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.

This article explores the diagram found on the recto side of Pierpont Morgan, M. 982, a single leaf from a twelfth-century manuscript held by the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, and believed to originate in the scriptorium of Saint Peter’s Abbey in Salzburg, Austria. The diagram represents knowledge as an ‘ecodiagrammatic’ pattern, depic…[Read more]

Gathering into lively conversation scholars in medieval, early modern and object studies, Inhuman Nature explores the activity of the things, forces, and relations that enable, sustain and operate indifferently to us. Enamored by fictions of environmental sovereignty, we too often imagine “human” to be a solitary category of being. This col…[Read more]

This article explores the representation of hunger and thirst as faculties within medieval spiritual allegory that existed at two forms. In their bodily form, hunger and thirst represented a feeling of lack indicating the need for sustenance. In their figurative moralised form these needs came to represent a longing for that which was missing…[Read more]

Following the voyages of Christopher Columbus, John Cabot, Alonso de Ojeda and Amerigo Vespucci in the last decade of the fifteenth century, the New World of the Americas entered the cartographic and moral consciousness of Europe. In the 1500 mappa mundi of Juan de la Cosa, navigator and map-maker, we see Europe as a hybrid moral entity, a…[Read more]

In the context of the global water crisis, we seek an understanding of the histories of water management, their fashioning, and their legacy today. We juxtapose temporally diverse narratives to explore the premodern imaginings that have shaped our inheritance of hydrological thought. Rather than conceptualize their historical influence as a linear…[Read more]

Sin duda tomando como base el que la condición del libro como elemento de transmisión de un contenido posee en sí misma “un interés conceptual o intelectual” (Reyes Gómez 39), los estudios de bibliografía material han empezado a desplazar un tanto, en términos científicos, a los de bibliografía erudita, tanto en su más clásico perfil, el de…[Read more]

Sin duda tomando como base el que la condición del libro como elemento de transmisión de un contenido posee en sí misma “un interés conceptual o intelectual” (Reyes Gómez 39), los estudios de bibliografía material han empezado a desplazar un tanto, en términos científicos, a los de bibliografía erudita, tanto en su más clásico perfil, el de…[Read more]

La presente comunicación pretende glosar algunos pequeños detalles biográficos de Luis Crespí de Valldaura, noble valenciano, hijo homónimo del II señor de Sumacàrcer, que fue uno de los primeros profesores del incipiente Studi General valenciano y rector del mismo entre los años 1506 y 1507. Además de esta presencia destacada en el ámbito u…[Read more]

Gózense, otrosí, los otros perlados, duques, marqueses, condes, cavalleros y scuderos, y todos los otros fieles cristianos que en esta santa enpresa han aconpañado a sus altezas, y ayudado con personas, armas y hazienda, pues plugo a Dios de dar tan glorioso fin y tan deseado.

Este fragmento de texto de lo que se ha venido en llamar sermón de…[Read more]

Semesterprogramm des Hauptseminars “Ausgrenzungstexte”

This article considers a recent critical problematisation of the discussion of ›Otherness‹ in Merovingian archaeology (Halsall 2017), and extends this problematisation to the early mortuary archae- ology of post-Roman/early Anglo-Saxon England. The article first examines the literary goals of Gildas’ De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae, and espec…[Read more]

Argues that to pass silently over the connections between English and Scottish literature is to reduce the multiple trajectories of British literary history, to silence the tensions regarding imperialism and sovereignty motivating literary production, and to miss out on the fruitful circulation of non- Chaucerian literary techniques such as the…[Read more]

The presence of Scotland on the medieval map has remained largely unstudied, yet its historic contested existence within the British Isles makes it an ideal subject of analysis in determining the role early maps play in expressions of the nation. This essay offers a survey of medieval English cartographic depictions of Scotland which demonstrates…[Read more]

The open access movement has taken a strong hold within cultural heritage institutions, as large-scale digitization efforts are becoming increasingly popular in most libraries, museums, and archives. These initiatives have had a particular effect on the status of rare and unique materials through the provision of high-quality images and…[Read more]

My article takes up the thirteenth-century French allegorical poem, the Roman de la Rose, a poem that was begun by one author and continued by another after the death of the first. I consider how the second part of the poem foregrounds its status as a continuation, arguing that the work exemplifies a model of literary succession marked by mourning…[Read more]

Through an engagement with theory from the fields of art history, anthropology, and sociology, this article examines the archival existence of medieval manuscripts and facilitates an understanding of archival practice and its effects on user experience from the perspective of the researcher, rather than from that of the archivist or information…[Read more]