Essays on the post-modern reception and interpretation of the middle ages.

Marginality assumes a variety of forms in current discussions of the Middle Ages. Modern scholars have considered a seemingly innumerable list of people to have been marginalized in the European Middle Ages: the poor, criminals, unorthodox religious, the disabled, the mentally ill, women, so-called infidels, and the list goes on. If so many inhabitants of medieval Europe can be qualified as "marginal," it is important to interrogate where the margins lay and what it means that the majority of people occupied them. In addition, we scholars need to reexamine our use of a term that seems to have such broad applicability to ensure that we avoid imposing marginality on groups in the Middle Ages that the era itself may not have considered as such. In the medieval era, when belonging to a community was vitally important, people who lived on the margins of society could be particularly vulnerable. And yet, as scholars have shown, we ought not forget that this heightened vulnerability sometimes prompted so-called marginals to form their own communities, as a way of redefining the center and placing themselves within it. The present volume explores the concept of marginality, to whom the moniker has been applied, to whom it might usefully be applied, and how we might more meaningfully define marginality based on historical sources rather than modern assumptions. Although the volume’s geographic focus is Europe, the chapters look further afield to North Africa, the Sahara, and the Levant acknowledging that at no time, and certainly not in the Middle Ages, was Europe cut off from other parts of the globe.

This book discusses the 'marginal' people of late medieval Paris, the large and shifting group of men and women who existed on the margins of conventional organized society. Professor Geremek examines the various groups which made up the marginal world - beggars, prostitutes, procuresses and pimps, petty criminals, casual workers and the unemployed - their haunts in and around Paris, their way of life, and their relation to 'normal' society. Professor Geremek has made with this book a major contribution to the study of late medieval society which illuminates the little-known area of the medieval underworld in a fascinating and very accessible manner. Translated by Jean Birrell from the French edition of 1976, this edition includes a new introduction by Jean-Claude Schmitt, which offers a frank appraisal of the author's life and career to date.

This ambitious and vivid study in six volumes explores the journey of a single, electrifying story, from its first incarnation in a medieval French poem through its prolific rebirth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Juggler of Notre Dame tells how an entertainer abandons the world to join a monastery, but is suspected of blasphemy after dancing his devotion before a statue of the Madonna in the crypt; he is saved when the statue, delighted by his skill, miraculously comes to life. Jan Ziolkowski tracks the poem from its medieval roots to its rediscovery in late nineteenth-century Paris, before its translation into English in Britain and the United States. The visual influence of the tale on Gothic revivalism and vice versa in America is carefully documented with lavish and inventive illustrations, and Ziolkowski concludes with an examination of the explosion of interest in The Juggler of Notre Dame in the twentieth century and its place in mass culture today. Volume 2: Medieval Meets Medievalism deals with the influence of the tale in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe and America, and the development of literary medievalism at this time. The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity is a rich case study for the reception of the Middle Ages in modernity. Spanning centuries and continents, the medieval period is understood through the lens of its (post)modern reception in Europe and America. Profound connections between the verbal and the visual are illustrated by a rich trove of images, including book illustrations, stained glass, postage stamps, architecture, and Christmas cards. Presented with great clarity and simplicity, Ziolkowski's work is accessible to the general reader, while its many new discoveries will be valuable to academics in such fields and disciplines as medieval studies, medievalism, philology, literary history, art history, folklore, performance studies, and reception studies.

A set of essays intended to recognize the scholarship of Professor Cynthia Neville, the papers gathered here explore borders and boundaries in medieval and early modern Britain. Over her career, Cynthia has excavated the history of border law and social life on the frontier between England and Scotland and has written extensively of the relationships between natives and newcomers in Scotland’s Middle Ages. Her work repeatedly invokes jurisdiction as both a legal and territorial expression of power. The essays in this volume return to themes and topics touched upon in her corpus of work, all in one way or another examining borders and boundaries as either (or both) spatial and legal constructs that grow from and shape social interaction. Contributors are Douglas Biggs, Amy Blakeway, Steve Boardman, Sara M. Butler, Anne DeWindt, Kenneth F. Duggan, Elizabeth Ewan, Chelsea D.M. Hartlen, K.J. Kesselring, Tom Lambert, Shannon McSheffrey, and Cathryn R. Spence.

Central Asia has been perceived as a landscape of connections, of Silk Roads; an endless plain across which waves of conquerors swiftly rode on horseback. In reality the region is highly fragmented and difficult to traverse, and overcoming these obstacles led to routes becoming associated with epic travel and high-value trade. Put simply, the inhabitants of these lands became experts in the art of travelling the margins. This volume seeks to unravel some of the myths of long-distance roads in Central Asia, using a desert case-study to put forward a new hypothesis for how medieval landscapes were controlled and manipulated.

