Richard Utz | Georgia Institute of Technology (original) (raw)
Richard Utz is Associate Dean for Faculty Development in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He previously served as Chair in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Tech. Before joining GA Tech, he served as Chair and Professor in the English Department at Western Michigan University and as a University Distinguished Scholar and Professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa. He studied English and German literature and language at the University of Regensburg (Germany) and Williams College (USA), specializing in Early English literature and linguistics and attending classes taught by Karl Heinz Göller, Gerhard Hahn, Otto Hietsch, Sherron Knopp, Ernst von Reusner, and Maureen Fries. In 1990, he received his doctorate in English and German philology from the University of Regensburg, and he has also taught at the Pädagogische Hochschule Dresden (1990-1991) and the University of Tübingen (1996-1998). In 2017, he served as the Johann von Spix International Visiting Professor at the University of Bamberg.
Utz has taught English literature from Chaucer through Chatwin, and his scholarship centers on medieval studies, medievalism, the history of English studies as a discipline, reception study, the permutations of science-like and humanistic philology, and the formation of cultural memories and identities. He is founder (and, until 2009, co-editor) of Brepols Publishers’ book series, Disputatio (with G. Donavin and C. Nederman), of Prolepsis: The Heidelberg Review of English Studies (with T. Rommel and P.P. Schnierer), and of Medievally Speaking and The Year's Work in Medievalism, and author and (co)editor of more than 20 book-length publications.
His essays have appeared in Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Arthuriana, Cambridge Companion to Medievalism, Chronicle of Higher Education, Erfurt Electronic Studies in English, The European Legacy, European Journal of English Studies, Felsefe Ve Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, Florilegium, Fremdsprachenunterricht, Inside Higher Ed, The Medieval Magazine, Medievalia et Humanistica, Das Mittelalter, Oxford Guide to Chaucer, Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism, Perspicuitas, Philologie im Netz, postmedieval, Studies in Medievalism, Transfiguration, UNIversitas, and The Year’s Work in Medievalism, and he has reviewed publications in American Historical Review, Anglia, Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, Arthuriana, Carmina Philosophiae, Christianity and Literature, Fremdsprachenunterricht, Jena Electronic Studies in English Language and Literatures, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Literatur in Bayern, The Medieval Review, Monatshefte, North American Review, Perspicuitas, Philosophy and Literature, Práticas da História, The Public Medievalist, Review of English Studies, South Atlantic Review, Speculum: The Journal of the Medieval Academy of America, Spenser Review, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, and Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik.
Utz has been the recipient, at the University of Regensburg, of the Dr. Katharina Seiler Award for Outstanding Work in the Field of English Studies and, at the University of Northern Iowa, of Sigma Tau Delta’s “English Professor of the Year Award;” the “College of Humanities and Fine Arts Teaching Award;” the “Donald N. McKay Research Award;” the "Dr. Philip Hubbard Award for Outstanding Educator," the "Distinguished Scholar Award," and the “Iowa State Board of Regents Award for Faculty Excellence.” From 2009 to 2021, he served as the President of the International Society for the Study of Medievalism.
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Papers by Richard Utz
Medievalists.net, 2022
Certain fake ideas about the medieval past become a central reference point for these nations as ... more Certain fake ideas about the medieval past become a central reference point for these nations as they strive to create distinctive national identities in support of their various goals. Medieval culture is co-opted as a “usable past” and made to serve national ideologies. -- An introduction for general audiences.
FAKE MOYEN ÂGE! ou comment le Moyen Âge est imaginé à travers les films,la bande dessinée, les jeux vidéo, la pop culture, 2022
The essay highlights the various patriotic and nationalist uses of imagined versions of the Eur... more The essay highlights the various patriotic and nationalist uses of imagined versions of the European Middle Ages from the nineteenth through the twenty-first century, surveying examples from architecture, art, literature, politics, and religion in Brazil, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and the United States.
The Medieval Review, 2011
The process of collecting the titles for the following bibliography was begun during the late 198... more The process of collecting the titles for the following bibliography was begun during the late 1980s, when I researched the correspondences between late medieval philosophy and literature. This work led to the publication of my doctoral dissertation, Literarischer Nominalismus im Spatmittelalter (1990), the first two essay collection on the topic, Literary Nominalism and the Rereading of Late Medieval Literature (1995), and Nominalism and Literature (1997), and a series of essays and reviews. Like few other topics in the academic study of medieval literature, the search for the possible parallels between philosophical and literary texts reveals the not always peaceful coexistence among the three basic approaches to the study of medieval literature and culture: While hard-core medieval philologists would not accept any claims for a “literary nominalism” unless direct textual dependence can be demonstrated, scholars in medieval studies and the comparative study of medieval literature h...
Arthuriana
CHRIS bishop, Medievalist Comics and the American Century. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi... more CHRIS bishop, Medievalist Comics and the American Century. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2016. Pp. x, 233. isbn: 978-1-496-808050-9. $65.There is no good reason why we should have had to wait this long for a booklength study of medievalist comics. After all, comic books have been an immensely popular genre throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. By 1940, for example, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby had sold fewer than 25,000 copies. In the same year, Superman comics were selling more than a million copies every month! Chris Bishop, thus, helps close an obvious lacuna in the study of medievalism. His monograph provides a rich fabric of contexts (political, social, biographical) for the seminal signposts in the history of American comic book medievalism. He shows Prince Valiant (1937) and Green Arrow (1941) as products of a rich engagement with Arthurian, Robin Hoodian, and general medievalist lore; Mighty Thor (1962) as a reaction to Germanic immigration; Conan the Barbarian (1970) as born from a desire to escape Depression-era Texas; Red Sonja (1973) as a response to the feminist movement; Beowulf: Dragon Slayer (1975) as an unsuccessful attempt at enticing a popular audience with a narrative that was mostly limited to academics; and Northlanders (2007) as a recent example in which modernity is 'transposed onto the Middle Ages' (p. 24). Bishop's chapters are valuable case studies in the reception history of each of these comics, including much detail about publication histories, personal connections between newspaper tycoons (William Randolph Hearst) and authors (Hal Foster, creator of Prince Valiant), and how the 1982 Barnard Conference on Sexuality and the 1980s sex wars had an impact on the publication history of Red Sonja, the feminist icon. His prose is delightfully clear and therefore accessible to non-academic readers, and his historicist approach makes for an unclouded organizational principle. A revised version should take care of a number of errata: The British Churchm[e]n (p. 6); Koln is situated in western not 'southern Germany' (p. 9); D[u]rer-esque (33); Fraternit[e] (p. 126); Cary Lenahan's B.A. Thesis is cited like a monograph in the bibliography (pp. 196, 222); Hearst[s] (p. 198); Ri[s]tson; William [James] Thoms (p. 200)-and I found these while reading for content, not as a copyeditor.As a detailed reception study of medievalist comic books in the 'American century,' Bishop's study is a success. However, in his introduction as well as in his conclusion, he adds an intellectual framework that feels imposed. Since he is writing about a popular form of medievalism, but does not want to do the hard work of engaging with the theory of medievalism studies, he declares that, 'while [m]edievalism will inform the discourse' of his study, 'reception history' is his 'primary objective' (p. 6). Similarly, after some cursory nods to Umberto Eco and Hedley Bull, he dismisses the differences between medievalist and neo-medievalist theories as 'relatively semantic' (p. …
Medievalism in the Modern World, 1998
Surveys the relationship between traditional forms of medievalism, the study of the middle ages, ... more Surveys the relationship between traditional forms of medievalism, the study of the middle ages, and recent, mostly technology-based re-creations of the middle ages in film, tv, and electronic games. Forms a frame for the volume together with Terry Jones's "Epilogue."
