Studies in Medievalism 33 Out Now

Released earlier this season:

Studies in Medievalism XXXIII: (En)gendering Medievalism

Edited by Karl Fugelso

Full details, preview, and ordering information at https://boydellandbrewer.com/9781843847175/studies-in-medievalism-xxxiii/.

TITLE DETAILS

270 Pages

23.4 x 15.6 cm

6 b/w illus.

Series: Studies in Medievalism

Series Vol. Number: 33

Imprint: D.S.Brewer

April 2024

DESCRIPTION

Essays on the post-modern reception and interpretation of the Middle Ages.

Though Studies in Medievalism has hosted many essays on gender, this is the first volume devoted specifically to that theme.

The first part features four short essays that directly address manifestations of sexism in postmedieval responses to the Middle Ages: gender substitutions in a Grail Quest episode of the 2023 television series Mrs. Davis, repurposed misogyny in the last two episodes of Game of Thrones (2011-19), traditional gender stereotypes in Capital One's credit card commercials from 2000 to 2013, and "shaggy" medievalism in Robert Eggers' 2022 film The Northman.

The second part contains ten longer essays, which collectively continue to demonstrate the ubiquity of gender issues and the extraordinary flexibility of approaches to them. The authors discuss the misogynistic sexualization of Grendel's mother in Parke Godwin's 1995 fantasy novel The Tower of Beowulf, in Graham Baker's 1999 film Beowulf, in three episodes from the television series Xena: Warrior Princess, and in Robert Zemeckis's 2007 film Beowulf; gender substitution in David Lowery's 2021 film The Green Knight and in Kinoku Nasu's and Takashi Takeuchi's anime series Fate (2004-); female authorship of three early-nineteenth-century plays about court ladies' medieval empowerment; extraordinary violence in medievalist video games; nationalism in fake nineteenth-century medievalist documents and in contemporary online fora; racial discrimination in video gaming and in Jim Crow literature; and the condemnation of racism in Maria Dahvana Headley's 2018 novel The Mere Wife.

CONTENTS

Preface - Karl Fugelso

I: (En)gendering Medievalism

The Peacock Television Network's Mrs. Davis, Sister Simone, and Messing Up the Quest for the Holy Grail - Kevin J. Harty

Bitches Be Crazy: Patriarchal Weaponization of Mental Distress in Game of Thrones - Lauryn Mayer

Capital One's Condemnation, Conversion, and Eventual Celebration of Mythical Medieval Northern European Males through Allegorical Commercials - Carol L. Robinson

The Northman and the Link between Past and Present Masculinities - H. Peter Johnsson

II: Other Responses to Medievalism

Maternal Games in The Green Knight: Launching Gawain - Carol Jamison

Seaxy Beast: Grendel's Mother and Responses to Third-Wave Feminism in Beowulf Adaptations - Alison Elizabeth Killilea

Artoria Pendragon: Anachronism, Gender and Self-Acceptance in the Fate Anime Series of Kinoko Nasu and Takashi Takeuchi - Lisa Myers

Exalted by Honour: Women's Medievalist History Plays in the Late-Eighteenth Century - Kirsten Ogilby

A Violent Medium for a Violent Era: Brutal Medievalist Combat in Dragon Age: Origins and Kingdom Come: Deliverance - Robert Houghton

The "Old Frisian" Tescklaow as Invented Tradition: Forging Friesland's Rural Past in the Early Nineteenth Century - Rolf H. Bremmer, Jr. and Philippus Breuker

Neither Brutes, Nor Sissies: Re-imagining the Vikings on a Swedish Online Forum - Christine Ekholst

Avatar Creation and White Masculinity in Wolfram van Eschenbach's Parzival and Ernest Cline's Ready Player One - Chelsea Keane

Intersectionality in Maria Dahvana Headley's The Mere Wife - Mareike Huber

The Smith, the Devil, and Jim Crow: Medieval Hagiography, Victorian Popular Culture, and the Legacy of Slavery in Edward G. Flight's The Horse Shoe: The True Legend of St. Dunstan and the Devil - Christina M. Heckman

The Year's Work in Medievalism 33 (2018)

The latest volume of The Year's Work in Medievalism has been released. It can be accessed at https://sites.google.com/site/theyearsworkinmedievalism/all-issues/33-2018.


