Exemplaria review essay by Sarah Elliott Novacich of recent books by Simon Gaunt, Jonathan Hsy, and Shirin Khanmohamadi on medieval contact zones.

“Notre-Dame in Jean Fouquet’s Hours of Etienne Chevalier, ca. 1452-52” is a book excerpt of May Spangler’s “Paris in Architecture, Literature and Art,” recently published at Peter Lang. Designed for an interdisciplinary course in Cultural Studies, the book capitalizes on the little exposure liberal arts students have to architecture, and the wid…[Read more]

This course was first taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in fall 2018.
It addresses feminism, gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, and critical race and ethnic studies in conjunction with translation studies.

A course (MA level) I taught at the University of Pittsburgh in 2001, the research for which culminated in my book Freedom Readers (Notre Dame 2011).

This paper links the medieval and early modern production of parchment and paper with modern electronics manufacturing, in order to examine some of the occluded ecological and political dimensions of archival study.

This article analyzes the politics of anachronism in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale. It argues that the Wife of Bath counters the Man of Law’s descending model of sovereignty and regulation of feminine agency with a powerful heroine who wields ascending sovereignty. The Old Wife lives in her Arthurian present and its English future simul…[Read more]

Late medieval culture tends to value pain highly and positively. Accordingly, much medievalist scholarship links pain with fear and emphasizes their usefulness in the period’s philosophy, literature, visual art, and drama. Yet, key moments in The York Play of the Crucifixion, The Second Shepherds’ Play, and The Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge tro…[Read more]

The transfer of Saracen arms into Frankish ownership is a leitmotif of
many chansons de geste, but one whose significance for translatio imperii has yet to be
elucidated. In this essay, I focus on the Chanson d’Aspremont, a twelfth-century epic
set in Calabria that narrates the pre-history of Durendal, Roland’s sword of Song of
Roland fam…[Read more]

Reads William of Rubruck’s mission to Asia as an instance of premodern ethnographic representation and the shape of the precolonial European ethnographic gaze upon Asia.

This essay examines how translingual poetry by immigrant Romanian writers who live in or travel to the United States requires a transnational community framing rather than a national one and raises new questions about cultural and linguistic identity formation that reflect on both national and world literature issues. This analysis of the…[Read more]

This paper deals with the complicated sociopolitical space defined by the use and transformation of what we call Occitan language. Literary and cultural production in Occitan language during the late 12th and early 13th centuries light up the boundary conditions, the boundary values of what we call courtly culture making them visible in all their…[Read more]

This paper deals with the complicated sociopolitical space defined by the use and transformation of what we call Occitan language. Literary and cultural production in Occitan language during the late 12th and early 13th centuries light up the boundary conditions, the boundary values of what we call courtly culture making them visible in all their…[Read more]

This paper deals with the complicated sociopolitical space defined by the use and transformation of what we call Occitan language. Literary and cultural production in Occitan language during the late 12th and early 13th centuries light up the boundary conditions, the boundary values of what we call courtly culture making them visible in all their…[Read more]