Medievalists.net, 2022
Certain fake ideas about the medieval past become a central reference point for these nations as ... more Certain fake ideas about the medieval past become a central reference point for these nations as they strive to create distinctive national identities in support of their various goals. Medieval culture is co-opted as a “usable past” and made to serve national ideologies. -- An introduction for general audiences.
FAKE MOYEN ÂGE! ou comment le Moyen Âge est imaginé à travers les films,la bande dessinée, les jeux vidéo, la pop culture, 2022
The essay highlights the various patriotic and nationalist uses of imagined versions of the Eur... more The essay highlights the various patriotic and nationalist uses of imagined versions of the European Middle Ages from the nineteenth through the twenty-first century, surveying examples from architecture, art, literature, politics, and religion in Brazil, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and the United States.
The Medieval Review, 2011
The process of collecting the titles for the following bibliography was begun during the late 198... more The process of collecting the titles for the following bibliography was begun during the late 1980s, when I researched the correspondences between late medieval philosophy and literature. This work led to the publication of my doctoral dissertation, Literarischer Nominalismus im Spatmittelalter (1990), the first two essay collection on the topic, Literary Nominalism and the Rereading of Late Medieval Literature (1995), and Nominalism and Literature (1997), and a series of essays and reviews. Like few other topics in the academic study of medieval literature, the search for the possible parallels between philosophical and literary texts reveals the not always peaceful coexistence among the three basic approaches to the study of medieval literature and culture: While hard-core medieval philologists would not accept any claims for a “literary nominalism” unless direct textual dependence can be demonstrated, scholars in medieval studies and the comparative study of medieval literature h...
Arthuriana
CHRIS bishop, Medievalist Comics and the American Century. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi... more CHRIS bishop, Medievalist Comics and the American Century. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2016. Pp. x, 233. isbn: 978-1-496-808050-9. $65.There is no good reason why we should have had to wait this long for a booklength study of medievalist comics. After all, comic books have been an immensely popular genre throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. By 1940, for example, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby had sold fewer than 25,000 copies. In the same year, Superman comics were selling more than a million copies every month! Chris Bishop, thus, helps close an obvious lacuna in the study of medievalism. His monograph provides a rich fabric of contexts (political, social, biographical) for the seminal signposts in the history of American comic book medievalism. He shows Prince Valiant (1937) and Green Arrow (1941) as products of a rich engagement with Arthurian, Robin Hoodian, and general medievalist lore; Mighty Thor (1962) as a reaction to Germanic immigration; Conan the Barbarian (1970) as born from a desire to escape Depression-era Texas; Red Sonja (1973) as a response to the feminist movement; Beowulf: Dragon Slayer (1975) as an unsuccessful attempt at enticing a popular audience with a narrative that was mostly limited to academics; and Northlanders (2007) as a recent example in which modernity is 'transposed onto the Middle Ages' (p. 24). Bishop's chapters are valuable case studies in the reception history of each of these comics, including much detail about publication histories, personal connections between newspaper tycoons (William Randolph Hearst) and authors (Hal Foster, creator of Prince Valiant), and how the 1982 Barnard Conference on Sexuality and the 1980s sex wars had an impact on the publication history of Red Sonja, the feminist icon. His prose is delightfully clear and therefore accessible to non-academic readers, and his historicist approach makes for an unclouded organizational principle. A revised version should take care of a number of errata: The British Churchm[e]n (p. 6); Koln is situated in western not 'southern Germany' (p. 9); D[u]rer-esque (33); Fraternit[e] (p. 126); Cary Lenahan's B.A. Thesis is cited like a monograph in the bibliography (pp. 196, 222); Hearst[s] (p. 198); Ri[s]tson; William [James] Thoms (p. 200)-and I found these while reading for content, not as a copyeditor.As a detailed reception study of medievalist comic books in the 'American century,' Bishop's study is a success. However, in his introduction as well as in his conclusion, he adds an intellectual framework that feels imposed. Since he is writing about a popular form of medievalism, but does not want to do the hard work of engaging with the theory of medievalism studies, he declares that, 'while [m]edievalism will inform the discourse' of his study, 'reception history' is his 'primary objective' (p. 6). Similarly, after some cursory nods to Umberto Eco and Hedley Bull, he dismisses the differences between medievalist and neo-medievalist theories as 'relatively semantic' (p. …
Medievalism in the Modern World, 1998
Surveys the relationship between traditional forms of medievalism, the study of the middle ages, ... more Surveys the relationship between traditional forms of medievalism, the study of the middle ages, and recent, mostly technology-based re-creations of the middle ages in film, tv, and electronic games. Forms a frame for the volume together with Terry Jones's "Epilogue."
Speculum: Journal of the Medieval Academy of America, 2021
The Medieval Review, 2021
Originally published with The Medieval Review, December 1, 2021. Ziolkowski, Jan M. The Juggler... more Originally published with The Medieval Review, December 1, 2021.
Ziolkowski, Jan M. The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity, volumes 5 and 6. Cambridge, UK: Open Book, 2018. Pp. 397; 324. £38.95 each (hb). ISBN: 978-1-78374-535-7; 978-1-78374-540-1 (hb).
Reviewed by Richard Utz
Georgia Institute of Technology
These final two volumes of Jan Ziolkowski’s fascinating reception history of the medieval juggler narrative display the same qualities as the first four volumes: a wealth of connections across numerous media, meticulously researched and lavishly illustrated, make this magnum opus a rich tapestry of information for anyone interested in how the Middle Ages have been researched, remembered, imagined, and used.
In volume 5, Tumbling into the Twentieth Century, Ziolkowski documents the increasing interest in the story in the wake of the success of Jules Massenet’s opera Le jongleur de Notre Dame in the early twentieth century. One manifestation of this popularity can be measured by the impressive number of retellings and reprints (books, typescripts, manuscripts), and the inclusion of Anatole France’s version of the medieval tale in textbooks for the teaching of French in other countries, a clear sign that the narrative had come to represent France and its cultural history. Another manifestation can be traced in the vast number of planned or actual performances, audio recordings, and films, including the idea for a film by a former clown, acrobat, aerialist, and skater by the name of Charlie Chaplin; annual performances during the weeks leading up to Christmas on Fred Waring’s America, a 1950s vaudeville-type television show; and the 50-minute made-for-television movie, The Juggler of Notre Dame, co-produced (please imagine!) by Walt Disney and the Catholic Paulist Order in 1982. A third kind of manifestation of the story’s popularity appears in its appropriation by members of many different faiths, and even in sports: it seems New York Giants coach Allie Sherman rallied his 1960s team by retelling the events of “Our Lady and the Juggler.” Finally, and unsurprisingly considering its child-like main character, volume 5 includes a sizeable section surveying numerous adaptations of the tale for children.
