Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/cjm.2023.a912703
Hilary Rhodes
Reviewed by: Courtly and Queer: Deconstruction, Desire, and Medieval French Literature by Charlie Samuelson Hilary Rhodes Charlie Samuelson, Courtly and Queer: Deconstruction, Desire, and Medieval French Literature (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2022), 229 pp. Even as the history of the queer Middle Ages continues to flourish, with a rapidly expanding scholarly focus on premodern gender and sexuality, it remains something of a staple disclaimer that these discourses took place relatively unnoticed, in the margins of medieval society, or that they were not understandable, interpretable, or otherwise applicable to the contextual and critical tools of modern queer theory. Charlie Samuelson’s ambitious monograph challenges both of these ideas by drawing primarily on twelfth- and thirteenth-century narrative romances and fourteenth-century dits, especially those of Chrétien de Troyes and Guillaume de Machaut. By placing these two famous figures of the Old French [End Page 262] literary tradition in a complex and multivariate analytical framework, wherein he reads them and several of their counterparts in conversation with modern queer theorists and queer literary topoi, Samuelson centrally contends that the high medieval genre of courtly love “self-consciously interrogates the indeterminacy of language and poetics and of gender and sexuality” (2). The implications of this thesis are twofold. First, an oeuvre often prone to conservative and patriarchal interpretations, which are then used to reinforce stereotypical depictions of medieval gender and sexuality, is in fact open to a number of subversive and ambiguous readings—in other words, critics should refrain from simply accepting these texts at face value, and instead lean in to the varied, nuanced, and often-times-audacious interrogations of medieval sexuality, gender, and society that exist within them. Second, the literary “sophistication” of these texts, a term often used to designate perceived intellectual merit and proximity to power, does not definitively exclude or foreclose queerness in any way—in fact, sometimes quite the opposite. As such, we are forced to substantially rethink our automatic and reductive assumptions that any “queerness” in the Middle Ages existed unnoticed on the margins of society, rather than in its very literary, cultural, and political center. Samuelson deploys a number of examples and arguments to make his point, some more successfully than others. His command of both the medieval French texts and the modern scholarship on gender and queer theory, particularly that of Judith Butler and Lee Edelman, is undoubted, and he often pinpoints dynamic intersections between past and present, particularly in chapter 2, “Medieval Metalepsis: Queering Narrative Poetics.” By explicitly inviting us to read a variety of medieval romances in a deliberately destabilized framework, where the “interpenetration of ostensibly discrete narrative levels or textual elements” (7
{"title":"Courtly and Queer: Deconstruction, Desire, and Medieval French Literature by Charlie Samuelson (review)","authors":"Hilary Rhodes","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912703","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912703","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Courtly and Queer: Deconstruction, Desire, and Medieval French Literature by Charlie Samuelson Hilary Rhodes Charlie Samuelson, Courtly and Queer: Deconstruction, Desire, and Medieval French Literature (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2022), 229 pp. Even as the history of the queer Middle Ages continues to flourish, with a rapidly expanding scholarly focus on premodern gender and sexuality, it remains something of a staple disclaimer that these discourses took place relatively unnoticed, in the margins of medieval society, or that they were not understandable, interpretable, or otherwise applicable to the contextual and critical tools of modern queer theory. Charlie Samuelson’s ambitious monograph challenges both of these ideas by drawing primarily on twelfth- and thirteenth-century narrative romances and fourteenth-century dits, especially those of Chrétien de Troyes and Guillaume de Machaut. By placing these two famous figures of the Old French [End Page 262] literary tradition in a complex and multivariate analytical framework, wherein he reads them and several of their counterparts in conversation with modern queer theorists and queer literary topoi, Samuelson centrally contends that the high medieval genre of courtly love “self-consciously interrogates the indeterminacy of language and poetics and of gender and sexuality” (2). The implications of this thesis are twofold. First, an oeuvre often prone to conservative and patriarchal interpretations, which are then used to reinforce stereotypical depictions of medieval gender and sexuality, is in fact open to a number of subversive and ambiguous readings—in other words, critics should refrain from simply accepting these texts at face value, and instead lean in to the varied, nuanced, and often-times-audacious interrogations of medieval sexuality, gender, and society that exist within them. Second, the literary “sophistication” of these texts, a term often used to designate perceived intellectual merit and proximity to power, does not definitively exclude or foreclose queerness in any way—in fact, sometimes quite the opposite. As such, we are forced to substantially rethink our automatic and reductive assumptions that any “queerness” in the Middle Ages existed unnoticed on the margins of society, rather than in its very literary, cultural, and political center. Samuelson deploys a number of examples and arguments to make his point, some more successfully than others. His command of both the medieval French texts and the modern scholarship on gender and queer theory, particularly that of Judith Butler and Lee Edelman, is undoubted, and he often pinpoints dynamic intersections between past and present, particularly in chapter 2, “Medieval Metalepsis: Queering Narrative Poetics.” By explicitly inviting us to read a variety of medieval romances in a deliberately destabilized framework, where the “interpenetration of ostensibly discrete narrative levels or textual elements” (7","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135712300","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/cjm.2023.a912682
Andrew Fogleman
Reviewed by: The Complete History of the Black Death by Ole J. Benedictow Andrew Fogleman Ole J. Benedictow, The Complete History of the Black Death (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2021), xxxii + 1026 pp., 94 ills. The Complete History of the Black Death is ostensibly the second edition of Ole J. Benedictow’s 2004 work by a similar name. But given so much new content (593 more pages than the first edition), it might be considered a new work that builds upon and persistently defends the findings of his first edition. In the spirit of the Annales tradition of “total history,” Benedictow provides the reader with a holistic study of the Black Death, synthesizing an impressive array of regional studies to establish the spread and mortality rates of the plague, providing demographic analysis with attention to source-specific problems, and guiding the reader through modern medical plague studies. Along the way, he argues that the Black Death is best understood as a rat-and-rat-flea-borne disease, that the outbreak of the Black Death happened in the Volga delta of southern Russia from which it spread west to Europe and east to China, and that the European mortality rates—factoring in source-critical reservations—were as high as sixty-five percent. The book is divided into five sections: a description of the Black Death containing its medical, clinical, and epidemiological features (pt. 1); a history of the plague before the Black Death (pt. 2); the outbreak and spread of the Black Death (pt. 3); the mortality of the Black Death with chapter profiles of mortality rates for six countries (pt. 4); and a final reflection that presents the Black Death as a turning point in history (pt. 5). The book also includes a helpful glossary of terms, twenty-three maps, seven figures, and sixty-four tables. At 1026 pages, this book will likely serve as a reference work for readers interested in specific questions, debates, or regional studies of the Black Death. The transmission of plague by the black rat flea was discovered in India and developed by the Indian Plague Research Commission (IPRC) in the early twentieth century. Benedictow draws extensively on their research in this portion of the book, arguing that only black rat fleas satisfy the various conditions needed to support the transmission of plague on an epidemic scale and that there “is not any empirically observed or realistically conceivable alternative of transmission” (34, 37). Benedictow shows that black rat fleas are uniquely suited for transmitting plague because they have developed a peculiar kind of blockage in the fore-gut of their stomach caused by the growth of a biofilm, which blocks infected blood from passing through the flea and causes plague bacteria to move back into bite wounds during feeding, thus infecting the host (33). Human plague cases, Benedictow notes, “do not have a role in the epidemiology of plague” because plague bacteria levels in humans are too low to cause human fleas or lice to transm
