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This article is both a reflection on the cultural, social, and political stakes of how early medieval literature and language functions as heritage in England, and on my practices as a museum educator. Language and literature in heritage contexts may enable rich emotional and intellectual engagement with early medieval stories, landscapes, and objects in ways which may unloose the early medieval from the grip of exclusionary narratives. I discuss how Old English language and literature may be understood within wider contexts of early medieval heritage, often called 'Anglo-Saxon' in English institutions, by sketching the overlapping public spaces of encounter with the past, and how we may read across them. With its longstanding links with Old English poetry across scholarship and public history, I suggest that Sutton Hoo provides an ideal case study for examining the enmeshment of early medieval literature, language, landscape, and archaeology as heritage categories. I discuss the planning and delivery of 'Trade and Travel', a temporary display and learning programme that I organised with the National Trust in 2017, and present findings from qualitative data I collected to suggest how people make sense of place, archaeology, and early medieval language and literature. Understanding language and literature as heritage, I show how visitors discover and create meaning through encounter and conversation. In heritage spaces, literature and language are sensory and emotional artefacts and experiences: observing visitor engagement reveals how both become integral to creative and identity-making work.

This essay argues for the consideration of energy and an energy-based humanities model in the study of water in the Middle Ages. It also proposes that 'energy', when discussed in the context of the Middle Ages, is in fact a study of 'energies', derived from technology, material culture, and intellectual culture in equal measure. It proposes three genres of medieval water energy as a model for the multi-valent study of the energy politics underpinning medieval society: the philosophical, the hydro-social, and the intellectual. The essay surveys approaches to medieval water history to propose a new approach, and makes an argument for the reimagination of water as an entity of energy with dimensions flowing beyond the history of science and social history dimensions of water history. Medieval thought did not conceive of water as wholly material or wholly abstract, but as a part of a larger world-system spanning the material and spiritual.Just as medieval people drew on a tiny percentage of gravity flow through hydraulics, so too did the water of medieval intellectual culture provide motive power through the infusion of divine power, setting the world-machine in process. A new approach to medieval water studies follows Imre Szeman's description of energy as an underpinning force within society, shaping its discourses, dialogues, norms, and political ecologies. For the Middle Ages, this model must account for a differing intellectual culture encompassing religious, philosophical, and technical models of water.

This dissertation explores Middle English literary texts that consistently portray ethics as a patently emotional affair. The introduction rehashes recent neuroscientific discourses that similarly assert the centrality of emotion in processes of ethical decision-making, as well as other contemporary theoretical and historiographic accounts of emotion. Chapter 1 argues that Middle English rhetorics of righteous and sinful anger played an important role both in sparking the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 and in retroactively reevaluating the dangers of unin-hibited anger in the uprising's posttramatic wake. The second chapter discusses Middle English discourses on dread that suggest that devotees in late medieval England conceptualized the ascetic project of dreading well as integral to the ethical project of living well. The third chapter argues that the three successive versions of _Piers Plowman_, as we know them today, contain three strikingly different theologies of love and dread. Rather than reading these as evidence of one man's gradual movement from a theology of dread to one of love, it reimagines the production of _Piers Plowman_ as a densely intersubjective affair that engendered a network of differing (and deferring) theologies of love and dread. Chapter 4 turns to the famous Middle English elegy _Pearl_, arguing that the Pearl-maiden does not prompt the dreamer to happily share in her celestial estate, but instead stirs his envy of her heavenly bliss, suggesting that terrestrial devotees ought to work through, rather than eschew, their envy of their celestial loved ones. Chapter 5 focuses on another poem solely attested in Cotton Nero A.x: _Sir Gawain and the Green Knight_. While critics often read Gawain's shame at the end of the poem as sundering him from his fellow courtiers, I read Gawain's shameful confession to the court as profoundly and successfully reparative of the homosocial, chivalric habitus wounded by Gawain's life loving transgression. Moving next to Geoffrey Chaucer's _Troilus and Criseyde_, Chapter 6 builds on a scholarly tradition that reads Troilus as a masochistic courtly lover, arguing that, at the poem's conclusion, Troilus spontaneously transforms into a sadistic courtly hater. Since masochistic courtly love and sadistic courtly hate constitute different responses to social privilege, the courtly lover always already possesses the potential to morph suddenly into a courtly hater, as does Chaucer's Troilus when he channels his disappointment at having lost Criseyde's love into vengeful, militarized violence against any and all Greeks. Finally, by way of conclusion, I discuss some of the pedagogical implications of my research into Middle English ideologies of emotion, focusing particularly on the vexed question of how one might ethically teach medieval cultures of compassion.

This essay argues for the consideration of energy and an energy-based humanities model in the study of water in the Middle Ages. It also proposes that 'energy', when discussed in the context of the Middle Ages, is in fact a study of 'energies', derived from technology, material culture, and intellectual culture in equal measure. It proposes three genres of medieval water energy as a model for the multi-valent study of the energy politics underpinning medieval society: the philosophical, the hydro-social, and the intellectual. The essay surveys approaches to medieval water history to propose a new approach, and makes an argument for the reimagination of water as an entity of energy with dimensions flowing beyond the history of science and social history dimensions of water history. Medieval thought did not conceive of water as wholly material or wholly abstract, but as a part of a larger world-system spanning the material and spiritual.Just as medieval people drew on a tiny percentage of gravity flow through hydraulics, so too did the water of medieval intellectual culture provide motive power through the infusion of divine power, setting the world-machine in process. A new approach to medieval water studies follows Imre Szeman's description of energy as an underpinning force within society, shaping its discourses, dialogues, norms, and political ecologies. For the Middle Ages, this model must account for a differing intellectual culture encompassing religious, philosophical, and technical models of water.