In volume 6, War and Peace, Sex and Violence, Ziolkowski presents examples that demonstrate the extreme malleability of the juggler narrative during WWII: Conservatives in occupied France as well as in the areas under the Vichy régime found the medieval tale and its nineteenth-century derivatives attractive, but they also inspired members of the French, Belgian, and Dutch resistance movement. In Great Britain, nostalgia and perhaps also loyalty to an occupied ally may have inspired the publication of some English versions of the story. Germany and Austria only show relatively little interest in the juggler before and during the war. Beginning in WWII, and increasingly so by the 1960s, the juggler’s story became associated with family audiences and the Christmas season. A striking degree of otherness and temporal distance emanates from many of these versions, one that may remind academic medievalists of the alterity that medieval studies scholars underlined in their work throughout the first half of the twentieth century.
Ziolkowski centers other observations on several case studies: the University of Notre Dame, which called one of its campus literary magazines The Juggler (full title: The Juggler of Notre Dame; founded in 1919), and especially one of the institution’s alumni and professors, Richard Sullivan (1909-1981), who attempted to revive the Marian aspects of the story; Robert Lax (1915-2000), a friend of Trappist theologian Thomas Merton and convert to Catholicism, who attempted to turn the juggler story into a movie; film star Tony Curtis (1925-2010), who played the acrobat in The Young Juggler, a telefilm that aired only once and is now known only to 1960s film buffs; W. H. Auden, whose faux-naïf poem “The Ballad of Barnaby” was originally drafted in 1969 as the libretto for a musical to be performed by a girls’ school in Connecticut; and various composers of music and ballet performances from Alfred Huth, Francis Poulenc, Ulysses Kay, and Juan Orrego-Salas, to Peter Maxwell Davis. Ziolkowski ends by describing the spurious use of the juggler in art and photography, laments the slow disappearance of the narrative as a result of “fable-fatigue” and “exasperation with the miracle” (150), and expresses hope that the juggler story won’t disappear entirely because “To kill off a story requires total annihilation” (174). I would like to add that Ziolkowski’s own six tomes dedicated to the narrative may well inspire some revivals, too.
The COVID-19 pandemic slowed down my reading and reviewing of this mega project. I apologize for this delay because the books truly deserve to be known and read. As a collection, they constitute the most detailed and most readable medievalist reception history I know. Two conditions rendered this result possible: the author’s awesome learnedness, and his application of this learnedness to the broad online access to isolated archives, scholarship, and otherwise unrelated factoids. Without the author’s amazing ability to compartmentalize as well as synthesize the millions of minutiae the Web yields, academic and non-academic readers could very easily lose interest as the red thread of the juggler story appears and reappears in a maze of genres, audiences, countries, social classes, languages, and cultures. In addition, the author’s determination to lower the linguistic drawbridge so that non-medievalists will enjoy his books is evident everywhere. Puns in chapter headings (“Membranes of Things Past” or “Missal Attack”) and affective authorial responses throughout invite readers to immerse themselves in one story, character, and subject after another, and a gentle and benevolent attitude toward human foibles accompanies even the strangest motivations among those shown to appropriate all or some aspects of the juggler narrative. And those with an interest in immersing more deeply will find all the scholarly commentary anyone might want in the extensive annotations. Unlike the sometimes unspeakably self-righteous academic investigations exclusively (and unceasingly) focused on “the worst of the worst” of modern and contemporary (ab)uses of the Middle Ages, Ziolkowski’s comprehensive studies reveal that most references to and uses of the medieval past, while integral to nineteenth- and twentieth-century mentalities, are in no way intrinsically complicit in violent or discriminatory ideologies or actions.
A case in point is Otto Blechman’s 1953 retelling/redrawing of the juggler narrative, The Juggler of Our Lady. Freshly graduated from Oberlin, the young artist was offered to design a “graphic novel” on a Noel theme. He was Jewish and apparently knew little about the Christian holiday. However, as part of the ubiquitous nature of postmedieval medievalia, he and some of his friends were familiar with the story of the juggler, which seemed to have enough of a connection to fulfill the publisher’s mandate for a book that would sell as a seasonal gift. Although the young artist could very well have secularized the story into a parable of his own life (the juggler performing to a world full of indifference for his art and dedication), he decided not to obliterate the religious theme involved. Armed with the outlines of medieval culture in Will Durant’s influential cultural history, specifically the volume on The Age of Faith, he resolved to situate the juggler’s story in a medieval monastery, but managed to ecumenize it so that it became attractive and acceptable to a larger audience: it could speak to those with a nostalgia for such a simpler “age of faith” as much as to those only deploring the general lack of spirituality in the twentieth century. While a minor event within the gargantuan cultural phenomenon of modern medievalism, Blechman’s imaginative and unassuming transmutation, which was adapted into a nine-minute animated version in 1957, with a voiceover by none other than Boris Karloff, may well be as representative of the modern reception of medieval culture as Hubert Lanzinger’s infamous 1935 portrait of Hitler as the knightly “Standard Bearer,” a meme that nowadays seems to accompany every other article on the troubling continuities between medieval past and medievalist present.
Jan Ziolkowski’s patient and ground-breaking effort encourages us to pay more attention to the benevolent and less sensational examples of modern receptions of the medieval. His books, freely accessible as they are via OpenBook publishers in .pdf and online versions (https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/697), are decades ahead of an academic industry still mostly wed to print and to prices that are sustainable only for the richest university libraries and independently wealthy individuals.
The Medieval Review, 2021
Review of: Ziolkowski, Jan M. The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity, volum... more Review of: Ziolkowski, Jan M. The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity, volumes III: The American Middle Ages, and IV Picture That: Making a Show of the Jongleur. Cambridge, UK: Open Book, 2018.
The Medieval Review, 2019
https://www.medievalitas.com/post/reviewing-ziolkowski-the-juggler-of-notre-dame-vols-i-ii
Going by the acknowledgements page for this essay collection, the history of this volume goes bac... more Going by the acknowledgements page for this essay collection, the history of this volume goes back all the way to 2005, to multiple conversations at conferences, seminars, and symposia in the context of the founding of The BabelWorking Group, a highly creative parainstitutional collective of scholars who collaborate, as expressed on their website (https://babel-meeting.org), “in the ruined towers and rubble of the post-historical university.” The cover of the volume, which shows the disembodied armor of a knight enveloped by a menacingly dark background,
leaves the expectant reader with a sense of foreboding similar to the one evoked by the volume’s title. “Fragments,” it seems, is all we scholars have left to offer when describing the “history of a vanishing humanism.”
