Medieval Narrative Research Articles

Weaponizing History

Abstract This paper deals with Weaponizing History in the Russo-Ukranian War in diachronic perspective focusing on the events of 2014 and 2022. It shall be demonstrated that in 2014 it was medieval narratives that were the main focus: For instance, in the presidential speech addressed to the Federal Assembly on December 4, 2014, the annexation of Crimea was legitimized by the disputed “Korsun Legend”. This firmly established narrative has made it possible to proclaim Crimea to be the cradle of the Russian nation and a sacred place. In the recent war Putin invokes the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945) which has been developed into a central place of remembrance in his regime and according to which Ukraine is to be denazified and delegitimized as a product of Bolshevism. It is significant to note that these narratives synchronize and harmonize rather well with one another in the collective historical consciousness of Russians.

Andrzej Pleszczyński / Grischa Vercamer (Eds.), Germans and Poles in the Middle Ages. The Perception of the „Other“ and the Presence of Mutual Ethnic Stereotypes in Medieval Narrative Sources. (Explorations in Medieval Culture, Vol. 16.) Leiden, Brill 2021

Article Andrzej Pleszczyński / Grischa Vercamer (Eds.), Germans and Poles in the Middle Ages. The Perception of the „Other“ and the Presence of Mutual Ethnic Stereotypes in Medieval Narrative Sources. (Explorations in Medieval Culture, Vol. 16.) Leiden, Brill 2021 was published on December 1, 2022 in the journal Historische Zeitschrift (volume 315, issue 3).

Kult populárního raně středověkého světce sv. Jiljí v českých zemích od jeho počátků až po konec středověku

The study deals with the medieval cult of the early medieval hermit and the Benedictine abbot St. Giles in the Bohemian lands from its earliest beginnings to the end of the Middle Ages. Saint Giles, living in the 7th and 8th centuries in the region of Septimania located in the south of modern‑day France, became one of the most popular Christian saints in the medieval Western and Central Europe due to his patronage. The study therefore seeks to create a comprehensive interpretation of the form of the St. Giles’s cult in the Bohemian lands in the Middle Ages. The historical research of the cult of St. Giles is carried out through a detailed analysis of the medieval narrative and material sources, iconography, legends and sources of Church‑administrative origin. The text presents, in detail and with the help of the analysis of relics, calendars and Church dedications, not only the spread of the St. Giles’s cult in the Bohemian lands in the 12th century, but also the close relationship of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV to the mentioned saint. The study also discusses the fine arts monuments and the cult of St. Giles as one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers at the end of the Middle Ages

IMITATION AND SIMULATION OF THE MEDIEVAL NARRATIONS IN MODERN MEDIEVALISM: FEATURES OF THE STRUCTURE AND ITS (DE)CONSTRUCTION

Goal. The goal of the article is to analyze the constructed “medieval” narrative in the texts of George Martin and other American authors, who form synthetic versions of the political, social, cultural and religious history of the Seven Kingdoms.
 The novelty of the article lies in the study of the features of the historical narrative in the texts of George Martin in contexts of its imitation and simulation of the medieval narrative structure of the text in combination with elements and techniques of postmodern prose.
 Methodology. Methodologically, the article is based on the principles of interdisciplinary historiography proposed in intellectual and cultural history, as well as in the study of medievalism as a synthetic form of mass ideas about the Middle Ages in the modern consumer society.
 Results. It is assumed that George Martin and his co-authors proposed a successful model for imitation of the medieval historical narrative, simulating the style and narrative techniques of medieval historical writings. This article analyzes the problems of historical narrative in the contexts of imagination, invention, simulation, imitation, construction and deconstruction. The author analyzes the systemic themes that form the historical narrative of George Martin. The author believes that chronology, religiosity, the heterogeneous nature of the text, images of Otherness, the presence of a hero of history form the basis of the simulated medieval historical narrative. It is shown that George Martin’s texts formally imitate the style of medieval narration, but actually actualize the potential of simulation and imitation of modern postmodern culture.
 Conclusions. The article shows that 1) George Martin and his co-authors reproduce a conditional “medieval” text, which is actually a construct, 2) the analyzed text can be interpreted in the categories of construction, deconstruction, assimilation, simulation and imitation, 3) the analyzed narrative is a form of deconstruction of the past, constructing alternative and parallel images of the Middle Ages, 4) George Martin’s texts can be described as attempts to assimilate academic medievalism and mass cultural medievalism.

