.

Richard Utz, Western Michigan University

Koman, A Who's Who of Your Ancestral Saints

2011-04-11T08:39:00.004-04:00

Alan J. Koman, A Who’s Who of Your Ancestral Saints, Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 2010.

Reviewed by Karl Fugelso (kfugelso@towson.edu)

In a departure from most medievalism, Alan J. Koman concentrates not on cultural references to the Middle Ages, but on genealogical links to it, specifically his own. In Part One of his tripartite book, he lists twenty-four of the “great men and women of medieval Europe” to whom he is related, including such luminaries as William the Conqueror and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Immediately beneath each of those entries, he names saints who qualify as either “Direct Ancestors” or “Aunts and Uncles” of the fab twenty-four. And in Parts Two and Three he gives a brief biography of each saint, their lineage, and the sources for that information.

Given that the book describes Koman as a lawyer by trade, “lifetime Catholic,” and first-time author in the fields of genealogy and hagiography, we may not be surprised that the biographies are wrapped around unwarranted assumptions, the lineages are presented with far too much confidence, and the sources tend to be extremely general and/or outdated. But to Koman’s great credit, he never presents himself as a professional medievalist or (other) scholar of the Middle Ages; he has humble expectations for his book, as he claims he will be satisfied if it “helps anyone to prepare at any level for the moment when all will be revealed”; and he foregrounds many issues that deserve our attention.

Chief among these is the definition of the Middle Ages. Koman locates them exclusively in Europe and dates them from the fall of the Roman Empire to shortly after the Western Church “universally recognized” the papal monopoly on beatification. But many other writers have located them far beyond the borders of anything that could be called “Western,” much less “European,” and some scholars have even identified them as a parallel but independent development in such distant lands as Japan, Cambodia, and Peru. These other Middle Ages may range widely in date, as they are rarely related to the Fall of Rome or the rise of the Renaissance, but their end tends to be particularly slippery, for, like many characterizations of its counterpart in Europe, it is often treated as a wane. Rather than being dated to the fall of an empire or another comparatively quick and dramatic event, it is frequently portrayed as a series of developments in a range of political, cultural, and economic circumstances. Beginning with the very choice of contexts in which it is supposedly found, it becomes a highly subjective determination that points to the elusiveness of our field and the challenges we face in finding common ground. Indeed, it opens up the possibility that there is no validity at all in making or studying references to the Middle Ages, other than in arguing we are chasing a chimera.

It also touches on another, closely related problem in much of medievalism, one that takes an unusual twist in Koman’s book. While generally characterizing the Middle Ages as long ago and far away, many medievalists treat particular references to this era not as reconstructions, revivals, or (other) returns, but as continuities. Koman, for example, invites us to find inspiration, comfort, and pride in bloodlines with figures that are “standing before the throne of God” because they led exemplary lives during far more difficult times than our own. Like many other medievalists, he exoticizes the Middle Ages even as he portrays some aspects of them as thoroughly familiar.

Indeed, he joins many of his colleagues in constructing a very particular, if not peculiar, Middle Ages. He, too, inserts enough documented details to lend his vision an aura of authenticity, yet aggressively shapes those details to serve his agenda, as when he claims Ermengarde of Zutphen “was a very devout and generous person. She and [her first husband] Gerard enlarged a church at Zutphen. She also made three pilgrimages to Rome during which notable miracles are said to have occurred.” And, as we can see from that example, he, too, frequently wrap the details in speculation and assumptions that do not always admit their hypothetical nature and are often delivered in an authoritative manner. He, too, presents the Middle Ages not as a fragmentary past that cannot even be described without bias, but as a knowable setting that definitely gave rise to at least some virtues of a preferred community.

Of course, as I have already suggested, the particularities of Koman’s vision do not prevent him from sharing in many stereotypes that still pervade our field, especially among those who make, rather than study, references to the Middle Ages. His illustrious ancestors stand like giants above a world of cruelty, mud, and ignorance. In their proximity to Christ and resistance to far greater challenges than our own, they evince a purer and more zealous spirituality. In fact, like many a character in modern art and literature, they shine like beacons from what Koman describes as the “Dark Ages.”

All of which is not to say we should dismiss Koman’s work, much less give up on medievalism. Indeed, A Who’s Who of Your Ancestral Saints points to the wonderful inclusiveness of, and opportunities in, our field. Even the most offhand, undocumented reference to the Middle Ages falls within our purview and may reveal much about the contexts in which it was made. And a work as sincere, ambitious, and engaging as Koman’s constitutes an unusually large and exceptionally clear window to many aspects of modern American culture. It may not meet the highest standards of professional medievalism, but, not least in that very shortcoming, it should be of interest to all medievalists, and, in fact, all who seek the present in the past.

Karl Fugelso

Towson University

Chwast, Dante's Divine Comedy: A Graphic Adaptation

2011-01-28T08:51:00.012-05:00

Seymour Chwast. Dante's Divine Comedy. A Graphic Adaptation (New York, Berlin, and London: Bloomsbury, 2010).

Reviewed by Karl Fugelso

"Film Noir Meets Medieval Monument: Seymour Chwast’s Adaptation of Dante’s Divine Comedy"

Every interpretation is, to some degree, a self-portrait. And that may never be more obvious than when, as in Seymour Chwast’s first graphic novel, the interpreter refracts his or her response through another context, through a filter that has roots outside of both the world in which he or she operates and the one that gave rise to his or her subject.

A well-respected New York artist born in 1931, Chwast has cast the Comedy as a film noir. In 127 pages of pen-and-ink drawings, Dante tromps through hell, purgatory, and heaven in a trenchcoat, fedora, and sunglasses, with a pipe jutting from his perpetual scowl. Although he crosses wild landscapes, meets traditional denizens of the afterworld, and sometimes falls into a swoon that would make Sam Spade cringe, he also passes through speakeasies, burlesque theaters, and carnivals, encounters dapper dons, pug-nosed thugs, and gangster molls, and narrates his story in a fashion that would make any gumshoe proud.

In sentences as short and to the point as a bullet, he paraphrases the action, circumstances, and/or dialogue in each major episode. In Inferno 3, he notes, “Capt. Charon ferries the new dead souls across the river to the other side”; in Purgatorio 27 he observes, “An angel wants us to ascend to the earthly paradise. But I am tired”; and in Paradiso 31, he says, “I am forever grateful for your guidance, Beatrice,” as she joins the other souls in the mystic rose. On occasion, his narrative is augmented by maps, labels, and remarks from other characters, as when Virgil says of the hypocrites, “The[ir] clothes are very heavy…they are lined in lead.” And the illustrations often reinforce or supplement the protagonist’s comments. But Chwast’s inscriptions give far more than they get, for, without them, perhaps only the most visually literate dantisti could relate the illustrations to the Comedy.

Besides being distanced from Dante’s text by a thick veneer of film noir, the images are often so minimalist that even direct references to the Comedy may be overlooked. In the fourth of four scenes for Inferno 11, for example, a foreground figure of Aristotle in a beard and toga, but without shading or texture, stares towards us as he points a thumb towards a bar graph that would be incomprehensible without an arrow pointing to it and saying, “Reasons for Different Levels of Punishment,” as well as labels below the bars reading “not so bad,” “very bad,” and “terrible,” and labels above the bars reading, respectively, “no self-control,” “malice,” and “insane brutality.” In the second of three scenes for Paradiso V, which would be equally incomprehensible without (and perhaps even with) a label saying, “In the sphere of Mercury,” we are given a bird's-eye view of Dante and Beatrice in a white circle interrupted by clouds and surrounded by a black sky sprinkled with stars and the sun. And in the second of two scenes for Paradiso 34, a profile figure of Dante stares up from within an inverted blank “v” at a black sky whose particular meaning hinges on the quote above it: “‘At this point power failed high fantasy/ But, like a wheel in perfect balance turning,/ I felt my will and my desire impelled/ By the love that moves the sun and other stars.’”

Indeed, at least some of the illustrations are so crude that they may cast doubt on Chwast’s ability to faithfully convey even their basic subject, much less his perceptions of the Comedy and/or film noir. In Inferno 1, the woods in which Dante finds himself are represented by a dense pattern of thick scribbles that parallel the surface of the page and do not seem to overlap each other or cast shadows. In Purgatorio 23, the gluttonous have shaky heads with facial features that comprise merely: “j”s, “u”s, or dots for noses; overtly scribbled rectangles or inverted commas for eyes; and wobbly rectangles, circles, “w”s, or upside-down “v”s for mouths. And in Paradiso 16 every building behind Cacciaguida is seen from a different angle, and sometimes more than one.

Yet these seemingly crude approaches often represent inspired storytelling and clever echoes of fourteenth-century art. The maze of scribbles in Inferno 1 is not only appropriate for a wood in which Dante has apparently lost himself, but also invokes the patterned backdrops in trecento paintings. The primitive heads in Purgatorio 23 trade Renaissance illusionism for far more visceral expressions of starvation. And as Cacciaguida refers back to the twelfth century, the buildings behind him match a late-medieval convention for distinguishing an architectural backdrop from the immediate circumstances of a foreground figure.

Of course, this deceptively subtle style meshes well with film noir, the Comedy, and graphic novels, for all three are sophisticated yet accessible. Dante weaves a complex political program and profound spiritual insights into a gossipy tale peppered with bawdy references and couched in the vernacular of his main victim—Florence. Film noir dwells on deep moral ambiguities in lurid tales of sex, drugs, and (proto-) rock and roll, not to mention violence. And graphic novels wrap the pictorial immediacy of comic books around overtly high-brow themes and extremely intricate plots (often by writers linked to art-house cinema and coffee-house literature).

But it is perhaps in the differences between these layers, particularly the Comedy and film noir, that we can find the greatest value in Chwast’s interpretation. As he boils Dante’s text down to what many an on-line reviewer has compared to a “Cliff’s Notes,” he concomitantly remarks on the subtlety of its language. As he interrupts his film noir with human-headed serpents and other fantastical elements, he underscores the creative limitations of that genre. And as he foregrounds those and other gaps between the two, he points to the many challenges of interpreting the past, particularly the impossibility of perfect knowledge, complete articulation, and absolute objectivity. He reminds us that we cannot fully understand what something means to anyone other than ourselves, and perhaps even to ourselves.

Indeed, as he himself demonstrates, we can perhaps gain greater insight on an interpreter—and find fresher perspectives on his or her subject—when he or she does not even pretend to completely comprehend a subject, much less to fully reconstruct it. In using an obvious mash-up to showcase what I, in my subjectivity, see as his perceptions of the common denominators between the Comedy and film noir, he sets those parallels against a backdrop of himself (and us). He advertises that he at least facilitated any common denominators we perceive, and he invites us to see them, and the rest of his subject(s) as if through his eyes.

With any luck, he will also inspire other artists to blatantly interpret medieval monuments via cultural systems that have not hitherto been associated with the Middle Ages. Rather than, say, burying an essay on 19th-century capitalism amid a painting of 12th-century serfs, or just dropping a Nike logo into the middle of a film about 14th-century knights, they, too, will hopefully wrap broad and deep analogies in obvious and substantial differences. Without effacing themselves or insisting that they are presenting the truth, they, too, will hopefully give us original and extensive responses to both the Middle Ages and their ostensible lens(es).

Karl Fugelso

Towson University

de Groot, The Historical Novel

2010-11-17T22:03:00.004-05:00

Jerome de Groot, The Historical Novel (London and New York: Routledge, 2010)

Reviewed by Lesley A. Coote (L.A.Coote@hull.ac.uk)

This small volume is part of Routledge’s ‘New Critical Idiom’ series. The general introduction to the series states that it seeks to extend the lexicon of literary terms in view of ‘radical changes in the study of literature in the last decades of the twentieth century’. This, of course, is hedging one’s bets in the manner which is customary for such statements; the idea of ‘a lexicon of literary terms’ suggests the imposition of parameters which might clash with the stated ideal of radical approach. This results in a collection of ‘bolded’ terms in the main body of the text, which are then explained in a glossary at the end. It implies the selection of some ideas as canonical: why do established terminologies stand out, and not newer, arguable more interesting ones such as ‘glocalisation’, a term attempting to describe the localised narratives with transnational qualities of writers such as Salman Rushdie and Orhan Pamuk? However, this does not detract overmuch from the real quality of the volume, in which the author interprets the series brief in his own way, thereby fulfilling the other, more interesting and useful, series aims – clarity of exposition, adventurousness of perspective, breadth of application and the opening up of many possible avenues of investigation. In this case, the last of these aims is not confined to the apparent generic boundaries of this particular volume. The book raises many interesting questions, offering some possible answers, but it is also humbly written, acknowledging that these are only one set of ‘possibles’ whilst allowing for the reader to seek and offer more. The series as a whole offers insights into a variety of very useful topics, and is entirely to be recommended, but this book is, for me, one of its highlights.

Jerome de Groot begins by asking a question: why is fiction set in the past enjoying such popularity in mass media culture at the moment? Having acknowledged that he will be concentrating on the ‘romance’ narrative rather than more psychological forms of historical fiction such as the novels of Jane Austen, he begins a chronologically-based (narrative?) exposition of the genre, of its development, its construction and meanings. In the light of this, he also touches upon issues of audience response, although there is still much to be done here, and in most of the areas he opens up. He might have added that he is also not dealing with ‘edutainment’, raising more questions about how far works such as Ian Mortimer’s Time Traveller’s Guide to the Middle Ages or Channel 4’s Time Team are actually ‘historical factual’, ‘historical fiction’ or at least ‘historical narrative’ by comparison with the novels he describes. What are the quantative and qualitative differences between an established academic such as Ian Mortimer or Robert Bartlett and a highly-informed entertainer-presenter such as Tony Robinson or Terry Jones, or any number of ‘expert talking heads’ in the minds of their television audiences? When de Groot then discusses the idea of the ‘levelling’ and hybrid generic qualities of the historical novel from Waverley to Wolf Hall, the subject becomes even more absorbing. Are these qualities illustrative of a tendency towards anti-intellectualism, or are they semi-intellectual, pan-intellectual or even pseudo-intellectual? And what does this tell us about our society, on its own and in relation to its forbears, and to other societies? As de Groot points out, we must look behind, forensically examine even, the idea that to read historical narrative fiction is to be somehow ‘duped’ by a fabricating author. He examines this idea in relation to Sir Walter Scott, pointing out that Scott was dogged by the ‘masculine’, rational and scholarly reading and writing of history, which marked the reading and writing of narrative fiction as feminised, hysterical, corporeal and, above all, false. By creating Waverley as a form of bildungsroman, in which the hero journeys into, and flirts with, Scotland’s backward-looking Jacobite past, but learns to grow up, be a man of reason and a forward-looking modern subject (in all senses of the word) of imperial Britain, Scott did much to reclaim the respectability of the genre, and to enable future, male-orientated, historical narratives whilst retaining the past as romance.

The chronological nature of the book is logical, although it does tend to separate some subjects from interesting ideas which might be applied to them. For example, the issue of Scott’s nationality and any feminised associations resulting therefrom is raised in a later part of the narrative: ideas have to be related back and forth due to the quandary of where precisely to mention them. This is, however, worth the effort. The idea of Horace Walpole writing The Castle of Otranto in order to be free of the Enlightenment, and to indulge in irrationality, sensuality and horror by imagining the past as savage, mysterious, sexual, Catholic, chaotic and dangerous, is one which can be applied to much later Gothic fiction, and also to the world of neo-medieval gaming, with some profit – even if it is not the whole story. De Groot traces this idea back to Cervantes’s Don Quixote, in which a romanticized idea of the past leads to madness. He might also have added some seventeenth-century examples, much closer to his assessment of Walpole, in particular the ‘secret memoir’ phenomenon and the work of Daniel Defoe within it. In the early days of the genre, the novel was a source of anxiety, in that it might excite the immature female reader, and emasculate the immature male one. This argument also raises what de Groot refers to as the ‘popular’ idea of history as process, and as progress. If the past was like this, we must be better (more scientifically advanced, more rational) than them. In other words, the past is an Other against which the readers of the novel (as a mass medium, therefore most people ) want to define themselves. Again, this issue of individual and mass identity is more of a question than an answer...

Another powerful idea put forward for discussion is how the readers of historical narrative fiction have, and do still, view the past. The novel (and one might add, many other media and genres) collapses the distance between the past and the present, by making what is very different seem more familiar, and approachable. Fiction, film, television, and in a more stylised manner, video games offer feelings of live contact with the past, with characters from the historical past, or ‘living’ in a historical setting. Whilst stating that modern mass market audiences usually prefer this contact to be untroubled by epistemological concerns, de Groot also raises issues inherent in such past/present mediation. He discusses ‘mainstream’ historical fiction for women, and for men, since the 1950s, and notes some of the major, gendered differences between them. Novels with a female target audience prefer stories about relationships, sex and love in a marginal, social setting, whilst those with a male trajectory indulge in female stereotyping, conventionally heroic behaviour, with highly individualised role models in political settings. Interestingly, there is a class-based character to this – the heroes are usually lower or middle class, frequently taking an important yet marginal part in great political events. Many examples are given (the book is a goldmine of references for those beginning study in this field), with some interesting descriptions and analyses, from Barbara Cartland and Georgette Heyer to Bernard Cornwell, from Regency belles to Sharpe. There is a section on writings about Anne Boleyn. I would add that much recent ‘bestseller’ writing tends to take up conservative positions with regard to history: is there much difference in general overall outlook between Children of the New Forest and The Devil’s Whore? Both are of the understanding that tradition, order and royalism are generally good things and to be preferred to republicanism and revolution. De Groot’s question is, therefore, a VERY apt one – does this type of fiction make history more accessible, or does it close it off?

