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

{"title":"Balthazar: A Black African King in Medieval and Renaissance Art ed. by Kristen Collins and Bryan C. Keene (review)","authors":"Caitlin Irene Dimartino","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912685","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912685","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Balthazar: A Black African King in Medieval and Renaissance Art ed. by Kristen Collins and Bryan C. Keene Caitlin Irene Dimartino Kristen Collins and Bryan C. Keene, eds., Balthazar: A Black African King in Medieval and Renaissance Art (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2023), xiii + 152 pp., 121 ills. In his introduction to Balthazar: A Black African King in Medieval and Renaissance Art, Henry Louis Gates Jr. aptly acknowledges the “enormous symbolic weight” that Black subjects have borne in the history of European art (xii). His observation is particularly applicable to representations of the biblical figure Balthazar, one of three kings present at the birth of Christ who, beginning in the late fifteenth century and continuing over the course of the early modern period, was increasingly understood in European visual culture, theological texts, and popular imagination as a Black king from the African continent. Building from a 2019 exhibition at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, Balthazar: A Black African King in Renaissance Art does more than simply chart racialization of a Christian holy figure across time. This text brings together manuscripts, paintings, sculptures, textiles, and portable objects to illustrate the interconnectedness of Africa and Europe and the dramatic impact of African diplomats, pilgrims, and missionaries on European audiences before and up through the onset of the slave trade. As the fulcrum around which the objects are organized, artistic interpretations of Balthazar reflect the absolute multiculturalism and plethora of exchange and [End Page 218] interchange between Africa and other parts of the world, while the shifting representation of Balthazar’s ethnicity, accoutrements, dress, or entourage registered fluctuating and multitudinous reactions to African sovereignty, piety, diplomacy, and subjection from a European perspective. As such, the text offers an alternative to the more common narratives of Blackness and Christianity through a binary model, where Black skin is relegated either to sinfulness, ethnography, and paganism or to purely positive representations of holy figures. The book’s three sections each begin with thematic overviews by the editors followed by focused essays from specialists on African art of Ethiopia, Nubia, West Africa, as well as of Europe and the African diaspora. This range of expertise speaks to the expansiveness of the theme of the Black Magus in premodern visual culture, as well as to the interconnectedness of Africa and Europe long before the “discovery” by the Portuguese on the Gold Coast in the sixteenth century. Sections are punctuated by “in focus” texts on language, memory, diaspora, and contemporary art, and the book closes with an essay by Tyree Boyd-Pates, a consultant to the project, who addresses the importance of telling a broader history of the early modern world that includes agency for people of African descent and that elevates Black subjects, especially in ","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":"34 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":"135712269","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":"Basilisks and Beowulf: Monsters in the Anglo-Saxon World by Tim Flight (review)","authors":"Scott Royle","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912689","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912689","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Basilisks and Beowulf: Monsters in the Anglo-Saxon World by Tim Flight Scott Royle Tim Flight, Basilisks and Beowulf: Monsters in the Anglo-Saxon World (London: Reaktion, 2021), 262 pp., 20 ills. The first book by author Tim Flight, Basilisks and Beowulf: Monsters in the Anglo-Saxon World, is a look into the various diabolic creatures that shared the land with the Anglo-Saxon peoples of medieval Britain. Flight presents a clear investigation of the origins, social utility, and Christian adoption of the various creatures that were said to plague the lands of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, including wolves, dragons, demons, and humanoids. The author takes special care to evidence how these monsters, and their homes, still influence our misunderstandings of the “other” and an ongoing weariness of the wild. After a very concise introduction, which includes pertinent historical remarks on Anglo-Saxon history, Flight’s first chapter, “The Map of Monsters,” geographically situates the coming chapters by providing an overview of the locations and habitations of monsters through both Graeco-Roman and Old English textual references, notably from The Wonders of the East, The Letters of Alexander to Aristotle, and the Liber monstrorum. It is in this section that the author demonstrates that a clear division between a civilized and uncivilized world existed in the cultures that influenced the Anglo-Saxons and that they readily adopted this