Medieval Memory Research Articles

Genealogy, gender, and memory culture in late medieval Sweden: the chronicle of Anna Fickesdotter Bülow

ABSTRACT Anna Fickesdotter Bülow (1440s–1519), abbess of the Birgittine Vadstena Abbey in Sweden, was also the author of Chronicon Genealogicum (c. 1515), a genealogical narrative of aristocratic families in late medieval Sweden. Anna Fickesdotter’s chronicle is one of the earliest examples of women writing genealogy in Sweden. It sheds light on the roles of women in the transmission and commemoration of family history, genealogy as a gendered imagination and practice, but also the scripting of self as a subjective voice and a woman remembering the past. The account is analysed as an expression of medieval memory culture, where genealogy as a gendered phenomenon had a fundamental impact on the mental, material, and social dimensions of memory.

BATTLING THE LION: VISUAL COMMEMORATIONS OF CRUSADE IN TWELFTH- AND THIRTEENTH-CENTURY SEALS FROM THE BRITISH ISLES

This article examines a group of five surviving twelfth- and thirteenth-century wax seal impressions from the British Isles that depict a scene of an armed knight in combat with a lion. This seal motif has tenuously been linked with crusading in the past, and so this paper seeks to address the connections between the sigillants and crusade, as well as the significance of commemoration of crusade culture on medieval seals. It highlights numerous links between this specific design and crusading experiences, literature and allegory. This paper focuses on an aspect of the medieval memory of crusade and the means of displaying chivalric, crusading identities within literate culture (on charters and letters) and in personal adornment.

The Lost Kingdom of St. Vladimir: Crusading Mentality, Medieval Memory, and the Russia-Ukraine War

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.

Animating the Past: History-Making, Memory-Making, Law-Making

This paper examines certain history-making and memory-making practices that allow us to see how the past may be animated. These practices are: first, the Ancient Greek sophistic arts, as exemplified by Gorgias’s Encomium of Helen, and as revived, in dialogue form, in Renaissance humanism; and second, Ancient Greek, Ancient Roman, and medieval memory arts, with particular attention to the composite generative imagery of those arts. Animating the past – as these practices of history-making and memory-making do – is of great epistemic and political value to communities: it enables acts of argument and judgement, and, more generally, it is vital for vibrant democracies. The paper signals, albeit only briefly, how these practices are also intertwined with legal history, and in particular the history of legal reasoning, suggesting some ways forward, in future work, for investigating the entangled histories of history-making, memory-making, and law-making.

Reader in the Cosmos

In his thirteenth-century astronomical encyclopedia, L’Image du Monde, French cleric Goussoin de Metz attempts to guide his readers to knowledge of God by demonstrating the unity of creation. This sense of the book as a tool to be used by the reader is evident in BnF fr. 574. This manuscript, likely painted in Paris around 1320 for Guillaume Flote (1280–1366), an advisor to Philip the Fair, contains twenty-eight detailed diagrams. Although analyses of such diagrams constitute a large part of the study of medieval memory, the figures of the Image have not been considered within this context. Taking BnF fr. 574 as a case study, I will examine how the Image’s diagrams serve as mnemonic devices—physical, external locations where information from the text can be stored and returned to for later examination. I will argue that these images work to simultaneously construct and reinforce the place of the reader within the broad system of creation. I will then propose three possible ways of reading the text: first in order, then in iteration, and finally in motion. Finally, I will consider evidence of previous owners’ engagement with the manuscript, and how these interactions further incorporated them into Goussoin’s cosmology.

‘The footsteps of that custom…still remaining’: Medieval memory culture and Thomas O’Sullevane’s portrayal of the Irish bardic tradition

The preface to the Memoirs...of the Marquis of Clanricarde (1722) is a curious text. Written by Thomas O'Sullevane, ostensibly in response to the 1720 printing of the 'Short view of the state and condition of the kingdom of Ireland' by Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, the preface challenged 'Protestant' narratives of Catholic butchery in the 1640s. For the most part, O'Sullevane's claims were supported by a sustained consideration of historical evidence, an uncommon feature in the contemporary discourse. His insights have had little impact, however, on how historians interpret the 1640s. Yet, Celtic scholars frequently invoke O'Sullevane's preface to describe the schooling of Irish bardic poets—without reference to its broader purpose. The aim of this article is to historicise O'Sullevane's work and to show how contemporary philological and antiquarian-minded investigations shaped O'Sullevane's portrayal of the Irish past, especially the Irish bardic world.