In a section on postmodernity and the historical novel, which actually invites us beyond postmodernity, de Groot deals with the transgressive nature of the genre. Even novels which take up generally conservative positions offer what he terms ‘a challenge to history’. He notes how later twentieth-century writers offer challenges to traditional social structures and ideas about them, Catherine Cookson’s challenge to the position of women and the poor in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century society, for example. The very use of marginal characters such as females, children/young adults and lower- or middle-class males (often feminised or marginalised in ‘official’ historical accounts or early romance writing) as heroes is a challenge to traditional means of telling ‘history’. It, too, is writing in – and sometimes from – the gaps of history. Marginalised individuals and societies have recently discovered the benefits of storytelling from these gaps, and de Groot’s book has a section on these. He includes women’s writing, colonial and ethnic minority writing, as well as discussing the drawbacks and benefits of contrafactual history such as the Nazi victory in the Second World War which forms the backdrop to Robert Harris’s Fatherland. An analytic account of historical novels which exploit the epistemological issues and tensions of the space between author and historical events, author and audience includes work from Orlando to Atonement, in which the author questions the trustworthiness not only of the author’s account, but of ‘history’ itself. The discussion includes a section on historical detective fiction which, de Groot maintains, arises from an awareness of the mediation of history across different spaces of historical time. Umberto Eco is a seminal figure in these developments, of course, and de Groot has – predictably but nonetheless very good for all that – a small section on The Name of the Rose.

Of course, when history is challenged it has a tendency to challenge us back. One of the phenomena noted in this book is the tendency, the necessity maybe, of writers to insert contemporary characters into the past, in order to avoid audience alienation and to make the hero more plausible. Philip Pullman’s Sally Lockhart would strain the credulity of a Victorian middle-class girl, and – to use a really up-to-date example – Ariana Franklin’s Adelia Aguilar has to be inserted into twelfth-century England with a heavy dose of belief suspension. Jerome de Groot notes that for George Eliot, a middle-class woman who really lived in the historical straightjacket provided by society for women, the social ending was ‘almost a tragedy’. These tendencies to modernise, indeed to colonise, the past, lie just beyond the scope of de Groot’s little book, but they form a logical codicil to it. Maybe, ultimately or at least for now, they lie outside the written or printed page, and on the screen, or the monitor. Arguably, up to now the mass market has rejected the influence of postmodernity, but recent work commissioned and promoted by the BBC has embraced it. Not only that, but programmes such as Bleak House, Desperate Romantics, Jekyll and Sherlock – not to mention (and who wouldn’t?) the cult classic Doctor Who, which enacts this colonisation – have also proved highly popular with their British audiences. It may be that what is dangerous historiographically is seen to be ‘safe’ and acceptable from such a traditional, institutionally stable, broadcaster. Is all historiography really colonisation, and is history postcolonially defying and reshaping us?

There is, of course, an obvious elephant in the room (or the book), a heavily implied, unasked and possibly unanswerable question: does it matter? When reading The Death Maze, for example, it matters very much to me (knowing what I do about Gothic and Edward III) that a twelfth-century building is described as having a fan vaulted ceiling, or that the arms of Henry II are said to be quartered with the fleur-de-lys of France, but for others those are uninteresting if important details. Their importance lies in the fact that there IS detail, and that it seems plausible within the context of what is ‘known’ culturally about the European Middle Ages. Such plausible detail is seen by the ‘general’ reader to be the seal of authenticity, of realism. But that leads into another avenue. Jerome de Groot is a gifted reader, a very good critical analyst and writer. I hope that this review has demonstrated some of the inspirational quality of his book. Its subject is historical novels of the ‘romantic’ kind, but its implications go far beyond that. And, like many of the examples which are the objects of this study, it’s a really good read.

Lesley A. Coote

University of Hull

Haydock/Risden, eds. Hollywood in the Holy Land

2010-11-16T22:24:00.009-05:00

Nickolas Haydock and E. L. Risden, eds., Hollywood in the Holy Land: Essays on Film Depictions of the Crusades and Christian-Muslim Clashes. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009.

Reviewed by Michael R. Evans (evans2m@cmich.edu)

This collection of essays is more expansive and inclusive than the title would suggest; it covers depictions on the big and small screen of crusades to the Holy Land, the Baltic crusades of the Teutonic Knights, the Templars and the Templar conspiracy theory genre, El Cid, medieval France, the Arabian Nights, and modern Christian dispensationalist apocalyptic fantasies. As might be expected from such a wide range of subject matter, and from a dozen contributors drawn from both literary and film studies, the quality of the essays is variable, but at its best the work shines a revelatory light on the western media treatment of the Muslim world and the Middle Ages. One contributor, John Ganim, is also the author of the book Orientalism and Medievalism, and these two themes figure prominently in most of the essays.

Haydock sets the scene in his introduction in which he contextualizes media treatments of the Muslim ‘Other’ in the age of the ‘War on Terror’. As well as critiquing recent Hollywood treatments of Muslims and the Middle East, he also challenges a recent turn toward crusades apologetics among some medieval historians such as Thomas Madden, whose writings in the conservative media portray the crusades as a ‘in every way a defensive war’ against an Islam described in Orientalist terms as an ‘opulent empire.’ (fn. 1)

Several essays focus on the core theme of the movies’ treatment of the Crusades to the Holy Land. Movies including Robin Hood (Allan Dwan, 1922), The Crusades (Cecil B. De Mille, 1935) An-Nasir Salah ad-Din (Youssef Chahine, 1963), Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (Kevin Reynolds, 1991) and Kingdom of Heaven (Ridley Scott, 2005) treated the crusades either as their central theme or as in important background element. Lorraine Stock’s essay on western crusades movies, and Paul B. Sturtevant’s on Chahine’s Salah ad-Din both relate how movie depictions of the crusades reflect contemporary political attitudes. Stock demonstrates how film versions of the crusades changed to reflect American attitudes to contemporary warfare, from the Douglas Fairbanks Robin Hood’s reflection of recent memories of World War 1 to Prince of Thieves’ ambivalent view of the Islamic world in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War, in which the U.S., had fought against a Muslim Arab power alongside Muslim Arab allies. Sturtevant demonstrates how Chahine’s portrayal of Saladin reflects the propaganda program of Nasser in support of Arab unity against Israel and the West. These are important papers in dealing with the core them of the book, but there is a danger in reducing art to a mere cipher that reads ‘X in the movie = Y in contemporary politics’. Sturtevant fails to fully recognize the complexity of Chahine’s vision, which discriminates between avaricious and idealistic members of the crusader forces; for example, Richard I is presented in a positive light, when it would surely have been more politically expedient, only seven years after the Suez Crisis of 1956, to present both Richard and Philip II of France as aggressive imperialists.

Several contributions address the subject matter from a more purely cinematic as well as a social and political perspective. A good example of this is Ganim’s essay ’Framing the West, Staging the East’ in which he argues that the cinematic framing of what he terms ‘Middle Easterns’, borrowing from the visual vocabulary of the ‘Western’ and from Orientalist paintings of the Middle East, creates an often clichéd vision of the Muslim world.

Although Orientalism is a key theme of the book, the films under discussion are at times perhaps treated a little too kindly, when more could have been said about their Orientalist elements. For example Risden, in an incisive article on the use of a Muslim ‘buddy’ in Hollywood medievalism, contrasts The Thirteenth Warrior favorably against other film treatments of the Muslim Other (notably Prince of Thieves), while missing the movie’s own Orientalism. Writing at the time of the film’s release, Ziauddin Sardar commented that it had merely added a layer of nuance to ‘the exotic Arabia of western imagination, complete with semi-clad veiled women, a Scheherazade, an ugly and conniving vizier and a despotic caliph.’ (fn. 2) Likewise, Kingdom of Heaven (1999), Ridley Scott’s bold but flawed attempt at a multiculturalist approach to the events leading to the Third Crusade, is treated sympathetically by Risden, overlooking the scene where Balian, newly arrived in Outremer, teaches the art of digging wells to Palestinian fellahin who were, presumably, completely unaware of such a concept before the arrival of the enlightened westerner.

The contributors might have been more critical in approaching the idea of 9/11. Many of them refer to it, and the whole ‘War on Terror’ casts its shadow across the subject matter of the book, but all take ‘9/11’ at face value. Yet has not the whole concept of ‘9/11’ itself become a media artifact, increasingly unhooked from the actual events of September 11 2001? A critique of medievalist presentations of ‘9/11’ and ‘Ground Zero’ in the media would have been fruitful in relation to the subject matter of this work. The ‘Hallowed Ground’ of the former World Trade center has become for many Americans akin to a medieval pilgrimage site, as demonstrated in the current (as of September 2010) furor over the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’. The real atrocity of September 11 has been overshadowed by the atrocity story of ‘9/11’, the universal excuse used to conduct war in the Middle East, just as atrocity stories about Muslim persecution of Christians were used by Urban II to build enthusiasm for the First Crusade.
On a production note, there are unfortunately many printing errors and much inconsistent orthography throughout the book. It may seem pedantic to comment on these issues, but errors such as references to ‘Muslin warriors’ detract from the seriousness of the tone, leading the reader to speculate on how a Muslin warrior might have fared against a Hessian horseman. Likewise, missing diacriticals might lead the reader to questions the writers’ or editors’ knowledge of foreign languages, especially when one contributor admits to basing his analysis of the dialog in an Arabic-language film solely on the English subtitles (p. 143).

It would be wrong, however, to make too much of the book’s flaws. This is the first scholarly work on this subject, and the study of medievalist film as a whole is in its early days. There are many excellent essays in the collection that deserve more attention from this reviewer than space restrictions allow, notably Tom Shippey’s and Kevin J. Harty’s chapters on the political context of the movie El Cid (Anthony Mann, 1961); Nickolas Haydock’s discussion of Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938) alongside lesser-known film depictions of the Baltic Crusades from the Eastern Bloc; and Lynn Ramey’s essay on post-war French racial politics in the film Le Chanson de Roland (Frank Cassenti, 1978). The editors and contributors are to be congratulated for a thought-provoking foray in a developing field, and we can look forward to scholars in the future building upon the arguments advanced in this collection.

Michael R. Evans
Central Michigan University

Notes:
1) Thomas F. Madden, ‘Crusades Propaganda: The abuse of Christianity’s holy wars,’ National Review, 2 November 2001.
2) Ziauddin Sardar, ‘A Traveller’s Tale,’ New Statesman and Society, September 6 1999.

Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre Dame

2010-08-23T21:12:00.004-04:00

Michael Camille. The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame: Medievalism and the Monsters of Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.

Reviewed by Janice Mann (jemann@bucknell.edu)

With the untimely death of Michael Camille in 2002, the history of medieval art lost one of its most astute and original interpreters. His scholarship as a whole is erudite without being dulled by excessive detail and informed by critical theory without being obfuscating. Unlike that of many postmodern art historians, Camille’s focus never strays too far from the images and the way they communicate their meaning to inform life in the past and now. He came to scholarship at a moment when new epistemologies brought to the fore by French critical theorists such as Foucault were beginning to displace restrictive modern, putatively objective intellectual practices in art history and other disciplines, creating a kind of openness, optimism, and excitement in the field. He introduced his students and readers to a new, exciting view of medieval ages by bringing the marginal into the mainstream, claiming equality between the carnal and the spiritual, and elevating the commonplace to the level of the elite.

The broad themes of Camille’s earlier works – the instability of identity, the significance of the marginal space as a site of extraordinary and subversive creativity, the unassailable link between the medieval and the modern – are explored again in his last book, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame: Medievalism and the Monsters of Modernity, published posthumously in 2009. This lavishly illustrated book is divided into two parts. Part one examines the creation of the famous chimeras of Notre-Dame de Paris during the restoration of the cathedral executed during the turbulent years between 1843 and 1864 by Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc and Jean-Baptist Lassus. The second part explores the afterlife of these medievalizing sculptures over the last 150 years and how they were incorporated into the work of artists as varied as the photographer Charles Nègre and the cartoonist Walt Disney.

The section of the book that explores the restoration of Notre-Dame is remarkable for the breadth of the material Camille covers in pursuit of learning how Lassus and Viollet-le-Duc conceived the fifty-four chimeras that still decorate the cathedral’s balustrade today. These snarling and shrieking creatures that gaze attentively with wide-eyed stares over the city of Paris from above may have an affinity with medieval sculpture, but they are the product of a 19th-century imagination according to Camille. Consulting the Journal des travaux, a day-by-day record of the work; drawings by Lassus and by Viollet-le-Duc, 14 of which were newly discovered by Camille; personal correspondence, various reports, and Viollet-le-Duc’s published works, Camille traces the history of the restoration from proposal to finish. He gives comprehensiveness to this history by emphasizing not just the roles of the well-known architects, clergy, and government officials but also the contributions of the carvers and masons who executed their ideas in stone. In particular, Camille rescues Victor Joseph Pyanet, who carved the chimeras from Lassus’s and Viollet-le-Duc’s drawings, from obscurity. Prior to Camille, most authors have automatically attributed the chimeras to Adolphe-Victor Geoffroy-Duchaume, who was the supervisor of the sculptors’ workshop.

In the first half of the book Camille also traces how the romantic fiction of Victor Hugo shaped the chimeras. He sees them as the “direct descendents” of the monstrosity of Hugo’s Quasimodo and credits Notre-Dame de Paris with establishing the cathedral’s balustrade and towers as a site of spectacle and as a vantage point for the panorama of Parisian life observed below. Camille links the creation of the best-known of all the chimeras, the pensive demon or le stryge, to Hugo’s interest in the devil. For Hugo, as for the historian Jules Michelet, Satan was a symbol of human freedom, “negative but creative and productive.” The pensive demon with his chin resting thoughtfully in his hands embodies a romantic evil, according to Camille, that sees all from above with a detached and melancholic air.

Camille’s observations on Hugo’s influence lead to an examination of other cultural factors that conditioned contemporary viewers’ understanding of the chimeras. The physiognomy of the gargoyles aligned them with certain racist stereotypes. For example, the curved hooknose of the pensive demon would have been understood as an anti-Semitic statement, as would the sculpture of the old man with a pointed hat and a flowing beard that Camille interprets as Ahasvérus, the wandering Jew. Somewhat less convincing is Camille’s equation of some of the chimeras with the city’s “dangerous classes” – the insane, criminals, and migrant laborers -- because of their muscularity and savage appearance. Camille ends this section of the book by noting how the political climate and public mood had changed over the 20-year period of the restoration. At the beginning of the restoration the chimeras were understood as Gothic fantasies, but by its end they were perceived as signs of darkness and oppression. He goes so far as to claim in the light of the clearing of the ancient slums around the cathedral and the Haussmannization of Paris, that the newly restored Notre-Dame became a tombstone marking the death of the medieval city.

The second part of Camille’s book explores how Notre-Dame’s chimeras have stirred the imagination of artists and observers from the time of their completion to the present day and how subsequent interpretations shift the meaning of the originals. The first artist to reproduce the chimeras was the printmaker Charles Méryon, whose 1854 etching of the pensive demon, renamed the melancholy demon, surrounded by swooping birds, marks the beginning of the afterlife of the sculptures. According to Camille, Méryon understood the chimeras not as external embodiments of evil but as tortured states of mind. The printmaker, who ended his life in an asylum, made the monsters his own and tried to control them through representation.

In a chapter entitled “Monsters of Light” Camille investigates the work of photographers, such as Charles Nègre and Henri Le Secq, who carried bulky, large format view cameras up the stairs to Notre-Dame’s balustrade in order to take photographs of themselves and others in the midst of the chimeras. Particularly interesting in the section is Camille’s close analysis of the way different photographic processes, for instance the albumin printing technique or wet plate collodion process, create subtly different images. For Camille, the photograph has an uncanny ability to make the chimeras come to life, giving them the capacity to become sites of identification onto which viewers project their most intimate desires. It is no wonder then, that the chimeras by the end of the 19th century become associated with the dangers of female sexuality, prostitutes, and “sexual inverts.”

For instance, in Félicien Champsaur’s erotic work Lulu: Roman clownesque, 1900, the chimeras actually come alive to comment on the book’s heroine, Lulu, a trapeze-striptease artist. The author’s descriptions of the chimeras are sexually charged, occasionally including elements that do not actually exist in order to heighten the titillating nature of his text.

