European Languages and Societies Commons^™

The Burgos Tapestry: Medieval Theatre And Visual Experience, Nathalie Rochel Frch '11

The Fordham Undergraduate Research Journal

In the field of art history, the medium of tapestry has only recently begun to gain attention as its own significant art form. This paper examines the possible relationship between the Burgos Tapestry, recently on view at The Cloisters after a thirty-year conservation, and medieval theatre. The compositional and stylistic forms of the tapestry may have been influenced by productions of medieval mystery plays, which through analysis can help provide a greater understanding of the medieval cultural mindset, the possible artistic decisions behind maintaining medieval pictorial traditions into the early sixteenth century, and the medieval viewer’s experience when looking at …

The Trentham Manuscript As Broken Prosthesis: Wholeness And Disability In Lancastrian England, Candace Barrington

Accessus

Gower’s Trentham manuscript allows us to think about pre-modern disabilities in three ways. First, because it encourages Henry IV to restore the body politic disabled by Richard II, we can see the manuscript as presenting itself as a prosthesis able to compensate, even cure, Henry’s illegitimate claims to the throne. Here, disability is a condition that needs to be eradicated at best, repaired at least.

Second, because the Trentham manuscript reports Gower’s blindness, we can examine how it registers that disability. As “Henrici quarti primus” makes clear, Gower’s disability allows him to assert his own legitimacy as king’s advisor. Here, …

Blind Advocacy: Blind Readers, Disability Theory, And Accessing John Gower, Jonathan Hsy

Accessus

Toward the end of his life, medieval poet John Gower (d. 1408) composed Latin poetry about his own progressive blindness, and later nineteenth-century Blind readers appropriated Gower’s work as part of a platform to advocate for changed perceptions and opportunities for the blind and other people with disabilities. In this essay, I approach nineteenth-century narrative compilations of blind lives (which include Gower’s) as transformative acts of literary historiography. These compilers not only appropriate the medieval blind poet to advance their own social and political ends, but they also create a new disability-centered approach to the entire Western artistic tradition. I …

Introduction, Georgiana Donavin, Eve Salisbury

Accessus

This Introduction by co-editors Georgiana Donavin and Eve Salisbury celebrates the publication of the first issue of Accessus: A Journal of Premodern Literature and New Media, a biannual publication of The Gower Project. The Introduction provides a short history of The Gower Project and explains the scope of Accessus: an e-journal dedicated to articles composed in electronic formats on Western European literature written before 1660. This first issue is dedicated to scholarship on the fourteenth-century English poet John Gower, who inspired the Project and this journal. For a decade The Gower Project has supported exciting new interpretations of …

Magistra Doctissima: Essays In Honor Of Bonnie Wheeler, Dorsey Armstrong, Ann W. Astell, Howell Chickering

Festschriften, Occasional Papers, and Lectures

The editors of this volume use its title to honor Bonnie Wheeler for her many scholarly achievements and to celebrate her wide-ranging contributions to medieval studies in the United States. There are sections on Old and Middle English Literature, Arthuriana Then and Now, Joan of Arc Then and Now, Nuns and Spirituality, and Royal Women. As the editors note in the introduction, the volume "confirms Bonnie's commitment to the multidisciplinary study of the Middle Ages" and affirms her conviction "that the medieval and the modern are best viewed not as 'the past' and 'the present' but as interpenetrative categories."

Review Of Takhyil: The Imaginary In Classical Arabic Poetics, Rebecca Gould

Rebecca Gould

No abstract provided.

Zadam Bede’S Dutch Realism And The Novelist’S Point Of View, Rebecca Gould

Rebecca Gould

No abstract provided.

Laws, Exceptions, Norms: Kierkegaard, Schmitt, And Benjamin On The Exception, Rebecca Gould

Rebecca Gould

No abstract provided.

Topographies Of Anticolonialism: The Ecopoetical Sublime In The Caucasus From Tolstoy To Mamakaev, Rebecca Gould

Rebecca Gould

No abstract provided.

Inimitability Versus Translatability: The Structure Of Literary Meaning In Arabo-Persian Poetics, Rebecca Gould

Rebecca Gould

No abstract provided.

The Good Corporation? Google's Medievalism And Why It Matters, Richard Utz

Richard Utz

This essay investigates Google's nostalgic romanticism as a form of medievalism and demonstrates how one of Google's products, the n-gram viewer, has changed what we know about the history of the term and mindset of "medievalism."