COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES最新文献

{"title":"Courtly and Queer: Deconstruction, Desire, and Medieval French Literature by Charlie Samuelson (review)","authors":"Hilary Rhodes","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912703","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912703","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Courtly and Queer: Deconstruction, Desire, and Medieval French Literature by Charlie Samuelson Hilary Rhodes Charlie Samuelson, Courtly and Queer: Deconstruction, Desire, and Medieval French Literature (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2022), 229 pp. Even as the history of the queer Middle Ages continues to flourish, with a rapidly expanding scholarly focus on premodern gender and sexuality, it remains something of a staple disclaimer that these discourses took place relatively unnoticed, in the margins of medieval society, or that they were not understandable, interpretable, or otherwise applicable to the contextual and critical tools of modern queer theory. Charlie Samuelson’s ambitious monograph challenges both of these ideas by drawing primarily on twelfth- and thirteenth-century narrative romances and fourteenth-century dits, especially those of Chrétien de Troyes and Guillaume de Machaut. By placing these two famous figures of the Old French [End Page 262] literary tradition in a complex and multivariate analytical framework, wherein he reads them and several of their counterparts in conversation with modern queer theorists and queer literary topoi, Samuelson centrally contends that the high medieval genre of courtly love “self-consciously interrogates the indeterminacy of language and poetics and of gender and sexuality” (2). The implications of this thesis are twofold. First, an oeuvre often prone to conservative and patriarchal interpretations, which are then used to reinforce stereotypical depictions of medieval gender and sexuality, is in fact open to a number of subversive and ambiguous readings—in other words, critics should refrain from simply accepting these texts at face value, and instead lean in to the varied, nuanced, and often-times-audacious interrogations of medieval sexuality, gender, and society that exist within them. Second, the literary “sophistication” of these texts, a term often used to designate perceived intellectual merit and proximity to power, does not definitively exclude or foreclose queerness in any way—in fact, sometimes quite the opposite. As such, we are forced to substantially rethink our automatic and reductive assumptions that any “queerness” in the Middle Ages existed unnoticed on the margins of society, rather than in its very literary, cultural, and political center. Samuelson deploys a number of examples and arguments to make his point, some more successfully than others. His command of both the medieval French texts and the modern scholarship on gender and queer theory, particularly that of Judith Butler and Lee Edelman, is undoubted, and he often pinpoints dynamic intersections between past and present, particularly in chapter 2, “Medieval Metalepsis: Queering Narrative Poetics.” By explicitly inviting us to read a variety of medieval romances in a deliberately destabilized framework, where the “interpenetration of ostensibly discrete narrative levels or textual elements” (7","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135712300","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Complete History of the Black Death by Ole J. Benedictow (review)","authors":"Andrew Fogleman","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912682","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912682","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: The Complete History of the Black Death by Ole J. Benedictow Andrew Fogleman Ole J. Benedictow, The Complete History of the Black Death (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2021), xxxii + 1026 pp., 94 ills. The Complete History of the Black Death is ostensibly the second edition of Ole J. Benedictow’s 2004 work by a similar name. But given so much new content (593 more pages than the first edition), it might be considered a new work that builds upon and persistently defends the findings of his first edition. In the spirit of the Annales tradition of “total history,” Benedictow provides the reader with a holistic study of the Black Death, synthesizing an impressive array of regional studies to establish the spread and mortality rates of the plague, providing demographic analysis with attention to source-specific problems, and guiding the reader through modern medical plague studies. Along the way, he argues that the Black Death is best understood as a rat-and-rat-flea-borne disease, that the outbreak of the Black Death happened in the Volga delta of southern Russia from which it spread west to Europe and east to China, and that the European mortality rates—factoring in source-critical reservations—were as high as sixty-five percent. The book is divided into five sections: a description of the Black Death containing its medical, clinical, and epidemiological features (pt. 1); a history of the plague before the Black Death (pt. 2); the outbreak and spread of the Black Death (pt. 3); the mortality of the Black Death with chapter profiles of mortality rates for six countries (pt. 4); and a final reflection that presents the