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

{"title":"Investigating Identities in Late Antiquity: A Case Study of the Roman Weapons Burial Deposit from the Sintrivani Basilica in Thessaloniki","authors":"Errikos Maniotis","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912675","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912675","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: The identification of “peoples” is the oldest purpose that the study of burial rites has been made to serve. Written sources tell us that in late antiquity different peoples migrated into the Roman Empire, both in the Western and in the Eastern half. Cemetery archaeology provides one of the most important sources for early medieval social history. Weapon deposits should not be excluded from this process. The current paper investigates the armament of a soldier’s burial found in a grave attached to the so-called Sintrivani Basilica in Thessaloniki, Greece, dated to the early fifth century CE and how the study of arms and armor combined with other archaeological findings could help us to explore identities in late antiquity. The most interesting weapon of the deceased from the whole hoard is the sword that had been found bent. This striking and critical feature led me to correlate it with the ritual of “killing a weapon.” The bent sword expresses complex social statements about status and identity and functions as a clue that the soldier was a “Romanized” Goth or from another Germanic tribe who served as a mercenary (foederatus) in the imperial Roman forces. Considering the importance of the burial location, it is also clear that the deceased was a high-ranking officer of the Roman army.","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":"135712297","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":"Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature ed. by Carol Mejia LaPerle (review)","authors":"Christina Kolias","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912698","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912698","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature ed. by Carol Mejia LaPerle Christina Kolias Carol Mejia LaPerle, ed., Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature (Tempe: ACMRS Press, 2022), vii + 221 pp., 4 ills. Carol Mejia LaPerle’s Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature is a welcome and noteworthy contribution to the Premodern Critical Race Studies (PCRS) field, as it is the first collection to discuss race’s direct relationship to affect theory in early modernity. In recent years, there has been an increase in interest and resistance to the rich history of PCRS scholarship, which seeks to question the supposed universality of early modern canonical literature. La-Perle’s collection embodies a similar task, where the past contributes to present understandings of racial formation and race-making. What sets this collection apart is each scholar’s personal connection and racial investment in exposing white supremacy and its affective relations in early modern texts and culture. Each contributor, through their means of rhetorical resistance and reckoning, proves that affect is a powerful lens to investigate race. Considering “affect is persistent proof of a body’s never less than ongoing immersion in and among the world’s obstinacies and rhythms, its refusals as much as its invitations” (Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010], 1), every chapter in this collection highlights not just the stark anti-Blackness of the period and its preservation of racist ideologies and categorizations but race’s many passionate affects that inform (un)belonging. Tracking the nuances of affect displays its variability as a verb and noun, where affect is expressive through thoughts (internal) and actions (external). Even LaPerle’s introductory reference to critical works by W. E. B. Du Bois, Fred Moten, and Calvin L. Warren draws attention to the collection’s focus on one retrospective question—how does race feel? The importance of feelings and passions in affect studies highlights the imbrication of externalized disgust and difference internalized by racialized subjects. Even though the collection analyzes early modernity’s attempts at dominance and disempowerment, the authors in this collection, as LaPerle notes, capture the spirit [End Page 250] of bell hooks’s “oppositional gaze.” Each contributor’s use of hooks’s gesture as methodology not only lays a foundation for the change they desire in the field but also, most importantly, illustrates the interplay between criticism and activism. The collection contains three equally balanced sections, each applying intersectional and/or cross-disciplinary lenses committed to uncovering racializing regimes and the importance of feeling race as evidenced in early modern literature and culture. The editor skillfully assembles a first-class group of con","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":"135711011","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 Chastity Plot by Lisabeth During (review)","authors":"Robyn McAuliffe","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912687","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912687","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: The Chastity Plot by Lisabeth During Robyn McAuliffe Lisabeth During, The Chastity Plot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 391 pp. The title of this book draws attention to a device or, as During reveals, a preoccupation of the media we consume. The “chastity plot” forms central narratives in contemporary books, films, and television shows (for example, Jane the Virgin and the American Pie franchise). The sociologist Laura Carpenter has written extensively on the stigmatization of virginity and virginity-loss within the United States in particular. Lisabeth During’s The