《黑死病全史》，作者:Ole J. Benedictow，《黑死病全史》(Woodbridge: Boydell, 2021)， xxxii + 1026页，94页。《黑死病全史》表面上是奥勒·j·本尼迪克托2004年同名作品的第二版。但是考虑到如此多的新内容(比第一版多593页)，它可能被认为是一部建立在第一版的基础上并坚持捍卫第一版发现的新作品。本着《年鉴》传统的“整体历史”精神，本尼迪克托为读者提供了对黑死病的全面研究，综合了一系列令人印象深刻的区域研究，以确定鼠疫的传播和死亡率，提供了关注来源特定问题的人口统计分析，并指导读者了解现代医学鼠疫研究。在此过程中，他认为黑死病最好被理解为一种由老鼠和老鼠跳蚤传播的疾病，黑死病的爆发发生在俄罗斯南部的伏尔加三角洲，它从那里向西传播到欧洲，向东传播到中国，而欧洲的死亡率——考虑到对资源至关重要的保留——高达65%。本书分为五个部分:对黑死病的描述，包括其医学、临床和流行病学特征(第1页);黑死病之前鼠疫的历史(第2集);黑死病的爆发和传播(第3页);黑死病的死亡率，附六个国家的死亡率概况(第4页);最后的反思将黑死病作为历史上的一个转折点(第5页)。这本书还包括一个有用的术语表，23张地图，7个数字和64张表格。这本1026页的书可能会成为对黑死病的具体问题、辩论或区域研究感兴趣的读者的参考作品。鼠疫通过黑鼠蚤传播是在印度发现的，并由印度鼠疫研究委员会(IPRC)于20世纪初发展起来。Benedictow在书的这一部分广泛引用了他们的研究，认为只有黑鼠蚤满足支持瘟疫大规模传播所需的各种条件，并且“没有任何经验观察到的或现实可行的替代传播方式”(34,37)。Benedictow表明，黑鼠蚤非常适合传播鼠疫，因为它们在胃的前肠中形成了一种特殊的堵塞，这种堵塞是由一种生物膜的生长引起的，这种生物膜阻止受感染的血液通过跳蚤，并导致鼠疫细菌在进食过程中回到被咬伤的地方，从而感染宿主(33)。Benedictow指出，人类鼠疫病例“在鼠疫流行病学中没有作用”，因为人类体内的鼠疫细菌水平太低，不足以导致人类跳蚤或虱子传播鼠疫(31)。Benedictow通过证明人口密度与死亡率和发病率呈负相关关系，进一步证明了人类、人类跳蚤或人类虱子不太可能在鼠疫传播中发挥任何重要作用(第44章)。从20世纪印度和中国的死亡率以及中世纪萨沃伊郡和英格兰的研究中可以看出，黑死病的这一“决定性特征”表明，人口密度越低，死亡率就越高(882,883)。Benedictow观察到，这些发现与现代科学流行病学(关于人类疾病传播)的中心原则相矛盾，即“易感人群密度的增加将促进其传播”(877)。这些发现证实了黑死病以老鼠和老鼠跳蚤为基础传播(885)。本尼迪克托还指出，黑死病的这一特征有助于解释黑死病造成的破坏，因为大约90%的欧洲人口生活在农村，因此比城市居民更容易受到鼠疫的影响。这本书的中心部分(509页)讲述了黑死病在欧洲爆发和传播的故事，其中的章节专门讲述了鼠疫在四个地区和16个不同国家的传播。就像在……
{"title":"The Complete History of the Black Death by Ole J. Benedictow (review)","authors":"Andrew Fogleman","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912682","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912682","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: The Complete History of the Black Death by Ole J. Benedictow Andrew Fogleman Ole J. Benedictow, The Complete History of the Black Death (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2021), xxxii + 1026 pp., 94 ills. The Complete History of the Black Death is ostensibly the second edition of Ole J. Benedictow’s 2004 work by a similar name. But given so much new content (593 more pages than the first edition), it might be considered a new work that builds upon and persistently defends the findings of his first edition. In the spirit of the Annales tradition of “total history,” Benedictow provides the reader with a holistic study of the Black Death, synthesizing an impressive array of regional studies to establish the spread and mortality rates of the plague, providing demographic analysis with attention to source-specific problems, and guiding the reader through modern medical plague studies. Along the way, he argues that the Black Death is best understood as a rat-and-rat-flea-borne disease, that the outbreak of the Black Death happened in the Volga delta of southern Russia from which it spread west to Europe and east to China, and that the European mortality rates—factoring in source-critical reservations—were as high as sixty-five percent. The book is divided into five sections: a description of the Black Death containing its medical, clinical, and epidemiological features (pt. 1); a history of the plague before the Black Death (pt. 2); the outbreak and spread of the Black Death (pt. 3); the mortality of the Black Death with chapter profiles of mortality rates for six countries (pt. 4); and a final reflection that presents the Black Death as a turning point in history (pt. 5). The book also includes a helpful glossary of terms, twenty-three maps, seven figures, and sixty-four tables. At 1026 pages, this book will likely serve as a reference work for readers interested in specific questions, debates, or regional studies of the Black Death. The transmission of plague by the black rat flea was discovered in India and developed by the Indian Plague Research Commission (IPRC) in the early twentieth century. Benedictow draws extensively on their research in this portion of the book, arguing that only black rat fleas satisfy the various conditions needed to support the transmission of plague on an epidemic scale and that there “is not any empirically observed or realistically conceivable alternative of transmission” (34, 37). Benedictow shows that black rat fleas are uniquely suited for transmitting plague because they have developed a peculiar kind of blockage in the fore-gut of their stomach caused by the growth of a biofilm, which blocks infected blood from passing through the flea and causes plague bacteria to move back into bite wounds during feeding, thus infecting the host (33). Human plague cases, Benedictow notes, “do not have a role in the epidemiology of plague” because plague bacteria levels in humans are too low to cause human fleas or lice to transm","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135710991","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/cjm.2023.a912702
Benjamin Hoover
Reviewed by: Writing Old Age and Impairment in Late Medieval England by Will Rogers Benjamin Hoover Will Rogers, Writing Old Age and Impairment in Late Medieval England (Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2021), 164 pp. Old men hold a prevalent presence in the span of Middle English narrative, however unexpected that presence might be. In a literary milieu wherein one might expect young men and their adventures to predominate, as is the case of the chivalric romance, the aged maintain a high degree of textual visibility, especially given the tendency of medieval narratives to draw attention to visual indicators of their embodied age. Readers of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales recall that the opening narrative of the pilgrims’ story competition—The Knight’s Tale—begins with an invocation of antiquity “Whilom as olden stories tellen us.” Such an acknowledgement of the story’s age, Rogers notes, complicates any totalizing understandings of the later part of the lifespan; oldness is as much a site of authoritative veneration as it is of debility. It is to this pattern of citing narrative antiquity that Will Rogers’s monograph Writing Old Age and Impairment in Late Medieval England first draws our attention. Rogers’s volume reviews a wide range of later medieval English canonical texts and authors from the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Each chapter takes a different author or range of texts as its subject, demonstrating the array of perspectives concerning representations of age in Ricardian and Henrician England. This critical selection includes: the alliterative poems Wynere and Wastoure and Parlement of the Thre Ages, Chaucer’s later lyrics and The Reeve’s [End Page 260] Tale, the reception of Thomas Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes in the early era of incunabula print by William Caxton, and citation of John Gower and his Confessio Amantis in Shakespeare’s Pericles. Rogers further articulates how, among these texts, age and its correlating debility are used as narrative prosthetics. Though the texts’ treatment of this metaphor vary, Rogers finds that “speakers and authors alike use narratives of age-related impairments to highlight and supplement these areas of debility, inability, or infirmity, turning impairment into a prosthetic that challenges the disabling notions of old age” (7). Such is the approach that Rogers lays out in his introduction, noting the several ways in which these texts produce a set of practices regarding the depiction of old age, ranging from critique of youthfulness within the Ricardian context of the fourteenth century to the supplementary role that medieval texts come to embody for early modern writers. The first two chapters, as Rogers notes, offer a focused examination of how Middle English narratives produce old age and how the narrators of these texts utilize narrative as a type of prosthesis, in which they define old age by lack and debility, using narrative to paper over such impairments. Chapter 1 offers a comparativ
