3 results
3 - Authority
- Edited by Elizabeth Emery, Richard Utz
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- Book:
- Medievalism: Key Critical Terms
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 08 October 2022
- Print publication:
- 20 November 2014, pp 27-34
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Summary
MEDIEVALISM IS INEXTRICABLY bound up with authority. The adaptation of, or appeal to, medieval tropes, whether philosophical, political, artistic, or popular, frequently serves as an auctoritee, an unassailable justification for the ideology and practices of the culture making the appeal. Such practice is, of course, itself an adaptation (conscious or otherwise) of the medieval appeal to ancient authority and hence a double practice of medievalism. In the last 150 years, however, a sustained habit of inventing precedent, even for texts that never existed in the Middle Ages, made such practice both more medieval and more dangerous.
The appeal to ancient authority in medieval texts originally stemmed from theological exigency to establish criteria and justification for the developing Catholic dogma. In the early Middle Ages, the Bible served as the ultimate authority (auctoritee), with God as the supreme auctor in religious and social issues. However, when the scriptures did not supply specific direction – and with a history of Roman political dominance – the mainstream Church came to rely on classical texts evincing cultural didacticism as auctoritees. In the realm of literature, this manifested first as translation into the vernacular and interpretation (frequently through glosses) of ancient texts and later as paraphrases of stories and poetry. From there, it was a short step to poets merely adopting a classical theme and claiming an ancient source to legitimize contemporary ideas. Such is Benoît de Sainte-Maure's Le Roman de Troie (1154–60), a tale of fin amor primarily of his own invention but claiming a classical heritage, cleansed (when it does peek through) of “immoral” and non-Christian elements. By the fourteenth century, poets following Benoît's lead merely nodded to the ancients, frequently inventing classical authors and sources for their original work. Chaucer, for example, appeals to an unnamed book, “myn auctor,” and the muse Clio to lend credence to Troilus and Criseyde, though, in fact, it is based on Boccaccio's Il Filostrato (c. 1336) and no ancient account of the tale has ever surfaced.
In the centuries following the close of the Middle Ages, appeals to the era in theology, philosophy, politics, and even simple tradition advanced the various agendas of churchmen and rulers, forming and reforming the ideologies and world-views of Western Europe.
Medievalism, Authority, and the Academy
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- By Gwendolyn A. Morgan, Montana State University
- Edited by Karl Fugelso
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- Book:
- Studies in Medievalism XVII
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 12 September 2012
- Print publication:
- 18 January 2009, pp 55-67
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Summary
Despite denoting one of the fastest growing approaches of academic inquiry within a number of fields, the term “medievalism” remains somewhat slippery. It may describe the use of medieval themes, stories, characters, or even styles in the fiction, art, or film in any period following the close of the Middle Ages. Politically, it frequently denotes the recreation or refashioning of historical figures or events to justify the ideologies or national identities of a subsequent age. It has been applied to the adoption and adaptation of medieval philosophies to illuminate the issues of a later time. It may even describe the revival of early medical or other scientific practices. One thing, however, that underlies all such endeavors, is the reliance on the medieval past to lend authority to contemporary thought. Consider, for example, that the Tudors rested their claim to the English throne partly on an invented lineage leading back to the fabled King Arthur, even going so far as to manufacture and “discover” his Round Table. Or, on a more modern note, consider that most New Age Wicca adherents believe they are reviving an ancient Celtic spirituality somehow secretly kept alive for 1500 years, despite the fact that the very name of their cult derives not from early Welsh but from Anglo-Saxon and that much of their supposedly arcane knowledge has no documented existence prior to the nineteenth century. Yet, in the popular imagination, to be rooted in the medieval is to have unquestioned tradition and authority, to be legitimized.
Modern Mystics, Medieval Saints
- Edited by Tom Shippey, Martin Arnold
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- Book:
- Studies in Medievalism XII
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 17 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 23 January 2003, pp 39-54
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Summary
Popularly acclaimed as a saint in her homeland and celebrated by such authors as Christine de Pisan some 500 years before receiving official Church sanction, Joan of Arc nonetheless remained vilified or ignored in the English-speaking world until the Romantics adopted her as a heroine of democracy and the oppressed masses. Since then, Joan has become an increasingly fashionable focus for both intellectual and popular ideologies, first in literature and in various professional and academic journals, and later in film. By 1996, she could claim sufficient cinematic versions of her story to merit an entire book devoted to the study of them. Part of our enduring re-creation of the Middle Ages, such films employ what Deren calls the “innocent arrogance of objective fact,” which is simultaneously film's authority and its illusion, to propose a medieval mystic who never existed. We have created Joans to embody Marxist, democratic, populist, and patriotic political agendas; female heroes for feminists and gays; new-age shamans with mystical journeys and guardian angels. More recently, we discover Joan as psychotic, schizophrenic, delusional, manic-depressive, or any combination of these, apparently the legacy of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Freudian interpretations of her as the frustrated victim of overactive, pubescent hormones. Whatever the sauce in which we serve her up, all these re-creations ignore the fundamental medieval reality of Joan as a woman of unshakable faith in her personal and profound experience of Christianity.
In our efforts to explain away the religious experiences so believable to her contemporaries and so unbelievable to the scientific rationalist impulse of the twentieth century, we have left the real Joan far behind and rendered her an icon defining our own concept of human identity. To borrow from Gledhill, she has become:
a signifier of the second order of signification – connotation… The connotative signifier drains the original purely denotative sign of its historical and material reference – what Barthes rather suspectly calls its meaning – and turns it into support for a new… signifier, the naturalized concept of eternal truths or the “human condition.”
In 1999, Hollywood and its Canadian equivalent produced two films – Columbia's blockbuster The Messenger and Joan of Arc, released for home video by Artisan – which provide excellent case studies of this process. Both productions claim veracity for their interpretations in introductory screen overlays.