According to their founders, the DVjs, established in 1923, was supposed to develop a specific focus also for medieval literature and culture. This article analyzes how this program was realized and how the relationship between literary studies and intellectual history (›Geistesgeschichte‹) was shaped in different periods from the early articles of Günther Müller, Wolfgang Stammler or Walther Rehm to the reestablishment by Hugo Kuhn around 1950. The authors reconstruct a particular branch of German medieval studies still (...) relevant today. (shrink)

This article traces the multiple and rapid changes that have occurred during the past fifteen years, in theorizing "sex/gender arrangements". A secondary aspect is the reception, application and above all modification of these theories by some scholars of European medieval cultural production, in which varieties of difference are found that do not apply in modern societies. Deconstruction of the binary m/f (whether thought of as sexual or gender difference) erupted among feminist thinkers in the 1990s and eventually "queered" academic (...) discourses by destabilizing labels that had been naturalized, including a consistent gender identity for the individual in medieval or modern society. The author claims that queer and post-colonial theory, far from being antithetical to feminist theory, are out-growths of it, and exist in parallel; the proponents of each are concerned with the societal forces, including our own discourses, that maintain difference, and create communities of oppression Yet it is also necessary to raise the question, when will the next radical departure occur, and how will new theories be generated? (shrink)

This book brings together never-before published contributions of leading scholars in Greek and Medieval thought. The list of thinkers examined includes Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Pseudo-Dionysius, Gregory of Nyssa, Anselm, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Henry of Harclay, William of Auvergne, Paulus Soncinas and William of Alnwick.

Aertsen’s recent book on the transcendentals in the thought of Thomas Aquinas and his immediate predecessors is a splendid piece of research that should prove useful for years to come to those interested in the history of medieval philosophy. The significance of the book derives mainly from three factors: its exploration of a central topic in medieval philosophy which, unfortunately, has been largely neglected; its extraordinary erudition; and the detailed and enlightening analyses found throughout the book. Aertsen discusses (...) every relevant text and has taken into account most of the significant secondary sources. The breadth and depth of the book make it required reading of all those interested in the thought of the Middle Ages. (shrink)

This article is currently available as a free download on Ingenta Connect.

Philology is a term of wide application, designating at its most narrow the study of specific linguistic and textual features, at its most extensive what Gustav Gröber, in the Grundriβ der romanischen Philologie , called “the human spirit in language.” The distance between these definitions measures the literary medievalist's task: on the one hand to engage in the disinterested and often highly technical practices of medieval studies, on the other to produce results of general interest. These imperatives converge (...) with a slightly different but analogous dilemma, the relation of medieval studies to the human sciences as a whole. On the one hand, as the custodian of the formative history of the cultures of the European nation states, and as the agency by which the study of the national literatures first entered the academy in the nineteenth century, medieval studies has provided a model for cultural study. Yet in the current academic milieu, at least in the Anglo-American world, medieval studies is a marginalized institution. Most literary scholars and critics consider medieval texts to be utterly extraneous to their own interests, as at best irrelevant, at worst inconsequential; and they perceive the field itself as a site of pedantry and antiquarianism, a place to escape from the demands of modern intellectual life. (shrink)

In the year 1471 a member of the Sorbonne, Guillaume Fichet, looking back on the history of what today we should call communication technology, divided it into three periods: antiquity , a subsequent period which we should identify as the Middle Ages , and a period just beginning . Just over five hundred years later an American scholar, Walter J. Ong, looking back on a longer historical span, divided it into orality, writing, printing, and electronic communications. No matter how much (...) these two figures may differ over details, they occupy a similar position: each stands at the start of a communications shift which has alerted him to changes in the past, and Ong claims explicitly that contrasts “between electronic media and print have sensitized us to the earlier contrast between writing and orality.” We do not have to go as far as Eric A. Havelock, who suggests that our new awareness can be precisely dated by a number of publications appearing in the annus mirabilis 1963 , in order to accept the general point that recent work has been stimulated by recent technology. (shrink)

Medieval Islamic Historiography: Remembering Rebellion. By Heather N. Keaney. Routledge Research in Medieval Studies. New York: Routledge, 2013. Pp. xx + 187, maps. $125.