division. As evidenced in their own writings, monsters were as much a part of the scenery for the Anglo-Saxons as any other natural wonder with “monsters [forming] part of the natural fauna of uncivilized places at the edge of the world” (61). In chapter 2, “Of Wolf and Man,” and chapter 3, “Hic Sunt Dracones,” Flight considers two of the most persistent monsters in the Anglo-Saxon world: the wolf and the dragon. Of the wolf, the author attests that the obvious nuisance of its preying upon the livestock of Anglo-Saxon farmers, combined with the viciousness of its attack, produced a supernatural fear of the animal. Despite the wolf’s acting within its own nature, the specimen was not only deemed a monster in the natural sense but one in opposition to that which is holy, with Flight saying that for this reason, “the wolf is both a monster and a diabolic creature” (73), one that dares defy the sanctity of God’s most innocent creations. While there is no evidence that dragons ever existed, Flight demonstrates in the next chapter that in the Anglo-Saxon world they were a very real fear and cited in numerous Old English texts. The author proposes that the perplexity of the dragon lends to its use as a device of otherness that encouraged a continued division between civilized and uncivilized lands, saying that “the dragon is able to fulfil [its] symbolic role because it is a monster of the pagan wilderness” (102). Ingrained into the mythology of the dragon is its greed, with many stories commenting on its lust for attainin","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":"135712623","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":"Art and Curiosity Cabinets of the Late Renaissance: A Contribution to the History of Collecting by Julius von Schlosser, and: Kunstkammer: Early Modern Art and Curiosity Cabinets in the Holy Roman Empire by Jeffrey Chipps Smith (review)","authors":"Rachel Daphne Weiss","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912704","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912704","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Art and Curiosity Cabinets of the Late Renaissance: A Contribution to the History of Collecting by Julius von Schlosser, and: Kunstkammer: Early Modern Art and Curiosity Cabinets in the Holy Roman Empire by Jeffrey Chipps Smith Rachel Daphne Weiss Julius von Schlosser, Art and Curiosity Cabinets of the Late Renaissance: A Contribution to the History of Collecting, trans. Jonathan Blower, ed. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2021), xi + 231 pp., 98 ills. Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Kunstkammer: Early Modern Art and Curiosity Cabinets in the Holy Roman Empire (London: Reaktion, 2022), 317 pp., 189 ills. Efforts to understand the macrocosm through the conceit of the microcosm may well be transhistorical, but their modern Euro-American origins can be alluringly traced to the Kunstkammer. Emerging mainly within dominions of the Holy Roman Empire during the early modern period, Kunstkammern (pl., art and curiosity cabinets) describe both physical sites of collection display and a particular orientation to the practice of collecting shared among princely patrons. Kunstkammern were fundamentally eclectic, juxtaposing works of art, natural objects, natural objects reimagined as works of art, tools, instruments, antiquities, and other miscellanea in service of complex ambitions. Such collections had microcosmic pretensions; they functioned as representations of their owner’s wealth, power, and aesthetic judgment; they triggered scientific inquiry through their wondrous and challenging materializations; and they helped to fathom and to impose order onto a cosmos destabilized by religious strife and encounters with peoples and geographies previously unknown to Europeans. Research on Kunstkammern has proliferated since the 1970s and 80s, but Julius von Schlosser’s Die Kunst- und Wunderkammern der Spätrenaissance planted the seeds of this avid interest upon its publication in 1908. Due to its hitherto untranslated state, Schlosser’s groundbreaking contribution has languished in the footnotes of Anglophone scholarship, rarely piercing the veil to become a subject of study in its own right. It is a boon, therefore, that this landmark was targeted for the Getty Research Institute’s (GRI) Texts and Documents series, appearing in translation by Jonathan Blower as Art and Curiosity Cabinets of the Late Renaissance: A Contribution to the History of Collecting with a substantial introductory essay by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann. That this publication was closely followed by Jeffrey Chipps Smith’s Kunstkammer: Early Modern Art and Curiosity Cabinets in the Holy Roman Empire gives further cause for excitement, as Smith’s study grounds what had through a multitude of perspectives become a dauntingly expansive field of study. The GRI publication’s success lies, in part, in its treatment of Schlosser’s text as a historical document. While Kaufmann analyzes the text’s ideas about and interpretations of Kunstkammern, much of the introduction","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":"72 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":"135710994","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 Nonsense: Signifying Nothing in