Rachel Schmidt - Böcker

Inscribing Pilgrimage uncovers the diverse, multilingual literary tradition surrounding the Camino de Santiago, one of the three most prominent routes of Christian pilgrimage, which guides travelers across Europe to the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, Spain. Focusing mainly on literature about pilgrims and their journeys, including references to visual art and music, the theoretical and methodological approach of the book links the historical construction of pilgrimage, as well as the action of journeying, to processes of writing and reading. Rachel Schmidt and Martha García examine permutations of the Camino in the medieval, early modern, and contemporary periods, tracing its origins in early Christian writings about pilgrimages to Jerusalem and Rome. Ranging from medieval literature written in Latin, Castilian, and Portuguese, to early modern Spanish texts by Cervantes and others, before concluding with considerations of the current revitalization of the Camino de Santiago, Inscribing Pilgrimage underscores the extent to which pilgrims who wrote about their journeys helped create ideas about pilgrimage, and vice versa. Journeying on a pilgrimage becomes, in turn, a model for writing, a means of promoting and imagining pilgrimage, and a form of plotting the act of writing. Schmidt and García highlight the ancient theological model of the pilgrim—depicted as a visitor and stranger in an unknown land—to demonstrate not only the creation of the homo viator identity of the Christian pilgrim, but also the way this model morphs into other tropes and figures found in texts from the Iberian Peninsula such as the exile, the pícaro, the knight errant, and the devotee. Throughout Inscribing Pilgrimage, Schmidt and García foreground the historical participation of women in pilgrimage rituals, including early Christians such as Egeria and Paula, as well as the fifteenth-century Spanish prioress Constanza de Castilla, whose work illustrates the ways in which pilgrimage intersects with modes of reading, writing, and thinking. The authors also explore how pilgrimage sanctuaries served as an informal safety net and retreat for the impoverished populations of early modern Spain. By tracing the dialectic relationship of pilgrimage to writing, this innovative, interdisciplinary study offers a new perspective on the literary imaginings that shaped the Camino de Santiago historically and culturally.

Rhetorical contests about how to frame a war run alongside many armed conflicts. With the rise of internet access, social media, and cyber operations, these propaganda battles have a wider audience than ever before. Yet, such framing contests have attracted little attention in scholarly literature. What are the effects of gendered and strategic framing in civil war? How do different types of individuals - victims, combatants, women, commanders - utilize the frames created around them and about them? Who benefits from these contests, and who loses? Following the lives of eleven ex-combatants from non-state armed groups and supplemented by over one hundred interviews conducted across Colombia, Framing a Revolution opens a window into this crucial part of civil war. Their testimonies demonstrate the importance of these contests for combatants' commitments to their armed groups during fighting and the Colombian peace process, while also drawing implications for the concept of civil war worldwide.

Rhetorical contests about how to frame a war run alongside many armed conflicts. With the rise of internet access, social media, and cyber operations, these propaganda battles have a wider audience than ever before. Yet, such framing contests have attracted little attention in scholarly literature. What are the effects of gendered and strategic framing in civil war? How do different types of individuals - victims, combatants, women, commanders - utilize the frames created around them and about them? Who benefits from these contests, and who loses? Following the lives of eleven ex-combatants from non-state armed groups and supplemented by over one hundred interviews conducted across Colombia, Framing a Revolution opens a window into this crucial part of civil war. Their testimonies demonstrate the importance of these contests for combatants' commitments to their armed groups during fighting and the Colombian peace process, while also drawing implications for the concept of civil war worldwide.

It's a critical cliché that Cervantes' Don Quixote is the first modern novel, but this distinction raises two fundamental questions. First, how does one define a novel? And second, what is the relationship between this genre and understandings of modernity? In Forms of Modernity, Rachel Schmidt examines how seminal theorists and philosophers have wrestled with the status of Cervantes' masterpiece as an 'exemplary novel', in turn contributing to the emergence of key concepts within genre theory.Schmidt's discussion covers the views of well-known thinkers such as Friedrich Schlegel, José Ortega y Gasset, and Mikhail Bakhtin, but also the pivotal contributions of philosophers such as Hermann Cohen and Miguel de Unamuno. These theorists' examinations of Cervantes's fictional knight errant character point to an ever-shifting boundary between the real and the virtual. Drawing from both intellectual and literary history, Forms of Modernity richly explores the development of the categories and theories that we use today to analyze and understand novels.