Shakespeare and Fletcher's Henry VIII contains more references to musical instrumentation than any other text in the Shakespearean corpus. Singers and musicians played a prominent though unnoticed role in the play's exploration of England's religious past and present. This essay argues that Henry VIII uses musical juxtaposition to compare the ecumenical potential in domestic and public forms of devotion. Music flourishes around the play's two queens: Anne Bullen's coronation with choirs singing Te Deum Laudamus immediately precedes Katherine of Aragon's tuneful, masque-like vision of her own coronation in heaven. As Katherine's private musicians play her a solemn deathbed “knell” blending Catholic and Protestant characteristics, they undercut the hegemonic nationalism of Anne's liturgical hymn. The play's meditation on devotion deepens with new evidence, first presented in this essay, that the composer Robert Johnson contributed to its music, including a devotional consort song that served as Katherine's “knell.”
Circulating in Castile during the fifteenth century, the poem Coplas del perro de Alva describes its protagonist, a dog, as a faithful Christian and guardian of the town of Alba de Tormes. According to the poem, the dog vigilantly safeguards the town so that neither Jew nor converso (Jewish convert) can enter. This article examines how the poem contributes to a larger debate taking place in the Iberian Peninsula on how to identify, classify, and locate the different groups — Christians, Jews, and conversos — inhabiting the Kingdom of Castile, while exemplifying the anxiety that accompanied the promulgation of the Statutes of Purity of Blood (1449). Furthermore, in line with recent scholarship in animal studies, the article analyzes how the dog, as a nonhuman protagonist, can illuminate the story's historical context by exposing the racial and political tensions and violent intolerance against Jews and conversos in Castile during this period.
This article examines the forms and practices of mediation employed by Hartmann von Aue in his version of the Arthurian romance Iwein. By depicting and enacting both contemporary media forms and processes of mediation, this article argues, Hartmann's text constantly foregrounds the technologies and processes of mediation through which its story reaches its public. Drawing on theories of medieval mediation put forward by Christian Kiening, this article analyzes Iwein as an example of engagement with concerns of mediation centuries before the establishment of explicit media discourses. The analysis targets depicted scenes of literary activity — reading, composing, and storytelling — that are laden with inherent cultural and religious iconography and are manipulated to produce moments that both reflect on and encourage processes of mediation in the discursive and narrative levels of the romance. This focus reveals how medieval textuality relied on and exploited a diverse landscape of existing medial forms and practices.
This article takes a new approach to the Pèlerinage allegories and later Latin poetry of the fourteenth-century Cistercian monk Guillaume de Deguileville. It argues that diagrams and “diagrammatic thinking” undergird his entire poetic oeuvre. The article situates Deguileville in a long medieval tradition of using diagrams as instruments for scientific and theological education. Deguileville understands diagrams not only as pedagogical tools, but as a way of structuring cognition and spiritual thought. Relying on ideas of similitude and analogy, these visual signs help his audience to process complex doctrines such as the Trinity. Deguileville's diagrams operate as aids to spiritual contemplation, in some cases bypassing ordinary modes of perception to offer insight into the divine. Ultimately, Deguileville's writings provide evidence of the rich complexity of medieval diagrams, which could function as cognitive prompts as well as deeply meditative and even sacramental images.
This article addresses a curious phenomenon: the refraction, or back-translation, of Latin texts through the vernacular back into Latin. It focuses on three distinct refractions of the Navigatio Sancti Brendani (ca. 800) via Benedeit's Old French Voyage de Saint Brendan (ca. 1118). Historically dismissed as devoid of interest and derivative, the Latin translations of Benedeit's poem, copied in France, Wales, and Portugal, offer a particularly rich record of the changing perceptions, positions, and abilities of Latin with regard to French from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. In Goliardic verse, Latin breaks with classical tradition and renovates its daring poetic abilities. In Cistercian houses, domestic Latin offers an open door to monastic readers and listeners. Prismatic translations in the Brendan tradition complicate the easy story of an inert and prestigious Latin, instead emphasizing its nimble response to the desires of its users.