Chastity Plot, however, is a much-needed and important new addition to the conversation surrounding chastity, covering a multitude of literary and cross-cultural traditions to identify and explicate the cultural preoccupation with chastity and virginity that has endured since antiquity. Drawing on examples from many literary genres, During uses each chapter to chart the glorification and downfall of the chastity ideal. She begins first with a brief introduction to the concept of chastity, its prevalence within contemporary evangelical and conservative Christian teachings, and its links with morality, before moving in chapter 1 to an elucidation of the differences between “the eunuch’s plot” favored by Church writings, specifically within saints’ lives, and “[c]hastity plots,” which “stage a struggle against the social insistence on marriage and reproduction” (30). From her analysis of the female saint Thecla, [End Page 223] known for her chastity and allegiance to the teachings of St. Paul, and the eighteenth-century advocate of chastity, Pamela, from Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, During moves on to an analysis in chapter 2 of the tragic hero Hippolytus, whose devout allegiance to the chaste state in Euripides’s classical Greek tragedy Hippolytus ends in turmoil. This is a particularly effective chapter for its exploration of male chastity, its links with misogyny within the play, and the dangers of an unchecked and uncontrolled male chastity. Chapter 3 focuses on the “antimarriage plot” and the issue of reconciling chastity with marriage (87). During’s analysis focuses predominantly on female characters who resent prescriptive marriage and seek a life of asexual independence; specifically, she looks to those in Aeschylus’s The Suppliants, the myth of the misandrist Chinese princess Turandot in various literary forms, including Gozzi’s Turandot, before turning to the twentieth-century antimarriage narrative of The Philadelphia Story. Chapters 4 and 5 take a more religious turn, focusing on the “radical sexual renunciation” of Christianity and the difficulty of aligning chastity with conjugality (132). Both chapters focus on the ascetic’s desire to return to a prelapsarian condition of sexual innocence, a sentiment that flavors many ecclesiastical diatribes advocating the spiritual benefits of virginity. Chapters 6 and 7 explore both the early mo","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":"51 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":"135711997","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":"Chaucer and the Ethics of Time by Gillian Adler (review)","authors":"Arpit Gaind","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912677","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912677","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Chaucer and the Ethics of Time by Gillian Adler Arpit Gaind Gillian Adler, Chaucer and the Ethics of Time (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2022), x + 230 pp. In Chaucer and the Ethics of Time, Gillian Adler examines temporality and structures of time in the works of fourteenth-century English poet Geoffrey Chaucer. Adler picks five of Chaucer’s seminal works, organized as five separate chapters with an introduction and a conclusion, addressing themes of morality, aesthetics, and epistemological structures in order to show the “temporal ethics” (2) of time in Chaucer’s poetry. Chaucer and the Ethics of Time demonstrates the ways in which Chaucer argued for ideas of subjectivity, free will, and chance that govern human individuality. Drawing from Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy and Augustine’s Confessions, Adler examines how time is experienced and the role of “intentionality” in understanding the past and its relevance to the present. According to Adler, the active transformation of the “now” and shaping how memory is structured govern Chaucer’s project of human ethics (7). Adler also explores Chaucer’s reworking of the moral and social discourses on temporality in the Middle Ages, where wasting time was considered a “sin of acedia.” In “The Process of Time in the Parliament of Fowls,” Adler starts with the writings of Shakespeare while giving a vivid description of the medieval notion of wasting time as a sin and expressing time as a virtue (124). However, Adler shows how Chaucer, in his works, departs from such a binary of sins and vices and points toward a more complex relationship that temporality shares with human subjectivity. The author points out the use of subversion in Chaucer as a way to move toward ambiguity showing temporal discourses as neither “productive” nor objectively accurate. Adler draws upon Chaucer’s work on poetic form and its impact on temporality by distinguishing between “story” and “narrative.” The former, for Chaucer, is a depiction of events, and the latter is about the structure of those events and the retelling of the story. For Adler, the dichotomy of story and narrative in Chaucer’s work is of great significance, as it shows the representational practices of language and literature during the Middle Ages; the poet created both “tales on time” and “tales about time” (17). Another theme of significance in Chaucer and the Ethics of Time is the question of “anachronism.” Adler argues that Chaucer’s works counterpose the wholeness and singularity of time and reasons for the ruptures and “fragmentations” that emerge in the human experience of time (39). For instance, in “Seeing Time and the Illusion of Control in Troilus and Criseyde,” Adler draws upon Chaucer’s Translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy in Troilus and Criseyde. Adler demonstrates well how Chaucer constructs time and its impact on the Thebes-Trojan “historical continuum,” as well as what the city of London as a fantasy mea","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":"55 