Medieval Media and Culture – serie

This book presents, for the first time, a coherent, tightly argued history of medieval mediality, which also casts a new light on modern thinking about the medial. Abundance and lack constitute the defining feature of all media forms. These forms always undertake to preserve, transmit, or give access to something that might otherwise be lost, or remain inaccessible or ineffective. But at the same time they are always in danger of disguising or distorting what they are referring to, or of missing their targetaltogether. Medieval culture offers an excellent chance to observe this. In this culture, media forms were places of mediated immediacy. They transported a presence of the divine, but also knowledge of its unattainability. This volume investigates the multi-layered and fascinating approaches of medieval authors to the word and writing, the body and materiality, and their experimentation with the possibilities of media before the concept was invented.

This book looks at the intersection between medieval studies and digital humanities, confronting how medievalists negotiate the “virtual divide” between the cultural artefacts that they study and the digital means by which they address those artefacts. The essays come from medievalists who have created digital resources or applied digital tools and methodologies in their scholarship. Text encoding and analysis, data modeling and provenance, and 3D design are all discussed as they apply to western European medieval literature, history, art history, and architecture.The volume examines the importance of combining the use of digital tools and methodologies with traditional close reading techniques and explores the physicality of the medieval manuscript and its digital analogue. Within the framework of digital humanities the book covers a host of significant issues that the academy and GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) institutions face together, such as differences in models of information organization, metadata standards, and the "lossiness" of the connections between those standards.

The twelfth century witnessed the birth of modern Western European literary tradition: major narrative works appeared in both French and in German, founding a literary culture independent of the Latin tradition of the Church and Roman Antiquity. But what gave rise to the sudden interest in and legitimization of literature in these “vulgar tongues"? Until now, the answer has centred on the somewhat nebulous role of new female vernacular readers. Powell argues that a different appraisal of the same evidence offers a window onto something more momentous: not “women readers” but instead a reading act conceived of as female lies behind the polysemic identification of women as the audience of new media in the twelfth century. This woman is at the centre of a re-conception of Christian knowing, a veritable revolution in the mediation of knowledge and truth. By following this figure through detailed readings of key early works, Powell unveils a surprise, a new poetics of the body meant to embrace the capacities of new audiences and viewers of medieval literature and visual art.

The first extended study of supernatural discourse in Old English poetry, Supernatural Speakers in Old English Verse fills a conspicuous gap in the scholarship of early medieval literature. Drawing insights from various disciplines, including critical discourse analysis, social psychology, and oral poetry studies, Supernatural Speakers demonstrates how and why three poets—the poets of Genesis A, Christ C, and Guthlac A—marshalled their distinction as experts of the Old English poetic medium to perform the power of supernatural speech by means of masterful poetics. By offering new analytical paths through these early medieval poems, Supernatural Speakers elucidates the importance of poetics as a critical window on the social and religious functions of verbal art in early medieval England.

The discovery of seven manuscript fragments of the Old French Suite Vulgate du Merlin in a set of early printed books in the Bristol Central Library hit global headlines in 2019. This book contains a comprehensive study of these fascinating Arthurian fragments.Beginning with an extensive contextual history, the authors reveal details of the fragments’ origin, their importation to England, and their subsequent journey to a waste pile in a bookbinder’s workshop, where they would be incorporated into the bindings of a four-volume edition of the works of Jean Gerson in the early sixteenth century. A full enquiry into the provenance of these host volumes sets out the possible routes from the bookbinder’s workshop to their final home in Bristol Central Library.Using multi-spectral imaging to read the damaged sections of text, the authors also provide a full edition and translation of the narrative contained in the fragments.

Less than a hundred years after Thomas Becket’s martyrdom at the hands of four of Henry II’s knights, his Anglo-Norman mother was transformed into a pagan princess who abandoned faith and kin for Becket’s father and Christianity. Pagès uses this wholly fictional legend about the saint to examine the place and function of conversion and mission in The Man of Law’s Tale, juxtaposing the tale with the legend about Becket’s mother to assess the power (or lack thereof) of baptism in late medieval English works. This new comparative study thus provides productive insights into the complexity of the emergence of the concept of race in medieval English culture and literature.

The importance of metrical analysis to the broad work of textual criticism and literary analysis cannot be overstated. In the thirty years since the publication of R. D. Fulk’s A History of Old English Meter, metrical theory has been brought to bear on questions of poetic style, dating and literary history, linguistics and language history, editing practice, manuscript analysis and scribal practice. The essays in this collection include contributions from both new scholars and established metrists. They focus on the application of metrical study to literary criticism and manuscript studies, engaging with current debate and offering new perspectives on the crucial role of metre to Old English scholarship.

In such a wide-ranging, long-standing, and international field of scholarship as Beowulf, one might imagine that everything would long since have been thoroughly investigated. And yet as far as the absolutely crucial question of the poem’s origins is concerned, that is not the case.This cross-disciplinary study by Bo Gräslund argues that the material, geographical, historical, social, and ideological framework of Beowulf cannot be the independent literary product of an Old English Christian poet, but was in all essentials created orally in Scandinavia, which was a fertile seedbed for epic poetry.Through meticulous argument interwoven with an impressive assemblage of data, archaeological and otherwise, Gräslund offers possible answers to the questions of the provenance of the Geats, the location of Heorot, and many more, such as the significance of Sutton Hoo and the signification of the Grendel kin and dragon in the sixth century when the events of the poem, coinciding with cataclysmic events in northern Europe, took place.

The importance of metrical analysis to the broad work of textual criticism and literary analysis cannot be overstated. In the thirty years since the publication of R. D. Fulk’s A History of Old English Meter, metrical theory has been brought to bear on questions of poetic style, dating and literary history, linguistics and language history, editing practice, manuscript analysis and scribal practice. The essays in this collection include contributions from both new scholars and established metrists. They focus on the application of metrical study to literary criticism and manuscript studies, engaging with current debate and offering new perspectives on the crucial role of metre to Old English scholarship.