This article argues that thirteenth- and fourteenth-century French and Occitan authors and manuscript makers used recurring tropes — texts as speech, plants, and precious objects — to conceptualize the act of interpolation and, more broadly, vernacular textuality. These figurative frameworks allowed authors and manuscript makers to articulate how texts related to their environments, to other texts, and to the people who produced, transmitted, and received them. The speech trope emphasized enunciation and authority, the plant trope modeled textual integration through metaphors of grafting and growth, and the precious object trope framed texts as crafted and valuable, underscoring authorial labor. Through close readings of works by Baudouin de Condé, Guyart des Moulins, Matfre Ermengaud, Jean Froissart, and others, the article shows that interpolation served not just as a compositional technique but as a means of theorizing literature's materiality, transmission, and relation to knowledge. In doing so, it proposes an ecological approach to medieval textuality grounded in figuration, networks, and situated practice.
William Langland uses Thomistic analogical thinking to depict the allegorical figure of Peace in Piers Plowman. A series of dynamic episodes shows how moral terms referring primarily to divine excellence become hollowed out through economic exchange and corrupt institutions. Three compromised versions of Peace — a citizen who abandons justice for gold, a debater limited by partial understanding, and a porter who admits corruption into the besieged church — contrast with Christ's enactment of true peace in the Harrowing of Hell. Corrupted figures bear the name of peace without embodying the reality, while Christ performs peace without naming it. This pattern reveals a deeper ontological reality: true peace remains beyond human reach without divine intervention. Langland's analogical poetics maps the possibilities and constraints of moral language, disclosing the poem's bleak theological vision.
Though Sir Orfeo is frequently taught in medieval literature courses, it is not often read for its race-making. However, reading Sir Orfeo through a psychoanalytic lens reveals the poem's pervasive race-thinking. In Sir Orfeo, anxieties about the instability of racial categories are expressed through the power that the King of Faerie — Orfeo's uncanny double — exerts over Orfeo and his kingdom. The King of Faerie serves as a catalyst for Orfeo's transformation into blackness and a second uncanny double of himself. Racialized as heathenness, this blackness is legible through markers such as beards and clothes and constructs a white self that assumes power through nobility and masculinity. In Sir Orfeo's happy ending, Orfeo is returned to his familiar self — shaved, crowned, and no longer black. Sir Orfeo therefore resists the mutability of the racial categories it constructs, making it a helpful example of how the uncanny can be used to read race in other texts with doubled selves.
Afterlives of Petrarch's Rerum vulgarium fragmenta 189 have produced an outsized emphasis on the poem's legacy of figuring a cruel mistress in the experience of unrequited love. This essay identifies a group of lyrics that adapt the ship similitude of Rvf 189 from the perspective of Rvf 261, thereby crafting an alternative legacy that emphasizes the literary generativity of the lady of Petrarch's verse. In Rvf 261, Petrarch portrays Laura as an unreachable exemplar for women aspiring to virtues that would earn them fame. Despite its assertion of Laura's unattainability, the poem presents a challenge that some subsequent poets suggest they meet. By likening the self to a storm-tossed ship specifically to authorize the female pursuit of fame, Gaspara Stampa, Edmund Spenser, and Margaret Cavendish constellate a writing community that transcends gender, linguistic, generic, and educational lines as they take up Petrarch's invitation of Rvf 261 in their recreations of Rvf 189.
This article examines the idea of Jewish poetic community and communal belonging in the multilingual and multiconfessional lyric arena of the medieval Mediterranean. The article presents early fourteenth-century Italian-Jewish thinker Immanuel of Rome as a case study for how to go about rethinking lyric communities in premodern worlds. Set within a broader historical discussion of the lyric positioning of Jewish authors in al-Andalus, Christian Spain, and the Islamic East, the article considers how non-Jewish contemporaries viewed non-Hebrew lyric experiments by Jews. In analyzing how Immanuel's Italian-Christian contemporaries regarded him, his poetry, and his Jewishness as it relates to the lyric, the article assesses the degree to which Immanuel precipitated a new model for Jewish poetic belonging in the medieval literary community.