Black Death as a turning point in history (pt. 5). The book also includes a helpful glossary of terms, twenty-three maps, seven figures, and sixty-four tables. At 1026 pages, this book will likely serve as a reference work for readers interested in specific questions, debates, or regional studies of the Black Death. The transmission of plague by the black rat flea was discovered in India and developed by the Indian Plague Research Commission (IPRC) in the early twentieth century. Benedictow draws extensively on their research in this portion of the book, arguing that only black rat fleas satisfy the various conditions needed to support the transmission of plague on an epidemic scale and that there “is not any empirically observed or realistically conceivable alternative of transmission” (34, 37). Benedictow shows that black rat fleas are uniquely suited for transmitting plague because they have developed a peculiar kind of blockage in the fore-gut of their stomach caused by the growth of a biofilm, which blocks infected blood from passing through the flea and causes plague bacteria to move back into bite wounds during feeding, thus infecting the host (33). Human plague cases, Benedictow notes, “do not have a role in the epidemiology of plague” because plague bacteria levels in humans are too low to cause human fleas or lice to transm","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135710991","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Writing Old Age and Impairment in Late Medieval England by Will Rogers (review)","authors":"Benjamin Hoover","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912702","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912702","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Writing Old Age and Impairment in Late Medieval England by Will Rogers Benjamin Hoover Will Rogers, Writing Old Age and Impairment in Late Medieval England (Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2021), 164 pp. Old men hold a prevalent presence in the span of Middle English narrative, however unexpected that presence might be. In a literary milieu wherein one might expect young men and their adventures to predominate, as is the case of the chivalric romance, the aged maintain a high degree of textual visibility, especially given the tendency of medieval narratives to draw attention to visual indicators of their embodied age. Readers of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales recall that the opening narrative of the pilgrims’ story competition—The Knight’s Tale—begins with an invocation of antiquity “Whilom as olden stories tellen us.” Such an acknowledgement of the story’s age, Rogers notes, complicates any totalizing understandings of the later part of the lifespan; oldness is as much a site of authoritative veneration as it is of debility. It is to this pattern of citing narrative antiquity that Will Rogers’s monograph Writing Old Age and Impairment in Late Medieval England first draws our attention. Rogers’s volume reviews a wide range of later medieval English canonical texts and authors from the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Each chapter takes a different author or range of texts as its subject, demonstrating the array of perspectives concerning representations of age in Ricardian and Henrician England. This critical selection includes: the alliterative poems Wynere and Wastoure and Parlement of the Thre Ages, Chaucer’s later lyrics and The Reeve’s [End Page 260] Tale, the reception of Thomas Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes in the early era of incunabula print by William Caxton, and citation of John Gower and his Confessio Amantis in Shakespeare’s Pericles. Rogers further articulates how, among these texts, age and its correlating debility are used as narrative prosthetics. Though the texts’ treatment of this metaphor vary, Rogers finds that “speakers and authors alike use narratives of age-related impairments to highlight and supplement these areas of debility, inability, or infirmity, turning impairment into a prosthetic that challenges the disabling notions of old age” (7). Such is the approach that Rogers lays out in his introduction, noting the several ways in which these texts produce a set of practices regarding the depiction of old age, ranging from critique of youthfulness within the Ricardian context of the fourteenth century to the supplementary role that medieval texts come to embody for early modern writers. The first two chapters, as Rogers notes, offer a focused examination of how Middle English narratives produce old age and how the narrators of these texts utilize narrative as a type of prosthesis, in which they define old age by lack and debility, using narrative to paper over such impairments. Chapter 1 offers a comparativ","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":"140 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135711000","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera by Sarah Kay (review)","authors":"Johannes Junge Ruhland","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912694","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912694","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera by Sarah Kay Johannes Junge Ruhland Sarah Kay, Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022), xix + 270 pp., 38 ills., with companion website by Christopher Preston