This essay triangulates the image of the nails in Elene, the runic signature at the end of this p... more This essay triangulates the image of the nails in Elene, the runic signature at the end of this poem, and the cross poems of Hrabanus Maurus to reveal a shared investment in the dynamics of figure and ground, which create a structure for devotional process.
From Kehinde Wiley to W.E.B. Du Bois, from Nubia to Cuba, Willie Doherty’s terror in ancient land... more From Kehinde Wiley to W.E.B. Du Bois, from Nubia to Cuba, Willie Doherty’s terror in ancient landscapes to the violence of institutional Neo-Gothic, Reagan’s AIDS policies to Beowulf fanfiction, this richly diverse volume brings together art historians and literature scholars to articulate a more inclusive, intersectional medieval studies. It will be of interest to students working on the diaspora and migration, white settler colonialism and pogroms, Indigenous studies and decolonial methodology, slavery, genocide, and culturecide. The authors confront the often disturbing legacies of medieval studies and its current failures to own up to those, and also analyze fascist, nationalist, colonialist, anti-Semitic, and other ideologies to which the medieval has been and is yoked, collectively formulating concrete ethical choices and aims for future research and teaching. In the face of rising global fascism and related ideological mobilizations, contemporary and past, and of cultural heritage and history as weapons of symbolic and physical oppression, this volume’s chapters on Byzantium, Medieval Nubia, Old English, Hebrew, Old French, Occitan, and American and European medievalisms examine how educational institutions, museums, universities, and individuals are shaped by ethics and various ideologies in research, collecting, and teaching.
... I thank Emily Albu, Joan Cadden, Lucy Corin, Fran Dolan, Margie Ferguson, Beth Freeman, Noah ... more ... I thank Emily Albu, Joan Cadden, Lucy Corin, Fran Dolan, Margie Ferguson, Beth Freeman, Noah Guynn, Richard Levin, Lisa Materson, Colin Milburn, Marijane Osborn, Winfried Schleiner, David van Leer, Ray Waddington, and Claire Waters. ...
Fifteenth-century dance manuals reveal an important distinction between the work of historical re... more Fifteenth-century dance manuals reveal an important distinction between the work of historical reconstruction and that of theoretical reenactment. Basse danse and bassadanza manuals clarify that the difference between reenactment and reconstruction is a difference in temporal experience. When we use these documents simply to reconstruct—to piece together and attempt to replicate a past step pattern—we discern in the manuals and in their dances an anticipatory temporality that privileges looking toward the future. When, however, we approach these texts through the theoretical discourse of reenactment, we discover a different kind of time. It is recursive, multidirectional, and far more layered than the anticipatory model that the dance instructions appear on the surface to adopt. When this more complex temporal structure becomes visible, this chapter argues, we recognize how these early dances and their instruction manuals theorize their own uses of time and thus their own reenactment.
Despite the conservative programs of John Lydgate's and Robert Henryson's fifteenth-century retel... more Despite the conservative programs of John Lydgate's and Robert Henryson's fifteenth-century retellings of the "cock and jewel" fable, these texts find ways to provoke both their own audiences and us as modern readers. This essay will demonstrate that the fable's provocations reveal themselves in the quotidian vocality of the medieval chicken yard. The soundscape of this space attunes the poetic audience to variations in the pace of rime royal, and this complex pacing draws out new meanings of the fabular moral. When read in terms of poultry sound, both Henryson and Lydgate's verses provoke readers to negotiate nuances of relation between individual experience and generalities of convention in formulating an understanding of value. The Middle Ages frequently retell Latin versions of the Aesopian "cock and jewel" fable, in which a rooster scratches up a gem while foraging and proceeds to address it with a meditation upon its lack of value to him. From Marie de France's twelfth-century Anglo-Norman adaptation to the fifteenth-century English fables of John Lydgate and Robert Henryson, we encounter diversely modified versions of this familiar scene of barnyard poetry and philosophy. The fifteenth-century fables in particular present themselves as a predominantly conservative endeavor, not only in their reactionary dependence upon a rime royal form developed in a previous century but also in the fact that their approach to their source seems considerably less adventurous than that of Chaucer. Unlike Chaucer, who, as Edward Wheatley points out, creatively inverts the fable's components by offering "a cock telling a fable of humans searching through a dung-heap, " Lydgate and Henryson cleave to their source with less imagination (2000, 109-10). 1 At the same time, and in some ways from within this very conservatism, these fables equally demonstrate the ability to provoke. In making this case about fifteenth-century literature, I consider two loci of provocation. The first, as Andrea Denny-Brown notes in her introduction to this special issue (268), involves this literature's incitement of its medieval audience to react to novelty and thus to alter their readerly encounters and interpretations. The second pertains to fifteenth-century literature's potential to provoke modern readers to recognize the need for new methods with which to approach it. This essay will demonstrate
This essay triangulates the image of the nails in Elene, the runic signature at the end of this p... more This essay triangulates the image of the nails in Elene, the runic signature at the end of this poem, and the cross poems of Hrabanus Maurus to reveal a shared investment in the dynamics of figure and ground, which create a structure for devotional process.