In Food and Feast in Premodern Outlaw Tales editors Melissa Ridley Elmes and Kristin Bovaird-Abbo gather eleven original studies examining scenes of food and feasting in premodern outlaw texts ranging from the tenth through the seventeenth centuries and forward to their cinematic adaptations. Along with fresh insights into the popular Robin Hood legend, these essays investigate the intersections of outlawry, food studies, and feasting in Old English, Middle English, and French outlaw narratives, Anglo-Scottish border ballads, early modern ballads and dramatic works, and cinematic medievalism. The range of critical and disciplinary approaches employed, including history, literary studies, cultural studies, food studies, gender studies, and film studies, highlights the inherently interdisciplinary nature of outlaw narratives. The overall volume offers an example of the ways in which examining a subject through interdisciplinary, cross-geographic and cross-temporal lenses can yield fresh insights; places canonic and well-known works in conversation with lesser-known texts to showcase the dynamic nature and cultural influence and impact of premodern outlaw tales; and presents an introductory foray into the intersection of literary and food studies in premodern contexts which will be of value and interest to specialists and a general audience, alike.

Since the end of the Cold War, the Middle Ages has returned to debates about history, culture, and politics in Northern and Eastern Europe. This volume explores political medievalism in two language areas that are crucial to understanding global medievalism but are, due to language barriers, often inaccessible to the majority of Western scholars and students. The importance of Russian medievalism has been acknowledged, but little analysed until now. Medievalism in Finland and Russia offers a selection of chapters by Russian, Finnish and American scholars covering historiography, presidential speeches, participatory online discussions and the neo-pagan revival in Russia. Finland is currently even more poorly understood than Russia in the discussions about global medievalism. It is usually mentioned only as of the birthplace of the Soldiers of Odin. The street patrol is, however, a marginal phenomenon in Finnish medievalism as this volume demonstrates. Instead of merely adopting the medievalist interpretation of the international alt-right, even the right-wing populists in Finland refer more to the nationalistic medievalist tradition, where crusades do not mark a Western Christian victory over the Muslim East, but a Swedish occupation of Finnish lands. In addition to presenting particular cases of medievalism, the chapters here on Finland challenge and diversify today's prevailing interpretation of shared online medievalism of European and American right-wing populists. This book reveals that while medievalisms in Finland and Russia share many features with the contemporary Anglo-American medievalist imaginations, they also display many original characteristics due to particular political situations and indigenous medievalist traditions. They have their own meta-medievalisms, cumulative core ideas and interpretations about the medieval past that are thoroughly examined here in English for the very first time.

The study of medieval literature has experienced a revolution in the last two decades, which has reinvigorated many parts of the discipline and changed the shape of the subject in relation to the scholarship of the previous generation. 'New' texts (laws and penitentials, women's writing, drama records), innovative fields and objects of study (the history of the book, the study of space and the body, medieval masculinities), and original ways of studying them (the Sociology of the Text, performance studies) have emerged. This has brought fresh vigour and impetus to medieval studies, and impacted significantly on cognate periods and areas. The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English brings together the insights of these new fields and approaches with those of more familiar texts and methods of study, to provide a comprehensive overview of the state of medieval literature today. It also returns to first principles in posing fundamental questions about the nature, scope, and significance of the discipline, and the directions that it might take in the next decade. The Handbook contains 44 newly commissioned essays from both world-leading scholars and exciting new scholarly voices. Topics covered range from the canonical genres of Saints' lives, sermons, romance, lyric poetry, and heroic poetry; major themes including monstrosity and marginality, patronage and literary politics, manuscript studies and vernacularity are investigated; and there are close readings of key texts, such as Beowulf, Wulf and Eadwacer, and Ancrene Wisse and key authors from Ælfric to Geoffrey Chaucer, Langland, and the Gawain Poet.

A Companion to Medieval Art brings together cutting-edge scholarship devoted to the Romanesque and Gothic traditions in Northern Europe. Brings together cutting-edge scholarship devoted to the Romanesque and Gothic traditions in Northern Europe. Contains over 30 original theoretical, historical, and historiographic essays by renowned and emergent scholars. Covers the vibrancy of medieval art from both thematic and sub-disciplinary perspectives. Features an international and ambitious range - from reception, Gregory the Great, collecting, and pilgrimage art, to gender, patronage, the marginal, spolia, and manuscript illumination.