Thompson. Prompted by “colleagues in musicology who protested at the absence of any discussion of music in [Sarah Kay’s] earlier work on sung texts” (xi), Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera revolves around an ontological question: what is song in the European Middle Ages? Sidestepping the common assumption that song is “the conjunction of words and music” (3), Kay instead focuses on “the act of singing, and the quality of being singable” (2). Positioning herself in the transdisciplinary field of sound studies, Kay places voice at the center of her discussion, at once relating song to the production of human speech and characterizing it as a phenomenon occurring in the wider cosmos (9). Medieval Song provides at least three answers to her ontological question. In its broadest sense, medieval song is the result of touch, light, breath, inspiration, and imagination. In the context of song largely mediated by manuscripts and opera, it is eminently multisensory, and lends itself to what Kay dubs “operatic reading,” a form of attention that grants song the status of sound, performance, and vision. And because no performance exhausts what can be heard in a song, song is essentially anachronic, lingering beyond its time of production and performance. The book’s corpus ranges from Aristotle to opera (including an opera created in 2019) and puts late antique, early medieval, scholastic, and contemporary theoretical writings in conversation with troubadour and trouvère poems, narrative dits, bestiaries, manuscripts, and operas. Kay offers an encyclopedic yet concise sum that complements existing scholarship on medieval song in musicology and literary studies (examples include Ardis Butterfield, Marisa Galvez, Elizabeth Leach, and Judith Peraino). The convergence of operatic reading with work by other scholars (Emma Dillon’s The Sense of Sound [2012] and Bissera Pent-cheva’s AudioVision in the Middle Ages [2023]), suggests how promising operatic reading is for medieval studies writ large. Essential to the book’s documentation and argumentation is a companion website curated by Christopher Preston Thompson (https://cornellpress.manifoldapp.org/projects/medieval-song), to which Kay regularly refers. It features (sometimes multiple) recordings of medieval songs by Thompson and the ensemble Concordian Dawn, texts, scores, and translations, as well as performance reflections by Thompson and Kay. For accessibility, videos are fully captioned. The book’s introduction provides three key parameters for the study to [End Page 240] follow. First, it justifies its definition of song as interconnected with the “wider universe” (9) by shifting attention from words to sound. Second, it develops the notion of operatic read","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135712001","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Symbolizing Reverence and Imperial Identity: The Elephant on the epi ton barbaron Seal","authors":"Quentin Clark","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912669","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912669","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Recent scholarship on Byzantine seals has broadened our understanding of both the practical and symbolic functions of these objects, as it primarily concerns their material, iconographic, and epigraphic content. This article focuses on one of only two known Byzantine seals featuring an image of an elephant. This eleventh-century seal belonged to an individual bearing the title “ἐπὶ τῶν βαρβάρων” ( epi ton barbaron ). Receiving little scholarly attention, this object is generally discussed in the context of other seals of the Byzantine period. I offer a new reading of this object and its image, arguing that the elephant on this seal served two primary functions: it represented its owner’s claim to imperial identity, and it also symbolized its owner’s reverence for the emperor. Through close iconographic and social art historical analysis, I examine the elephant’s use during the Roman and Byzantine periods in three distinct categories: as a motif, as material, and as a living animal. I draw upon primary texts, seals, and ivory objects of the Byzantine period to emphasize the elephant’s imperial associations. I also analyze this seal’s image in conjunction with the administrative titles present in this object’s inscription— epi ton barbaron , in particular. This article expands the ways in which both the iconographic and epigraphic content of Byzantine seals can be used to interpret the symbolic identities their owner’s often project.","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":"140 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135712622","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Flesh and Bones: The Art of Anatomy by Monique Kornell et al (review)","authors":"Emily White","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912697","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912697","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Flesh and Bones: The Art of Anatomy by Monique Kornell et al Emily White Monique Kornell et al., Flesh and Bones: The Art of Anatomy (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2022), 248 pp., 163 ills. Accompanying the 2022 exhibition Flesh and Bones: The Art of Anatomy curated by Monique Kornell at the Getty Research Institute (GRI), this