The Vlachs - People Formed Around a Dynasty

Serbian kings were co-heirs to the Arpad dynasty, Stefan Dragutin and his son, Stefan Vladislav, son of the eldest daughter of the last significant Arpad king. His Angevin adversaries, descendants of a younger sister of Dragutin’s wife, had the support of the papacy. In the Hungarian regions where Dragutin and Vladislav’s supporters had estates, Serbian Vlachs were colonized. In the Krasso region, where even today the population is bilingual in Serb and Vlach and has a mixed identity, in which Serb and Vlach are interchangeable, the same, and which onomastically preserve all the main family names that Vlach nobility in counties colonized later from this region, such as Maramoros or Hunyad has (this is the Crisov land mentioned in the Roman and Vlachata medieval narrative, the first land settled by the Serb Vlachs under Dragutin in Hungary from which they later spread). In the Hunyad County, where the wedding of Dragutin’s son, Vladislav, and Laszlo Kán’s daughter took place, the first Vlachs from Serbia came as reinforcement of the political enterprise of the Nemanjic dynasty as a successor of the Arpad line, despite a papal ex-communication. Afterwards, in the areas of Miklos Pok (Maramaros, Ugocsa, Bereg), another ally of Dragutin, influenced by Andrew of Halics, another wave of Serbian Vlach colonists came, the ancestors of Maramaros nobility. In the acts of the Catholic Church in Câmpulung Muscel, a note about Negru Vodă’s wife is preserved. She is called Katalin, the daughter of the Hungarian King. This implies the identity between the semi-legendary XVIIth century figure of Negru Vodă and Dragutin. Negru Vodă probably is a translation of Maurovlach, black Vlach. Heraldry common to Serbia, Bosnia, Wallachia, and Moldavia, the Ethiopic heads, supports the identity between Hungarian Wallachia, and Nemanjic Serbia, and the origin of its dynasty from the Nemanjic. This genealogic identity is preserved in the painted family tree of Curtea de Argeş, where Neagoe Basarab implies the symbolism of the 12 tribes of Israel to suggest the political unity of Serbian Vlachs in the ottoman regions and the colonized north.

The Afterlives of Crisis: Harold and Custer on The Slipstream

ABSTRACT 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.

