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This article seeks to understand how medieval Icelandic authors may have considered the possibility of speaking to the future. In the absence of explicit statements to this effect, it does this by looking at representations of time travel — or chronodisplacement — within medieval Icelandic sagas. When something from the past abruptly appears in the narrative, the past is seen as communicating with its future. The examples looked at include undead mound-dwellers, long-lived wanderers and the Icelandic version of the Seven Sleepers. The frequent association of voices emerging from the past with the underland is considered, particularly in relation to Iceland's geology. This is also linked to the possibility for medieval Icelanders to engage with deep time. The analysis reveals that Icelandic authors were interested in the dynamic of the past speaking to its future, but chose always to represent it within a past setting. Moreover, authors seem to have been aware that speaking to a future inevitably involves changes in media and the materiality of communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medieval translations can be a shaping force in emerging vernacular literatures, as Marie de France's Fresne and its Old Norse and Middle English translations demonstrate. While Sif Ríkharðsdóttir highlights that each version is adapted to its target literature, these texts also draw on the cultural authority of translatio studii to legitimize innovation. This article traces each text's influence using Itamar Even-Zohar's polysystem theory, having determined their position within the literary polysystem through textual and manuscript contexts. Each version constructs its own cultural authority to reshape the polysystem for different ideological purposes, thus producing texts that differ both from their source material and the norms of their target literatures. This is most apparent in their representations of courtliness: by invoking translatio studii, the Anglo-Norman Fresne establishes an exemplar of sincere interiority-based courtesy, whereas the Old Norse Eskia instrumentalizes French prestige to legitimize a performative ideal of courtliness in Norwegian literature. Conversely, the Middle English Lay le Freine uses translatio to reinvent its genre as the socially inclusive Middle English Breton lay, where courtliness is primarily a literary effect. Intervernacular translations therefore emerge as a key source of innovation in vernacular polysystems, pointing towards a new approach to comparative medieval literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers how the experience of being a Jewish heritage traveler inflects the author's approach to reading and teaching medieval literature. For the author, Jewish heritage travel, whether medieval or modern, tells alternative histories which rely upon alternative ways of seeing and interpreting in the face of ongoing, chronic crisis. Just as the medieval travel narrative of Benjamin of Tudela lists Jewish monuments in Rome alongside Christian ones, modern heritage tours intersect with and deviate from mainstream historical narratives, highlighting the achievements — and suffering — of the Jewish minority. To examine medieval literature from this vantage point leads the author not only to construct a parallel archive of Jewish-authored narratives, but also to find surprising examples of collective identity, borne of trauma and the shared experience of crisis, in Christian anti-Semitic sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My contribution to this cluster seeks to situate and understand the Vita Haroldi through slipstream — a genre of Indigenous Sci-Fi writing that enacts temporal sovereignty in the past, present, and future. The Vita Haroldi (BL Harley MS 3776), a story about King Harold II's life living in the Welsh borderlands after the Battle of Hastings, can be understood as an alternate temporality constructed as a response to a crisis. Specifically, this essay will read Vita Haroldi alongside Gerald Vizenor's short story "Custer on the Slipstream" which details the resurrections of General George Armstrong Custer, the infamous US soldier who graduated bottom of his class at West Point in 1861 and was killed by the Oceti Sakowin and their allies at the Battle of Greasy Grass in 1876. This essay will not "i/Indigenize" Harold or early English people more broadly, but instead open up the productions of early medieval settlers to the gaze of contemporary Indigenous scholars, and offer a temporally sovereign theoretical approach to early medieval narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