In the second to last chapter of the book, “Monsters of the Media,” Camille takes on the daunting task of exploring representations of the chimeras in the 20th-century’s new media, such as film and the internet. Postcards, surrealist images, esoteric tracts, Hollywood movies, New Yorker cartoons, and plastic squeaky toys are among the types of representations Camille examines. Although the afterlife of chimeras and gargoyles of Notre-Dame takes place in reproduction, Camille asserts that their meaning is still derived from their reference to mid-19th century Paris because Viollet-le-Duc’s restoration of Notre-Dame was the beginning of a commodified and modernized Middle Ages.

In the epilogue to the second part of the book Camille examines the deteriorated condition of the chimeras and the most recent restoration of Notre-Dame. According to Camille, the chimeras are about the constant disappearance of the past rather than its restoration. Now, as in the 19th century when they were first conceived, the chimeras served to move history forward rather than to create continuity between the past and present.

The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame’s thoroughness of research, erudition, and clarity of thought reveal the workings of an extraordinary scholarly mind. Although detailed, Camille’s prose is never turgid or jargon-laden. His ability to draw together evidence as disparate as top hats and Sigmund Freud’s student years in order to support his claim that Notre-Dame’s chimeras are as significant for modernity as Baudelaire’s flaneur or Benjamin’s arcades is worthy of admiration. The synthesis of literature, art history, critical theory, cultural history, and even the history of science will interest scholars in many fields. But what makes this book truly extraordinary are Camille’s wide-ranging curiosity and his compassionate commitment to understanding the human condition, which are evident on every page.

Janice Mann

Bucknell University

Marshall, ed., Mass Market Medieval

2010-08-17T21:11:00.003-04:00

David W. Marshall, ed., Mass Market Medieval: Essays on the Middle Ages in Popular Culture, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007.

Reviewed by Amy S. Kaufman

The commercial popularity of the Middle Ages and its seemingly perpetual marketability is sometimes taken for granted in studies of contemporary medievalism; we allow history’s commodification to pass by without comment on how and why the “medieval” is marketed, or more specifically, as David W. Marshall puts it in his introduction to Mass Market Medieval: Essays on the Middle Ages in Popular Culture, how “the European Middle Ages are packaged into easily consumable nuggets in a process that we might think of as shrink-wrapping time” (6). It is this aspect of medievalism—what sells about the Middle Ages, and what doesn’t—that forms the organizing query for Marshall’s diverse essay collection, which includes but also expands beyond analyzing commodification within traditional medievalist genres such as film and video games to explore heavy metal and silent film, lesson plans and tourism. Marshall’s introduction groups the essays thematically, explaining that they move from considering recent social concerns to the political uses of the Middle Ages, from politics to historiography, historiography to pedagogy, and pedagogy to the replication of medieval structures and forms. As one might imagine, there is a great deal of overlap and conversation among contributors and categories. The book is thus more network than narrative, appropriate in a volume that must address the peculiarities of medievalism via postmodernity.

Indeed, far from speaking in a unified voice about the commodification of the Middle Ages, the contributors reveal some fruitful disagreements: Paul Hardwick’s “ ‘If I Lay My Hands on the Grail’: Arthurianism and Progressive Rock,” laments the disappearance of romantically medievalist bands like King Crimson and The Moody Blues in the wake of punk rock’s cynical presentism, whereas Simon Trafford and Aleks Plukowski’s “Antichrist Superstars: The Vikings in Hard Rock and Heavy Metal,” problematizes the romantic medieval longings in music by pointing out that the “semiotic system” of medievalism can lend itself to the glorification of nationalism, hyper-masculinity, and white supremacy (65).

Medievalism is often ideologically conflicted: the contemporary longing for history can be at odds with the distance we want to place between ourselves and the ‘barbaric past.’ Marshall has paired two essays in this collection, Lesley Jacobs’s “Idealized Images of Wales in the Fiction of Edith Pargeter/Ellis Peters” and Benjamin Earl’s “Places Don’t Have to Be True to Be True: The Appropriation of King Arthur and the Cultural Value of Tourist Sites” to reveal the more nuanced problematics of the past for a postcolonial culture with medieval roots. While Earl studies a Welsh Arthurian site that seeks to authenticate its own heritage by creating a fictional medieval past in the present (“King Arthur’s Labyrinth,” as Earl tells us, is actually a series of slate mines that closed in 1970) (102), Jacobs’s author, on the other hand, attempts to locate the present in the past through historical fiction that portrays the Welsh as more compassionate and less barbaric than their English colonizers—ultimately, as Jacobs puts it, “more in line with our contemporary democratic values” (100). Both fiction and tourism must reject England in order to authenticate Wales: Jacobs’s subject does so by portraying the English as the ‘real’ and therefore unenlightened medieval people, but Earl’s tourist industry depicts the English as usurpers and latecomers, advertising Welsh culture as older and, therefore, more authentically medieval. Thus, Jacobs and Earl not only showcase the conflicted longings of medievalism both to embrace and to distance itself from the past, but they also provoke readers to ponder whether colonized peoples are better off aligning themselves with a mythic past or an ‘enlightened’ present.

Authenticity is also at stake in the contributions on education. Whereas Carl James Grindley’s “Teaching the Middle Ages” advocates a series of sobering reminders of vast medieval class divisions and crushing sexism to help elementary school classrooms dispel an ever-present “skewed and potentially harmful view of the Middle Ages, one that centers on a flapping dragon being harassed by a little boy wielding a cardboard sword” (151), Daniel T. Kline’s “Virtually Medieval” reveals paths through which educators might teach history through fantasy. Kline argues that the video game Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings contains “historical ideas and cultural implications central to the game and pertinent in the classroom, even when academically suspect” (155). Whereas Grindley’s quest is to help child educators present their students with improved historical accuracy, Kline reminds us of “the inherent ‘messiness’ of history,” and he suggests that the postmodern “mash-up” of medieval representations in Age of Empires is a more promising educational tool than are linear historical narratives with particular ideological investments (165).

As Marshall’s introduction explains, studying medievalism requires applying two sets of lenses: comparing what is retained or reformulated from the Middle Ages with the contemporary reception of its fragments. The best pieces in Mass Market Medieval apply this double lens. Hannah R. Johnson’s elegant essay, “Medieval History and Cultural Forgetting: Oppositional Ethnography in The Templar Revolution,” examines a seductive revisionist history of the Provençal Magdalene but transcends the anticipated question of accuracy to conclude that revisionist history’s “insistence on the idea that the past has an agency, even a diffuse consciousness, is a fascinating response to postmodern agonizing about history’s fragility, its malleability in the hands of a skilled historian-narrator” (136). Alison Tara Walker’s keenly focused study of music in the silent film Häxan manages to capture the entirety of medievalism’s problematically divided attachments to the past and present by revealing the ways in which Häxan’s soundtrack struggles against its narrative, causing the film to waver between privileging the perceived emotions of the past and the ‘logical intellect’ of the present. Finally, Trafford and Pluskowski’s “Antichrist Superstars,” while conscious of the dangerous possibilities buried in the Viking imagery adopted by musicians, is also an exercise in pleasure and discovery, reminding us that some of the most passionate and creative engagement with the past can be found well outside the ivory tower.

Scholars already involved in medievalism may find a few of the other essays within Mass Market Medieval a bit diffuse and less theoretical than those listed above, but they are still useful surveys of medievalism that delineate fertile ground for future scholars. Furthermore, what the collection occasionally lacks in depth, it makes up for with an inspiring interdisciplinarity, and the range of tone and approach in its contents also makes Mass Market Medieval a useful teaching tool for introducing graduate or even undergraduate students to the study of medievalism. Marshall’s compelling inducements for studying popular medievalisms—that they “are frequently the first introduction to medieval studies” and that even pleasure “is a valid reason to pursue the field” (8)—may seem self-evident just these few years after he issued them. Papers on popular medievalism appear with great frequency at medieval studies conferences, the study of medievalism finds the occasional home in cultural studies programs, and journals like Studies in Medievalism and Arthuriana have long recognized the value of studying contemporary reproductions of the past. Still, the pleasures of both teaching and studying medievalism are so obviously enjoyed by the contributors to Mass Market Medieval that a thirst for future exploration, so often inspired by enthusiastic collections, is highly contagious to the reader.

Amy S. Kaufman
Middle Tennessee State University

Davis/Altschul, eds., Medievalism in the Postcolonial World

2010-08-11T21:09:00.003-04:00

Medievalism in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of “The Middle Ages” Outside Europe. Edited by Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2009.

Reviewed by Mustafa Kemal Mirzeler (mustafa.mirzeler@wmich.edu)

Outstanding reflexivity is the hallmark of Medievalism in the Postcolonial World. The essays in the volume showcase diverse epistemologies, theories, and methodologies as each contributor develops and blurs the boundaries between historical and spatial distinctions, between modern and medieval, between the west and the rest of the world. More importantly, many of the essays suggest the ending of the western political and academic hegemony that, in the past, has emphasized the distinctions between what is and is not medieval. Such distinctions, according to Dipesh Chakrabarty, the author of one of the response essays that accompany each section of this essay collection, “are actually and necessarily implicated in the history of European expansion into lands that eventually became European colonies” (p. 109).

As such, this volume is an expression of a crisis in Medieval Studies yet, at the same time, celebrates the exciting beginning of a new era in this field. It is an attempt to incorporate the historical dimensions of colonial and postcolonial worlds into medieval research and to understand so called “third world” societies within the contexts of their own significant historical traditions. The contributors approach Medievalism through the lens of colonial and postcolonial studies – a natural approach, as both disciplines involve as a tenet the ‘self’ and the ‘other,’ which contributes to the reflexivity characteristic of both fields.

While medieval and postcolonial studies are distinct yet interrelated fields, each investigates the remote and recent pasts. The scholars in this volume have perceived the ‘otherness’ of the past in their respective fields, and researchers in both fields draw inspiration from one another. Each chapter in this volume clarifies the contours of the rapprochement between the two fields. Thus, the ‘other’ medieval scholars have traditionally studied sheds light on the colonial ‘other,’ which is spatially, if not temporally, distanced from the coeval presence of the familiar medieval Europe. The medieval scholars’ ‘other’ has often been situated within Europe. The ‘colonial other’ often studied by European anthropologists in different cultural traditions is juxtaposed by various scholars in this volume with medieval ‘others’ in an attempt to negate and blur constructed boundaries. They thus avoid the reification of the imagined boundaries between colonial studies and Medievalism.

In Medieval Studies, various theories have been utilized by scholars of colonial and postcolonial studies to problematize the images of the Middle Ages in “non-European spaces” that preserve, complicate, confirm, and disrupt the categories traditionally relegated to the Middle Ages and postcoloniality. Each chapter in the volume amply demonstrates the irrelevance of distinct boundaries between Medievalism and postcolonialism as scholars of both fields engage in conversations about the shared histories of their respective fields.

A new form of historicized Medievalism and postcolonialism emerges from the epistemological exploration and conciliation of theories and practices. Such conciliations encourage the authors to see the ‘ironclad model’ of the Eurocentric grand narrative operating in popular scholarly works in Medieval Studies in a new light. The contributors expose the limitations of this grand narrative as it relates to postcolonial situations and spaces, showing how their predecessors incorrectly captured, filtered, and interpreted ‘others.’ They present convincing evidence that the histories of peoples outside of Europe do not, in many ways, correspond to the paradigm and construct of the European Middle Ages.

Furthermore, older generations of scholars seemed to have assumed that colonial contacts alone produced historical changes and enabled colonies to enter modernity. The authors of the volume confront this line of argument and explore the presence of the “Middle Ages” in non-European spaces, such as in Mali (Chapter 10), Latin America (Chapter 4), and Japan (Chapter 5), both before and after colonial contact. According to Sylvie Kande, for instance, the burden of representing Medieval Europe imposed on Africa by nineteenth-century scientific racism, later rehabilitated by African nationalism, is epitomized by the Malian Empire founded in the thirteenth century by Sundiata Keita. Victor Holiston puts forth a similar argument in his examination of Medieval Studies in South Africa.

Each chapter in the volume examines an aspect of Medievalism in the post-colonial world. José Rabasa, in the first chapter, for example, focuses on the process of colonial contact and colonization as a confrontation of practices, showing how institutions and systems of representation of a given habitus were transformed by Europeans to participate in the habitus of colonial power. For Rabasa, such practices were present in the “medieval manuscript culture” which erased Mesoamerican historiographic conventions, reducing the informants’ voices to factual historical information (p. 39). According to Dipesh Chakrabarty however, “Rabasa attempts to produce a narrative that resists absorbing pre-colonial Mesoamerica into the story of ‘European transition to capital and modernity’” (p. 113).

The conciliation between colonialism and medievalism in the volume promises a significant contribution to the way medievalists and postcolonial scholars make sense of Europe’s Middle Ages. What is it that medievalists and postcolonial scholars want from one another? What makes Medieval Studies attractive to those in postcolonial studies? Why do different aspects of these two fields appeal to the other at this specific historical moment? In this remarkable volume, the authors engage these questions through scholarly meditations on Medieval Studies and postcolonial theories. The volume is thoughtful, original, and compelling. The authors interweave sophisticated theoretical engagement with issues of medievalism and postcolonialism and provocatively juxtapose non-Western interpretations of the past with Western-centered grand narratives to expand their scholarly reach beyond their respective fields to include history and anthropology, philosophy and psychology, to name only a few. The authors demonstrate how contemporary global dynamics problematizes the past and transforms it in diverse ways, engendering competing symbolic constructs of national and political identities. In this volume, the political dynamism of medievalism, colonialism, and postcolonialism are unveiled when representations of histories are contested and seen as the lived experiences of contending actors. Students and scholars of Medievalism and postcolonialism, according to the authors, must remain aware that, whatever one’s theoretical perspective, historical processes, both in the western and non-western worlds, are multiple and influence one another dialogically in unexpected ways. The contributors to this volume emphasize this fact, showing how cultures often affect one another and appropriate ideas and images of the Middle Ages and modernity. Appropriation of both the medieval past and modernity by diverse cultures around the world must be evaluated as dialogical engagement between cultures within the coeval unfolding of historical processes.

According to the contributors, when we deny these processes, we face the problems posed by old and irrelevant dichotomies. ‘Self’ and ‘other’ and the Middle Ages and modernity are not antithetical. Each is ingrained in the other and each shares similar historical processes. In the same way, no medieval past is entirely disconnected from other worlds, and hence they must be understood in broader contexts. Thus, the contributors emphasize the complex relationships between ‘self’ and ‘other’ and demonstrate how the structure and meaning of histories are not only plural, as the authors in this volume suggest, but also strategically contested and negotiated by colonial and postcolonial actors.

Although no book can satisfy every reader, I do wish the contributors to the volume had taken into account, explicitly, the role of postmodernism since the 1980s in western and non-western academic fields, a process that has fostered similar conciliations between other fields, most notably between history and anthropology concerning the issue of spatial and temporal ‘others.’ This minor point aside, I highly recommend this book to both scholars of medievalism and colonialism, as well as scholars in other fields, such as history and anthropology. The volume is smart, persuasive, engaging, and provocative, and the contributors engage in a wide range of theoretical debates, from competing views on history and historicity to problems associated with capturing and recapturing colonial encounters in non-European spaces. The chapters in the book are not always easy to read, especially for those unfamiliar with theories of ‘postcolonialism’ and ‘medievalism,’ but this volume could well serve such yet uninitiated scholars as a solid foundation for continued discussion about medievalisms in the post-colonial world.

Mustafa Kemal Mirzeler

Western Michigan University

Saunders, Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism

2010-05-16T21:17:00.003-04:00

Clare Broome Saunders, Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Reviewed by Katie Lister (katielisterkt@yahoo.co.uk)

There have been many studies tracing the vogue for medievalism that flourished in the nineteenth century. Marc Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman; Kevin L. Morris, The Image of the Middle Ages in Romantic and Victorian Literature; Alice Chandler, A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in the Nineteenth-Century English Literature; Roger Simpson, Camelot Regained: The Arthurian Revival and Tennyson; and Kathleen Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism, are but some examples. Thus, the field of nineteenth-century Medievalism seems, prima facie, demonstrably well mapped. There is, however, a glaring omission in our present appreciation: the inclusion of Medievalism by women. Clare Broome Saunders sets about remedying the scant critical attention nineteenth-century female medievalists have received in her recent publication: Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism. In a detailed and thought provoking study, Saunders considers how women poets, translators, biographers and artists employ medieval motifs to explore and comment upon controversial socio-political issues that were usually considered ‘off limits’ to female criticism.

Saunders not only assesses well known writers, such as Elizabeth Barret Browning, Lady Charlotte Guest, and Felicia Hemans from the original perspective of female Medievalism, but also brings a host of less well known yet vital figures to modern scholarly attention. Writers and artists such as Louisa Stuart Costello, Dinah Mulock Craik, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Florence Harrison, and Anna Jameson inform much of Saunders’ contextualisation and present her readers with an exciting host of ‘new’ authors for future critical consideration.