Guyot-Bachy, Isabelle, and Jean-Marie Moeglin, eds. La naissance de la médiévistique. Les hist... more Guyot-Bachy, Isabelle, and Jean-Marie Moeglin, eds. La naissance de la médiévistique. Les historiens et leurs sources en Europe (du XIXe au début du XXe siècle). Actes du colloque de Nancy, 8-10 novembre 2012. Geneva: Droz, 2015. Pp. x, 550. €61.99. ISBN: 978-2-600-01380-2.
Reviewed by Richard Utz
Georgia Institute of Technology
richard.utz@lmc.gatech.edu
Over the last forty years, medieval scholars have exponentially increased our knowledge of the reception of medieval culture in postmedieval times. Cultural studies, feminism(s), medievalism studies, postmodernism(s), Rezeptionsgeschichte, Rezeptionsästhetik, and various sociological studies of intellectual and academic culture have added to our self-awareness of the constructed nature of medievalist practices and rites. La naissance de la médiévistique offers twenty-five essays that focus on the genesis and development of the discipline of medieval history at the modern university during the nineteenth- and early twentieth century, i.e., a period of intensifying nationalism. As a consequence, many of the contributions describe scholars, research projects, policies, organizations, methodologies, universities, museums, and libraries that navigate the conflicting priorities of universal scholarly paradigms and specific national contexts....
When a writer of great promise dies early, literary and biographical mythmaking commences almost ... more When a writer of great promise dies early, literary and biographical mythmaking commences almost immediately. In the case of Bruce Chatwin, there is the question--raised for example by his friend Paul Theroux ("Chatwin Revisited" 15)--about the novelist's sexual orientation; there is the perhaps related question of his mysterious and lethal illness; there is his habit of travelling around the globe
At first sight, the title of this book, repeated on the cover and title pages in English, French,... more At first sight, the title of this book, repeated on the cover and title pages in English, French, and German, looks like that of a Baroque novel. However, telling the story of the institutionalization of English Studies at the University of Strasbourg in three languages instead of one is not a matter of redundancy. In fact, Renate Haas (University of
In 2012 it will be 20 years that I attended my first Medievalism conference at the University of ... more In 2012 it will be 20 years that I attended my first Medievalism conference at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Then, as a European greenhorn who thought that growing up among the remnants of medieval architecture automatically conferred authority on me to speak of the Middle Ages, I voiced some glib doubts about the location for the conference among palm trees and close to Busch Gardens. The conference participants and their papers convinced me otherwise...
With this Festschrift, colleagues and friends honour the memory of John Julian Anderson (1938–200... more With this Festschrift, colleagues and friends honour the memory of John Julian Anderson (1938–2007), an internationally known medievalist and co-founder (with Gail Ashton) of the Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture book series...
This collection of seventeen essays reveals the beginnings and longue durée of the German-languag... more This collection of seventeen essays reveals the beginnings and longue durée of the German-language reception of the Griselda narrative from the fourteenth through the early twentieth century.
A. D. Mills is known to specialists in etymology and historical geography as the author of highly... more A. D. Mills is known to specialists in etymology and historical geography as the author of highly valued volumes such as The Place-Names of Dorset, The Place-Names of the Isle of Wight, and A Dictionary of London Place Names. His new dictionary of British place names is a fully revised, updated, and slightly expanded version of his 1991 Dictionary of English Place-Names (second edn. 1998). In addition to the 12,000 entries in that predecessor tome, this edition includes what Mills somewhat vaguely calls "a good selection" (p. vii) of place-names from Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, all compiled by Adrian Room, who also contributed the sections on Irish, Scottish, and Welsh place-names...
This book is a Habermasian answer to the sempiternal question about the special attraction the la... more This book is a Habermasian answer to the sempiternal question about the special attraction the late medieval Canterbury Tales exerts on (post)modern readers. Habermas, in The Inclusion of the Other, states that "in modern societies a consensus on principles of justice that is neutral with respect to worldviews, and hence inclusive, is required in view of religious and cultural pluralism" (quoted according to Schildgen, p. 3). Schildgen, who feels that the majority of existing interpretations of the Canterbury Tales have restricted the meaning of the collection of stories through the positing of one single and exclusive thought system (e.g., Augustinianism, a mercantile ethic, gender studies, etc.), wants to abandon such reductionism...
In 1871, in the Trial-Forewords to my "Parallel-Text Edition of Chaucer's Minor Poems," Frederick... more In 1871, in the Trial-Forewords to my "Parallel-Text Edition of Chaucer's Minor Poems," Frederick James Furnivall praised Berhard ten Brink and his Chaucer: Studien zur Geschichte seiner Entwickelung und zur Chronologie seiner Schriften (also 1871) for having "let a flood of light in on the matter" (6). Then, Furnivall was greatly pleased that ten Brink had produced ample evidence of three distinct periods in Chaucer's work. Today, I am at least as enthusiastic about...
Comprehensive essay collection surveying the work done in research, scholarship, creative activit... more Comprehensive essay collection surveying the work done in research, scholarship, creative activity, teaching, learning, and community outreach by members of the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
ISBN-10: 0990996166
ISBN-13: 978-0990996163
Issue 32 (2017) of the annual proceedings journal of the International Society for the Study of M... more Issue 32 (2017) of the annual proceedings journal of the International Society for the Study of Medievalism, ed. Richard Utz
Since the inclusion of medieval studies in the modern academy, professional scholars have insiste... more Since the inclusion of medieval studies in the modern academy, professional scholars have insisted on distinguishing their work from extra-academic lovers of medieval culture. Richard Utz analyses the semantic, institutional, and sociopolitical history of the relationship between medieval studies and medievalism. He provides a survey of how scholars' exteriorization of amateur interest in the medieval past narrowed the epistemological range of medieval scholarship and how reception studies, feminism, and postmodernism gradually expanded modern pastist approaches to the Middle Ages. Utz advances specific examples for reconnecting investigating scholarly subjects with their subjects of investigation, and he challenges scholars to make a conscious effort to engage in public scholarship and explore inclusive gestures toward the contributions non-academic lovers of the Middle Ages can offer. His manifesto advocates an active integration of academic medievalists' work within the many other equally valuable artistic and sociopolitical partner contexts of reading the medieval past.
Table of Contents: E.L. Risden: Introduction Ann F. Howey: Father Doesn’t Know Best: Uther and Ar... more Table of Contents:
E.L. Risden: Introduction
Ann F. Howey: Father Doesn’t Know Best: Uther and Arthur in BBC’s Merlin
Leah Haught: “What if your future was the past?”: Temporality, Gender, and the “Isms” of Outlander
Elan Pavlinich: The Chaucerian Debate of Auctorite versus Experience in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty and Maleficent
J.P. Telotte: Flatness and Depth: Classic Disney’s Medieval Vision
Valerie Johnson: Identity and Posthuman Medievalism in Sons of Anarchy
Michael Evans: Is pre-Columbian America Medieval?: Indigenous Absence in American Medievalisms
John Wm. Houghton: “The Lay of Baldor: a Play for Voices”
... process. The present writer, moreover, would also like to thank his co-editors, Christoph Bod... more ... process. The present writer, moreover, would also like to thank his co-editors, Christoph Bode and Richard Utz, for their part in the work, but in particular for the special contributions they made for this project to come into being. ...
