Material Remains: Reading the Past in Medieval and Early Modern British Literature: Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture
Editat de Jan-Peer Hartmann, Andrew James Johnstonen Limba Engleză Paperback – 9 dec 2024
Medieval and early modern literature was fascinated with the material remains of the past. Scenes involving the discovery, description, circulation, or contemplation of archaeological objects can be found in texts ranging from hagiography to elegiac poetry, from historiography to romance—across regions and periods. This volume gathers voices to explore the ways in which these texts employ descriptions of objects from the past to produce aesthetic and literary responses to questions of historicity and the epistemological conditions of historical knowledge. The contributions to Material Remains: Reading the Past in Medieval and Early Modern British Literature examine the understanding and experience of temporality as registered through the representation of found objects. From Beowulf and King Arthur to Richard III, Roger de Norton, and more, these essays reproduce the thrill of the archaeological find and generate new forms of historical understanding beyond the established narratives that reinforce modern forms of periodizing the Middle Ages. List of Contributors Neil Cartlidge, Roberta Frank, Lori Ann Garner, Jonathan Gil Harris, Jan-Peer Hartmann, John Hines, Naomi Howell, Andrew Hui, Andrew James Johnston, Sarah Salih, Philip Schwyzer
| Toate formatele și edițiile | Preț | Express |
|---|---|---|
| Paperback (1) | 377.25 lei 38-44 zile | |
| Ohio State University Press – 9 dec 2024 | 377.25 lei 38-44 zile | |
| Hardback (1) | 586.98 lei 6-8 săpt. | |
| Ohio State University Press – 13 aug 2021 | 586.98 lei 6-8 săpt. |
Preț: 377.25 lei
Nou
Puncte Express: 566
Preț estimativ în valută:
72.24€ • 74.43$ • 60.62£
72.24€ • 74.43$ • 60.62£
Carte tipărită la comandă
Livrare economică 18-24 februarie
Preluare comenzi: 021 569.72.76
Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814257999
ISBN-10: 0814257992
Pagini: 302
Ilustrații: 27 b&w images
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 28 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture
ISBN-10: 0814257992
Pagini: 302
Ilustrații: 27 b&w images
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 28 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture
Recenzii
“William Carlos Williams wrote that there are ‘no ideas but in things’ and reading this fascinating collection of essays it is tempting to concur, for the authors … make a compelling case for the importance of reading literature in a variety of intersections with material culture.” —Rebecca Pinner, English: Journal of the English Association
“Its chronological sweep and the attention to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries make Material Remains a welcome departure from business as usual in medieval English (note: not “British”) studies. The volume will interest scholars concerned with alliterative verse, burial practices, hagiography, historiography, material culture, and issues of temporality and fictionality in early literature.” —Eric Weiskott, Speculum
“I was inspired by what this volume accomplishes, not only in its plethora of intersections between material culture and literature but also its demonstrations of how these intersections encourage us—indeed, oblige us—to breach ‘period’ barriers between early and late medieval, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and often enough the centuries beyond.” —Andrew Galloway, author of Medieval Literature and Culture: A Student Guide
“The range is admirably wide, from early Anglo-Saxon writing to early modern, a width that answers to the volume’s own resistance to historical alterity: these are stories that can be told only within long chronologies. The objects, as recounted in these stories of invention, are wonderfully alive, giving a good name to Thing Theory.” —James Simpson, author of Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism
Notă biografică
Jan-Peer Hartmann is a Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin. Andrew James Johnston is Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English Literature at Freie Universität Berlin.
Extras
The capacity of material remains for eliciting different and sometimes conflicting responses and perspectives is highlighted also in Andrew Hui’s discussion of the status of ruins in early modern visual culture. Early modern culture—like medieval or modern cultures, one might add—had no single way of looking at ruins; rather, Hui argues, the ruin constituted an open site onto which humanists could project very different ideas and perspectives. Hui discusses eleven different perspectives on ruins that were, if not in all cases ubiquitous, then at least widespread in early modern thought. As Hui demonstrates, ruins were both “material and metaphoric, architectural, and allegorical,” and always responsive to “architectural needs, fashions, and exigencies of the present moment.” In keeping with Sebastiano Serlio’s assertion that “perspective would be nothing without architecture and the architect nothing without perspective,” Hui argues that Renaissance architecture and perspective were both informed by the perception and visualization of ruins.
