Locating the Middle Ages: The Spaces and Places of Medieval Culture (Kings College London Medieval Studies)

by Julian Weiss

This interdisciplinary collection of sixteen essays explores the significance of space and place in Late Antique and medieval culture, as well as modern reimaginings of medieval topographies. Its case studies draw on a wide variety of critical approaches and cover architecture, the visual arts (painting and manuscript illumination), epic, romance, historiography, hagiography, cartography, travel writing, as well as modern English poetry. Challenging simplistic binaries of East and West, self and other, Muslim and Christian, the volume addresses the often unexpected roles played by space and place in the construction of individual and collective identities in religious and secular domains. The essays move through world spaces (mappaemundi, the exotic and the mundane East, the Mediterranean); empires, nations, and frontier zones; cities (Avignon, Jerusalem, and Reval); and courts, castles and the architecture of subjectivity, closing with modern visions of the medieval world. They explore human movement in space and the construction of time and place in memory. Taking up pressing contemporary issues such as nationalism, multilingualism, multiculturalism and confessional relations, they find that medieval material provides narratives that we can use today in our negotiations with the past.

Contributors:
Richard Talbert, Paul Freedman, Sharon Kinoshita, Luke Sunderland, Julian Weiss, Sarah Salih, Konstantin Klein, Katie Clark, Elizabeth Monti, Elina Gertsman, Elina Rasanen, Geoff Rector, Nicolay Ostrau, Andrew Cowell, Joshua Davies, Chris Jones, Matthew Francis.

Contents:
1 Peutinger's Map Before Peutinger: Circulation and Impact, AD 300-1500
2 Locating the Exotic
3 Locating the Medieval Mediterranean
4 Multilingualism and Empire in L'Entrée d'Espagne
5 Remembering Spain in the Medieval European Epic: A Prospect
6 Lydgate's Landscape History
7 The Politics of Holy Space: Jerusalem in the Theodosian Era (379-457 CE)
8 Redefining Space in Early Fourteenth-Century Avignon: The St-Etienne Episode
9 Locating Legitimacy: Architectural Patronage in Schismatic Avignon
10 Locating the Body in Late Medieval Revival
11 Literary Leisure and the Architectural Spaces of Early Anglo-Norman Literature
12 Enclosures of Love: Locating Emotion in the Arthurian Romances Yvain/Iwein
13 The Subjectivity of Space: Walls and Castles in La Prise d'Orange
14 Relocating Anglo-Saxon England: Places of the Past in Basil Bunting's Briggflatts and Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns
15 Recycling Anglo-Saxon Poetry: Richard Wilbur's `Junk' and a Self Study
16 Rewriting Mandeville's Travels

Hardcover

First published December 20, 2012

About the author

Julian Weiss is Professor of Medieval & Early Modern Spanish Studies at King's College, London.

After receiving his DPhil at Oxford (1984), Professor Weiss held positions at the Universities of Liverpool, Virginia, and Oregon, and was appointed to King’s in 2001. In addition to numerous articles on his research topics, he is the author of two books: The Poet's Art: Literary Theory in Castile, c. 1400-60 (1990) and The ‘Mester de clerecía’: Intellectuals and Ideologies in Thirteenth-Century Castile (2006), which was awarded the annual international book prize from the journal La Corónica. He has also edited or co-edited several volumes of essays, including Poetry at Court in Trastamaran Spain: From the ‘Cancionero de Baena’ to the ‘Cancionero general’ (with Michael Gerli, 1998), Cultural Traffic in the Medieval Romance World (with Simon Gaunt, 2004), Reading and Censorship in Early Modern Europe (2010, with María José Vega & Cesc Esteve), and Locating the Middle Ages: The Places and Spaces of Medieval Culture (2012, with Sarah Salih). With Antonio Cortijo, he has produced a critical edition of a Renaissance commentary on Juan de Mena’s Laberinto de Fortuna (1444): Glosa a las ‘Trescientas’ de Hernán Núñez de Toledo, el Comendador Griego (1499, 1505), published in 2013. Among his graduate teaching and research interests is the idea of Muslim Spain in the European imagination from the Middle Ages to the Romantic period.

An associated staff member of the Programme in Comparative Literature, he is a member of the international research group Seminario de Poética Europea del Renacimiento, based at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, http://spr.uab.cat/. Between 2007-10, he served as Director of the Centre for Late Antique & Medieval Studies, King’s College London (an Arts & Humanities Research Centre, 2007-10), and he continues to be general editor of the Centre’s publication series, King’s College London Medieval Studies.