lavish catalog examines the ways anatomy has been presented over the years from the early modern period to the present. The striking images in this volume include dissections, antique sculpture, life-size prints, creative paper flaps, and 3-D stereoscopic photographs. Kornell’s inspiration for this exhibition was the GRI’s acquisition of three life-sized prints from the eighteenth century by engraver Antonio Cattani after anatomical sculptures by Ercole Lelli, which are featured in the catalog. Kornell’s research reinforces that many of the illustrated books and prints in this exhibition are the direct result of close collaboration between anatomists and printmakers. This catalog draws on a wide range of media, primarily from the Special Collections of the GRI. Included among these works are titans of anatomical illustrations such as Jacopo Berengario da Carpi’s Isagogae breves (1523), a first edition of Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (1543), and Govard Bidloo’s Anatomia humani corporis (1685), along with lesser-known innovative anatomy works. Each work in the exhibition is incorporated throughout eight chapters, with additional comparative works and an accompanying fifty-six-item catalog at the end of the volume. Each catalog entry includes a full-page color reproduction with accompanying text that includes information on provenance, formal description, historical context, and their significance to the study of anatomy. The volume begins with an introduction by Italian historian Valeria Finucci overviewing the discipline of anatomy in relation to artistic practices in the Renaissance. Beginning with the landmark reference of Vesalius, Flesh and Bones proceeds thematically through the history of anatomical illustration. Chapter 1 examines key figures in the history of anatomical illustration and lays out a chronology of developments beginning in the mid-sixteenth century up until the mid-nineteenth century. Anyone looking for a useful overview of artistic production in conjunction with the scientific field would do well to study Kornell’s research timeline provided. Chapter 2 introduces the artistic concept [End Page 248] of the “living dead” within anatomical illustration and the animation imbued to lifeless bodies and diagrams. The tradition of depicting corpses seemingly among the land of the living is linked to the Dance of Death, “wound men,” and emotive skeletons. Included are examples of écorché figures in the art treatise of Samuel van Hoogstraten (1678) and studies on dissection from Guilio Casseri’s Pentaestheseion (1609). Kornell argues the purpose of the emotion","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135712302","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"早期英国⽂学与⽐较⽂学散论 by Tianhu Hao (review)","authors":"Lian Zhang","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912691","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912691","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: 早期英国⽂学与⽐较⽂学散论 by Tianhu Hao Lian Zhang Tianhu Hao, 早期英国⽂学与⽐较⽂学散论 [Essays on early English and comparative literature] (Nanjing: Nanjing University Press, 2022), 330 pp. This review was supported by the National Humanities and Social Sciences Foundation, China (authorization: 21BWW046) In the early nineteenth century, Chinese scholars began to read medieval and Renaissance English literature. Ever since the Imperial University of Peking set up an English department in China in 1903, university courses like English literary history and European literary history have generally included medieval and Renaissance English literature. Studies of medieval and Renaissance literature have gradually developed and prospered since the 1970s, after decades of war turmoil and political movements. Chinese scholars have used their own academic experience and research methods, combined with a unique Chinese perspective, to elaborate their particular viewpoints. Tianhu Hao’s new book offers a vigorous and thorough study of medieval and Renaissance English literature, and suggests new attitudes toward the connection between Chinese and Western literary theories and methods in the twenty-first century. This learned book collects twenty-five essays and takes as its subject the study of early English literature and its reception and translation in China. Hao turns to an impressively wide variety and a formidable amount of evidence—history play, romance, sonnet, miniature painting, epic, commonplace book, English and Chinese lyric poetry, translation, university syllabus, encyclopedia entry, and more—to support his central claim that “medieval and Renaissance studies, in literature, history, philosophy, political science, art history, and history of science, though conducted only by a small group of Chinese scholars, not only has significant academic value, but also contributes to a deep understanding of today’s China and the world, and will effectively promote China’s new cultural construction” (301; translation mine, here and throughout). With its perceptive and original readings informed by a judicious recourse to theories, this book makes a major contribution to our understanding of medieval and Renaissance writing and culture and to the history of Chinese and Western comparative literature study. As the title suggests, the role of medieval and Renaissance English literature in Chinese comparative literature study