本杰明·胡佛·威尔·罗杰斯:《写中世纪晚期英格兰的老年与损伤》(利兹:Arc人文出版社，2021年)，164页。老人在中世纪英语叙事的跨度中普遍存在，尽管这种存在可能出乎意料。在一个文学环境中，人们可能期望年轻人和他们的冒险占据主导地位，就像骑士浪漫的情况一样，老年人保持着高度的文本可见性，特别是考虑到中世纪叙事倾向于将注意力吸引到他们体现年龄的视觉指标上。读过乔叟的《坎特伯雷故事集》的读者还记得，清教徒故事竞赛的开篇叙述——《骑士的故事》——以一段对古代的召唤开始，“就像古老的故事告诉我们的那样。”罗杰斯指出，这种对故事年代的承认，使对生命后期的整体理解变得复杂;年老是权威崇拜的场所，也是衰弱的场所。威尔·罗杰斯(Will Rogers)的专著《中世纪晚期英格兰的老年与损伤》(Writing Old Age and Impairment in Late Medieval England)正是对这种引用古代叙事的模式首先引起了我们的注意。罗杰斯的卷评论了广泛的中世纪后期的英国规范文本和作者从14世纪末和15世纪。每一章都以不同的作者或文本范围为主题，展示了李嘉图和亨利时代英格兰关于年龄表征的一系列观点。这一重要选集包括:头韵诗《怀纳尔和韦斯托尔》和《三个时代的议会》，乔叟后期的歌词和《里夫的故事》，威廉·卡克斯顿在早期的古努布拉印刷中对托马斯·霍克列夫的《王子团》的接受，以及引用约翰·高尔和他在莎士比亚的《伯里克利斯》中的《忏悔录》。罗杰斯进一步阐述了在这些文本中，年龄及其相关的衰弱是如何被用作叙事修复术的。尽管文本对这一隐喻的处理各不相同，罗杰斯发现，“演讲者和作者都使用与年龄有关的缺陷的叙述来突出和补充这些衰弱、无能或虚弱的领域，把缺陷变成了挑战老年残疾观念的假肢”(7)。这就是罗杰斯在他的引言中列出的方法，注意到这些文本产生一系列关于老年描绘的实践的几种方式。从14世纪李嘉图背景下对年轻人的批判，到中世纪文本对早期现代作家的补充作用。正如罗杰斯所指出的，前两章重点考察了中世纪英语叙事是如何产生老年的，以及这些文本的叙述者是如何利用叙事作为一种假体的，在这种假体中，他们将老年定义为缺乏和虚弱，用叙事来掩盖这些缺陷。第一章对头韵诗《三个时代的议会》和《温纳尔和瓦斯图尔》进行了比较分析，认为这两首诗对拟人化的老年叙述者的描写，都表明了老年叙述者讲故事的中心地位。同样，第二章，转向乔叟的《里夫的故事》和他的一些歌词，展示了贯穿乔叟文学语料库的老年和叙事的持续联系。正如这一章所指出的，里夫用攻击性和暴力的语言来代替晚年带来的伤害——这种威胁的语言在乔叟的其他诗歌中也有相似之处，比如亚当·斯克里维恩和斯科根特使。在《坎特伯雷故事集》的片段1中，《骑士的故事》和《里夫的故事》的残忍有助于展示一种关于年龄的持续视角，在《骑士的故事》和《里夫的故事》中，都是老年人在他们的叙述中保持着权力和代理。在第3章中，讨论的方向开始从叙事中的义肢转向更类似于16世纪用法的义肢概念，其中对文本的添加改变了对它们补充的材料的理解。古体在序言中处于更准文本的位置，回忆起“过去既是序言，也是这些作者挖掘过去——无论是作品还是作者——的假体……
{"title":"Writing Old Age and Impairment in Late Medieval England by Will Rogers (review)","authors":"Benjamin Hoover","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912702","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912702","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Writing Old Age and Impairment in Late Medieval England by Will Rogers Benjamin Hoover Will Rogers, Writing Old Age and Impairment in Late Medieval England (Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2021), 164 pp. Old men hold a prevalent presence in the span of Middle English narrative, however unexpected that presence might be. In a literary milieu wherein one might expect young men and their adventures to predominate, as is the case of the chivalric romance, the aged maintain a high degree of textual visibility, especially given the tendency of medieval narratives to draw attention to visual indicators of their embodied age. Readers of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales recall that the opening narrative of the pilgrims’ story competition—The Knight’s Tale—begins with an invocation of antiquity “Whilom as olden stories tellen us.” Such an acknowledgement of the story’s age, Rogers notes, complicates any totalizing understandings of the later part of the lifespan; oldness is as much a site of authoritative veneration as it is of debility. It is to this pattern of citing narrative antiquity that Will Rogers’s monograph Writing Old Age and Impairment in Late Medieval England first draws our attention. Rogers’s volume reviews a wide range of later medieval English canonical texts and authors from the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Each chapter takes a different author or range of texts as its subject, demonstrating the array of perspectives concerning representations of age in Ricardian and Henrician England. This critical selection includes: the alliterative poems Wynere and Wastoure and Parlement of the Thre Ages, Chaucer’s later lyrics and The Reeve’s [End Page 260] Tale, the reception of Thomas Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes in the early era of incunabula print by William Caxton, and citation of John Gower and his Confessio Amantis in Shakespeare’s Pericles. Rogers further articulates how, among these texts, age and its correlating debility are used as narrative prosthetics. Though the texts’ treatment of this metaphor vary, Rogers finds that “speakers and authors alike use narratives of age-related impairments to highlight and supplement these areas of debility, inability, or infirmity, turning impairment into a prosthetic that challenges the disabling notions of old age” (7). Such is the approach that Rogers lays out in his introduction, noting the several ways in which these texts produce a set of practices regarding the depiction of old age, ranging from critique of youthfulness within the Ricardian context of the fourteenth century to the supplementary role that medieval texts come to embody for early modern writers. The first two chapters, as Rogers notes, offer a focused examination of how Middle English narratives produce old age and how the narrators of these texts utilize narrative as a type of prosthesis, in which they define old age by lack and debility, using narrative to paper over such impairments. Chapter 1 offers a comparativ","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":"140 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135711000","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/cjm.2023.a912694
Johannes Junge Ruhland
Reviewed by: Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera by Sarah Kay Johannes Junge Ruhland Sarah Kay, Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022), xix + 270 pp., 38 ills., with companion website by Christopher Preston Thompson. Prompted by “colleagues in musicology who protested at the absence of any discussion of music in [Sarah Kay’s] earlier work on sung texts” (xi), Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera revolves around an ontological question: what is song in the European Middle Ages? Sidestepping the common assumption that song is “the conjunction of words and music” (3), Kay instead focuses on “the act of singing, and the quality of being singable” (2). Positioning herself in the transdisciplinary field of sound studies, Kay places voice at the center of her discussion, at once relating song to the production of human speech and characterizing it as a phenomenon occurring in the wider cosmos (9). Medieval Song provides at least three answers to her ontological question. In its broadest sense, medieval song is the result of touch, light, breath, inspiration, and imagination. In the context of song largely mediated by manuscripts and opera, it is eminently multisensory, and lends itself to what Kay dubs “operatic reading,” a form of attention that grants song the status of sound, performance, and vision. And because no performance exhausts what can be heard in a song, song is essentially anachronic, lingering beyond its time of production and performance. The book’s corpus ranges from Aristotle to opera (including an opera created in 2019) and puts late antique, early medieval, scholastic, and contemporary theoretical writings in conversation with troubadour and trouvère poems, narrative dits, bestiaries, manuscripts, and operas. Kay offers an encyclopedic yet concise sum that complements existing scholarship on medieval song in musicology and literary studies (examples include Ardis Butterfield, Marisa Galvez, Elizabeth Leach, and Judith Peraino). The convergence of operatic reading with work by other scholars (Emma Dillon’s The Sense of Sound [2012] and Bissera Pent-cheva’s AudioVision in the Middle Ages [2023]), suggests how promising operatic reading is for medieval studies writ large. Essential to the book’s documentation and argumentation is a companion website curated by Christopher Preston Thompson (https://cornellpress.manifoldapp.org/projects/medieval-song), to which Kay regularly refers. It features (sometimes multiple) recordings of medieval songs by Thompson and the ensemble Concordian Dawn, texts, scores, and translations, as well as performance reflections by Thompson and Kay. For accessibility, videos are fully captioned. The book’s introduction provides three key parameters for the study to [End Page 240] follow. First, it justifies its definition of song as interconnected with the “wider universe” (9) by shifting attention from words to sound. Second, it develops the notion of operatic read