This essay explores a feature of the sixteenth-century Italian lyric tradition that has not been studied in the detail it deserves: the ongoing “social turn” of the later decades of the century. Social poetry, in a broad sense (verse that thematizes social relationships, exchanges, and events) came to occupy an ever-greater space within verse collections of the period, and paratexts developed to facilitate an informed social reading, such as the rich contextualizing indexes (tavole) common in late-Cinquecento volumes. The essay argues that “social volumes” of this kind construct and stage a particular type of lyric community, crafted through practices of honorific naming and praise. Like real-world communities, such textual communities policed their boundaries and distinguished between in-groups and out-groups. A diachronic and geo-culturally sensitive consideration of such inclusions and exclusions has much to tell us about the intricate social-literary landscape of Italy as it evolved between Renaissance and Baroque.
Throughout his life, the troubadour Sordello da Goito employed poetry to establish and reinvent his public image, and the same medium was used by other troubadours to react — positively or negatively — to his self-representation. This article examines the transformations of Sordello's public image over time, their impact on poetry and, in turn, the influence of poetry on his real-life social standing. It does so by examining a variety of poems by and about Sordello through which his moral authority and position at court were established, accepted, or defended. New interpretations of poems BEdT 76,12, 330,14, and 437,34 are particularly exemplary of these phenomena. In doing so, the article shows how Sordello's public image changed over time from satirist, to kidnapper of women, to widely recognized chivalric moralist. Sordello's career offers an example of the complex intertwining of poetry and social identity that characterized troubadour poetry throughout its history and of the role played by poetic communities in confirming or challenging individual poets’ claims of authority.
This article examines the function of lyric poetry by demonstrating how prosimetric sources portray an insane poet. It argues that the earliest biographies of the poet, lover, and madman Majnūn (ca. 688) reveal how the boundary between madness and rationality is socially constructed, and how early Arabic literature navigated that boundary by construing a poetic madman who was to be marveled at from a distance. Drawing from historical discourses on madness in early Islam, medical ideas about lovesickness, and mad and disability studies, it shows how the biographies indicate that Majnūn's madness placed him beyond the normalized madness of contemporaneous poet-lovers due to his “going wild” [tawaḥḥush] among beasts before insanity leads him to death. Rather than frame Majnūn as exemplary or nonexemplary, the biographies articulate how this unruly madness causes Majnūn's poetry to become a marvel, demonstrating how anecdotal explanation crafted a model response to lyric poetry's ideal of love.
Rather than conceiving of poetry as a container of biographically determined meaning, medieval Arabo-Persian poetics emphasize the impact that texts have on the human body and psyche. Medieval manuals on mystical practices describe the correlation between ecstatic states of consciousness and the experience of listening to lyric poetry. In a similar vein, contemporary theorizations conceive of lyric as a suspended gesture that neither mimics external reality nor provides readers with purely fictional worlds. According to such models, the sharing of lyric poetry is conceived as an act-event that must be performed by a reading or listening subject in order to generate meaning. By juxtaposing medieval Persian poetics with modern paradigms through a critical inquiry that is both circular and cross-cultural, this article shows how a new affective theory of the lyric can account for experiences of enchantment, disenchantment, and partial self-loss that redefine the boundaries of selfhood and regulate the reader's jouissance when embodying lyric texts.
In some funerary poems, the grief-stricken tone clashes with self-serving encomia, undermining the commemorative purpose of the poems. This is the case in the lyric poems of French sixteenth-century authors Geoffroy Tory (In filiam charissimam epitaphia et dialogi, 1522), Olivier de Magny (“L'Umbre de Salel,” 1554) and Pierre de Ronsard (“Elegie à Loïs des Masures,” 1560). Funerary lyric thus destabilizes the socio-affective models of the relationships between the living and the dead by instrumentalizing the tools of the lyric address — through ironic prosopopoeia for example, or dramatized dialogues. To better understand these paradoxical dynamics, it is useful to revisit traditional commemorative practices and their role in fostering communal bonds by giving more prominence to the material concerns that bind communities of poets together.