The Everyman’s Pilgrimage: Medieval Allegory and Narrative in Everyman

The Everyman’s Pilgrimage: Medieval Allegory and Narrative in Everyman

Form and Foreskin: Medieval Narratives of Circumcision by A.W. Strouse

Reviewed by: Form and Foreskin: Medieval Narratives of Circumcision by A.W. Strouse William Robert a.w. strouse, Form and Foreskin: Medieval Narratives of Circumcision. New York: Fordham University Press, 2021. Pp. 165. isbn: 9780823294756. $25. Circumcision is a slippery operation. Form and Foreskin examines circumcision's different operations: as medical procedure, religious ritual, cultural metaphor, hermeneutic practice, and narratological trope. Foreskin is slippery, too. It, Form and Foreskin tells us, 'connotes the slippage between body and soul, text and meaning' (p. 2). These slippages, figured textually, are Form and Foreskin's subjects. It tracks these subjects through ancient Mediterranean and medieval English texts and contexts. Form and Foreskin examines, in successive chapters, letters by Paul of Tarsus, a passage in one of Augustine of Hippo's commentaries on Genesis, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and The Wife of Bath's Tale in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Through its readings, Form and Foreskin considers—in stylistically varied prose—questions of (among other things) exegesis, physicality, identity, gender, desire, marriage, and time. [End Page 111] In the process, Form and Foreskin also identifies 'circumological narrative' as a genre of allegory. Circumlogical narratives revolve around cuts, nicks, and foreskins. It demonstrates how they 'amplify their textual bodies precisely in order to stage an unveiling of their inner, spiritual meanings' (p. 8). 'Nicking Sir Gawain' is the chapter in which Form and Foreskin's Arthurian elements appear. It's also Form and Foreskin's longest and most technical chapter. (I'd recommend rereading Gawain before reading it—and keeping Gawain within reach as you do.) Form and Foreskin reads Gawain as 'the circumlogical narrative par excellence' (p. 9) Following its circumological hermeneutic, Form and Foreskin shows that in Gawain, content mimics form. That means Gawain's human bodies reveal things about its textual body—all masculine bodies, on Form and Foreskin's reading. But they don't stay masculine. Sir Gawain's journey unfolds a feminization of Gawain's textual body, and 'the climax of the poem circumcises this body' (p. 53). Exposing that, Form and Foreskin reveals that across bodies, Gawain accepts the impossibilities of a complete identity and a straight, monolithic masculinity. Circumcision doesn't appear only at Gawain's climax. It also appears throughout Gawain, via a ritual-textual calendar. Sir Gawain decapitates the Green Knight on the Christian feast of Christ's circumcision. A year later, on the same feast, the Green Knight nicks Sir Gawain's neck. This pair of cuts plays out Christian senses of Christ's circumcision: as confirming the Incarnation and portending the Passion. For this textually masculine poem, these scenes of slightly sexualized masculine violence enact a theory of reading as circumcision. The cuts on Gawain's male characters' necks are, for Form and Foreskin, coded as hermeneutic acts, ones that 'metacritically comment upon how the poem invites multiple interpretations of its textual body' (p. 54). Following one of these interpretations, Form and Foreskin demonstrates that Gawain's narrative follows a Pauline movement from literal circumcision (of the flesh) to spiritual circumcision (of the heart). In Gawain, Christ's circumcision translates letter into spirit via a liturgical performance of multiple meanings. And Gawain's doubled cuts generate a narrative structure based on the letter-spirit dual. This movement is important for Gawain, whose fundamental questions are, in Form and Foreskin, hermeneutic ones: questions about ways of reading. It's important for a vernacular romance like Gawain, since this genre is usually preoccupied with male-female erotic seduction. It's also important for a circumlogical narrative like Gawain, which rethinks 'the preputial veil of allegory as feminine' and 'disciplines the body of romance' (p. 81). I've left out a lot, like Form and Foreskin's attention to alliteration and poetics, its biblically informed reading of Gawain with Cleanliness (another text by the Gawain- poet), and its nuanced narratological theory. But I hope I've included enough to illustrate how Form and Foreskin operates complexly, to turn circumcision into an innovative way of interpreting narratives and refiguring narratology. [End Page 112] William Robert Syracuse University Copyright © 2022 Arthuriana

A. W. Strouse. 2021. Form and Foreskin: Medieval Narratives of Circumcision. New York: Fordham University Press, 165 pp., $ 90.00 (hc)/$ 25.00 (pb).

Article A. W. Strouse. 2021. Form and Foreskin: Medieval Narratives of Circumcision. New York: Fordham University Press, 165 pp., $ 90.00 (hc)/$ 25.00 (pb). was published on March 1, 2022 in the journal Anglia (volume 140, issue 1).

