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PDF hosted at the Radboud Repository of the Radboud University Nijmegen The following full text is a publisher's version. For additional information about this publication click this link. http://hdl.handle.net/2066/105830 Please be advised that this information was generated on 2021-09-26 and may be subject to change. PDF hosted at the Radboud Repository of the Radboud University Nijmegen The following full text is a publisher's version. For additional information about this publication click this link. http://hdl.handle.net/2066/69404 Please be advised that this information was generated on 2016-09-21 and may be subject to change. VolumeVolume II 1 Anglo-SaxonMedievalist Culture Enlightenment: and the Modern Imagination Britain’sFrom pre-Conquest Charles past Perrault and its culture to continue Jean-Jacques to fascinate modern Rousseau writers and artists. From Henry Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader to Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf, and from high modernism to the musclebound heroes of comic book and Hollywood, Anglo-Saxon England has been a powerful and often unexpected source of inspiration, antagonism, and reflection. The essays here engage with the ways in which the Anglo-Saxons and their literature have been received, confronted, and re-envisioned in the modern imagination. They offer fresh insights on established figures such as W.H. Auden, J.R.R. Tolkien, and David Jones, and on contemporary writers such as Geoffrey Hill, Peter Reading, P.D. James, and Seamus Heaney. They explore the interaction between text, image, and landscape in medieval and modern books, the recasting of mythic figures such as Wayland Smith, and the metamorphosis of Beo- wulf into Grendel — as a novel and as grand opera. The early medieval emerges not simply as a site of nostalgia or anxiety in modern revisions, but instead provides a vital arena for creativity, pleasure, and artistic experiment. Anglo-Saxon Culture.indb 1 29.6.2010 15:27 ISSNVolume 2043–8230 1 Series Editors Karl Fugelso Chris Jones Medievalism aims to provide a forum for monographs and collections devoted to the bur- geoning and highly dynamic multi-disciplinary field of medievalism studies: that is, work investigating the influence and appearance of ‘the medieval’ in the society and culture of later ages. Titles within the series will investigate the post-medieval construction and manifestations of the Middle Ages – attitudes towards, and uses and meanings of, ‘the medieval’ – in all fields of culture, from politics and international relations, literature, history, architecture, and ceremonial ritual to film and the visual arts. It welcomes a wide range of topics, from historiographical subjects to revivalism, with the emphasis always firmly on what the idea of ‘the medieval’ has variously meant and continues to mean; it is founded on the belief that scholars interested in the Middle Ages can and should commu- nicate their research both beyond and within the academic community of medievalists, and on the continuing relevance and presence of ‘the medieval’ in the contemporary world. New proposals are welcomed. They may be sent directly to the editors or the publishers at the addresses given below. Professor Karl Fugelso Dr Chris Jones Art Department School of English Towson University University of St Andrews 3103 Center for the Arts St Andrews 8000 York Road Fife KY16 9AL Towson, MD 21252–0001 UK USA Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9 Woodbridge Suffolk IP12 3DF UK Previous volumes in this series: I Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination edited by David Clark and Nicholas Perkins Medievalist Enlightenment From Charles Perrault to Jean-Jacques Rousseau Alicia C. Montoya D. S. BREWER © Alicia C. Montoya 2013 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2013 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge ISBN 978 1 84384 342 9 D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Papers used by Boydell & Brewer Ltd are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests Typeset by Frances Hackeson Freelance Publishing Services, Brinscall, Lancs Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 I Conceptualizing the Medieval 1 A Sense of the Past: Ancients, Moderns, and the Medieval 17 2 The Medievalist Rhetorics of Enlightenment 43 II Reimagining the Medieval 3 Survivals: Reading the Medieval Roman at the Dawn of the 71 Enlightenment 4 Continuities: The Medieval as Performance 107 5 Reconfigurations: Medievalism and Desire, Between Eros and Agape 145 III Studying the Medieval 6 The Invention of Medieval Studies 185 Conclusion: Medievalism as