Medievalism in the Age of COVID-19: A Collegial Plenitude
Compiled and edited by Richard Utz
When reposting or quoting this compilation, we request
you attribute its first place and time of publication: “Medievalism in the Age
of COVID-19: A Collegial Plenitude,” comp. & ed. Richard Utz, Medievally
Speaking, May 4, 2020.
Introduction
About four decades ago, when Leslie J. Workman organized
the first sessions on the subject of Medievalism at the International Congress
on Medieval Studies, few people
listened. As a paradigm, Medievalism Studies questioned the prevalent
scholarly notion of an unbridgeable chasm between ourselves and the medieval
artifacts and subjects we study. Only a scientific and distanced approach to
this almost incomprehensibly different era, so scholars of Medieval Studies
professed, would yield reliable results. Medievalism was branded as something amateurs,
dilettantes, and enthusiasts do.
As I am writing the intro to this collection of news, reflections, reports, shout outs, and vignettes,
it is as clear as is the summer sun that the paradigm of Medievalism
has helped transform the way we study and engage with the medieval past. By
focusing on the humanity of medieval people and their emotions and motivations,
and by understanding and embracing our own (sublimated) desire for a deep engagement
with the medieval past, we have enriched and humanized our own present as well
as the past we investigate, re-present, and reenact. Journals, book series,
essay collections, blogs, radio programs, videos, podcasts, and annual
conferences attest to an almost omnipresent multimodal rendezvous with the past
that investigates and acknowledges the multiple mirrors through time that influence
our contemporary scholarly and creative reinventions of the Middle Ages.
Another essential insight medievalism studies has
revealed is how scholars, artists,
practitioners, and fans all collaborate, albeit often in their own groups
and in diverse ways, at increasing what we know about the Middle Ages and its continuities
in the present. Appropriately, then, the authors of the short pieces assembled
below include not only those who work at (or alongside) educational and research
institutions: graduate students, retired faculty, full-time tenure track
faculty, contingent faculty, independent scholars, software developer, administrators; but also
those in non-academic or academy-adjacent professions: publishers, writers, a
medieval coach, a composer, an industry analyst, and a jouster and professional
fencing master. The contributors are based around the world, including Australia,
Austria, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Hungary, Iceland, Japan, Switzerland,
Turkey, the UK, and the USA; and their areas of interest, from the medieval
through the contemporary, include Art, Comparative Literature, English, Church
History, Cultural Studies, History, Latin, Linguistics, Literature, Media, Music,
Political Science, and Philosophy. Because such is the collegial plenitude of Medievalism.
Despite this plenitude, this compilation of more than 40
voices is not meant to be a formal and comprehensive survey of the current state
of medievalism studies. However, in the time of COVID-19, when we cannot meet
in person during our annual pilgrimages to Kalamazoo or Leeds, where we usually
refresh our batteries and learn about our projects, I thought it would be a
good idea to share publicly what’s been happening in our field of engagement. I
contacted colleagues either because I knew they were working on projects or had
presented papers and plenaries at our past conferences and events. I originally
imposed word counts, only to abandon them when confronted with a somewhat
longer well-wrought urn (well, some contributions were so long that they will
be published in full in Medievally
Speaking as individual pieces in the near future); I did not edit everyone
into one style sheet or variety of English; since not everyone sent me a “title”
for their entries, I invented some; I added some links and visuals not
originally included by contributors; and I specifically asked about personal as
well as professional news, impressions, and messages, which means that readers
will learn about a joyous wedding (cum picture) right next to the
announcement of a new essay collection. I encouraged this conscious mélange of the
personal and professional because, most of all, I wanted this project to offer
a collegial sign of hope and continuity in a world that has been too much with
us in recent months.
Many medievalism-ists I contacted were simply too busy at
this time of the year, as they took on additional stressful responsibilities at
home and at (remote) work. And, yes, one colleague had to decline because she has
been suffering from the symptoms of COVID-19. Therefore, because some voices
could not be included this time around, I promise there will be future opportunities
for our ailing colleague and others to share what they would like to share. Medievally Speaking will
remain open to additional contributions.
I will end this intro with the joyful news that the most
recent issue of Studies
in Medievalism has just been published, expertly brought together and edited
by Karl Fugelso, and beautifully produced by our friends at Boydell &
Brewer. In its 29th iteration, it remains the top journal in
Medievalism Studies. Together with our annual conference (to be hosted by Kevin
Moberly for its 35th iteration at Old Dominion University, November
12-14, 2020), and our conference proceedings, The Year’s
Work in Medievalism (edited by Valerie B. Johnson and Renée Ward), Studies
in Medievalism ensures the continuity of the multivocal intellectual
community we call the International Society for the Study
of Medievalism. You can find the SiM 2020 Table of Contents as
well as the Call for Papers for the 35th International Conference as
the two final entries, below. Because, you guessed it, such is the plenitude of
Medieval-ISSM.
Richard Utz
President, International Society for the Study of Medievalism
List of contributors
Susan Aronstein, English, U of Wyoming, USA
Teodora Artimon, Publisher, Trivent Publishing, Hungary
Matthias Berger, Medieval English Studies, U of Berne,
Switzerland
Anne Berthelot, Literatures, Cultures & Languages, U
of Connecticut, USA
Mary Boyle, Medieval & Modern Languages, U of Oxford,
UK
Danièle Cybulskie, Author, Historian, Medieval Coach, Canada
Louise D’Arcens, English,
Macquarie University, Australia
Andrew B.R. Elliott, Media
& Cultural Studies, U of Lincoln, UK
Mimi E. Ensley, Literature, Media, and Communication,
Georgia Tech, USA
Vincent Ferré,
Literature and Human Sciences, U of Paris-East Créteil, France
Kelly Ann Fitzpatrick,
Industry Analyst, RedMonk
Karl Fugelso, Art+Design,
Art History, Art Education, Towson U, USA
Simon Forde, Director,
Arc Humanities Press, Europe
Luiz Felipe Anchieta Guerra, History & Political
Cultures, Federal U of Minas Gerais, Brazil
Jonathan Good, History, Reinhardt U, USA
Susanne Hafner, German, Fordham U, USA
Kevin J. Harty, English, Lasalle U, USA
Ann F. Howey, English, Brock
University, Canada
Sylvie Kandé, History & Philosophy, SUNY Old Westbury,
USA
Dina Khapaeva, Modern Languages, Georgia Tech, USA
Stefanie Matabang, Comparative Literature, UCLA, USA
David Matthews, English, U of Manchester, UK
Jenna Mead, English & Literary Studies, U of Western Australia,
Australia
Brent A. Moberly, Software Developer, Indiana U, USA
Kevin A. Moberly, English, Old Dominion U, USA
Ken Mondschein, Writer, Historian, Jouster, Professional Fencing
Master, USA
Laura Morreale, Independent Scholar, Washington, DC, USA
Jan Alexander van Nahl, Icelandic & Comparative
Cultural Studies, U of Iceland, Iceland
Martha Oberle, Retired-Independent Scholar, USA
Nils Holger Petersen, Church History, U of Copenhagen, and
composer, Denmark
Tison Pugh,
English, University of Central Florida, USA
Huriye Reis,
English, Hacettepe U, Turkey
Fernando Rochaix,
Art, Georgia Perimeter College/Georgia State U, USA
Siegrid Schmidt, Medieval
German Literature, Paris Lodron U of Salzburg, Austria
Yoshiko Seki, Humanities
and Social Sciences, Kochi U, Japan
Clare A. Simmons,
English, Ohio State U, USA
Alexandra
Sterling-Hellenbrand, Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Appalachian State U,
USA
Lorraine Kochanske
Stock, English, U of Houston, USA
Arwen Taylor, English
& World Languages, Arkansas Tech, USA
Richard Utz, Literature,
Media, and Communication, Georgia Tech, USA
Dustin M. Frazier
Wood, English & Creative Writing, U of Roehampton, UK
Kirsten Yri, Music,
Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada
Jan M. Ziolkowski,
Medieval Latin & Comparative Literature, Harvard U, USA
News, reflections, reports, shout outs, and
vignettes
All we need is … Radio Medieval
Teodora C. Artimon, Publisher, Trivent Publishing,
Hungary
“Past Perfect!” - Five Years of Interviews
with CEU Medieval Radio,
edited by Christopher Mielke, Stephen Pow, and Tamás Kiss (Budapest: Trivent, 2020)
includes a selection of interviews with the most memorable guests invited to
the Past Perfect! talk show hosted by
Central European University’s first and only radio station, CEU Medieval Radio.
CEU Medieval Radio was established by Tamás Kiss in 2012 as a non-profit
initiative to popularize medieval and early modern music, history, and culture.
