This article reconsiders the matter of race in the Old English Life of Saint Mary of Egypt. The remarkable representation of Mary the Egyptian in this eleventh-century account, I argue, demonstrates the pains and pleasures of racialization shown in the critical work of Hortense Spillers and Jennifer C. Nash. Drawing on key debates in Black feminism and premodern critical race studies, this article emphasizes the enduring patterns in the production of racial-sexual difference, and how we can creatively work across archives to imagine the radical possibilities of Black and Brown fleshiness.
This Terms of art examines Valhalla as a phantasmic construct that gathers fantasies of whiteness, masculinity, and militarism across political, religious, and temporal divides. Beginning with invocations of Valhalla by Director of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation Kash Patel and radio host Alex Jones in commemoration of evangelical pundit Charlie Kirk, the authors trace how this ‘banal medievalism’ operates as a portable, affective fantasy rather than a historically coherent cosmology. Turning from close readings of Old Norse texts to their historical and modern afterlives, the authors argue that Valhalla has long served as an instrument of ideological legitimation, across different political imaginaries. This piece not only illustrates how Valhalla is able to reconcile contradictory eschatologies under the sign of heroic death, but also contends that this phantasm raises pressing political and methodological questions for the field of Medieval Studies. We argue that scholars must confront, rather than correct, such medievalisms as sites where exclusionary politics and mythic longing converge.
This article examines processes of reading and interpretation in the B text of Piers Plowman arguing that the poem’s engagement with liturgy can be illuminated through the framework of embodied cognition. I propose that liturgical references provide a pathway for the personified Will towards an embodied and enactive mode of interpretation that unites intellect, affect, and experience. Using perspectives from Ritual Studies, the article shows how Piers Plowman both develops and disrupts embodied interpretation, particularly in relation to speech, time, and space.
This article argues against the dominant scholarly assessment of the figure of Hervör/Hervarðr as a ‘cross-dressing woman’ within the Old Norse–Icelandic saga Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks. Instead, paying attention to pronoun and name shifts in three manuscript attestations, it reads Hervör/Hervarðr through a transmasculine lens. Placing the saga within the context of linguistic purism in Iceland, issues of medieval ‘heritage,’ and their role in reaffirming cisnormativity, this article asserts that the medieval manuscript recensions validate a temporary male identity for Hervör/Hervarðr, reflecting the potential for more fluid attitudes toward gender than previously assumed to exist in Old Norse–Icelandic literature. Examining the manuscript recensions as well as a later adaptation of the saga in Ormars rímur, I explore how Hervör/Hervarðr’s gendering as a man is co-produced through their movement with and through other bodies—both human and more-than-human—and spaces, aligning them within pre-established narrative trajectories of youthful manhood in Old Norse–Icelandic sagas.
The monsters of Beowulf are sites of political boundary-formation at which Early English society constitutes itself via violent exclusion. Synthesizing Carl Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction with Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection, this article demonstrates how each monster embodies the transgression of specific sociopolitical nomoi: Grendel perverts the reciprocal bonds of martial society, his mother usurps masculine sovereignty, and the dragon negates entirely the gift-economy structuring premodern Germanic life. The progressive distancing of these creatures—from the disturbing proximity of the Grendelkin to the dragon’s absolute alterity—creates a taxonomy of political judgments through which cultural anxieties crystallize into concrete friend-enemy distinctions. The article concludes that Beowulf does not simply reflect Early English values but actively participates in constructing political subjectivity, functioning as a technology through which audiences learn to recognize and expel that which threatens the boundaries of their world.
The renowned historian and medievalist Caroline Walker Bynum has given many interviews, but none, until now, to a fellow medievalist. In what follows, Bynum discusses with literary critic Kathy Lavezzo her formation as an intellectual and feminist during the 1960s at Harvard; her crucial relationship with her mother, philosopher Merle Grubbs Walker; the central components and legacy of her scholarly corpus; her writing process, mortality, and childhood love of Tolkien; and much more.
In Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1.750–2.365), the Roman poet gives an aetiology of blackness via the myth of Phaethon, whose failure to control his father’s solar chariot leads to the scorching of the earth. This article situates Ovid’s myth of Phaethon within ancient discourses of race, contextualizing the sequence within ancient environmental theory, racial affect theory, and the melancholic tensions of Rome’s enslaving practices. The article concludes with an analysis of the reception of Ovid’s myth of Phaethon in Rita Dove’s The Darker Face of the Earth (1994).
Born in Saskatchewan to a Cree mother and Swedish father, Harold R. Johnson (1954–2022) dedicated his life as a lawyer, activist, and author to repairing Indigenous/settler relations. This mission undergirds his novel The Björkan Sagas (2021), which restages the medieval encounter between Norse and First Nations through the lens of science fiction. In an illuminating case study of ‘Red Reading,’ Johnson rebuts a millennium of texts that assumed necessary hostility between Norse and First Nations. He instead draws on the expansiveness and flexibility of speculative fiction to imagine a utopian alternative in which medieval Norse and Native communities join together to resist colonialism’s impacts of environmental destruction, spiritual alienation, religious bigotry, and racism. Considering The Björkan Sagas alongside its medieval source material disrupts settler assumptions about natural and inevitable divisions, hierarchies, and conflicts between peoples.
This Dialogue thinks about how the late antique Christian monk John Cassian and the medieval Zen teacher Dōgen described religious concentration, exploring both why mental focus is so important and what happens when distraction wins the day.
Videogames house a wide variety of fantastical medieval worlds that serve as gateways to the Middle Ages for modern audiences. Those in the genre of grimdark medievalism, however, often misleadingly exaggerate historical brutalities marginalized subjects face in their imagined pasts. This article examines how Baldur’s Gate 3, a Dungeons Dragons–inspired roleplaying videogame, queerly complicates such expectations by constructing a grimdark neomedieval setting without cisheteronormativity. Using several of the game’s central queer characters as case studies, I demonstrate how the speculative medieval past can be used to figuratively explore—and potentially offer healing for—difficult and painful contemporary queer circumstances without literally representing and re-inscribing violence motivated by antiqueer sentiment. I propose that this model presents fantasy medievalisms with meaningful opportunities to critique the cisheteronormative, racial, colonial, and patriarchal injustices they too habitually perpetuate.
This article attends to miraculously resuscitated children’s voices as interventions in time, showing that the very notion of ‘recovery’ creates and depends on a disjunction between developmental time and lived time. The article begins with an introduction to child resuscitation miracles and the role that voice plays in them, before taking a deeper look at Gautier de Coinci’s tale of the little boy who sang Gaude Maria. Inspired by recent concepts in Sound Studies and placing them in conversation with the Disability Studies notions of ‘crip time’ and ‘curative time,’ it posits that the voice of the resuscitated child, during and after the interval between life and death, becomes productively asynchronized from the body from which it emanates. Modern readers can tap into this same productive asynchrony, it argues, to hear the Middle Ages with fresh ears.
Overhearing is a ubiquitous phenomenon in the experience of illness, but it has only recently been recognized as a robust mode of communication in the medical encounter. In this article, I link two early English accounts of overhearing one’s own prognosis to modern-day discussions of eavesdropping, both literary-theoretical and clinical. An anecdote in Henry Daniel’s uroscopy Liber uricrisiarum suggests that overhearing can serve as narrative motivation for a patient’s reclamation of their own future, a possibility likewise explored by the protagonist of Thomas Hoccleve’s Complaint and Dialogue as he overhears and seeks to undo the communal prognosis attached to his body. I argue that overhearing highlights the epistemic inequalities inherent in prognosis communication, but also usefully complicates the divide between public and private selves and provides room for imagining alternative futures. This article contributes both to a better understanding of overhearing as a narrative device and to building a longer cultural history of illness-related communication.
