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To Hear with Early Ears: Hearkening to Premodern Sound Studies Exemplaria Pub Date : 2024-03-12 Paul Michael Johnson
Published in Exemplaria: Medieval, Early Modern, Theory (Vol. 36, No. 1, 2024)
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Sending a Message to the Future: (Deep) Time Travel in and through Medieval Icelandic Literature Exemplaria Pub Date : 2024-03-12 Philip Lavender
This article seeks to understand how medieval Icelandic authors may have considered the possibility of speaking to the future. In the absence of explicit statements to this effect, it does this by ...
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Unlyric: The Lute-Object in Early Modern English Poetry Exemplaria Pub Date : 2024-03-12 Danila Sokolov
Considering that early modern poetic theory retains the classical genealogies and iconographies of lyric poetry as song to the accompaniment of a lyre, how can one account for lyrics which portray ...
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Discerning Race: Humoralism and Jonson’s Comic Poetics in Every Man Out of His Humour Exemplaria Pub Date : 2024-03-12 Yunah Kae
This article shows how Jonson devises a racialized comedy form to navigate the increasingly complex social terrain of early modern London. Reading the avant-garde “comical satire” Every Man Out of ...
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Caring for Chastity in Milton’s Mask Exemplaria Pub Date : 2024-03-12 Connie Scozzaro
John Milton’s Mask dramatizes a story of three young siblings, a sister and her two brothers, who find themselves lost in a magical forest. While they initially stick together, the brothers acciden...
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Mediality, Materiality, and Medieval Books Exemplaria Pub Date : 2024-03-12 Sarah Kay
Published in Exemplaria: Medieval, Early Modern, Theory (Vol. 36, No. 1, 2024)
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On Chaucer, Raptus, and the Physician’s Tale Exemplaria Pub Date : 2023-12-21 Robyn A. Bartlett
This article argues both that the Physician’s Tale explicitly addresses the sexually threatening nature of employment for women, and that it offers a suggestive parallel to the situation as it may ...
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Disputing the Cisgender Body in A Disputacioun Betwyx Þe Body and Wormes Exemplaria Pub Date : 2023-12-21 Zachary Engledow
Whether in its medieval or modern instantiations, flesh conjures to mind the various material forms and networks that constitute the body. Historically, medieval theologies on the body tend to gend...
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Objects, Matter, and Assemblage: Orientalism and Awe in Robert de Clari’s Constantinople Exemplaria Pub Date : 2023-12-21 Joseph Derosier
This article proposes to read Robert de Clari’s account of Constantinople through the lenses of vibrant materiality, orientalism and the ethics and affects of colonial pursuit. Why was his account ...
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Priests, Poets, and Saints: The Entanglement of Literature and Religion in Early Modern Europe Exemplaria Pub Date : 2023-12-21 Ellen McClure
Published in Exemplaria: Medieval, Early Modern, Theory (Vol. 35, No. 4, 2023)
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Chaucer’s The Merchant’s Tale and the Sense of Having Exemplaria Pub Date : 2023-10-16 H. M. Cushman
Critical accounts of The Merchant’s Tale often take one of two points of view. On the one hand, many readings of the tale focus on its representation of sensory perception and the metaphor of Janua...
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Profitable Beholding in The Fyve Wyttes Exemplaria Pub Date : 2023-10-16 Arthur J. Russell
The Fyve Wyttes, a unique Middle English manual of moral sensology, begins with a promise to instruct readers in the spiritual advantages of governing their bodily senses. While the manual is organ...
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Remote Sensing: Touch at a Distance Exemplaria Pub Date : 2023-10-16 Lara Farina
Today’s remotely operated sensors extend and restructure geographies of feeling. While media theorists often claim that these sensory transformations result from recently developed machinery, this ...
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Looking Like a Lollard Exemplaria Pub Date : 2023-10-16 Thomas A. Prendergast
The increasing emphasis on ocular communion in the later Middle Ages highlighted the paradox that attended the Eucharistic miracle—that, at the elevation of the host, one is looking at the body of ...