([6], 218-19) Likewise, Barthes's return to the Middle Ages "engenders" a comparable "displacement", and this is further complicated by multiplicity: on the one hand, the multiple returns made by Barthes to medieval writings and concepts in different texts and at different times (in short: Barthes's own multiplicity); on the other hand, the multiple Middle Ages from which Barthes chooses and which we, in turn, can choose to place in relation to Barthes's ways of thinking. On the other, it explores the uses of Barthes within medieval studies: what medievalists have learnt from Barthes; how Barthesian concepts can be adapted for different medieval contexts; how medievalists inflect and change the way we read Barthes's texts. This special issue reflects in two different ways on the notion of a "Medieval Barthes."[1] On the one hand, it considers Barthes's own engagement with medieval culture, in his reading of medieval authors and in his engagement with medieval styles of thought. As Ilina and Matei argue, Barthes's approach to Michelet's I oeuvre i through excerpting and commentating combines the four medieval authorial roles: copyist, compiler, commentator, and author, figures Barthes will later mention in I Critique et vérité i ( I Criticism and Truth i ). [Extracted from the article]

This article brings together Critical Disability Studies and the ethics of neighboring to examine not only the intimate alterity of disabled figures in medieval literature, but also how nonnormative embodiments are a recurring feature in the ethical discourse of the neighbor. Neighbor-love and disability justice share an ethical orientation that emphasizes difference, yet the ethics of the neighbor stresses an asymmetrical and non-reciprocal relationship between self and other whereas an ethics of care emphasizes interdependence. However, attending to the nonnormative embodiment of the neighbor introduces a transformed sense of reciprocity to the neighborly encounter. In order to think about the generative possibilities of the intersection between neighborliness and disability, the paper explores varied encounters with nonnormative embodiments, including the meeting between King Edward and the disabled beggar Ghillie Michael in Matthew Paris's History of Saint Edward the King and the confrontation between Arthur's court and the loathly lady in The Wedding Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle. Each of these encounters seemingly illustrate a drive towards normalcy, a temporality of inclusion where the strangeness of the neighborly figure is neutralized through miraculous or magical means. Centering nonnormative figures in these narratives, however, reveals the working of parasynchrony, a shared temporality that resists a turn toward normativity and enables reciprocity based not on exchange but on interdependence and mutual care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reading Sir Thopas through cuteness shifts critical attention from the tale’s generic classification to questions of aesthetics and affect. The production of cute features through infantilization and feminization triggers tender caretaking and sadistic aggression; the cute object is paradoxically held gently and squeezed violently. Under the duress of the cute response, the Chaucerian narrator, Thopas, and the text become deformed. The flattening of physical and textual bodies leads to the obliteration of verticality and depth. Drawing on the superflat movement in Japanese contemporary art, I argue that cuteness in Sir Thopas effects a compression of the text’s narrative layers and semiotic networks. Mirroring the horizontal, non-linear organization of the poem’s layout in medieval manuscripts, desire moves sideways across Sir Thopas. The lateral mobility and the agglutinating property of cuteness allow it to adhere to and cutify objects in its vicinity; the catalogues of romance tropes in Sir Thopas thereby function as cute object clusters within a late medieval middling household. Too much sticky sweetness, however, results in revulsion and not adoration. When the Host interrupts Chaucer and compares the poem to excrement, he enacts the labile fungibility of cuteness and disgust. Sir Thopas is both feces and a dainty thing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes the use of transgender theory within medieval studies as both a productive and a politically significant optic. The article employs transgender theory to effect a new reading of the miraculous transformation of the character of Blanchandin/e, in the fourteenth-century French chanson de geste, Tristan de Nanteuil, from female to male. First, the often-overlooked importance of Judith Butler’s analysis of sex and gender for the understanding of transgender and non-normatively-gendered identities is addressed. Next, using theoretical work by Deleuze, and by Deleuze and Guattari, the article demonstrates how the rhizomatic and folding structures that a transgender reading of Blanchandin/e’s transformation brings to light cohere with the series of rhizomes and folds which structure the genealogical logic of the text as a whole. The family tree of Tristan de Nanteuil is shown to answer to queer, rhizomatic, and folding imperatives. In this way, the article demonstrates that the text’s transgender genealogy contradicts the anti-generative model of queerness proposed by queer theory’s antisocial turn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the resilience of the mother’s powerful influence during early infancy as it is described in child-abandonment stories in the Old Icelandic sagas of Icelanders. When male characters in the sagas try to co-opt maternal space by exposing unwanted infants to the elements, opportunities to apply recent feminist approaches crop up with