From Kehinde Wiley to W.E.B. Du Bois, from Nubia to Cuba, Willie Doherty’s terror in ancient land... more From Kehinde Wiley to W.E.B. Du Bois, from Nubia to Cuba, Willie Doherty’s terror in ancient landscapes to the violence of institutional Neo-Gothic, Reagan’s AIDS policies to Beowulf fanfiction, this richly diverse volume brings together art historians and literature scholars to articulate a more inclusive, intersectional medieval studies. It will be of interest to students working on the diaspora and migration, white settler colonialism and pogroms, Indigenous studies and decolonial methodology, slavery, genocide, and culturecide. The authors confront the often disturbing legacies of medieval studies and its current failures to own up to those, and also analyze fascist, nationalist, colonialist, anti-Semitic, and other ideologies to which the medieval has been and is yoked, collectively formulating concrete ethical choices and aims for future research and teaching. In the face of rising global fascism and related ideological mobilizations, contemporary and past, and of cultural heritage and history as weapons of symbolic and physical oppression, this volume’s chapters on Byzantium, Medieval Nubia, Old English, Hebrew, Old French, Occitan, and American and European medievalisms examine how educational institutions, museums, universities, and individuals are shaped by ethics and various ideologies in research, collecting, and teaching.
... I thank Emily Albu, Joan Cadden, Lucy Corin, Fran Dolan, Margie Ferguson, Beth Freeman, Noah ... more ... I thank Emily Albu, Joan Cadden, Lucy Corin, Fran Dolan, Margie Ferguson, Beth Freeman, Noah Guynn, Richard Levin, Lisa Materson, Colin Milburn, Marijane Osborn, Winfried Schleiner, David van Leer, Ray Waddington, and Claire Waters. ...
Fifteenth-century dance manuals reveal an important distinction between the work of historical re... more Fifteenth-century dance manuals reveal an important distinction between the work of historical reconstruction and that of theoretical reenactment. Basse danse and bassadanza manuals clarify that the difference between reenactment and reconstruction is a difference in temporal experience. When we use these documents simply to reconstruct—to piece together and attempt to replicate a past step pattern—we discern in the manuals and in their dances an anticipatory temporality that privileges looking toward the future. When, however, we approach these texts through the theoretical discourse of reenactment, we discover a different kind of time. It is recursive, multidirectional, and far more layered than the anticipatory model that the dance instructions appear on the surface to adopt. When this more complex temporal structure becomes visible, this chapter argues, we recognize how these early dances and their instruction manuals theorize their own uses of time and thus their own reenactment.
Despite the conservative programs of John Lydgate's and Robert Henryson's fifteenth-century retel... more Despite the conservative programs of John Lydgate's and Robert Henryson's fifteenth-century retellings of the "cock and jewel" fable, these texts find ways to provoke both their own audiences and us as modern readers. This essay will demonstrate that the fable's provocations reveal themselves in the quotidian vocality of the medieval chicken yard. The soundscape of this space attunes the poetic audience to variations in the pace of rime royal, and this complex pacing draws out new meanings of the fabular moral. When read in terms of poultry sound, both Henryson and Lydgate's verses provoke readers to negotiate nuances of relation between individual experience and generalities of convention in formulating an understanding of value. The Middle Ages frequently retell Latin versions of the Aesopian "cock and jewel" fable, in which a rooster scratches up a gem while foraging and proceeds to address it with a meditation upon its lack of value to him. From Marie de France's twelfth-century Anglo-Norman adaptation to the fifteenth-century English fables of John Lydgate and Robert Henryson, we encounter diversely modified versions of this familiar scene of barnyard poetry and philosophy. The fifteenth-century fables in particular present themselves as a predominantly conservative endeavor, not only in their reactionary dependence upon a rime royal form developed in a previous century but also in the fact that their approach to their source seems considerably less adventurous than that of Chaucer. Unlike Chaucer, who, as Edward Wheatley points out, creatively inverts the fable's components by offering "a cock telling a fable of humans searching through a dung-heap, " Lydgate and Henryson cleave to their source with less imagination (2000, 109-10). 1 At the same time, and in some ways from within this very conservatism, these fables equally demonstrate the ability to provoke. In making this case about fifteenth-century literature, I consider two loci of provocation. The first, as Andrea Denny-Brown notes in her introduction to this special issue (268), involves this literature's incitement of its medieval audience to react to novelty and thus to alter their readerly encounters and interpretations. The second pertains to fifteenth-century literature's potential to provoke modern readers to recognize the need for new methods with which to approach it. This essay will demonstrate
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