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Obscene Activity: Rethinking Agency and Desire in Early Medieval England Exemplaria Pub Date : 2023-10-16 Una Creedon-Carey
The Exeter Book, a tenth-century collection of Old English poetry, contains ninety-odd riddles describing human interactions with objects, abstract concepts, and the natural world. Significant rece...
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Between Historicism and Theory: Reading Early Modern Tragedy Today Exemplaria Pub Date : 2023-10-16 Victoria Kahn
Published in Exemplaria: Medieval, Early Modern, Theory (Vol. 35, No. 3, 2023)
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The Elf and the Cyborg Exemplaria Pub Date : 2023-10-16 Adin E. Lears
Building from scholarship accentuating the confluence of science, technology, and economics in The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, I argue that Chaucer critiques the pursuit of mastery associated with alche...
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Claustrophobia, Race, and The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man Exemplaria Pub Date : 2023-10-16 Shoshana Adler
The universal Christian subject at the center of The Pilgrimage of the Lyf of Manhode is a figure dependent on racist difference for a coherent experience of self. This essay focuses on the allegor...
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Eating Well/Well Eaten: Lot’s Wife’s Folly and the Wisdom of Salt in Cleanness Exemplaria Pub Date : 2023-09-11 Jamie C. Fumo
ABSTRACT In attributing the punishment of Lot’s wife to a culinary misuse of salt, the Cleanness-poet evinces salt’s potential as a vexed and unstable signifier in medieval cultural discourse. Far from clarifying the workings of divine justice, the poet’s rationale for Lot’s wife’s punishment actually exposes the inconsistencies of her story in its moral setting. Cleanness deviates from the predominantly
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Matter and Meaning: Early English New Materialisms Exemplaria Pub Date : 2023-09-11 Adin E. Lears, Tekla Bude
ABSTRACT New materialism is often understood as a modern theoretical solution to a modern ontological problem (that is, it critiques the forms of violence against human and nonhuman beings that the Enlightenment birth of “humanity” and “humanism” engendered). This cluster’s introductory article argues that the Anglo-European Middle Ages, rather than being historically absolved from the effects of Western
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“Of spicerie of leef, and bark, and roote”: Recombinative Materiality in the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale Exemplaria Pub Date : 2023-09-11 Rebecca Davis
ABSTRACT Geoffrey Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale offers a rich case study of the dynamic materiality of food and its relation to literary practice. A particularly complex version of what Jane Bennett describes as “edible matter,” spices challenge our assumptions about material passivity, both because of their well-documented allure and because of their charismatic but finally insubstantial
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Shamanizing Matter: Whiteness and the Materiality of Belief Exemplaria Pub Date : 2023-09-11 Wan-Chuan Kao
ABSTRACT Shamanism is as much a cultural technology as a material hermeneutics. In its westward transmission, the legend of an Asiatic shaman who rode a horse into the sky and foretold the Mongol imperium transformed into a dream vision of a knight in white armor on a white horse who uttered the prophecy to Genghis Khan. Yet the divide between the Oriental shaman and the European knight is illusory
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“Roote out those odde rymes!”: The Unruly Matter of Early Modern Verse Exemplaria Pub Date : 2023-09-11 Bethany Dubow
ABSTRACT This article focuses on the literary-critical metaphors of late sixteenth-century England, taking as its starting point Thomas Lodge’s 1579 call to “roote out those odde rymes which runnes in euery rascales mouth.” In contrast to the humanist poetics that envisioned poetic form as geometric, even transcendent, artifice, Lodge’s language (“roote out,” “runnes”) suggests the earthbound and invasive
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“Manlike, but Different Sex”: Genealogies of Trans Femininity in Milton’s Paradise Lost Exemplaria Pub Date : 2023-09-11 Nat Rivkin
ABSTRACT This article examines how Paradise Lost serves as a source for trans studies from the field’s inception in the 1990s. Susan Stryker cites Adam’s fallen lament as a conclusion to her landmark essay “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Mountain of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,” but she uses his speech without attending to the troublingly misogynistic direction in which it turns