Fourteenth-Century England by Jordan Kirk (review)","authors":"Kashaf Qureshi","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912696","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912696","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Medieval Nonsense: Signifying Nothing in Fourteenth-Century England by Jordan Kirk Kashaf Qureshi Jordan Kirk, Medieval Nonsense: Signifying Nothing in Fourteenth-Century England (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021), 187 pp. While the term “signification” lends itself to oversaturation in literary studies, it poses a unique problematic in the study of medieval literature, where critics too often treat texts as puzzles meant to be secured into predetermined, discernable fixtures. Jordan Kirk reminds us to remain open to the idea that the interpretive purchase of medieval texts is, in fact, their inchoateness, engaged in the play of not making meaning, or nonsense. Bringing together the grammatical arts of the Middle Ages, the discipline of medieval logic, and fourteenth-century contemplative literature, Medieval Nonsense: Signifying Nothing in Fourteenth-Century England reorients us toward the ubiquity of nonsignification in medieval thought. Through the book’s structural organization, Kirk draws the mind’s ear into the world of nonsignification, each chapter divided by short subtitles such as “Bu, Ba, Buf,” emblematizing a verbal crux at the heart of each section. Kirk’s designs are intentional, and he describes the four main chapters of the book as a sequence of commentaries operating as “a set of mind engines” that “allow for awareness to encounter itself in the mirror of the past” (21). Because of this methodological commitment, some of the book’s innovations are understated. For instance, Kirk’s archive may seem odd at first—the first two chapters are an exhaustive linguistic history whereas the second two chapters each analyze a single work of experimental literature, respectively The Cloud of Unknowing and St. Erkenwald. However, these archival choices produce a cogent literary history that encompassed what I considered to be one of Kirk’s most compelling and salient [End Page 245] contributions: a call for the renovation of the category of the literary itself. For Kirk, the literary is a hermeneutic mode rooted in the emptiness of words, a topic most explicitly explored in the book’s introductory prolegomena. In the prolegomena, Kirk asks readers to think of Medieval Nonsense as an “archeology of the literary” (24), where literature encompasses any text that is “engineered in such a manner as to arrest the faculty of interpretation and force it to focus on the nonsignificative event of language itself” (25). In the treasury of these first twenty-six pages, where Kirk constellates nonsignification in Chaucer’s House of Fame, modernist literature and theory, and Anslem of Canterbury’s ontological proof of God, readers will discover what might be shared between medieval texts and avant-garde poetics, opening an exciting avenue for transhistorical literary theorization. This book will largely appeal to medievalists working in the fields of linguistics, philosophy, religion, and literary studies; but its introduction should b","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":"40 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":"135711236","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 Lost Kingdom of St. Vladimir: Crusading Mentality, Medieval Memory, and the Russia-Ukraine War","authors":"Hilary Rhodes","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912676","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912676","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine has reawakened interest in the long-running historical, political, and cultural sources of the conflict, and produced a vast discourse from Russian, Ukrainian, Western, and other regional, national, and international actors. While such analyses often focus on Vladimir Putin’s perceived desire to rebuild the Soviet Union as it existed from 1922 to 1991, this article argues that his chief motivations, and the ultimate sources of his rhetoric, are drawn from much deeper medieval roots. It explores the premodern ancestries of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, Prince Vladimir the Great’s conversion to Orthodox Christianity in circa 988, and Russia’s deeply complicated relationship with the medieval crusades, especially in regard to the thirteenth-century Baltic expeditions and the heroic depiction of Prince Aleksandr Nevsky (1221–63) as a crusading defender against aggressive Western invaders. By demonstrating how the conflict between Russia and the West has long been perceived or cast in metaphors, rhetoric, and symbolism with explicit crusading origins, from the Baltic crusades to the Crimean War (1853–56) to the present-day struggle, the article offers a comparative perspective on medieval and modern historiography, illuminates the medieval origins of an ongoing modern global and geopolitical issue, and urges scholars to consider more complex frames of reference for both this war and the memory and usage of the crusades more generally.","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":"135712276","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":"Louise of Savoy’s Epistles