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Books by Benjamin A. Saltzman

Cambridge University Press, 2022

The mid-twentieth century gave rise to a rich array of new approaches to the study of the Middle ... more The mid-twentieth century gave rise to a rich array of new approaches to the study of the Middle Ages by both professional medievalists and those more well-known from other pursuits, many of whom continue to exert their influence over politics, art, and history today. Attending to the work of a diverse and transnational group of intellectuals – Hannah Arendt, Erich Auerbach, W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Erwin Panofsky, Simone Weil, among others – the essays in this volume shed light on these thinkers in relation to one another and on the persistence of their legacies in our own time. This interdisciplinary collection gives us a fuller and clearer sense of how these figures made some of their most enduring contributions with medieval culture in mind. Thinking of the Medieval is a timely reminder of just how vital the Middle Ages have been in shaping modern thought.

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019

“Highly original, Bonds of Secrecy reveals something that has been hidden in plain sight throug... more “Highly original, Bonds of Secrecy reveals something that has been hidden in plain sight throughout a wide variety of texts and makes a significant impact on our understanding of historical and narrative motivations. Saltzman succeeds in clearing away presentist mental furniture to reveal what secrecy meant to Anglo-Saxons who understood it to be inseparable from divine omniscience.” — Leslie Lockett, The Ohio State University

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What did it mean to keep a secret in early medieval England? It was a period when the experience of secrecy was intensely bound to the belief that God knows all human secrets, yet the secrets of God remain unknowable to human beings. In Bonds of Secrecy, Benjamin A. Saltzman argues that this double-edged conception of secrecy and divinity profoundly affected the way believers acted and thought as subjects under the law, as the devout within monasteries, and as readers before books. One crucial way it did so was by forming an ethical relationship between the self and world that was fundamentally different from its modern reflex. Whereas today the bearers of secrets might be judged for the consequences of their reticence or disclosure, Saltzman observes that, in the early Middle Ages, a person attempting to conceal a secret was judged for believing he or she could conceal it from God. In other words, to attempt to hide from God was to become ensnared in a serious sin, but to hide from the world while deliberately and humbly submitting to God’s constant observation was often a hallmark of spiritual virtue.

Looking to law codes and religious architecture, hagiographies and riddles, Bonds of Secrecy shows how legal and monastic institutions harnessed the pervasive and complex belief in God’s omniscience to produce an intense culture of scrutiny and a radical ethics of secrecy founded on the individual’s belief that nothing could be hidden from God. According to Saltzman, this ethics of secrecy not only informed early medieval notions of mental activity and ideas about the mind but also profoundly shaped the practices of literary interpretation in ways that can inform our own contemporary approaches to reading texts from the past.

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Articles by Benjamin A. Saltzman