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Life in the Grotto: Montaigne & the Meaning of Posthumanism Exemplaria Pub Date : 2023-09-11 Chad Córdova
ABSTRACT This article delineates two principles of the grotesque in Renaissance visual art, texts, and garden grottoes, one more superficial and one more radical. In sixteenth-century Europe, the latter mode finds its most striking manifestation in the Essays (1580–95) of Michel de Montaigne. The Essays offer a paradigm for grotesque thinking, one that crucially inflects contemporary ideas on the potentialities
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Flesh Side: Reading Bodies and Boethius in the Yale Girdle Book Exemplaria Pub Date : 2023-04-17 Kayla Lunt
ABSTRACT How does the parchment codex inform a text’s meditations on what it is to be bound by and to one’s body? The Yale Girdle Book (New Haven, Beinecke MS 84) contains Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy; it is bound with a soft leather wrapper that, shroud-like, envelops the codex and reveals that it was meant to be worn. Enabled by the material and affective turns and the field of skin studies
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Courtly Carnality: Consuming Flesh in the Lai d’Ignaure Exemplaria Pub Date : 2023-04-17 Anthony Revelle
ABSTRACT In the Lai d’Ignaure twelve ladies who share the same lover are tricked by their husbands into eating his heart and genitals, cooked as meat in a stew. When the jealous husbands declare that they have fulfilled the ladies’ desire for flesh, the ladies counter with the claim that they were already replete with Ignaure’s love, and they swear to die since they could never again have a meal of
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The Anchorite as Analysand: Depression and the Uses of Analogy Exemplaria Pub Date : 2023-04-17 Spencer Strub
ABSTRACT Contemporary scholars sometimes analogize premodern acedia to modern depression, finding promise in ancient therapies for acedia—chiefly forms of bodily activity and mental discipline. This article identifies an alternative model of medieval ascetic therapy in a brief passage in Ancrene Wisse in which a mother playfully hides from her child, who is left to cry alone until she returns and embraces
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Cosmography and/in the Academy: Authorizing the Ideological Pathways of Empire Exemplaria Pub Date : 2023-04-17 Nedda Mehdizadeh
ABSTRACT This article examines how the study of premodern cosmographical knowledge in the modern classroom can educate students about how knowledge is made. Through my discussion of a course unit that considers Richard Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations (1589) in conversation with Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia (1544), I demonstrate how these premodern visions of the world created ideological pathways
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On the Shimmer of the Black Madonna Exemplaria Pub Date : 2023-02-03 Emma Maggie Solberg
ABSTRACT This article argues that the ambiguity and scarcity of the evidence for the existence of the Black Madonna before the year 1500 need not prevent medievalists practicing premodern critical race studies from pursuing further study of her early history. Applying the work of Cord Whitaker on the “shimmer of blackness” in the medieval archive and of Karin Vélez on the mutability of the coloration
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Evoking Pure Narrative in La Chanson de Roland’s Laisses Similaires Exemplaria Pub Date : 2023-02-03 Trask Roberts
ABSTRACT This article proposes a rereading of the famed laisses similaires of the Oxford manuscript of La Chanson de Roland to highlight how contradictory elements (emotions, actions, dialogue, etc.) stubbornly resist being smoothed away for conventional narrative harmony’s sake. These laisses similaires, successive retellings of presumably the same event in different words, occur at several key moments
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Translatio Studii as Literary Innovation: Marie de France’s Fresne and the Cultural Authority of Translation Exemplaria Pub Date : 2023-02-03 Michael Lysander Angerer
ABSTRACT Medieval translations can be a shaping force in emerging vernacular literatures, as Marie de France’s Fresne and its Old Norse and Middle English translations demonstrate. While Sif Ríkharðsdóttir highlights that each version is adapted to its target literature, these texts also draw on the cultural authority of translatio studii to legitimize innovation. This article traces each text’s influence
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Nonbinary and Trans Premodernities Exemplaria Pub Date : 2023-02-03 Karma Lochrie
Published in Exemplaria: Medieval, Early Modern, Theory (Vol. 34, No. 4, 2022)
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Forum Editors’ Introduction: Spaces and Times of Crisis Exemplaria Pub Date : 2022-10-11 Elizabeth Allen, Gina Marie Hurley, Mary Kate Hurley