... ant vert de Jean Lemaire de Beiges Romuald I. Lakowski 161 Sir Thomas More's Corresp... more ... ant vert de Jean Lemaire de Beiges Romuald I. Lakowski 161 Sir Thomas More's Correspondence: A Survey and Bibliography Bernadette A. Masters ... and "why the epistle was invented." Their remarks are always brief and usually appear at or near the beginning of the trea-tise. ...
In the spring semester of 2007, I offered a graduate seminar investigating the "The Arthurian Leg... more In the spring semester of 2007, I offered a graduate seminar investigating the "The Arthurian Legend in English Literature and Culture" at the University of Northern Iowa. In order to extend the scope of the class beyond the area of English studies and to provide participants with a chance to showcase their scholarship to a wider audience than themselves and their instructor, I organized a conference, entitled "Culture and the Medieval King," which invited contributions from graduate students and advanced undergraduate students to present papers on all cultural manifestations of King Arthur and Arthuriana in the Middle Ages as well as in postmedieval times. The cluster of essays in this Forum section makes available Dr. Kay Harris's fascinating plenary speech as well as four excellent student contributions.
Medievalism, the continuing process of rethinking, rewriting, and recreating the Middle Ages, is ... more Medievalism, the continuing process of rethinking, rewriting, and recreating the Middle Ages, is a cultural phenomenon that has in recent years received much attention not only in the academy in general, but especially on the campus of the University of Northern Iowa. In 2002, Jesse Swan and I co-hosted the Seventeenth International Conference on Medievalism on the UNI campus, with sixty scholars and students of medievalism from six countries, and we co-edited an essay collection, Postmodern Medievalisms, with Boydell & Brewer Publishers in 2005. In May of 2005, I had the pleasure of facilitating several sections on medievalism for the participants in the Roy J. Carver summer seminar on "Integrating Disciplines in the Liberal Arts Core." These events, and a graduate seminar I taught on the topic back in the fall of 2002, have occasioned - in one form or other - most of the essays united in the Forum section presented here...
Festschrift in Honor of William Calin.
How do humanistic views, values, and research paradigms enter into fruitful interaction with tech... more How do humanistic views, values, and research paradigms enter into fruitful interaction with technology and science? Humanistic Perspectives in a Technological World. Ed. R. Utz, V. Johnson & T. Denton (Atlanta: School of Literature, Media, and Communication, Georgia Inst. of Technology, 2014) is a narrative tour through an academic unit whose raison d'être is to identify and develop such convergences, each faculty in their specific research/scholarship, teaching, and service. Here is the Table of Contents:
Richard Utz - Come Join Us in the Cloud
Lauren Klein - Digital Humanities as Method and Mission
Kenneth Knoespel - A Laboratory for the Future of Higher Education
Brian Magerko - ADAM, EarSketch, and I
Carol Senf - Why We Need the Gothic in a Technological World
Michael Nitsche - What I Make
Jay David Bolter - Examining and Changing a World of Media
T. Hugh Crawford - Making Theory: Useless Design/Risky Pedagogy
Qi Wang - Mapping Cinema and the World
Karen Head - At the Center: Innovation in Research, Practice for 21st Century “Writing Centers”
Lisa Yaszek - Amazing Stories, or, Why We Do Science Fiction
Janet Murray - Inventing the Medium: The Radical Challenge of Humanistic Digital Design
Nihad Farooq - On Slavery and Social Networks
Krystina Madej - History of Narrative as Material Practice: Interpreting Communication Technologies
Ian Bogost - Understanding the “Experience” of Objects
Thomas Lux - The Poem is a Bridge: Poetry@TECH
Carol Colatrella - On Narrative
Anne Pollock - Biomedicine and Culture
Blake Leland - We’re in the Money
Carl DiSalvo - Why Study and Do Design in a College of Liberal Arts
Melissa Foulger - The Performing Arts in a Technological World
Aaron Santesso - Value and Literary Study
Jay P. Telotte - Film, Media, and SF at GT
Rebecca E. Burnett - Connecting Research and Teaching in the Rhetoric of Risk
Chistopher Le Dantec - Designing Community Engagement
Philip Auslander - Humanism, Technology, and Performance Studies
Robert E. Wood - One Cultural Context
TyAnna Herrington - Technological Empowerment in a Human World
John Thornton - Storytelling and the Art of Filmmaking
Narin Hassan - Cultural Exchanges/Global Histories: Reading Mobility
Nassim JafariNaimi - Designs, Values, and Democracy
Angela Dalle Vacche - Film Studies and International Understanding
Kathleen Ann Goonan - Science Fiction, Writing Fiction, and Understanding the History and Social Impact of Science and Technology
Rebecca Burnett, Lisa Dusenberry, Andy Frazee, Joy Robinson, Rebecca Weaver - Communicating as a Professional
Richard Utz - Past, Present, and Neo
Special issue, 28 (2013), of The Year's Work of Medievalism
The discipline of medievalism has produced a great deal of scholarship acknowledging the "makers"... more The discipline of medievalism has produced a great deal of scholarship acknowledging the "makers" of the Middle Ages: those who re-discovered the period from 500 to 1500 by engaging with its cultural works, seeking inspiration from them, or fantasizing about them. Yet such approaches - organized by time period, geography, or theme - often lack an overarching critical framework. This volume aims to provide such a framework, by calling into question the problematic yet commonly accepted vocabulary used in Medievalism Studies. The contributions, by leading scholars in the field, define and exemplify in a lively and accessible style the essential terms used when speaking of the later reception of medieval culture.