Saunders does not limit her study to one medium of Medievalism but sources material through novels, poetry, historical texts, personal letters and diaries as well as paintings and photography. The result of such an inclusive approach is the revelation that the relatively untapped canon of female Medievalism is surprisingly vast, and when one begins to look for it, it is apparent in rather embarrassing quantities. Saunders suggests that a primary reason for the paucity of critical research on the subject is that female engagement with medieval culture was initially considered a quaint ‘feminine’ hobby rather than a serious study of any kind. Regardless of intellectual merit, female endeavours in Medievalism were often patronised as “elegant little works” or “charming little volumes” (Saunders 2009, 26) rather than worthy contributions to the male dominated field of nineteenth-century Medievalism. Subsequently, from initial publication, female Medievalism has never commanded the gravitas freely given to the works of male medievalists like Tennyson, Sir Thomas Percy or Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

However, endowing female medievalists with the intellectual gravitas they rightfully deserve is not a primary focus of Saunders’ work (although she achieves this objective throughout). Saunders identifies a distinct ‘female’ Medievalism and considers it along the dominant ‘male’ strain to revel in women’s frequently satirical and contradictory use of Medievalism. Read against the backdrop of the social and political upheaval that characterised the nineteenth century, Saunders shows how women writers commented on ‘hot topics’ of the day from a safe, yet highly subversive position. Should anyone question if Elizabeth Barrett Browning might have dared to comment on the barbaric nature of the Crimean war, they could be swiftly silenced with a reminder that her “charming little works” spoke only of an imagined past and that such discussion was not suitable for ladies.

Saunders explores female responses to nineteenth-century warfare in great detail and in particular the paradoxical relationship that existed between women and war: While women are ‘forbidden’ to interfere with the politics of war, they are always directly involved as victims, inciters, or camp followers. Saunders goes on to apply this paradox to female presentations of the archetypal medieval warrior woman, Joan of Arc, who is revered both as a revolutionary nationalist and a lunatic adolescent. Saunders explains how women writers made Joan acceptable to the nineteenth-century palate by sanitising her from all masculine associations, downplaying her role as general and war strategist, emphasising her virginity, youth, and religious devotion, and presenting her as a ‘domesticated’ heroine with all the virtues of a respectable Victorian lady. Whilst expunging her ‘medieval’ virtues seems to weaken Joan’s status as a feminist icon, this process allowed women to cast Joan as a role model to young girls, retain her status as a strong woman, and defend her reputation from those who would cast her as a foreign, gender confused, emasculating abomination.

In tandem with the figure of the warrior woman Saunders explores the concept of ‘Queenliness.’ What makes for a good Queen and concurrently what makes for a good woman informs much of Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism. This is hardly surprising given the accession of the young Queen Victoria and the cult of chivalry that flourished about her. Saunders explores nineteenth-century literary and artistic presentations of various historical Queens (e.g., Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I) as well as the fictional Queen Guinevere, and shows how nineteenth-century writers viewed their Victoria as a womanly ideal, the doting mother and wife. Saunders goes further and explores how Queen Victoria was able to draw upon the cult of medieval chivalry to secure her popularity whilst many female writers were deeply critical of the implicit gender structures that encourage female passivity. Just as Joan of Arc was made acceptable by ‘domesticating’ her strength, so too was the power of a Queen diluted by urging all women to become Queens in their own home.

In addition to demonstrating how Victorian women writers employed medieval motifs to popularise and accept Queen Victoria as monarch, Saunders gives over a large section of her work to investigating the female presentations of the adulterous, yet powerful Arthurian Queen Guinevere. Saunders traces female responses to Tennyson’s unsympathetic and condemnatory presentation of Guinevere in his Idylls of the King and reveals an earnest attempt by several female medievalists to reclaim Guinevere from his invective. Writers such as Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Violet Fane, and Sara Teasdale go some way in recasting the Queen as a victim of an unfeeling and impossible ‘perfect’ husband rather than the destroyer of Camelot. Other writers such as Landon and Costello choose to condemn Lancelot by heavily critiquing his role in the tale of Elaine of Astolat, known better as the Lady of Shalott. In showing Lancelot to be a medieval love rat, Guinevere is partially absolved of her adultery. As with Joan and Queen Victoria, Guinevere is cleansed of her medieval associations and tempered with nineteenth-century respectability.

Although many female medievalists, such as Costello, Elizabeth Elstob, and Susannah Dobson, clearly wished to revive an antiquarian interest in Medievalism through their various translations of obscure texts, Saunders argues that female Medievalism can be predominantly characterised by a desire to subvert and contradict ‘traditional’ medieval motifs. Issues such as warfare, female leadership, sexual morality and women’s rights all find expression through the writings of these female medievalists. Whilst many nineteenth-century male medievalists look for an imagined medieval world to inspire and inform their modern world, women medievalists use the Middle Ages to explore controversial issues, particularly issues of gender, and cast the period as one fraught with problems and paradoxes. Saunders argues that at the centre of female Medievalism is the desire to grant the iconic and passive female an articulated voice, expressed by women who re-read and re-write medieval legends.

Katie Lister

University of Leeds

Kemmler, trans., Be þam lytlan æþelinge

2010-03-05T21:15:00.003-05:00

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Be þam lytlan æþelinge. Trans. Fritz Kemmler. Neckarsteinach: Edition Tintenfaß, 2008.

Reviewed by Gwendolyn Morgan (gmorgan@english.montana.edu)

What may at first seem a whimsical effort, Fritz Kemmler’s Anglo-Saxon translation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s classic children’s story Le Petit Prince (English, The Little Prince) is significant to scholars for two reasons. First, it provides teachers and students of Old English with an effective and pleasant instructional tool, offering a number of advantages over the study of original poems in initial acquisition of the language. Second, it is the latest installment in a popular revival of a tongue dead for almost a millennium. Such provides fodder for the theoretical mills of literature and film critics, anthropologists, and sociologists alike. Incidentally, for those of us who simply enjoy the ancient form of English, it offers an interlude of pure delight.

The late West Saxon version is intrinsically excellent, preserving the story with complete accuracy and presented with the original illustrations. However, Kemmler employs more articles and consistently regular syntax than we have come to expect in original texts, thereby facilitating modern comprehension. Nonetheless, he also allows inconsistencies in spelling and conjugation, reflecting the same in authentic late Anglo-Saxon compositions, but not in a way that obscures meaning. Rather, such serve to demonstrate the more fluid nature of the language in the tenth-century. An illusion of authenticity is furthered by producing all subsidiary text—copyright information, Forward, Afterword, and cover and title page—completely in Anglo-Saxon: the only trace of modern English lies in the Translator’s Note at the back of the book. The most significant feature of the translation, however, is its creative aspect. Kemmler has managed to produce artistic compounds and kennings not extant from the Old English corpus but suggested by de Saint-Exupéry’s original prose and faithful to the practice of the early poets. He offers, for example, lyftfloga for airplane and feorrsceawere for telescope. This aspect provides a delightful illustration of the language’s metaphoric and artistic potential. Perhaps the only aspect to stimulate regret is that, as a prose composition, Le Petit Prince offers Kemmler no opportunity to demonstrate Anglo-Saxon poetic technique.

Because Be þam lytlan æþelinge is all but unique as a translation into, rather than from, Old English, and because it is familiar to native speakers of multiple tongues from personal childhood experience or from parenting, it is an excellent subject for beginning study of the language. In short, it is familiar territory, and one need not be versed in Anglo-Saxon culture, poetics, archetypes, myth, or other aspects of social context to grasp its nuances of feeling or expression. The task of the student, then, primarily lies in learning syntax and vocabulary, with a secondary emphasis on stylistics. Certainly, it is far less intimidating an undertaking in initial language acquisition than, say, The Dream of the Rood. Moreover, that same familiarity with the original text facilitates appreciation of Anglo-Saxon kenning and metaphor. All in all, Kemmler’s translation provides for a new and more effective approach to teaching Old English.

More interesting to scholars of medievalism is that Be þam lytlan æþelinge exists at all. In a sense, it is equivalent to someone translating a Dr. Seuss story into medieval Latin. Of course, this has been done with other texts, notably A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, but the difference lies in its audience: Winnie Ille Pu clearly targets an academic readership. The reception of Kemmler’s translation has yet to be seen, but it nonetheless could represent the latest achievement is a nascent revival of the Anglo-Saxon language in popular culture.

When Philip Chapman Bell’s Old English translation of the Christmas song “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer” began to make the rounds on professorial computers some years ago, it was an “in joke,” something comprehensible to and appreciated by the small community of students and teachers of Anglo-Saxon language and culture. More recently, however, patently non-academic instances of the use of Old English have begun to appear. First, at least for a mass audience, was Peter Jackson’s inclusion of the language in his cinematic rendering of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. One scene, present only in the director’s cut of The Two Towers, involves Eowyn’s singing a giedd at the funeral of Theodred, Theoden’s son. The second, in which Eowyn is again the speaker, appears in The Return of the King, as she presents Aragorn with the peace cup upon the Rohirrim’s return to Edoras and wishes him “Wes ru ysonde.” Of course, Tolkien modeled the people of Rohan upon his vision of the Anglo-Saxons and assigned them the language in his original epic, and indeed, Tolkien enthusiasts who have taken it upon themselves to learn a little Old English have always existed. Nonetheless, the vast majority of Jackson’s audience had not read Tolkien before viewing the films, and it is likely the majority still have not, and this very fact makes his preservation of snippets of the language in his trilogy significant. It raised no protests, indeed was rarely remarked in the reviews, though as yet no evaluation of its impact on the popular audience has been done.

A great deal more dialogue in Anglo-Saxon appears in Roger Zemecki’s late 2007 CGI Beowulf, in which entire conversations between Grendel and his Mother, as well as the monster’s side of his final, desperate exchange with Beowulf, occur in the ancient language. In neither film do explanatory modern English subtitles appear. In publishing a copy-righted Anglo-Saxon version of Le Petit Prince with a regular press, Fritz Kemmler is thus following a trend. Unlike “Hrodulf Rednosa Hrandeor,” published on an Amherst College web page and circulated only on the Internet, Kemmler’s translation aims at a popular market.

What all this says about contemporary popular culture with its budding revival of things Anglo-Saxon is beyond the scope of this review. What can be said is that the revival exists. It began almost two decades ago with Seamus Heaney’s astonishingly popular (in both senses of the word) imitative and poetic translation of Beowulf. It evinces itself in the six cinematic versions of the same epic in the last 12 years, and in the enormous revival in interest in Tolkien’s medievalist Lord of the Rings. Anglo-Saxon is “in” at the moment; whether it is here to stay is anybody’s guess, but that it has spanned twenty years thus far is significant enough to merit scholarly investigation, and any such must include Be þam lytlan æþelinge.

Gwendolyn Morgan

Montana State University

Eisenbichler, ed., Renaissance Medievalisms

2010-02-05T21:14:00.002-05:00

Renaissance Medievalisms. Ed. Konrad Eisenbichler. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, Victoria University in the University of Toronto, 2009.

Reviewed by Jesse G. Swan (jesse.swan@uni.edu)

“A Renaissance of Medievalisms”

Speaking medievally, perhaps especially in writing, vexes modern literacy. Such vexation either closes the mind, by producing responses of avoidance, or opens the mind, by producing responses of engagement. This polarized set of reactions has characterized the function of medievalism, even as the participative mode of engagement most properly characterizes the affirming effort that promotes historical ideas as helpful or otherwise to be commended because the ideas were and are medieval. As Leslie Workman puts it, one leans “to the Middle Ages because it is open-ended,” especially if one thinks “in terms of an organic community: a landscape that [has] come to cohere through time.” [fn.1] Softly lyrical in a relentlessly expository age, Workman’s sensibility, like medievalism, appeals to many, including those who wish to explain medievalism clearly, which is to say, in this expository age, objectively. Clear, objective delineations, unlike some of Workman’s most lyrical illuminations, are articulated in the positivistic and empirical manner of a rational culture that, historically speaking, generated itself, at least in good measure, from its commitment to making itself markedly different from all of pre-modernity, but particularly the medieval. This current or dominant sense of exposition and clarity is important to foreground, since it is impossible to speak medievally or to follow Leslie Workman, if we do not circumscribe the modern form of clarity by highlighting its historicity, its artificiality. This is what Workman did much of his life, I believe, even when he may not have appreciated the fact fully, even when he might have actually denied it. [fn.2]

This movement into alternative forms of clarity is also attempted by others who are drawn to medievalisms. Some of these people came together in the autumn of 2006 in Toronto and contributed to a vibrant “international conference on [the topic of] ‘Renaissance Medievalisms’” (7), a conference that provided the impetus for the 2009 publication of a collection of essays, also entitled Renaissance Medievalisms, edited by Konrad Eisenbichler. In the book, a particularly remarkable discussion of medievalism in terms other than the strictly modern is that by Brian Gourley, “Carnivalising Apocalyptic History in John Bale’s King Johan and Three Laws.” In something of a mash up exposition, which makes comprehensible ways of thinking alien to a modern mind, Gourley draws on early modern (apocalyptical), modern (history), and critically modern (carnavalesque) modes of comprehension to speak medievally in several ways, simultaneously and equanimously. The essay really is so smooth that one might well fail to apprehend the advancement it offers, but this is a shame that cannot be avoided, since to write in ways that more forcibly demand apprehension of literary historiography after the stronghold of stabilizing positivism and objectification simply is to write, at the moment, without clarity. It is work such as Gourley’s that will bring readers along to our next forms of comprehension and ways of being medieval.

Gourley’s essay is, conceptually, a remarkably simple effort: First, it means to indicate how Bale conceptualized and used his sense of the medieval to advance his sense of the progressive, righteous state, a state that is both personal and national, and, second, it means to indicate how Bale has been used subsequently in a way that precludes apprehension of what he actually thought and accomplished. This is a nicely humanist endeavor, even as it unabashedly promotes a materialism that is distinctly dependent upon an Enlightenment-inflected hermeneutics. These features are brought together in many places, but nowhere more concisely than in the conclusion, where we learn that “the Tudor practice of medieval historiography not only serves as an epistemological tool that explains the past, but also becomes, through a frame of apocalypse, a self-sustaining hermeneutic tool through which one can also explain the present and the future” (185). Unlike materialist history, Gourley further explains, “Revelation exegesis was . . . a contested discourse that could be used to create history in multiple ways” (185). The difference between materialist and Revelationist interpretation of the past is not that one is a contested discourse, while the other remains uncontested, but that one recognizes that it creates history, while the other believes that it properly or improperly perceives history.