'The footsteps of that custom...still remaining': Medieval memory culture and Thomas O'Sullevane's portrayal of the Irish bardic tradition

'The footsteps of that custom...still remaining': Medieval memory culture and Thomas O'Sullevane's portrayal of the Irish bardic tradition

How the Church has Change the World The Medieval Memory Palace

How the Church has Change the World The Medieval Memory Palace

Medieval memories and the reformation of religious identity: Catholic and Anglican interactions with parish church sites in County Limerick, Ireland

SUMMARY: This paper examines parish church sites in County Limerick and their evolving meanings as a result of Ireland’s unsuccessful Protestant Reformation. Unusually for Europe, most Irish parish churches fell into ruin from 1550 to 1700. Conquest, loss of patronage and the Anglican Church of Ireland’s failure to convert most native Catholics ensured this eventuality. Nevertheless, local memories continued to draw people to these sites. There is evidence for Catholic burial in the 18th and 19th centuries, conversion of chancels into burial plots and, sometimes, church maintenance or construction by Anglicans. These activities all reveal contemporary concerns with history, identity and legitimacy.

Middle English Romance and the Craft of Memory by Jamie McKinstry

Reviewed by: Middle English Romance and the Craft of Memory by Jamie McKinstry Karen Derelle Norwood Jamie McKinstry, Middle English Romance and the Craft of Memory (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer 2015) 276 pp. While much has been done in the study of medieval memory practices and the history of the craft of memory, McKinstry discusses in his book Middle English Romance and the Craft of Memory how previous research has stopped short in the examination of how memory functions within individual medieval tales themselves. Because “romances are imaginative, creative works and rely on the memory of past cultures and contexts in order to create present fiction,” the author argues that memory is an essential component of the medieval romance genre (8). McKinstry sets out to demonstrate how romances themselves employ memory and how both characters and audience participate in the creation, recollection, and practice of memory within romances. Using precise organization through eight chapters and a conclusion that progressively build off of one another, McKinstry not only provides a clear and concise background to the study of medieval memory practices, but also further applies the many complex aspects of memory to a variety of texts such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Emaré, Sir Orfeo, Ipomadon, Le Morte D’Arthur, and many others. McKinstry provides an overview of classical and medieval memorial theorists and techniques in the second chapter giving specific attention to Aristotle, Hugh of Saint Victor, and Thomas Aquinas. McKinstry is careful to clarify that it is unlikely that the lay public audiences of medieval romance would have had such detailed knowledge of these processes of memory; he instead proposes that memory practices and recollection were a part of everyday life as implemented by different professions, human relationships, and the church. The third chapter goes on to examine how specific romance elements such as place and material objects function in terms of recollection in order to create connections between the past and the present. McKinstry highlights the medieval landscape in Sir Orfeo as a constructed connection to the classical setting of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. He further demonstrates the power of recollection to connect the past to the present in objects such as the magic embroidered cloth in Emaré that contains woven scenes from past tales where each image on the cloth corresponds to a current event in Emaré’s own life. McKinstry argues that the insertion of past images into highly-wrought, new imaginative works shows how “decorative memories allow romances to encode a genetic identity along with their place within that very tradition” (67). McKinstry concludes this [End Page 307] chapter with his assertion that the frequent use of memory in the genre of medieval romances is conventional and even ritualistic. The fourth chapter continues with the identification of rituals and structural patterns in romances. McKinstry also uses this chapter to discuss and demonstrate how locations of “present confusion” within tales such as the forest are connected to memory and ritual. Both the fourth and fifth chapters examine the complicated relationship of memory and trust between the creativity of the author and the audience who has the task of constant recollection. Chapter 5 explores the ways romances promote memory and how the audience can trust memory such as through the implementation of memorial objects in Sir Isumbras and King Horn. One of the most interesting features of this section is McKinstry’s discussion of dreams and visions in relation to memory and the past. McKinstry draws attention to complex characters like Merlin who serve as dream interpreters and who are able to recall the past and predict the future. Examining in particular the dreams in King Horn and William of Palerne, McKinstry emphasizes the significant connection dreams have to memory as they are experienced, remembered, and ultimately validated within the romance narrative. Chapter 6 sets out to identify the challenges posed to the memory of both the characters and the audience through destructive forces of forgetfulness and falseness. McKinstry pays particular attention to the tales of Sir Launfal, Floris and Blancheflour, and Gamelyn to demonstrate a variety of ways memory may be compromised or complicated for effect. Chapter 7 examines the progression of time and its...