The terms: Archive, Authenticity, Authority, Christianity, Co-disciplinarity, Continuity, Feast, Genealogy, Gesture, Gothic, Heresy, Humor, Lingua, Love, Memory, Middle, Modernity, Monument, Myth, Play, Presentism, Primitive, Purity, Reenactment, Resonance, Simulacrum, Spectacle, Transfer, Trauma, Troubadour
E. L. Risden: Introduction Glenn Steinberg: Teaching Shakespeare’s Sources and Contexts William ... more E. L. Risden: Introduction
Glenn Steinberg: Teaching Shakespeare’s Sources and Contexts
William Hodapp: Shakespearean Medievalism in Performance: The Second Tetralogy
Bonnie J. Erwin: “Is This Winning?”: Reflections on Teaching The Two Noble Kinsmen
Leigh Smith: “The matter that you read”: Saxo Grammaticus as a Source for Shakespeare and a Resource for Teachers of Hamlet
Brandon Alakas: Shakespeare’s Medievalism and the Life Removed: Depictions of Religious in Measure for Measure
Karl Fugelso: Cecco Bonanotte’s Moving Illustrations of the Divine Comedy
Heta Aali: Early Nineteenth-Century French Historiography and the Case of the Merovingian Queens
Sandra Gorgievski: Secret Gestures and Silent Revelations: The Disclosure of Secrets in Selected Arthurian Illuminated Manuscripts and Arthurian Films
Richard Utz Introduction [2–4] Margaret Connolly: 'Dr Furnival and Mother like the same old b... more Richard Utz
Introduction
[2–4]
Margaret Connolly:
'Dr Furnival and Mother like the same old books': Mary Haweis and the Experience of Reading Chaucer in the Nineteenth Century
[5–20]
Louise D'Arcens:
"She ensample was by good techynge": Hermiene Ulrich and Chaucer under Capricorn
[21–40]
William Snell:
A Woman Medievalist Much Maligned: A Note in Defense of Edith Rickert (1871–1938)
[41–54]
Juliette Dor:
Caroline Spurgeon (1869–1942) and the Institutionalisation of English Studies as a Scholarly Discipline
[55–66]
Volume XIII, 2003, of Studies in Medievalism: 1 Pavel Chinezul, Negru Voda, and `Imagined Commu... more Volume XIII, 2003, of Studies in Medievalism:
1 Pavel Chinezul, Negru Voda, and `Imagined Communities': Medievalism in Romanian Rock Music
2 Disparate Medievalisms in Early Modern Spanish Music Theory
3 Arvo Pärt's Tintinnabuli Style: Contemporary Music Towards a New Middle Ages?
4 Medievalism, Modernism and Postmodernism in Contemporary Architecture
5 Robert Rauschenberg's Inferno Illuminations
6 A Distant Mirror: Tolkien and Jackson in the Looking-glass
7 I Learned It at the Movies: Teaching Medieval Film
8 The Subversion of Medievalism in Lancelot du lac and Monty Python and the Holy Grail [with Lesley Coote]
9 The Subversion of Medievalism in Lancelot du lac and Monty Python and the Holy Grail [with Brian Levy]
10 `Historians...Will Say I Am a Liar': The Ideology of False Truth Claims in Mel Gibson's Braveheart and Luc Besson's The MessengerMessenger
11 Games for the Nation: A Postmodern Reading of Alfonso X's Libro de ajedrez, dados y tablas
12 The Journey from Modern to Postmodern in the Travels of Sir John Mandeville and Marco Polo's Divisament dou Monde
13 History Straight and Narrow: Marvell, Mary Fairfax, and the Critique of Sexual and Historical Sequence
14 Postmodernism and the Press in Naomi Mitchison's To the Chapel Perilous
15 The Crusades and Frankish Medieval Greece as (Re)appropriation: Carnivalesque Histiographic and Modern Greek Humorist Nikos TsiforosTsiforos
The medieval sermon provides the focus for the first volume of Disputatio because it often expres... more The medieval sermon provides the focus for the first volume of Disputatio because it often expresses the concerns of various intellectual milieux, such as the university, Church or court, and attempts to convey those concerns to other parts of medieval society.
Speculum Sermonis is an anthology of essays about medieval sermons in the Christian East and West. It aims to reveal precisely how sermons inform different disciplines (for instance, social and Church history, literature, musicology) and how the methodologies of different disciplines inform sermons. Sermons can, for instance, provide evidence for a reconstruction of medieval liturgy; reciprocally, the field of liturgiology investigates sermons as one aspect of Church performance. The volume’s title image of the mirror and the reference to medieval specula convey the idea of multiple reflections: the sermons’ on culture and the disciplines’ on sermons. Because the contributors to Speculum Sermonis come from a variety of fields, the essays here collectively provide a rich historical and contemporary academic context for reading the medieval sermon.
In addition to essays from across the fields, a number of which establish conclusions transcending disciplinary boundaries, Speculum Sermonis includes an introduction defending interdisciplinary study of sermons and an authoritative bibliography covering both primary and secondary resources for medieval sermons. A unique feature of the volume is the inclusion of response papers to the essays in each of the sections, in the spirit of the book series title Disputatio.
Medievalism and Medieval Romances Within the history of the reception of medieval culture in pos... more Medievalism and Medieval Romances
Within the history of the reception of medieval culture in postmedieval times the reception of medieval romances plays a special role. In fact, medieval romances provide a perfect case study of a medieval genre that attracts the attention of antiquarians and other enthusiastic readers of past texts because of their otherness and popular nature. After this first phase of reception, romances quickly become the subject of philologists and linguists in medieval studies, especially because they are considered not to have the poetic everlastingness attributed to the works of Chaucer or Gower. However, soon after most manuscripts of romances have appeared in scholarly editions, and after the language of the romances has served as a quarry for language studies, only romances with sufficient national appeal (Matter of Britain) continue to attract scholarly attention. Thus, medieval romances suffer the same fate as the term, "medievalism" which, born in the first half of the nineteenth century to describe the increasingly historically-minded reception of a specifically defined medieval culture, is semantically narrowed by the beginning of the twentieth century to mean the unscholarly re-imagining or re-inventing of the Middle Ages. The advent of feminism, postmodernism, and the Studies in Medievalism movement has recently brought about a return to the possibility of a healthy mix between pastist medieval studies and presentist medievalism, which might bode well for a renewed interest in medieval romances. Conscious negotiations of temporality should be the hallmark of such scholarship.
Between 1963 and 1966, French Television broadcast a medievalist series entitled Thierry La Frond... more Between 1963 and 1966, French Television broadcast a medievalist series entitled Thierry La Fronde, or Thierry the Sling. This successful series, which was also shown in Canada, Poland (Thierry Śmiałek), Australia (The King's Outlaw), and the Netherlands (Thierry de Slingeraar), transposes the English Robin Hood narrative into late medieval France in fascinating ways. Drawing from the postmedieval English tradition surrounding Robin Hood, in which the protagonist appears as a member of the nobility who has fallen from grace, Thierry de Janville, a young Sologne nobleman, who had fought against the English occupation by the French during the Hundred Years War, loses his title and lands because of his disloyal steward. Taking up the name "Thierry La Fronde" and surrounding himself with a host or merry men (and Isabelle, his "Maid Marian"), he wields his knightly sword as well as the popular sling in his résistance against the oppressive Black Prince and his allies. My analysis of the series addressed the feuilleton's indebtedness to numerous elements of the Robin Hood narrative, characters, and episodes, specifically those in The Adventures of Robin Hood and Ivanhoe, two TV shows targeting Anglo-American audiences in the 1950s. I also pointed out how the series presents an excellent reservoir for investigating common 1960s conceptions about medieval history, literature, and culture.