is a central concern of this book. The temporal span of the study is chosen with astuteness: the Middle Ages and the Renaissance were the initial periods of relatively deep contacts and exchanges between Chinese and Western culture (300); in the late 1970s, during the period of reform and opening up, Chinese readers warmly affirmed the value of Shakespeare and the epoch-making significance of the European Renaissance, earnestly calling for a new Chinese Renaissance (300–301); in the twenty-first century, the great national rejuvenation of the n","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135711013","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Dante, Artist of Gesture by Heather Webb (review)","authors":"Martina Franzini","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912706","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912706","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Dante, Artist of Gesture by Heather Webb Martina Franzini Heather Webb, Dante, Artist of Gesture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 208 pp. In Dante, Artist of Gesture, Heather Webb proposes a reading of gestures in Dante’s Comedy that combines textual and visual analysis. Webb argues that Dante intentionally conveys gestures in the Comedy as a narrative strategy to engage readers’ emotions. Since this is a poem about redemption, readers might reproduce the same postures as the souls and join in their process of penance. The book provides a creative methodology incorporating modes of investigation of diverse fields of study. Each chapter presents examples from works of Dante, from the Vita Nova to the Comedy, without necessarily focusing on a distinct section but suggesting instead a cross-canto (and sometimes cross-work) kind of reading to shed light on disparate, noncontiguous moments in the text. Furthermore, every chapter is enriched by images from manuscripts of the Comedy to explain how the text’s visual reception allows us to comprehend Dante’s characterization of gesture. In the first chapter, Webb begins with an overview of theories on gestures through different fields of study. In particular, she looks at visual studies. At the same time, she also clarifies some issues regarding the contextualization of distinct medieval signs. The second chapter continues to set up the methodological foundation for applying viewing models from the visual arts to Dante’s text. Webb recollects some studies investigating the connection between the Comedy and art represented in the Baptistery of Florence, the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, and churches in Assisi. Readers of the poem were the same viewers of art in churches, so they make “connections that traverse the textual and visual fields to fully participate in the poem and its devotions” (50). Webb looks at representation external to the poem and the gestural connection between different cantos to demonstrate how the Comedy approximates viewers’ engagement with [End Page 269] illustrated representation. As an instance of a connection between episodes of gestures in the Comedy and visual depiction of the same gestures in art, Webb argues how Bonconte’s arms crossing in Purgatorio 5 resembles a representation in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. The middle section of the book analyzes passages from Purgatorio. In chapter 3, Webb focuses on gestural choreography in Purgatorio 5 and 6. Dante challenges readers with these cantos to reflect on their condition through specific kinesic descriptions. In Purgatorio 5, Dante’s and Virgil’s actions express a kind of gestural ethics; their movements are indications of an affective reaction to the souls of the Ante Purgatory. Sounds also contribute to this aspect, and Webb observes how the use of a particular interjection, “deh,” serves to catch the attention “both within the diegesis and beyond the frame of the text, reaching to the reader” (75). For ","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135712631","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Holy Digital Grail: A Medieval Book on the Internet by Michelle R. Warren (review)","authors":"Gennifer Dorgan","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912705","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912705","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Holy Digital Grail: A Medieval Book on the Internet by Michelle R. Warren Gennifer Dorgan Michelle R. Warren, Holy Digital Grail: A Medieval Book on the Internet (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022), xiii + 342 pp. Much of today’s scholarship on medieval manuscripts relies exclusively on work with digitized objects—though how much is impossible to know, since authors rarely acknowledge differences between formats of the book they are studying. This is a significant oversight, as Michelle R. Warren’s Holy Digital Grail: A Medieval Book on the Internet lays bare. We have come to take for granted that “forms effect meaning,” as Donald F. McKenzie wrote (quoted by Warren, 28), but the significance of a book’s multiplication of forms over the internet is not merely interpretive. Texts’ long histories in manuscript, print, and digital forms are inseparable from many other histories, including those of nationalism, colonialism, and capitalism. Treating the medieval manuscript as a “hybrid book-form” including its digital