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":"135712291","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 Manuscripts and Literary Forms by Jessica Brantley (review)","authors":"Sally Elizabeth Tozer","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912683","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912683","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Medieval Manuscripts and Literary Forms by Jessica Brantley Sally Elizabeth Tozer Jessica Brantley, Medieval Manuscripts and Literary Forms (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), xiv + 346 pp., 25 ills. In Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms, Jessica Brantley impresses upon fledgling medievalists the importance of understanding the distinctions between encountering modern print books and encountering medieval ones. She questions what it means to physically navigate a digital edition, versus a print edition, versus the manuscript artifact in its extant form, which is to consider not only the past life of the codex as a material artifact but also its future transmission in the form of a digital facsimile. Considered as such, the life of the manuscript book is a circular one. Finding its genesis in the technological advancements that precipitated the codex form, the manuscript book presages the organizations of language and data found in the modern print book, and, in turn, how digital “books”—laptops, tablets, smartphones, and e-readers—are visually organized and virtually navigated. Rather than imagining the field of manuscript studies as one ruptured by the proliferation of online facsimiles—in which one body of scholars, versed in a dying art of tactile research, stands in opposition to a newer cohort, literally and metaphorically unfeeling in their commitment to digitization—Brantley reminds readers of the contingency of material and virtual forms. It is for this reason, no doubt, that all of the case-study texts in her book are fully accessible online, equipped with borderline-nostalgic, page-turning features and enhanced with the ease of virtual navigation. The newfound accessibility of these landmark texts can further proliferate the practice of global medieval studies and renew appetites for manuscript investigation. In the first section of the book, a vocabulary that describes the physical features of the manuscript artifact is outlined, elucidating the later section’s “heuristic categories [which are] meant to be portable, not determinative” (115). In conjunction with the glossary, this section offers readers an arsenal of terminology, a series of keys by which the entrances to the codicological surface of the manuscript can be unlocked. These terms relate variously to material support (“the material upon which the text is inscribed” [323]); inks and pigments (lamp-black, iron gall, atramentum, lapis lazuli, scarlet kermes); paleographic scripts (calligraphic and cursive hands, Gothic, textura, secretary script); codex structure and layout (collation, binding, pricking, ruling); decoration, illumination, and illustration; as well as errors, absences, abbreviations, and editorial details. Each aspect partakes in the overall impression of the manuscript and each offers scholars ample material for interpretation, comparison, and analysis. Collectively, these terms furnish the reader’s mind with a too","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":"135712602","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":"Rethinking the Ancient Druids: An Archaeological Perspective by Miranda Aldhouse-Green (review)","authors":"Rachael Maxon","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912678","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912678","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Rethinking the Ancient Druids: An Archaeological Perspective by Miranda Aldhouse-Green Rachael Maxon Miranda Aldhouse-Green, Rethinking the Ancient Druids: An Archaeological Perspective (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2021), xvii + 188 pp., 55 ills. The Druids have long stood as one of the great mysteries of the distant past. Faced with a lack of written records and scant archaeological remains, scholars have had to contend with the testimonies of late Greek and Roman writers, such as Julius Caesar, Lucan, Tacitus, Diodorus Siculus, and Cassius Dio, in order to understand these perplexing figures. Instead of accepting these foreign writers at face value, Aldhouse-Green critically engages with their testimonies and places them in context with the archaeological record in order to investigate the veracity of the ancient claims against the physical evidence. As a companion to Nora Chadwick’s 1966 monograph The Druids, Ald-house-Green’s Rethinking the Ancient Druids engages with recent archaeological excavations in Britain and Wales that show clear evidence of people with religious knowledge, that are associated with religious objects, or sites that show remains of organized ritual behavior. While Andrew Fitzpatrick also uses this approach of combining the textual and the archaeological record, Aldhouse-Green’s approach to who was considered a Druid is much broader and includes not only “those who called themselves Druids, but also those whose communities recognized them as such, as well as those who simply held religious knowledge and spiritual skills” (2). This broader definition allows her to attribute more archaeological material to the Druids. Rather than reanalyze old evidence with her new methodology, Aldhouse-Green uses the latest evidence from recent [End Page 200] archaeological investigations in Britain, Gaul, and Wales. She includes Wales even though it usually gets left out of traditional discourses, because she believes it has similar archaeological evidence to that of Britain and Gaul, and therefore should be included in discussions about the Druids, as she shows