‘O Damietta’: war memory and crusade in thirteenth-century Egypt

The Egyptian port city of Damietta was a place which occupied a brief but important position in the crusading imaginary of the thirteenth century. This article examines how this city was used both to communicate particular memories of war experience and to lay down future patterns of remembrance. Processes of eyewitnessing, establishing the wider meaning of war, creating a warrior tradition and affirming the value of location or place were all ways in which war memory was articulated during the crusading period. Through an exploration of crusader encounters with the city of Damietta, this article offers some new insights into the nature and importance of medieval memory and remembrance of war.

Cultural Memory and Gender in Iceland from Medieval to Early Modern Times

Cultural Memory and Gender in Iceland from Medieval to Early Modern Times Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir Thanks to the humanistic movement of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, many of the great Icelandic manuscripts from the Middle Ages were collected, transcribed, and preserved.1 Ever since Michael Clanchy’s From Memory to Written Record in the late 1970s, there has been a growing research interest in the field of medieval literacy and memorial culture in a European context (Clanchy 1979, 202). In the Icelandic case, much more can be done.2 Clanchy underscored that for a long time after the introduction of literacy, an oral culture continued to exist: written words were, for instance, communicated by being read aloud, and throughout the Middle Ages, memorial culture continued to be a mixture of the oral and the written. In this context it is important to remember what Elisabeth van Houts has convincingly argued, namely that writing was not only produced by an isolated group of men in monasteries, since women, as well as laymen, actively participated in textual production (van Houts 1999, 1–2, 2001, 1–16). This paper will first focus on the fact that the transmission of certain texts and stories became an important part of the cultural memory of [End Page 378] the Icelanders, while other texts were forgotten and lost. Second, we shall ask who the bearers of the textual transmission were, and why some stories became more popular than others. The third question to be treated is what role gender played in collective memory in Iceland during the time of transmission from the medieval to the early modern period. Throughout this paper I will focus on the transcription and preservation not only of literature, but also of legal documents as well as devotional literature and—to a certain degree—various artifacts. In his Varieties of Cultural History from 1997, Peter Burke underlined that the social history of remembrance is selective, adding that it is our task as historians to identify the principles of selection (Burke 1997, 45). To be able to study this problem historically, one needs to identify how memory in past times was made and produced. Normally in social and cultural studies, this memory is related to communication of a collective character through some sort of media. Here we shall focus on some of the medieval media used for transmitting memory in the Icelandic context (Hermann 2009). There was a selective remembrance of the past, and—following Peter Burke—our task is both to identify this selection and to determine the principle behind it. Not all historical sources are media for cultural memory, but the earliest textual production of the Icelanders was to a very high degree, in a way that gave storytelling an entirely new platform.3 Something similar can be said about the printing revolution of the early modern period. After the Reformation, printing technology was introduced in Iceland, and greater stress was laid on publishing religious texts, not least the Bible, in the vernacular. Thus, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a shift in media from handwritten manuscripts on parchment or paper to printed books occurred, which had profound consequences for the art of memory, sometimes even described as “the death of the medieval memory” (Le Goff 1992, 81–82). That point is open to debate, but it is certain that with the introduction, first of paper in the fifteenth century, then of printing in the sixteenth century, it became easier and cheaper to make all kinds of transcriptions. Just as important was that the new faith introduced with the Reformation had consequences with regard to the type of books being published. The Reformation was followed, as we have already noted, by a growing interest in new religious literature in the [End Page 379] vernacular, but it also made some of the Latin writings from the medieval period—for instance, collections of Canon Law and ecclesiastical statutes, or sermon collections—outdated.4 Canon Law and Latin Manuscripts With the Christian religion, the Latin language was introduced in Iceland. Icelandic history was written in the vernacular, but during the twelfth century, how to place the history of Iceland in the...

La memoria y la historia medievales como realidades indisociables

In this paper, we study the relations between medieval history and medieval memory. We will do a historiographical historical and conceptual analysis. The conclusion is that it is impossible to separate history and memory. Also, The historians are important in this balance with his subjectivity and his work.