Full contents as follows:


The Year's Work in Medievalism 33 (2018)

Edited by Valerie Johnson & Renée Ward, with Laura Harrison

Valerie Johnson & Renée Ward: Introduction

Alexandra Sterling-Hellenbrand: East Meets West? Heritage, Medievalism, and the Nibelungenlied on the Danube

Sarah J. Sprouse: From ides aglæcwif to “shebeast”: The Loss of the Wrecend in Thomas Meyer’s Translation of Beowulf

Loredana Teresi: Jo Nesbø’s The Snowman and the Myth of Týr: Addressing Contemporary Issues through Literary Tradition

Karl Fugelso: A Mickey Mouse Inferno: Medievalist Legacies and the Marketing of the Middle Ages

Alicia McKenzie: A Patchwork World: Medieval History and World-Building in Dragon Age: Inquisition

Scott Manning: Warriors “Hedgehogged” in Arrows: Crusaders, Samurai, and Wolverine in Medieval Chronicles and Popular Culture

Adam Debosscher: #ForTheThrone: A Study of the Emphasis on the Medievalism in the Paratext of G. R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire in HBO’s Game of Thrones

Call For Submissions

CFP Medieval in Modern Children's Literature (Spec Issue of ChLAO) (11/1/19)

I'm sorry to have missed this sooner; do note the impending due date.

Call for journal articles: "The Medieval in Modern Children's Literature" (ChLAQ)
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2019/02/13/call-for-journal-articles-the-medieval-in-modern-childrens-literature-chlaq

deadline for submissions:
November 1, 2019
full name / name of organization:
Kristin Bovaird-Abbo / Children's Literature Association Quarterly
contact email:
kristin.bovairdabbo@unco.edu

The Medieval in Modern Children's Literature
A Special Issue of Children's Literature Association Quarterly

Edited by Kristin Bovaird-Abbo
Deadline: 1 November 2019

The pervasive presence of medieval elements in children's texts and media (including but not limited to animation, picture books, young adult novels, television series, video games, and graphic novels) has long been acknowledged, as evidenced by Clare Bradford's 2015 monograph The Middle Ages in Children's Literature. This special issue of the Children's Literature Association Quarterly invites essays that continue to explore how recent texts and media created specifically for children complicate or extend their treatment of the medieval beyond the conventional heroes of Britain, and Europe in general. Authors and directors retell tales of Beowulf, Robin Hood, and King Arthur with female and non-binary protagonists, filling in gaps of traditional narratives, and creating new characters to engage with these older themes. More important than what these texts tell us about the medieval, though, is what these medievalized stories tell us about the modern.

This special issue particularly seeks papers that treat issues such as (but not limited to) the following:

• Depictions of racial diversity
• Gendered identities, including questioning of gender binaries, depictions of female agency
• Depictions of religious identity
• Intersectionality in children's medievalism
• Depictions of geographical space, including issues of identity, migration, and diaspora
• Depictions of people with disabilities, illness, non-normative bodies
• Fidelity (perceived and otherwise) to medieval historicity
• The medieval as modernity's other
• Medievalism vs. fantasy
• Magic vs. science

Papers should conform to the usual style of ChLAQ and be between 5,000-7,000 words in length.

Queries and completed essays should be sent to Kristin Bovaird-Abbo (kristin.bovairdabbo@unco.edu with a re: line indicating "ChLAQ Essay") by 1 November 2019.

The selected articles will appear in ChLAQ in 2020.


Last updated February 14, 2019

CFP Old English Literature, Including Beowulf (7/31/2018; PAMLA 11/09-11/2018)

Of potential interest: 

Old English Literature, Including Beowulf
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2018/06/30/old-english-literature-including-beowulf

deadline for submissions: July 31, 2018

full name / name of organization: Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association

contact email: dupdegraff@apu.edu



The session "Old English Literature, Including Beowulf" is still accepting abstracts in July for the 2018 PAMLA conference, which will be held from November 9-11 at Western Washington University. This call is a deadline extension, so please submit abstracts soon if you are interested. Papers can explore any Old English texts, not just Beowulf.

Use the proposal submission system at https://www.pamla.org/2018/topic-areas

Direct questions to Dr. Derek Updegraff (dupdegraff@apu.edu).

Studies in Medievalism for 2013

The 2013 volume of Studies in Medievalism, published as Corporate Medievalism II, has now been released. Details and contents as follows:


Studies in Medievalism XXII
Corporate Medievalism II
Edited by Karl Fugelso

Details

First Published: 18 Jul 2013
13 Digit ISBN: 9781843843559
Pages: 218
Size: 23.4 x 15.6
Binding: Hardback
Imprint: D.S.Brewer
Series: Studies in Medievalism
Subject: Medieval Literature
BIC Class: DSBB
Price: $90
Details updated on 25 Jun 2013

In the wake of the many passionate responses to its predecessor, Studies in Medievalism 22 also addresses the role of corporations in medievalism. Amid the three opening essays, Amy S. Kaufman examines how three modern novelists have refracted contemporary corporate culture through an imagined and highly dystopic Middle Ages. On either side of that paper, Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz explore how the Woolworth Company and Google have variously promoted, distorted, appropriated, resisted, and repudiated post-medieval interpretations of the Middle Ages. And Clare Simmons expands on that approach in a full-length article on the Lord Mayor's Show in London. Readers are then invited to find other permutations of corporate influence in six articles on the gendering of Percy's Reliques, the Romantic Pre-Reformation in Charles Reade's The Cloister and the Hearth, renovation and resurrection in M.R. James's "Episode of Cathedral History", salvation in the Commedia references of Rodin's Gates of Hell, film theory and the relationship of the Sister Arts to the cinematic Beowulf, and American containment culture in medievalist comic-books. While offering close, thorough studies of traditional media and materials, the volume directly engages timely concerns about the motives and methods behind this field and many others in academia.