Past Perfect! is the station’s show
on medieval and early modern history and culture, where the interviews
conducted by Christopher Mielke aim to popularize myriad issues in medieval
studies with the help of some of the most internationally well-known scholars
in their fields – the selected interviews in this volume include academics like
Natalie Zemon-Davis, Patrick Geary, Averil Cameron, János Bak, Peter Burke,
József Laszlovszky, Richard Unger, etc. talking about topics as varied as
mythbreaking, witch hunting, beer,
queens, code-breaking, and apocalypses. Furthermore, as both the radio station
and this volume value interdisciplinarity and try to keep subjects relevant,
these interviews reflect historic topics that carry a strong resonance up to
the present day: examples are the programs dedicated to Crusader studies and to
the impact of religious warfare on modern issues such as demography, diaspora,
and the environment. Plans for future interviews touch on the New World and the
Far East in the Middle Ages, medieval humor, the Middle Ages in modern culture
(fantasy literature and video games), and the medieval roots of modern
political conflicts.
The volume is
available at Trivent
Publishing, here with three interviews readable in open access; CEU
Medieval Radio can be accessed at https://medievalradio.org/.
What did the Tudors think of Middle English?
David Matthews,
English, University of Manchester, UK
Many people
comment that they find it hard to concentrate in the current situation. I share
that, and find that I'm best at pursuing tasks for a short time and then
turning to something else. However, I was in the incredibly lucky position that
I was already on research leave when lockdown in the UK commenced. I was
already deep into the slightly strange headspace that leave can create -
removed from teaching, students, even my office - and working away on a couple
of talks I had to give, one of which was cancelled at only a few days' notice.
Left with a bunch of ideas that had no immediate outlet, and in the yawning
spaces that have opened up, when I am not baking bread (like the rest of the
UK, it seems), I have been able to think about my long-term project. I have
been interested in Middle
English for a long time, and particularly the ways in which the study of it
came to be - this could be thought of as being about 'medievalism before
medievalism'. I've been looking at the Tudor understanding of Middle English,
because there's a real sense in which the Tudors invent it; they have to, in a
sense, to be modern themselves. They have to have a perceptible past. That's
putting it rather simply - it's a rather more complicated matter than that! I
was fortunate in that ahead of the lockdown I had spent time in libraries,
looking at some early printed sources of Middle English material, and
specifically the annotations on medieval devotional material, either side of
the Reformation. So I'm living off the memory of that sense of contact with the
medieval and early modern past and doing quite well, if only for a couple of
hours a day, at reconstructing the ways in which Tudor readers put together a
sense of the Middle Ages. The past - fortunately - is another country, and it
helps to be there sometimes.
Medievalism at
the Met
Sylvie Kandé,
History & Philosophy, SUNY Old Westbury, USA
Crossroads, the tripartite exhibit currently on
display at The Met, is a brilliant commentary on both the virulent nature
of nationalism and the calcifying effects of categories.
“Power
and Piety”, one of Crossroads’ three installations, showcases
magnificent objects taken from their respective collections and paired to shine
in a novel, transcultural manner. Two of them (an “African Magus” from a Cistercian
Abbey in Lichtenthal, sculpted before 1489; and a 14-17th-century Dogon “Male
Figure with Raised Arms”), labelled “Venerated Intermediaries,” are, according
to the curatorial description, “powerful depictions of Africans from the
premodern era.”
The concept
behind Crossroads is indeed felicitous; moreover, it succeeds in firmly
reinscribing Africa in museal medievalism. However, when examining what M.
Détienne calls the “mechanisms of thought in the articulation among the
elements brought into relation,” one may feel that the pairing of the Magus
with the Rainmaker somewhat undermines the exhibit’s main purpose. Though both
figures are mighty mediators represented in acts of devotion, should we assume
that they were Africans in the eyes of the anonymous artists who sculpted them?
Was a premodern African identity meaningful for the models (provided they
existed), or is this identity projected onto the juxtaposed objects by our
modern (that is to say, shaped by the legacy of slavery) minds? And doesn’t
this juxtaposition reaffirm, instead of challenging, the alleged divide between
ethnic and Western art?
As we are
preparing to emerge into a post-COVID-19 era, shifting from the concept of
“objects of inquiry” to that of “lines of inquiry”, in medieval matters and
beyond, could help us train our eyes to un-see Modernity’s invented colors.
Et Nolite Te Buteones
Carborundorum, or advice on
making it through this mess with your feathers intact from two reprobate gamers
(excerpt from an extended discourse to be published in Medievally Speaking in full
soon™)
Brent A.
Moberly, Software Developer, Indiana U, USA
Kevin A.
Moberly, English, Old Dominion U, USA
Joust
(1982) – If you must social distance, then what better way to do it than armed
with a six-foot lance astride an ostrich (or a stork) soaring over an
ever-rising lava lake. The gameplay is as simple as it is allegorical: keep
flapping and don’t let the buzzards get you down. Originally released as an
arcade game, Joust has been ported to any number of home entertainment
systems and is still widely playable on the web. It also lives on as a sort of ghost in
the machine, with cameos in World of Warcraft: Cataclysm (2010) and Ernest
Cline’s Ready
Player One (2011). For those of us with as-of-yet unspent research
monies, a restored version of the original arcade cabinet is available for around $3000.
Bayeux Zoom
Arwen Taylor, English
& World Languages, Arkansas Tech, USA
Recently my
academic writing group (re)discovered the Bayeux Tapestry meme
generator (you might recall the Medieval Knievel or Field Barren of Fvcks
iterations). I’ve been meeting with this writing group for around eight years
now; we started out workshopping each other’s dissertations and shifted to
Skype as we started taking fellowships and jobs in other states. There’s a lot
to say about the Bayeux meme as medievalism, in its use of archaic but
anachronistic language, its juxtaposition of medieval and modern media, its
depoliticized grab-bag treatment of the tapestry as ripe for appropriation and
re-arrangement. But also, it’s just fun, something that a couple of
computer-savvy students made available to anyone who wants to play. Lately our
writing group meetings have been more personal conversation than writing
feedback, as scholarly projects are on some back burner way behind online
teaching, family care, and anxiety management. But making Bayeux Zoom jokes and
putting masks on Norman soldiers amounts to a small, satisfying creativity that
is also a little grounding: in uncertain times, we can still make things and
say things, and connect with each other while doing it.
The Afterlives of Vienna’s Jews
Siegrid Schmidt, Medieval
German Literature, Paris Lodron U of Salzburg, Austria
Medievalism, in the German-speaking world still
generally referred to as Mittelalter-Rezeption, entered my research
agenda once again recently when Vienna’s Jewish Museum invited me to contribute
an essay on contemporary perceptions of the Middle Ages for a catalog exhbit on
the everyday experience of Vienna’s Jewish population. What surprised me immediately
was that the invitation did not at all specify that I focus on phenomena
related to the lives and experiences of Vienna’s Jews. Instead, I was asked to
write on the afterlife of the Middle Ages in general. Of course, I could not
imagine writing such a general treatment without at least spending some time on
searching for potential intersections with Jewish culture. What I found was
shocking: In the German-speaking world I could not identify any recreations of
Jewish life during the Middle Ages. While I did not have time for a
comprehensive investigation, the only full-scale representation of medieval
Jewish history and culture I could find was Willy Thaler’s German translation, Der
Medicus (1987), of American author Noah Gordon’s bestseller The
Physician (1986), and of course the widely viewed 2013 movie version, Der
Medicus/The Pysician, directed by Philipp Stölzl. This topic definitely
invites more in-depth study.
Living the Medieval
Podcast
Danièle Cybulskie,
Author/Historian/Medieval Coach, www.danielecybulskie.com
The Medieval Podcast is
based at home, so the way it’s put together hasn’t been much changed by
COVID-19. But as our doors and borders closed, suddenly its significance did
change, at least to my mind. I had always thought of it as being a pleasant
diversion: a friendly way of learning something new. As our worlds shrunk to
four walls, however, every time I sat down at the microphone, I was reminded of
the significance of radio during the tumultuous moments of the twentieth
century: how it brought people together and gave them some relief from the
bleakness of war. Now, I create each episode with an ear to how it might bring
information and entertainment, but also relief from loneliness and stress.
Maybe medievalism isn’t an essential service, but in this moment especially, I
think it can still be put to the service of others in some small way.
