scholarly journals Defining and Defending the Middle Ages with C. S. Lewis

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Murdoch
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Medieval Literature ◽  
Technical Skills ◽  
Courtly Love ◽  
The Self ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Love Song ◽  
Universal Values ◽  
Love Lyric ◽  
The Middle Ages

The scholarly writings of C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) have both inspired the study of the Middle Ages and confirmed the relevance to the humanities that medieval literary texts can have for the present. He was aware that the straitjacket implied by periodisation can blind us to the universal values presented in medieval literature. Qualitative assumptions made about the (usually undefined) Middle Ages include an alienating remoteness, and also a general ignorance, especially of science and technology. Lewis drew attention to the knowledge of astronomy, for example, and pointed out that medieval technical skills in architecture, agriculture and medicine are important for us to be aware about. Three medieval works illustrate this universality with respect to technical skills (the Völundarkviða); identity and the self (the Hildebrandslied); and the popular love-song (the courtly love-lyric). Lewis cautioned against pejorative terms like ‘Dark Ages’, noted problems of perspective in assessing all pre-modern literature, and showed that earlier works have a continuing value and relevance.

scholarly journals O cruzamento entre o Sagrado e o Profano na temática do Amor Cortês * The intersection between the Sacred and the Profane in the theme of Courtly Love

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 442
Author(s):  
LIGIA CRISTINA CARVALHO
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Courtly Love ◽  
The Self ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Opposite Sex ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Middle Ages

<p><strong>Resumo</strong>: Por ter sido elaborado dentro de uma sociedade religiosa cristã medieval, que tem a Bíblia como paradigma e a Igreja como norteadora espiritual e comportamental, pelo menos desde o século V, o amor cortês caracteriza-se pela tensão dos contrários que marca tão singularmente o perfil histórico e cultural da Idade Média. Para Santo Agostinho, o amor eleva o indivíduo à verdade, ao conhecimento unitivo de Deus. Em conformidade com a ideia de Santo Agostinho, o amor cortês era tido como fonte de todo o bem. Entretanto, na literatura cortês, não era o conhecimento de uma verdade transcendente que se consegue com o amor, mas um enobrecimento do próprio ser em sua realidade terrena e, além disto, este amor não se dirige a Deus, mas ao próximo de sexo oposto. Dito isto, neste artigo discutiremos o cruzamento entre o sagrado e o profano na temática do amor cortês.</p><p><strong>Palavras-chave</strong>: Idade Média Central – Literatura cavaleiresca – Amor cortês.</p><p> </p><p><strong>Abstract</strong>: Because of drawning into a medieval Christian religious society, which has the Bible as a paradigm and the Church as a spiritual and behavioral guiding, at least since the fifth century, courtly love is characterized by the tension of opposites that mark the historical and cultural profile of the Middle Ages so singularly. For St. Augustine, love elevates the individual to the truth, to the unitive knowledge of God. In accordance with the idea of St. Augustine, courtly love was taken as the source of all good. However, in courtly literature, the knowledge of a transcendent truth was not achieved by love, but an ennoblement of the self in its earthly reality and, moreover, this love is not addressed to God but to others of the opposite sex. Said that, this article will discuss the intersection between the sacred and the profane in the theme of courtly love.</p><p><strong>Keywords</strong>: Central Middle Ages – Chivalric literature – Courteous love.</p>

Allegra Iafrate, The Long Life of Magical Objects: A Study in the Solomonic Tradition. The Magic in History Series. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019, xi, 235 pp., 19 b/w images, 2 tables.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 252-254
Author(s):  
Albrecht Classen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Modern World ◽  
State University ◽  
Eastern Culture ◽  
Historical Objects ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Objects ◽  
The Middle Ages

