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26 - Simulacrum
- 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 223-230
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Summary
JEAN BAUDRILLARD'S DEFINITION of the simulacrum as “a copy without an original” is deliberately paradoxical and provoking. If there is no original, how could there possibly be a copy, since the term “copy” depends for its meaning on the idea of an original for comparison (a “good” or “bad” copy). Although the term was designed to describe the hyperrealistic nature of twentieth-century Western or Westernized culture, the definition has even more resonance for the study of medievalism, since there can be no original. Imagine, for example, that you could go back to the tenth century and attend a celebration in a mead hall; you could even bring a video camera. Nonetheless, you could not bring back an original; your presence itself would change the past, and even if you were invisible, a recording would be necessarily subjective, and probably reveal more about you than it would about the period, the event, or the participants, no matter how much you presented it as authentic history. The presence of the simulacrum haunts traditional medievalism and its desire to re-create the period. For postmodern or neomedievalism, the same impossibility of accessing an original provides a way of critiquing or challenging traditional medievalism and creates a space for neomedievalism's deliberate play with the inevitably constructed nature of all re-creations of the Middle Ages.
Before addressing the specific importance of the “simulacrum” for the study of “neomedievalism,” both terms should be defined and elucidated. Put as simply as possible, a simulacrum is something that subverts our ability to distinguish between what is real and what is represented. Moreover, it calls into question the hierarchy of reality over representation. Think, for example, of the public unease caused when several fashion photographers decided to stop using expensive and necessarily imperfect human models and instead to rely on digitally created ones, or the inversion of hierarchy implied when one sees a beach and says, “It looks just like a postcard!” This simplified definition of the simulacrum, however, cannot address the levels of complexity the term has acquired over centuries of use, study, and debate. “Medievalism” and “neomedievalism” are similarly problematic terms, particularly since some writers use them interchangeably.
Bringing Elsewhere Home: A Song of Ice and Fire's Ethics of Disability
- from I - Ethics and Medievalism: Some Perspective(s)
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- By Pascal J. Massie, Miami University of Ohio, Lauryn S. Mayer, Washington and Jefferson College
- Edited by Karl Fugelso, Professor of Art History at Towson University in Baltimore, Maryland
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- Book:
- Studies in Medievalism XXIII
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 05 May 2014
- Print publication:
- 21 August 2014, pp 45-60
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Summary
As essay after essay in this series has reminded us, the term “neomedievalism” is too multivalent and maddeningly complex to define with any satisfaction: any attempt to create a definition invariably oversimplifies the concept or distorts it to fit current needs. In the case of neomedievalism, rather than attempt another iteration of an Ur-definition, Carol R. Robinson and Pamela Clements have done invaluable work in creating a field guide to understanding the characteristics of neomedievalism. In brief, we can call a text neomedieval when it does one or more of the following:
It is playful or ironic in nature.
It calls attention to its own construction, often as a work of bricolage.
It deliberately shatters any possibility for a “sealed world” of the text.
It refuses the nostalgic fantasy of being able to retrieve the medieval past.
Its task is to create a conscious vision of an alternative universe.
This last item holds the most promise as a way of reading George R. R. Martin's multi-volume A Song of Ice and Fire as a text concerned with particular ethical issues surrounding disability: the damage ableist discourses and narratives inflict on the disabled.
In the landmark case Arline vs. Nassau County, Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., summarizing the need for an inclusive definition of disability, noted the problems that narratives of disability posed for the disabled: “society's accumulated myths and fears about disability and disease are as handicapping as are the physical limitations that flow from actual impairment.”
Unsettled Accounts: Corporate Culture and George R. R. Martin's Fetish Medievalism
- from I - Corporate Medievalism: Some Perspective(s)
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- By Lauryn S. Mayer, Washington and Jefferson College
- Edited by Karl Fugelso
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- Book:
- Studies in Medievalism XXI
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 05 February 2013
- Print publication:
- 19 July 2012, pp 57-64
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Summary
Tyrion owned a fine suit of heavy plate, expertly crafted to fit his misshapen body. Alas, it was safe at Casterly Rock, and he was not. He had had to make do with oddments […]: mail hauberk and coif, a dead knight's gorget, lobstered greaves and gauntlets, and pointed steel boots. Some of it was ornate, some plain, not a bit of it matched, or fit as it should. […] Shae stepped back and looked him over: “M'lord looks fearsome.” “M'lord looks a dwarf in mismatched armor,” Tyrion answered sourly.
