Performing the Middle Ages from ‘Beowulf’ to ‘Othello’
By (author) Andrew James Johnston
Performing the Middle Ages from ‘Beowulf’ to ‘Othello’ traces the dialogic nature of the relationship between the Middle Ages and modernity. Arguing that modern beliefs in the alterity of the Middle Ages stem from the Middle Ages’ own processes of self-representation, Johnston explores varieties of nostalgia through a wide selection of texts. This volume spans an extensive chronological period with a view to demonstrating how our notions of the medieval have been crucially informed by the past itself. The study is focused on works which stage that popular literary archetype – the nostalgic figure of the aristocratic warrior – and argues that it is this image that provides a structural model for so many modern perspectives on the Middle Ages. And yet, in the Middle Ages this model was being deconstructed as it was also being generated. By moving from the self-consciously archaic heroism of Beowulf to the scathing comment on chivalric narrative presented in Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’, Johnston’s analysis offers an intriguing insight into the way medieval texts engage in a continual aesthetic and ideological critique of their own cultural moment. Using Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Alliterative Morte Arthure as examples of an incisive critique of the cult of subjectivity and of a highly self-conscious desire for tradition, Johnston extends his analysis to the early seventeenth century, and explores the ways in which Shakespeare’s Othello brilliantly deconstructs the very concept of ‘Renaissance Man’. With its interest in issues of subjectivity, textual performance, and the ideological self-awareness of medieval culture, Performing the Middle Ages provides a scholarly and compelling investigation into the Middle Ages’ ability both to understand itself and to shape (post)modern notions of the medieval.
- By (author) Andrew James Johnston
Other Titles in this Series
Women and Petitioning in the Seventeenth-Century English Revolution
Deference, Difference, and Dissent
Volume 25
Servants of Satan and Masters of Demons
The Spanish Inquisition's Trials for Superstition, Valencia and Barcelona, 1478-1700
Volume 17
Disciplined Dissent in Western Europe, 1200-1600
Political Action between Submission and Defiance
Volume 29
The Ghost of Boccaccio
The Ideology of Martyrdom in the Hebrew Crusade Chronicles and its Jewish and Christian Background
Volume 7
Rituals, Images, and Words
Varieties of Cultural Expression in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe
Volume 3
Sedition
The Spread of Controversial Literature and Ideas in France and Scotland, c. 1550-1610
Volume 28
Renaissance Florence in the Rhetoric of Two Popular Preachers
Giovanni Dominici (1356-1419) and Bernardino da Siena (1380-1444)
Volume 4
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