unusual force. Using such approaches, this article observes a remarkable pattern in these child-abandonment stories: first, maternal space clearly manifests itself within the space where a child is exposed; second, a reference to language acquisition — sometimes a very involved and lengthy reference — occurs parallel to the description of exposure. Thus, maternal space in the sagas of Icelanders opens a window into the idea of agency for women, even in their highly circumscribed roles as mothers. This opening lasts only briefly, and the aperture is often difficult to negotiate or even see. Nevertheless, the idea of a language exclusive to women is discernible, while Old Icelandic works vary in a virtuosic fashion in their treatment of this language theme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building from past work in oral theory that has productively nuanced notions of literacy and orality as multi-faceted and deeply interconnected concepts, this essay calls for an equally complex model for our understanding of the hearing experience itself, focusing in particular on Anglo-Saxon England. To this end, relevant approaches emerging from medieval studies, studies in oral tradition, and — most importantly — Deaf studies are triangulated with the goal of more fully understanding the scant and often cryptic clues that survive to us in such places as law codes, medical texts, literature, and archeological records. Scholars in Deaf studies have long applied interpretive models from oral theory to analyze the cultural expressivity of signed storytelling; the influence of Deaf studies, however, has yet to be fully felt in the fields of oral theory or Anglo-Saxon studies. Opening a dialogue across disciplines can help counteract the potential for audism inherent in “oral” tradition studies, and focusing more sharply on a specific region and period effectively complicates the history of deafness in pre-modern eras. Most importantly, close attention to Deaf studies opens awareness to categories of “hearing” and “deafness” as they were socially constructed in the early medieval world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that the Middle English miracles and lyrics of the Virgin Mary borrow the language of chivalry and courtly love in their depiction of the intercessory powers of the Mother of God. Because both chivalry and courtly love bear evidence of signifying contestation during the late Middle Ages, Marian texts that use the language of both or either can themselves be seen as complex and potentially anxiogenic. Understood through the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the miracles themselves can be defined as documents of signifying alliance or as evidence of what Deleuze and Guattari call “becoming.” Thus, the miracles and lyrics of the Virgin that use such fraught codes present us with an image of Mary that is unstable. An examination of such signifying alliances helps us better understand both the signifying networks at play in the later Middle Ages and the language work produced by them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the hybrid Viking-Saracen figure found in several late medieval English works. Drawing on manuscript illumination from works such as John Lydgate's Lives of Saints Edmund and Fremund, alongside a range of medieval romances such as King Horn, Guy of Warwick, “The Man of Law's Tale,” and Gower's “Tale of Constance,” this work explores the traditional literary and artistic connection between the Northern pagans of England's past, and the Eastern Muslim enemies of late medieval Europe. By the end of the fourteenth century, when English was becoming dominant as a language and “Englishness” was gaining in importance, writers such as Chaucer and Gower began to find the traditional parallels between Anglo-Saxon pagans and Saracen Muslims problematic, and questioned why their ancestors converted to Christianity while the Eastern Muslims did not. Throughout the essay, religion, rather than race, emerges as of primary importance for these writers. Such analysis counters the work of recent scholars reading these texts as exemplary of “orientalist” attitudes in the Middle Ages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently scholars have taken increasing account of medieval literary theory and criticism (particularly as it is expressed in the Latin commentary tradition) in their readings of medieval French poetry. Nevertheless, the degree to which those critical texts are themselves complicit in the rhetorical strategies and ideological function of the kinds of texts that they purport to explicate has largely escaped comment. This essay investigates the rhetorical figures exploited in medieval Latin critical discourse: specifically the metaphors for allegory (integument), satire (nakedness), and poetic material (the not-yet-dressed body). These figures reappear in Jean de Meun's continuation of the Roman de la Rose, in the speeches of Reason and the Jealous Husband, and in the exempla of Mars and Venus and Pygmalion. Through a reading that juxtaposes these passages to commentaries and artes poetriae, I argue that, while the critical discourse's largely implicit figuration of text as female body provides an interpretive key to the romance, the latter in turn reveals the limits and contradictions of the former. Thus the article raises larger questions about the relation that literary criticism establishes with literary texts and about the modern critic's complicity with specific kinds of medieval reading or classes of medieval readership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a bibliography of published works by the medieval scholar Sheila Delany, including "Tell Me Another Funny One," "Melville in the Darbies," "On Salinger," and more.

