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Relics Medieval – Clare Hartwell By the early nineteenth century, Manchester had already established itself as a prodigy of industrial and mercantile power; as an unimaginably different future took shape, it was also an age of re-evaluation of the past. There was growing national interest in native traditions, as romantic notions of a medieval past were developed in Walter Scott’s novels, in Romantic poetry, and with the scholarly study of English medieval architecture. Appreciation of a home-grown Gothic style was popularised and validated by the decision in
This book destabilises the customary disciplinary and epistemological oppositions between medieval studies and modern medievalism. It argues that the twinned concepts of “the medieval” and post-medieval “medievalism” are mutually though unevenly constitutive, not just in the contemporary era, but from the medieval period on. Medieval and medievalist culture share similar concerns about the nature of temporality, and the means by which we approach or “touch” the past, whether through textual or material culture, or the conceptual frames through which we approach those artefacts. Those approaches are often affective ones, often structured around love, abjection and discontent. Medieval writers offer powerful models for the ways in which contemporary desire determines the constitution of the past. This desire can not only connect us with the past but can reconnect present readers with the lost history of what we call the medievalism of the medievals. In other words, to come to terms with the history of the medieval is to understand that it already offers us a model of how to relate to the past. The book ranges across literary and historical texts, but is equally attentive to material culture and its problematic witness to the reality of the historical past.
Medieval film' forces us into a double-take on chronology. This book argues that such a playful confusion of temporalities is a fundamental characteristic not just of the term but also of medieval films themselves. Medieval films reflect on the fact that they make present a past that was never filmable and offer alternatives to chronological conceptions of time. The book examines the contrasting uses, or non-uses, of medieval art objects in two medieval films and assesses how they contribute to the films' overall authenticity-effects. It makes tentative contribution to a list of such characteristics: that the fragmented visual profile of the medieval makes medieval authenticity-effects particularly troublesome to produce. The reliance of film theory on medievalism has never been acknowledged by film scholars. The book shows the ways in which preconceived notions of the Middle Ages filtered into and were influenced by film theory throughout the twentieth century; and to what extent film theory relies on knowledge about the Middle Ages for its basic principles. It explores to what extent medieval film engages with questions of language, and to what extent these engagements may be distinctive. Cinematic medievalism participated in and drew on a wider cultural and political preoccupation with the Middle Ages. Romanticism posited the Middle Ages as an alternative, utopian realm promising creative and political possibility. The book argues that certain films with medieval themes and settings, mostly dating from the 1940s to the 1960s, demonstrate a surprising affinity with the themes and techniques associated with film noir.
The argument of this chapter is that certain films with medieval themes and settings, mostly dating from the 1940s to the 1960s, demonstrate a surprising affinity with the themes and techniques associated with film noir . The apocalyptic landscapes of these films are often bleak mirrors of the empty streets of film noir and sometimes allude to the sense of impending doom that haunted the
, already look upon the face of God; the purged, on the other hand, look forward to that vision but, for now, are still very much, as the poem puts it, “evolving,” subject to time—or, at least, to process—and, of course, traditionally, to pain. If you said “ And here ” to a seraph, she’d probably tell you: No shit; I’m there already . If you said “ And here ” to a soul in purgatory, she’d probably say: Polish it in every corner. The book of hours is therefore both an object in a museum—technically, a medieval object in a presumably modern museum—and a word for that
of the law of nations. The law of neutrality, in short, was made not, as it were, from the top-down by scholars and commentators, but rather from the bottom-up by statesmen, generals, admirals and traders. It was a fact of life first, and an institution of law only later. This state of affairs may seem surprising, in light of the fact that the medieval natural lawyers devised a
financial investment necessary for the stone structure implies inhabitation at least most of the time. As pastoralism increased, arable agriculture, or crop growing, has been said to have decreased, with only some regions of the Pale continuing with the farming practices developed by the Anglo-Normans in the high Middle Ages. In contrast to these long-accepted conventions of late medieval Irish agriculture, there is strong documentary evidence for water mills located close to, and controlled from, tower houses. This demonstrates that grain was
John’s Confessio theologica and its ideas about monastic prayerful emotion were alive and well at Fécamp during the years of John’s abbacy, from 1028 to 1078. But did they die with the abbot who authored them, or did they live on? This chapter will detail how John’s ideas were embraced, built upon, and transformed by those who came after him: his students, the generations of monks that succeeded him at Fécamp, the Norman monks who were his younger contemporaries, and a wider audience of late medieval Christians
literature. Travel writing, indeed, describes some of the oldest narratives, including Homer’s Odyssey , Virgil’s Aeneid , and the Old Testament Exodus . 2 Among specifically medieval English accounts of journeys across Europe and beyond, Mandeville’s Travels and the Book of Margery Kempe may be the most well-known today. Fascinating in their own ways, each also has the limitations of any premodern travel narrative. The former, an account of a fictional journey to the Middle East and Asia, has no truly authorial, definitive version, surviving as it does in several
The study of the medieval peasantry in demographic terms is new relative to other kinds of historical approach in this area. The history of population emerged as an academic subject in the second half of the twentieth century. It was, mostly, with the expansion of the subject range of the discipline of history in the 1960s that systematic demographic investigation of past societies was undertaken, and this was as true for the study of the medieval English countryside as for other research areas. Themes central to demography, most