New Medieval Literatures

Abstract New Medieval Literatures is a new annual of work on medieval textual cultures. Its scope is inclusive of work across the theoretical, archival, philological, and historicist methodologies associated with medieval literary studies. The title announces an interest both in new writing about medieval culture and in new academic writing. As well as featuring challenging new articles, each issue will include an analytical survey by a leading international medievalist of recent work in an emerging or dominant critical discourse, in this volume Louise O. Fradenburg's study of psychoanalytical medievalism. The editors aim to engage with intellectual and cultural pluralism in the Middle Ages and now. Volume 2 features in particular work representing European continental traditions as well as Anglo-Norman and Anglo-Latin writings. The essays in this volume move from the streets of Paris, London, and English market towns to English monasteries, idealized pastoral spaces, Christian-Jewish-Muslim Spain, Rome, and fourteenth-century Oxford. Subjects discussed include the spectral Jew in the making of Christian history; Peter Damian's Liber Gomorrhianus and the sexual politics of papal reform; sexuality and the improper allegory of the Romance of the Rose; violence, gender, and states of siege in Christine de Pizan's Paris; metonymy, montage, and death in Villon's Testament; maytime in late medieval courts; the ideological context of the Vita Haroldi; John Wyclif and scriptural truth, and bill-casting and political discourse in late medieval England.The volume as a whole coheres around three important issues of cultural analysis: gender, space, and reading history. Volume 3 will feature the winning essay from the essay prize competition, a major new historiographical essay by David Wallace on Dante in England and medieval-renaissance periodization, and an analytical survey by Sarah Kay on romance literatures and the 'New Philology'. Other contributions will represent new approaches to canonical authors, including Aelfric, Caxton, and Christine de Pizan.