postmedieval, 2022

Colour. Shape. Space. Time. The lines we draw between medieval and modern art delineate periods, ... more Colour. Shape. Space. Time. The lines we draw between medieval and modern art delineate periods, but also connect them.
When we visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) and look at ‘The Love Song (Le Chant d’Amour)’ (1868–77) by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones, we instantly register an imagined medieval life. We can’t help but notice the armoured knight, enamoured with his love as she plays a portable organ with its bellows pressed by an angel. We might observe the quiet outline of a walled medieval city that recedes in the background. We might learn from a placard or exhibition book that the painting was supposedly inspired by a Breton lai: ‘Hélas! je sais un chant d'amour/ Triste ou gai, tour à tour’ (Alas! I know a love song/ Sad or happy, each in turn).Footnote 1 If the painting is located in time, its location is expressed through a distinctly medievalising temporality.
When we stand before Marc Chagall’s ‘White Crucifixion’ (1938) at the Art Institute of Chicago, our eyes are drawn to the central figure of Christ, spotlighted, as though with divine light, from above. We might think of all the crosses and bodies of Christ in the ‘Arts of Europe: Medieval and Renaissance’ exhibit at the far corner of the building. You move to or from the Modern Wing through the other spaces of the museum, as though moving through history. But if you dwell with Chagall’s Christ, you notice his waist wrapped in a tallit. You notice the scenes of chaotic pogroms, the pillaged and burning buildings, Jewish figures lamenting and refugees fleeing by foot, carrying the Torah, or fleeing by boat en masse. You notice the host of Nazi soldiers standing in for the persecutors of a distinctly Jewish Jesus. The painting thus takes us back to the medieval, only to situate us again in the contemporary urgency of the late 1930s.
When we take in Ellsworth Kelly’s ‘Red White’ (1962) at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, we are drawn to the colour, the shape, the space. Description and explication feel insufficient. But I’ll try: it’s a single asymmetrical abstract shape with eight slightly curved and irregular sides, filled in with solid cadmium-esque red, the crisp edges of which are set against a clean white background. Time feels uncannily absent, or at least still.
That is, until you come across the final folios of the Old English Illustrated Hexateuch, an English manuscript from around the first half of the eleventh century and currently held in the British Library under the shelf-mark Cotton Claudius B.iv. It contains an Old English translation of the first six books of the Old Testament and over 400 vibrantly coloured illustrations. Embedded in history and gracing the cover of this issue of postmedieval – the title of which already temporally frames the art in relation to the medieval and its futurity – is a close-up of one of the illustrations on folio 145v of the manuscript. Here the artist was interrupted while drawing a scene from the Book of Joshua. Remarkably, these unfinished drawings give us insight into the process itself, the way art is made over time: after the figures are roughly sketched, colour is added to form the general shapes of bodies, clothes, rivers, buildings (Johnson 2000). It becomes a kind of post-figurative abstraction.
But it also does something else. I’ve always felt an eerie attraction to the parts of manuscripts that are left blank or incomplete, awaiting a planned program of illustrations or words to come. But here, it’s all the more eerie. Time feels frozen, started then stopped, but not in an anticipatory way. It is as though the freezing of time produces a work of art that could be complete, that could stand on its own. What we are left with are pure colors and shapes that seem to draw me back, as it were, to the art of Ellsworth Kelly. In a 2015 interview, he reflected on the way he ‘made drawings of things, ideas of structure,’ and explained how his art, which appears purely abstract and almost as far from figurative as possible, was often inspired by the colours and shapes he would observe around him, emerging from shadows, stairs, furniture, plants, window frames.
‘I’d like my paintings to be in the present tense,’ remarked Kelly at the start of the same interview (2015). We might pause here to ask, what would it mean for medieval art to occupy tense in the same way? Alexander Nagel offers one way to approach defamiliarising juxtapositions between medieval and modern art – juxtapositions of ‘art out of time,’ out of ‘mere historical sequence’ – proposing that ‘the point of the comparison is not merely to find a precursor or “reference” for the modern intervention; the effect of the encounter goes in both directions’ (2012, 22-23). In light of Nagel’s suggestion, the incomplete drawings of the Old English Illustrated Hexateuch invite us not to think about how those drawings look ahead in time (whether in their immediate almost-completeness or in their anticipation of future imitations), but rather to reflect on the way they exist in the present and singular moment of recognition: that is, the moment in which I – as the viewer who happens to have seen both folio 145v of the medieval manuscript and enough of Ellesworth Kelly’s art to have made some kind of phenomenologically inexplicable connection between them – stand before one or the other, absorbing their pure colour and shape in unique constellations of consciousness.

The Yearbook of English Studies, 2022

This is an essay about the ways in which one person's inconceivable suffering — that of the virgi... more This is an essay about the ways in which one person's inconceivable suffering — that of the virgin martyr, St Margaret of Antioch — moves through history, the ways such historicity operates unpredictably, mediated by eye-witnesses, recounted in narratives that test the limits of belief, and in this case rephrased by twelfth-century translators looking backwards as their translations are read today. In particular, I take up two Old English translations of the Life of St Margaret and show how the differences between them emerge in the figure of the witness — especially the witness who refuses to look — and produce two distinct hagiographic modes of transmitting a narrative of inconceivability through history, necessarily framed in relation to modernity and the present.

