In this paper I outline a historical materialist framework for the transhistorical critique of ethnicity, providing a case study in the shaape of Armenian settlements in medieval New Rome. This is necessary since constructivism – the dominant theoretical tradition of the last forty years or so – has failed to dethrone common sense, met…[Read more]

Review of the collected volume Court Ceremonies and Rituals of Power in Byzantium and the Eastern Mediterranean.

From Constantinople to the Frontier: The City and the Cities provides twenty-five articles addressing the concept of centres and peripheries in the late antique and Byzantine worlds, focusing specifically on urban aspects of this paradigm. Spanning from the fourth to thirteenth centuries, and ranging from the later Roman empires to the early…[Read more]

Review of a collection of essays on classical literature and medieval Irish narrative.

Review of a collection of essays on classical literature and medieval Irish narrative.

Edition des ‘Kommunionverbots der Diözese Eichstätt’ des Johann von Eych aus dem Jahre 1456 nach dem Erstdruck in den ‘Statuta synodalia Eystettensia et provincialia Maguntina’ (Eichstätt Michael Reyser 15.03.1484).

Marco Heiles, Johann von Eych: Kommunionverbot für die Diözese Eichstätt. Edition und Kommentar, in: Mittelalter. Inter…[Read more]

Front matter and introduction from my monograph Popular Romance in Iceland

Introduction to a late medieval Icelandic romance along with a normalized Old Norse text and facing page modern English translation.

Overview of the relationships between the older manuscripts preserving the medieval Icelandic romance Nítíða saga, with a rough stemma

Literary scholars have traditionally understood landscapes, whether natural or manmade, as metaphors for humanity instead of concrete settings for people’s actions. This book accepts the natural world as such by investigating how Anglo-Saxons interacted with and conceived of their lived environments. Examining Old English poems such as Beowulf and…[Read more]

Syllabus for ENGL 758D, The Speculative Situation, graduate seminar in the University of Maryland English department, Fall 2017.

Bibliography on late medieval and early modern book production in the German speaking areas.

In The Burns Antiphoner – From manuscript to interactive resource, Anna Kijas reports on a new project based around a 14th-century source, the Burns Antiphoner. In this project they focus on integrating and delivering images, metadata, and recorded audio and video to provide an in-depth look at the contents and experience of this particular s…[Read more]

Using the postmodern theory of Jean Baudrillard I will argue that Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, especially the relationship between Chaucer the poet and Chaucer the pilgrim, follows Baudrillard’s order of simulacra as put forward in his book Simulacra and Simulation. Applying Baudrillard’s theory of the simulacra to Chaucer’s poem, I will an…[Read more]

The use of water as an expressive trope of spiritual hygiene was widespread among monastic writers of the twelfth century, adapted for different uses in different genres. Aqueous imagery was particularly frequent within allegories or didactic figurae exploring the care of the soul as if it were a material body, with a constitution that could be…[Read more]

This paper proposes that we can reimagine insular literatures and medieval islescapes as commodious seas of cultural and intellectual loci that span time, culture, and text alike. By moving beyond the rhetoric of insular separation or connectivity, we can see that islands connect even when medieval minds saw separation. The essay focuses on the…[Read more]

This essay argues that understanding both the process by which medievalism tropes feature in the formation of moral panics and the manner in which medievalists are drawn into the debate reveals much about the imagination of the medieval in the shaping of the modern, and also some salient points relating to role of scholars in public discourse.