Abstract
What is the difference between medieval studies and medievalism studies?1 One of the easiest answers to this question makes a distinction between the Middle Ages as a finite historical period, and those cultural, political, and social forms that, coming after that period, seem to allude to it in some way. According to this model, the medieval period functions as the primary text, where all expressions of medievalism constitute a kind of secondary commentary on that period, necessarily belated, derivative, and attenuated by historical distance. Our scholarly training teaches us how to tell these things apart; and how to privilege the former, so that when the discipline of medievalism studies emerged, in the 1970s, it was seen by many as hopelessly tertiary: a weak discipline that studied the weak reflections of the Middle Ages.
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Notes
Bruce Holsinger, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2007), 30.
Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyper-Reality, trans. William Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 59–85.
For an extended treatment of desire and the academy that has informed our own, see L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, Sacrifice Your Love: Psychoanalysis, Historicism, Chaucer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002)
Stephanie Trigg, Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 211.
Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 51.
Dominick LaCapra, “The University in Ruins?” Critical Inquiry 25 (Autumn 1998): 32–55
Karl Marx, Capital, ed. Frederick Engels; trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1887), 89.
Doris Banks, Medieval Manuscript Bookmaking: A Bibliographic Guide (Metuchen, N. J.: Scarecrow Press, 1989), 4.
Catherine Brown, “In the Middle,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30 (2000): 547–574
Sir M. Monier-Williams, A Sanskrit-English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1899)
Richard Schmidt’s Beiträge zur Indischen Erotik: Das Liebesleben des Sanskritvolkes (Berlin: Hermann Barsdorf Verlag, 1922), 410
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, trans. David Wright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 83.
The best discussion of how this hostility characterized medieval studies in the twentieth century remains “Historicism and Its Discontents” in Lee Patterson’s Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1987), 3–74.
Melissa Mohr, “Defining Dirt,” Textual Practice 17 (2003): 253–275
Sheila Delany, “Anatomy of the Resisting Reader: Some Implications of Resistance to Sexual Wordplay in Medieval Literature,” Exemplaria 4 (1992): 7–34
Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 92.
Sir Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, ed. J.A. Van Dorsten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966; rpt. 1986), 33.
Traugott Lawler, ed., The Parisiana Poetria of John of Garland (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 93.
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© 2009 Elizabeth Scala and Sylvia Federico
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Prendergast, T., Trigg, S. (2009). The Negative Erotics of Medievalism. 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_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230621558_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-37462-5
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