Turnhout, Brepols, 2004 Hardback, X+384 p., 160 x 240 mm. ISBN 9782503511658.
This volume explores the reciprocal relationships that can develop between medieval women writers and the modern scholars who study them. Taking up the call to 'research the researcher', the authors indicate not only what they bring to their study from their own personal experience, but how their methodologies and ways of thinking about and dealing with the past have been influenced by the medieval women they study. Medieval women writers discussed include those writing in the vernacular such as Christine de Pizan and Margaret Paston, those writing in Latin such as Hildegard of Bingen, Heloise, and Birgitta of Sweden, and the works transcribed from women mystics such as Margery Kempe, Hadewijch, and Julian of Norwich. Attention is also given to medieval women as the readers, consumers and patrons of written works. Issues considered in this volume include the place of ethics, interestedness and social justice in contemporary medieval studies, questions of alterity, empathy, essentialism and appropriation in dealing with figures of the medieval past, the permeable boundaries between academic medieval studies and popular medievalism, questions of situatedness and academic voice, and the relationship between feminism and medieval studies. Linked to these issues is the interrelation between medieval women and medieval men in the production and consumption of written works both for and about women and the implications of this for both female and male readers of those works today. Overarching all these questions is that of the intellectual and methodological heritage - sometimes ambiguous, perhaps even problematic - that medieval women continue to offer us. Languages : English.
Turnhout, Brepols, 2011 Hardback, XIV+216 p., 15 b/w ill., 156 x 234 mm. ISBN 9782503535661.
This volume is the first close examination of the rich and diverse body of medievalist texts produced in late colonial and early Federal (ie post-1901) Australia. It examines the many ways in which early Australian novelists, poets, and dramatists drew on the motifs, events, and personages of the medieval past, and places particular emphasis on how they used the European past to illuminate their sense of the Australian present. Broadly stated, the book argues that a study of early Australian medievalist literature and theatre uncovers a rich and revealing drama in which the forces of cultural nostalgia and cultural amnesia sometimes contended against one another, and sometimes harmonised, to produce a unique and distinctive corpus. The book significantly extends current knowledge about nineteenth-century literary and theatrical medievalism by offering an exploration of how medievalist discourses and idioms came to be taken up within a major, but as yet under-examined, branch of Anglophone literature. It aims also to broaden the cultural ambit of nineteenth-century medievalism by offering analyses of popular and ephemeral instances alongside more ?serious? medievalist texts. The study balances an interest in how this medievalism responded to local conditions with an interest in its international complexion, examining how Australian medievalist novels, poems, and plays, participated in imperial and transpacific intellectual and entertainment circuits. While the emphasis of the volume is on close, historically-contextualising interpretations of texts, it has woven through its arguments a series of meditations on such theoretical matters as how we determine the boundaries of medievalism, how we might develop an account of colonial medievalism as non-derivative, whether medievalist discourses are equally amenable across gender, class, and ideological lines, and how the premodern past is evoked as a means for formulating the present and the future. Languages : English.
Turnhout, Brepols, 2011 Hardback, XIV+216 p., 15 b/w ill., 156 x 234 mm. ISBN 9782503535661.
This volume is the first close examination of the rich and diverse body of medievalist texts produced in late colonial and early Federal (ie post-1901) Australia. It examines the many ways in which early Australian novelists, poets, and dramatists drew on the motifs, events, and personages of the medieval past, and places particular emphasis on how they used the European past to illuminate their sense of the Australian present. Broadly stated, the book argues that a study of early Australian medievalist literature and theatre uncovers a rich and revealing drama in which the forces of cultural nostalgia and cultural amnesia sometimes contended against one another, and sometimes harmonised, to produce a unique and distinctive corpus. The book significantly extends current knowledge about nineteenth-century literary and theatrical medievalism by offering an exploration of how medievalist discourses and idioms came to be taken up within a major, but as yet under-examined, branch of Anglophone literature. It aims also to broaden the cultural ambit of nineteenth-century medievalism by offering analyses of popular and ephemeral instances alongside more ?serious? medievalist texts. The study balances an interest in how this medievalism responded to local conditions with an interest in its international complexion, examining how Australian medievalist novels, poems, and plays, participated in imperial and transpacific intellectual and entertainment circuits. While the emphasis of the volume is on close, historically-contextualising interpretations of texts, it has woven through its arguments a series of meditations on such theoretical matters as how we determine the boundaries of medievalism, how we might develop an account of colonial medievalism as non-derivative, whether medievalist discourses are equally amenable across gender, class, and ideological lines, and how the premodern past is evoked as a means for formulating the present and the future. Languages : English.