{"title":"Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera by Sarah Kay (review)","authors":"Johannes Junge Ruhland","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912694","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912694","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera by Sarah Kay Johannes Junge Ruhland Sarah Kay, Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022), xix + 270 pp., 38 ills., with companion website by Christopher Preston Thompson. Prompted by “colleagues in musicology who protested at the absence of any discussion of music in [Sarah Kay’s] earlier work on sung texts” (xi), Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera revolves around an ontological question: what is song in the European Middle Ages? Sidestepping the common assumption that song is “the conjunction of words and music” (3), Kay instead focuses on “the act of singing, and the quality of being singable” (2). Positioning herself in the transdisciplinary field of sound studies, Kay places voice at the center of her discussion, at once relating song to the production of human speech and characterizing it as a phenomenon occurring in the wider cosmos (9). Medieval Song provides at least three answers to her ontological question. In its broadest sense, medieval song is the result of touch, light, breath, inspiration, and imagination. In the context of song largely mediated by manuscripts and opera, it is eminently multisensory, and lends itself to what Kay dubs “operatic reading,” a form of attention that grants song the status of sound, performance, and vision. And because no performance exhausts what can be heard in a song, song is essentially anachronic, lingering beyond its time of production and performance. The book’s corpus ranges from Aristotle to opera (including an opera created in 2019) and puts late antique, early medieval, scholastic, and contemporary theoretical writings in conversation with troubadour and trouvère poems, narrative dits, bestiaries, manuscripts, and operas. Kay offers an encyclopedic yet concise sum that complements existing scholarship on medieval song in musicology and literary studies (examples include Ardis Butterfield, Marisa Galvez, Elizabeth Leach, and Judith Peraino). The convergence of operatic reading with work by other scholars (Emma Dillon’s The Sense of Sound [2012] and Bissera Pent-cheva’s AudioVision in the Middle Ages [2023]), suggests how promising operatic reading is for medieval studies writ large. Essential to the book’s documentation and argumentation is a companion website curated by Christopher Preston Thompson (https://cornellpress.manifoldapp.org/projects/medieval-song), to which Kay regularly refers. It features (sometimes multiple) recordings of medieval songs by Thompson and the ensemble Concordian Dawn, texts, scores, and translations, as well as performance reflections by Thompson and Kay. For accessibility, videos are fully captioned. The book’s introduction provides three key parameters for the study to [End Page 240] follow. First, it justifies its definition of song as interconnected with the “wider universe” (9) by shifting attention from words to sound. Second, it develops the notion of operatic read","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135712001","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/cjm.2023.a912669
Quentin Clark
Abstract: Recent scholarship on Byzantine seals has broadened our understanding of both the practical and symbolic functions of these objects, as it primarily concerns their material, iconographic, and epigraphic content. This article focuses on one of only two known Byzantine seals featuring an image of an elephant. This eleventh-century seal belonged to an individual bearing the title “ἐπὶ τῶν βαρβάρων” ( epi ton barbaron ). Receiving little scholarly attention, this object is generally discussed in the context of other seals of the Byzantine period. I offer a new reading of this object and its image, arguing that the elephant on this seal served two primary functions: it represented its owner’s claim to imperial identity, and it also symbolized its owner’s reverence for the emperor. Through close iconographic and social art historical analysis, I examine the elephant’s use during the Roman and Byzantine periods in three distinct categories: as a motif, as material, and as a living animal. I draw upon primary texts, seals, and ivory objects of the Byzantine period to emphasize the elephant’s imperial associations. I also analyze this seal’s image in conjunction with the administrative titles present in this object’s inscription— epi ton barbaron , in particular. This article expands the ways in which both the iconographic and epigraphic content of Byzantine seals can be used to interpret the symbolic identities their owner’s often project.
摘要:最近关于拜占庭印章的学术研究拓宽了我们对这些物品的实用和象征功能的理解，因为它主要涉及它们的材料、图像和铭文内容。本文关注的是目前已知的仅有的两个以大象为特征的拜占庭印章中的一个。这枚11世纪的印章属于一个人，他的头衔是“ν π ν τ ν βαρβ ρων”(epi ton barbaron)。受到很少的学术关注，这个对象通常在拜占庭时期的其他印章的背景下讨论。我对这件物品和它的形象有一种新的解读，认为这枚印章上的大象有两个主要的功能:它代表了它的主人对皇帝身份的要求，它也象征着它的主人对皇帝的尊敬。通过密切的图像和社会艺术史分析，我研究了罗马和拜占庭时期大象的使用，分为三个不同的类别:作为主题，作为材料，作为一个活生生的动物。我利用拜占庭时期的原始文本、印章和象牙物品来强调大象与帝国的联系。我还分析了这枚印章的图像，并将其与物品铭文中出现的行政头衔联系起来——特别是埃皮顿·巴巴隆。本文扩展了拜占庭印章的图像和铭文内容可以用来解释其所有者经常项目的象征性身份的方式。
{"title":"Symbolizing Reverence and Imperial Identity: The Elephant on the epi ton barbaron Seal","authors":"Quentin Clark","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912669","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912669","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Recent scholarship on Byzantine seals has broadened our understanding of both the practical and symbolic functions of these objects, as it primarily concerns their material, iconographic, and epigraphic content. This article focuses on one of only two known Byzantine seals featuring an image of an elephant. This eleventh-century seal belonged to an individual bearing the title “ἐπὶ τῶν βαρβάρων” ( epi ton barbaron ). Receiving little scholarly attention, this object is generally discussed in the context of other seals of the Byzantine period. I offer a new reading of this object and its image, arguing that the elephant on this seal served two primary functions: it represented its owner’s claim to imperial identity, and it also symbolized its owner’s reverence for the emperor. Through close iconographic and social art historical analysis, I examine the elephant’s use during the Roman and Byzantine periods in three distinct categories: as a motif, as material, and as a living animal. I draw upon primary texts, seals, and ivory objects of the Byzantine period to emphasize the elephant’s imperial associations. I also analyze this seal’s image in conjunction with the administrative titles present in this object’s inscription— epi ton barbaron , in particular. This article expands the ways in which both the iconographic and epigraphic content of Byzantine seals can be used to interpret the symbolic identities their owner’s often project.","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":"140 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135712622","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/cjm.2023.a912697
Emily White