This is the first full-length study of Robin Hood Christmastime poems, novels, short stories, dramatic and musical performances, material culture, and media. Set in the cozy confines (and harsh climate) of the winter months, there exists a unique genre within the Robin Hood tradition, the winterwood, one that over the centuries has helped to secure the popularity of the outlaw and create and maintain memories of him for audiences of all ages. These winterwood stories unite the Robin Hood tradition with the Christmastime season, welcome performance and performativity, embrace and interrogate the commercial aspect of the season, and are created mostly for children and for families to experience together. As Christmas is a time for peace, mercy, and goodwill toward all, Robin Hood is both the good outlaw and also the trickster, for in these winterwood texts he becomes an exemplar of “proper” Christmastime moral thought and action.

This volume presents new perspectives on the sources, transmission, and reception of Anglo-Latin poetry, ca. 650–1100.In the wake of recent seminal studies on Aldhelm, these essays collectively explore the wider poetic tradition, spanning the Late Antique inheritance through to the eleventh century. By encompassing select studies of both major and lesser-known authors, sources, and works, the volume can present new understandings of the multifaceted intellectual culture that gave rise to this unique and vibrant literary period. It engages with the medium of poetry, including manuscript culture, historical and intellectual backgrounds, and the epigraphic traditions; and highlights idiosyncratic style, metre, poetic diction, and formulas.The Anglo-Latin poetic tradition is notoriously and deliberately challenging, but this accessible collection yields rich new insights from emerging and established Anglo-Latin scholars.

The discovery of seven manuscript fragments of the Old French Suite Vulgate du Merlin in a set of early printed books in the Bristol Central Library hit global headlines in 2019. This book contains a comprehensive study of these fascinating Arthurian fragments.Beginning with an extensive contextual history, the authors reveal details of the fragments’ origin, their importation to England, and their subsequent journey to a waste pile in a bookbinder’s workshop, where they would be incorporated into the bindings of a four-volume edition of the works of Jean Gerson in the early sixteenth century. A full enquiry into the provenance of these host volumes sets out the possible routes from the bookbinder’s workshop to their final home in Bristol Central Library.Using multi-spectral imaging to read the damaged sections of text, the authors also provide a full edition and translation of the narrative contained in the fragments.

Less than a hundred years after Thomas Becket’s martyrdom at the hands of four of Henry II’s knights, his Anglo-Norman mother was transformed into a pagan princess who abandoned faith and kin for Becket’s father and Christianity. Pagès uses this wholly fictional legend about the saint to examine the place and function of conversion and mission in The Man of Law’s Tale, juxtaposing the tale with the legend about Becket’s mother to assess the power (or lack thereof) of baptism in late medieval English works. This new comparative study thus provides productive insights into the complexity of the emergence of the concept of race in medieval English culture and literature.

What does it mean to digitize a medieval manuscript? This book examines this question by exploring a range of advanced imaging technologies, from multispectral to 3D to reflectance transformation imaging. To understand imaging technologies requires an understanding of the complex materiality of what is being digitized and, to this end, the book focuses on the relationship between digital technologies and the complex materiality of manuscripts and the human bodies that engages them.From this perspective, the chapters explore imaging technologies, interfaces to present digital surrogates, and limitations to and enhancements through the digital. But lest past photographic information be lost, the book also examines historical photographs, exploring their rich visual information, and how digitizing and comparing them transforms what can be known. Examples and innovations from the author’s work digitizing the eighth-century St. Chad Gospels at Lichfield Cathedral are provided.This book is essential reading for all those involved in large and small scale manuscript digitization projects in both scholarly and cultural heritage contexts.

This volume presents new perspectives on the sources, transmission, and reception of Anglo-Latin poetry, ca. 650–1100.In the wake of recent seminal studies on Aldhelm, these essays collectively explore the wider poetic tradition, spanning the Late Antique inheritance through to the eleventh century. By encompassing select studies of both major and lesser-known authors, sources, and works, the volume can present new understandings of the multifaceted intellectual culture that gave rise to this unique and vibrant literary period. It engages with the medium of poetry, including manuscript culture, historical and intellectual backgrounds, and the epigraphic traditions; and highlights idiosyncratic style, metre, poetic diction, and formulas.The Anglo-Latin poetic tradition is notoriously and deliberately challenging, but this accessible collection yields rich new insights from emerging and established Anglo-Latin scholars.

This beautifully illustrated book provides an accessible introduction to the medieval manuscript and what it can tell us about the world in which it was made and used. Captured in the materiality of manuscripts are the data enabling us to make sense of the preferences and habits of the individuals who made up medieval society. With short chapters grouped under thematic headings, Books Before Print shows how we may tap into the evidence and explores how manuscripts can act as a vibrant and versatile tool to understand the deep historical roots of human interaction with written information. It highlights extraordinary continuities between medieval book culture and modern-world communication, as witnessed in medieval pop-up books, posters, speech bubbles, book advertisements, and even sticky notes.

This beautifully illustrated book provides an accessible introduction to the medieval manuscript and what it can tell us about the world in which it was made and used. Captured in the materiality of manuscripts are the data enabling us to make sense of the preferences and habits of the individuals who made up medieval society. With short chapters grouped under thematic headings, Books Before Print shows how we may tap into the evidence and explores how manuscripts can act as a vibrant and versatile tool to understand the deep historical roots of human interaction with written information. It highlights extraordinary continuities between medieval book culture and modern-world communication, as witnessed in medieval pop-up books, posters, speech bubbles, book advertisements, and even sticky notes.