With similar brilliance and even more well-deserved confidence, Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, in their essay, “What Counted as an ‘Antiquity’ in the Renaissance,” further advance our capacity for expansive historiography. By liberating from “modern scholarship” (70) artefacts, including “not only buildings, but also medieval sculpture thought to be ancient, Byzantine icons, mosaics, floor pavements, and manuscript illumination” (54), Nagel and Wood wish to

go so far as to argue that, strictly speaking, such [chronologically Medieval] monuments ought to be catalogued in the Census of Antique Works of Art known to the Renaissance, alongside Hellenistic sarcophagi and statuary. The corpus of “alternative antiquities” introduces a stranger antiquarianism, one that does not so much dispel as thrive on temporal confusion. (70)

An –ism that thrives on confusion is a very different –ism from one that dispels confusion, making the thinker of the –ism responsible for his or her own intellectual ability, be it chameleon-like, as Pico celebrates, or, as Shakespeare contends regarding love, be it ever-fixèd. My use of the present-tense, with my references to Pico and Shakespeare, is apropos Nagel and Wood, insomuch as the central tenet of their essay is a claim about an un-modern, Renaissance sort of medievalism or historiography: “The claim of this article,” Nagel and Wood declare so as to be plain and clear, “is that the present-tense authority of many images and monuments, religious or secular, was bound up with some claim to ancient origins; and that that claim was sustained by a notional model of production similar to the one that sustained the sacred portraits or the central plan buildings. Like the icon or octagonal Baptistery, the artefact either was the original artefact, or was a reliable substitute for the original” (63). Paying attention to the italics and the import of the word, “substitute,” necessarily makes the declaration hardly plain and clear, to a stabilizing, positivistic form of expository comprehension, such as that of modern historiography. To follow Nagel and Wood into their best and most rewarding conceptions, we must think otherwise, medievally, as Workman encourages, confusedly, as Nagel and Wood propose. [fn.3]

The unicorn and virgin mother provide further medieval or confused knowledge in the elegant essays by Hans Peter Boedel and Gary Waller. Boedel fosters an un-modern comprehension by establishing his topic – ostensibly unicorns in natural history, but really the deep topic is existence – according to modern standards against which the latter part of his essay moves. From the casually magical efflorescence of his title, “’Now I will believe that there are unicorns’: The Existence of Fabulous Beasts in Renaissance Historiae Naturales,” Boedel, in the body of his essay, treats three early modern writers on unicorns, starting with the one simplest for the modern reader to comprehend, John Maplet, author of A Green Forest, Or a Natural History. [fn.4] A Renaissance historian of rather limited interests, Maplet is un-medieval by lacking any tendency for generalizations, while he remains pre-modern in his disregard for empirical sorts of evidence. Maplet decides that the unicorn is a fallacious textual product borne of “philological confusion” and “medieval texts, the work . . . that Maplet most disliked” (291). By contrast, Wolfgang Franz, in the Historia Animalium Sacra, determines that there are unicorns, and he does so by drawing upon all of the disparate forms of evidence each of his readers most desire, whether the literary desire be Medieval, Renaissance, Reformed, or early modern. With playfulness engaging Medieval modes of analogy and a certain ambivalence engaging religious and modern modes, Franz “seamlessly integrates his sources of valid knowledge – classical and contemporary authorities, Scripture, and eyewitness testimony – in a way entirely characteristic of Renaissance natural historians” (294). This Renaissance comprehensiveness is extended with the “far more influential and far more original” work of Conrad Gessner, the Historia animalium. Gessner, unlike Maplet and Franz, is best comprehended by a reader who can imagine various sorts of emotional states of being that Gessner appears to express, in relation to the various topics of his critical and remarkably pleasing encyclopedia. Understanding Gessner and his Renaissance appeal requires the adoption of an early modern but not modern physician’s adaptability, making Gessner and his Renaissance appeal the most elusive of topics, in Boedel’s essay, for the modern reader to comprehend. Yet, if the reader follows Boedel with generosity and imagination, he or she comes to understand the profundity and cogency of expositions such as the following:

Gessner was writing during the heyday of Galenic medicine in the sixteenth century and, like other contemporary physicians, was deeply influenced both by Galen and by the current discourse of medical humanism. Although Renaissance physicians respected ancient authority, Galen himself laid special emphasis upon the value of experience in the diagnosis and treatment of disease: physicians were not to let the dictates of learned authority override the evidence of personal experience and eye-witness testimony. Thus, Renaissance medical humanism combines philological approaches to medical problems with the practical and empirical, precisely as does Gessner’s catalogue of the animal world. (299-300)

The real world of unicorns that Gessner gives his readers is very much Gessner’s world, at least according to Boedel’s understanding, made remarkably plain and clear, by this essay in a Renaissance Medievalism.

Less demanding than Boedel, because more circumscribed in his reach, Waller employs an agile interpretive mind similar to Boedel’s to indicate the Renaissance power of a comic climax that is lost on readers uncultivated in the multiple historiographies of the Shakespearean stage. In a milieu comprised of traditional and reformed ideas of the virgin mother competing with the spectacular humanism of the theatre and, to a lesser but not insignificant degree, a skeptical materialism of the burgeoning governmental bureaucracy, the presentation of Helena at the end of All’s Well, That Ends Well operates like unicorns in Gessner: Helena is and is not a virgin mother, and both statuses are real simultaneously, according to various ways of being. For theatrical humanism, the experience represented by the characters of the play make Helena a pregnant virgin as does, more importantly, according to Waller, the thematic fact that Helena is placed in the status-defining role for herself, with the assistance of another woman, Diana. The bed-trick, at once believable because so traditional and incredible because so silly, becomes the locus of the confluence of varying realities, with Medieval senses feeling that every moment before, during, and after the bed trick generates piety by effecting the proper conditions of the sacrament of marriage, and with certain Reformed senses feeling that Helena is righteous by effecting the conditions necessary for her virginal as well as maternal chastity. Humanists see that this is all the product of humans – and male actors – while nascent empiricists see that this is all how the rational mind is diverted, perhaps pleasantly, perhaps perniciously. The resolution, the happiness, the laughter, the commoner-class wish fulfillment – in short, the comedy – of the revelation of the pregnant Helena at the end of the play “manages both to look back to a rich intellectual and devotional tradition and to look forward to an emergent role of sexual affirmation and sexual choice that was, in part, developing from the more positive side of the Reformers’ views of marriage. The play achieves this balance by working both within and against. . . our history” (117). As with Erasmus, with whom Waller opens and closes his essay, Helena or “Shakespeare’s Reformed Virgin,” as Waller puts it as the title of his essay, needs to be positioned carefully so as to be made to reveal the polysemous quality of a virgin mother at a specific moment in time, “the great transition between Medieval and Renaissance” (117).

If unicorns and virgin mothers allow us to sense movements of what would come to be thought of as Medieval fantasy or idolatry, other concepts felt to be foundationally modern provide opportunities to contemplate the naturalization of perception. Time, geography, cosmography are three such fundamentally modern concepts that, three separate essays show, were forged from Medieval models. Using John Duns Scotus as representing a Medieval conception of time and duration in distinction to space and place, the latter set having been produced by more extended authorial contemplation, leaving time and duration to require considerable readerly improvisation, Michael Edwards offers to explain how Renaissance metaphysics generated senses of temporal reality as materially observable, as opposed to theoretical but unobserved possibilities. This was important, since angelic duration was a central issue. With an evolving conception of internal and external time and duration, early modern pedagogues developed the new distinction into an elaborated, materialized account and represented the account as Scotism, although “the theoretical spine behind their arguments was not the Subtle Doctor himself, but an argument made widespread by [Francisco] Suárez” (241). Richard Raiswell, taking up the discussion of space and its early modern English representation, uses William Watreman’s translation of the 1538 edition of Joannes Boemus’s Omnium gentium mores leges et ritus ex multis clarissimis rerum scriptores to show how new and simpler minds reading from printed texts in the vernacular were gratified by “a world that was reassuringly ordered and [because of the kind of order offered] tended to confirm the expectations of its readers” (281). [fn.5] And then from the earth to the cosmos, Gabrielle Sugar offers an explanation of how Johannes Kepler’s calculated thought – drawn from his conclusion “that God’s nature is mathematical” (313) – was presented and viewed as a merger with Medieval Aristotelian thought. In this, Sugar presents Kepler as something of the modern, dialectical synthesizer: “As Aristotelian thought mingled with the new astronomical knowledge, Kepler envisioned a cosmos that integrated both, a paradoxical space of both medieval universes and early modern worlds” (317).

This forging of modernity out of dimensions of Renaissance medievalisms was achieved by readers as much as writers. Examining how Leone Ebreo, the “Portuguese Jew . . . [who] left Spain at the age of 32 in the wake of the expulsion of the Jews . . . [fleeing] to Spanish dominated Southern Italy” (75-76), read and then used Boccaccio’s De Genealogia Deorum Gentilium, James Nelson Novoa calls for a more imaginative consideration of Ebreo’s Weltanschauung than has been published, as a way to better comprehend intellectual and emotional trends obscured by medievalisms, particularly Renaissance medievalisms. Notably, the polarized explanations of Leone Ebreo’s character – the one promoting him as a constituent of “the Jewish philosophical and specifically Sephardic intellectual tradition,” while the other makes “him out to be a child of the Italian Renaissance thoroughly imbued by Ficinean Neoplatonism” (86) – preclude other, more rewarding explanations, particularly, for Novoa, the characterizations made possible by thinking of Judah Abravanel, i.e., Leone Ebreo as named at birth, as produced by “the Iberian vernacular movement” (86). This vernacular movement, Novoa suspects, in good psychological fashion, must account for “at least part of his forma mentis” that accounts for how he read (86). Also modernizing the conception of reading, but to a much wider reach, is Donald Beecher, who, in writing a history of the changing interpretive relations to The Fables of Bidpai, means to show how the “Renaissance mind . . . possessed and processed the medieval fable in its own unique way, and largely without changing a word” (105). The culture of the printed book generated by and generating Renaissance iconography produced a conception of the mind and memory that was foundationally visual, literally and then figuratively, so that those effected by such objectification of thought and understanding, such as the Tudor English translator of the Bidpai tales, Sir Thomas North, would employ a “frame of associations” (98) to indite the tale-within-a-tale amorphous quality of the original in linear, early modern English, an English more akin to the printed book’s woodcut and the protocols of interpretation it elicits, than it was to the “oceans of stories” of the original, pre-modern fables. Not only North, the translator, but all of North’s readers had to interpret in the new, materializing manner, and the Renaissance quality is that of being the limina by which readers transform the literary abstractions of the Bidpai fables.

The implicit stability of our own reading practices and abilities is not challenged by considering how the Bidpai fables were re-interpreted over a period of years, or by wanting to expand our psychological, ethnic, and social consideration of Leone Ebreo; indeed, these considerations in the essays speak in rather the modern idiom, albeit in ingenious ways. Similarly, other essays of the collection provide fascinating considerations of features of post-Renaissance personal and social institutions, without challenging the idiom in which those personal and social institutions thrive. For instance, Philippa Sheppard, Linda Vecchi, and E. Natalie Rothman discuss aspects of the self. Unlike previous, Medieval icons of Joan of Arc, Shakespeare’s Joan, as read by Sheppard in “The Puzzle of Pucelle or Pussel: Shakespeare’s Joan of Arc Compared with Two Antecedents,” has an essentialized self-realized character, “effeminate, superstitious, dishonourable, deceitful, and lascivious,” which is to say, a character that all of Shakespeare’s English audience “would have liked to believe was wrong with France” (208). The self as written, as opposed to the self as read, is skillfully excavated by Vecchi, in “A Vale of Tears: Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Lamentory Style.” The lamentation form possessed a “paradoxical nature that led to its reconfiguration in the hands of many Renaissance poets,” Vecchi tells us, and this paradoxical nature is what Isabella Whitney exploits in order to formulate and express her “obvious pride and acceptance of herself as a writer” (218; italics in the original; I might have also italicized and hyphenated, her-self, but this sort of thing can get out of hand) and “the indignation and independent mind of a confident Renaissance woman” (223). In producing the self through reading and writing, Rothman most thoroughly modernizes the past, so that her subject, the seventeenth-century Venetian diplomatic interpreter, or dragoman, Giovanni Battista Salvago, can be explained in terms of how he read people and texts and how he wrote for specific readers, readers he knew would interpret in certain, highly specific ways. In Salvago’s Relazioni degli Ambasciatori veneti, which is the basis of Rothman’s elaborations, we are given to see that Salvago, “while evincing an insider’s understanding of Ottoman imperial governance, also betrays [his simultaneous] effort to distance himself from things Ottomans and to establish his unambiguous position as a loyal, useful, and humanistically inclined Venetian subject” (128). Salvago is able to do this, because his readership is inclined to interpret what he writes in the way “they expected” (137), just as we can be expected to interpret Rothman in a certain, modernized way, and not other ways, such as medieval or variously un-modern.

Also writing in terms of modern literary expectations, Vittoria Feola, Lidia Radi, and Paul F. Grendler detail how institutionalized forms of science, government, and education came to operate differently, even as they continued to appear in remarkably pre-modern form, well past the Renaissance. In each of these considerations, it is pedagogy that is of determinative significance. For the mid-seventeenth-century Elias Ashmole, the new methods for educating common people were important topics of debate, particularly in Cromwellian England, so that his curious mixture of alchemy and chemistry, antiquarianism and Baconian style, published in 1652 and entitled, Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, is nicely comprehended as one of the hybrids of literary history: a Renaissance Medievalism in itself. That is, specifically, the Theatrum is a text that intervenes in contemporaneous academic hostilities by attempting to celebrate the Medieval against the Renaissance and the Renaissance against the Medieval as a way of diverting attention from the deeper singularization of thought in pedagogical practice developing for use with vernacular studies. This deeper effect seems to have been what Ashmole thought was realistic and practical. The realistic or practical, in Guillaume Michel’s Le Penser de royal memoire, published in 1518, seems to have the obverse status from that in Ashmole’s Theatrum; that is, in Le Penser, the rhetorical purpose to get the king to go on crusade turns out to be that which is the diversionary material. As Radi’s essay shows, what is effected by Michel with his work is the production of the feeling that imagining “material images” (153), such as a woman as Joan of Arc and such as Joan of Arc’s spurs, was remembering, and that associating proper meaning with those images was thought, so that reading a book such as Le Penser was both intellectual training and intellectual exercise. Pedagogy becomes all, even though it ostensibly was designed to prepare a king for action, such as a crusade. These sorts of schoolbook decadences and theatre diversions seem to be symptomatic or instrumental of modern higher education, when considered, as in Renaissance Medievalisms, with Grendler’s brief account of how Italian universities of the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries changed their curriculum – mostly by adding areas of “teaching and research” without subtracting other activities, especially any activities associated with theology – yet did so while managing to look “almost identical to medieval universities” (48). We can feel that the university personnel of the period understood that this was what they were doing, if we remember the way a famous modern pedagogue of the Renaissance expressed the advice for the manager of people in changing conditions: videri quam esse. [fn.6]

Whether seeming medieval or being Medieval, Renaissance Medievalisms, like so many other medievalisms, “is an assortment of diverse and fascinating objects” (29). And while the collection of essays does contribute, as the editor hopes it will, “to current discussions on the relationship between the Renaissance and the Middle Ages” (29), it does so as it also contributes to the greater current of historiographical movement, a movement involving, in good measure, speaking medievally. As Alice Chandler, one of Leslie Workman’s most revered historians, said of nineteenth-century medievalism, we may say of twenty-first-century medievalism: “[W]hile we may admire the medievalists . . . or criticize them, . . . we must always consider their ideas as part of a larger social movement still being acted out today.” [fn.7] Even when the editor of Renaissance Medievalisms may not fully appreciate the fact, or even when he might actually deny the fact, the best advancements realized by the book are made when it speaks in un-modern, mashed-up, confused, lyrical, Medieval ways. In this, we get, in this time of x-modernity, something of a renaissance of medievalisms. Who could have thought up such thing, but a collective, a collective of handsomely cultivated intellectuals convened in an admirably urbane college? Leslie Workman, like so many of us, would have been very pleased, indeed, to have been present for the convocation. We can be happy, as am I, at least to have the thrilling collection of essays.

Jesse G. Swan

University of Northern Iowa

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Notes:
1) “Speaking of Medievalism,” in Medievalism in the Modern World. Essays in Honour of Leslie J. Workman, ed. Richard Utz and Tom Shippey (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), p. 336.
2) The final paragraph of part I of Workman’s introduction to Medievalism in Europe provides one nice instance in which Workman gestures toward the ethereal (the dream of having with medievalism the sort of “philosophical and critical appreciation . . . of related fields like Romanticism”), while being pulled toward the figuratively tangible hypostasis of modernity (“Medievalism is a new field of very great scope and significance in which much of the basic exploration is still to be done”).
3) More precisely, I do not use the present tense as much as the subjunctive, in my references to Pico and Shakespeare. However, modern literacy is impatient with mood, preferring to limit its range to tense in the indicative. Nagel and Wood are better read in the subjunctive, it seems, as is so much that is spoken medievally.
4) The magical aura for the essay is established in the title by the reference to Shakespeare’s romance, The Tempest.
5) There is considerably more slippage in Raiswell’s essay than I suggest in my précis. For instance, that Watreman uses the 1538 edition of Boemus for his translation is a bibliographical statement implied by Raiswell’s notes 3 and 4, not directly stated by Raiswell or known from bibliographical analysis on my part. Also, and more importantly, the distinction between Watreman and Boemus is generally elided throughout the essay, so that the representation of Boemus in Watreman’s remarkably distinct rendition is usually presented as not Watreman but as Boemus.
6) This pedagogue is, of course, Machiavelli, and this advice – to seem rather than to be – is given in his schoolbook, The Prince.
7) Alice Chandler, A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century English Literature (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1970), p. 11.

Hazell, The Plants of Middle-Earth

2009-12-08T08:45:00.002-05:00

Dinah Hazell. The Plants of Middle-Earth: Botany and Sub-creation. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006.

Reviewed by Ilse A. Schweitzer

In recent years, literary scholars and students have witnessed a growing interest in the role of ecology in texts, authors’ portrayals of the natural world, and even the colonization of nature in literature. Dinah Hazell applies this “green lens” to the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, analyzing his methods of creating a literary world, and its less-often studied inhabitants—plants. Her strategy is two-pronged: Hazell undertakes an exploration of the botanical influences on Tolkien’s writings, but also his practice of “sub-creation,” the idea of creating a believable fictional world. Tolkien’s mythical world promises to be fertile ground for an exploration of the “lives of plants,” and Hazell teases meaning out of the linguistic, literary, and historical contexts of Tolkien’s plant-life. She draws connections between the natural world of Middle-earth and the landscapes of Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, Renaissance, and later English texts, a type of analysis particularly suited to Tolkien’s works, as Tolkien was a medievalist and linguist himself.