Remenants of Things Past: Memory and the Knight's Tale

Chaucer's Knight's Tale uses medieval memory theory and the practice of mnemonics to suggest the inescapability of trauma for chivalric subjects racked by violent, compulsive remembering. The Tale explores the burdensome chivalric requirement that living knights remember their dead companions, set out by Theseus in his Boethian First Mover speech. Examining Chaucer's philosophical reworking of Boethian conceptions of memory in the Boece illuminates the poet's understanding of the function of human memory and its resonance in the opening of the Canterbury Tales. The memorial onus of this obligation, figured in both the Knight narrator's Tale and in his telling of it, marks a mournful ambivalent desire to remember lost friends and to forget traumatic memorial images of death and violence; the Knight narrator alternately expands and contracts the remnant of his Tale.

The First Rite of Passage: Baptism in Medieval Memory

This article is part of a wider study that examines over 10,000 jurors' testimonies in proof-of-age hearings from 1246 to 1432, which were conducted to determine the legal majority of heirs-in-chief of the crown. It looks specifically at more than 1,500 references to the ceremony of baptism and tries to build up a picture of what the service was like in the memories of the participants. It reveals the haste and sometimes confusion of the preparations beforehand, the naming of infants, the role of godparents, the use of writing and the giving of gifts to record the birth, the celebrations that accompanied it, and details of the ceremonial itself, including the processions with lit torches and the crowds that often gathered. Despite the stereotypical nature of much testimony, it attempts to capture the atmosphere of what went on and what stuck in the minds of jurors.

Our cyborg past: Medieval artificial memory as mindware upgrade

The philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark has argued that humans have always been ‘natural-born cyborgs,’ that is, they have always collaborated and merged with non-biological props and aids in order to find better environments for thinking. These ‘mindware’ upgrades (I borrow the term ‘mindware’ from Clark, 2001) extend beyond the fusions of the organic and technological that posthumanist theory imagines as our future. Moreover, these external aids do not remain external to our minds; they interact with them to effect profound changes in their internal architecture. Medieval artificial memory systems provide evidence for just this kind of cognitive interaction. But because medieval people conceived of their relationship to technology in fundamentally different ways, we need also to attend to larger epistemic frameworks when we analyze historically contingent forms of mindware upgrade. What cultural history adds to our understanding of embedded cognition is not only a recognition of our cyborg past but a historicized understanding of human reality.

Ars Reminiscendi: Mind and Memory in Renaissance Culture ed. by Donald A. Beecher, Grant Williams (review)