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s De gestis Britonum (DgB) has long been credited with secularizing historical writing in the medieval West, in large part because Geoffrey is explicitly interested in connecting English history to a classical rather than a biblical past. But prioritizing the secularity of DgB, I argue, elides a deliberately and consistently, though subtly, encoded erasure of the Israelite past within its classical narrative. By populating ancient Israelite narratives with proto-English characters, DgB replaces the Jews in the historical memory of the English Christian. Moreover, by including in this historical memory a prophetic tradition (i.e., the Prophecies of Merlin) that echoes much of the prophecies of the Hebrew Scriptures, DgB extends its colonization of Israelite history to the eschaton. This article proposes that this replacement of a people in a nationalistic historical memory mirrors the kind of forgetting necessary for hegemonies to sustain xenophobic replacement anxieties in modern political discourse.
In 1987, the British company Maritime Exploration Recoveries PLC (MER PLC) serendipitously discovered the Nanhai No. 1 Shipwreck, a Southern Song dynasty, Chinese merchant vessel, on the seabed near Hailing Island, Guangdong. Salvaged in 2007 along with approximately 160,000 artifacts, Chinese authorities conducted excavations in the purpose-built Maritime Silk Route Museum. Among the most intriguing finds is a collection of gold jewellery, whose origins defy simple attribution. A stylistic analysis spanning China, South and Southeast Asia, and Western Asia is crucial to understanding this unique material. This study contributes to scholarship by exploring gold trade, cultural interactions, and premodern globalization through the lens of material culture’s cultural biography.
This article engages critical Indigenous theories of Story and memory to examine interconnected histories of other-than-human representation. To better understand how we arrived in a present where old animism seems new and the natural world needs legal representation, we foreground the Te Urewera Act of 2014, which granted legal personhood to the Te Urewera rainforest. We explore the colonial conditions necessitating such recognition of other-than-human sovereignty and then read backward into medieval representations of nature in literary and material culture. Focusing on the dual meanings of representation—artistic mimesis and legal advocacy—the article investigates early medieval English arboreal representations, including Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Poetria nova and the Bayeux Embroidery, to trace colonial ideologies embedded in depictions of trees. At the core of this approach is the premise that representing nature is not just a mimetic activity but a political one, and an imperative to foreground the ways in which poets, artists, and other ‘representers’ think about the governance of society with, through, and against ‘nature.’ This Indigenous-informed perspective reiterates the importance of medieval/modern dialogue in the climate crisis of the twenty-first century.
This article explores ritualistic cliff jumping in the Nordic literary tradition and its later adaptation in the film Midsommar. Both the medieval Icelandic Gautreks saga and Ari Aster’s 2019 film portray pagans who voluntarily jump to their deaths from a so-called family cliff. The cliff jumpers in the saga choose to die because they fear material loss and prefer to join Óðinn (Odin) in the afterlife, whereas the cliff jumpers in the film choose to die to conform to their community’s worldview, an outlook that prescribes death at age seventy-two. To contextualize the saga, I firstly provide an outline of influential premodern European attitudes toward voluntary death. I then go on to analyze the sacrificial episode from Gautreks saga, and subsequently describe the reception of the family cliff motif in Sweden, before scrutinizing Midsommar’s adaptation of the motif.
The only source presenting original horse-training techniques for medieval Western Europe is found in the veterinary treatise by the Italian knight Jordanus Rufus, De medicina equorum (c. 1250). Since it was addressed to fellow knowledgeable horsepeople, aspects of the training method he elaborated can only be truly understood when put in practice. This is why experimental approaches can provide valuable research insights and reveal the complexities of medieval horse-training. This article showcases how elements of Rufus’s training method were applied to two feral Dartmoor Hill ponies. It discusses the effects of the medieval techniques on the horses as well as the benefits of such approaches in the context of Animal Studies. More agency is given to the horses as they participate in the research aiming to reveal their role in history.