Following a brief biographical sketch of Sheila Delany, the introduction to this special issue focuses on Delany's oeuvre, discussing her most celebrated work and locating her scholarship within some of the intellectual debates in which she participated from 1967 through 2006. As a young activist invested in Marxism, Delany critiqued New Criticism's promotion of bourgeois ideologies and argued for the expansion of the canon, to include thinkers who represent a tradition of dissent. When New Criticism enjoyed hegemony in medieval literary studies and induced medievalists to universalize (for example, about an alleged human condition), Delany insisted upon the importance of historicizing texts. Suspicious of white, middle-class feminisms inside and outside academe, she argued that considerations of gender must be structured by investigations of race and particularly class. Her analyses of intersections between gender and class in fourteenth- and fifteenth- century literary texts eventually propelled her to the forefront of medieval English studies. Delany's most influential scholarship centers on Osbern Bokenham, Margery Kempe, Christine de Pizan, and especially Chaucer, most notably the Wife of Bath's Tale and The Legend of Good Women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the medieval Italian work "Filocolo," by Giovanni Boccaccio. The story is based on two French Romances, "Conte de Floire et Blancheflor" and "Floire et Blancheflor." The author discusses Boccaccio's poetic intent behind his style of reiterating the tale from different viewpoints.

This article discusses medieval French texts about saints' lives. The author focuses on the recurring themes within the writings; the medieval writers acknowledge that while those in political power have rule over the saints' bodies, God has power over their spiritual bodies. The author also discusses the differences in treatment between female and male saints.

This article presents a critique of the story "Lai de Guigemar," by Marie de France. The story revolves around the life of a cursed man who can only be saved from his malady through an intimate relationship with a woman. According to the author, the love symptoms manifested by the hero and his lover are quite similar to the Ovidian love repertory. The story is considered a typical medieval French work that plays around suffering, love and sex that is obscure in manner.

This article focuses on the book "Book of Margery Kempe." It offers a postmodern "defamiliarization" of a medieval text that has, thanks to its popularity as an object of analysis, become, for many scholars and teachers, a bit routine, perhaps even mundane. Critic Lisa Manter has argued persuasively that conventional scholarship on Kempe tends to "erase the idiosyncrasies of Kempe's text in order to extract a generalizable cultural or psychological schema." This tendency exists not only in studies of Margery Kempe's Book, but in literary criticism generally. At its best, critical theory offers unexpected insights and fresh perspectives. Too often, though, it devolves into the maintenance of formulaic and predictable paradigms. What has variously (perhaps misleadingly) been called "autobiographical" or "confessional" criticism offers a provocative, productive alternative. Though reading from the "I" position may transgress the norms of traditional academic practice, it engages a powerful interpretive lens, one that acknowledges the situatedness of its scope and the complexities of its operation.