Speculum, 2018

If solving a riddle involves returning the obscured referent to a state of clarity, then what are... more If solving a riddle involves returning the obscured referent to a state of clarity, then what are we to do when we encounter in the margin of Aldhelm of Malmesbury’s Aenigma 100 a scribe’s solution that looks like this: ut hkskdkxt? Such playful cryptography was quite common in early medieval manuscripts, particularly in the context of didactic texts and riddles, but there is something peculiar about this example (and several of the others that surround it in Cambridge, University Library, Gg. 5. 35): it contains an error, a slip that has made it all but impossible for modern editors and scholars to decrypt it accurately. But that error and others like it give us a new way to understand the nature of early medieval cryptographic inscriptions. By recognizing such mistakes and errors as an integral feature of scribal cryptography, we discover that that some of them may have actually involved tremendous ingenuity.

PMLA, 2018

Beowulf is a poem that confronts the limits of knowledge in various forms: the unknowability of d... more Beowulf is a poem that confronts the limits of knowledge in various forms: the unknowability of death, the secretive behavior of its monsters, the epistemological distance of the past, and our inevitably fragmentary understanding of the poem itself. In the process, the poem also tells us something important about the methods and possibilities that it imagines for the work of discovery and, I argue, literary interpretation more broadly. It is common for scholars to address the poem as a text whose secrets need uncovering, but in this essay I take the poem’s own engagement with the mechanics of secrecy as a cue for thinking through our own methods as literary critics in encounters with texts of the past. If we take the poem’s treatment of secrecy as a guide for its hermeneutic potential, then we find that it invites a kind of reading that rigorously, yet humbly acknowledges how little we can actually know.

The Chaucer Review, 2017

In the Friar’s Tale, the summoner extorts his victims with the promise of striking their names fr... more In the Friar’s Tale, the summoner extorts his victims with the promise of striking their names from his “feyned mandement.” Then, in the Summoner’s Tale, the friar’s companion planes away the names of their patrons from his wax tablets. In these two parallel acts, we get a glimpse into a deep seated cultural anxiety over the opportunities and dangers posed by various forms of textual and documentary erasure. This essay explores the materiality and literary significance of such erasures, which ultimately invite us to revise our view of these two antagonistic tales and read them not merely as a simple expression of quiting, but instead as an instance of mutual cancellation in which the erasure of a name simultaneously inscribes a person into the narrative.

Anglo-Saxon England, 42, 2013

The verb /forgytan/ is used reflexively six times in the extant Old English corpus, and all six i... more The verb /forgytan/ is used reflexively six times in the extant Old English corpus, and all six instances are found in King Alfred’s translation of Gregory the Great’s /Regula pastoralis/. As the translation adopts from its Latin source the concept of what I call ‘completely reflexive forgetting’ (the forgetting of one’s self), it adjusts the concept for an Anglo-Saxon audience by reimagining and reconfiguring the logistics of the mind and its mechanisms of perception. Completely reflexive forgetting is thus imagined as the process by which a ruler ceases to perceive himself from within (as God always does) and begins perceiving himself from without (from the perspective of his subjects), thereby slipping into a perpetually totalizing state of self-concealment.

postmedieval, 2014

By reading and situating Henry David Thoreau’s essay, “Walking,” alongside Henry Adams's /Mont-Sa... more By reading and situating Henry David Thoreau’s essay, “Walking,” alongside Henry Adams's /Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres/ and the work of William Morris, this article argues that Thoreau conceived of the Middle Ages not as a past to be recuperated and recovered (as by Morris) or as a past to be gazed upon from our modern perspective (as by Adams), but rather as a future to remain perpetually before us as we saunter forwards, meandering between wildness and civilization.