In her brief introduction, Hazell alludes to Tolkien’s theories of sub-creation; as nature and history must serve as the foundation on which an author builds his or her worlds of “faerie” or fantasy, we should expect that Tolkien would use “elements from his own English and created worlds to achieve a rich mixture of experience and meaning” (2). Thus, Hazell’s process of guiding her readers through the environments of Tolkien’s England to find the roots of his Middle-earth and its cultures makes sense. However, given the size and depth of Tolkien’s history and mythology of Middle-earth (spread out over The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and “prequels” The Hobbit and The Silmarillion), and Hazell’s attention to Tolkien’s other short texts, such a project merits encyclopedic length instead of this slim volume. Moreover, while Hazell’s choice to present a “botanical tour” through Middle-earth, with pauses for specific flora or regions, provides the reader with a pleasant reminiscence of the sites and events of Tolkien’s epic, this structure prevents her from providing detailed analysis of Tolkien’s fictive environments and method of sub-creation.

The botanical tour begins (as does Tolkien’s trilogy) in the Shire, with the first chapter devoted to “Hobbit Names.” Hazell reasonably suggests that Tolkien’s “botanical names are steeped in associations and lore,” and transfer these meanings to the characters who bear them. As she paraphrases Tolkien’s own explanation of the origins of the term “hobbit,” from Anglo-Saxon roots through Middle English texts, she also notes the medieval literary roots of names of many of Tolkien’s non-human characters. The majority of the chapter, though, is devoted to the names of Hobbit women, which tend to derive from the nomenclature of flowers. Hazell explores the significances of floral names with special reference to the plants’ roles and symbolic values in English history, and appearances in a variety of literatures (including Middle English poetry and Renaissance drama). She draws on Culpeper’s Complete Herbal and English Physician to provide background on these plants’ provenances and botanical and folkloric uses. Ideally, this layering of the various uses and meanings of floral terminology should be a fertile foundation for an analysis of the connections of the hobbit women’s names to their characters and experiences. Unfortunately, the hobbit women do not feature prominently in Tolkien’s works in general, and typically (with the exception of Rosie Cotton), appear only in the context of family histories. Hazell’s closing assertion that “plants can have both good and bad natures, sometimes mixed, and fulfilling the promise of floral symbolism often requires effort and choice by the namesake” (24) draws attention to the flaw in her first chapter: how can readers evaluate the extent to which characters “fulfill the promise” of their names if these characters appear rarely in Tolkien’s narrative? Hazell acknowledges Tolkien’s sparse and archetypal portrayals of women in a digression toward the close of the chapter; in fact, digressions of this sort occur often in The Plants of Middle-Earth, at times illuminating, at times an encumbrance to Hazell’s argument.

In her second chapter, “From Shire to Mordor: A Botanical Tour of Middle-earth,” Hazell delivers a cursory tour through the geography and narrative of Tolkien’s trilogy. Although this provides a helpful orientation for readers not so familiar with Middle-earth, Hazell’s method of moving through narrative space as she moves eastward from the Shire forces her to jump forward and backward along the timeline of the Ages of Middle-earth. This jumbled summary of narrative is broken by several tangents; for example, Hazell interrupts her description of Rohan with a discussion of Tolkien’s use of diverse dialects among the peoples Middle-earth. Even though the topic of language was beloved by Tolkien and not irrelevant for an analysis of his work, this particular digression slows the pace of the botanical tour and directs attention to Hazell’s pattern of inserting patches of analysis that are valuable but unrelated to the foci of her chapters. Overall, Hazell provides a trek across a world far too rich and complex for the short chapter it receives here.

Chapters three and four allow Hazell opportunity to focus her analysis on smaller, more manageable natural spaces. In the third chapter, she describes the specific plant-life of Ithilien, which provides sustenance to Frodo and Sam as they approach Mordor, and literary depth to Tolkien’s world. Unfortunately, here and throughout her volume, Hazell prefers to summarize Tolkien’s descriptions of settings rather than provide textual evidence (in the form of excerpted quotations). Given Tolkien’s love for and inventiveness with languages and neologisms, this choice will likely be disappointing both to literary scholars and fans of Middle-earth. This criticism aside, Hazell produces compelling linguistic, literary, and historical lineages for Tolkien’s plants. For example, the herbs culled by Sam (including thyme, marjoram, and sage) are described in terms of the origins of their names, and their uses in ancient and medieval society. Later, in a moment of biographical criticism, Hazell suggests that the appearance of the anemone in Ithilien recalls the brilliantly colored anemone blossoms that Tolkien saw at Merton College, and, in his collected letters, likened the site to a Pre-Raphaelite portrait (57). Tolkien’s letters are one of many sources mined by Hazell to trace his floral inspiration; in chapter three, she draws connections between the plants of Gondor and plant-life in poetry ranging from Homeric epic, the Middle English “Pearl,” to Tolkien’s own “Lay of Luthien,” and the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century herbals of Nicholas Culpeper and John Gerard.

Chapter four is dedicated to the forests and trees of Tolkien’s texts. Hazell begins by observing similarities between the creative processes of Tolkien’s fictional artist, Niggle, of the short story “Leaf by Niggle,” and Tolkien himself. In Niggle’s portrait of an ideal tree, Hazell sees “imagery of perpetually unfolding space and the independent, seemingly autonomous life of the creative process,” infinite artistic possibilities that parallel the infinite “leaves” of “untold stories” on “Tolkien’s literary tree” (66). As she moves to more specific analyses of woodlands and trees in Middle-earth (including Mirkwood, Fangorn Forest, Lothlórien, the Old Forest and Old Man Willow), Hazell reminds the reader that Tolkien’s trees are empowered with both positive and negative potential, depending on the abuse or nurture they experience at the hands of humans and non-human beings. Hazell is at her best here, as in the previous chapter, when she directs her focus on the literary and botanical histories of specific plants; for example, her elucidations of the nomenclatures, pharmaceutical uses, folkloric and symbolic values, and literary mentions (in Chaucer’s House of Fame, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Tolkien’s own personal memoirs) of the willow tree are fascinating, even though Hazell concludes that this “does not explain Tolkien’s choice of the tree for such a vicious character [Old Man Willow]” (75). Further, Hazell’s choice to structure this chapter by beginning with a discussion of woodlands and ending with a discussion of modern technology evokes Tolkien’s polarization of the natural and industrial worlds in his trilogy, as well as his implied observation that both forests and factories pose dangers and benefits to human society.

In her brief final chapter, Hazell assesses themes of “restoration and recovery” in Middle-earth. In a lovely moment, she compares Tolkien’s own artistic renderings of Minas Tirith to a walled medieval town, noting its inclusion of a medieval garden in the form of the Houses of Healing, an area symbolic of the post-war recovery undergone by Tolkien’s protagonists. She summarizes the destruction wrought by the Enemy in the geography and societies throughout Middle-earth, reaching back into the pre-history of The Silmarillion to observe that, as the sacred Trees of the elves were restored over generations and moved with them as the elves settled into new realms, so too we witness the beginnings of recovery in the return of a king to Gondor, the cleansing of the Shire, and the promises of humankind in Tolkien’s “Fourth Age.”

Of Hazell’s two appendices, “Appendix A” provides a wealth of information and resources for readers interested in plant lore. This section features a more academic tone than in previous chapters; Hazell gives a useful, short history of herbals and plant folklore in Britain, from ancient texts originating in the classical world to modern English lore. The second appendix—a list of real and fictive plants in Middle-earth—is a thoughtful addition, but like the remainder of Hazell’s book, lacks textual citations. Scholarly readers, especially those interested in Tolkien’s portrayal of the natural world, may wish that Hazell had provided citations for volumes and page numbers where each plant is mentioned in Tolkien’s texts, or even a short description of each plant. Hazell’s bibliography is not extensive, and shows an even distribution between medieval (and later) English texts, herbals and histories of plants and gardens, Tolkien’s own texts, and previous scholarly works on Tolkien. Recreating the visual effect of an historical herbal, the book contains watercolor illustrations of flora by contemporary artists. However, in several chapters Hazell refers to Tolkien’s own watercolors and sketches of trees and gardens; if Tolkien’s own artwork were available for reproduction, his illustrations might make better additions to Hazell’s book than even these artists’ fine work.

In her preface, Hazell states that her intention in writing this book is “to create an environment that will enhance the reader’s perspective during future journeys along the roads and through the forests of Middle-earth, and to provide a place for reviving the memory of those trips” (x). Casual readers of Tolkien will find much to interest them here; Hazell certainly succeeds in evoking memories of Middle-earth, and establishes connections between Tolkien’s real and imagined environments that contribute to our contemporary understanding of the famous author. However, readers with a scholarly interest in botany, Tolkien, and his methods of sub-creation will likely find other texts offering more complex and well-researched commentary than Hazell’s exploration.

Ilse A. Schweitzer

Western Michigan University

Mission

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medievally speaking encourages critical engagement with all investigations and creative reinventions of the continuing process of creating the middle ages. as the web-based arm of studies in medievalism, the leading academic publication in the study of the postmedieval reception of medieval culture, medievally speaking draws from a vast pool of international scholars dedicated to the multilingual and interdisciplinary negotiation of medievalia in postmedieval times.