of the Heroines as a Fashion Statement","authors":"Juliet Huang","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912672","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912672","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This article examines issues that surround portraits of ancient heroines in a manuscript commissioned by the French noblewoman Louise of Savoy at the end of the fifteenth century. With a focus on the images of Phaedra and Laodamia, this article explores how clothes worn by the sitter amplify, confirm, and transform the subject’s identity in relation to the many roles women played at the French court, such as wives and regents, and through which they exercised their influence. Through meaningful representations of dress, the manuscript emerges as a subtle commentary on contemporary court politics in light of the ancient examples and moral principles they illustrate, and in particular as an implicit and subtle argument in support of the significant role and efficacy of women in politics. The multiplicity of identity that clothing constructs for the sitter ushers in new understandings of royal- and noblewomen’s political, social, and intellectual aspirations.","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":"24 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":"135712293","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":"Western Monastic Spirituality: Cassian, Caesarius of Arles, and Benedict ed. by Roger Haight, Alfred Pach III, and Amanda Avila Kaminski (review)","authors":"Lucas P. Depierre","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912690","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912690","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Western Monastic Spirituality: Cassian, Caesarius of Arles, and Benedict ed. by Roger Haight, Alfred Pach III, and Amanda Avila Kaminski Lucas P. Depierre Roger Haight, Alfred Pach III, and Amanda Avila Kaminski, eds., Western Monastic Spirituality: Cassian, Caesarius of Arles, and Benedict (New York: Fordham University Press, 2022), 136 pp. In this accessible introduction to Western monastic spirituality, Roger Haight (Union Theological Seminary in New York), Alfred Pach III (Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine), and Amanda Avila Kaminski (Texas Lutheran University) offer primary texts from three classic figures: John Cassian (d. ca. 435), Caesarius of Arles (d. 542), and Benedict of Nursia (d. 547). These texts are accompanied by an introduction on the historical context, as well as a concluding essay that engages spirituality in the present day. These editors have published the volume within the series Past Light on Present Life: Theology, Ethics, and Spirituality, with a threefold aspiration (130–31): (1) providing historical context for the primary texts and their authors to introduce the central theme, in this volume “western monastic spirituality”; (2) offering primary texts that serve as testimony to the key insights of the classical figures under study; and (3) providing reflections on the enduring relevance of those teachings in our current life. In contrast with the promising title, this work falls short of engaging Western monasticism as a comprehensive phenomenon but succinctly presents the three figures mentioned in the subtitle. In general, the introduction of the historical context (part 1, pp. 1–20) is unsatisfactory if not misleading. For instance, it fails to notice that Cassian’s spiritual themes are primarily addressed to individual ascetic sages rather than regulated monasteries; in fact, what evidence is there that he ever found a community? Explaining that Caesarius simply “translates Cassian’s theory” (9) overlooks the crucial significance of contrasting paradigms (eremitical/communal) in the birth of monasticism—and even monasticisms. The introduction of the texts themselves disregards the complexity of late antique and early medieval sources that have intricately shaped Western monasticism and these specific texts. The assertion that Caesarius solely relies on [End Page 230] Augustine and Cassian (9) is dubious. For example, living in Arles, Caesarius probably knows De vita contemplativa of Julianus Pomerius who died in Arles around 499–505. The exhortations to virgins by Clement of Rome (d. ca. 99) or De laude heremi of Eucherius of Lyon (d. ca. 449) addressed to Hilary of Arles (d. ca. 428) may have also influenced him. Furthermore, in contrast to an idealist picture, the Eastern inspiration of monastic spirituality was not only conveyed in the south of France through the mediation of Cassian as the reader may believe reading this volume. Notably, Rufinus of Alquileia (d. ca. 411) had translated the In","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":"39 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":"135712284","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":"Early Modern Trauma: Europe and the Atlantic World ed. by Erin Peters and Cynthia Richards (review)","authors":"Justine Semmens","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912700","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912700","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Early Modern Trauma: Europe and the Atlantic World ed. by Erin Peters and Cynthia Richards Justine Semmens Erin