Mourning the death of a friend posed a problem for late Anglo-Saxon monasticism. Newly reformed u... more Mourning the death of a friend posed a problem for late Anglo-Saxon monasticism. Newly reformed under the authority of the /Benedictine Rule/ and the /Regularis Concordia/, religious were precluded from developing personal friendships so as to protect a world in which all things—including friends—must be held in common. Within this context, two Old English documents, so-called /Rules of Confraternity/, were inscribed in the early eleventh century into two manuscripts at New Minster, Winchester and Sherborne, establishing provisions for a reciprocal exchange of prayers following a death at a neighboring monastery. However, through scribal amendments and emendations, the Sherborne /Rules/ subtly break apart and reformulate the sense of community upheld in contemporary monastic codes: by liturgically imagining the confraternity as a bond of friendship between two monastic institutions, the Sherborne /Rules/ clear ground for the possibility that one friend might singularly mourn the death of another.

Book Chapters by Benjamin A. Saltzman

Bonds of Secrecy: Law, Spirituality, and the Literature of Concealment in Early Medieval England (Penn Press, 2019), 2019

On discovering their nakedness, they covered themselves; on hearing the voice of God, they hid am... more On discovering their nakedness, they covered themselves; on hearing the voice of God, they hid amid the trees of paradise. This primordial moment of concealment-the moment in which Adam and Eve attempt to hide themselves from the face of God-was clearly an impracticable endeavor from the start. The intangibility of God's face and the disembodiment of his voice would render his omniscience at once distant and ubiquitous, at once secret and manifest. Those physical trees of paradise, placed there by the Creator himself, could hardly conceal the shameful couple from his scrutiny. Yet still they tried. The lavishly illustrated vernacular translation of the first six books of the Old Testament known as the Old English Hexateuch (a manuscript produced in the eleventh century at Canterbury, probably at Saint Augustine's Abbey) makes that futile attempt to hide from God uncannily palpable. 1 In the top frame on fol. 7v (fig. 1), God stands at the left looking from a distance through the tree that divides the frame and separates him from Adam and Eve, as they entangle themselves with one another in a nest of serpentine branches. With his hands clasped at his heart, Adam looks in God's direction with an expression of profound confusion and regret-a tear even seems to flow from his eye. It is as though Adam recognizes not only his act of betrayal but also the failure of his own attempt at concealment, as he tries to glance back at his Creator only to set his eyes on this solid tree, an object that occludes Adam's vision but not God's. In contrast to Adam's longing gesture, Eve grasps a loose branch in one hand and holds her face in the other, looking downward and away. As Adam clutches his heart and Eve grasps her face, they are together held and fettered by the foliage that inadequately conceals them.

Thinking of the Medieval: Midcentury Intellectuals and the Middle Ages , 2022

Introduction to *Thinking of the Medieval: Midcentury Intellectuals and the Middle Ages* Cambridg... more Introduction to *Thinking of the Medieval: Midcentury Intellectuals and the Middle Ages* Cambridge University Press, 2022.

The mid-twentieth century gave rise to a rich array of new approaches to the study of the Middle Ages by both professional medievalists and those more well-known from other pursuits, many of whom continue to exert their influence over politics, art, and history today. Attending to the work of a diverse and transnational group of intellectuals – Hannah Arendt, Erich Auerbach, W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Erwin Panofsky, Simone Weil, among others – the essays in this volume shed light on these thinkers in relation to one another and on the persistence of their legacies in our own time. This interdisciplinary collection gives us a fuller and clearer sense of how these figures made some of their most enduring contributions with medieval culture in mind. Thinking of the Medieval is a timely reminder of just how vital the Middle Ages have been in shaping modern thought.