Published in Exemplaria: Medieval, Early Modern, Theory (Vol. 34, No. 3, 2022)
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Verifying Confession: Finding Space for Truth in Le Bone Florence of Rome Exemplaria Pub Date : 2022-10-11 Gina Marie Hurley
ABSTRACT In the late fourteenth-century romance, Le Bone Florence of Rome, the titular heroine finds herself at the center of a crisis. Her reputation has been the subject of so many lies and so much deceit that it is hard to imagine she will ever be vindicated, or indeed, that anyone’s words about anything could be trusted again. To remediate this hopeless situation, Florence takes an unusual step
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Gawain, Race, and the Borders in The Turke and Sir Gawain1 Exemplaria Pub Date : 2022-10-11 Nahir I. Otaño Gracia
ABSTRACT This essay works through ideas of settler colonialism, displacement, and border-crossings in order to investigate the character of Gawain. The Middle English Romance, The Turke and Sir Gawain (TG), seems to follow Gawain as he learns to be a better knight and to uphold ideologies of inclusivity, courtesy, and virtue which appear to invite and accept difference. Nevertheless, Gawain’s attributes
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Langland’s Ethical Imaginary: Refuge and Risk in “Piers bern” Exemplaria Pub Date : 2022-10-11 Jennifer Sisk
ABSTRACT Originally imagined as both granary and church writ large, Langland’s Barn of Unity morphs into a space of refuge-in-crisis as it is besieged by Antichrist and the Seven Deadly Sins in Piers Plowman’s apocalyptic finale. Central to Langland’s imagining is a conundrum at the heart of hospitality, the Latin root of which means not only guest and friend but also stranger and enemy. Within Unity
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Communities in Crisis: The Medieval Archive and the Jewish Heritage Traveler Exemplaria Pub Date : 2022-10-11 Emily Steiner
ABSTRACT This essay considers how the experience of being a Jewish heritage traveler inflects the author’s approach to reading and teaching medieval literature. For the author, Jewish heritage travel, whether medieval or modern, tells alternative histories which rely upon alternative ways of seeing and interpreting in the face of ongoing, chronic crisis. Just as the medieval travel narrative of Benjamin
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Crisis And Ambivalent Futures in Middle English Romance Exemplaria Pub Date : 2022-10-11 Catherine Sanok
ABSTRACT This paper seeks to contribute to recent work that explores the relationship between affect and temporality by looking at the relationship between crisis, ambivalence, and futurity. The cluster’s operative definition of crisis, highlighting its early use to indicate a turning point in the progress of a disease, already links crisis to possible alternative futures: unlike a catastrophe — an
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The Afterlives of Crisis: Harold and Custer on The Slipstream Exemplaria Pub Date : 2022-10-11 Tarren Andrews
ABSTRACT My contribution to this cluster seeks to situate and understand the Vita Haroldi through slipstream — a genre of Indigenous Sci-Fi writing that enacts temporal sovereignty in the past, present, and future. The Vita Haroldi (BL Harley MS 3776), a story about King Harold II’s life living in the Welsh borderlands after the Battle of Hastings, can be understood as an alternate temporality constructed
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No Future, Perhaps* Exemplaria Pub Date : 2022-10-11 Karma Lochrie
ABSTRACT This essay explores the medieval idea of contingent futurities, especially as it is explored by Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde. In contrast to the prevalent understanding of the divine experience of futurity as an eternal present made famous by Boethius and The Consolation of Philosophy, the human experience of sublunar futurity is plagued by uncertainty, fear, anticipation, and even regret
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Preaching to the Choir Fantastic: Conversion and Racial Liminality in Elene Exemplaria Pub Date : 2022-10-11 Mariah Junglan Min
ABSTRACT In Cynewulf’s Elene — an Old English verse narrative in the Inventio Crucis tradition, which survives in the Vercelli Book — the figure of Judas stands out among the Jews of Jerusalem as the only person present who can answer Helena’s questions about the location of the True Cross. Although critical consensus has considered Judas to be an archetypal representative of the Jewish population
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Guilt Historicism: Walter Benjamin’s “Capitalism as Religion,” Aura, and the Case of Chaucer’s Pardoner Exemplaria Pub Date : 2022-07-15 George Edmondson