The Kilwa Coins: Australia and the ‘Global Medieval’
Louise D’Arcens, English, Macquarie University, Australia
The northeast coast of Arnhem Land, in Australia’s
Northern Territory, offers tantalising but inconclusive evidence of possible contact
with medieval Islamicate trade networks. Six copper coins from the East African
sultanate of Kilwa Kisiwani have been found on Yolngu country, on the Wessel
Islands. Five coins were found in 1944 by an airman monitoring Japanese threats
to Australia. The sixth, discovered in 2018, is currently unconfirmed as a
Kilwa coin but has the same dimensions as the others. Dated c. 900-1300 CE, the
coins bear the names of identifiable rulers. Kilwa’s significance within a
premodern Eurasian/African mercantile ‘world system’ is well-known. One theory
is that the coins washed up from a later shipwreck. Others believe trade ships
from medieval Kilwa could have reached the seas near Arnhem Land: Ian McIntosh (Australasian
Science, May 2014) claims “[t]he
Kilwa-Oman-Gudjerat-Malacca-Moluccas sea route was well established by the
1500s” (2014). Did the ‘global Middle Ages’ stretch to Northern Australia? Do
the Kilwa coins “implicate Australia’s Aboriginal peoples in the Maritime Silk
Route” (McIntosh)? What alternative accounts might the Yolngu offer?
Receiving the
German Middle Ages
Mary Boyle, Medieval and Modern Languages, University
of Oxford
In the midst of lockdown, I am embarking on a
three-year Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Oxford,
investigating how, during the
long nineteenth century, German- and English-language writers created distinct
constructions of the Middle Ages by translating, adapting, and rewriting one
another’s medieval literature. This builds on my previous work on nineteenth-century
Anglo-American reception of the German Middle Ages, which was funded
by the Irish Research Council and hosted by Maynooth University. I am indebted
to both funding bodies for enabling me to conduct this research – deeply
relevant in today’s political climate in
which populist narratives depend on selective interpretations of medieval and
modern history. As borders close around the world, my research emphasises the
interdependence of German and anglophone contemporary and historical constructions
of the national(ist) and transnational past.
Medievalism’s relevance,
right now
Jonathan Good,
History, Reinhardt University, USA
Medievalists,
particularly American medievalists, are usually starved for attention. They
must work very hard to convince other people that their subject is relevant. So
when the country is under coronavirus quarantine, they naturally bring up
parallels with the Black Death of the fourteenth century, which can provide
illuminating insights or at least comic relief. A friend claimed that he and
his family were hunkered down, “telling a story a day to each other,” like the
characters in Boccaccio’s Decameron. Another jokingly announced:
Hmm, just got a
thing from a local church. They're organizing a large group of Christians to
publicly pray for mercy and strike themselves with belts and other things to
show that they mean it. If it goes well locally, they plan on organizing a
march of penance to other towns and cities.
But presumably
this neo-Flagellant group is not going to proceed to a local Jewish
neighborhood and beat up the inhabitants there, for allegedly poisoning the
wells. Because, let’s be honest: a study of history often makes one very
grateful to be living in the time and place that one does. We know that this pestilence
is caused by a virus, and we know how it spreads; we can even come up
with vaccines against it, which eventually we will. No more messing around with
astrology, humorism, or aromatherapy. We might study the Middle Ages, but I
doubt any one of us actually wants to return to them.
Although, if
there is one fruitful parallel between Yersinia Pestis and SARS-CoV-2 it is how the spread of both microbes was
abetted by international trade. The Black Death got to Europe over the Silk
Road; our outsourcing of most manufacturing to China has given us lots of cheap
stuff to buy, but it is also the means by which a local outbreak of a novel
coronavirus in Wuhan became an international sensation. This is an unintended
price of globalism, and another reason why rebuilding our manufacturing base
might be a good idea.
Entrenched stories
of ancient national exceptionalism
Matthias Berger,
Medieval English Studies, U of Berne, Switzerland
Amidst a global
pandemic, nationalist uses of the deep past – on which I'd just
written a PhD – suddenly seemed a little more esoteric than I’d
convinced myself they were. Before long, though, my sense of purpose was
steadied by no less a figure than the British PM, who regretfully informed the
British public that “the ancient, inalienable right of free-born people of the
United Kingdom” – the right to a drink at the pub – would have to be
suspended. There it was: the old Anglo-Saxonist myth, in bizarre miniature, of
the free-born Englishman. My heart leapt for perverse joy.
Cultural memories of the Middle Ages continue to shift steadily towards themes
of national belonging – not just in Britain, and also in rather more
consequential forms. I’m eager to see how those who labour in the field of
medievalism studies will continue to make themselves heard as global
challenges boost ideas of age-old national exceptionalism.
Memory in the age
of antihumanism
Dina Khapaeva,
Modern Languages, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
In our
virus-ridden “modern” world, which fights a pandemic with remedies that recall
the times when Black Death ravaged Europe, neomedievalism emerges as a ghost of
a dreadful past and threatens to become our daily reality. The question of how
this pandemic will influence contemporary democracy may depend on the
resistance to neomedieval politics in a given society and culture. In my
current book project on neomedievalism in post-Soviet Russia (working title: “Memory
in the Age of Antihumanism. Neomedievalism in Putin’s Russia and Beyond”), I
argue that cultural neomedievalism is laden with and is reinforced by a
neomedieval political and social agenda. I focus in particular on the fervent
public debates surrounding the confluence of oprichnina – the first bout
of state terror in Russian history (1565-1584) – and Stalinism. Over the
past decade, the normalization terror – both medieval and Stalinist – has
become a staple of Putin’s politics
and ideology. It seems that in Russia, the pandemic will only reinforce
neomedieval projects. Will countries with a stronger democratic tradition be
more successful at defying the challenges of neomedievalism amidst a modern
plague?
Anglo-Saxonism
during a lockdown
Dustin M. Frazier
Wood, English & Creative Writing, U of Roehampton, UK
With a series of
conferences cancelled, public lectures postponed, and other projects delayed
until libraries re-open, I've been expanding on a paper intended for Kalamazoo.
That paper considers how people learned Old English in the 17th and early 18th
centuries. Among my key sources are two versions of Edmund Gibson’s 1692
edition of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The first is a translation by the
antiquary Richard Gough (1735-1809), now in the Bodleian; the second, an
interleaved and heavily annotated ‘re-edition’ by the polymath and bibliophile
Maurice Johnson (1688-1755), now at the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society (SGS).
Reconstructing Gough’s and Johnson’s libraries from archival evidence means we
can identify the Old English dictionaries, grammars, and editions they used to
create their texts, both intended as a kind of learning exercise. The evidence
reveals more than a process of language acquisition, though; it provides
evidence for how language acquisition related to ideas about Old English as
not-yet-dead language.
The lockdown in
the UK has meant trading my normal volunteer work as Librarian of the SGS with
a temporary role as the trustee responsible for carrying out weekly
conservation, security, and environmental checks on the SGS’s museum, library
and archive collections. That access - accidental and unfortunate as the
circumstances that have led to it may be - gives me a chance to develop a
project that has fascinated me for a while now.
A significant
part of Maurice Johnson’s re-edition of the Chronicle is written in his
imitation Anglo-Saxon hand. Beyond learning Old English, he was driven to
create it in the form of facsimiles of extracts from manuscripts he’d seen
elsewhere and as new text of his own composition. In fact, imitation medieval
script is scattered throughout Johnson’s surviving papers. Some examples are
beautiful, others clumsy; some recreate whole charters while others contain
just a word or two. In some senses they were all unnecessary. In the early 18th
century, published guides to medieval script were available and Anglo-Saxon
fonts were used in printed editions; both types of source were available in
Johnson's library or the library of the SGS. One explanation is that they
represent a particularly intense form of auto-didacticism - maybe Johnson was
just that student. But there is too much recreated medieval script, and
too much evidence that Johnson’s methods and skill level increased over the
course of his life. It’s one more of the many forms of medievalism that mark
Johnson’s intellectual oeuvre. From my perspective, it's one that seems key to
understanding his ideas about the very nature of medieval text.
Memories are
made of this
Martha Oberle,
Retired-Independent Scholar, USA
Some years ago, a
little girl living in New York City looked up and down the Hudson River.
Upriver stood the great bridge connecting two states; downriver, the yacht
basin emptied by war, and beyond, the docks including Pier 90, home to Cunard’s
Queens, ocean liners become troop ships. The USNS Comfort sits there now.
Far downtown,
Trinity Church; closer, St. Patrick’s, buildings whose designs hark back to any
medieval town’s church or medieval city’s great cathedral. The school, a convent – nuns conversant in
English, French, Latin.
All true. The
point? Bygones, aka Medievalism(s),
speak to the present. Consider the
parallels: Crusade in Europe -The Conquest of Constantinople. Apollo 13’s voyage to unknown space -Prince
Henry, da Gama, Columbus, Magellan. Feminism/scholarship/politics: Eleanor of
Aquitaine, Hildegard, Hilda of Whitby.
Unorthodoxies: the 60’s -Carmina Burana. Certainly, particulars differ but the
essentials – intelligence, daring, courage, hope, magnanimity, search for truth
– are steady. And steadying.