Quiet No More: Women Religious in Contemporary North America and Medieval Europe William Wordswo... more Quiet No More: Women Religious in Contemporary North America and Medieval Europe
William Wordsworth, in his sonnet “It is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free,” likened the tranquil and harmonious atmosphere of a country evening to a “holy time,” as “quiet as a Nun.” His comparison well captures the degree to which the Catholic Church was believed to have controlled the voices of women religious in the nineteenth century. In Wordsworth's day, and even late into the twentieth century, the misconception of nuns as forever cloistered in prayer, silently accepting the spiritual and temporal authority of priests and bishops, was also maintained about these nineteenth-century nuns' forebears, giving rise to the general belief that medieval women religious had always been accepting of their allegedly sempiternal role within the Church. Since the second Vatican Council, Catholic nuns in the United States and beyond have been challenging this “convenient” untruth by basing their own activism on the example of women religious in the foundational Middle Ages, thus subjecting the male church hierarchy's claims of preserving the true traditions of the Church with a historicizing critique. Most recently, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, which was founded in 1956 and today represents some 80 percent women religious in the United States, has been under investigation by the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for undermining Roman Catholic teachings on homosexuality and birth control and promoting “radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith.” CDF also admonished the nuns for hosting speakers who contradict or disregard church teachings and for publicly disagreeing with the bishops, “who are the church's authentic teachers of faith and morals.” This paper intends to demonstrate how issues of temporality inform the arguments on both sides in this long-term altercation. I will argue a) that silencing the voices of women religious has been among the constitutive elements of official Roman Catholic thought from the Middle Ages through contemporaneity, and b) that controlling the grand narrative about the foundational or non-foundational nature of the role distribution for women and men religious in the Middle Ages will be decisive for the development of the conflict.
SmarTech: Scholarly Materials and Research at Tech, Nov 13, 2012
Opening Remarks Burnett, Rebecca; Meyer, Kellie; Utz, Richard The Afterlives of Gawain: I... more Opening Remarks
Burnett, Rebecca; Meyer, Kellie; Utz, Richard
The Afterlives of Gawain: Illustration as Annotation in the Cotton Nero Ax Manuscript
Haught, Leah
Biology and Germ Warfare
Spencer, Chrissy
Blacksmithing and Timber-Framed Houses: Pedagogy of Risk
Crawford, T. Hugh
Medieval Construction – Foundation of Today's Industry
Bowen, Brian
Neo-Medieval Fantasy in Video Games
Pearce, Celia
Tried and True Methods
Madej, Krystina
Your Mission is to Rescue Lorenzo di Medici: A Demonstration of the Pedagogical Potentials of Using Assassin's Creed II for Teaching the Italian Renaissance
Madden, Amanda
Open Access in the Academy, a roundtable at 29th Intl. Conference on Medievalism, Georgia Tech, O... more Open Access in the Academy, a roundtable at 29th Intl. Conference on Medievalism, Georgia Tech, October 2014, with Thomas Hahn, Kevin Harty, Leah Haught, J. Britt Holbrook, Fred Rascoe, Paul Sturtevant, Jesse G. Swan, Robin Wharton, and Richard Utz (chair)].
Cyberscriptorium, 2016
Join us as Charles Lein talks to Dr. Richard Utz at the 50th International Congress on Medieval S... more Join us as Charles Lein talks to Dr. Richard Utz at the 50th International Congress on Medieval Studies. Richard Utz was a plenary lecturer at the 50th ICMS and presented on "The Notion of the Middle Ages: Our Middle Ages, Ourselves," and he was gracious enough to sit down with us a tell us more about his ideas on popular notions on the Middle Ages and how medievalists might benefit from embracing and working with popular medievalism.
October 30, 2017. Georgia Institute of Technology Game of Thrones is an extended transmedia fict... more October 30, 2017. Georgia Institute of Technology
Game of Thrones is an extended transmedia fiction based in an encyclopedically detailed storyworld that pushes the envelope on how much plot and how many characters reader/viewers can keep track of. It is therefore a productive focus for thinking about the new multisequential story structures that digital media can make possible. I will show some examples from my Project Studio group and talk about related story abstraction work beginning in the Digital Integrative Liberal Arts Center
Medievalists too often consider Game of Thrones as an opportunity to attract additional students and identify the narrative's alleged sources and analogues. They disregard the neomedievalist aesthetics of the series, which has more to do with contemporary game worlds than medieval influence. In fact, had the author of the medieval Morte d'Arthur (c. 1485) written his book in 2017, his compendious prose compilation of Arthurian stories may have found as enthusiastic a reception among contemporary TV audiences as the smart TV adaptation of the prosaic The Song of Ice and Fire.
The chairs of Georgia Tech's six Schools in the College of Liberal Arts recently got together the... more The chairs of Georgia Tech's six Schools in the College of Liberal Arts recently got together the with dean of science, the VP of undergraduate education, and the chair of mechanical engineering to provide their perspectives on the current and the next for liberal arts education at Georgia Tech and beyond. The event was part of our Innovation and Collaboration in Liberal Arts, Science, and Technology (ICLAST) Speaker Series.
Academic conference investigating the reception of medieval culture in postmedieval times.
The Year's Work in Medievalism, 2018
Edited by Valerie Johnson & Renée Ward, with Laura Harrison Table of Contents Valerie Johnson &... more Edited by Valerie Johnson & Renée Ward, with Laura Harrison
Table of Contents
Valerie Johnson & Renée Ward: Introduction pdf
Alexandra Sterling-Hellenbrand: East Meets West? Heritage, Medievalism, and the Nibelungenlied on the Danube pdf
Sarah J. Sprouse: From ides aglæcwif to “shebeast”: The Loss of the Wrecend in Thomas Meyer’s Translation of Beowulf pdf
Loredana Teresi: Jo Nesbø’s The Snowman and the Myth of Týr: Addressing Contemporary Issues through Literary Tradition pdf
Karl Fugelso: A Mickey Mouse Inferno: Medievalist Legacies and the Marketing of the Middle Ages pdf
Alicia McKenzie: A Patchwork World: Medieval History and World-Building in Dragon Age: Inquisition pdf
Scott Manning: Warriors “Hedgehogged” in Arrows: Crusaders, Samurai, and Wolverine in Medieval Chronicles and Popular Culture pdf
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 pdf
Call For Submissions, 34 (2019) pdf
n/a, 2019
Overview of syllabus on undergraduate/graduate class on Game of Thrones as Global Media phenomeno... more Overview of syllabus on undergraduate/graduate class on Game of Thrones as Global Media phenomenon. Part of course offerings of inaugural cohort of MS degree in Global Media and Cultures, at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Medievalitas, 2019
As the global media phenomenon called Game of Thrones ends (or will it?), the foundations and fut... more As the global media phenomenon called Game of Thrones ends (or will it?), the foundations and futures of what we refer to as the Middle Ages have come under increased scrutiny. Questions of affect, gender, nationalism, race, and religion, even if starting small and locally, can quickly reach regional, national, and global audiences, just as global, national, and regional matters can quickly impact local discussions. In addition, the roles of those engaged in studying and teaching the reception of medieval culture in postmedieval times are changing, perhaps demanding more public outreach. And the boundaries between 'amateurs' and 'specialists' are increasingly called into question as large scale access to the Digital Plenitude blurs the traditional distinctions between academic and non-academic research and scholarship. Aware of these complex developments, this year's conference intends to bring together worldwide perspectives and perhaps suggest a toolkit of practices we can employ to bring to bear our experience on the manifold new and old instantiations of medievalism. We will also hold a number of ISSM organizational meetings and workshops (TBD). Please send abstracts of c. 300 words for individual papers or entire sessions of on global and all other kinds of medievalisms by June 15 to Richard Utz (richard.utz@lmc.gatech.edu). For the wide range of topics of interest to the study of medievalism, please visit the table of contents pages of Studies in Medievalism and The Year's Work in Medievalism, and the reviews published in Medievally Speaking. We will do our best to respond to abstracts as quickly as possible since we know you will need to plan your travel relatively quickly. Please know that we won't have a dedicated conference hotel. For Atlanta hotels surrounding Georgia Tech, online special offers are usually better priced than the special rates provided to organizers of small conferences like ours. Therefore, simply search online for the 10 hotels within walking distance to the Stephen J. Hall Building on the GT campus, 215 Bobby Dodd Way, NW, Atlanta, Georgia, 30313. For those who joined us in 2014, it's the same building in which we held the conference then. Finally: As an organization, we have a long history of being open to proposals from the widest possible range of participants, including independent scholars and students. Therefore, we are committed to keeping our conference fees reasonable ($30-$100, depending on income), to help colleagues in contingent positions, independent scholars, international travelers, and students attend.