REVIEWS 229 Ars Reminiscendi: Mind and Memory in Renaissance Culture, ed. Donald A. Beecher and Grant Williams (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies 2009) 440 pp. The Western textual tradition of the ars memoriae, or art of memory, begins as advice for the rhetorician. Three classical treatises well-known in the Middle Ages described the practice of mentally organizing and recalling imagery in the service of oratory: De inventione by Cicero, Institutio oratoria by Quintilian, and the Rhetorica ad Herennium by an unknown author (formerly attributed to Cicero). Medieval treatises, however, were less likely to associate the memory arts with speechmaking than with ethics; Albertus Magnus (1193–1280) and Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) wrote of developing the art of memory as a religious duty. The Renaissance witnessed a proliferation of ars memoriae texts, by Jacobus Publicius (fl. 1462–1470), Giulio Camillo (1480–1554), Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), Robert Fludd (1574–1637), and many others, several of whom developed “systems of memory” that were connected to hermeticism or the occult. In 1929 Ludwig Volkmann (“Ars memorativa”) described the complexity of this rich and unusual literary tradition , which was brought to the attention of a new generation of scholars with the publication of Paolo Rossi’s Clavis universalis: Arti mnemoniche e logica combinatoria de Lullo a Leibniz (1960) and to numerous English-speaking scholars with Frances Yates’s The Art of Memory (1966). In the last decades, several important studies related to the ars memoriae include: Herwig Blum’s Die antike Mnemotechnik (1969), Jonathan Spence’s The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (1984), Mary Carruthers’s The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (1990), Janet Coleman’s Ancient and Medieval Memories. Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past (1992), and Lina Bolzoni’s The Gallery of Memory: Literary and Iconographic Models in the Age of the Printing Press (2001). This impressive collection of sixteen essays edited by Donald Beecher and Grant Williams takes for its topic Renaissance memory. As Beecher observes in his introduction and postscript, the subjects of recent studies on Renaissance memory have been limited neither to ars memoriae treatises nor to mnemonic devices such as the memory palace. Rather, scholars have broadened their research to include: memory in connection with literary forms, such as travel writing, memoir, commonplaces, ricordanze, diary, and autobiography; memory as a faculty of cognition described by philosophers and physicians; memory in relation to personal, collective, and cultural identity; the significance of the printed book and the development of the library on memory; and social memorializing . Hence Beecher and Grant have organized their volume thematically into six sections of two or three essays: “Revisioning the Classical Art of Memory”; “Manuscripts, Commonplace Books, and Personal Recollection”; “Learning, Rhetoric, and the Humanist Challenge”; “Ethics and Memory in English Literature”; “Nations, Historiography, and Cultural Identity”; and “Natural Memory vs. Artificial Recollection.” The essays can only briefly be described here. In the first section, Brenda Dunn-Lardeau investigates the mnemonic architecture and the organization of images of exempla in loci memoriae in Jehan Du Pré’s Le Palias des nobles Dames (1534), a text in the tradition of the defense of illustrious women. An- REVIEWS 230 drea Torre illustrates how early modern mnemonic imagery might influence other arts by relating patterns of imago memoriae in two anonymous fifteenthcentury ars memoriae manuscripts at the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève (MSS 3368 and 2521) to emblems located in the wooden choir of St. Giustina’s church in Padua and to the panegyric Il memoriale by Emanuele Tesaura (1592–1675). Wolfgang Neuber examines the creation, reception, and dissemination of early modern printed images of cannibalism, especially those involving depictions of New World natives, in order to consider how cultures employ mnemonic imagery when constructing their own collective memory. The second section includes essays by James Nelson Novoa, who transcribes from aljamiado (Castilian written in Hebrew letters), translates, and analyzes the Arte a la memoria, a unique Sephardic text. Kenneth R Bartlett contemplates why Sir Thomas Hoby (1530–1566), the English ambassador to France and pioneering translator of Castiglione’s Il Libro del cortegiano (1561), copied into his travel journal, The Travail and Lief of...

The Great War and Medieval Memory: War, Remembrance, and Medievalism in Britain and Germany, 1914–1940. By Stefan Goebel. Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare. Edited by, Jay Winter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xviii+357. $90.00.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThe Great War and Medieval Memory: War, Remembrance, and Medievalism in Britain and Germany, 1914–1940. By Stefan Goebel. Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare. Edited by, Jay Winter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xviii+357. $90.00.Thomas WeberThomas WeberHarvard University and University of Aberdeen Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 81, Number 1March 2009European Childhood in the Twentieth Century Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/598716 Views: 52Total views on this site © 2009 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Great War and Medieval Memory: War, Remembrance and Medievalism in Britain and Germany, 1914-1940

The Great War and Medieval Memory: War, Remembrance and Medievalism in Britain and Germany, 1914-1940