Medievalism Timeline

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1853
John Ruskin (in a lecture on Pre-Raphaelitism) distinguishes three artistic periods in European history: “Classicalism, extending to the fall of the Roman Empire; Mediaevalism, extending from that fall to the close of the fifteenth century; and Modernism thenceforward to our days.” (OED)
1872
Charles Eastlake, A History of the Gothic Revival
1908
George Tyrell, Medievalism. A Reply to Cardinal Mercier
1911
P. Berret, Le Moyen Age dans la ‘Légende des Siècles’ et les sources de Victor Hugo
1917
Eleanor N. Adams, Old English Scholarship in England from 1566-1800
1922
Gottfried Salomon, Das Mittelalter als Ideal in der Romantik
1924
Reinhard Haferkorn, Gotik und Ruine in der englischen Dichtung des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts
1928
Kenneth Clark, The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste
1932
R.F. Brinkley, Arthurian Legend in the Seventeenth Century
Paul Yvon, Le Gothique et la renaissance gothique en Angleterre (1750-1880)
1936
W. Farnham, The Medieval Heritage of Elizabethan Tragedy
1945
Margaret Rose Grennan, William Morris: Medievalist and Revolutionary
1946
N. Edelman, Attitudes of Seventeenth-Century France towards the Middle Ages
1952
S. Kliger, The Goths in England: A Study in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Thought
1955
Charles Herbert Kegel, Medieval-Modern Contrasts Used for a Social Purpose in the Works of William Cobbett, Robert Southey, A. Welby Pugin, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, and William Morris
1964
A. Johnston, Enchanted Ground: The Study of Medieval Romance in the Eighteenth Century
1966
A Briggs, Saxons, Normans and Victorians
1968
Lionel Gossman, Medievalism and the Ideologies of the Englightenment: The World and Work of la Curne de Sainte-Palaye
1969
Lorayne Horka-Follick, Los Hermanos Penitentes: A Vestige of Medievalism in Southwestern United States
1970
Alice Chandler, A Dream of Order. The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century English Literature
1972
Stuart McDougal, Ezra Pound and the Troubadour Tradition
1973
Vittore Branca edits Concetto, storia, miti e immagini del medio evo
Francesco Alberoni, Furio Colombo, Umberto Eco, Giuseppe Sacco, Documenti su il nuovo medioevo
1975
Leslie J. Workman and Alice P. Kenney, “Ruins, Romance, and Reality: Medievalism in Anglo-American Imagination and Taste, 1750-1840, Winterthur Portfolio 10
R. Bales, Proust and the Middle Ages
Patricia Ward, The Medievalism of Victor Hugo
F. Graus, Lebendige Vergangenheit: Überlieferung im Mittelalter und in den Vorstellungen des Mittelalters
L. Kerssen, Das Interesse am Mittelalter im deutschen Nationaldenkmal
1976
Leslie J. Workman’s organizes the first sessions at the International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, MI, USA
1976-2005: The journal Quaderni medievali includes a column of essays focusing on ideas of the Middle Ages held by people who are not professional historians of the era. The column is titled “L’altro medioevo” (“The Other Middle Ages”)
1977
H. Cooper, Pastoral: Medieval into Renaissance
Hans Robert Jauss, Alterität und Modernität der mittelalterlichen Literatur
1978
G.M. Gugelberger, Ezra Pound’s Medievalism
1979
Leslie J. Workman founds Studies in Medievalism with vol. I.i dedicated to Medievalism in England
E. MacAndrew, The Gothic Tradition in Fiction
1980
Paul Zumthor, Parler du Moyen Age
1981
Mark Girouard, The Return of Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman
1982
Leslie J. Workman edits Studies in Medievalism I.ii, Medievalism in America
John Mulryan edits Milton and the Middle Ages
J. Fraser, America and Patterns of Chivalry
Leslie Workman and Jane Chance edit Studies in Medievalism II.i, Twentieth Century Medievalism
1983
Leslie J. Workman and Heather Arden edit Studies in Medievalism II.ii, Medievalism in France
Leslie J. Workman and Kathleen Verduin edit Studies in Medievalism II.iii, Dante in the Modern World
Leslie J. Workman and Veronica M.S. Kennedy edit Studies in Medievalism II.iv, Modern Arthurian Literature
1984
J. Banham and J. Harris edit William Morris and the Middle Ages
Paul Ruggiers edits Editing Chaucer: The Great Tradition
1985
Leslie J. Workman, publishes “To Castle Dangerous: The Influence of Walter Scott,” in: Castles: An Enduring Fantasy, ed. N. Kline
Umberto Eco, “Dieci modi di sognare il medioevo,” in Sugli specchi e altri saggi, pp. 78-89 (transl. as “Ten Little Middle Ages,” in Faith in Fakes. Travels in Hyperreality, pp. 68-72)
1986
Annual International Conference on Medievalism congress founded
Conference proceedings series, The Year’s Work in Medievalism, commences publication
A. B. Ferguson, The Chivalric Tradition in Renaissance England
Leslie J. Workman’s entry on “M” appears in the Arthurian Encyclopedia, ed. Norris Lacy
Il sogno del medioevo. Il revival del medioevo nelle culture contemporanee, monographic issue of the journal Quaderni medievali, 21
1987
Leslie J. Workman and Heather Arden edit Studies in Medievalism III.i, Medievalism in France 1500-1700
R.G. Smith, The Gothic Bequest: Medieval Institutions in British Thought, 1688-1863
Malcolm D. Allen, The Medievalism of Lawrence of Arabia
1988
K. Bergeron, Decadent Enchantments: The Revival of Gregorian Chant at Solesmes
Janet E. Goebel and Rebecca Cochran, Selected Papers on Medievalism
A. H. Harrison, Swinburne’s Medievalism: A Study in Victorian Love Poetry
1989
Leslie Workman,”’My First Real Tutor’: The Correspondence of John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton,” New England Quarterly 62.4
Michel Cerquiglini, Éloge de la variante: Histoire critique de la philologie
P. Hunter Stiebel, Of Knights and Spires: Gothic Revival in France and Germany
Siegfried Grosse & Ursula Rautenberg, Die Rezeption mittelalterlicher deutscher Dichtung. Eine Bibliographie ihrer Übersetzungen und Bearbeitungen seit der Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts
Reinhart Elze & Pierangelo Schiera edit Italia e Germania. Immagini, modelli, miti fra due popoli dell’Ottocento: il medioevo
1990
Leslie Workman & John R. Zukowsky edit Studies in Medievalism III.ii, Architecture and Design
Stephen G. Nichols publishes the January 1990 edition of Speculum (60/1) on “The New Philology”
L. Fraisse, L’oeuvre cathedrale: Proust et l’architecture médiévale
C. Guilfoyle, Shakespeare’s Play within the Play: Medieval Imagery and Scenic Form in Hamlet, Othello and King Lear
R.R. Agrawal, The Medieval Revival and its Influence on the Romantic Movement
H. Whittaker, King Arthur in Legend and History
R. Simpson, Camelot Regained: The Arthurian Revival and Tennyson, 1800-1849
Valerie M. Lagorio & Mildred Leake Day edit King Arthur through the Ages
1991
Leslie J. Workman & Jane Chance edit Studies in Medievalism III.iii, Inklings and Others
Leslie J. Workman and Francis G. Gentry edit Studies in Medievalism III.iv, German Medievalism
Norman Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century
Boydell & Brewer adopts Studies in Medievalism as one of its book series
Kevin J. Harty edits Cinema Arthuriana: Essays on Arthurian Film
Marina S. Brownlee, Kevin Brownlee, and Stephen G. Nichols edit The New Medievalism
1992
Leslie J. Workman edits Studies in Medievalism IV, Medievalism in England
F. Boos edits History and Community: Essays in Victorian Medievalism
Jacques Heers, Le Moyen Age, une imposture
Gerd Althoff edits Die Deutschen und ihr Mittelalter
L. Girolamy-Cheney edits Pre-Raphaelitism and Medievalism in the Arts
John Simons, From Medieval to Medievalism
1993
Leslie J. Workman edits Studies in Medievalism V, Medievalism in Europe
V. Attolini, Immagini del Medioevo nell’cinema
Leslie J. Workman publishes “Medievalism and Romanticism” in special issue of Poetica
Renato Bordone, Lo specchio di Shalott. L’invenzione del medioevo nella cultura dell’Ottocento
Matteo Sanfilippo, Il medioevo secondo Walt Disney: come l’America ha reinventato l’età di mezzo
1994
Kathleen Verduin edits Studies in Medievalism VI, Medievalism in North America
Stephen Knight, Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw
William D. Paden edits The Future of the Middle Ages. Medieval Literature in the 1990s
John Van Engen edits The Past and Future of Medieval Studies
1995
Leslie J. Workman & Kathleen Verduin edit Studies in Medievalism VII, Medievalism in England II
Georges Duby, An 1000 An 2000. Sur les traces de nos peurs
Studi medievali e immagine del medioevo fra Ottocento e Novecento, monographic issue of Bullettino dell’Istituto storico italiano per il medio evo, 100
1996
Leslie J. Workman & Kathleen Verduin edit Studies in Medievalism VIII, Medievalism in Europe II
Universitätsverlag Konstanz, Germany, begins book series, Mittelalter-Mythen, ed. U. Müller & W. Wunderlich
R. Howard Bloch & Stephen G. Nichols edit Medievalism and the Modernist Temper
P. Carr-Gomm, The Druid Renaissance: The Voice of Druidry Today
Kim Moreland, The Medievalism Impulse in American Literature: Twain, Adams, Fitzgerald and Hemingway
Leslie J. Workman publishes “Medievalism Today” in the Medieval Feminist Newsletter
B. Bergdoll, A.W.N. Pugin: Master of the Gothic Revival
1997
Leslie J. Workman, Kathleen Verduin, & David Metzger edit Studies in Medievalism IX, Medievalism and the Academy
M.-F. Alamichel and Derek Brewer edit The Middle Ages after the Middle Ages in the English-Speaking World
Allen J. Frantzen and John D. Niles edit Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity
G. Allaire, Andrea de Barberino and the Language of Chivalry
N.U. Haghofer, The Fall of Arthur’s Kingdom: A Study in Tennyson’s ‘The Holy Grail’
Gugliemo Cavallo, Claudio Leonardi & Enrico Menestò edit Lo spazio letterario del medioevo. 1. Il medioevo latino. IV. L’attualizzazione del testo
Enrico Menestò edits Il medioevo: specchio ed alibi
1998
Richard Utz & Tom Shippey edit Medievalism in the Modern World. Essays in Honour of Leslie Workman
David Metzger edits Studies in Medievalism X, Medievalism and the Academy II
A. Kreutziger-Herr & D. Radepennig edit Mittelalter-Sehnsucht? Texte des interdisziplinären Symposiums zur musikalischen Mittelalterrezeption an der Universität Heidelberg, April 1998
Brepols Publishers begins book series Making the Middle Ages, U of Sydney Centre for Medieval Studies
Roger Dahood edits The Future of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Problems, Tends, and Opportunities for Research
William Gentrup edits Reinventing the Middle Ages and the Renaissance:Constructions of the Medieval and Early Modern Period
Kathleen Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism
1999
Palgrave Macmillan Publishers begins its book series: The New Middle Ages, ed. Bonnie Wheeler
Kevin J. Harty, The Reel Middle Ages: American, Western and Eastern European, Middle Eastern, and Asian Films About Medieval Europe
David Matthews, The Making of Middle English, 1765-1910
Romanticismo/Medievalismo, monographic issue of the journal La Questione romantica, 7/8
Giuseppe Sergi, L’idea di medioevo. Fra storia e senso comune
2000
K. Jurzig, Mittelalterrezeption in Wackenroders ‘Herzensergiessungen’
A.G. Stanley, Imagining the Anglo-Saxon Past
E. Höltenschmidt, Die Mittelalterrezeption der Brüder Schlegel
Laura Cooner Lambdin, Camelot in the Nineteenth Century: Arthurian Characters in the Poems of Tennyson, Arnold, Morris, and Swinburne
Andrew Wawn publishes The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in 19th-Century Britain
Michèle Gally edits La trace médiévale et les écrivains d’aujourd’hui
2001
Leslie J. Workman dies in Grand Rapids, Michigan
Tom Shippey & Martin Arnold edit Studies in Medievalism XI, Appropriating the Middle Ages: Scholarship, Politics, Fraud
Elizabeth Emery, Romancing the Cathedral: Gothic Architecture in Fin de Siècle French Culture
I. Durand Le-Guern, Le Moyen Age des Romantiques
2002
J.P. Midant, Viollet-le-Duc: The French Gothic Revival
P. Clarkson, Chivalry and Medievalism in Cheltenham’s Victorian Public Schools
Elizabeth Fay, Romantic Medievalism: History and the Romantic Literary Ideal
Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century
Daniele Lupo Jalla, et al., edit Medioevo reale, medioevo immaginario. Confronti e percorsi culturali tra regioni d’Europa
2003
Tom Shippey & Martin Arnold edit Studies in Medievalism XII, Film & Fiction: Reviewing the Middle Ages
J. Aberth, A Knight at the Movies: Medieval History on Film
Angela Jane Weisl, The Persistence of Medievalism. Narrative Adventures in Contemporary Culture
Jane Chance, Tolkien the Medievalist
Elizabeth Emery & Laura Morowitz, Consuming the Past: The Medieval Revival in Fin de Siècle Fance
2004
Richard Utz and Jesse G. Swan edit Studies in Medievalism XIII, Postmodern Medievalisms
A.G. Watson, Medieval Manuscripts in Post Medieval England
Allen J. Frantzen publishes Bloody Good. Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War
R. Sweet, Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Kathleen Verduin publishes extensive entry on “M” in the supplement to the Dictionary of the Middle Ages
Louise D’Arcens & Juanita Feros Ruys edit “Maistresse of My Wit:” Medieval Women, Modern Scholars
Neil Winn, Neo-Medievalism and Civil War
Stéphane Michaud edits Chemins tournants. Cycles et recueils en littérature, des romans du Graal à la poésie contemporaine
Giuseppe Sergi & Enrico Castelnuovo edit Il medioevo al passato e al presente
Piero Boitani, Mario Mancini & Alberto Vàrvaro edit Lo spazio letterario del medioevo. 2. Il medioevo volgare. IV. L’attualizzazione del testo
2005
Tom Shippey & Martin Arnold edit Studies in Medievalism XIV, Correspondences: Medievalism in Scholarship and the Arts
Brepols Publishers begins its book series: Ritus et Artes, Centre for the Study of the Cultural Heritage of Medieval Rituals, U of Copenhagen
Eyolf Østrem, Mette Birkedal Bruun, Nils Holger Petersen & Jens Fleischer edit Genre and Ritual: The Cultural Heritage of Medieval Rituals
Stephanie Trigg edits Medievalism and the Gothic in Australian Culture
Susan Aronstein, Hollywood Knights: Arthurian Cinema and the Politics of Nostalgia
Bruce Holsinger, The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory
Jennifer Palmgren & Lorretta M. Holloway edit Beyond Arthurian Romances: The Reach of Victorian Medievalism
2006
Veronica Ortenberg, In Search of the Holy Grail. The Quest for the Middle Ages
Erin Felicia Labbie, Lacan’s Medievalism
Dinah Hazell, The Plants of Middle-Earth: Botany and Sub-creation
2007
Karl Fugelso edits Studies in Medievalism XV, Memory and Medievalism
Michael Alexander, Medievalism. The Middle Ages in Modern England
Jane Chance, Tolkien the Medievalist
Stephan Goebel, The Great War and Medieval Memory: War, Remembrance and Medievalism in Britain and Germany, 1914-1940
Tom Shippey, Roots and Branches: Selected Papers on Tolkien
Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli edits Neomedievalismi: recuperi, evocazioni, invenzioni nelle citta dell’Emilia-Romagna
2008
Karl Fugelso & Carol Robinson edit Studies in Medievalism XVI, Medievalism in Technology Old and New
Eyolf Østrem and Nils Holger Petersen, Medieval Ritual and Early Modern Music: The Devotional Practice of Lauda Singing in Late-Renaissance Italy
John M. Ganim, Medievalism and Orientalism: Three Essays on Literature, Architecture and Cultural Identity
Mette B. Brun & Stephanie Glaser edit Negotiating Heritage: Memories of the Middle Ages
Nickolas Haydock, Movie Medievalism: The Imaginary Middle Ages
Isabel Divana, Reconstructing the Middle Ages: Gaston Paris and the Development of Nineteenth-Century Medievalism
Marco Brando, Lo strano caso di Federico II di Svevia. Un mito medievale nella cultura di massa, prefazione di Raffaele Licinio, postfazione di Franco Cardini
2009
Konrad Eisenbichler edits Renaissance Medievalisms
Liz Scala & Sylvia Federico edit The Post-historical Middle Ages
Michael Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame. Medievalism and the Monsters of Modernity
ms publishes its inaugural review, by Ilse A. Schweitzer, of D. Hazell’s The Plants of Middle-Earth
Karl Fugelso edits Studies in Medievalism XVII, Defining Medievalism(s)
Clare Broome Saunders, Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism
Kathleen Coyne Kelly & Tison Pugh edit Queer Movie Medievalism
2010
ms publishes Jesse Swan’s review of K. Eisenbichler, ed., Renaissance Medievalisms
Karl Fugelso and Chris Jones call for manuscripts for book series, Medievalism, Boydell & Brewer
Kathleen Davis & Nadia Altschul edit Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World
ms publishes Gwendolyn Morgan’s review of A. de Saint-Exupéry, Be þam lytlan æþelinge
Fidel Fajardo-Acosta, Courtly Seductions, Modern Subjections
ms publishes Katie Lister’s review of C.B. Saunders, Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism
Michelle Warren publishes Creole Medievalisms
Marie Bouhaïk-Gironès, Véronique Dominguez & Jelle Koopmans edit Les pères du théâtre médiéval
Alicia C. Montoya, Sophie van Romburgh, and Wim van Anrooij edit Early Modern Medievalisms
Kathryn Bush edits Mapping Medievalism at the Canadian Frontier
ms publishes Mustafa Kemal Mirzeler’s review of K. Davis & N. Alschul, Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World
ms publishes Amy S. Kaufman’s review of David W. Marshall, ed., Mass Market Medieval
ms publishes Janice Mann’s review of Michael Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre Dame
Gwendolyn Morgan edits The Year's Work in Medievalism 10 (2010)
ms publishes Michael R. Evans's review of Nickolas Haydock and E. L. Risden, eds., Hollywood in the Holy Land: Essays on Film Depictions of the Crusades and Christian-Muslim Clashes
2011
ms publishes Lesley A. Coote's review of Jerome de Groot, The Historical Novel
ms publishes Karl Fugelso's review of Seymour Chwast, Dante's Divine Comedy
David Matthews edits In Strange Countries: Middle English Literature and Its Afterlife. Essays in Memory of JJ Anderson [review]
ms publishes Karl Fugelso's review of Alan J. Koman, A Who's Who of Your Ancestral Saints
ms publishes Richard Utz's review of Kathryn Bush, ed., Mapping Medievalism at the Canadian Frontier
ms publishes William Calin's review of Vincent Ferré, ed., Médiévalisme. Modernité du Moyen Âge
Ute Berns and Andrew James Johnston edit Medievalism (special edn. of European Journal of English Studies, 15:2)
Louise D'Arcens publishes Old Songs in the Timeless Land: Medievalism in Australian Literature 1840-1919
Nadia R. Altschul publishes Geographies of Philological Knowledge
Tommaso Di Carpegna Falconieri publishes Medieovo militante. La politia di oggi alle prese con barbari e crociati
2012
ms publishes Amy Kauman's review of Berns/Johnston, eds., Medievalism
Carol L. Robinson and Pamela Clements edit Neo-medievalism in the Media: Essays on Film, Television, and Electronic Games

Terminologies

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This page, albeit not in alphabetical order, lists key terms used in studies of the reception of medieval culture in postmedieval times:

pastism preservation memorialization Verzeitlichung nostalgia romanticism echo imagination politics consumption trauma invention palimpsest interpretation erasure enlightenment architecture amateur emulation variation carnival revision mirror modernity root music humanism revival heritage continuity Mediävalismus subersion copy antiquarianism philology topos enactment mythos ethnicity mentalités art gaming sentimentalism editing aesthetics monumenta medievalismo entertainment neoclassicism Stammbaumtheorie periodicity renaissance figuration Mittelalterkonjunktur representation disciplinarity médiévisme nationalism orientalism neomedievalism history construction reception positivism simulacra analysis gender literature variance Alterität empathy touch ideology media genealogy discovery creation theory religion presentism identity imposture mouvance modernism contiguity inspiration origin desire postmodernity obscurantism science anachronism instrumentalization mimesis idolatry inhabiting commodification retrospective practice ritual enlightenment separation chivalry postcolonialism gothic...

Medievalism?

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WHAT IS MEDIEVALISM?

The following citations from scholarship on the subject of “Medievalism” exemplify the interdisciplinary scope and contested nature of the field:

“[Medievalism is] the study of the Middle Ages, the application of medieval models to contemporary needs, and the inspiration of the Middle Ages in all forms of art and thought.” Leslie J. Workman, “Editorial,” Studies in Medievalism III/1 (1987), 1.

“[M]edievalism, in origin and for the first hundred years, was an English movement. [...] In the early twentieth century, medievalism was virtually driven off the field by two things: primarily the First World War, which overwhelmingly discredited the whole ethos of ‘chivalry’ to which ruling classes across Europe had committed themselves; and secondly by Romanticism, a process which I have described in my article, ‘Medievalism and Romanticism’. Leslie J. Workman, “Speaking of Medievalism: An Interview with Leslie J. Workman,” Medievalism in the Modern World. Essays in Honour of Leslie J. Workman, ed. Richard Utz and Tom Shippey (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), pp. 439-40.

“Twain, Adams, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway repeatedly grapple’ consciously or unconsciously, textually or subtextually, with various questions: What is the relationship between modern America and the Middle Ages? Did the Middle Ages offer a mythic golden past to which America could link itself, its abrupt beginnings in the seventeenth-century American wilderness too stark for imaginative nourishment later in its history? What is the relationship between dreaming the Middle Ages and the American Dream? Do the childlike qualities attributed to the Middle Ages bear a particular relevance to this youthful nation? Do the social and martial conventions of courtly love and chivalry offer a guide, or perhaps a reproach, to an America whose vaunted freedom renders it particularly vulnerable to abrupt changes, technological disruptions, and social upheavals? What lessons does the figure of the medieval knight have to teach nineteenth- and twentieth-century male writers and the culture in general?” Kim Moreland, The Medievalist Impulse in American Literature: Twain, Adams, Fitzgerald, Hemingway (Charlottsville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1996), pp. 26-27.

“In posing the relation of the terms medievalism and Romanticism, the estranged or violently obscured past of the first is balanced by the second’s implication of Jacobin hopes for a utopian future. But “Romanticism” is a Janus-faced movement, always looking back even as it looks forward, anachronistically replaying and revising history even as it proleptically installs a modernity we now recognize. And the look back, always in order to look forward, can stem from conservative impulses as well as radical ones.” Elizabeth Fay, Romantic Medievalism. History and the Romantic Literary Ideal (Houndsmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), p. 1.

“There are two ways that medieval studies can be didactically justified as of central and consistent importance in education and culture. First, we can say the medieval heritage is very rich today in a prominent set of ideas and institutions, such as the Catholic Church, the university, Anglo-American law, parliamentary government, romantic love, heroism, just war, the spiritual capacity of little as well as elite people, and the cherishing of classical literatures and languages. That this heritage ought to be consciously identified, cultivated, and refined is commonly asserted. Secondly, we can say less conventionally that medievalism civilization stands toward our postmodern culture as the conjunctive other, the intriguing shadow, the marginally distinctive double, the secret sharer of our dreams and anxieties. This view means that the Middle Ages are much like our culture of today, but exhibit just enough variations to disturb us and force us to question some of our values and behavior patterns and to propose some alternatives or at least modifications. The difference is relatively small, but all the more provocative for that.” Norman Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages (New York: Morrow, 1991), p. 47.

“Four distinct models of medieval reception can be determined: (1) The productive, i.e., creative reception of the Middle Ages: subject matter, works, themes, and even medievalism authors are creatively re-formed into a new work; (2) The reproductive reception of the Middle Ages: the original form of medieval works is reconstructed in a manner viewed as ‘authentic,’ as in musical productions or renovations (for example, paintings and monuments). (3) The academic reception of the Middle Ages: medieval authors, works, events, etc., are investigated and interpreted according to the critical methods that are unique to each respective academic discipline; (4) The political-ideological reception of the Middle Ages: medieval works, themes, ‘ideas’ or persons are used and ‘reworked’ for political purposes in the broadest sense, e.g., for legitimization or for debunking (in this regard, one need only recall the concept ‘crusade’ and the ideology associated with it).” Francis G. Gentry and Ulrich Müller, “The Reception of the Middle Ages in Germany: An Overview,” Studies in Medievalism III/4 (Spring 1991), p. 401.

