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postmedieval : a journal of medieval cultural studies
Journal Prestige (SJR): 0.218  Number of Followers: 18  Hybrid journal (It can contain Open Access articles)ISSN (Print) 2040-5960 - ISSN (Online) 2040-5979 Published by Springer-Verlag  [2468 journals]
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- Creative practice as research in Old Norse-Icelandic studies: Ancillary
characters as storytellers-
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Abstract: Abstract This article is a discussion between two writer-academics about projects that re-imagined medieval Icelandic sagas from the perspectives of female characters in these works, and in ways that adopted conventions of interiority and point of view associated with modern creative writing. The discussion examines the potential for creative practice to form a research methodology within Old Norse-Icelandic studies. In particular, the contingent or open-ended nature of creative practice makes it a vehicle by which to raise new questions in relation to texts that have been the subject of extensive prior study. While creative practice as research is to some extent limited by its personal and often quite individual nature, it does offer methods by which imagination and the deeply engaged act of making and re-telling can form part of our understanding of Old Norse-Icelandic texts.
PubDate: 2023-09-22
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- Dancing the Kleptocene
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Abstract: Abstract Dance writings appear widely in early colonial documents. This essay studies danceways and land as I turn to Kyle Keeler’s neologism ‘Kleptocene’ to examine memory, extraction, and ecology with a focus on ‘New France.’ Following Bitterroot Salish scholar Tarren Andrews’ insights addressing an ‘Indigenous turn’ in medieval studies, ‘Dancing the Kleptocene’ investigates criticism of the Doctrine of Discovery in ongoing acts of protest, decolonising the arts, and history. With the notion of the danceway, I address kinesthetic practices by examining dance writing in claims made by Samuel de Champlain, the Jesuit relations, and Madame de la Peltrie, each commenting on ‘ballets’ in early seventeenth-century Turtle Island in North America. Connected to this, the article then turns to and examines the work of Aquinnah Wampanoag artist Elizabeth James-Perry on Indigenous practices of bead and memory work as well as histories of colonial violence and enslavement.
PubDate: 2023-09-11
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- Coda: Interview with Charlotte Ewart
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Abstract: Abstract Charlotte Ewart is one of the foremost experts on Medieval and Renaissance choreography. She is trained in classical and contemporary dance, and obtained a BA in History and Dance from the University of Surrey, as well as an MA in Dance from the University of Roehampton. Ewart has taught dancers and actors across all age groups, and is currently an Associate Artist for Historic Royal Palaces and a Lecturer at the University of Chichester. Moreover, she has worked with a wide variety of prestigious universities and organizations, including English Heritage, Bristol, Brunel, Teeside and Cambridge Universities, as well as The National Theatre, Time will Tell Theatre, and The History Channel. This article contains excerpts from an online interview with Ewart that Kathryn Dickason conducted on July 16, 2022.
PubDate: 2023-08-31
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- Process Essay. ‘A Feather on the breath of God’: Medieval legacies in
modern choreography-
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Abstract: Abstract This article is a reflection on and analysis of my working process as a scholar-artist, based on my experience choreographing and performing ‘Cosmic Dance,’ an evening-length work of modern dance accompanied by a live choral performance of Hildegard von Bingen’s antiphons for St. Ursula and the eleven thousand virgins from her Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum, in 2017. I explain my approach to the piece, explicating the challenges of ‘recreating’ or ‘reconstructing’ medieval movement practices in modern performance, as well as the challenges particular to this project, then reflect on the ways in which engaging with legacies of the medieval in my choreographic methodology and performance choices helped me to navigate those challenges. Throughout the article I discuss specific instances of these engagements, integrating images and video from the performance itself as examples of interactions with traditions of medieval dance, text, art, performance practice, and concepts of authorship.