parts enables the acknowledgement of these histories in the name of both academic ethics and methodological rigor (31). Combining expertise in textual scholarship and digital humanities, Warren demonstrates how to undertake this multimedia approach to manuscript studies through a case study of Cambridge, Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, MS 80, the titular “medieval book on the internet.” Each of the six chapters tells a different history of MS 80, which contains a Middle English Grail narrative written by Henry Lovelich in the early fifteenth century. Chapter 1, “Translating Arthur: Books, Texts, Machines,” deals with the translation of Arthurian stories from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Lovelich to internet folklorists. Though these authors often obscure their works’ relationships to other texts, every instance of intertextual transfer shapes meaning, a point of which we should be especially aware in an age when governments are researching “fully automatic high-quality translation” (FAHQT) for military purposes (76). FAHQT is one of many elusive technological goals that has been called a “grail”: a mystification that Warren tells us is frequently used to teach users of the internet “not to ask too many questions about machines or their makers” (12). The role of the Grail myth in forming stratified communities is further explored in the next two chapters. In “Performing Community: Merchants, Chivalry, Data,” Warren traces the relationship of MS 80 to the interests of the London Skinner’s Guild, of which Lovelich was a member. The Guild benefitted from social transformations taking place in the fifteenth century, including access to privilege through wealth as well as lineage. Accordingly, Lovelich’s narrative emphasizes social hierarchies while presenting Arthur as a “people’s king” (90). In producing books like MS 80, the Skinner’s Guild aimed to consolidate its own prestige. In the centuries since, many readers h","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":"71 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135712290","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England by Urvashi Chakravarty (review)","authors":"Sarah Bischoff","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912684","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912684","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England by Urvashi Chakravarty Sarah Bischoff Urvashi Chakravarty, Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), ix + 295 pp. Fictions of Consent examines the contradiction between early modern England’s reliance on compulsory service and the claims that English air was “too pure for slaves to breath [sic] in” (John Lilburne’s Star Chamber Case of 1638, cited in Chakravarty, Fictions of Consent, 1). Urvashi Chakravarty highlights that this is [End Page 215] a matter of belief—not just of legislation. This belief made slavery in England (supposedly) an impossibility, despite the immense amount of historical and literary material that attests to compulsory labor and service on the island during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Chakravarty examines this fissure, showing that the philosophical, legal difference between bound service and slavery is, per the title, supposed consent. Chakravarty thus argues that the primary operative fiction is that all persons on English soil willingly serve their betters all the way up to the monarch, who in turn willingly serves god. Such a structure legitimized the paradigm of the supposed impossibility of slavery on English soil—which legally and philosophically rendered enslaved people invisible—but still managed to enforce servitude through many avenues. One example she cites is the often brutal vagrancy and begging laws of the sixteenth century that punished and put to work the “masterless,” or those living outside socially acceptable systems of labor (often the houseless and/or beggars) (4). This coercion, however, is coincidental to the fiction and the mythos of English freedom, even as it is the fundamental contradiction that makes up the very matter of willing servitude. The ideological dependence upon this hairsplitting is that the idea of consent honed the fictions that underwrote and authorized compulsory servitude, even as it made slavery ostensibly impossible. This consent is a fiction in multiple senses of the word, Chakravarty argues: it is, as mentioned, an imagined reality that makes up the legal structures that forbid slavery on English soil, despite there being documented presences and an evident economic reliance on enslaved people; it is a rhetoric that turns compulsory labor into willing devotion and service; it becomes integral to the emergences of what will define the family, genealogy, and race. Of particular importance, also, is that these fictions reshape social reality as time continues, even as their artificiality stands out. These fictions can (and do) defend both the naturalization of racialized slavery and the naturalization of somatically marked race itself. These traced emergences make Chakravarty’s text a useful one for following questions of service and slavery across multiple centuries, from Engl","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":"66 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135712595","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}