https://humantech.lmc.gatech.edu/, 2019
Project description for Georgia Tech, School of Literature, Media, and Communication symposium, A... more Project description for Georgia Tech, School of Literature, Media, and Communication symposium, April 19-20, 2019
Richard Utz is Chair and Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the G... more Richard Utz is Chair and Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology and President of the International Society for the Study of Medievalism. He is the author of Literarischer Nominalismus im Spätmittelalter (1990) and Chaucer and the Discourse of German Philology (2002), and coeditor of Medievalism in the Modern World (with Tom Shippey, 1998) and of Medievalism: Key Critical Terms (with Elizabeth Emery, 2014). He is also the founding editor of Medievally Speaking, an open access review journal encouraging critical engagement with all manifestations of medieval culture in postmedieval times.
There are many recent books about medievalism. What’s different about yours?
The study of how the Middle Ages has been reinvented, repurposed, and reenacted in postmedieval times has become an established academic subject over the last 25 years. However, most book-length studies investigate one kind or genre of medievalism or the biography of a specific scholar: Louise D’Arcens’ Comic Medievalism (2014), for example, examines the role of humour in the reception of medieval culture across several centuries; Tison Pugh’s Queer Chivalry (2013) explores the history of white masculinity in Southern U.S. Literature; and Michelle Warren’s Creole Medievalism (2013) reveals editor and warrior scholar Joseph Bédier’s pro-colonial medievalist work. My own book wants to present a meta-perspective on the field of medievalism studies. Specifically, I would like to encourage colleagues to acknowledge, perhaps even embrace, the subjective and affective origins of our interest in the medieval past. Therefore, I took the unusual step of having my own parents featured on the book’s cover. Their and my own direct involvement in medievalist reenactment, games, and education are among the affective forces that have shaped many of my interests as a scholar.
Aren’t you worried about being accused of being a mere amateur or dilettante by embracing the personal, affective, and subjective?
No, quite the opposite! I think it’s an epistemological fallacy to believe that a scholar, the investigating subject, needs to be kept strictly separate from the scholar’s research, the subject under investigation. I believe with Norman Cantor (Inventing the Middle Ages, 1993) that all scholarship is, in the end, a form of autobiography and that the multitude of scholarly endeavors to recuperate the Middle Ages has only resulted in ever so many (subjective) reinventions of that time period. In the end, an amateur (from Latin amare, to love) or a dilettante (from Italian dilettare, to delight) is not so different from a scholar of the Middle Ages, who has simply sublimated his or her love for the medieval past into a formal academic practices like editing, translation, or criticism. In my book I want to exemplify how a scholar’s open and conscious inclusion of personal connections will enhance, not hinder, our understanding of the medieval past.
How do you manage to infuse your research with your personal history?
In his Parler du Moyen Age (1980), Paul Zumthor said that it is a “delusion […] to speak of the past otherwise than on the basis of now.” Like Carolyn Dinshaw in How Soon Is Now (2013), I am putting Zumthor’s postulate into practice: After discussing some of the theoretical and historical aspects of medievalism, I present three concise cases studies that show how academic medievalists can produce research that includes their own personal history, reaches out, and gives back to the society that supports them. One of the cases studies exposes the dark side of medievalism in my native town of Amberg, Germany, where post-WW II open air festivals continued medievalist traditions originally created during the Weimar Republic and the Nazi regime. My second case study demonstrates how an early twentieth-century residence in my current hometown, Atlanta, GA, celebrates medieval chivalry and slavery as predecessors of Confederate values via medievalist architecture and craft. And my third case study encourages scholars to investigate numerous Christian traditions, rituals, and tenets as steady bridges between the medieval past and the present. All three of these examples illuminate the advantages of including our own current as well as previous reinventions of medieval culture when trying to understand the Middle Ages.
Why did you decide to write about these issues as a ‘manifesto’ and in the new Past Imperfect book series?
Well, I am trying to convince as many of my colleagues as possible to change their ways, and that’s why I chose this specific format and series. Since the late 19th century, medievalists (and many other humanities scholars) have been trying to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the general public, writing essays and books exclusively for each other. My modest proposal is to abandon this attitude and embrace the public humanities movement that wants to lower the drawbridge for the many lovers of medieval culture outside the academy to and to enter into a lively and mutually beneficial exchange. What I am proposing is rather revolutionary (hence: ‘manifesto’) , because I suggest we should not only interpret texts and artifacts for other specialists, but see it as our most noble task to render those texts and artifacts relevant to contemporary extra-academic audiences. Most academic publishers and book series editors would still prefer not to take on a project that might rub a good number of traditional medievalists the wrong way. Thus, I am glad Past Imperfect provides a platform for something like my long essai that is openly political in its intent and somewhat more ‘edgy’ in its tone. Just like the annual International Congress on Medieval Studies has done for more than 50 years, this new MIP book series promises a more open, democratic, and entrepreneurial engagement with the medieval past.
So are you proposing that all academic medievalists become medievalism-ists?
No. I realize that many colleagues will continue to investigate and write on what they consider the “real” Middle Ages. Many will defend an exclusively academic medieval studies within which making one’s work inaccessible (linguistically, economically, hermeneutically) to larger audiences is almost a precondition to professional success. And they will do this at the danger of uncritically recording or repeating medieval culture’s self-understandings. I am convinced that all lovers of the Middle Ages are capable of relating to the basic humanity of medieval human beings, to their motivations and emotions. I also believe that we produce less comprehensive understandings of medieval culture if we exclude our own subjective admission tickets to the Middle Ages and the reception histories of medieval events and practices. What my manifesto should help establish is that medieval studies, the academic study of medieval culture, is only one facet of medievalism, the overarching cultural phenomenon of any and all engagements with the medieval past. We scholars are participants in, not distant critics of this cultural phenomenon.
Course pitch for an undergraduate/graduate course on Global Medievalisms