throughout the book. Two major arguments run throughout the book. The first is that the Druids may have left more traces of their existence in the archaeological record than we have come to believe. Aldhouse-Green believes that by shifting our perspectives on the available archaeological remains, we might find more traces of the Druids at sites across Britain and Wales. The second argument is that Wales had a “pivotal rather than peripheral role in a religious leadership usually portrayed as a primarily Gallic phenomenon” (3). This, she argues, can be seen once Welsh mythological texts such as the Mabinogion are combined with the Welsh archaeological record, a claim she supports primarily in chapter 5. By including the finds from Wales alongside those of Britain and Gaul, she argues that new patterns may emerge that shed light on the elusive Druids. The book ","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":"117 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":"135712630","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":"Brokers of Salvation: Merchants and Missionaries in the Europeanization of the North, 800–1300","authors":"Wesley Gaines","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912670","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912670","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: The conventional narrative of the conversion of Scandinavia to Christianity depicts a top-down, mass conversion carried out by the monarchs of Scandinavian kingdoms. This paper adds to these analyses the preexisting economic relationship between trade towns of Latin Christendom with Scandinavia and the Baltic and credits this trade for carrying ideas and cultural norms to the region, as well as for establishing trade routes along which missionaries would follow in the footsteps of these merchants. It traces the establishment of official bishoprics and sees of the Latin Church in Scandinavian and Baltic trade towns as well as the adoption of distinctly European forms of social organization. It also lends agency to the people of Scandinavia themselves, adding to the narrative their understudied role in the process by crediting their chieftains with willfully and strategically importing Christianity for their own gain rather than depicting them as passive agents with change foisted upon them from the outside. The primary sources bear out not an immediate change, but a gradual one, carried out not by armies and kings, but by merchants and trades-men, clergy and chieftains in their daily interactions, which built up social networks, compiled social trust, and contagiously spread cultural norms.","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":"33 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":"135712597","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 t4t Gift Economy and Its Romance within the Middle English Lai Sir Launfal","authors":"Alice Fulmer","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912671","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912671","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Contemporary discourse around t4t (trans for trans) relationships involves speculation about bodies in transition. What do such relationships signify toward the bodies of compulsory heterosexuality, not just today, but in the historical record? In the case of the Middle English lai tradition, a t4t framework assists a postmodern audience in uncovering instances not only of gendered affects relative to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries but also of the affect economies that facilitate (or negate) gender affirmations. Romances such as Thomas Chestre’s Sir Launfal (a translation of a twelfth-century lai of Marie de France) exhibit romantic, platonic, and (the potentiality of) sexual relationships from which a semblance of t4t dynamics is constructively reassembled. Looking at some of the poem’s central characters and their relationships’ dynamics, both from Sir Launfal and from the larger “Lanval” tradition, provides a means from which t4t can be understood as a framework—one that measures not only affect between transgender individuals but also social systems like gift economies within the text that bear resemblance to contemporary mutual aid networks in transgender communities today. Instances of camp and parody within the romance genre historically are also observed in this paper. The gift economies in Sir Launfal and their gender affirmations propel the narrative’s resolution to demonstrate how they scaffold the genre of romance within the Middle English lai. This is an inquiry into exploring what focusing a distinctly trans lens can do when looking.","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":"135712605","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":"Imagining Anglo-Saxon England: Utopia, Heterotopia, Dystopia by Catherine E. Karkov (review)","authors":"Melissa X. Stevens","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912693","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912693","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Imagining Anglo-Saxon England: Utopia, Heterotopia, Dystopia by Catherine E. Karkov Melissa X. Stevens Catherine E. Karkov, Imagining Anglo-Saxon England: Utopia, Heterotopia, Dystopia (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2020), vii + 272 pp., 11 ills. Imagining Anglo-Saxon England: Utopia, Dystopia, Heterotopia, by distinguished art historian Catherine E. Karkov, questions presumptions about “Anglo-Saxon” England and English claims to superiority that have resulted in centuries of violence. Karkov distinguishes between England, the literal location, and “Anglo-Saxon” England, a signifier onto which ideas about the place are projected. England has never had a single, monolithic ethnicity or culture; it has always been a heterogeneous place comprising multiple