Karl Fugelso is Professor of Art History at Towson University in Baltimore, Maryland.

Contributors: Aida Audeh, Elizabeth Emery, Katie Garner, Nickolas Haydock, Amy S. Kaufman, Peter W. Lee, Patrick J. Murphy, Fred Porcheddu, Clare A. Simmons, Mark B. Spencer, Richard Utz.


Contents

1 Editorial Note (Karl Fugelso)

2 The Corporate Gothic in New York's Woolworth Building: Medieval Branding in the Original "Cathedral of Commerce" (Elizabeth Emery)

3 Our Future is Our Past: Corporate Medievalism in Dystopian Fiction (Amy S. Kaufman)

4 The Good Corporation? Google's Medievalism and Why It Matters (Richard Utz)

5 "Longest, oldest, and most popular": Medievalism in the Lord Mayor's Show (Clare A. Simmons)

6 Gendering Percy's Reliques: Ancient Ballads and the Making of Women's Arthurian Writing (Katie Garner)

7 Romancing the Pre-Reformation: Charles Reade's The Cloister and the Hearth (Mark B. Spencer)

8 Renovation and Resurrection in M. R. James's "Episode of Cathedral History" (Patrick J. Murphy and Fred Porcheddu)

9 Rodin's Gates of Hell and Dante's Inferno 7: Fortune, the Avaricious and Prodigal, and the Question of Salvation (Aida Audeh)

10 Film Theory, the Sister Arts Tradition, and the Cinematic Beowulf (Nickolas Haydock)

11 Red Days, Black Knights: Medieval-themed Comic Books in American Containment Culture (Peter W. Lee)

Rebecca Barnhouse’s Novels

The Medieval News blog has a post on Rebecca Barnhouse’s new novel Peaceweaver, which is inspired by episodes from Beowulf. 

An interview with Barnhouse on the novel appears at Suvudu, and an earlier interview at The Enchanted Inkpot looks at her earlier book, The Coming of the Dragon, which is also based on material in Beowulf. 

Barnhouse has published further material set in the Middle Ages for young readers as well as two academic studies of similar works. Her website is: http://www.rebeccabarnhouse.com/. 

Beowulf by James Rumford

I recently picked up James Rumford's Beowulf: A Hero's Tale Retold (2007) and found it an interesting read. The book--both written and illustrated by Rumford--offers young readers a simplified and non-gory version of Beowulf that makes several attempts for a more "authentic" version of the story. The costumes, arms and armor, architecture and decoration are suitably early medieval in appearance, and the text itself both uses keenings and employs a lexicon of words primarily derived from Old English. Rumford details his approach to the book in an author's note that concludes the work and on his website. This is definitely something to consider for the young medievalists on your holiday shopping lists.

CFP "Does Beowulf Allow (for) Illustration?" (due 9/5/2011)

http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/42051

New College Conference, March 8-10, 2012, Sarasota, FL: Call for papers: "Does Beowulf Allow (for) Illustration?" (due 9/5/2011)
full name / name of organization:
Matthew J. Snyder / University of Florida
contact email:
msnyder@ufl.edu

This session will seek to explore the question: Can Beowulf be illustrated, or does the poem exhibit and/or foster an inherent antagonism between sign and icon? Recent efforts to provide illustration that augments (or perhaps subsumes or subordinates) the poem's 3182 lines of text, including Seamus Heaney and John D. Niles' Beowulf: An Illustrated Edition (Norton, 2007), the graphic novel Beowulf: Monster Slayer (Graphic Universe, 2008), and Robert Zemeckis' 2007 motion-capture animated film, all would seem to push back against what might be termed the text's opacity of the visual imaginary. Do these works and others, including various Beowulf adaptations to film and new media, succeed in their self-appointed task of turning the poem into a (moving-)picture book? Can they? Why might – or might not – these approaches represent successful or failed (re)interpretations or adaptations of the epic, and is there some other logic or desire behind the apparent drive to illustrate Beowulf that we ought to try to get at?

Please submit 250-word abstracts of proposed twenty-minute papers in the body of an email with a current CV attached. The deadline for the submission of abstracts for this session is 5 September 2011. For more on the New College Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Studies, visit http://faculty.ncf.edu/medievalstudies/index.html.

Matthew J. Snyder
Department of English
University of Florida