From the Pearl-poet to the Pre-Raphaelites and beyond, the trope of the knight's farewell to his lady before battle nicely condenses the ideals of courtly love, aristocratic valor, pageantry, and chivalry. To open the battle between the Stark and Lannister forces in A Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin presents us with a relentless attack on the trope. The excellent and costly armor covers a “misshapen,” stunted body, and is not even available for use. Tyrion, the leader of one flank, has never been in a battle, and the admiring lady is a whore Tyrion bought from one of his soldiers, whose early promise of a Dulcinea-like transformation ends abruptly as she sells out Tyrion to certain death in a later volume. Moreover, unlike the warlike and noble Starks, the Lannisters' primary means to power is through the accumulation and deployment of wealth.
Dark Matters and Slippery Words: Grappling with Neomedievalism(s)
- Edited by Karl Fugelso
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- Book:
- Studies in Medievalism
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 11 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 15 July 2010, pp 68-76
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Uncle Julian rubbed his hands together. “I am going to begin the chapter with a slight fabrication, and then proceed to an outright lie.”
In Passus Eight of William Langland’s Piers Plowman, Will sets off to discover Dowel, convinced that he is on a quest for a single correct answer. Many years, paths, and interpretive mires later, he (and the reader) finally grasp the hard truth: Dowel is a reflexive and reflective process that must be continually repeated in a postlapsarian world. If there is one aspect of neomedievalism that critics can agree upon, it is that it resists any easy definition, and the problem may lie in the questions we are asking. To ask “what is neomedievalism?” or even “what are neomedievalisms?” is to treat a continuously unfolding and changing phenomenon as if it were a finished and static entity; any answer given will by default be “a slight fabrication.” With this in mind, I want to explore four patterns within the “continuing process of creating the Middle Ages” with the aim of providing interpretive models while avoiding the problems of strict taxonomy.
The Neo/medieval
The Neo/medieval model I would like to propose builds on the foundation that Carol Robinson, Pam Clements, and MEMO offer: “a medievalism that seems to be a direct and unromantic response to the general matrix of medievalisms from which people are partially ‘unplugged’.” The reference here is from the 1999 movie The Matrix, in which the hacker Neo learns that his destiny is to free a populace enslaved by their belief in and dependence upon projections of “reality” from an enormously complex computer system, the matrix of the title. However, the programming is not foolproof, and the system itself betrays its constructed nature at times:
Cypher: What happened?
Neo: A black cat went past us, and then another that looked just like it.
Trinity: How much like it? Was it the same cat?
Neo: It might have been. I’m not sure. […]
Neo: What is it?
Trinity: A déjà vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something.
The Neo/medieval text occurs when its creators play Morpheus, deliberately disrupting medievalist programming by the insertion of “red pills,” blatantly anachronistic elements.
Promises of Monsters: The Rethinking of Gender in MMORPGs
- Edited by Karl Fugelso, Carol L. Robinson
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- Book:
- Studies in Medievalism XVI
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 10 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 21 April 2008, pp 184-204
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Summary
Consider gender, for instance, as a corporeal style, an “act” as it were, which is both intentional and performative, where “performative” itself carries a double meaning of “dramatic” and “nonreferential.”
Yes, it's just a game, the way that the real world is a game.
It is a commonplace to assert that one of medievalism's greatest virtues lies in its opportunities for the loosening of gender constrictions, and certainly a quick inventory of medievalist texts from the 1980s on seems to bear witness to this phenomenon, as it features females taking up traditionally male roles, alternative matriarchal societies, and the sharp questioning of traditional masculine values. Yet while these may be refreshing changes from the pale and overtressed maidens of Pre-Raphaelite painting or the vapor-prone women of Gothic novels, celebration of this phenomenon needs to be tempered with caution. Jane Tolmie's intelligent essay on heroines in the fantasy genre, for example, shrewdly points out that like their forerunners in medieval romance, fantasy heroines’ very exceptionalism depends, within the constraints of the genre, upon the flattening of representation and upon lack of power for the other female characters. Moreover, the heroine's access to power is frequently through the very cultural institutions that support constraining ideologies of gender in the first place. Other critics, such as James Noble and Lee Tolbin McClain, have focused attention on the problematic gender essentialism and homophobia in The Mists of Avalon, or found that overly narrow emphasis on behavioral gender roles in medievalist texts ignores the issue of determinative embodiment of these heroines: where, for example, is the place in medievalism for the “gap-tothed” Wife of Bath or Grendel's grieving mother? However, most studies of the relationship of gender and medievalism have focused on traditional texts: novels, short stories, films, and, occasionally, graphic novels. Massively multi-player online role-playing games (known as MMORPGs), of which the dominant games are largely medievalist, complicate the idea of a medievalist “text” on a number of grounds. First, they are capable of near-infinite expansion of both narrative geography and characters; in fact, their survival depends upon continual growth in both areas. Second, they are collaborative texts formed from the templates given by the programmers and from the adventures and contextual narratives provided by the participants.