Disability and Medieval Law: History, Literature and Society is an intervention in the growing and complex field of medieval disability studies. The size of the field and the complexity of the subject lend themselves to the use of case studies: how a particular author imagines an injury, how a particular legal code deals with (and sometimes creates) injury to the human body. While many studies have fruitfully insisted on theoretical approaches, Disability and Medieval Law considers how medieval societies directly dealt with crime, punishment, oath-taking, and mental illness. When did medieval law take disability into account in setting punishment or responsibility? When did medieval law choose to cause disabilities? How did medieval authors use disability to discuss not only law, but social relationships and the nature of the human?The volume includes essays on topics as diverse as Francis of Assissi, Margery Kempe, La Manekine, Geoffrey Chaucer, early medieval law codes, and the definition of mental illness in English legal records, by Irina Metzler, Wendy J. Turner, Amanda Hopkins, Donna Trembinski, Marian Lupo and Cory James Rushton.

This article deals with the productive reception and re-working of the Medieval Arthurian topic in the theatre of the former GDR. In Die Ritter der Tafelrunde, the East German playwright Christoph Hein dramatises the decadence and subsequent disappearance of chivalrous ideals in the decline of the Middle Ages. The play was first performed in April 1989, only months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, bringing a definitive end to the GDR. The fact that the play's central theme was the disappearance of an obsolete social and political system made it easier for the Arthurian court to be read as a metaphor for Erich Honecker's government. But, beyond its ad hoc interpretations, it is worth studying this drama as part of an ongoing trend throughout this country's history: the adoption of the literary legacy, represented in this case by Wolfram von Eschenbach's novel Parzival and its manipulation for extra-literary purposes. ; Este estudio trata acerca de la recepción productiva y reelaboración de la materia artúrica medieval en el teatro de la extinta RDA. En Die Ritter der Tafelrunde, el dramaturgo germano- oriental Christoph Hein lleva a escena la decadencia y posterior desaparición de los ideales caballerescos en el ocaso de la Edad Media. La obra se estrenó en abril de 1989, meses antes de la caída del muro que daría paso al final definitivo de la RDA. El hecho de que el motivo central de la pieza fuera la desaparición de un sistema social y político obsoleto facilitó la interpretación de la corte artúrica como trasunto del gobierno de Erich Honecker. Pero más allá de las interpretaciones ad hoc, interesa estudiar esta pieza dramática dentro de una tendencia constante a lo largo de la historia de aquel país: la adopción del legado literario, representado en este caso por la novela de Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, y su instrumentalización con fines extraliterarios.

Section I: Introduction -- 1. Embodied Difference: Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman -- Section II: Discourses of Bodily Difference -- 2. From Monstrosity to Postnormality: Montaigne, Canguilhem, Foucault -- 3. "If in Other Respects He Appears to be Effectively Human": Defining Monstrosity in Medieval English Law -- 4. (Dis)functional Faces: Signs of the Monstrous? -- 5. Grendel and Goliath: Monstrous Superability and Disability in the Old English Corpus -- 6. E(race)ing the Future: Imagined Medieval Reproductive Possibilities and the Monstrosity of Power -- Section III: Dis/Identifying the Other -- 7. "Blob Child" Revisited: Conflations of Monstrosity, Disability, and Race in King of Tars -- 8. Attending to "Beasts Irrational" in Gower's Visio Anglie -- 9. How a Monster Means: The Significance of Bodily Difference in the Christopher Cynocephalus Tradition -- 10. Lycanthropy and Lunacy: Cognitive Disability in The Duchess of Malfi -- 11. Eschatology for Cannibals: A System of Aberrance in the Old English Andreas -- 12. The Monstrous Womb of Early Modern Midwifery Manuals -- Section IV: Queer Couplings -- 13. Blindness and Posthuman Sexuality in Paradise Lost -- 14. Dwelling Underground in The Book of John Mandeville: Monstrosity, Disability, Ecology -- Section V: Coda -- 15. Muteness and Disembodied Difference: Three Case Studies

"In this volume, scholars of pre-modern Europe and the Arab world examine the issues of incarceration and slavery. The emphasis rests on religious, literary, philosophical, and historical narratives, buttressed by art-historical evidence, all of which demonstrates the true importance of these painful problems"--

This dissertation rereads five thirteenth-century Spanish hagiographic poems in the light of modern subaltern studies: the anonymous Vida de Santa María Egipciaca, and Gonzalo de Berceo's Martirio de San Lorenzo, Vida de San Millán de la Cogolla, Vida de Santo Domingo de Silos, and Vida de Santa Oria. Observing the numerous similarities between hagiographic writing and twentieth-century Latin American activism literature known as testimonio—the innocent and suffering victim, the elite facilitator of the narrative, the illiterate speaker, and the sense of urgency caused by oppression and injustice—the project concludes that the invention and promotion of martyrs and saints provided a crucial space for Christianity to constitute and maintain its power and identity while at the same time providing a space for diverse, marginalized individuals to find expression and influence in their societies. In hagiography, as in testimonio, powerful writers seek legitimacy within their communities by representing, imitating, conveying, facilitating, or portraying voices in pain, exploiting the heroism of suffering and the ideal of administering to others in need. In this way, the politics of suffering unifies the discourses of both hagiography and testimonio as multivalent interests and variant powers cohabitate not merely to entertain or instruct, but to motivate change in society.