Textual Identities in Early Medieval England Essays in Honour of Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe, 2022

THE POETIC account of Adam and Eve's Fall is punctuated in the Junius Manuscript with an abundanc... more THE POETIC account of Adam and Eve's Fall is punctuated in the Junius Manuscript with an abundance of illustrations. Four of these illustrations depict with apparent redundancy the fallen couple facing one another and uncannily holding their hands up to their faces, partially covering their eyes: in the upper frame of p. 34 (Figure 4.1), the couple cover their genitals with one hand and their faces with the other; in the lower frame, we see them surrounded by foliage, which has now provided a more substantial covering for their lower regions, though their hands still cover their faces; on p. 36 (Figure 4.2), they carry on with the same gesture, as the satanic messenger returns to hell; and on p. 39 (Figure 4.3), after looking at and conversing with one another, they take a seat and return their hands to their faces once again.

This sequence of gestures is an unusual variant in the iconography of Adam and Eve's shame, which is almost always characterized by the couple’s postlapsarian desire to conceal their newly sexualized bodies. While the Junius artist certainly conveys this more common gesture of concealment with the careful placement of the couple's hands and accompanying foliage (indicating their desire not to be seen), Adam and Eve's repeated and mutual act of covering their eyes (indicating, in contrast, a desire not to see) illuminates the artist's multivalent and dynamic interpretation of Adam and Eve's shame, the liability of vision, and what it means to be a human observer of evil, death, and suffering after the Fall.

Thinking of the Medieval: Midcentury Intellectuals and the Middle Ages, 2022

In 1980, Paul Zumthor (1915–1995) published Parler du moyen age (Speaking of the Middle Ages), an... more In 1980, Paul Zumthor (1915–1995) published Parler du moyen age (Speaking of the Middle Ages), an elegant little book on the state of the discipline and the task of the medievalist, tracing a history of medieval studies from its prewar associations with romanticism and positivism up to Zumthor’s own view from the horizon of the late 1970s. Through this retrospective, Zumthor in part recounts the transformation of the field by medievalists such as Erich Auerbach (1892–1957), Ernst Robert Curtius (1886–1956), and Leo Spitzer (1887–1960), but also positions himself as a kind of bridge between that generation of medievalists whose most influential works came out in the years immediately following World War II and the work of medievalists today, with the rise of post-structuralism, for instance, breaking in between. One of the central concerns of the book is precisely this movement between eras, not only between postwar medievalism and its romantic heritage, but also between the present moment of a reader and the objects of the past being read.

Dating Beowulf: Studies in Intimacy, ed. Edited by Daniel C. Remein and Erica Weaver (Manchester University Press), 2020

As medievalists, we often say (and sometimes even boast) to our students--not just to those in th... more As medievalists, we often say (and sometimes even boast) to our students--not just to those in the History of the English Language (HEL) classroom, but also to freshmen who might be lured into our Old English classes, or even to accountants at dinner parties--that Old English looks scarcely like the Modern English we know today, that there is an intriguing foreignness to the earliest stage of our language, indeed that it must even be taught as a kind of foreign language. These are claims for how far the language has come, how much it has changed over the past thousand-odd years, and implicitly therefore one of the reasons why it is worth studying in the first place, both as an integral part of an HEL curriculum and as a language in itself. As Haruko Momma has pointed out, this view of Old English is hardly new: not only does Old English look "foreign" today, but until the 1870s, when scholars referred to the language as Saxon or Anglo-Saxon, they were emphasizing its Germanic origins over its affiliation to the English of the day. In part, it is this remarkable difference between Old and Modern English that justifies teaching the linguistic history of English as a standalone undergraduate course, inspiring student curiosity and interest along the way. And the same is true at the other end of the historical spectrum: as the varieties of English unfold around the world today, it is precisely their diversity and their difference--often problematically stated in terms of nativeness and foreignness--from some semblance of a "standard English" that makes the study and thus the teaching of those Englishes so compelling and rewarding. Yet even positing "the Modern English we know today," as I have just done and against which a linguistic history of the language is often drawn, assumes a relatively stable entity knowable to a certain "we" that is nevertheless class-marked by virtue of regularly being in a position to enjoy such offhand conversations about linguistic change--academics, in other words, who attend dinner parties with accountants.

