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Rethinking the New Medievalism

edited by R. Howard Bloch, Alison Calhoun, Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, Joachim Küpper, and Jeanette Patterson

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Twenty years after Stephen Nichols transformed the study of medieval literature, leaders in the field pay tribute to his work and expand on it.

In the early 1990s, Stephen Nichols introduced the term "new medievalism" to describe an alternative to the traditional philological approach to the study of the romantic texts in the medieval period. While the old approach focused on formal aspects of language, this new approach was historicist and moved beyond a narrow focus on language to examine the broader social and cultural contexts in which literary works were composed and disseminated. Within...

Twenty years after Stephen Nichols transformed the study of medieval literature, leaders in the field pay tribute to his work and expand on it.

In the early 1990s, Stephen Nichols introduced the term "new medievalism" to describe an alternative to the traditional philological approach to the study of the romantic texts in the medieval period. While the old approach focused on formal aspects of language, this new approach was historicist and moved beyond a narrow focus on language to examine the broader social and cultural contexts in which literary works were composed and disseminated. Within the field, this transformation of medieval studies was as important as the genetic revolution to the study of biology and has had an enormous influence on the study of medieval literature. Rethinking the New Medievalism offers both a historical account of the movement and its achievements while indicating—in Nichols’s innovative spirit—still newer directions for medieval studies.

The essays deal with questions of authorship, theology, and material philology and are written by members of a wide philological and critical circle that Nichols nourished for forty years. Daniel Heller-Roazen’s essay, for example, demonstrates the conjunction of the old philology and the new. In a close examination of the history of the words used for maritime raiders from Ancient Greece to the present (pirate, plunderer, bandit), Roazen draws a fine line between lawlessness and lawfulness, between judicial action and war, between war and public policy. Other contributors include Jack Abecassis, Marina Brownlee, Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, Andreas Kablitz, and Ursula Peters.

Reviews

Reviews

The essays ranged here by German and American scholars, in homage to Nichols and his cohort of new materialists, new philologists, new medievalists, are strong and ambitious attempts to revisit the twenty-year-old call for methodological reinvention.

Festschrifts are often marred by a lack of coherence or a retrospective, elegiac cast. By contrast, this volume coheres through its methodology and projects the need for future work. It is impressively wide-ranging in its language, culture, and topic.

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Book Details

Publication Date
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Available
Trim Size
6
x
9
Pages
288
ISBN
9781421412412
Illustration Description
7 halftones
Table of Contents

Introduction. The New Philology Comes of Age
Chapter 1. New Challenges for the New Medievalism
Chapter 2. Reflections on The New Philology
Chapter 3. Virgil's "Perhaps": Mythopoiesis and Cosmogony in

Introduction. The New Philology Comes of Age
Chapter 1. New Challenges for the New Medievalism
Chapter 2. Reflections on The New Philology
Chapter 3. Virgil's "Perhaps": Mythopoiesis and Cosmogony in Dante's Commedia (Remarks on Inf. 34, 106–26)
Chapter 4. Dialectic of the Medieval Course
Chapter 5. Religious Horizon and Epic Effect: Considerations on the Iliad, the Chanson de Roland, and the Nibelungenlied
Chapter 6. The Possibility of Historical Time in the Crónica Sarracina
Chapter 7. Good Friday Magic: Petrarch's Canzoniere and the Transformation of Medieval Vernacular Poetry
Chapter 8. The Identity of a Text
Chapter 9. Conceiving the Text in the Middle Ages
Chapter 10. Dante's Transfigured Ovidian Models: Icarus and Daedalus in the Commedia
Chapter 11. Ekphrasis in the Knight's Tale
Chapter 12. Montaigne's Medieval Nominalism and Meschonnic's Ethics of the Subject
Chapter 13. The Pèlerinage Corpus in the European Middle Ages: Processes of Retextualization Reflected in the Prologues
Chapter 14. Narrative Frames of Augustinian Thought in the Renaissance: The Case of Rabelais
Chapter 15. From Romanesque Architecture to Romance
List of Contributors
Index

Author Bios
Featured Contributor

R. Howard Bloch

R. Howard Bloch is chair of the Department of French and Romance Philology at Columbia University. He is author of several books, including Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, cowritten with Stephen Nichols, and published by Johns Hopkins.
Featured Contributor

Alison Calhoun

Alison Calhoun is a new faculty fellow and visiting assistant professor of French at Indiana University.
Featured Contributor

Jeanette Patterson

Jeanette Patterson is a new faculty fellow of French and Italian at Princeton University.