Reviewed by: Flesh and Bones: The Art of Anatomy by Monique Kornell et al Emily White Monique Kornell et al., Flesh and Bones: The Art of Anatomy (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2022), 248 pp., 163 ills. Accompanying the 2022 exhibition Flesh and Bones: The Art of Anatomy curated by Monique Kornell at the Getty Research Institute (GRI), this lavish catalog examines the ways anatomy has been presented over the years from the early modern period to the present. The striking images in this volume include dissections, antique sculpture, life-size prints, creative paper flaps, and 3-D stereoscopic photographs. Kornell’s inspiration for this exhibition was the GRI’s acquisition of three life-sized prints from the eighteenth century by engraver Antonio Cattani after anatomical sculptures by Ercole Lelli, which are featured in the catalog. Kornell’s research reinforces that many of the illustrated books and prints in this exhibition are the direct result of close collaboration between anatomists and printmakers. This catalog draws on a wide range of media, primarily from the Special Collections of the GRI. Included among these works are titans of anatomical illustrations such as Jacopo Berengario da Carpi’s Isagogae breves (1523), a first edition of Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (1543), and Govard Bidloo’s Anatomia humani corporis (1685), along with lesser-known innovative anatomy works. Each work in the exhibition is incorporated throughout eight chapters, with additional comparative works and an accompanying fifty-six-item catalog at the end of the volume. Each catalog entry includes a full-page color reproduction with accompanying text that includes information on provenance, formal description, historical context, and their significance to the study of anatomy. The volume begins with an introduction by Italian historian Valeria Finucci overviewing the discipline of anatomy in relation to artistic practices in the Renaissance. Beginning with the landmark reference of Vesalius, Flesh and Bones proceeds thematically through the history of anatomical illustration. Chapter 1 examines key figures in the history of anatomical illustration and lays out a chronology of developments beginning in the mid-sixteenth century up until the mid-nineteenth century. Anyone looking for a useful overview of artistic production in conjunction with the scientific field would do well to study Kornell’s research timeline provided. Chapter 2 introduces the artistic concept [End Page 248] of the “living dead” within anatomical illustration and the animation imbued to lifeless bodies and diagrams. The tradition of depicting corpses seemingly among the land of the living is linked to the Dance of Death, “wound men,” and emotive skeletons. Included are examples of écorché figures in the art treatise of Samuel van Hoogstraten (1678) and studies on dissection from Guilio Casseri’s Pentaestheseion (1609). Kornell argues the purpose of the emotion
莫尼克·科内尔等人，《肉与骨:解剖学的艺术》(洛杉矶:盖蒂研究所，2022)，248页，163页。2022年，盖蒂研究所(Getty Research Institute)的莫妮克·科内尔(Monique Kornell)策划了一场名为“肉与骨:解剖学艺术”的展览，与此同时，这本豪华的目录考察了从近代早期到现在解剖学的呈现方式。本卷中引人注目的图像包括解剖，古董雕塑，真人大小的印刷品，创意纸瓣和3-D立体照片。Kornell对这次展览的灵感来自于GRI从18世纪获得的三幅真人大小的版画，这是由雕刻家Antonio Cattani在Ercole Lelli的解剖雕塑之后获得的，这些雕塑在目录中有特色。科内尔的研究强调，这次展览中的许多插图书和版画都是解剖学家和版画家密切合作的直接结果。该目录采用了广泛的媒体，主要来自GRI的特别收藏。这些作品中包括解剖学插图的巨著，如Jacopo Berengario da Carpi的Isagogae breves (1523)， Andreas Vesalius的De humani corporis fabrica libri septem(1543)的第一版，以及Govard Bidloo的Anatomia humani corporis(1685)，以及不太知名的创新解剖学作品。展览中的每件作品都包含在八个章节中，在卷的末尾有额外的比较作品和附带的56项目录。每个目录条目都包括一整页彩色复制，附带文本，包括来源信息，正式描述，历史背景，以及它们对解剖学研究的意义。卷开始由意大利历史学家瓦莱里娅·菲努奇概述解剖学的学科在文艺复兴时期的艺术实践介绍。从具有里程碑意义的维萨里开始，《肉与骨》通过解剖插图的历史主题进行。第1章考察了解剖插图历史上的关键人物，并列出了从16世纪中期到19世纪中期的发展年表。任何想要了解艺术创作与科学领域结合的有用概况的人，都可以好好研究康奈尔提供的研究时间表。第二章介绍了解剖插图中“活死人”的艺术概念[End Page 248]，以及注入无生命的身体和图表的动画。在生者的土地上描绘尸体的传统与死亡之舞、“受伤的人”和情感骷髅有关。其中包括Samuel van Hoogstraten(1678)的艺术论文中的雕像((1609)的解剖研究。科内尔认为，这些人物的情感和态度的目的是“模仿和重新捕捉生活，并以此揭示其内在运作”(17)。第3章和第4章侧重于解剖学在艺术社区的正式培训和古董研究中的应用。科内尔将注意力转向负责插图的艺术家，以及艺术家对获得解剖学知识的渴望，特别是在意大利。艺术家们不仅在视觉上呈现身体，而且在某些情况下，还进行解剖，从剥皮的尸体上制作模型，并研究医学材料。科内尔写道，艺术界和医学界之间的关系直到16世纪后期才正式确立，当时解剖学成为正式艺术学院的宗旨。科尼利厄斯·科特在美术学院的版画(1578年)和彼得罗·弗朗西斯科·阿尔贝蒂的《皮托里学院》(约1600年)展示了年轻学徒观察骨骼和尸体解剖的研究。科内尔断言，除了文艺复兴时期对人体的表现外，还有与古希腊和罗马的联系，古代雕塑代表了理想的比例。第4章中提出的研究表明，重新发现的古代雕塑的影响影响了19世纪解剖学插图发展的历史态度。科内尔观察到，“将古代雕塑视为有生命的东西，并检查其结构层，与维萨里和他的同事在研究和教学中所做的类似……
{"title":"Flesh and Bones: The Art of Anatomy by Monique Kornell et al (review)","authors":"Emily White","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912697","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912697","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Flesh and Bones: The Art of Anatomy by Monique Kornell et al Emily White Monique Kornell et al., Flesh and Bones: The Art of Anatomy (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2022), 248 pp., 163 ills. Accompanying the 2022 exhibition Flesh and Bones: The Art of Anatomy curated by Monique Kornell at the Getty Research Institute (GRI), this lavish catalog examines the ways anatomy has been presented over the years from the early modern period to the present. The striking images in this volume include dissections, antique sculpture, life-size prints, creative paper flaps, and 3-D stereoscopic photographs. Kornell’s inspiration for this exhibition was the GRI’s acquisition of three life-sized prints from the eighteenth century by engraver Antonio Cattani after anatomical sculptures by Ercole Lelli, which are featured in the catalog. Kornell’s research reinforces that many of the illustrated books and prints in this exhibition are the direct result of close collaboration between anatomists and printmakers. This catalog draws on a wide range of media, primarily from the Special Collections of the GRI. Included among these works are titans of anatomical illustrations such as Jacopo Berengario da Carpi’s Isagogae breves (1523), a first edition of Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (1543), and Govard Bidloo’s Anatomia humani corporis (1685), along with lesser-known innovative anatomy works. Each work in the exhibition is incorporated throughout eight chapters, with additional comparative works and an accompanying fifty-six-item catalog at the end of the volume. Each catalog entry includes a full-page color reproduction with accompanying text that includes information on provenance, formal description, historical context, and their significance to the study of anatomy. The volume begins with an introduction by Italian historian Valeria Finucci overviewing the discipline of anatomy in relation to artistic practices in the Renaissance. Beginning with the landmark reference of Vesalius, Flesh and Bones proceeds thematically through the history of anatomical illustration. Chapter 1 examines key figures in the history of anatomical illustration and lays out a chronology of developments beginning in the mid-sixteenth century up until the mid-nineteenth century. Anyone looking for a useful overview of artistic production in conjunction with the scientific field would do well to study Kornell’s research timeline provided. Chapter 2 introduces the artistic concept [End Page 248] of the “living dead” within anatomical illustration and the animation imbued to lifeless bodies and diagrams. The tradition of depicting corpses seemingly among the land of the living is linked to the Dance of Death, “wound men,” and emotive skeletons. Included are examples of écorché figures in the art treatise of Samuel van Hoogstraten (1678) and studies on dissection from Guilio Casseri’s Pentaestheseion (1609). Kornell argues the purpose of the emotion","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135712302","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/cjm.2023.a912691
Lian Zhang
Reviewed by: 早期英国⽂学与⽐较⽂学散论 by Tianhu Hao Lian Zhang Tianhu Hao, 早期英国⽂学与⽐较⽂学散论 [Essays on early English and comparative literature] (Nanjing: Nanjing University Press, 2022), 330 pp. This review was supported by the National Humanities and Social Sciences Foundation, China (authorization: 21BWW046) In the early nineteenth century, Chinese scholars began to read medieval and Renaissance English literature. Ever since the Imperial University of Peking set up an English department in China in 1903, university courses like English literary history and European literary history have generally included medieval and Renaissance English literature. Studies of medieval and Renaissance literature have gradually developed and prospered since the 1970s, after decades of war turmoil and political movements. Chinese scholars have used their own academic experience and research methods, combined with a unique Chinese perspective, to elaborate their particular viewpoints. Tianhu Hao’s new book offers a vigorous and thorough study of medieval and Renaissance English literature, and suggests new attitudes toward the connection between Chinese and Western literary theories and methods in the twenty-first century. This learned book collects twenty-five essays and takes as its subject the study of early English literature and its reception and translation in China. Hao turns to an impressively wide variety and a formidable amount of evidence—history play, romance, sonnet, miniature painting, epic, commonplace book, English and Chinese lyric poetry, translation, university syllabus, encyclopedia entry, and more—to support his central claim that “medieval and Renaissance studies, in literature, history, philosophy, political science, art history, and history of science, though conducted only by a small group of Chinese scholars, not only has significant academic value, but also contributes to a deep understanding of today’s China and the world, and will effectively promote China’s new cultural construction” (301; translation mine, here and throughout). With its perceptive and original readings informed by a judicious recourse to theories, this book makes a major contribution to our understanding of medieval and Renaissance writing and culture and to the history of Chinese and Western comparative literature study. As the title suggests, the role of medieval and Renaissance English literature in Chinese comparative literature study is a central concern of this book. The temporal span of the study is chosen with astuteness: the Middle Ages and the Renaissance were the initial periods of relatively deep contacts and exchanges between Chinese and Western culture (300); in the late 1970s, during the period of reform and opening up, Chinese readers warmly affirmed the value of Shakespeare and the epoch-making significance of the European Renaissance, earnestly calling for a new Chinese Renaissance (300–301); in the twenty-first century, the great national rejuvenation of the n
