LIT011000 Archives

Beyond Medieval Archives

Beyond Medieval Archives approaches the archive as a site of immense creative potential. It argues that, through new perspectives from Medieval Studies and creative practice, we can instigate a more diverse range of critical approaches in which the archive emerges as a space where revelation and discovery are haunted by the provocations of silence and omission. Contributions to this volume engage with archives as repositories existing within and beyond institutions, as more makeshift assemblies of materials and artefacts, and as conceptual and theoretical frameworks.

This collection expands the scope of the creative-critical archive by engaging the archive with and through medieval literature and culture. The volume includes critical essays, creative reflections, dialogue pieces and creative-critical collaborations from medievalists, poets, artists and writers. By placing creative practice and critical medievalist research about the archive into conversation, the book traces the emergence of medieval literature and culture in the modern and contemporary archive. We can use the postmedieval archive to reread, or reconfigure, the material of the medieval past and to examine how the archives of the Middle Ages are reforged through creative work. The book also includes engagements in archival acts that revive or incite new exchanges with the materials of the medieval past, while challenging understandings and intuitions about the issues of archival access.

Ethics, Politics and Justice in Dante

Ethics, Politics and Justice in Dante presents new research by international scholars on the themes of ethics, politics and justice in the works of Dante Alighieri, including chapters on Dante’s modern ‘afterlife’.

Together the chapters explore how Dante’s writings engage with the contemporary culture of medieval Florence and Italy, and how and why his political and moral thought still speaks compellingly to modern readers. The collection’s contributors range across different disciplines and scholarly traditions – history, philology, classical reception, philosophy, theology – to scrutinize Dante’s Divine Comedy and his other works in Italian and Latin, offering a multi-faceted approach to the evolution of Dante’s political, ethical and legal thought throughout his writing career.

Certain chapters focus on his early philosophical Convivio and on the accomplished Latin Eclogues of his final years, while others tackle knotty themes relating to judgement, justice, rhetoric and literary ethics in his Divine Comedy, from hell to paradise. The closing chapters discuss different modalities of the public reception and use of Dante’s work in both Italy and Britain, bringing the volume’s emphasis on morality, political philosophy, and social justice into the modern age of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.

Beards and Texts

Beards and Texts explores the literary portrayal of beards in medieval German texts from the mid-twelfth to the early sixteenth centuries. It argues that as the pre-eminent symbol for masculinity the beard played a distinctive role throughout the Middle Ages in literary discussions of such major themes as majesty and humanity. At the same time beards served as an important point of reference in didactic poetry concerned with wisdom, teaching and learning, and in comedic texts that were designed to make their audiences laugh, not least by submitting various figure-types to the indignity of having their beards manhandled.

Four main chapters each offer a reading of a work or poetic tradition of particular significance (Pfaffe Konrad’s Rolandslied; Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Willehalm; ‘Sangspruchdichtung’; Heinrich Wittenwiler’s Ring), before examining cognate material of various kinds, including sources or later versions of the same story, manuscript variants and miniatures and further relevant beard-motifs from the same period. The book concludes by reviewing the portrayal of Jesus in vernacular German literature, which represents a special test-case in the literary history of beards. As the first study of its kind in medieval German studies, this investigation submits beard-motifs to sustained and detailed analysis in order to shed light both on medieval poetic techniques and the normative construction of masculinity in a wide range of literary genres.