Matthew Boyd Goldie – författare

This study uses critical theory to investigate the history of how people have thought about the antipodes—the places and people on the other side of the world—from ancient Greece to present-day literature and digital media. Taking into account maps, letters, book illustrations, travel writing, poetry, and drama, Goldie reveals that the history of the idea of the antipodes might be seen as different modes or discourses: mathematical and geographical in the earliest era, cartographical and kinetic in the medieval period, social and sexual in the Early Modern, sartorial and littoral in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and bodily and humorous in the latest era. Using the theories of Eve Sedgwick, Michel Foucault, Epeli Hau‘ofa, and others, this book extends postcolonialism’s historical scope and challenges the theory’s approaches and perceptions: center-periphery, East-West, and mimicry.

This collection of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century documents is designed for students of Chaucer and Middle English literature. It makes readily available accounts of key historical events and descriptions of pertinent cultural phenomena. Brings together in one volume fourteenth- and fifteenth-century historical and cultural texts. Documents shed light on the themes and styles that appear in Chaucer and other Middle English literature. Contains twelve important images from the period. Concise introductions and bibliographies accompany all documents.

This collection of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century documents is designed for students of Chaucer and Middle English literature. It makes readily available accounts of key historical events and descriptions of pertinent cultural phenomena. Brings together in one volume fourteenth- and fifteenth-century historical and cultural texts. Documents shed light on the themes and styles that appear in Chaucer and other Middle English literature. Contains twelve important images from the period. Concise introductions and bibliographies accompany all documents.

This study uses critical theory to investigate the history of how people have thought about the antipodes—the places and people on the other side of the world—from ancient Greece to present-day literature and digital media. Taking into account maps, letters, book illustrations, travel writing, poetry, and drama, Goldie reveals that the history of the idea of the antipodes might be seen as different modes or discourses: mathematical and geographical in the earliest era, cartographical and kinetic in the medieval period, social and sexual in the Early Modern, sartorial and littoral in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and bodily and humorous in the latest era. Using the theories of Eve Sedgwick, Michel Foucault, Epeli Hau‘ofa, and others, this book extends postcolonialism’s historical scope and challenges the theory’s approaches and perceptions: center-periphery, East-West, and mimicry.

Scribes of Space posits that the conception of space—the everyday physical areas we perceive and through which we move—underwent critical transformations between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. Matthew Boyd Goldie examines how natural philosophers, theologians, poets, and other thinkers in late medieval Britain altered the ideas about geographical space they inherited from the ancient world. In tracing the causes and nature of these developments, and how geographical space was consequently understood, Goldie focuses on the intersection of medieval science, theology, and literature, deftly bringing a wide range of writings—scientific works by Nicole Oresme, Jean Buridan, the Merton School of Oxford Calculators, and Thomas Bradwardine; spiritual, poetic, and travel writings by John Lydgate, Robert Henryson, Margery Kempe, the Mandeville author, and Geoffrey Chaucer—into conversation. This pairing of physics and literature uncovers how the understanding of spatial boundaries, locality, elevation, motion, and proximity shifted across time, signaling the emergence of a new spatial imagination during this era.

This book considers how to conceive of the group of islands known in our time as the British Isles in the Late Middle Ages. Contributions consider possible paths to thinking about late-medieval archipelagism, and in doing so, highlight the inconsistencies and contradictions in medieval (and modern) conceptions of the region.