Myra Seaman

In a talk he gave in 1995 at a conference at Georgetown University, "Cultural Frictions: Medieval Cultural Studies in Post-Modern Contexts," Paul Strohm asserted that "postmodernism is preoccupied with history, endlessly obsessed with history, and with the nature of the claims the past exerts upon us; it might almost be called a way of thinking about history and representation, provoked and endlessly refreshed by its refusal to allow final understanding." Moreover, "Postmodern theory has always needed us—that is, needed the past—in the sense that it has never not had designs upon us." Strohm further noted the way postmodernism fundamentally restores "the variegation, the fully contradictory variety of the historical surface"—which it does, however, by insisting on a "medieval organicism which secretly nourishes the illicit relation between most postmodern culture analysis and the idea of the social 'totality or whole.'" Stroh...

Art without consolation would, it seems, be fatally deficient. Art's distinctive identity, central to a humanist aesthetic, emanates from its supposedly singular capacity to transcend: where humanists are menaced by meaninglessness, art offers significance; where humanists lament loss, art reveals timeless truth and enduring beauty; where humanists sense absence, art promises presence. Humanist art consoles the living about the dead and the losses they signify. It affirms the extension of (human) life into the realms of the lifeless. Read (as it customarily is) with such expectations, Chaucer's Book of the Duchess becomes an artistic experiment in which the death of John of Gaunt's wife provides Chaucer the matter through which to transcend the boundaries of human life and, in that act, create art. But not so fast. Humanist traditions prepare readers for such a result, and yet this narrative continuously avoids granting it. Instead, the poem actively "refuses to re-...

The essays, manifestos, rants, screeds, pleas, soliloquies, telegrams, broadsides, eulogies, songs, harangues, confessions, laments, and acts of poetic terrorism in these two volumes — which collectively form an academic "rave" — were culled, with some later additions, from roundtable sessions at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in 2012 and 2013, organized by postmedieval: a journal for medieval cultural studies, the BABEL Working Group, and George Washington University's Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute. Gathering together a rowdy multiplicity of voices from within medieval and early modern studies, these two volumes (bound together in one edition) seek to extend and intensify a conversation about how to shape premodern studies, and also the humanities, in the years ahead. Authors in both volumes lay claim to the act(s) of manifesting, and also anti-manifesting, as a collective endeavor that works on behalf of the future without laying any bel...

Part of the pre-release publicity blitz accompanying the 2004 film King Arthur1 was The Quest for King Arthur2, an independently produced documentary aired by the History Channel in the weeks preceding the release of the Hollywood film. This version of the documentary (unlike the original version, available for purchase on the History Channel website) includes supplemental narration provided by Ioan Gruffudd, the actor who plays Lancelot in the film. The documentary, in turn, was promoted by a supplement included in The New York Times. This composite text—the film (and its promotional trailers), the documentary, and the ad for the documentary—reflects a shared vision of the truth: Arthur the (historical and real) Man must be rediscovered, to replace Arthur the (fictional and unreal) Myth. This tension is revealed as the two inner pages of the four-page newspaper insert present a series of short blurbs to describe the legends of King Arthur and their transformations over the centuries. The ad notes that “[e]ach generation of Britons, from the fall of Rome onward[,] had need for an Arthur. And each generation, for several centuries, got the Arthur it needed.”3 The ad further explains that the versions of the story written by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century and Sir Thomas Malory in the fifteenth had the greatest impact on their respective generations and those to come, seen for instance in Victorian England’s regular adoption of Arthurian tropes for its literature and in the Kennedy administration being referred to as the new Camelot in the White House.