ABSTRACT This article takes up Walter Benjamin’s allusive 1921 sketch “Capitalism as Religion” in order to think about the place of debt and guilt in our relation, as members (or perhaps apostates) of what Benjamin describes as the “purely cultic religion” of capitalism, to the Middle Ages. My focus here is on two aspects of Benjamin’s sketch. One is its evocation, diametrically opposed to that found
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“The pitous pite deserveth”: Justice, Violence, and Pity in the Prioress’s Tale and “The Jew and the Pagan” Exemplaria Pub Date : 2022-07-15 Jessica Hines
ABSTRACT This article analyzes the role of pity in the construction and management of structures of antisemitism in late fourteenth-century English literature. Reading poet John Gower’s “The Jew and the Pagan” from the Confessio Amantis and his close contemporary Geoffrey Chaucer’s the Prioress’s Tale as in dialogue with one another, I ask how to make sense of the logic of these two tales that espouse
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Travels in Deleuzean Time: Virtual Pilgrimage, Temporal Paradox, and the Newberry and Bicester Stacions of Rome Exemplaria Pub Date : 2022-07-15 Logan Quigley
ABSTRACT Extant in nine manuscripts, the fourteenth-century poem The Stacions of Rome is often relegated to the dustbin of pilgrimage propaganda. Turning to its presence in two understudied manuscripts, Newberry Case MS 32 and National Archives PRO SC 6/956/5 (known as the “Bicester” roll), this article proceeds from C. David Benson’s recent argument that the Stacions should be reconsidered within
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Gorboduc on Fire: The Pyropoetics of Tyranny in Early Modern England Exemplaria Pub Date : 2022-07-15 Harriet Archer
ABSTRACT This article rereads Norton and Sackville’s Inns of Court tragedy Gorboduc (1562) in the light of its neglected preoccupation with fire. It posits the 1561 lightning strike on St Paul’s as a critical context for the play’s emphasis on fire as a motor of providential justice, through the repeated evocation of the myth of Phaethon, and locates its use of fire in performance at the intersection
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Early Modern Civility: A Pre-Democratic Form of Living Together? Exemplaria Pub Date : 2022-04-28 Hélène Merlin-Kajman
Published in Exemplaria: Medieval, Early Modern, Theory (Vol. 34, No. 2, 2022)
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Swimming Through the Fires: The Lucretian Beast Fable in The Duchess of Malfi Exemplaria Pub Date : 2022-04-27 Kate Bolton Bonnici
ABSTRACT In this article, I investigate the operative force of the insufficiently studied beast fable in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi in light of the physics-poetics of the Lucretian clinamen and by bringing together theoretical perspectives from Michel Serres, Jacques Derrida, and Louis Marin. The Duchess’s fable is a radical intervention capable of arresting the drama’s tragic structures.
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Animal Umwelt and Sound Milieus in the Middle English Physiologus Exemplaria Pub Date : 2022-04-27 Liam Lewis
ABSTRACT The Middle English Physiologus features three different nonhuman animals — the lion, the mermaid, and the elephant — whose vocalized sounds resonate on literal and figurative levels. The networks of relationality that ascribe agency to these beings through the representation of sonic phenomena are complex in ways that exceed the conceptual boundaries of a textual “soundscape.” Drawing on recent
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Pure Pleasure: Cleanness and Fourteenth-Century Sexual Liberation Exemplaria Pub Date : 2022-04-27 James C. Staples
ABSTRACT Although the critical tradition reads the Middle English poem Cleanness as a homophobic endorsement of heteronormativity, this article insists that the fourteenth-century poem contributes to a much more interesting moment in the history of sexuality. Cleanness includes one of the most shocking celebrations of sexual pleasure from the Middle Ages: without any reference to procreation, God exhorts
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Human Vulnerability and Natural Slavery in The Faerie Queene Exemplaria Pub Date : 2022-04-27 Jeffrey B. Griswold
ABSTRACT This article traces Aristotelian ideas about natural slavery through Book VI of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. By putting the Salvage Man episode in conversation with Louis Le Roy’s commentary on the Politics, I demonstrate that the poem naturalizes the enslavement of extra-European peoples. This reading reconsiders analysis of the Salvage Man as a figure of savage assimilation. Rather
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Marvelous Monstrosity and Disability’s Delights: New Directions in Premodern Critical Disability Studies Exemplaria Pub Date : 2022-04-27 Jennifer Eun-Jung Row
(2022). Marvelous Monstrosity and Disability’s Delights: New Directions in Premodern Critical Disability Studies. Exemplaria: Vol. 34, No. 1, pp. 87-101.