(Neo)Medieval(ism)
reaches out
Kelly Ann Fitzpatrick, Industry Analyst, RedMonk
The academic job
market being what it is, I now work in the tech industry at an analyst firm
called RedMonk. While the name and logo themselves
are instances of medievalism, the work I do is not, focusing primarily on how
developers build software. And yet, my tech colleagues have embraced my
background in medieval(ism) studies, have supplied me with venues
to talk
about medievalism, and were the first to congratulate me when my monograph
on neomedievalism came out.
I am also
unendingly thankful for the folks who engage with public medievalism(s),
especially through social media. For those of us doing intellectual work in the
field but who are, job-wise, on the outskirts of academia (or even in
increasingly marginalized positions within it), it can be a lifeline to see our
colleagues in action, whether they are combatting plague propaganda,
compiling anti-racist
resources, or surfacing a Twitter
take on medieval bunnies.
Medievalism
matters both “there” and “back again”
Alexandra
Sterling-Hellenbrand, Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Appalachian State
U, USA
In the context of
this call, I have found myself thinking about how the “matter” of medievalism
has mattered in unexpected ways in spring 2020. In mid-February, I arrived in
Austria ready to embark on two Fulbright projects designed to explore
medievalism as a comparative study of the made and the found middle ages
involving examples from US-American and Austrian culture. One project involved
a class for the American Studies program at the University of Graz on “The American
Middle Ages.” The other project is a new research topic for me, a corollary to
my recent work on museums, that explores installations and monuments relating
to medieval literature in the modern Austrian landscape. I was eager to get
better acquainted on site with a comprehensive project where medieval studies
meets medievalism at the University of Graz entitled “The Styrian Literature
Pathways of the Middle Ages.” (https://literaturpfade.uni-graz.at/de/)
My own project builds on that work to explore
the interplay of local, regional, and (to an extent) national interests in
various representations of medieval German literature within the context of
cultural sustainability in Austria today.
That was the plan—until
the suspension of all Fulbright programs due to Covid-19 brought me home in
early April. As I re-tool my research plan, looking forward hopefully to MAMO
in 2021 (!), I find that medievalism seems to have provided a common coping
mechanism for me and my Austrian students, who went to remote learning and then
lockdown country-wide right after their semester began in March. Taking a page
from Leila Norako in her introductory essay to postmedieval (2018), I
asked the students to begin our course by reading “Harold and the Purple Crayon,”
a book that I rightly suspected the students would not know. We could not realize,
in early March, that Harold’s worldbuilding would offer inspiration, not just
as a way of imagining an American “medieval” but as a metaphor for the sudden
re-organizing of our own lives and a need to chart (draw) different paths
through 2020. I also sense from the
entire class a much keener pleasure in many-faceted medievalisms, as the
students follow their chosen key critical terms through the semester; if you
want to know, the most popular in this class of 27 are authenticity, humor, and
simulacrum. The creative American middle
ages will be happily colliding with Austrian notions of the authentic until
June, and I think it gives us all something to look forward to more than we had
anticipated.
What might be our
future?
Simon Forde, Director,
Arc Humanities Press, Europe
This Easter I have sat out in a garden for
the first time in my adult life, marvelling at how nature is so rapidly
restoring itself, and enjoying a peace and quiet that reminds me of my youth in
the 60s. I have been reading novels by John Buchan set at another turning point
in globalization, prior to 1914, and re-reading La Peste.
After this period in our anchoritic cells,
will we really return so easily to our old frenetic, wasteful lifestyle? Facing
into the abyss of my business being destroyed by the lockdown, and to guide my
thinking, I have been pondering what the Zeitgeist might be in the
coming generation, particularly in comparison with the post-Berlin Wall
generation where globalism held sway and as medievalists we focused a lot on
integrating scholars from the former Eastern Bloc. And how the Leeds IMC has
played such a transformative role here.
Key features of this new period may well
include increasing tension between globalization and localism, tension between
home-working and travel by car or plane, and a quandary between repairing a
destroyed economy and concerns for nature, the environment, and climate change.
Accordingly, for medieval studies I wonder
if minor conferences will lose their draw, with e-conferencing coming more to
the fore. Will we finally make connections with archaeologists, anthropologists,
historians, and cultural historians in and of East Asia, Africa, and the
Americas for the period roughly from 500 to 1500 and start seeing this
millennium from a non-Eurocentric perspective?
Medievalisms in music and religion
Nils Holger Petersen, Church History,
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Watch out for the The
Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism, ed. by Stephen C. Meyer and
Kirsten Yri (OUP, 2020), which will appear in print this month. My contribution
is the article “Medievalism and Rued Langgaard’s Romantic Image of Queen Dagmar,”
concerning the Danish composer Rued Langgaard (1893–1952) and his appropriation
of (assumed medieval) ballads about the Danish Queen Dagmar (early thirteenth
century) in his Ninth Symphony (1942).
One of my other projects is the composite
article on “Medievalism” (about the role of the Bible in medievalism) in the
forthcoming vol. 18 of the Encyclopedia
of the Bible and its Reception (De Gruyter, 2020). Richard Utz has
written the general introduction, other scholars supplement from specific
disciplinary angles, I write about music.
Currently, I am working on a book project
about W.A. Mozart and medieval liturgy, basic for Baroque Catholic liturgy, also
in Salzburg where Wolfgang grew up working at the court of the
prince-archbishop. My claim (previously made in articles) is that even some of
his most important operas draw on experiences derived from medieval Latin
liturgy.
Reading communities past and present
Mimi Ensley, Literature, Media, and
Communication, Georgia Institute of Technology
“In the modern western world
reading is considered to be a silent, solitary, individual, and
private activity,” writes Wendy Scase in the Oxford Handbook
of Medieval Literature in English. “Medieval reading was, by contrast, always
a community activity.”
If modern reading is solitary and private,
as Scase suggests, then social distancing has shown the value of
reading communities. In March of this year, Sir Patrick Stewart began
reading #ASonnetADay on his social media accounts. Author Yiyun Li
started #TolstoyTogether to tackle War and Peace with other
readers sheltering in place. Online story times fill the gaps left by
shuttered schools and libraries. With physical separation,
people craved interaction, and communal reading began to bring them
together.
Like many, I am
currently developing my online course for the summer
semester, and I am considering ways to foster
community in my virtual classroom. I’ve decided to take a cue from medieval
readers and consider how the act of reading itself can support
community. Indeed, my course, entitled “Reading Communities,” will be themed
around this very idea. My students and I
will examine digital communities of
readers, and we will also investigate the long histories of
such communities. We will, I hope, come away with a better understanding
of reading communities past and present.
Participatory
networks
Andrew B.R.
Elliott, Media and Cultural Studies, University of Lincoln, UK
Amid the global
lockdown, it is often difficult to think about long-term research. (Imaginary)
ivory towers are suddenly toppled as academics acclimatise to online teaching,
all the while juggling caring responsibilities, new work-life balances, and
often requiring us gracefully to herd animals, partners and/or children out of
the office during Zoom sessions.
In my work on
participatory medievalism, for years I’ve been exploring how the Middle Ages
which circulate in popular culture are not passed down to us, but co-curated
through a participatory model and hammered into shape by a fundamental human
propensity to play and to share. Much of that work has involved tracking uses
of the medieval across networks of hate.
The pandemic has
thrown up some glimpses of the flipside of that equation. Despite its tragic
context, it has shown that homo sapiens is not only a social animal, but a
playful one. Homo ludens (as Johan Huizinga called us) exists
across the family quizzes, the online board games, and the surge in
multi-player online gaming. Likewise a global participatory project, whereby
healthy citizens remain in isolation to benefit others more vulnerable, is
showing positive results almost everywhere. 3D printers are quickly repurposed
to produce medical equipment, previously paywalled content has been unlocked,
and huge ad-hoc networks of volunteers from hyper-local to global have sprung
up in response to a host of social problems. Despite its spiteful, selfish
stockpiling, humanity has also shown its participatory hand.
I have no wish to
be a Pollyanna about what is clearly a devastating pandemic. Rather, and
simply, I note the irony that asking us to shut ourselves away in isolation has
created the very participatory networks which prove humanity’s playful, caring
and sharing nature, and which serve as an antidote to the negative medievalisms
I’ve been working with before.
Medievalism-ists, meet Joscelyn?
