Abstract
Petrarch’s skull and Ovid’s shells, giants’ teeth and book reviews, the Hereford map and the Helgeland film: these are but some of the artifacts collected here as touchstones for reflection upon the place of historicism in the field of medieval literary studies today. We begin with the acknowledgment that historicism has become the Jamesonian “cultural dominant” of our field, one whose posture “allows for the presence and coexistence of a range of very different, yet subordinate, features.”1 Our volume further assumes that historicism’s dominant status ought to mark it, for all medievalists, as an object (or perhaps an artifact) primed for reexamination and redefinition. Through such a “historicizing of historicism,” this collection aims more broadly to encourage a profession-wide interrogation of contemporary critical practices—where they came from, what they mean for their practitioners, and what future orientations they might assume.
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Notes
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism-or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke UP, 1999), 4.
Lee Patterson, Negotiating the Past: On the Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1987), ix–x.
Lee Patterson, ed., Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530 (Berkeley: U of California P, 1992), 1.
David Schalkwyk, “Between Historicism and Presentism: Love and Service in Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest” Shakespeare in Southern Africa 17 (2005): 1–17
See Bruce Holsinger, The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005)
Erin Felicia Labbie, Lacan’s Medievalism (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2006).
Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981), 56.
David Aers, ed., Culture and History, 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1992).
David Aers, Community, Gender, and Individual Identity: English Writing 1360–1430 (NY: Routledge, 1988).
“Medievalists and De construction: An Exemplum” in From Medieval to Medievalism, ed. John Simons (New York: St. Martins, 1992), 24–40.
Lee Patterson recuperates de construction for political historicism in “Making Identities in Fifteenth-Century England: Henry V and John Lydgate,” in New Historical Literary Study: Essays on Reproducing Texts, Representing History, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox and Larry Reynolds (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993), 69–107.
Paul Hamilton, Historicism, 2nd edn, New Critical Idiom Series (NY: Routledge, 2003), 86.
Paul Strohm, Theory and the Premodem Text (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000), xiii.
“The Marxist Premodern,” ed. Bruce Holsinger and Ethan Knapp, special issue of JMEMS 34 (2004): 463–672.
Carolyn Dinshaw, “Temporalities,” in Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm, Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature (Oxford UP, 2008), 107–123. See also Christopher Lane, “The Poverty of Context: Historicism and Nonmimetic Fiction,” PMLA 118 (2003): 450–469
Mary Poovey, “Ambiguity and Historicism: Interpreting Confessions of a Thug” Narrative 12 (2004): 3–21.
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© 2009 Elizabeth Scala and Sylvia Federico
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Federico, S., Scala, E. (2009). Introduction Getting Post-Historical. In: Scala, E., Federico, S. (eds) The Post-Historical Middle Ages. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230621558_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230621558_1
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