identities. Karkov argues that “Anglo-Saxon” England is a signpost onto which is mapped the identities, ideologies, “empty ideas and hierarchies that have emerged within Anglo-Saxonism” (26). This distinction enables her to separate the field of early [End Page 237] medieval studies from contemporary white supremacist groups that endorse racist, homophobic, and misogynist ideologies while misappropriating early medieval English and Viking myths, legends, objects, words, and symbols. The Angles and Saxons were two of the Germanic groups that migrated to England during and after the Roman occupation. Karkov frames the underlying argument by stipulating that people who populated early medieval England and came to be known collectively as the “Anglo-Saxons” viewed themselves—via a set of compelling origin myths—as a chosen people arriving in a promised land. These myths facilitated the denial and erasure of the violence they committed against the land’s original inhabitants, retelling these atrocities as supernaturally preordained. This cultural tendency repeated as the English colonized other parts of the world. Karkov’s critical theoretical analyses of several early medieval English texts utilize psychoanalytical and philosophical concepts of time and space, particularly utopia and its variants, dystopia, heterotopia, and retrotopia. She uses encryption to propose that the early English denied and erased the brutality of their origins while simultaneously perpetuating the illusion of superiority, enabling them to continue practicing invasion, usurpation, and settler colonialism. According to Karkov, they accomplished this via conceptions of utopia, a discontent with the present that leads to anticipating a different future. She examines the political and cultural implications of stories about “Anglo-Saxon” England that have hugely impacted early medieval English scholarship, creating the foundation for attitudes that endure, manifesting as gatekeeping in today’s politics, popular culture, and the academy. Karkov employs several theoretical concepts to address the idea of utopia underlying the construct of “Anglo-Saxon” England. She suggests that the idea of the uncanny can demonstrate how the En","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":"55 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":"135712607","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":"Animal-Human Relationships in Medieval Iceland: From Farm-Settlement to Sagas by Harriet J. Evans Tang (review)","authors":"Amanda Coate","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912688","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912688","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Animal-Human Relationships in Medieval Iceland: From Farm-Settlement to Sagas by Harriet J. Evans Tang Amanda Coate Harriet J. Evans Tang, Animal-Human Relationships in Medieval Iceland: From Farm-Settlement to Sagas (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2022), 258 pp., 14 ills. In Animal-Human Relationships in Medieval Iceland, Harriet J. Evans Tang examines interactions between humans and other animals in medieval Iceland. Evans Tang approaches this topic using multiple disciplines and a variety of sources (including literature, legal texts, and archaeological evidence), and illustrates the numerous ways in which animals participated in and influenced Icelandic society [End Page 225] and culture. Chapter 1 considers the roles of domestic animals in the settlement of Iceland during the late ninth and early tenth centuries. It employs archaeological evidence, the Landnámabók (a work that describes the settlement of Iceland, the oldest surviving copies of which date to the thirteenth century), and selected Íslendingasögur (sagas of Icelanders, likely compiled between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries but containing narratives set several centuries earlier). Evans Tang argues that Iceland underwent a “co-settlement” dependent on “mutual care and cooperation, and the apparent mediatory role of animals between humans and their new land” (23). The Landnámabók and sagas depicted animals—sometimes in the guise of paranormal entities such as “land-spirits,” other times as more naturalistic animals—as variously aiding settlers by leading them to desirable land, escaping settlers’ control to form their own communities, and hindering settlers’ prosperity. This shared animal-human process of settlement led to shared animal-human living spaces, and chapter 2 discusses archaeological findings of potential animal-buildings at two Viking Age sites: Vatnsfjörður in the Westfjords and Sveigakot in northern Iceland. Drawing on archaeologist Kristin Armstrong Oma’s concept of animal-human “meeting points” and spatial analysis techniques, Evans Tang demonstrates how settlers built in response to the needs of domestic animals and how the organization of farmsteads might have impacted the daily interactions between animals and humans that occurred there. One avenue of research that might be explored further is Evans Tang’s hypothesis that the compilers of the Landnámabók and the sagas sought to depict a version of Icelandic settlement that “create[d] longevity for ideas of Icelanders as responsible farmers” (50). That is, these textual sources emphasized Icelanders’ interactions with domestic animals and their importance to settlement. However, Evans Tang notes that some archaeologists have recently proposed that the earliest settlement of Iceland was motivated by walrus-hunting. If this turns out to be the case, what would have been the cultural impacts of such a shift from walrus-hunting, which implies a close entanglement with animals in the wilderness, to an","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":"44 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":"135712615","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}