Andrew James Johnston – författare

This collection of essays explores medieval and early modern Troilus-texts from Chaucer to Shakespeare. The contributions show how medieval and early modern fictions of Troy use love and other emotions as a means of approaching the problem of tradition. As these texts reflect on their own traditionality, they highlight both the affective nature of temporality and the role of affect in scrutinising tradition itself. Focusing on a specific textual lineage that bridges the conventional period boundaries, the collection participates in an exchange between medievalists and early modernists that seeks to generate a dialogic encounter between the periods with the aim of further dismantling the rigid notions of chronology and periodisation that have kept medieval and early modern scholarship apart.

Strange matter offers exciting new perspectives on the premodern fascination with materiality and the various ways in which the Middle Ages and subsequent periods experienced things in time. Drawing on a wide selection of examples that range from medieval texts and artefacts of both European and non-European origin to Macbeth’s highly evocative meditation on bubbles, the essays compiled in this volume look beyond the confines of the Anglophone world. As they engage critically with the specific temporal otherness modernity has so often ascribed to medieval texts and artefacts, the contributors also enter into productive dialogue with recent trends in criticism, such as thing studies and the growing field of ‘object biographies’ in cultural studies and museology.

This volume comprises selected papers of SEM VI to VIII (Studientage Englisches Mittelalter), held at Jena, Bochum, and Zurich between 2004 and 2007. It presents a representative cross-section of topics in the field of English medieval studies in Germany and Switzerland. The spectrum ranges from philological textual criticism, cultural studies centring around the history of ideas, questions of historical writing, alliteration, and the depiction of the monstrous in early modern literature, to philological and linguistic approaches focussing on morphology and grammar.

Traditionen leben von der Dialektik der Wiederholung, die das Gleiche stets anders inszeniert. Sie speisen sich aus den Erinnerungen; an der Grenze von bedacht und selbstverständlich getan lassen sie sich nur als selbstverständliche Überzeugungen bestimmen. Aber wie ist es dennoch möglich, Traditionen zu beeinflussen? Der vorliegende Band widmet sich der Frage, wie man mit Traditionen Symbolpolitik machen kann. Was sind die Zumutungen der Traditionen, wenn sie politisch instrumentalisiert werden? Gibt es Grenzen der Manipulation, die im Wesen der jeweiligen Traditionen liegen und sie folglich definieren? Die BeiträgerInnen geben eine Vielzahl von Antworten, indem sie sich Topoi aus Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit aus interdisziplinärer Perspektive widmen.Traditions thrive on the dialectic of repetition. Drawing their topoi from the well of memory, they are situated on the very border between the deliberate and the habitual. Yet how is it possible to influence traditions? The present collection of essays studies the ways in which traditions are employed in the service of symbolic politics. What are the burdens and impositions of traditions, when their topoi are consciously exploited in the service of ideological purposes? Are there certain limits to manipulation that lie in the very nature of the traditions in question, a nature which therefore defines them? The contributors give a host of answers, studying topoi in medieval and early modern Europe from an interdisciplinary perspective.