Jenna Mead, English and Literary Studies,
University of Western Australia, Australia
On 30 March @MSS_AfterPrint tweeted a
shoutout to Peter Baker, font-developer extraordinaire, with a gif showing his
Joscelyn font appearing across a small screen to explain itself. ‘This hand (not
Joscelyn’s own) is much more formal than many secretary hands . . .’ By 2 April
@MSS_AfterPrint’s tweet had notched up 1K likes and 382 RTs. The hive mind
celebrated its novelty, its beauty, Professor Baker’s undoubted talents, a new
fetish object: we loved it with return gifs and hat-tips. This isn’t my field:
recent work was on medievalism and Indigenous country in Australia though
current work has me reading Stephen Dodesham’s hand in his copy of Chaucer’s Astrolabe
most days. And for some colleagues, Joscelyn is way too late for the medieval-
part of medievalism. But there’s something there, for medievalists, I mean. The
Joscelyn font unfurling across the screen looks like Edward FitzGerald,
wealthy, eccentric and obscurely intense, hard at work, in 1859, on the
most famous of the Persian quatrains he translated. ‘The moving finger writes;
and having writ/Moves on.’ Thankfully, the digital coding strips away all that
icky red-plush slightly smelly über-mouldy 19thc fin-de-siècle medievalism. And
with its being driven by code, there’s Daniel unpacking that seriously bad news
on the blank screen behind Belshazzar’s feast. ‘Haec est autem scriptura, quae
digesta est: Mane, Thecel, Phares.’ (Daniel V:25) The party’s over, dude.
You’re in all kinds of merde. And then, over on the digitalmedievalist list,
Peter Baker himself, having corrected a point about ligatures, laid it out for
me. ‘Designing the behaviour of a font in this way is endlessly
fascinating. I never get tired of it.” This isn’t some indulgence of the
Anthropocene or bit of flabby anthropomorphism. He means that individual
letterforms, spatialized one after the other, adapt their habitual forms in
response to each other. Letterforms behave relationally and that
behaviour both requires a techné for it expression and solicits serious
affective commitment. Professor Baker is ‘fascinated’ by such behaviour, attentive,
mesmerized, spellbound, without tedium, without exhaustion, without end.
Digital medievalism can do this: virtualizing a moment in the emotional life of
your work and your thinking just long enough to catch your attention, to make
it real.
Anglo-Saxonism
and Englishness
Clare A. Simmons,
English, Ohio State University, USA
Literary history has
often told the story like this: There’s not much to say about medievalism in eighteenth-century
Britain since in the “Neoclassical” or “Augustan” age cultural expression drew
inspiration not from the Middle Ages but from ancient Greece and Rome. Dustin M. Frazier-Wood’s fascinating new book Anglo-Saxonism
and the Idea of Englishness in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Boydell,
2020) tells a different story. Medievalism
in fact flourished in the 1700s in the form of Anglo-Saxonism as many people
from varied backgrounds began to think of the English before the Norman
Conquest as being their true “ancestors.”
Anglo-Saxonism could both be a means of critiquing or withdrawing from
the status quo, as in the case of Non-Jurors like George Hickes and Thomas
Hearne early in the century and John Cartwright towards the end of it; or of
endorsing it by reminding everyone that the Hanoverian kings and the English
Saxons shared common ancestry: “Rule, Britannia!” after all, comes from a masque
celebrating Alfred the Great. Impeccably
researched, the book provides a wealth of information on how literature,
history, topography, the fine arts, linguistics, antiquarianism, and politics
drew inspiration from an imagined sense of the Anglo-Saxon world. I would warmly recommend it to anyone
interested in the history of medievalism.
Hope in the
time of COVID-19
Kevin J. Harty, English,
Lasalle University
So what can you
do? -- Two things:
First, you can
get married right before all hell breaks loose at the Church of the Atonement
in Chicago—left to right Rick Tempone, the Reverend Mother Erika Takas (Rector
of Chicago’s Church of the Atonement), and Kevin J. Harty.
And second, you can publish a new book on cinematic medievalism. Medieval Women on Film: Essays on Gender, Cinema and History: In this first
ever book-length treatment, 11 scholars with a variety of backgrounds in
medieval studies, film studies, and medievalism discuss how historical and
fictional medieval women have been portrayed on film and their connections to
the feminist movements of the 20th and 21st centuries. From detailed studies of
the portrayal of female desire and sexuality, to explorations of how and when
these women gain agency, these essays look at the different ways these women
reinforce, defy, and complicate traditional gender roles. Individual essays
discuss the complex and sometimes conflicting cinematic treatments of
Guinevere, Morgan Le Fay, Isolde, Maid Marian, Lady Godiva, Heloise, Eleanor of
Aquitaine, and Joan of Arc. Additional essays discuss the women in Fritz
Lang’s The Nibelungen, Liv Ullmann’s Kristin Lavransdatter,
and Bertrand Tavernier’s La Passion Béatrice.
Ken Mondschein, kenmondschein.com, USA
In some ways the pandemic
is a blessing in disguise for me. To be sure, it's no picnic. I'm contingent faculty,
so my job situation is unstable, as is all of higher ed. My main gig is a
teach-out and would have been done after this semester; whether the other is
tenable depends on how many students come back next fall. Teaching is harder,
of course, and I miss seeing my students. Zoom is no substitute for in-person
contact (though now all the vet techs can bring their pets to
"class").
But it's also a chance to slow down and not drive all over New England for work. I'm doing medieval brewing experiments (I have a stout, barleywine made with hops versus a batch made with wormwood, braggot, and spiced sack mead going). I have two books I'm proofreading. I'm finishing my fantasy novel and after that I'll get started on the book on timekeeping primary sources that I owe Italica.
But, as someone on
the margins of academia, I'm worried about my future. Teaching historical
fencing was a big part of my income, and I'm trying to do online workouts for
my fencing students, but that's gone.But it's also a chance to slow down and not drive all over New England for work. I'm doing medieval brewing experiments (I have a stout, barleywine made with hops versus a batch made with wormwood, braggot, and spiced sack mead going). I have two books I'm proofreading. I'm finishing my fantasy novel and after that I'll get started on the book on timekeeping primary sources that I owe Italica.
All of this is, I suppose, why I think we should come out of this with fundamental reform of higher education, as for the economy in general. The extraordinary efforts of poorly-paid adjuncts are critical to keeping schools going and providing services to our students so that they can graduate on time. Even if we're not experiencing physical risk -- and I would never say we should be fiscally rewarded on par with the brave doctors, nurses, and EMTs/paramedics who are exposing themselves to infection on a daily basis -- our labor deserves the same consideration as the other necessary workers in this extraordinary environment, and we deserve the same financial security as anyone else.
Medievalism, musealized
Richard Utz,
Literature, Media, and Communication, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
Here is a warm
recommendation to all practitioners of medievalism: Alexandra
Sterling-Hellenbrand’s Medieval Literature on Display: Heritage
and Culture in Modern Germany (2019) brings to
bear museum studies, memory studies, heritage studies, nostalgia studies,
medieval German studies, reception and adaptation studies on two regional
museum spaces that attempt to past-presence (or re-present) two of the best
known medieval German-speaking narrative traditions:
The museum in the small Franconian town of Wolframs-Eschenbach
(a little over an hour away from where I was born), which intends to resurrect the
author of the Middle High German Parzival, Titurel, Willehalm,
and some oft he most unforgettableTagelieder (aubades); and the
Nibelungen Museum in Worms, which aims at connecting us with the famed Lay
of the Nibelungs, elevated by Wagnerians and post-Wagnerian national fandom
to the German(ic) epic par excellence.
Alexandra has framed her scholarly observations somewhat similar to the
way in which a Johann Wolfgang von Goethe described his first visit to
Strasbourg and its cathedral. I find her close readings of the museum spaces’
various elements and their affective and intellectual properties all the more
believable because she manages to take me on a personal visit to the spaces in Wolframs-Eschenbach
and Worms. Her introduction confirms this personal approach, linking her
research to a specific moment in her younger years, similar to what Jacques Le
Goff did in his auto/biography some years
ago. A great contribution to Medievalism Studies.
Making research lemonade
Susanne Hafner,
German, Fordham University, USA
As we are hanging
on to the semester by our fingernails, we have been so preoccupied with
teaching, taking care of our families, and just plain surviving, that the only
time we had available to think about our research was when we watched our
summer plans evaporate: Kalamazoo is suspended in time, conferences are
cancelled, papers postponed. But I wonder how this sequestration will change
our research in the long run. In my case, it means that I won’t be able to
visit the archive which is crucial for my research, nor can I hope that the
grant money for this trip will still be available next year. So I won’t be able
to write the article – which I need to apply for research grants – which will
allow me to go on sabbatical – which will free my time to write the book ….. a
scholar’s nightmare, in other words.
This forces me to
rethink my research agenda: What CAN I do, sitting in my Bronx apartment in my
comfy pants? The result will be a different book, shaped by necessity, but also
by opportunity: The opportunity to sit still and hear myself think. I’d love to
know how many scholars, a couple of years from now, will be able to put their
finger on a page in their work and say: “And this is where Covid-19 changed my
research.”