I think for many of us who teach the history of the language from a scholarly background in Old or Middle English literature, these World Englishes pose a daunting pedagogical challenge. And as Seth Lerer reminds us Anglo-Saxonists and Chaucerians at American universities are typically an English department's first defense against this piece of the curriculum. In Chapter 7, Lerer argues this precisely because HEL remains a narrative of origin and change, it has been left to those who specialize in origins to be its overseers." Regardless of medievalists' own increasingly diverse cultural experiences of English, a hard-won diversity that has already benefited the field of Medieval Studies, medievalists' exposure to World Englishes as a field of study is necessarily more limited than those scholars of later periods, during which English first began to spread across the world. How then are such medievalists to grapple with the task of teaching precisely that which is most distant and most different from the origins of the language that we study, especially given that the scholarship on World Englishes now comprises an established and thriving field far outside the scholarly comfort zone of most medievalists? How, in
other words, can we do justice to the global phenomenon and the particularities of English in today's world?

Encyclopedia Articles by Benjamin A. Saltzman

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11, also known as the Junius Manuscript, is one of four major... more Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11, also known as the Junius Manuscript, is one of four major codices that together preserve the bulk of surviving Old English poetry. It was produced around the end of the tenth century and contains four poems: Genesis A and B, Exodus, Daniel, and Christ and Satan.

St. Dunstan was an important figure in the late Anglo-Saxon church and the political landscape of... more St. Dunstan was an important figure in the late Anglo-Saxon church and the political landscape of tenth-century Wessex. Early in his career, he spent time in the courts of King Æthelstan, King Edmund, and King Eadred. He was appointed abbot of Glastonbury in the early 940s and built up the Abbey's endowment. And after a period of exile on the Continent, he was appointed archbishop of Canterbury in 960 and held the position until his death in 988.

Glastonbury Abbey was an important monastic center in southern England from the seventh century u... more Glastonbury Abbey was an important monastic center in southern England from the seventh century until its dissolution in the sixteenth. It played a central role in the Benedictine Reform of the tenth century and in the accompanying intellectual and monastic advancements. The town of Glastonbury and its Abbey also figure prominently in Arthurian legend.

Cambridge University Press, 2022

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019

Pre-order from Penn Press: https://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/16030.html
Pre-order from Amazon: https://amzn.to/2LIe9mv

Now Available!
20% OFF ! Use code: PP20 -- https://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/16030.html
Pre-order from Amazon: https://amzn.to/2LIe9mv

postmedieval, 2022

The Yearbook of English Studies, 2022

Speculum, 2018

PMLA, 2018

The Chaucer Review, 2017

Anglo-Saxon England, 42, 2013

postmedieval, 2014

Bonds of Secrecy: Law, Spirituality, and the Literature of Concealment in Early Medieval England (Penn Press, 2019), 2019

Thinking of the Medieval: Midcentury Intellectuals and the Middle Ages , 2022

Textual Identities in Early Medieval England Essays in Honour of Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe, 2022

Thinking of the Medieval: Midcentury Intellectuals and the Middle Ages, 2022

Dating Beowulf: Studies in Intimacy, ed. Edited by Daniel C. Remein and Erica Weaver (Manchester University Press), 2020

Arthuriana, 2019

This ambitious and significant volume tackles a central aspect of medieval and early modern cultu... more This ambitious and significant volume tackles a central aspect of medieval and early modern culture—indeed, one could argue, of any culture—assessing the phenomenon of murder and homicide in a variety of different contexts and from a wide range of angles. Its nineteen chapters consider questions of law and ethics, literary and artistic representation, secrecy and openness, state violence and individual killings, matricides and fratricides, infanticides and ‘malicides,’ massacres and poisonings, to list but a few.