This article offers an alternative story of the transmission of Middle English verse romance to the one traditionally told by textual scholarship, one rooted in stemmatics' focus on genealogical descent and its principal interest in origins. Like the medieval romance hero himself, the English romance narrative wandered from locus to locus, in this case from manuscript to manuscript, with each encounter inscribing on it a different identity with characteristics influenced by local cultural values. Stemmatics' analogy of the family tree thus enforces an artificially unified reading of Middle English romance and promotes a fundamentally modern reception of the genre. The stories that individual manuscript versions tell, when linked together in an organic network rather than grafted into a hierarchical family tree, is episodic with no clear cause-and-effect, action-and-reaction relationship indicated among these various versions. Its story lies in its scattered dissemination, fr...

... and Glossary, 3 vols., EETS es 46,48, and 65 (London, 1885-94; reprint, Millwood, NY: Krause Reprint ... refused to convert to Islam in order to wed her, thereby in-sulting both king and princess. ... that the horse is more loyal than Josian: "'Wer losiane,' a Pou3te, 'ase lele, / Alse is ...

battle, or Merlin’s escapes from the Druids on Afallach and from the princes of the Morgannawg—are engaging, fast-paced, and suspenseful. Poems written in an alliterative style often punctuate moments of action or provide commentary on events, thus effectively placing the action in a tradition of heroic storytelling. The novel weaves together various legends of Merlin, incorporating his associations with Arthur’s sword, apple trees, bardic knowledge, prophecy, and battle madness. The disadvantage of trying to incorporate all of the Merlin and other, lessrelated, legends, however, is that too many historical and legendary traditions vie for attention, and it strains credibility that one character could witness so many events or, alternately, just happen to avoid death by being fortuitously absent. Merlin’s survival sometimes seems mechanical: he endures because as focalizant he must, not because his survival grows organically from what is happening. When a lapse in time needs to be accounted for, magic bridges separate events. Furthermore, the different legendary and historical narratives are not always synthesized; most problematic to me was the recital of the story of the Crucifixion by Joseph of Arimathea. Whereas Merlin’s earlier learning of Greek philosophy is narrated instead of performed, he hears the Christian message with readers: four chapters are devoted to the life story of Joseph, which incorporates the Biblical story within it. The forward momentum of Merlin’s story, not to mention the history of Britain, stops. Although the Grail appears as if it will be important to further installments of the series, its introduction through such an extensive narrative digression is not as effective as it might be. Adderley’s Merlin is both warrior and visionary, acting within a context of changing religious belief. Ultimately, Adderley uses Merlin as witness to emphasize the bloodthirst of any leader or group who seeks power. Cartimandua, Boudicea, Morgana, and the Druids, however different or understandable their motives, violate Merlin’s vision—now given Christian overtones—of a peaceful, prosperous Britain, a vision that presumably only Arthur can begin to fulfill in a continuation of the series.

Fragments for a History of a Vanishing Humanism brings together scholars working in prehistoric, classical, medieval, and early modern studies who are developing, from longer and slower historical perspectives, critical post/humanisms that explore: 1) the significance (historical, sociocultural, psychic, etc.) of human expression and affectivity; 2) the impact of technology and new sciences on what it means to be a human self; 3) the importance of art and literature in defining and enacting human selves; 4) the importance of history in defining the human; 5) the artistic plasticity of the human; 6) the question of a human collectivity—what is the value, and peril, of “being human” or “being post/human” together?; and finally, 7) the constructive, and destructive, relations (aesthetic, historical, and philosophical) of the human to the nonhuman. This volume, edited by Myra Seaman and Eileen A. Joy, insists on the always provisional and contingent formations of the human, and of vario...

The author discusses a Middle English literature course she centered on the array of noncanonical texts in one fifteenth-century manuscript, Ashmole 61. In reading only noncanonical texts, students acquired a broader understanding and experience of what Middle English literature is, while expanding their sense of the methods and purposes of literary research.

... and Glossary, 3 vols., EETS es 46,48, and 65 (London, 1885-94; reprint, Millwood, NY: Krause Reprint ... refused to convert to Islam in order to wed her, thereby in-sulting both king and princess. ... that the horse is more loyal than Josian: "'Wer losiane,' a Pou3te, 'ase lele, / Alse is ...