PubDate: 2023-08-22
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- Dance as a liberating practice into divine darkness': A systematic
theologian re-reads Philo of Alexandria’s descriptions of dance-
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Abstract: Abstract In this article, I show how a deeper understanding of Lived Theology can enrich discussions about historical dance practices. I elaborate on the teachings of Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BCE–50) and how his descriptions of dancing indicate that such practices may be understood as worship and contemplation. I further suggest that dancing in Philo’s texts, especially On the Contemplative Life, can be understood as an exegetical practice. I describe how a supersessionist logic insensitive to traditions of Lived Theology has operated in the theological discourse on Philo and thus has been unable to recognise these dimensions of the described dancing.
PubDate: 2023-08-21
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- Pathei mathos and skandalon in Le Sacre du Printemps
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Abstract: Abstract In spite of abundant research on Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring), an avant-garde ballet that premiered in Paris in 1913, there is no substantive examination of the ballet’s re-imagining of premodern rituality, aesthetics, and performance. In this brief essay, I interpret Igor Stravinsky’s musical score and Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography for Le Sacre in an exposition of two specific terms: pathei mathos (knowledge by ordeal) and skandalon (‘stumbling stone,’ a trap, scandal). As I demonstrate with my exegesis of each term, the celebrated radicality of Stravinsky’s composition and the presumed modernism of Nijinsky’s movement are in fact indebted to Greco-Roman antiquity and the Middle Ages. Ultimately, this essay shows how a high modernist ballet is in fact intimately tied to ancient ritual and medieval gesture.
PubDate: 2023-08-21
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- Antisemitism, dance, and the law in the late medieval Holy Roman Empire
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Abstract: Abstract This article examines how late medieval Christian approaches to Jewish dance within antisemitic moralistic discourse and legal codes contributed to Jewish subjugation within Christian hegemony in the Holy Roman Empire. Analysing polemical debates, moralistic literature, and artworks, I demonstrate how Christians used the ancient Israelites’ dance around the golden calf in Exodus to vilify Jewish dance as an embodiment of ancient and contemporary Jews’ inherent immorality. Through this theological discourse, Jewish dancing, I argue, became symbolic of Jews’ spiritual inferiority to Christians. Antisemitic attitudes towards Jewish dance permeated into legal codes, which marginalized Jewish dance practices by subordinating them to Christian moral codes. I trace the documented and possible effects of antisemitic measures on the medieval Ashkenazi Jewish community’s wedding dance practices. Dance served as a significant medium for Christians to construct racist, antisemitic ideas about Jewish identity and project those ideas onto Jewish bodies, real and imagined.
PubDate: 2023-08-15
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- ‘To se hem play, hyt was fayr game’: Playing & dancing in Thomas
Chestre’s Sir Launfal-
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Abstract: Abstract In this article, I approach premodern dance through the lens of cultural game theory. Specifically, I examine how the Middle English Sir Launfal (c.1400) is transformed by Thomas Chestre into a narrative about games. Chestre’s ludic additions have been met with criticism for how they disrupt the plot of Marie de France’s twelfth-century Lanval. While the games interrupt narrative progression, the ludic additions allow Chestre to consider the porousness between game worlds and the official world. Chestre’s ludic additions are not merely digressive. I demonstrate how the two longest ludic additions—the joust with Sir Valentine and the dance with Guinevere—share a structural pattern. I argue that the poem’s joust and dance games realise the more serious social implications inherent in playing games as the poet shows the consequences of Launfal’s unsportsmanlike behaviour.
PubDate: 2023-08-14
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- Chiasm in choros: The dance of inspirited bodies
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Abstract: Abstract This paper explores the chiastic sign ⊗ in Romanesque art showing its investment in the form of the crown of the saints (e.g., the corona on the golden statue of Sainte Foy at Conques); in the mirroring of celestial and terrestrial music (Paris, BnF, MS Lat. 776, fol. 1v); and in the chiastic step of Christ, the Archangel Michael, and the apostles (sculptures and the Beatus MS at Santo Domingo de Silos). The pirouetting step present in the art at Santo Domingo de Silos is interpreted here as the expression of the imbrication of human and divine. This entwining channels caritas: the love for one’s neighbour through which the faithful can return to the divine at the end of time. A powerful confirmation of these ideas about the interdigitation of human and divine through the practice of caritas is offered by the poetry and music for the feast of the Mandatum (The Washing of the Feet).