{"title":"早期英国⽂学与⽐较⽂学散论 by Tianhu Hao (review)","authors":"Lian Zhang","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912691","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912691","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: 早期英国⽂学与⽐较⽂学散论 by Tianhu Hao Lian Zhang Tianhu Hao, 早期英国⽂学与⽐较⽂学散论 [Essays on early English and comparative literature] (Nanjing: Nanjing University Press, 2022), 330 pp. This review was supported by the National Humanities and Social Sciences Foundation, China (authorization: 21BWW046) In the early nineteenth century, Chinese scholars began to read medieval and Renaissance English literature. Ever since the Imperial University of Peking set up an English department in China in 1903, university courses like English literary history and European literary history have generally included medieval and Renaissance English literature. Studies of medieval and Renaissance literature have gradually developed and prospered since the 1970s, after decades of war turmoil and political movements. Chinese scholars have used their own academic experience and research methods, combined with a unique Chinese perspective, to elaborate their particular viewpoints. Tianhu Hao’s new book offers a vigorous and thorough study of medieval and Renaissance English literature, and suggests new attitudes toward the connection between Chinese and Western literary theories and methods in the twenty-first century. This learned book collects twenty-five essays and takes as its subject the study of early English literature and its reception and translation in China. Hao turns to an impressively wide variety and a formidable amount of evidence—history play, romance, sonnet, miniature painting, epic, commonplace book, English and Chinese lyric poetry, translation, university syllabus, encyclopedia entry, and more—to support his central claim that “medieval and Renaissance studies, in literature, history, philosophy, political science, art history, and history of science, though conducted only by a small group of Chinese scholars, not only has significant academic value, but also contributes to a deep understanding of today’s China and the world, and will effectively promote China’s new cultural construction” (301; translation mine, here and throughout). With its perceptive and original readings informed by a judicious recourse to theories, this book makes a major contribution to our understanding of medieval and Renaissance writing and culture and to the history of Chinese and Western comparative literature study. As the title suggests, the role of medieval and Renaissance English literature in Chinese comparative literature study is a central concern of this book. The temporal span of the study is chosen with astuteness: the Middle Ages and the Renaissance were the initial periods of relatively deep contacts and exchanges between Chinese and Western culture (300); in the late 1970s, during the period of reform and opening up, Chinese readers warmly affirmed the value of Shakespeare and the epoch-making significance of the European Renaissance, earnestly calling for a new Chinese Renaissance (300–301); in the twenty-first century, the great national rejuvenation of the n","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135711013","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/cjm.2023.a912706
Martina Franzini
Reviewed by: Dante, Artist of Gesture by Heather Webb Martina Franzini Heather Webb, Dante, Artist of Gesture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 208 pp. In Dante, Artist of Gesture, Heather Webb proposes a reading of gestures in Dante’s Comedy that combines textual and visual analysis. Webb argues that Dante intentionally conveys gestures in the Comedy as a narrative strategy to engage readers’ emotions. Since this is a poem about redemption, readers might reproduce the same postures as the souls and join in their process of penance. The book provides a creative methodology incorporating modes of investigation of diverse fields of study. Each chapter presents examples from works of Dante, from the Vita Nova to the Comedy, without necessarily focusing on a distinct section but suggesting instead a cross-canto (and sometimes cross-work) kind of reading to shed light on disparate, noncontiguous moments in the text. Furthermore, every chapter is enriched by images from manuscripts of the Comedy to explain how the text’s visual reception allows us to comprehend Dante’s characterization of gesture. In the first chapter, Webb begins with an overview of theories on gestures through different fields of study. In particular, she looks at visual studies. At the same time, she also clarifies some issues regarding the contextualization of distinct medieval signs. The second chapter continues to set up the methodological foundation for applying viewing models from the visual arts to Dante’s text. Webb recollects some studies investigating the connection between the Comedy and art represented in the Baptistery of Florence, the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, and churches in Assisi. Readers of the poem were the same viewers of art in churches, so they make “connections that traverse the textual and visual fields to fully participate in the poem and its devotions” (50). Webb looks at representation external to the poem and the gestural connection between different cantos to demonstrate how the Comedy approximates viewers’ engagement with [End Page 269] illustrated representation. As an instance of a connection between episodes of gestures in the Comedy and visual depiction of the same gestures in art, Webb argues how Bonconte’s arms crossing in Purgatorio 5 resembles a representation in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. The middle section of the book analyzes passages from Purgatorio. In chapter 3, Webb focuses on gestural choreography in Purgatorio 5 and 6. Dante challenges readers with these cantos to reflect on their condition through specific kinesic descriptions. In Purgatorio 5, Dante’s and Virgil’s actions express a kind of gestural ethics; their movements are indications of an affective reaction to the souls of the Ante Purgatory. Sounds also contribute to this aspect, and Webb observes how the use of a particular interjection, “deh,” serves to catch the attention “both within the diegesis and beyond the frame of the text, reaching to the reader” (75). For