Speculum, 2018

Wendy Davies and Roy Flechner contend that the introduction of Christianity had a longterm econom... more Wendy Davies and Roy Flechner contend that the introduction of Christianity had a longterm economic impact with the development of large-scale fish traps and mills, but this was a consequence of conversion, not because of it. Martin Carver's chapter on Pictland is somewhat of an outlier, focusing on ideological changes as represented by the sites of Rhynie and Portmahomack. I felt the comparison with Scandinavian cult sites and the guldgubber was rather tenuous; further detail and explanation is required in order to make their relevance to Rhynie clear.

Speculum, 2017

contextual narratives that go a long way in providing information surrounding the drafting of the... more contextual narratives that go a long way in providing information surrounding the drafting of the documents in question. Richard Sharpe follows with a new reading of the difficult and at times faulty Haddenham narrative in the Textus, which brings to light important details about the negotiation for the transfer of Haddenham Estate to Rochester. This discussion showcases the way in which favors were obtained from William Rufus in intricate detail. Sally N. Vaughn's study fittingly closes the volume. Her contribution gives readers an excellent account of the monastic context that produced figures like Bishop Gundulf as well as physical entities like the cathedral and castle at Rochester, and the Textus Roffensis itself, each of which can be connected with the influence of Bec. Vaughn's work more than adequately concludes this fine volume.

This seminar will explore the role of the Middle Ages (its literature, art, philosophy, theology)... more This seminar will explore the role of the Middle Ages (its literature, art, philosophy, theology) in the intellectual culture of the years during and just after WWII. Readings will pair midcentury thinkers with their medieval interlocutors. For example, Simone Weil will be read alongside texts in the tradition of medieval mysticism; Hannah Arendt, alongside Augustine. Other intellectual figures include: Erich Auerbach, Ernst Robert Curtius, Norbert Elias, Franz Fanon, Paul Zumthor, Erwin Panofsky, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Ernst Bloch, Hans Blumenberg.

This symposium brings together three scholars whose work, in varied ways, has generated new insig... more This symposium brings together three scholars whose work, in varied ways, has generated new insights into the devotional cultures of medieval England. At this one-day symposium, we invite them to explore issues of devotional aesthetics in their respective archives. How did medieval spiritual writings seek to provoke and steer readers’ responses? In what ways did the design of a text reflect conceptions of who would be using it and why? How might we understand issues of (for instance) ecclesiastical hierarchy, monastic discipline, or lay piety to have been negotiated through formal and poetic decisions that leave their traces in medieval works we continue to encounter today? Our choice of the term 'aesthetics' is meant to call on the word’s roots, in the ancient Greek term for sense perception. Focus on perception—or, more generally, on the experiential uptake of religious texts and objects—both follows from recent invocations of 'form' in medieval literary studies and also departs from them. Aesthetics seeks to push form into motion, into those dynamic processes of apprehension that generate meaning and experience. We look forward to a day of conversation about the interplay between English medieval religious writing and the sensory, affective, and interpretive responses it sought to incite.

How does art reflect and represent acts of violence? How does violence shape artistic expression?... more How does art reflect and represent acts of violence? How does violence shape artistic expression? And in what ways can art itself be violent, or perpetuate violence? Featuring talks by Susanna Throop (Ursinus College), Matthew Sergi (Toronto), and Heather Badamo (UCSB) as well as responses by Heather Blurton (UCSB), Christine Chism (UCLA), and Glenn Peers (UT Austin), this workshop will explore the relationship between art and violence in the Middle Ages, from the Crusades to infanticide, from medieval drama to Byzantine images of warrior saints.

Organized by Benjamin Saltzman, Marcos Garcia, Jacob Hobson, Jennifer Lorden, and R. D. Perry