PubDate: 2023-08-10
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- About the Cover
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PubDate: 2023-08-09
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- The Ballet of the Bombs: Isherwood’s camp remake of Dante’s
rota of the Sodomites-
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Abstract: Abstract In 1954, Christopher Isherwood daringly defended ‘camp’ as an aesthetic concept in his fifth novel, The World in the Evening. Two years later he completed his sixth novel, The Forgotten, a mid-century American update of Dante’s Inferno. By casting his alter ego Chris as Dante, and his hustler friend Denny as Virgil, Isherwood not only queered but ‘camped up’ the underworld journey of the wayward pilgrim and his moral guide. En route to the Capital, Chris stops over at an artists’ colony located in a dormant volcano where three male dancers perform a ballet symbolizing the nuclear arms race. Their performance not only recalls bomb-themed ballets staged in the post-war period, but also evokes the round dance of the three Florentine Sodomites in Inferno canto 16. Isherwood’s comic send-up of Inferno canto 16 accords with his pioneering definition of ‘High Camp’ as a queer response to the aesthetics of classical ballet.
PubDate: 2023-08-03
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- Singing of and with the Other: Flamenco and the politics of pastoralism in
medieval Iberia-
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Abstract: Abstract Flamenco has only existed as such since the mid-nineteenth century, yet the sung and danced poetry out of which it grows is rooted in medieval Iberia. This essay focuses on a flamenco gesture, the pellizco (pinch), as a flash of recognition that leaps across the supposedly impermeable barrier separating our present from the distant past. The lyric forms that emerged in ninth-century Islamic Iberia were courtly pastorals, representing Christian vernacular songs for Muslim audiences. Ironically, as the balance of power flipped, so did the politics of representation: at Christian courts, these verse forms now portrayed Muslims as uncouth country bumpkins. Post-Iberian reconquest and eyeing American colonization, this parody of religious difference would come to represent the Blackness of race-based slavery, not only in Spain but throughout Europe and its former possessions. Thus, the medieval Iberian lyric illuminates important aspects of our political present. And, although it does not register in the textual record, flamenco as a body of knowledge archives layers of meaning and memory that are often blanketed by the politics of whiteness.
PubDate: 2023-08-03
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- The transhistorical, transcultural life of sausages: From medieval
morescas to New Mexican Matachines with Aby Warburg-
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Abstract: Abstract New Mexican Matachines dances have long been discussed as descendent dances of medieval morescas. This article explores this ‘ancestral relation’, beginning on New Year’s Day in 1896 at the colonial outpost of Cubero, New Mexico. There, the German art historian Aby Warburg met a local shepherd who endeavoured to explain the pantomimic killing of a bull in the dance drama by saying the blood was ‘good for making sausages.’ Accordingly, this article investigates Warburg’s lifelong exploration of Matachines antecedents in the margins of his research on early Italian Renaissance images of medieval festive drama, and ‘headhuntress’ figures, such as Judith and Salome. Warburg’s thoughts on New Mexican Matachines meandered over the course of his life from Aztec sacrifice to medieval morescas, to the Mithras cult. Through these explorations, Warburg pursued a cultural evolutionary theory that would situate New Mexican Matachines as a descendent of antique pagan blood ceremony.