{"title":"Dante, Artist of Gesture by Heather Webb (review)","authors":"Martina Franzini","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912706","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912706","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Dante, Artist of Gesture by Heather Webb Martina Franzini Heather Webb, Dante, Artist of Gesture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 208 pp. In Dante, Artist of Gesture, Heather Webb proposes a reading of gestures in Dante’s Comedy that combines textual and visual analysis. Webb argues that Dante intentionally conveys gestures in the Comedy as a narrative strategy to engage readers’ emotions. Since this is a poem about redemption, readers might reproduce the same postures as the souls and join in their process of penance. The book provides a creative methodology incorporating modes of investigation of diverse fields of study. Each chapter presents examples from works of Dante, from the Vita Nova to the Comedy, without necessarily focusing on a distinct section but suggesting instead a cross-canto (and sometimes cross-work) kind of reading to shed light on disparate, noncontiguous moments in the text. Furthermore, every chapter is enriched by images from manuscripts of the Comedy to explain how the text’s visual reception allows us to comprehend Dante’s characterization of gesture. In the first chapter, Webb begins with an overview of theories on gestures through different fields of study. In particular, she looks at visual studies. At the same time, she also clarifies some issues regarding the contextualization of distinct medieval signs. The second chapter continues to set up the methodological foundation for applying viewing models from the visual arts to Dante’s text. Webb recollects some studies investigating the connection between the Comedy and art represented in the Baptistery of Florence, the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, and churches in Assisi. Readers of the poem were the same viewers of art in churches, so they make “connections that traverse the textual and visual fields to fully participate in the poem and its devotions” (50). Webb looks at representation external to the poem and the gestural connection between different cantos to demonstrate how the Comedy approximates viewers’ engagement with [End Page 269] illustrated representation. As an instance of a connection between episodes of gestures in the Comedy and visual depiction of the same gestures in art, Webb argues how Bonconte’s arms crossing in Purgatorio 5 resembles a representation in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. The middle section of the book analyzes passages from Purgatorio. In chapter 3, Webb focuses on gestural choreography in Purgatorio 5 and 6. Dante challenges readers with these cantos to reflect on their condition through specific kinesic descriptions. In Purgatorio 5, Dante’s and Virgil’s actions express a kind of gestural ethics; their movements are indications of an affective reaction to the souls of the Ante Purgatory. Sounds also contribute to this aspect, and Webb observes how the use of a particular interjection, “deh,” serves to catch the attention “both within the diegesis and beyond the frame of the text, reaching to the reader” (75). For ","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135712631","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/cjm.2023.a912705
Gennifer Dorgan
Reviewed by: Holy Digital Grail: A Medieval Book on the Internet by Michelle R. Warren Gennifer Dorgan Michelle R. Warren, Holy Digital Grail: A Medieval Book on the Internet (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022), xiii + 342 pp. Much of today’s scholarship on medieval manuscripts relies exclusively on work with digitized objects—though how much is impossible to know, since authors rarely acknowledge differences between formats of the book they are studying. This is a significant oversight, as Michelle R. Warren’s Holy Digital Grail: A Medieval Book on the Internet lays bare. We have come to take for granted that “forms effect meaning,” as Donald F. McKenzie wrote (quoted by Warren, 28), but the significance of a book’s multiplication of forms over the internet is not merely interpretive. Texts’ long histories in manuscript, print, and digital forms are inseparable from many other histories, including those of nationalism, colonialism, and capitalism. Treating the medieval manuscript as a “hybrid book-form” including its digital parts enables the acknowledgement of these histories in the name of both academic ethics and methodological rigor (31). Combining expertise in textual scholarship and digital humanities, Warren demonstrates how to undertake this multimedia approach to manuscript studies through a case study of Cambridge, Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, MS 80, the titular “medieval book on the internet.” Each of the six chapters tells a different history of MS 80, which contains a Middle English Grail narrative written by Henry Lovelich in the early fifteenth century. Chapter 1, “Translating Arthur: Books, Texts, Machines,” deals with the translation of Arthurian stories from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Lovelich to internet folklorists. Though these authors often obscure their works’ relationships to other texts, every instance of intertextual transfer shapes meaning, a point of which we should be especially aware in an age when governments are researching “fully automatic high-quality translation” (FAHQT) for military purposes (76). FAHQT is one of many elusive technological goals that has been called a “grail”: a mystification that Warren tells us is frequently used to teach users of the internet “not to ask too many questions about machines or their makers” (12). The role of the Grail myth in forming stratified communities is further explored in the next two chapters. In “Performing Community: Merchants, Chivalry, Data,” Warren traces the relationship of MS 80 to the interests of the London Skinner’s Guild, of which Lovelich was a member. The Guild benefitted from social transformations taking place in the fifteenth century, including access to privilege through wealth as well as lineage. Accordingly, Lovelich’s narrative emphasizes social hierarchies while presenting Arthur as a “people’s king” (90). In producing books like MS 80, the Skinner’s Guild aimed to consolidate its own prestige. In the centuries since, many readers h
米歇尔·r·沃伦，《神圣的数字圣杯:互联网上的中世纪书籍》(斯坦福大学:斯坦福大学出版社，2022年)，13 + 342页。今天关于中世纪手稿的许多学术研究完全依赖于数字化对象的工作——尽管有多少是不可能知道的，因为作者很少承认他们正在研究的书的格式之间的差异。这是一个重大的疏忽，正如米歇尔·r·沃伦(Michelle R. Warren)的《数字圣杯:一本关于互联网的中世纪书籍》(Holy Digital Grail: a Medieval Book on Internet)所揭示的那样。正如唐纳德·f·麦肯齐(Donald F. McKenzie)所写的那样(沃伦引用，28岁)，我们已经理所当然地认为“形式影响意义”，但一本书在互联网上形式的乘法的意义不仅仅是解释。手稿、印刷和数字形式的文本的悠久历史与许多其他历史密不可分，包括民族主义、殖民主义和资本主义的历史。将中世纪手稿视为一种“混合书籍形式”，包括其数字部分，可以以学术道德和方法论严谨的名义承认这些历史(31)。结合文本学术和数字人文学科的专业知识，沃伦通过剑桥大学帕克图书馆，科珀斯克里斯蒂学院，MS 80的案例研究，展示了如何采用这种多媒体方法进行手稿研究，名义上是“互联网上的中世纪书籍”。六章中的每一章都讲述了公元80年的不同历史，其中包括亨利·洛夫里奇在15世纪早期写的中世纪英语圣杯故事。第一章，“翻译亚瑟王:书籍、文本、机器”，讨论了从蒙茅斯的杰弗里到洛夫里奇再到互联网民俗学家对亚瑟王故事的翻译。虽然这些作者经常模糊他们的作品与其他文本的关系，但每一个互文转换的例子都塑造了意义，在政府正在研究用于军事目的的“全自动高质量翻译”(FAHQT)的时代，我们应该特别注意这一点(76)。FAHQT是许多难以捉摸的技术目标之一，被称为“圣杯”:沃伦告诉我们，这是一个神秘的东西，经常被用来教导互联网用户“不要问太多关于机器或它们的制造商的问题”(12)。圣杯神话在形成分层社区中的作用将在接下来的两章中进一步探讨。在《表演社区:商人、骑士、数据》一书中，沃伦追溯了MS 80与伦敦斯金纳协会的利益关系，洛夫里奇是该协会的成员。公会受益于15世纪发生的社会变革，包括通过财富和血统获得特权。因此，洛夫里奇的叙述强调社会等级，同时把亚瑟王描绘成“人民的国王”(90)。通过出版《MS 80》这样的书，斯金纳协会旨在巩固自己的声望。几个世纪以来，许多读者以注释的形式对Lovelich的作品做出了回应，这是第3章“标记手稿:制造者，用户，编码器”的重点。手稿中的手写注释显示了早期现代读者对MS 80作为历史事实来源的兴趣。这些注释对帕克图书馆数字化手稿的读者在Web 2.0上很容易访问。然而，当数据在平台之间移动时，数字注释(例如现在存档的Parker 1.0代码中的注释)往往会丢失。沃伦提醒我们，这样的注释也是微软80正在进行的历史的一部分。像注释一样，目录和版本揭示了读者对一本书的反应。这种关于文本的文本对文学史叙事的塑造也起着积极的作用。在第四章“编目图书馆:历史、浪漫、网站”中，沃伦详细介绍了MS 80的编目者如何在历史和浪漫之间转换文本的类型，并将作者的身份置于焦点之外。这种现象一直延续到数字时代，影响了读者使用索引或关键词搜索等工具访问书籍的方式。正如19世纪的目录对数字平台显示出相当大的影响一样，19世纪的版本也一样，正如第5章“编辑浪漫:诗歌、印刷、平台”所详述的那样。弗雷德里克·j·弗尼瓦尔1861年早期英语文本学会版的扫描图
{"title":"Holy Digital Grail: A Medieval Book on the Internet by Michelle R. Warren (review)","authors":"Gennifer Dorgan","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912705","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912705","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Holy Digital Grail: A Medieval Book on the Internet by Michelle R. Warren Gennifer Dorgan Michelle R. Warren, Holy Digital Grail: A Medieval Book on the Internet (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022), xiii + 342 pp. Much of today’s scholarship on medieval manuscripts relies exclusively on work with digitized objects—though how much is impossible to know, since authors rarely acknowledge differences between formats of the book they are studying. This is a significant oversight, as Michelle R. Warren’s Holy Digital Grail: A Medieval Book on the Internet lays bare. We have come to take for granted that “forms effect meaning,” as Donald F. McKenzie wrote (quoted by Warren, 28), but the significance of a book’s multiplication of forms over the internet is not merely interpretive. Texts’ long histories in manuscript, print, and digital forms are inseparable from many other histories, including those of nationalism, colonialism, and capitalism. Treating the medieval manuscript as a “hybrid