“The Middle Ages on Imperial service”: Czech, Hungarian and Polish historical images in works by Franz Grillparzer, 1825–1830

The paper deals with historical images of non-Germanic peoples living in the Austrian empire and presented in romanticist fiction. The author analyzed several narratives from the heritage of Franz Grillparzer, the Austrian writer and dramatist. He referred to images of Czech, Hungarian and Polish medieval and early modern history. The chosen dramas are “Fortune and Fall of the king Ottokar” and “A Faithful servant to his Lord”, and the novella “A monastery in Sandomir”. They had a significant role in forming the image of non-Germanic Habsburg realms medieval history for subjects of the Empire. Romanticism and medievalism dominating in the European and Austrian public opinion and politics have put an impact on perception of Czechs, Hungarians and Poles by the German community of Austria. Despite the fact, that medieval narratives got the attention from national movements, Grillparzer referred to them basing on the Austrian conservatism. In this way his works enforced the Habsburg myth and “organic constitution” for the state. The author came to a conclusion that images of Czech, Hungarian and Polish medieval and early modern history presented in works by Grillparzer have filled the gap in official historical memory. It became possible due to overweighting Austro-German and Habsburg emphasis in official discourse, what gave a certain ground for national movements and became a disadvantage for official historiography. Appeal to dynastic patriotism and legitimism has got a certain enforcement with reflections on disunity of Hungarian, Czech and Polish elites. According to the author, the mobilization of the elites was to illustrate the thesis and to promote the official version of the Habsburg empire history.

Conversion as an exemplary experience in the 14th century and today: narrative-comparative approaches to the Exemplum

ABSTRACT What should we learn from another individual’s experience? What kind of narrated experiences become cultural masterplots and genres in different historical contexts? This article introduces an approach to medieval exemplary narratives of conversion that combines narrative theory and comparatist attention to the historical context and forms of narrative experientiality. We take two exempla from the sermon of the feast of the canonization of Saint Birgitta as our test case. The historical specificity of narrative didacticism is further highlighted by comparing medieval exempla with social media-fuelled stories of personal conversion-like transformation that gain representative and normative power in today’s narrative environments. Who are the saints and sinners in today’s social media didacticism? Our narrative-theoretical and comparative analysis focuses on conversion as a replicable model experience and a prototypical element of a shareable narrative. We also pay attention to the dynamics of narrative authorization in medieval and contemporary narrative environments and sketch an interdisciplinary synthesis of the genre of the exemplum as a narrative form.

Dreamworlds, Storyworlds: Narrative Proliferation and the Case of Stjörnu-Odda draumr

Dreamworlds, Storyworlds: Narrative Proliferation and the Case of <i>Stjörnu-Odda draumr</i>

Germans and Poles in the Middle Ages: The Perception of the ‘Other’ and the Presence of Mutual Ethnic Stereotypes in Medieval Narrative Sources, ed. Andrzej Pleszczyński and Grischa Vercamer. Explorations in Medieval Culture, 16. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2021, xxv, 433 pp., 2 maps.

Abstract Much too often we use the modern term ‘the Other’ with respect only to monsters or non-white people in the Middle Ages. ‘Others,’ however, often appear and determine our epistemological framework both then and today. Only difference, as Ferdinand de Saussure had taught us, makes it possible to comprehend the value of an entity in contrast to the context. Similarly, the perception of other people, especially neighbors (Germans vs. Poles, vs. Czechs, Danes, etc.) mattered greatly already in the Middle Ages, which was the topic of a conference held in Warsaw from May 24 to 27, 2018. The present volume contains the proceedings, which are divided into five parts: 1. zones of contacts across Europe; 2. Polish views of Germans; 3. German views of Poles; 4. regional zones of contacts between Poles and Germans; and 5. German-Polish stereotypes in modern times as a counter-image to the medieval conditions.