PubDate: 2023-08-01
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- Tracing the legacies of medieval dance: Historical, critical, and artistic
approaches-
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PubDate: 2023-08-01
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- Dance, Institution, Abolition
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Abstract: Abstract Antiracist commitments—in medieval studies and elsewhere—are incomplete without a commitment to abolitionist principles. These principles involve the dismantling of police, prisons, and many other institutions fostering the interests of carcerality, property protection, and racial capitalism. This essay encourages scholars of medieval dance to explore abolitionist horizons because, it argues, the study of medieval dance requires the development of three capacities also integral to the abolitionist project: 1) an ability to envision what we cannot know; 2) an understanding of how to act collectively even through our estrangement from each other (as medieval dancers did); 3) a willingness to take risks. These characteristics could help scholars of dance confront medieval studies and mobilize it to make not just the field but also the world a place of freedom, thriving, and mutual care.
PubDate: 2023-07-24
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- Dancing in silence in premodern Europe
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Abstract: Abstract In contemporary scholarship, emphasis on music and dance as intertwined art forms drives the popularity of terms such as choreomusicology. Premodern dance and music practices, however, are difficult to link together in the absence of evidence aligning music and choreography, calling into question the very categories of ‘music’ and ‘dance.’ This essay interrogates the relationship between dance and music in premodern Europe by focusing on moments when bodies move seemingly unaccompanied or unmotivated by audible music. Through case studies on choreomania and mystical dance I ask what is heard versus what is unheard, and who hears what when dance happens. I explore the interplay between embodied, corporeal, ‘real’ dance practices and inaudible, incorporeal, ‘virtual’ music. What happens to dance when music is inaudible to listeners or participants' What does imagined versus sounded music do to the perception of the cultural and theological meanings of movement practices in premodern Europe'
PubDate: 2023-07-20
DOI: 10.1057/s41280-023-00268-0
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- Sacrilegious bodies: Gender, race, and medieval dance in
nineteenth-century missions-
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Abstract: Abstract Through pairing a study of vernacular religious texts from late medieval England with a case study focused on Baptist mission work and conflicts over dance in nineteenth-century Jamaica, this article shows how medieval theologies of lay dance shaped modern missionary efforts. Late medieval sermon authors and ecclesiastical authorities repeatedly treated dance as a sacrilegious transgression associated with effeminacy and female bodies, drawing and reinforcing connections between dance and gender. These rhetorical moves were then applied to discussions of race, religion, and conversion during the era of British imperialism. One of the enduring legacies of medieval English discussions of dance was the religious othering of dancing Black bodies in British imperial contexts, as missionaries used dance as a marker of false faith, effeminacy, and moral susceptibility. White missionaries, applying the paradigm regarding dance and sin developed in the late Middle Ages, attempted to force Black bodies into stillness.
PubDate: 2023-07-18
DOI: 10.1057/s41280-023-00272-4
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- Toying with dance: A medievalist interprets The Nutcracker ballet
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Abstract: Abstract This article draws attention to elements of medievalism in The Nutcracker ballet, which premiered in St. Petersburg in 1892. I argue that medieval tropes of sacred play are embedded within this postmedieval work of art. Interpreting medieval toy culture alongside Western classical dance, this article articulates how medieval religiosity informs aesthetic production and perception today. In conclusion, I touch upon a more disturbing side of ballet medievalism, which contributes to the otherization and racialisation of non-Christian dancers. In sum, this article suggests that premodern cultures can lend layers of significance to artistic creations of the modern era.
PubDate: 2023-07-18
DOI: 10.1057/s41280-023-00269-z
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- Correction to: Accessing the medieval: Disability and distance in Anna
Gurney’s search for St Edmund-
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Abstract: A publisher's error was made in the Acknowledgements in Helen Brookman's article for postmedieval 10.3 (Fall 2019), "Accessing the medieval: Disability and distance in Anna Gurney's search for St Edmund." Dr. Marie Tidball's last name was misspelled.
PubDate: 2023-03-01
DOI: 10.1057/s41280-019-00151-x
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- About the Cover
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PubDate: 2023-02-03
DOI: 10.1057/s41280-022-00261-z
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