Most medieval Persian lyric poems, or ghazals, combine brevity of form with dense and allusive language to meditate on love, one of the most multifaceted of human experiences. Concision and complexity — particularly in an environment where desire for another person and longing for the divine were not considered incompatible — placed the burden of interpretation on communities of readers and auditors. Mutability of signification made the ghazal into a popular form, since audiences could stretch the meanings of a poem, but may have also made it harder for readers to find common ground with one another in the text, since their interpretations of authorial intention could vary dramatically. Through a close reading of the ghazals of Busḥāq-i Aṭʿima, who transformed the lyrics of earlier canonical poets into burlesques on the theme of food, this article examines what the work of poets who attempted to reformulate the modes of ghazal verse and to provoke an unexpected emotional response in their audiences can tell us about the constitution of lyric communities in medieval Iran.
Taking the idea of lyric communities as both a critical question and a heuristic tool, this special issue of JMEMS explores how lyric poetry facilitated and shaped the formation of different kinds of community in Europe and Western Asia during the premodern era, engaging poetic filiation, social positioning, political grouping, religious bonding, affective engagement, and spiritual connection. Featuring contributions on Arabic, Occitan, Italian, English, French, Hebrew, and Persian poetry, the articles interrogate relationships between social groups and practices of writing, reading, performing, collecting, rewriting, and interpreting lyric poetry. This introductory essay highlights three pairs of dialectical tensions that arise in the relationships between lyric poetry as a social practice and community formation within the wider social space: mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, local and translocal dimensions, and the dynamics of competition and cooperation. These recurring tensions across literary traditions provide grounds for considering lyric poetry from transhistorical and global perspectives, moving beyond the conventional divide in current lyric studies between historicist and transhistoricist approaches. Conversely, the modes of production, circulation, and reception of lyric poetry provide an ideal opportunity to reconsider the premodern era across different regions, cultures, and epochs.
From around the turn of the millennium, postcolonial theory exerted a formative influence in the study of the Middle Ages, especially in the field of literature. A quarter-century on, this essay investigates its continued relevance at a moment when the field is wrestling with the emergence (and to some extent the institutionalization) of interest in the global Middle Ages. Taking the case of the Mongols, the Central Asian Silk Road, and Marco Polo's Description of the World as its focus, it argues for an intense engagement with global macro- and microhistories as a corrective to two of postcolonial theory's tendencies: (1) seeing the world through the lens of binary difference, and (2) disregarding the way premodern cases pose implicit or explicit challenges to modern categories of analysis.
This article presents a case study of the Arabic version of the 1001 Nights story of the enslaved scholarly maiden—found in the thirteenth-century manuscript held at the Real Academia de la Historia in Madrid, Gayangos 71—exploring the tale's immediate translation networks. It argues (1) that translation needs to be viewed as a form of renovation, and (2) that translated premodern texts can both illuminate and be illuminated by twenty-first-century postcolonial studies. Forms of decolonial praxis emerge with the dynamics of premodern translations across cultures and centuries.
The late 1990s and early 2000s witnessed the publication of a substantial body of scholarship exploring intersections and points of friction between medieval studies and postcolonial theory. Yet during this first phase of medieval postcolonialism, conceived here as ending around 2015, engagement with the larger field of postcolonial studies was limited in scope. While a handful of foundational theoretical texts proved immensely generative, significant contributions to this vast, heterogeneous field were overlooked. Connections between medieval and postcolonial studies have, moreover, expanded very little over the last decade, a period in which the “postcolonial” has been displaced by the “global” as the dominant framework for exploring premodern cross-cultural relations. This special issue introduces new postcolonial voices, paradigms, and analytical methods into medieval studies. Its goals in doing so are (1) to enlarge the conceptual and theoretical arsenal used by medievalists to understand cultural contact in the distant past; (2) to invite new ways of thinking about the relations between the medieval and modern; and (3) to advance urgent conversations on premodern race, Mediterranean history, and the global Middle Ages.