As in the examples discussed by Harris, there is thus a pronounced performative and even theatrical aspect to Hui’s ruins in that they are staged spectacles onto which a variety of philosophical, ethical, theological, and political practices and discourses could be projected. John Hines, too, stresses the interactive nature of premodern (fictional) encounters with material remains. Indeed, he observes that traces of the material past are so pervasive that no society can escape some form of engagement with it; nevertheless, he maintains, the later Middle Ages witnessed a fundamental change in the cognitive status of the material world that “proved essential to the transition from the medieval world to the early modern.” Discussing Chaucer’s House of Fame as a literary archetype of a museum, Hines argues that the poem remained incomplete because the reconceptualization of the classical heritage and its material remains in the present had not reached a point that allowed Chaucer to bring the poem to a satisfactory ending. Hines’s observation that Chaucer’s museum embodies interactive and participatory ideals also favored by present-day museum pedagogy draws attention to the often discontinuous and nonteleological nature of historical responses to material remains over time. Whatever their manifold differences, the medieval viewpoint that material objects possess a substantial discursive capacity of their own can be brought into meaningful dialogue with new materialist approaches that stress the agential status of matter within cultural practices. The urge to stage the material traces of the past in ways that creatively engage with or enact that past may be especially strong in late medieval and early modern texts and practices. Yet a playful engagement with material remains can be detected throughout the time span under discussion in this volume, as well as before and beyond. Material remains may elicit different aesthetic and performative responses in different cultural environs, and they are subject to trends or fashions that are never, however, absolute. Literary practices always provide the possibility of a counter-discourse, the potential to conceptualize aesthetically what is not or cannot be theorized explicitly. It is the collective aim of the papers gathered in this volume to demonstrate that the literary depiction of archaeological objects generates new forms of historical understanding that can provide alternative ways of reflecting on historical processes, ways of thinking that may even move beyond both the established master narratives of medieval and early modern historiography as well as the kind of master narratives that undergird modern forms of periodizing the Middle Ages and the early modern period.
As in the examples discussed by Harris, there is thus a pronounced performative and even theatrical aspect to Hui’s ruins in that they are staged spectacles onto which a variety of philosophical, ethical, theological, and political practices and discourses could be projected. John Hines, too, stresses the interactive nature of premodern (fictional) encounters with material remains. Indeed, he observes that traces of the material past are so pervasive that no society can escape some form of engagement with it; nevertheless, he maintains, the later Middle Ages witnessed a fundamental change in the cognitive status of the material world that “proved essential to the transition from the medieval world to the early modern.” Discussing Chaucer’s House of Fame as a literary archetype of a museum, Hines argues that the poem remained incomplete because the reconceptualization of the classical heritage and its material remains in the present had not reached a point that allowed Chaucer to bring the poem to a satisfactory ending. Hines’s observation that Chaucer’s museum embodies interactive and participatory ideals also favored by present-day museum pedagogy draws attention to the often discontinuous and nonteleological nature of historical responses to material remains over time. Whatever their manifold differences, the medieval viewpoint that material objects possess a substantial discursive capacity of their own can be brought into meaningful dialogue with new materialist approaches that stress the agential status of matter within cultural practices. The urge to stage the material traces of the past in ways that creatively engage with or enact that past may be especially strong in late medieval and early modern texts and practices. Yet a playful engagement with material remains can be detected throughout the time span under discussion in this volume, as well as before and beyond. Material remains may elicit different aesthetic and performative responses in different cultural environs, and they are subject to trends or fashions that are never, however, absolute. Literary practices always provide the possibility of a counter-discourse, the potential to conceptualize aesthetically what is not or cannot be theorized explicitly. It is the collective aim of the papers gathered in this volume to demonstrate that the literary depiction of archaeological objects generates new forms of historical understanding that can provide alternative ways of reflecting on historical processes, ways of thinking that may even move beyond both the established master narratives of medieval and early modern historiography as well as the kind of master narratives that undergird modern forms of periodizing the Middle Ages and the early modern period.
Cuprins
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction Reading the Past through Archaeological Objects Andrew James Johnston and Jan-Peer Hartmann Part I Traces 1 Found Bodies: The Living, the Dead, and the Undead in the Broad Medieval Present Sarah Salih 2 The Beaker in the Barrow, the Flagon with the Dragon: Accessorizing Beowulf Roberta Frank 3 Evidence of the Past in the Legend of the Seven Sleepers Neil Cartlidge 4 The Return of the King: Exhuming King Arthur and Richard III Philip Schwyzer Part II Entanglements 5 Global Beowulf and the Poetics of Entanglement Andrew James Johnston 6 Weapons of Healing: Materiality and Oral Poetics in Old English Remedies and Medicinal Charms Lori Ann Garner 7 Saracens at St. Albans: The Heart-Case of Roger de Norton Naomi Howell 8 The Ruthwell Cross and the Riddle of Time Jan-Peer Hartmann Part III Spectacle and Perfomance 9 Archaeo-Theatrics Jonathan Gil Harris 10 Ways of Looking at Renaissance Ruins Andrew Hui 11 But men seyn, “What may ever laste?”: Chaucer’s House of Fame as a Medieval Museum John Hines Bibliography List of Contributors Index
Descriere
Examines how medieval and early modern British texts use descriptions of archaeological objects to produce aesthetic and literary responses to questions of historicity and epistemology.