Making the handbook,
on music and medievalism
Kirsten Yri,
Music, Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada
In March, at long
last, my copy of the Oxford
Handbook on Music and Medievalism (shameless plug) arrived in the mail.
Because it appeared just as the Ontario Government declared a State of
Emergency to enforce ‘distancing’ and isolation at home, the book will forever
be tied to the Covid-19 crisis. Over the next few weeks, I received notes of
thanks from contributors, with updates on and concerns about the unfolding
pandemic in their countries, but that yes, they were happy to report that the Handbook
would receive pride of place in their COVID reading. Working remotely (like
editing or writing…) can be lonely, so even the shortest of exchanges or a
quick repartee can lighten the day. All the more when the banter involves a
passage from a medieval text that is as relatable today as it was +600 years
ago (as when one colleague quoted passages from Boccaccio’s Decameron.)
They say editing is a thankless task…but an enthusiastic, supportive co-editor
(Stephen Meyer) and thoughtful contributors have proved that wrong.
The Plague of
memeing about hope
Fernando Rochaix,
Art, Georgia State University
Plague history
can serve as a comforting reminder that our own bumbling and painful responses
with catastrophe predate modernity. But knowing things could be worse can only
get us so far. During my extended family indoor vacation (ie quarantine), I've
found something better than reassurance in the posts and comments of r/dankdarkages/ and r/MedievalHistoryMemes on
Reddit. Memeing about plagues of the past serves two functions. It brings
fun to and engenders history with a common-sense vocabulary. Memeing let's us
feel at a time of disconnection. In so doing history can help us handle
uncertainty and imagine the past in ourselves.
Vanishing communities
of medievalism
Susan Aronstein,
English, University of Wyoming, USA
Tison Pugh,
English, University of Central Florida, USA
In mid-March this
year, COVID-19 closed America’s medieval playgrounds. Las Vegas’s Excalibur
Hotel went dark; Disney promised guests that dreams would still come true even while
locking down Magic Kingdom’s iconic castle; and Medieval Times sent its knights
and royalty home. Watching videos shot from drones flying over empty castle
courtyards and other deserted fairy-tale landscapes, it strikes us how many of
our fantasies of the Middle Ages stem from a longing for community, for a long-lost
Golden Age of shared village life. These now-empty spaces were designed to foster
mingling: the bustling fair, the ball, the feast, the celebration. Without the
happy crowds, these spaces look desolate yet bloated, cavernous yet almost
wistful. They stand as a mute commentary on a world where Boccaccio seems more
relevant than Camelot, and where the cruelest
oxymoron of the English language, social
distancing, reminds us of the pleasures of community—a pleasure that should
have never needed the fantasies of medievalism in the first place.
After continuities,
continuities
Jan M. Ziolkowski,
Medieval Latin & Comparative Literature, Harvard U; Director, Dumbarton
Oaks, USA
The COVID-19
crisis has set in motion unprecedented woes and worries. Simultaneously, it has
accelerated a chain reaction of other trials and tribulations that was already
underway, whether detected or not. Tough times will follow afterward, but we
have the power to ensure that the new realities to emerge do not reenact the
grimnesses of the 1930s or of postapocalyptic movies.
To make proverbial
lemonade of lemons, those of us passionate about literature and culture should hasten
and improve our efforts to communicate with larger audiences, while not
abandoning the ambition to advance knowledge. By example, we must argue the
case for the values of engaging with the past, appreciating the extraordinary
variety of human creativity, and sharpening our abilities in interpretation and
articulation. Good can come of what is beginning to play out.
Breathtaking
progress has been achieved in remote learning, telework, and online
entertainment and edification. Human imagination and adaptation have been on
display as never before in my lifetime. Most of my waking hours have continued
to go into administration, just as before, but when free from its demands I
have tried to put my money (and for scholars, time is money and vice versa)
where my mouth or keyboard is.
In modest
contributions in this vein, I wrote a short piece for the newsletter of Classics,
my department at Harvard, about a ninth-century Latin masterpiece and the
relation of its reception to the development of my field: “The Poem of Walter
and the Creation of Medieval Latin.” In due course it will be accessible on https://harvard.academia.edu/JanZiolkowski.
Likewise, I produced two posts for the blog of OpenBookPublishers, which relate
to my six-volume open-access study of the jongleur de Notre Dame that
they brought out in 2018 [LINK]. One was on a
bizarre telefilm (called “The Young Juggler”) by Tony Curtis that aired in 1960
[LINK],
another on the death of the children’s book author and illustrator, Tomie
dePaola [LINK].
A third is on the way, about a stained-glass representation of the climactic
episode in the story. Ideas for further posts are steeping.
In less
public-facing work, I have been determined to complete two long-overdue books
for which collaborators fulfilled their obligations a decade ago. By
temperament I tend not to need reminding of mortality, but events bring home on
a daily basis the desirability of carpe diem … which for humanists who
are researchers can be synonymous with carpe librum and carpe stylum.
On April 19, 2020 my Doktorvater, Peter Dronke, died. His world was distinct
from the one he inherited from Ernst Robert Curtius and Erich Auerbach. Ours
differs far more. Discovering and demonstrating the connectedness of the Middle
Ages with later centuries, including this brave new one today, remain pursuits of
paramount importance. The people of all those bygone days committed their fair
share of mistakes: that is, famously, inherent in being human. While
recognizing and righting past wrongs, it is up to us to maintain good old
traditions—and to establish even better new ones. The present tells us, as if
we had to be told, that the future will never have required the past as urgently
as it will in the coming year.
A Grail in the
Philippines
Stephanie
Matabang, Comparative Literature, UCLA
A Bikolano
adaptation of the Perceval story is preserved on microfilm at the University
Library of UP Diliman in Quezon City, Philippines. This particular rare copy of
Agui-Agui ni Percibal asin ni Rouchenec Reina Encantada sa Palmira was
published in 1951 by the Cecilio Press of Naga City, Philippines. Despite the
relatively recent date, Percibal may provide an unexpected glimpse into
the Perceval tradition’s early European medieval stage. It was likely first transmitted
to the archipelago during the Spanish colonial period (16-19th century).
Of note is the absence of the Grail and the presence of a fairy queen,
Rouchenec, who transports Percibal to her Otherworld kingdom. The arguably Breton
origin of the name ‘Rouchenec’ and the positioning of Percibal’s father as the
king of Scotland, further digs into the tale’s Celtic roots. Percibal reveals
the potentiality of the Philippine metrical romance corpus as not only a
representation of global post-medieval imaginings, but as a textured lens into
a medieval literary past.
Médiévisme v.
Médiévalisme
Anne
Berthelot, Literatures, Cultures & Languages, University of Connecticut
When I
arrived in the United States more than thirty years ago, I quickly discovered I
was no longer a “médiéviste” but a “médiévaliste”, which seemed a little odd to
me, as was the translation of “spiritisme” by “spiritualism”, which is not the
same thing. [But at the time this was not a major problem, much less so than
the absence in English of the false "médiéval"-"moyenâgeux”
doublet. Indeed, without this doublet, how to make English speakers understand
that Walter Scott and Viollet-le-Duc create “moyenâgeux” works which are not
very “médiéval”, and that their idea of the Middle Ages, like that of most of
their 19th-century contemporaries’, has little to do with the
subject of “médiéval” studies proper? In French, at least, when a colleague
declared tongue-in-cheek (hopefully so!) during a department meeting that
such-or-such practice was “medieval”, that is to say barbaric and worthy of the
“Dark Ages” preceding the Enlightenment, one could point out to him that the
term he was looking for was not “medieval”, but “moyenâgeux”.]
Since that
time, three decades ago, the Middle Ages have experienced an unexpected
resurgence, in the form of a plethora of novels, films, games, comics, and so
on: in short, creative works, whether of good or poor quality – that is not the
question – which reproduce or draw inspiration from medieval times. The
accumulation of these works has led to a new corpus, not “médiéval”, but “médiévalisant”
(another of those terms that the spell checker refuses to translate). And quite
naturally, this corpus has generated its own scholars and critics, who may not
be connoisseurs of the original Middle Ages (we can even say it is often
preferable that they are not, in order to avoid comparisons unfavorable to one
or the other of the periods considered ...), scholars and critics who are
therefore not, technically, “médiévistes”—but “médiévalistes”.
Their field of expertise, their set of values, their global
perspectives are not the same as those of mediévistes: they focus on the
contemporary reception of their corpus, its implications for and is effects on
20th- or 21st-century culture, while the “médiévistes”
focus on medieval works, without necessarily being interested in their modern
“significance” or “impact”. The official distinction between two different fields
thus makes it possible for “médiévistes” and “médiévalistes” to coexist more or
less peacefully, while the confusion between the two categories created by the
linguistic undifferentiation of English in this particular case can only
generate tensions that are sometimes acute.