“Medieval philology is the mourning for a text, the patient labor of this mourning. It is the quest for an anterior perfection that is always bygone, that unique moment in which the presumed voice of the author was linked to the hand of the first scribe, dictating the authentic, first, and original version, which will disintegrate in the hands of all the numerous, careless individuals copying a literature in the vernacular. [...] Philology is a bourgeois, paternalist, and hygienist system of thought about the family; it cherishes filiation, tracks down adulterers, and is afraid of contamination. It is thought based on what is wrong (the variant being a form of deviant behavior), and it is the basis for a positive methodology. Bernard Cerquiglini, In Praise of the Variant, trans. Betsy Wing (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp. 34 and 49.

“In what ways can the study of the Middle Ages teach us to historicize the field of critical theory? Which is another way of asking: to what extent do our own strategies and desires determine the questions we pose and the answers we give? We cannot escape the obligation to clarify our own agendas. We can do so only by recognizing the degree to which the inquiring subject stands in a compromising position: on the one hand, involved in an enterprise that, since the Renaissance, has assumed the disinterestedness of knowledge, the objectivity of philological science: on the other, participating as a socially contextualized being in a network of predetermined subjectivities such as sex, social position, or ethnic origin.” R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols, “Introduction,” Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, ed. R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 5.

“The belief that the skills of a discipline are neutral methods rather than complex systems of representation encourages the illusion that disciplines, which are skill-centered, are themselves different; the belief also devalues the skills. It has been my aim to show that the skills of traditional medieval scholarship -- the essence of the tradition now confronted by innovation -- are not timeless, transhistorical, and unchanging. Rather, they are the products of the ages in which they were devised and are personal as well as professional ways of speaking; contemporary criticism, likewise, is not only a new collection of critical languages but also a new group of persons speaking languages of their own. The traditional skills of our disciplines, which are the means of maintaining discipline, cannot be dispensed with; nor can the history of the scholarly disciplines that they have shaped be ignored. The skills must be renewed and the history must be deconstructed or ‘dismantled’ to enable ‘a more intimate kind of knowing’ in which we find another way of knowing ourselves and our predecessors, and of speaking their languages, as well as our own, in the conversation through which we know the Middle Ages.” Allen J. Frantzen, “Prologue: Documents and Monuments: Difference and Interdisciplinarity in the Study of medieval Culture,” Speaking Two Languages: Traditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval Studies, ed. Allen J. Frantzen (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1991), pp. 32-33.

“What, then, does New Medievalism mean? I will offer you two versions. First, it means study of the Middle Ages in the light of what literary scholars call, by ellipsis, ‘theory’ -- that is, the literary and cultural theories associated with thinkers such as Derrida and Michel Foucault. [...] More specifically, New Medievalism means Postmodern Medievalism, study of the Middle Ages from a consciously held postmodern perspective, a point of view which distinguishes itself from modernity, or what I have proposed to call the Long Renaissance.” William D. Paden, “’New Medievalism’ and ‘Medievalism’,” The Year’s Work in Medievalism X (1995), 232-33.

“The Middle Ages are virtually unique among major periods or areas of historical study in being entirely the creation of scholars. Since the term ‘Middle Ages’ in one of its many forms was first coined by Italian humanists, successive cultural revolutions down to and the including the advent of Romanticism at the end of the eighteenth century found it desirable to adopt and enlarge the term for their own proposes. It is axiomatic that every generation has to write its own history of the past, and this is especially true in the case of the Middle Ages. It follows that medievalism, the study of this process, is a necessary part of the study of the Middle Ages. [...] [M]edievalism, being concerned with process rather than product, is a particularly fruitful area of several forms of postmodern criticism. Since the establishment of Studies in Medievalism, other forms of medievalism, particularly critical approaches, have emerged – in Germany, Mittelalter-Rezeption, which takes its name and inspiration from the reception theory of Hans Robert Jauss, and in the United States a new approach to the Middle Ages inspired by Paul Zumthor, whose Parler du Moyen Age (1980), appeared in this country in 1986 as Speaking of the Middle Ages, with an introduction by Eugene Vance. Leslie J. Workman, “Medievalism,” The Year’s Work in Medievalism X (1995), 227.

“Das Mittelalter hat Konjunktur, in Deutschland wie in anderen Ländern, deren Zivilisation der abendländischen Tradition verpflichtet ist. [...] Wer die Arbeit der verschiedenen Disziplinen mustert, kann den Eindruck gewinnen, daß die Hinterlassenschaft des Mittelalters seit den Anfängen der Mediävistik in der ersten Hälfte Des 19. Jahrhunderts nicht mehr mit der Intensität umgewendet und befragt worden ist wie heute. Zwei Denkfiguren bestimmen die Struktur der Fragestellungen: Alterität und Kontinuität.” Joachim Heinzle, “Einleitung: Modernes Mittelalter,” Modernes Mittelalter. Neue Bilder einer populären Epoche, ed. Joachim Heinzle (Frankfurt a.M.: Insel, 1994), pp. 9-10.

“The Methods used to establish medieval studies as an academic discipline in the nineteenth century are well known and can be summarized as follows. In order to separate and elevate themselves from popular studies of medieval culture, the new academic medievalists of the nineteenth century designated their practices, influenced by positivism, as scientific and eschewed what they regarded as less-positivist, ‘nonscientific’ practices, labeling them medievalism. They isolated medieval artifacts from complex historical sediments and studied them as if they were fossils.” Kathleen Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 1-2.

“A new interest in medieval things surfaced in England in the 1760s and with it a revival of medieval forms, manifest in literature and in architecture. At first this modern medievalism was experimental and uncertain. A more serious attitude to the medieval past developed during the long war with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. This longer historical perspective altered the ways in which the English came to think of the evolution of their society and its political arrangements. In the 1830s this Medieval Revival affected religion, and produced major changes in architecture, and then painting and the decorative arts. The country’s idea of its history, and of its identity, changed. Michael Alexander, Medievalism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), p. xii.

“What, to begin with, is the nature of the signifying field in which medievalist historiography, as a mode of sublimation, takes place? I use the term ‘sublimation’ to refer to the problem addressed by Freud of how the creation of art and other forms of cultural ‘achievement’ may be understood in relation to desire. The movie Babe will help us to an initial sketch of what is at stake in the relation of the signifier to desire and memory. Babe is, first of all, a film with a recognizably medievalist agenda. It celebrates love between master and servant (these days, animals have to stand in for the peasants), and rural life as the scene in which such love might be rediscovered. It expresses distaste for technology, focused especially on communications in the form of a Fax machine, but also recuperates the Fax, as well as discipline, training, technique. These figures recall the master tropes of anti-utilitarian medievalism in the nineteenth century. So does the film’s insistent association of meaningless speech with commercialism and disbelief in the remarkable, and its association of meaningful speech with Babe’s taciturn but loving farmer--a man behind the times who nonetheless is able to succeed because he recognizes the distinctive gifts of his animals, even when they want to do the work of the ‘other’ (even, that is, when the pig Babe wants to do the work of a sheep dog.” Louise Fradenburg, “’So That We May Speak of Them’: Enjoying the Middle Ages,” New Literary History 28.2 (1997) 205-30.

“Studies we might define under the heading of medievalism, where we examine representation of the medieval or definitions of the medieval, suffer from just such a circuit, an illness of causality one might say, as we seek to consider the effects of a particular image of the medieval and its causes, whether historical, aesthetic, or even cosmological. But medievalism offers a potentially more powerful theoretical position tha[n] that of the New Historicism in that medievalism is not about defining a particular truth about the Middle Ages, but rather about defining the truth of a Middle Ages, a point of impasse that is the subject of representation across periods, media, genres, and theories. Medievalism acknowledges the fictional structure of history, going beyond simple historical understandings, to focus instead on a mythic structure that ties us to history.” Richard Glejzer, “Medievalism and New Historicism,” The Year’s Work in Medievalism X (1995), 220-21.

"By exposing the historical contingency of our scholarly conventions, such research, which has become increasingly widespread, clears the way for us to be reconsider, and in same cases even adopts, those practices that have come to be regarded as the province of non- or pre-professional medievalism. Through its examination of the many ways in which medieval scholarship has been instrumentalized for political and ideological ends, this wok has also been able to show that scholarly bias was never fully expunged from medieval studies, even when the field was most apparently hostile to it in the name of disinterested scholarship." Louise D’Arcens and Juanita Feros Ruys, “Introduction,” Maistresse of My Wit. Medieval Women, Modern Scholars, ed. Louise D’Arcens and Juanita Feros Ruys (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), pp. 7-8.

Bibliography

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The following, continually updated titles are meant as a first introduction to the joyously interdisciplinary character of studies in medievalism. For additional titles, please consult the Tables of Contents for Studies in Medievalism and The Year’s Work in Medievalism, and Richard Utz and Aneta Dygon, “Medievalism and Literature: An Annotated Bibliography of Critical Studies,” Perspicuitas (2002). See further this site's Timeline for an attempt at a comprehensive history of Medievalism since the nineteenth century.

Alexander, Michael, Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,

2007).

Aurell, Jaume, “El Nuevo Medievalismo y la Interpretacion de los Textos Historicas,” Hispania. Revista Espanola de Historia 66 (2006), 809-32.

Barnes, Geraldine, “The Norse Discovery of America and the American Discovery of Norse (1828-1892),” Studies in Medievalism XI (2001), 167-88.

Biddick, Kathleen, The Shock of Medievalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).

Bloch, R. Howard, and Stephen G. Nichols, eds., Medievalism and the Modernist Temper (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).

Brownlee, Marina S., Kevin Brownlee, and Stephen G. Nichols, eds., The New Medievalism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).

Camille, Michael, “Philological Iconoclasm: Edition and Image in the Vie de Saint Alexis,” Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, ed. R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 371-401.

Cantor, Norman F. Inventing the Middle Ages. The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century (New York: Morrow, 1991).

D’Arcens,Louise, “From Holy War to Border Skirmish: The Colonial Chivalry of Sydney’s First Professors,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30:3 (2000), 519-45.

De Prospo, R. C., “The Patronage of Medievalism in Modern American Historiography,” Medievalism in American Culture: Special Studies, ed. Bernard Rosenthal and Paul E. Szarmach (Binghamton, NY: SUNY Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1984), pp. 1-15.

Fleischmann, Suzanne, “Methodologies and Ideologies in Historical Grammar: A Case Study from Old French,” Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, ed. R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 402-37.

Frantzen, Allen J. Desire For Origins. New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990).

---, ed., Speaking Two Languages. Traditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval Studies (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1991).

Gentry, Francis G., and Ulrich Müller, “The Reception of the Middle Ages in Germany: An Overview,” Studies in Medievalism III/4 (Spring 1991), 399-422.

Girouard, Mark. Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (London: ????, 1981).

Gleijzer, Richard, “Medievalism with New Historicism: A Question of Doctrine,” The Year’s Work in Medievalism X (1995), 215-27.

Greetham, David, “Romancing the Text, Medievalizing the Book,” Medievalism in the Modern World. Essays in Honour of Leslie J. Workman, ed. Richard Utz and Tom Shippey (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), pp. 409-31.

Hamos, Andrea, “The Middle Ages and Modern Oral Traditions: The Case of Spanish Biblical Ballads,” The Year’s Work in Medievalism X (1995), 135-42.

Heinzle, Joachim, ed., Modernes Mittelalter. Neue Bilder einer populären Epoche (Frankfurt a.M.: Insel, 1994).

Horka-Follick, Lorayne Ann, Los Hermanos Penitentes. A Vestige of Medievalism in Southwestern United States (Los Angeles, Westernlore Press, 1969).

Jauss, Hans Robert, Alterität und Modernität in der mittelalterlichen Literatur (Munich: Fink, 1977).

Leupin, Alexandre, “The Middle Ages, The Other,” Diacritics (Fall 1983), 22-31. Linton, Ruth C., “The Glory of the Gothic: Interior Decor and the Gothic Revival,” Medievalism in American Culture: Special Studies, ed. Bernard Rosenthal and Paul E. Szarmach (Binghamton, NY: SUNY Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1984), pp. 65-87.

Mancoff, Debra N., The Return of King Arthur: The Legend Through Victorian Eyes (New York: ????, 1995).

Matthews, David, The Making of Middle English, 1765-1910 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

Morgan, Gwendolyn, “Gnosticism, The Middle Ages, and the Search for Responsibility: Immortals in Popular Fiction,” Medievalism in the Modern World. Essays in Honour of Leslie J. Workman, ed. Richard Utz and Tom Shippey (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), pp. 317-27.

Mulryan, John, ed. Milton and the Middle Ages. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1982.

Paden, William D. “Reconstructing the Middle Ages: The Monk’s Sermon in The Seventh Seal,” Medievalism in the Modern World. Essays in Honour of Leslie J. Workman, ed. Richard Utz and Tom Shippey (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), pp. 289-305.

---, ed., The Future of the Middle Ages. Medieval Literature in the 1990s (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1994).

Patterson, Lee, “On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval Studies,” Speculum (1990), 87-108.

Petersen, Nils Holger, “’In Rama Sonat Gemitus...’ The Becket Story in a Danish Medievalist Music Drama, A Vigil for Thomas Becket,” Medievalism in the Modern World. Essays in Honour of Leslie J. Workman, ed. Richard Utz and Tom Shippey (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), pp. 341-58.

Richter, David H., “From Medievalism to Historicism: Representations of History in the Gothic Novel and Historical Romance,” Studies in Medievalism 4 (1992), 79-104.

Rosenthal, Bernard, “Medievalism and the Salem Witch Trials,” Medievalism in the Modern World. Essays in Honour of Leslie J. Workman, ed. Richard Utz and Tom Shippey (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), pp. 61-68.

Sears, Theresa Ann, “Medievalism and the Construction of Authority in Conquest Narratives,” Medievalism in the Modern World. Essays in Honour of Leslie J. Workman, ed. Richard Utz and Tom Shippey (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), pp. 15-26.

Stock, Brian, “The Middle Ages as Subject and Object: Romantic Attitudes and Academic Medievalism,” New Literary History 5 (1974), 527-47.

Trigg, Stephanie, “The Traffic in Medieval Women: Alice Perrers, Feminist Criticism and Piers Plowman,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 12 (1998), 5-29.

Utz, Richard, “Medievalism,” Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. Robert Bjork (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), vol. III, pp. 1118-1119.

Utz, Richard J., “Resistance to the (New) Medievalism? Comparative Deliberations on (National) Philology, Mediävalismus, and Mittelalter-Rezeption in Germany and North America,” The Future of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Roger Dahood (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), pp. 151-70.

Utz, Richard, and Tom Shippey, eds., Medievalism in the Modern World. Essays in Honour of Leslie J. Workman (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998).

Van Engen, John, ed., The Past and Future of Medieval Studies (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994).

Verduin, Kathleen, "Medievalism," Dictionary of the Middle Ages (2004).

Verduin, Kathleen, “Medievalism, Classicism, and the Fiction of E. M. Forster,” Medievalism in the Modern World. Essays in Honour of Leslie J. Workman, ed. Richard Utz and Tom Shippey (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), pp. 264-86.

Watson, Steve, “Touring the Medieval: Tourism, Heritage and Medievalism in Northumbria,” Studies in Medievalism XI (2001), 239-61.

Workman, Leslie J., “Medievalism,” The Arthurian Encyclopedia, ed. Norris J. Lacy (New York: Garland, 1985), pp. 387-91.

Zumthor, Paul, Speaking of the Middle Ages (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1986).

List of Reviews

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Amy Kaufman on: Ute Berns & Andrew James Johnston, eds. Medievalism
William Calin on: Vincent Ferré, ed., Médiévalisme. Modernité du Moyen Âge
Richard Utz on: Kathryn Brush, ed., Mapping Medievalism at the Canadian Frontier
Karl Fugelso on: Alan J. Koman. A Who's Who of Your Ancestral Saints
Karl Fugelso on: Seymour Chwast. Dante's Divine Comedy. A Graphic Adaptation
Lesley A. Coote on: Jerome de Groot, The Historical Novel
Michael R. Evans on: Nickolas Haydock and E. L. Risden, eds., Hollywood in the Holy Land: Essays on Film Depictions of the Crusades and Christian-Muslim Clashes
Janice Mann on: Michael Camille. The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame: Medievalism and the Monsters of Modernity
Amy S. Kaufman on: David W. Marshall, ed., Mass Market Medieval: Essays on the Middle Ages in Popular Culture
Mustafa Kemal Mirzeler on: Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul, eds. Medievalism in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of “The Middle Ages” Outside Europe
Katie Lister on: Clare Broome Saunders, Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism
Gwendolyn Morgan on: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Be þam lytlan æþelinge. Trans. Fritz Kemmler
Jesse G. Swan on: Konrad Eisenbichler, ed., Renaissance Medievalisms
Ilse A. Schweitzer on: Dinah Hazell. The Plants of Middle-Earth: Botany and Sub-creation