Medieval Narratives of Alexander the Great: Transnational Texts in England and France

Medieval Narratives of Alexander the Great: Transnational Texts in England and France

Тюркский свод Прохора Коломнятина в ряду нарративных памятников крымской тематики XIV–XVII веков

Research objectives: To analyze the genre-typological and stylistic peculiarities of the narrative parts that accompany the actual dictionary entries of the Turkic-Russian dictionary, and thus to add a new source to the group of narrative monuments from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries centuries which pertain to Crimea. Research materials: The Turkic-Russian dictionary (“Kniga Elihv”) included in the manuscript miscellany (“Tsvetnik”) that was compiled by the hieromonk, Prokhor Kolomiatin, in 1668. The manuscript is kept in the collection of the State Historical Museum (Muzeyskoe sobr., No. 2803). Results and novelty of the research: The Turkic-Russian dictionary included in Prokhor Kolomiatin’s miscellany is one of the earliest examples of a Turkic lexicography in the Cyrillic tradition. Along with the records of lexemes and word collocations, it contains lengthy narratives concerning religion, geography, and ethnography of Crimea. The nature of the information provided suggests that the author of the dictionary was living in Crimea for some time, most likely as a prisoner, although having a certain privileged status. Having little opportunity to travel outside the peninsula, he received knowledge, including information about other countries, from verbal communication with the local inhabitants made up of different national and social groups. Analysis of the content of the narrative material allows us to state that the text has its own degree of originality, although it naturally finds thematic and genre parallels with the well-known medieval narratives concerning Crimea.

Communicating God’s war. Accounts of holy war in Polish medieval narrative sources

The authors of Polish medieval narrative accounts from and about Poland communicated episodes of Christian holy war and proto-crusades in a distinct and consistent way from the early twelfth century. In this article I will argue that the anonymous author of the Gesta principum Polonorum presented the Polish conquest of Pomerania as a holy war, and that a hundred years later, the learned Vincentius Bishop of Cracow in his Chronica Polonorum depicted three military campaigns against the Prussian pagans and apostates as crusading expeditions. I will also argue that the first Polish historian Jan Długosz, deliberately celebrated and highlighted these earlier accounts to his contemporary fifteenth century readership, using these histories to position Poland’s rulers as having a longstanding and consistent commitment to crusading, at a time when participation in crusades was a central concern of Poland’s ruling elites. This article will conclude that each of these written works was a commissioned text and part of a deliberate strategy by the rulers of Poland to communicate their engagement in Christian holy wars at the periphery of Christian Europe.

The Animal Nurse in Late Medieval Narrative and its Relation to Genre

The Animal Nurse in Late Medieval Narrative and its Relation to Genre

Jews and the child murder libel in the medieval Iberian Peninsula: European trends and Iberian peculiarities

ABSTRACT This article examines the history of the child murder libel – the claim that Jews abducted and murdered Christian children for religious or magical purposes – in the Iberian Peninsula before the expulsion of the Jews from the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon in 1492. After analysing the documentary evidence and the number of alleged cases from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, this article seeks to answer the following questions: Are the medieval Iberian child murder libel narratives just bland retellings of narratives found elsewhere in Europe, as has been argued, or did they develop peculiarities that set them apart?

Transdisciplinarity—A Bold Way into the Academic Future, from a European Medievalist Perspective and or the Rediscovery of Philology?

This essay examines the challenges and opportunities provided by transdisciplinarity from the point of view of medieval literature. This approach is situated within the universal framework of General Education or Liberal Arts, which in turn derives its essential inspiration from medieval and ancient learning. On the one hand, the various recent efforts to work transdisciplinarily are outlined and discussed; on the other, a selection of medieval narratives and one modern German novel plus one eighteenth-century ode are examined to illustrate how a transdisciplinary approach could work productively in order to innovate the principles of the modern university or all academic learning, putting the necessary tools of twenty-first century epistemology into the hands of the new generation. The specific angle pursued here consists of drawing from the world of medieval philosophy and literature as a new launching pad for future endeavors.

Narrative coherence inDigenes Akrites(G)

This article argues that coherence in medieval narratives was perceived differently than it is in modern literature, offering an analysis of coherence principles inDigenes Akriteswhich seem to have been more relevant for its original audiences. Drawing on contemporary narratology and recent research on comparable western works, the author does not search for one sole superordinate principle, but rather for so-called structures of mid-range coherence. The article contains some examples of such ‘centres of gravity’ – the schema, the scene and the meaning – in the G version.