Medievalism musings
Juanita Feros Ruys
From the time I first arrived
as a student at the University of Sydney, I immersed myself in medieval
history, Old and Middle English, and Medieval Latin. Following my PhD, my career
centred on palaeography, producing editions and translations of Medieval Latin
manuscripts. Perhaps my proudest achievement was my first-time publication of
the interlinear glosses in a twelfth-century Latin manuscript, which I thought showed
that the text was used to teach schoolboys grammar.
But where was my
connection to the world of twenty-first-century Australia? In 2015, drawing
from my research on medieval demons, I began work on a documentary that explored
how the Devil’s
Coach House, a cavern in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, came by its diabolic
name. My research took me from convict stories and settler histories to a place
I hadn’t expected: the violence, still only partially acknowledged, of the mid-nineteenth-century
frontier wars waged by European colonists against the Indigenous peoples of
Australia. This was the first time in over twenty years that my research had prompted
me to consider contemporary real-world concerns.
Having left academia in
2018, I now work as a grant-writer in regional Australia, an area of massive
social and economic disadvantage, particularly for First Nations Australians.
The insights I gained through my investigations in medievalism have helped me
understand this context better. And now my proudest achievement is helping a
local Indigenous group gain funding to reawaken their traditional language. A
career in Medieval Studies that segued into the social engagement of
medievalism has in turn led to the meaningful community work that grounds me in
the heart of where I live.
Medievalism lost: A lament for the 2020 season of Texas’s Sherwood
Forest Faire
Lorraine Kochanske
Stock, English, University of Houston, USA
Recently, I contributed a chapter to the forthcoming volume, The
United States of Medievalism, in which I showcase the historically
grounded, immersive entertainment Sherwood Forest Faire (hereafter SFF) in
McDade, Texas https://www.sherwoodforestfaire.com/.
SFF offers its visitors—both faithful “playtrons” and occasional “mundanes”—opportunities
generally to experience the imaginary simulacrum of life in early period
England and, per SFF’s title, particularly the legend of Robin Hood, his outlaw
cohort, and the Plantagenet royals in his orbit. As I regularly teach a course,
Robin Hood in Culture, at the University of Houston, this arrow of immersive medievalism
“slit the wand” for me. SFF mirrors the carnivalesque
goals and achieves the philanthropic effects of actual local parochial Whitsun-ales,
May-games, and Robin Hood Revels, celebrated from the fourteenth through
seventeenth centuries in England. Money collected from patrons at the May-games’
community feasts supported the parish’s financial needs, whether to build a new
church roof or to succor needy parishioners. Folk-plays performed at the Whitsun-ales,
celebrating the theme of Robin’s robbing the rich to aid the poor, rendered him
a natural money collector. Replicating the
medieval May-games’ fundraising function, SFF’s proprietors George Appling and
Zane Baker contribute part the faire’s
revenues to the Make-a-Wish Foundation. Mirroring the original medieval parochial
paradigm, SFF also donates to RESCU, “Renaissance Entertainers Services Crafters
United,” a nonprofit established to promote the medical well-being of employees
of Renaissance Faires, largely itinerant and seasonal workers lacking health
insurance. https://rescufoundation.org/
Unfortunately, like most other American entertainment
venues, because of covid-19, SFF closed after the first weekend of the Spring
2020 season. In the fundraising spirit of medieval fairs and its own
medievalism-inspired philanthropy, SFF endeavored to raise money for its now-unemployed
performers by broadcasting a virtual “faire” on its YouTube channel for four consecutive
Saturdays of its cancelled 2020 season. Loyal audience members were invited to
experience SFF, if not literally, then virtually, and to contribute to a fund financially
supporting its performers. https://www.sherwoodforestfaire.com/virtual-faire.
I fervently hope that SFF will survive this pandemic-enforced cancellation of
its tenth season and that my forthcoming essay, celebrating SFF’s successful
engagement with medievalism, will not be its obituary.
Learning from
literary texts
Ann F. Howey, English, Brock University,
Canada
I find myself becoming more and more
interested in texts that represent acts of reception of medievalism. They may
not necessarily recreate the medieval, but they include fictional characters
responding to medieval texts, thus modeling a form of medievalism. From
Charlotte Yonge’s young adults arguing the merits of Malory (The Heir of
Redclyffe 1853), to T. H. White’s imagined reader exploring the ruins of a
medieval castle (The Sword in the Stone 1938), to Meg Cabot’s sarcastic
first-person narrator commenting on the way people romanticize the Middle Ages
(Avalon High 2006)—there is a thread of medievalism, particularly in
young people’s literature, that teaches us how to respond to and use
appropriately the medieval, that teaches us the value of the medieval and of
texts that represent it—texts teaching generations of readers to be medieval(ism)ists.
Research continuity in dire times
Luiz Felipe Anchieta Guerra, History & Political Cultures, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil
As a Brazilian I am seeing the shorter end of an already very short
stick, our president being one of the few who remains in utmost denial about
the pandemic. Consequently, our academic world is filled with uncertainty and
gloom: with research funds and scholarships being cancelled and the public
Universities staying under constant threat from the very organs who should
support them. However, we medievalists, historians and scholars in general are
finding other ways to be active, and bridges have been built despite the
adversities. A Facebook group called Medievalistas
em Pandemia - Ferramentas de Pesquisa em História Medieval (Medievalist
in times on Pandemics – Research tools for Medieval History) is connecting
students, professors, researchers and enthusiasts of the subject. And these
virtual interactions are also allowing not only social distancing, but also for
physical barriers to be overcome, with some research groups having successfully
transferred their presential sessions to a digital environment, allowing for
professors and students from other cities, states and even countries to
contribute to said meetings. One such example, in which I have the honor of
being participating, despite not being a member of the group, is the student-led
GEHM (Study Group in Medieval Studies) from the State University of Montes
Claros who has regular meetings every Wednesday. These initiatives are
specially important not only to keep our research flourishing, but also to
alleviate the generalized sense of dread and to help building and maintaining
support networks and some resemblance of a “normal” routine, which is paramount
to help us preserve our mental health, as best as we can, during this dire
times.
My thoughts on medievalism
Yoshiko Seki, Humanities and Social Sciences, Kochi University, Japan
I read a paper last year about William Morris’s versification – how
his way of writing poetry at his workshop while working together with Edward
Burne-Jones on the production of beautiful book-prints at the same time helped
his poetical works to get more medieval atmosphere. Now I am trying to revise
the paper into a journal article, but interrupted by the need to prepare online
lectures from home. As a private/domestic project, I am also working on
embroidery to make a height chart for my newborn baby, who will arrive in late
July. Doing writing work at home as well as occasionally stitching, I often
imagine how people would have been working at the pre-industrial age, when
people worked at home and children were looked after at home, not at nursery or
at school.
Another small topic. After the corona outbreak, a three-legged mermaid
called “Amabie” became popular in Japan through SNS. According to the legend,
the mermaid said to a man: “If disease spreads, show a picture of me to those
who fall ill. They will be cured.” Now the Ministry of Health, Labor and
Welfare in Japan uses the image for the campaign of stopping spreading
Covid-19. Although the legend is not as old as from the Middle Age but from the
Edo period, the mid-nineteenth century, I thought it very medievalesque. Feel
free to use the image as a talisman.
[translation of the text on the label]
Because you spread it without knowing it.
STOP!
Spreading Infection
– COVID-19 –
Image taken from the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare
The
Middle Ages for Educators
Laura
Morreale, Independent Scholar, Washington, DC, USA
A new project I have been working on these days is Middle Ages for Educators (middleagesforeducators.com, MAFE). The site was created in response to the challenges facing medievalists at the onset of the COVID-19 crisis. What started in late March 2020 as an offhand Twitter exchange between myself and a few friends expressing a desire to help colleagues as they made the rapid transition to digital teaching soon led to a serious discussion about resources we could provide, the wealth of medieval studies materials already available online, and the need to centralize all of these resources in a single place. By April 2, 2020, less than two weeks after our initial exchange, the newly-minted MAFE co-editors had launched our website, designed according to needs expressed by colleagues in a survey disseminated during the planning phase. Marketing for the project took place on social media outlets, but also through the Medieval Academy of America’s April 6 blogpost.
The
success of such a hastily-compiled resource has been astonishing. Our analytics
demonstrate that beginning on April 4, during the first three weeks of
collecting site-usage data, almost 3,000 sessions were initiated and users
clicked on our site pages over 6,000 times. During the same period, nearly
2,000 unique users signed on from locations around the globe. Contributions and
interest have poured in from medievalists throughout the US and Europe who have
offered to add material to the site, whether in the form of small videos,
supplementary links, or translated primary sources. Users are enthusiastic
about the content we present, and medievalist colleagues are eager to join in
with the project’s aims by contributing their own materials. Given its initial
planning goals, MAFE has been a massive success, due in great measure to our
fellow medievalists who, feeling those same sentiments expressed in our early
Twitter exchange, brought their skills and expertise to the project so
generously.
