Subtheme:
Medievalism from William Caxton to Hope Emily Allen
Organizer: Stacie Vos (U of San Diego)
To what extent is scholarship on the Middle Ages a joyful, celebratory activity? This sub-theme invites participants to think about the ways in which the medieval past has come down to us through mediators, chief amongst them printers like Caxton and Wynkyn de Worde who describe textual editing and other forms of scholarly activity in celebratory ways. Caxton's prologues, for instance, constantly offer praise, or "great thanks and laud" to the authors whose work he has prepared for publication. How does this form of praising the medieval reappear with Victorian and Modernist medievalist projects? How has this praise changed over the centuries, and what has changed about whom is praised? What, for instance, might we do about claims like that of early modern translator Gavin Douglas, who said Chaucer was too much "womanis frend" and too much on the side of Dido?
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Recent scholars have begun to identify medievalists who have not been properly recognized in the history of the field, especially Edith Rickert, Hope Emily Allen, and Belle da Costa Greene. How can further attention to figures such as these help us to see the ways in which research and teaching on the Middle Ages is driven by our own sense of personal connection to one another and to figures of the medieval past? Potential figures and approaches include the Caxton exhibition of 1877, early print design (and paratexts) as a form of medieval commemoration, celebrations of Caxton's biographer William Blades and other antiquarians, the medievalist visions of William Blake and William Morris, medieval plays and pageants performed in the 20th century, the role of pioneering female medievalists such as Eileen Power, Allen, and their networks of women artists and writers, and contemporary scholarship placing current medievalists in the context of a transhistorical archive such as the one Carolyn Dinshaw describes in How Soon is Now?
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Are attempts to recreate the past, including the manuscript, printed volume or work of art, always celebrations? To what extent is medievalism evidence of an arguably inherent, and potentially unique, participatory aspect of medieval studies? And how does medievalism negotiate worship in a secularized time?