This article focuses on various forms of noise as depicted in medieval literature. It requires some imaginative effort to appreciate how medieval grammar and music were perceived as intrinsically ethical. In this structure, noise possesses a moral force quite lost on modem ears, it is a kind of audible violence, corruption is something one can hear. Within the acoustical cosmos, noise inhabits sound less as audibilia of some precise pitch or decibel count than relationally, as a principle of violence, which effects its damage by contrariety or intensification, that is, by a kind of defect or excess of consonant sound. In this article author Valerie J. Allen considers the various violent forms that bodily noise assumes; how poets "break air" (or rather wind), grammatically, musically, with the mouth, and with its pneumatic reverse, the butt. Finally, Allen considers bodily noise as noyous, as a vocabulary of aggression and the occasion of harm, from its metaphoric presence on the battlefield to its real presence in the private space of marriage.

The author introduces the reader to the articles related to medieval literature published in the October 2004, issue of "Exemplaria." Discussion of how and where noise exists; A play called "Christ before Herod," about a king who cannot bear the disturbance of unmandated "noyse"; Differences of noise at gender as well as racial and religious boundaries; Discussion of the article "The Noise of Roland."

In the course of the study of the author of this article on early vernacular manuscripts, she have become increasingly aware of the role played by the parchment itself in the communicative system of French medieval codices. This surface, so carefully prepared for the inscription of the text, is itself a skin, and every skin, whether animal or human, is unique. She finds evidence of this individuality not only in the color of the skin and its particular tactile quality but also in its imperfections: holes, tears and cuts. Such imperfections have hitherto received little attention, but, as she has been able to establish, they are often integrated by the scribe into the system of meaning of the codex and therefore richly repay close scrutiny. Presented in this article are three examples, chosen to suggest the range of such effects.

The article explores how rhetoricians and Geoffrey Chaucer construct verbal display of the female body and the desire embodied in and evoked by it. The author discusses the various concepts that best describe the gendered potraiture in medieval literature, specifically in medieval poetry. He mentions that the full picture of feminine beauty in the "Poetria nova" ends with a discourse on male desire.

This article examines the representation of Jews in late medieval English literature. Literary scholars had resisted the notion that medieval Christian response to Jews and Judaism transcends the rubric of a univocal and monolithic Judaism. Harold Fisch recognized the double value of the Jews in literature. One of which was that a Jew is both noble and ignoble, black and white.

The author discusses the relation of the concept of colors of rhetoric to the human body by means of desire, which is reflected in medieval literature. In the 12th-century Latin text "De planctu Naturae," writer Alain de Lille states that the evil grammarian discolors the colors of beauty through the dye of desire. According to her, the physical tint in the face and body by emotions, like physical love and desire, reflects the image of dyeing as a topos where rhetoric, morality and the body came together.

The article discusses the representation of women and medicine in medieval French narrative literature. The author explored how pharmacology appears to have had a special appeal for writers and storytellers in the French Middle Ages, appearing in works such as the Arthurian legend, the tale "Cligés," by Chrétien de Troyes and "Les Deus Amanz," by Marie de France. She noted the fact that it is usually women who make drugs in medieval stories.

The article provides information on the poem entitled "Par tibi Roma nihil," by Hildebert of Lavardin. The author said Hildebert probably wrote the elegiac praise of the ancient ruins of Rome. At the core of the poem is an admiration for the art of the ancient Romans. Hildebert admires the crumbling statues of the ancient gods in what is regarded as one of the most impressive passages of medieval poetry. He pictures the gods themselves appearing bodily before their statues.

The article discusses the impact of the retheorization of the grotesque in medieval literature made by literary critic M. M. Bakhtin . The author explains that the association of medieval literature with barbarism was caused by the tendency of writers to relate such concept to proportions and styles. He cites that the ideas of Bakhtin about the Middle Ages could be considered within the framework of Russian academic medieval studies.

The article analyzes Hartmann von Aue's "Der arme Heinrich," with respect to the concept of looking and representation in medieval literature. Since the pivotal moment of the narrative relies upon a scene of quintessential voyeurism, feminist film theorists speculate that it was driven by the threat of castration for the male viewer, who acts to contain this threat through sexual domination.

