Rethinking the New Medievalism

"In the early 1990s, Stephen Nichols introduced the term 'new medievalism' to describe an alternative to the traditional philological approach to the study of the romantic texts in the medieval period. While the old approach focused on formal aspects of language, this new approach was historicist and moved beyond a narrow focus on language to examine the broader social and cultural contexts in which literary works were composed and disseminated. Within the field, this transformation of medieval studies was as important as the genetic revolution to the study of biology and has had an enormous influence on the study of medieval literature. Rethinking the New Medievalism offers both a historical account of the movement and its achievements while indicating--in Nichols's innovative spirit--still newer directions for medieval studies. The essays deal with questions of authorship, theology, and material philology and are written by members of a wide philological and critical circle that Nichols nourished for forty years."--Publisher's Web site.

New challenges for the New Medievalism / Stephen G. Nichols -- Reflections on The new philology / Gabrielle M. Spiegel -- Virgil's 'perhaps': mythopoiesis and cosmogony in Dante's Commedia (Remarks on Inf. 34, 106-26) / Gerhard Regn -- Dialectic of the medieval course / Daniel Heller-Roazen -- Religious horizon and epic effect: considerations on the Iliad, the Chanson de Roland, and the Nibelungenlied / Joachim Küpper -- The possibility of historical time in the Crónica Sarracina / Marina Brownlee -- Good Friday magic: Petrarch's Canzoniere and the transformation of medieval vernacular poetry / Andreas Kablitz -- The identity of a text / Jan-Dirk Mü̈ller -- Conceiving the text in the Middle Ages / Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet -- Dante's transfigured Ovidian models: Icarus and Daedalus in the Commedia / Kevin Brownlee -- Ekephrasis in the Knight's tale / Andrew James Johnston -- Montaigne's medieval nominalism and Meschonnic's ethics of the subject / Jack Abecassis -- The Pélerinage corpus in the European Middle Ages: processes of retextualization reflected in the prologues / Ursula Peters -- Narrative frames of Augustinian thought in the Renaissance: the case of Rabelias / Deborah…