Throughout times, magic and magicians have exerted a tremendous influence, and this even in our (post)modern world (see now the contributions to Magic and Magicians in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Time, ed. Albrecht Classen, 2017; here not mentioned). Allegra Iafrate here presents a fourth monograph dedicated to magical objects, primarily those associated with the biblical King Solomon, especially the ring, the bottle which holds a demon, knots, and the flying carpet. She is especially interested in the reception history of those symbolic objects, both in antiquity and in the Middle Ages, both in western and in eastern culture, that is, above all, in the Arabic world, and also pursues the afterlife of those objects in the early modern age. Iafrate pursues not only the actual history of King Solomon and those religious objects associated with him, but the metaphorical objects as they made their presence felt throughout time, and this especially in literary texts and in art-historical objects.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 191-200
Author(s):  
Jacqueline de Romilly
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Greek Culture ◽  
The Middle Ages

This concluding chapter discusses how the story of Alcibiades' life requires consulting both historical and literary texts. The honors bestowed on his tomb by the emperor Hadrian have served as the epilogue of Alcibiades' death. This is not surprising since Hadrian was known to be an admirer of Greek culture. Nor is it surprising that cultivated Romans knew about Alcibiades. They read Plato, the Greek historians, and later Plutarch. And in addition to the biography written by Cornelius Nepos, one encounters Alcibiades in all the scholars of the imperial age. After that, a heavy veil of silence fell. There is no mention of Alcibiades through the Middle Ages until the reappearance of Greek texts. The chapter then offers an analogy between Alcibiades' life and the unification of Europe. When one looks back at his life, the crisis in democracy is what is most striking and moving today.

The space of time and the medievalist imaginary

2018 ◽  
pp. 22-49
Author(s):  
Thomas A. Prendergast ◽  
Stephanie Trigg
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Medieval Literature ◽  
Time Travel ◽  
Conventional Wisdom ◽  
Social Difference ◽  
The Past ◽  
Medieval English Literature ◽  
Spatio Temporal ◽  
The Middle Ages

Conventional wisdom sees medievalism occurring “after” the Middle Ages; and indeed much medievalist practice seems to support this view, as the Middle Ages are often conceptualised in spatio-temporal terms, through the fictions of time-travel and the specific trope of “portal medievalism”. But the two formations are more accurately seen as mutually constitutive. Medieval literature offers many examples of layered or multiple temporalities. These are often structured around cultural and social difference, which is figured in powerfully affective, not just epistemological terms. Several examples from medieval English literature demonstrate how medieval culture prefigures many of medievalism’s concerns with the alterity of the past.

Painting a Musical Masterpiece

2019 ◽  
pp. 63-69
Author(s):  
Nate Sloan ◽  
Charlie Harding ◽  
Iris Gottlieb
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Courtly Love ◽  
Magnum Opus ◽  
Text Painting ◽  
As If ◽  
The Middle Ages

Chapter 6 discusses “What Goes Around . . . Comes Around,” Justin Timberlake and Timbaland’s magnum opus, a seven-minute-plus track spinning a saga of love and karma through creative instrumentation, pointed lyrics, and an effect called text painting. Text painting sets a lyric to music that mirrors its meaning—such as a melody moving in a circle to illustrate the idea of “coming back around.” It’s as if Timberlake starts his paintbrush in the center of the canvas, on the home pitch of A, descends down as he repeats “goes around,” then makes a sudden upward brushstroke, before falling back to the starting note on the final “comes back around” right in the center of his canvas. Text painting dates back to the Middle Ages, making Timberlake a kind of latter-day troubadour and “What Goes Around” a modern ballad of courtly love.

The vocacyon of Johan Bale and Early English Autobiography

1971 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 327-340 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie P. Fairfield
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
The Self ◽  
Human Personality ◽  
The Past ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Early English ◽  
Sub Specie Aeternitatis ◽  
The Middle Ages

Sixteenth-Century Englishmen were not frequently given to self-scrutiny—at least not in writing. This was a disinclination which they shared with their medieval forbears, since autobiography was not a very common form of literary activity in the Middle Ages. Monastic self-analysis, sub specie aeternitatis and guided by the standard categories of virtues and vices—yes. Coherent study of the self, for its own sake and in all its quirks and idiosyncracies—scarcely ever. In the early sixteenth century, the murmur of new ideas from Italy did begin to touch England: a sense of distance and of difference between the present and the past, and an awakened appreciation for the discrete, the singular in human personality.

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