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Intersex Between Sex And Gender In Cause Et Cure Exemplaria Pub Date : 2022-02-17 François·e Charmaille
ABSTRACT This article argues that intersex is present in medieval medical texts outside of the medieval concept of hermaphroditism. The phlegmatic man, the phlegmatic woman, and the sanguine man, in the twelfth-century medical text Cause et cure, all exhibit intersex characteristics. The close examination of the terms in which these figures are described also shows that the elaboration of intersex
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The Kelmscott Chaucer: The Book-Object, its Facsimiles, and Labor Exemplaria Pub Date : 2022-02-17 Kathleen Coyne Kelly
ABSTRACT William Morris’s Kelmscott Chaucer was an attempt to reproduce an “authentic” medieval artifact, albeit as a printed book rather than as a handwritten manuscript. The Kelmscott invites us to theorize about the medieval book; the medievalized book; the reproduction or facsimile of the medieval book; and the reproduction or facsimile of the medievalized book. The Kelmscott also urges us to consider
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Francis of Assisi on Protecting, Obeying, and Worshiping with Animals Exemplaria Pub Date : 2022-02-17 Susan Crane
ABSTRACT Francis of Assisi is well known for his devotion to all God’s “creatures,” from worms and fish to moon and stars. Francis’s devotion also has some little known dimensions that are unprecedented in his own time but that anticipate central tenets of posthumanist animal theory and ecotheology. In the earliest Franciscan documents, Francis asserted that he obeyed non-human animals as an expression
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Medieval Knowledges in Practice: Cognitive Rituals and the Epistemic Body Exemplaria Pub Date : 2022-02-17 Wesley Chihyung Yu
(2021). Medieval Knowledges in Practice: Cognitive Rituals and the Epistemic Body. Exemplaria: Vol. 33, No. 4, pp. 389-399.
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Editors’ Introduction: The Case for a Medieval Barthes Exemplaria Pub Date : 2021-12-16 Jennifer Rushworth, Francesca Southerden
(2021). Editors’ Introduction: The Case for a Medieval Barthes. Exemplaria: Vol. 33, The Case for a Medieval Barthes, pp. 209-219.
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Making Flowers Speak: Petrarch and Idiorrhythmy Exemplaria Pub Date : 2021-12-16 Francesca Southerden
ABSTRACT This article brings Petrarch’s (1304–74) lyric poetry into dialogue with Barthes’s notion of “idiorrythmie” (idiorrhythmy) as outlined in his lecture course Comment vivre ensemble (How to Live Together). It explores both the idiorrhythmic aspects of Petrarchan desire and the traits of lyric utterance through which they are expressed, with a focus on canzone 126 of Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium
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“An Inert and Neutral State of Form”: Zero-degree Writing, Photography, and Early Prose Narrative in French Exemplaria Pub Date : 2021-12-16 Jane Gilbert
ABSTRACT Part of my project on literary form in translation, this article stages a dialogue between, on the one hand, the formal and stylistic qualities of medieval literary French prose in the first half-century of its practice, and, on the other, Roland Barthes’s essays on zero-degree writing and on photography. French literary prose, which came to the fore suddenly around 1200 ce, presents itself
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Barthes’s “Musica Practica” and its Antecedents Exemplaria Pub Date : 2021-12-16 Matthew Cheung Salisbury
ABSTRACT This article explores Roland Barthes’s use of the term musica practica (which emanates from historical theoretical treatises on music) in his eponymous essay of 1970, which was originally a contribution to a journal issue dedicated to Ludwig van Beethoven. It is possible that Barthes was familiar with the term either from awareness of medieval music theory or through its secondary use by writers