Contributions from medievalists of any professional standing are welcome, and
we are pleased to feature independent scholars, alt-ac medievalists, academic
librarians, newly-minted PhDs, and university professors of every rank on the
site's video section. Please reach out to us if you would like to add your
expertise to the site as well. It's been a wonderful project, one that has given
much to me during this time of isolation, allowing us all to see our colleagues
well, looking healthy, and doing what they do best.
Modernités
Médiévales
Vincent
Ferré, Literature and Human Sciences, U of Paris-East Créteil, France
I
thought I would let everyone know about Modernités Médiévales. Since 2004, our
association has been engaged with the study of the academic and non-academic
reception of the Middle Ages, especially the recreation and representation of
medieval culture in the 19th, 20th, and 21st century, from Romanticism,
symbolism, through modernism, and from fantasy through young adult literature.
As an organization that is wide open to numerous fields and approaches, we
represent the subject of “medievalism studies” in France; and we interrogate
the complex term, medievalism, and the practices connected with it, together
with other European and American colleagues. Our monthly newsletter (in French)
is received by 270 subscribers, from 17 countries, including Belgium, Brazil,
Canada, China, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands,
Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, and the United States. Check us
out at: Modernités Médiévales.
Health and Healing
Huriye Reis, English, Hacettepe University, Turkey
Trying to deal with the conflicting and confusing reports
about the Corona virus, wondering whether we have really made any significant
progress from the days of the Black Death in terms of developing means of effective
protection and treatment of such diseases are part of my varying responses to
what I call “our new lifestyle”. Fort his compilation in Medievally Speaking, I
would like to say a few words about my recent engagement with potential health
and healing, response, and remedy in Chaucer’s dream poems. My research,
clearly, has a long way to go. So far, I have completed only the part of reading
the Book of the Duchess as a plague poem
of unhealth in its presentation of grief and extreme numbness towards life,
defined as (post)plague sickness by the narrator. That the poem presents a
potential for renewal, although the poem’s characters are only fledglings in
that sense, and life thus regenerated takes a new form and turn seem relevant
to our global experience now. “Speaking of Sickness and Healing in Chaucer’s Book
of the Duchess” will become a chapter in a book called Health and Healing in Literature and Culture, which is planned to
be published by the end of June.
Banal
medievalism?
Jan Alexander van
Nahl, Icelandic & Comparative Cultural Studies, U of Iceland, Iceland
Following daily
media, it is uncomfortably easy to notice (allegedly) medieval notions enacting
a part within the anew growing tendency in Western society to think in
categories such as ‘we’ and ‘the others’. In his 2017 monograph Medievalism,
Politics and Mass Media, media theorist Andrew Elliott claimed a transition
in popular culture towards the emptying of such notions of any earlier
(pseudo-scientific) meaning, and turning them into easily-recognizable memes
now used to convey (extreme) black-and-white ideologies. Elliott proposed the
term ‘banal medievalism’ to grasp this semantic shift, with a superficial
reference to Hannah Arendt’s 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on
the Banality of Evil, pursuing “a similar kind of amalgamation of serious
ideological issues into everyday discourse.” With this catchy phrase being
introduced, the question arises as to how to follow up on this potentially
powerful connection. If ‘the medieval’ today is unconsciously being absorbed by
extremism, how do all those specialists in medieval studies plan to address
this serious “act of half-remembering but also of half-forgetting”? Answers are
due.
Politics and Medievalism
(Studies): Studies in Medievalism XXIX, 2020
Karl Fugelso, Art
+ Design, Art History, Art Education,
Towson U, USA
Table of Contents:
Preface: Karl Fugelso, Editor
I:
Essays on Politics and Medievalism (Studies)
· Esther
Liberman Cuenca: Historical Malapropism and the Medieval Blood Libel in
American Politics
· Sean
Griffin: Putin’s Medieval Weapons in the War against Ukraine
· Daniel
Wollenberg: The Battle of Tours and the US Southern Border
· Andrew
B. R. Elliott: Medievalism, Brexit, and the Myth of Nations
· Christopher
Jensen: An Arthur for the Brexit Era: Joe Cornish’s The Kid Who Would be King
II:
Other Responses to Medievalism
· Mary
Behrman: Angle-ing for Arthur:
Erasing the Welsh in Guy Ritchie’s King
Arthur: Legend of the Sword
· Ali
Frauman: Chasing Freyja: Rape, Immigration, and the Medieval in Alt-Right
Discourse
· Laura
E. Cochrane: “Things painted on the coarse canvas”: Political Polemic in Jean-Paul
Laurens’s Portrait of the Child Emperor Honorius
· M.
J. Toswell: The Capacious Medievalisms of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
· Victoria
Yuskaitis: Archaeology and Medievalism at Julian of Norwich’s Anchorite Cell
· Laura
Varnam: A Revelation of Love: Christianity, Julian of Norwich, and Medieval
Pity in the Harry Potter Series
· Anna
Fore Waymack & John Wyatt Greenlee: In the Beginning Was the Word: How
Medieval Text Became Fantasy Maps
· Usha
Vishnuvajjala: Objectivity, Impossibility, and Laughter in Doctor Who’s “Robot of Sherwood”
· James
Cook: Sonic Medievalism, World Building, and Cultural Identity in Fantasy Video
Games
Impossible Pastimes: Playing In, With, and Through the
Middle Ages
35th International Conference on Medievalism
Old Dominion University,
Norfolk, VA, November 12-14, 2020
Kevin A. Moberly, Conference Host
Play is one of the most significant sites of production
in contemporary medievalism. As evidenced by the popularity and ubiquity of
medieval-themed games, it is one of the primary ways through which the
dominant, consensus view of the Middle Ages is reproduced as a political,
historical, economic, and cultural reality in both mass culture and the popular
imagination. Play, as such, functions to reify many of the most problematic
aspects of traditional medievalism, including the persistent racial and
gendered stereotypes that explicitly imagine the Middle Ages as a period of
profound cultural crisis—a crucible of violence and want in which masculine
white privilege was tested and emerged in its nascent, modern form to exercise
sovereignty over the peoples and cultures that, despite their threat, were
simultaneously shown to be inferior.
Yet by the same token, play inherently calls this vision
of reality into question. As Johan Huizinga writes, play interpellates
participants in a magic circle in which space and time are suspended—an
imaginary situation that, according to Lev Vgotsky, is a manifestation of
“desires and tendencies of what cannot be realized immediately.” Play, in this
sense, is not an expression of what is but of what is denied. Facilitated
through ritual and performance, it represents an attempt to make material and
therefore real a fundamentally occult vision of what its participants want
their worlds to be. Play, as such, inherently calls into question the veracity
of its own productions. In the context of the medievalism of the contemporary
moment, it foregrounds the fact that many of the problematic worldviews that
are constructed as historical reality by contemporary medievalism are
themselves fantasies.
What is more, play simultaneously recognizes that other
fantasies are possible. In its ability to at once conjure and critique reality,
it foregrounds the fact that there are always other ways of re-imagining
ourselves and our circumstances via the Middle Ages or any number of other
impossible sites of desire. Conceived as an experiment in playing with—which is
to say, re-imagining the generative possibilities of the Middle Ages, the 2020
ISSM conference seeks to interrogate the doubled potential of play as it is
manifested not only in contemporary medieval-themed games, hobbies, and
pastimes, but in any of the myriad ways that we play with the Middle Ages
through art, scholarship, or other forms of critical inquiry and cultural
production broadly defined.
Please send abstracts of c. 300 words for individual
papers or entire sessions on medieval-themed games, hobbies, pastimes and all
other kinds of medievalisms (which is to say, other forms of medievalesque
play) by June 15 to Kevin Moberly (kmoberly@odu.edu).
For the wide range of topics of interest to the study of medievalism, please
visit the table of contents pages of Studies
in Medievalism and The Year’s
Work in Medievalism, and the reviews published in Medievally Speaking.
This year’s conference will be hosted by Old
Dominion University, located in Norfolk, Virginia. We are not certain at
this time whether or not Old Dominion’s campus will be closed due to
precautions surrounding the COVID-19 Pandemic. Therefore, we have not
determined whether or not the 2020 ISSM Conference will take place physically,
virtually, or as a mixture of both format. However, the organizing committee
will announce the format of the conference once we have more information about
the status of the university in the Fall.
When reposting or quoting this compilation, we request
you attribute its first place and time of publication: “Medievalism in the Age
of COVID-19: A Collegial Plenitude,” comp. & ed. Richard Utz, Medievally
Speaking, May 4, 2020.