Peters and Cynthia Richards, eds., Early Modern Trauma: Europe and the Atlantic World (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021), xii + 397 pp., 7 ills. Melinda Rabb opens the afterword to Early Modern Trauma with a rich and satisfying salvo that more than justifies the need for more research into the role and impact that trauma played in shaping early modern texts: “Seen through the complex lens of contemporary trauma theories, the early modern world discloses its vulnerabilities, its catastrophes, and its strategies for representing experiences that defy representation” (361). First developed as a field of Freudian psychoanalytical theory in the 1990s, trauma studies originally posited that extreme experiences of physical, psychological, and emotional suffering can cause severe disruptions in memory, the integrity of identity and the psyche, and an epistemological rupture between the experience of this suffering and the inadequacy of language to describe or comprehend it. Although trauma was initially pathologized as a diagnostic function for clinical settings, by the early aughts deploying trauma as a category of analysis was beginning to enter the margins of the lexical toolbox of literary criticism, cultural studies, and historical analysis. Much of this scholarship has concentrated on examinations of trauma in modern or, even more precisely, the late modern contexts and social rupture of industrialized war, genocide, and mass economic migration that has isolated the interrogation of trauma from the more distant past. The first aim of Early Modern Trauma, a collection of essays edited by Erin Peters and Cynthia Richards, is to urge scholars of premodern art, literature, and society to take more seriously the opportunity to examine the early modern past through the lens of trauma studies—a lacuna they argue that is all the more vexing because the early modern world was shaped by the sort of rupture and violence that trauma studies is devoted to understanding. Peters and Richards point out that scholars of the early modern world have exhibited a certain amount of reticence about configuring trauma studies into their analyses on the basis that it introduces anachronistic models of identity, individuality, and social belonging that cannot be accurately or reliably transported to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The second aim of this collection of essays is to demonstrate that trauma theories can be applied fruitfully “beyond and before” contemporary experience that “transcends time” (4). In other words, while what constitutes a traumatic event is specific to cultural, historical, and social contexts, violent and unspeakable rupture remains germane to the human experience of trauma. The ways that various texts and the authors that produce them ultimately derive meaning from trauma by synthesizing it into their s","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":"65 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":"135712289","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":"Jewish Identity, al-Andalus, and Interfaith Communities: The Medieval Legacy of Islamic Spain","authors":"Aaron Forman","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2022.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2022.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The Jews of al-Andalus experienced two interconnected military conquests that constituted major shifts in the history of medieval Iberia. The Almohad invasion of 1148 resulted in mass displacement of Jews, many of whom fled to the Christian kingdoms of northern Spain and Provence in modern-day southern France. Subsequently, the rapid territorial expansion of the Christian kingdoms of Castile and Aragon following the 1212 Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa ensured that by the mid-thirteenth century, much of the remaining Jewish population in al-Andalus was now living under Christian rule. However, changes in political territory did not necessitate total cultural transformation. Indeed, legacies of Jewish life in al-Andalus continued to permeate the culture of its diaspora, but discontinuities also emerged with each succeeding generation. Ultimately, the perpetuation of cultural symbols such as ideas of exceptionalism within the diaspora, use of the Arabic language, references to admired figures of the Andalusi past, and adaptations to professional activity that enabled the continuation of trading practices demonstrates the strong presence of the idea of al-Andalus in the identity of the medieval Jewish communities of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Christian Spain and Provence.","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":"53 1","pages":"103 - 120"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48430906","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":"A Warning for Fair Women: Adultery and Murder in Shakespeare's Theater ed. by Ann C. Christensen (review)","authors":"Francesca Bua","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2022.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2022.0011","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":"53 1","pages":"238 - 240"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45447163","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}