Late Medieval and Early Modern Studies

An announcement about three new books in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Studies series published by Brepols and co-ordinated by an editorial team from Melbourne and Arizona (specifically, me, Charles Zika, Ian Moulton and Fred Keifer, with a larger advisory board).

Here is our blurb:

Jointly directed by Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and the University of Melbourne and published by Brepols, this series covers the historical period in Western and Central Europe from ca. 1300 to ca. 1650. It concentrates on topics of broad cultural, religious, intellectual and literary history. The editors are particularly interested in studies that are distinguished by

• their broad chronological range;
• their spanning of time periods such as late medieval, Renaissance, Reformation, early modern;
• their straddling of national borders and historiographies;
• their cross-disciplinary approach.

A list of books in the series is available in Brepols’ online catalogue at www.brepols.com. The Brepols code for the series is LMEMS.

If you have an idea for a book that you think would fit this series' remit (a word I only started to use once I got involved with this series), please contact me or any of the editors.

These three latest titles might be of particular interest to readers of this blog, as they deal with gender studies, the medieval/early modern transition in English literature, and the theatre of the body in seventeenth-century England. All are fabulous!

Practices of Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, edited by Megan Cassidy-Welch and Peter Sherlock

The Theatre of the Body: Staging Death and Embodying Life in Early Modern London, by Kate Cregan

Performing the Middle Ages, from 'Beowulf' to 'Othello', by Andrew James Johnston

Scroll down for order forms and deadline for 20% discount...

One Garter or Two?

OK, all you eagle-eyed costume historians and dedicated followers of fashion, what is the courtier on the right wearing around his leg? It's a garter, yes, but is it The Garter? It has an unusually long pendant which makes me think it's more like a kind of decorative garter, especially as the right, white-hosed leg of the same man seems to have a similar garter. (From what I have seen so far, medieval Garters don't seem to have a matching, plainer band on the other leg, though this was the convention later on.)

Note how his elegant footwear extends across the frame of the picture...


This is from a MS of Philippe de Mézières’ Epistre au roi Richart, British Library Royal MS 20 B Vl, f.2, detail (c. 1395-6). I haven't seen this manuscript discussed in any Garter contexts, which is interesting because if it's not thought to be The Garter, then it's evidence that decorative garters were fashionable in Richard's court. But perhaps it is a Garter: no reason why it couldn't have a long pendant, after all.

I've finished drafting Chapter Six (hooray for me!), and am just starting the long haul through all my badly organised files to fill in all the gaps before I start drafting Chapter Seven then re-doing all those early chapters. So I will have fun problems about deciding where to put all my juicy little snippets. For example, the Queen's driving mascot is a silver model of St George (the Garter's patron saint) slaying the Dragon, and it is transferred from car to car. What a weird world it is.

Medievalist Commodities

At the State Library of Victoria, there is currently a wonderful exhibition of medieval manuscripts, mostly from Cambridge, but with a goodly selection of local treasures, from the State Library, the National Gallery and the Baillieu Library in Melbourne, from Ballarat and Canberra, and also from New Zealand. It's not brilliantly laid out, unfortunately: some of the cases cast a shadow on the information cards, and half the time you have to look from an angle so as not to cast your own shadow on the cases. It's tricky with illuminated mss., though, as you can't have much direct light on them.

It's lovely to see the Library's own ms. of Deguileville's Pèlerinage de la Vie Humaine against Cambridge's Roman de la Rose, though, and the giant antiphonals with their heavily embossed and gold plated illuminations. Or clever comparisons of different pictures of elephants from bestiaries.

The Library's website has some great features: an online image collection, and a soundless video presentation about the re-binding of the Pèlerinage for the exhibition (there is an article about this process forthcoming in the Library's LaTrobe Journal, too), which chimes beautifully with Ampersand Duck's recent post about bookbinding.

The exhibition seems to be attracting substantial crowds, and has been heavily advertised: here's the promo that's been playing in some cinemas, for example.

It's on my tram ticket, too.





And in addition to the glossy catalogue, and other books on sale, I can buy some more affordable postcards and bookmarks, or a poster; and if I can't afford any books, I can at least pick up the brochure of the books on sale:





This is not just clever marketing and promotional work: I reckon it also taps into the heart of much medievalism and typifies it: the desire to possess the medieval in some way, to take home or domesticate a little of its beauty. Of course it's incredibly selective: the manuscripts that go on tour like this (and it's rare to see them making such a voyage) are not the medieval workaday books of devotion or history; but rather the top-end products for a wealthy readership. We can't read more than a page at a time when they are displayed like this, either, but thousands of Melbournians are peering into the glass cases and glimpsing those worlds. And by taking home a poster or a postcard or a bookmark, and indeed by hosting this free and public exhibition in the heart of the city we can purchase a great deal of very attractive symbolic capital at very little cost.

Truly, if you get a chance to visit, it's worth it.

And more is yet to come: this Sunday, April 20, there is a "medieval fayre" from 10.00 - 4.00. I'll be there, for research and teaching reasons, you understand...