The article highlights the inefficiency of the author- and manuscript-centered models in revolutionizing medieval literary art in the 20th century. Based on the article, the increased value being placed on the manuscript text itself by recent publications about fabliaux has damaged the Author-Scribe-Text relationship. The author said that despite the changes in philology, the process of dislodging an "Author" from a position in understanding medieval literary production is not yet complete.

The author discusses how two Middle English versions of the legend of Eustace can be a way of raising questions about popular medieval narrative and its use of generic convention. The author explored the thirteenth-century poem "Eustace," which focuses on a saint's life, and the fourteenth-century tail-rhyme romance "Sir Isumbras." She also emphasized the principle of Hans Robert Jauss regarding the medieval system of expectations, which conditions medieval audiences' response to literary works.

The article focuses on the subject and authorship of the medieval literary text "The Book of the Duchess." The author described how much effort has been exerted in proving that the text was written by English poet Geoffrey Chaucer. He also discussed the questions recommended by French philosopher Michel Foucault in the privileging of artistic originality and an autonomous self.

The article presents a paradigmatic reading of the interrupted discourse which constitutes the text of medieval literary work "Perceval," by French author Chrétien de Troyes. The text was discussed in light of the perspective by French philosopher Jacques Lacan that any discourse can be interpreted according to either a syntagmatic or a paradigmatic reading strategy. The author focused on one line extracted from the episode of the character Perceval's adventure at the Beaurepaire castle.

The article explores the implications of the "Book of Margery Kempe," by Margery Kempe for problems related to the late Medieval subjectivity to authorities. The author assesses the mechanisms of mystical discourse with regards to the increasing use of late Medieval English religious writings. The author also examines the impact of religious beliefs on subjectivity to political leaders.

The article discusses the resistance of women readers to sexual wordplay in medieval literature. The author cites the book of Judith Fetterley entitled "The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction" which focuses on the resistance of women readers with antifeminism in American classics. The author mentions that there are evidences for the likelihood of wordplay in medieval literature.

The article discusses the changes in the study of medieval literature. An outline of the hermeneutic paradigm which guide the study of medieval literature is provided. The author explains the redefinition of the hermeneutic paradigm and some of the scholarly reactions to that redefinition. He cites the factors defining the directions in the study of medieval literature.

The article focuses on poet Marie de France's notion of obscurity in literature during the Middle Ages. A brief description of obscurity in literature is provided. For France, every clear text is fated to disappear because it is understood before it is even read. Her text comprises a reserve of meaning which is not exhausted by its Christian manifestation.

The article examines the relationship between allegory and allegoresis in the Middle Ages. A brief description of the exegetical role of allegoresis is provided. Allegoresis has traditionally been denied the temporal dynamic so valued in allegory. The article also discusses the unification of rhetoric and hermeneutics and its implications for understanding reading and writing in the Middle Ages.

The article deals with the ideological implications of medieval literary production. There are a number of ideological, even political, decisions or assumptions promoting a view of literary authority as centralized and exclusive. The author suggests that a deconstructive free play of writing may be similar with the normal procedure for producing a work in the late Middle Ages.

The article discusses the historicism behind Bishop Richard Hurd's 1762 book "Letters on Chivalry and Romance." Hurd used an historicist approach in investigating the chivalry and romance of the Middle Ages. Throughout the book, an opposition between enlightenment and ignorance, light and dark was expressed in several ways. For Hurd, maintaining his own enlightened exemption from history takes precedence over understanding the Middle Ages.

The article discusses the text and context in the reading of medieval literature and the medieval German epic "Dukus Horant." Historical background of the medieval epic is provided. The case of the epic is the reminder that considerations of text and context must involve a critical exchange. The author believes that the epic is a product of a significant degree of cultural overlap with Christian society.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Peter Travis on the relationship between poet Geoffrey Chaucer and his readers, and another by Rita Copeland and Stephen Melville on the twin medieval techniques of allegorical writing and allegoresis.