book-form” including its digital parts enables the acknowledgement of these histories in the name of both academic ethics and methodological rigor (31). Combining expertise in textual scholarship and digital humanities, Warren demonstrates how to undertake this multimedia approach to manuscript studies through a case study of Cambridge, Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, MS 80, the titular “medieval book on the internet.” Each of the six chapters tells a different history of MS 80, which contains a Middle English Grail narrative written by Henry Lovelich in the early fifteenth century. Chapter 1, “Translating Arthur: Books, Texts, Machines,” deals with the translation of Arthurian stories from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Lovelich to internet folklorists. Though these authors often obscure their works’ relationships to other texts, every instance of intertextual transfer shapes meaning, a point of which we should be especially aware in an age when governments are researching “fully automatic high-quality translation” (FAHQT) for military purposes (76). FAHQT is one of many elusive technological goals that has been called a “grail”: a mystification that Warren tells us is frequently used to teach users of the internet “not to ask too many questions about machines or their makers” (12). The role of the Grail myth in forming stratified communities is further explored in the next two chapters. In “Performing Community: Merchants, Chivalry, Data,” Warren traces the relationship of MS 80 to the interests of the London Skinner’s Guild, of which Lovelich was a member. The Guild benefitted from social transformations taking place in the fifteenth century, including access to privilege through wealth as well as lineage. Accordingly, Lovelich’s narrative emphasizes social hierarchies while presenting Arthur as a “people’s king” (90). In producing books like MS 80, the Skinner’s Guild aimed to consolidate its own prestige. In the centuries since, many readers h","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":"71 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135712290","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/cjm.2023.a912684
Sarah Bischoff
Reviewed by: Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England by Urvashi Chakravarty Sarah Bischoff Urvashi Chakravarty, Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), ix + 295 pp. Fictions of Consent examines the contradiction between early modern England’s reliance on compulsory service and the claims that English air was “too pure for slaves to breath [sic] in” (John Lilburne’s Star Chamber Case of 1638, cited in Chakravarty, Fictions of Consent, 1). Urvashi Chakravarty highlights that this is [End Page 215] a matter of belief—not just of legislation. This belief made slavery in England (supposedly) an impossibility, despite the immense amount of historical and literary material that attests to compulsory labor and service on the island during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Chakravarty examines this fissure, showing that the philosophical, legal difference between bound service and slavery is, per the title, supposed consent. Chakravarty thus argues that the primary operative fiction is that all persons on English soil willingly serve their betters all the way up to the monarch, who in turn willingly serves god. Such a structure legitimized the paradigm of the supposed impossibility of slavery on English soil—which legally and philosophically rendered enslaved people invisible—but still managed to enforce servitude through many avenues. One example she cites is the often brutal vagrancy and begging laws of the sixteenth century that punished and put to work the “masterless,” or those living outside socially acceptable systems of labor (often the houseless and/or beggars) (4). This coercion, however, is coincidental to the fiction and the mythos of English freedom, even as it is the fundamental contradiction that makes up the very matter of willing servitude. The ideological dependence upon this hairsplitting is that the idea of consent honed the fictions that underwrote and authorized compulsory servitude, even as it made slavery ostensibly impossible. This consent is a fiction in multiple senses of the word, Chakravarty argues: it is, as mentioned, an imagined reality that makes up the legal structures that forbid slavery on English soil, despite there being documented presences and an evident economic reliance on enslaved people; it is a rhetoric that turns compulsory labor into willing devotion and service; it becomes integral to the emergences of what will define the family, genealogy, and race. Of particular importance, also, is that these fictions reshape social reality as time continues, even as their artificiality stands out. These fictions can (and do) defend both the naturalization of racialized slavery and the naturalization of somatically marked race itself. These traced emergences make Chakravarty’s text a useful one for following questions of service and slavery across multiple centuries, from Engl
{"title":"Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England by Urvashi Chakravarty (review)","authors":"Sarah Bischoff","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912684","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912684","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England by Urvashi Chakravarty Sarah Bischoff Urvashi Chakravarty, Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), ix + 295 pp. Fictions of Consent examines the contradiction between early modern England’s reliance on compulsory service and the claims that English air was “too pure for slaves to breath [sic] in” (John Lilburne’s Star Chamber Case of 1638, cited in Chakravarty, Fictions of Consent, 1). Urvashi Chakravarty highlights that this is [End Page 215] a matter of belief—not just of legislation. This belief made slavery in England (supposedly) an impossibility, despite the immense amount of historical and literary material that attests to compulsory labor and service on the island during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Chakravarty examines this fissure, showing that the philosophical, legal difference between bound service and slavery is, per the title, supposed consent. Chakravarty thus argues that the primary operative fiction is that all persons on English soil willingly serve their betters all the way up to the monarch, who in turn willingly serves god. Such a structure legitimized the paradigm of the supposed impossibility of slavery on English soil—which legally and philosophically rendered enslaved people invisible—but still managed to enforce servitude through many avenues. One example she cites is the often brutal vagrancy and begging laws of the sixteenth century that punished and put to work the “masterless,” or those living outside socially acceptable systems of labor (often the houseless and/or beggars) (4). This coercion, however, is coincidental to the fiction and the mythos of English freedom, even as it is the fundamental contradiction that makes up the very matter of willing servitude. The ideological dependence upon this hairsplitting is that the idea of consent honed the fictions that underwrote and authorized compulsory servitude, even as it made slavery ostensibly impossible. This consent is a fiction in multiple senses of the word, Chakravarty argues: it is, as mentioned, an imagined reality that makes up the legal structures that forbid slavery on English soil, despite there being documented presences and an evident economic reliance on enslaved people; it is a rhetoric that turns compulsory labor into willing devotion and service; it becomes integral to the emergences of what will define the family, genealogy, and race. Of particular importance, also, is that these fictions reshape social reality as time continues, even as their artificiality stands out. These fictions can (and do) defend both the naturalization of racialized slavery and the naturalization of somatically marked race itself. These traced emergences make Chakravarty’s text a useful one for following questions of service and slavery across multiple centuries, from Engl","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":"66 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135712595","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：