an Alternative Modernity 221 Bibliography 225 Index 241 Samuel and Nathaniel, this one is for you Acknowledgements A project such as this one could not have reached fruition without the generous support of many people and institutions. I wish to thank, first of all, the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), without whose Veni grant this book might never have been written. Although I do not know their names, I wish particularly to express my gratitude to the anonymous reviewers at NWO who first expressed their faith in the project’s viability. Earlier versions of some sections of chapters 2 and 4 appeared in, respectively, The Romanic Review (2009) and Studies in Medievalism (2008). Some passages of chapter 3 appeared in a book chapter in Commonplace Culture in Western Europe in the Early Modern Period, vol. 3 (Peeters, 2011), edited by Joop W. Koopmans and Nils Holger Petersen. More substantial sections of chapter 6 have appeared as chapters in The Making of the Humanities, vol. 2 (Amsterdam UP, 2012), edited by Rens Bod, Jaap Maat and Thijs Weststeijn, andAccès au texte médiéval (Champion, 2012), edited by Michèle Guéret and Claudine Poulouin. I gratefully acknowledge the publishers’ permission to print revised versions of these sections here. I am grateful to the many colleagues who took the time to read and comment on drafts of individual chapters or parts of the book, at different stages of their composi- tion: Carolina Armenteros, Monika Baár, Rens Bod, Ruth (Sue) Bottigheimer, Marshall Brown, Michèle Guéret, Els Jongeneel, Mary Kemperink, Joop Koopmans, Nils Holger Petersen, Claudine Poulouin, Paul J. Smith, Thijs Weststeijn and the anonymous reviewers at the various journals to which I submitted previous versions of some of this book’s chapters. Many others helped me sharpen my ideas through discussion and feedback in various settings, by digging out that crucial article or passage, making me read authors I should have read long ago, and in other ways some of them may not even be aware of: Marc-André Bernier, Henri Duranton, Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink, Kees Meerhoff, Kenta Ohji, Paul Pelckmans, Sophie van Romburgh, Marine Roussillon, Sophie Tonolo, and Kocku von Stuckrad. All remaining errors of fact or judgement, infelicities of expression, or oddities of thinking are, of course, my own. viii Acknowledgements The University of Groningen, and the Rosalind Franklin Fellowship programme in which I was honoured to participate, provided a supportive setting in which to work on this book. To my department colleagues in Groningen with whom I talked through its ideas, at various stages of elaboration, who commiserated with me and facilitated the writing process itself, and whose questions sometimes provoked entire new chains of thought, I am grateful, especially to Philiep Bossier, Annemie De Gendt, Hub. Hermans, and Liesbeth Korthals Altes. A special word of thanks is due to the enthusiastic students of my literature survey course Vroegmodern tot modernistische letteren: Frans, who over the years, by their many questions and insights, have helped me to clarify my ideas and intentions, and to write this book, again in many more ways than they may know themselves. Finally, I gratefully acknowledge the various audience members at the conferences where I presented my work in progress, whose questions and comments often helped me to further refine my ideas, but whose names I did not always have the occasion to learn. I am particularly grateful for invitations to present my ideas at conferences organized by Marc-André Bernier and Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink in Québec, Michèle Guéret and Claudine Poulouin in Rouen, Geneviève Goubier and Stéphane Lojkine in Aix-en-Provence, and Jean-François Courouau and Isabelle Luciani in Toulouse. I would also like to thank the organizers of the annual Conference on Medievalism, which provided a welcome and exceptionally congenial venue for exploring some of the ideas in this book. Those remaining listeners – my patient and ever-supportive husband and children – who had no choice in the matter, but on whom I inflicted steady doses of medievalism, day and (sometimes) night, I cannot properly thank, but do gratefully acknowledge their forbearance during the past years. Introduction erceptions of medieval literature, far from being a simple matter of philological interest, have historically been fraught with ideological implica- tions. Thus, for example, when, announcing the advent of romanticism, Madame Pde Staël famously proposed that “romantic or chivalric literature is indigenous to us’, she was not only celebrating the birth of a literary movement.