Medievalism in Technology Old and New by Karl Fugelso, Carol L. Robinson

136 Reviews Thisbook isrichingains toourunderstanding and inquestionsitopensup. In additiontothehardly surprising absenceofpictures ofauthorsinheroicliterature (where we find gestures oforality depictedinstead) we areconfronted with their unexpected absence, withbut fewexceptions, in thetransmission of thecourtro mance, including evenChretien himself. Despite the pictorialrange ofthe Manesse codex,itcontains onlya few pictures ofauthorship, giving us admittedly pictures of authors, but rarely explicitly as authors. LikeHuot,Petersstresses theperformative qualityof the medievalbook and devotesa valuablesectionto theParisArsenal manuscript3142with itspictorialcombination ofwrittenauthorship (parchment scroll)andoraldelivery (speechgesture, listeners). Among the Germanworkscon sidered, particular valueattaches topictures ofthe narrator as amediator, discussed with reference to Wolfram's WillehalmandThomasin's Welscher Gast. Of by far the greatest interest iswhat Peters has to say about Christine de Pizan in what isthelongest section of thelongest chapterinherbook.The large volume ofChristine's work ismatchedby thelarge numberofauthorial portraits, by the first-person emphasisinherwork,andbyan iconographically wide variety ofways ofpresenting heras an author(dedicating her finished book,workingon itather desk,discussingit withothers, beinginstructed to workon it byallegorical figures). With this writer, aswithotherstoo,the medievalauthor, so farfrom beingdead, is visibly aliveandkicking. For thisenrichment ofourunderstanding Petersis tobewarmlycongratulated, as are also her publishers forproducing a volume whose many illustrations are a delightto workwithandwhosepriceishappilyfarfrom excessive nowadays. Much, perhaps even the greater part, of thiswork is devoted to French literature, along side German. It is to be hoped that the language barrier will not prevent French scholarship from deriving asmuch profit from itas can German. TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE D. H. GREEN Medievalism inTechnology Old andNew. Ed. byKARLFUGELSO withCAROLL. ROBINSON. (StudiesinMedievalism, 16) Cambridge:Brewer. 2008. xiv+ 207 PP. ?45. ISBN 978-1-84384-156-2. Once again, perceptions of the Middle Ages are thewide umbrella of a volume edited byKarl Fugelso.Itshelters elevenchapters(someactuallyrelating to technology). Alicia C. Montoya learnedly discussesmedieval themesin seventeenth-century Frenchfairytales,includingtraditions ofRichard theLionheartand supposed ProvenSal verse by him. She admits that,while analysis here reveals much of the modern era, it tells us littleof theMiddle Ages. (The same applies to other papers inthis book.)AlbertD. Pionke memorably describesthat waterlogged Victorianex travaganza, theEglinton tournament of 1839. His view of itspolitics contrasts with that in Michael Alexander's Medievalism: TheMiddle Ages in Modern England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). Pionke sees itas a fiasco, aptly symbolizing the last stand of a beleaguered Tory aristocracy. Alexander (who calls the tournament MLR, 104.1, 2009 137 a success, once itstoppedraining)is more conservative, seeingits medievalismas vitaltothe politicalstability andgradualism ofnineteenth-century Britain. In a brief but significant paper (withillustrations), Gretchen Kreahling McKay examines Byzantinereligious artinnineteenth-century France, where itoffered al ternatives toa prevailing nationalistic harking-back to medievalFrenchorFlemish schools. CheneHeady analyses Yeats's rewriting (in an early poem) ofTennyson onMerlin andVivien.Yeats,as an Irishpatriotand visionary, there cuthimself freefromthe'plots ofempireand the materialistic web ofcapitalism'(p.78) that enmeshed poorTennyson. BruceC. Brasington shows American morale-builders of World War I reaching for themedieval to defend their cause. He represents Stars andStripes(1917-19), the AmericanExpeditionary Force'snewspaper, asnomere propaganda sheet, so that itsallusions toChartres and Joan ofArc had theirplace in the perennialidealism ofUSmilitary forays. He thus offers comparisons withStefan Goebel's The Great War and Medieval Memory: War, Remembrance and Medieval ismin BritainandGermany, 1914-1940(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007),where theimage ofaTeutonic knightina coal-scuttle helmetimplies other agendas.Stefano Mengozziwriteson theafterlife of the Guidonianhand,a dense and technical piecewhich ishard workfor non-musicologists. The latter partofFugelso'scollection has contributions byCarol L. Robinson, Oliver M. Traxel, AmyS.Kaufman, Brent MoberlyandKevin Moberly,andLauryn S.Mayer.Theyall discussmedievalisminvideo games.Theydealwith pseudo medieval elementsincomputer role-playing, thefeminine inNeverwinter Nights, ethicsofempireinStarWars:Knights of the Old Republic,'Rethinking ofGender in MMORPGs', and thelike. Theirexpert discussiondoes notmaterially advance ourknowledge of the Middle Ages. It mightimply that videogamesare(as snooker once was) a way tomisspend one's youth. But they potently suggest the allure of the medieval.Like everycontribution in thisbook, theyshowthatitsappeal to theimagination or intellect cannotbe stifled: a point worthremembering, when so many turn resolutely deaf ears to it. UNIVERSITY OF NAVARRE,PAMPLONA ANDREW BREEZE La Posteritede la Renaissance. Ed. by FIONAMCINTOSH-VARJABE'DIAN with VERONIQUE GEILY. (UL3,Travauxet recherches) Lille:Universite Charles de-Gaulle-Lille3. 2007. 316pp. ?18.50. ISBN978-2-84467-o96-6. This isa volumeofarticlesinFrenchon varioustopicsrelated to thereception of the RenaissanceinEuropeup tothetwenty-first century. It isdividedintosixsec tions, dealing withpolitics,thearts...