Alicia Spencer-Hall – författare

This volume significantly expands current understandings of both disability and sanctity in the Middle Ages. Across the collection, heterogeneous constructions, and experiences, of disability and holiness are excavated. Analyses span the sixth to the fifteenth century, with discussion of holy men and holy women, Western Christian and Buddhist traditions, hagiographic texts, images, and artefacts. Each chapter underscores that disability and sanctity co-exist with a vast array of connotations, not just fully positive or fully negative, but also every inflection in between. The collection is a powerful rebuttal to the notion of the integral relationship of disability-medieval and otherwise-with sin, stigma, and shame. So doing, it recentres medieval disability history as a lived history that merits exploration and celebration. In this way, the volume serves to reclaim sanctity in disability histories as a means to affirm the possibility of radical disability futures.

This volume significantly expands current understandings of both disability and sanctity in the Middle Ages. Across the collection, heterogeneous constructions, and experiences, of disability and holiness are excavated. Analyses span the sixth to the fifteenth century, with discussion of holy men and holy women, Western Christian and Buddhist traditions, hagiographic texts, images, and artefacts. Each chapter underscores that disability and sanctity co-exist with a vast array of connotations, not just fully positive or fully negative, but also every inflection in between. The collection is a powerful rebuttal to the notion of the integral relationship of disability-medieval and otherwise-with sin, stigma, and shame. So doing, it recentres medieval disability history as a lived history that merits exploration and celebration. In this way, the volume serves to reclaim sanctity in disability histories as a means to affirm the possibility of radical disability futures.

This ground-breaking book brings theoretical perspectives from twenty-first century media, film, and cultural studies to medieval hagiography. Medieval Saints and Modern Screens stakes the claim for a provocative new methodological intervention: consideration of hagiography as media. More precisely, hagiography is most productively understood as cinematic media. Medieval mystical episodes are made intelligible to modern audiences through reference to the filmic - the language, form, and lived experience of cinema. Similarly, reference to the realm of the mystical affords a means to express the disconcerting physical and emotional effects of watching cinema. Moreover, cinematic spectatorship affords, at times, a (more or less) secular experience of visionary transcendence: an 'agape-ic encounter'. The medieval saint's visions of God are but one pole of a spectrum of visual experience which extends into our present multi-media moment. We too conjure godly visions: on our smartphones, on the silver screen, and on our TVs and laptops. This book places contemporary pop-culture media - such as blockbuster movie The Dark Knight, Kim Kardashian West's social media feeds, and the outputs of online role-players in Second Life - in dialogue with a corpus of thirteenth-century Latin biographies, 'Holy Women of Liège'. In these texts, holy women see God, and see God often. Their experiences fundamentally orient their life, and offer the women new routes to knowledge, agency, and belonging. For the holy visionaries of Liège, as with us modern 'seers', visions are physically intimate, ideologically overloaded spaces. Through theoretically informed close readings, Medieval Saints and Modern Screens reveals the interconnection of decidedly 'old' media - medieval textualities - and artefacts of our 'new media' ecology, which all serve as spaces in which altogether human concerns are brought before the contemporary culture's eyes.

This pioneering monograph provocatively explodes current research paradigms for the modern and the medieval by showing that Twitter shares key similarities with medieval literary forms, texts, and narrative techniques. Analyzing tweets with medieval texts, and vice versa, Spencer-Hall initiates readers into an innovative methodology of interdisciplinary literary criticism, posing vital questions about the politics of medievalism today. Chapters include brand-new readings of The Owl and the Nightingale, the Chastelaine de Vergi, and Marie de France’s Laüstic, and arresting insights into troubadour style, Margery Kempe, and #MedievalTwitter. The book culminates in a medieval(ist) reading of Twitter’s premature demise, and Elon Musk’s medievalism. Throughout, points of contact and divergence are dissected, re-contextualizing the socio-cultural meaning of communication and texts across the temporal divide.

This pioneering monograph provocatively explodes current research paradigms for the modern and the medieval by showing that Twitter shares key similarities with medieval literary forms, texts, and narrative techniques. Analyzing tweets with medieval texts, and vice versa, Spencer-Hall initiates readers into an innovative methodology of interdisciplinary literary criticism, posing vital questions about the politics of medievalism today. Chapters include brand-new readings of The Owl and the Nightingale, the Chastelaine de Vergi, and Marie de France’s Laüstic, and arresting insights into troubadour style, Margery Kempe, and #MedievalTwitter. The book culminates in a medieval(ist) reading of Twitter’s premature demise, and Elon Musk’s medievalism. Throughout, points of contact and divergence are dissected, re-contextualizing the socio-cultural meaning of communication and texts across the temporal divide.

This book presents an interdisciplinary examination of trans and genderqueer subjects in medieval hagiography.

By examining medieval female saints' lives in dialogue with modern film theories, a trans-historical spectrum of visual experience is revealed: medieval saint and modern moviegoer are connected in the visual act.

This book presents an interdisciplinary examination of trans and genderqueer subjects in medieval hagiography.