The Postcolonial Middle Ages

An increased awareness of the importance of minority and subjugated voices to the histories and narratives which have previously excluded them has led to a wide-spread interest in the effects of colonization and displacement. This collection of essays is the first to apply post-colonial theory to the Middle Ages, and to critique that theory through the excavation of a distant past. The essays examine the establishment of colony, empire, and nationalism in order to expose the mechanisms of oppression through which 'aboriginal' 'native' or simply pre-existent cultures are displaced, eradicated, or transformed.

This fascinating study explores the intersection of postcolonial theory and medievalism. While the latter has traditionally been defined primarily in terms of European nationalism, the essays in this volume discuss medievalism in regions as wide-ranging as the United States, India, Latin America, and Africa. This innovative approach demonstrates the ways alternative conceptions of medieval and modern history can provide new insights into the idea of the Middle Ages and the origins and legacy of colonialism. Through diverse and thought-provoking essays, the contributors demonstrate that writing the Middle Ages has been key in colonial and postcolonial struggles over racial, ethnic, and territorial identity. They also argue that colonial medievalisms are crucial to understanding the history of entrenched temporal and political partitions, such as medieval/modern and East/West. The essays are divided into four sections that address a set of related questions raised by the literary and political intersections of medievalism and colonialism. Each section is followed by a response—two are by postcolonial theorists and two by medievalists—that carefully considers the essay's arguments and comments on its implications for the respondent’s field of study. This volume is the first to bring medievalists and postcolonial scholars into conversation about the shared histories of their fields and the potential for mutual endeavor. Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World will both redirect scholarship in medievalism and inform approaches to temporality in postcolonial studies.

Much theoretical and historical work engaged with the question of the "postcolonial" is built upon an imagined, unified premodern "Middle Ages" in Europe. One of the results of this has been that in recent years scholars in medieval and early modern studies have been critically assessing the uses of postcolonial and subaltern theoretical perspectives in their fields, and considering what their periods have to say to postcolonial theorists. This book offers a series of original essays that explore with specificity the methodological, textual, cultural, and historiographic moves required for postcolonial engagements with premodern times.

This volume provides a comprehensive introduction to postcolonial medieval studies and examines the historical connections between postcolonial studies and medieval studies. Lisa Lampert-Weissig provides new readings of medieval texts including Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, Mandeville's Travels and Guillaume de Palerne, a romance about werewolves set in Norman Sicily. In addition, she examines Walter Scott's Ivanhoe from the perspective of postcolonial medieval studies, as well contemporary novels by Salman Rushdie, Tariq Ali, Juan Goytisolo, and Amitav Ghosh.

A collection of original essays exploring the intersections between medieval and postcolonial studies.

In the Middle Ages, the life story of Alexander the Great was a well-traveled tale. Known in numerous versions, many of them derived from the ancient Greek Alexander Romance, it was told and re-told throughout Europe, India, the Middle East, and Central Asia. The essays collected in Alexander the Great in the Middle Ages examine these remarkable legends not merely as stories of conquest and discovery, but also as representations of otherness, migration, translation, cosmopolitanism, and diaspora. Alongside studies of the Alexander legend in medieval and early modern Latin, English, French, German, and Persian, Alexander the Great in the Middle Ages breaks new ground by examining rarer topics such as Hebrew Alexander romances, Coptic and Arabic Alexander materials, and early modern Malay versions of the Alexander legend. Brought together in this wide-ranging collection, these essays testify to the enduring fascination and transcultural adaptability of medieval stories about the extraordinary Macedonian leader.

The challenges of cultural and religious diversity that face European and American societies today are not a new phenomenon. People in the Middle Ages lived in pluralistic societies, and they found highly interesting ways of dealing with religious and cultural diversity. While religious and political authorities commanded people to stick to their kind, some people explored the borderland between religious identities. In medieval Iberia, Christians and Muslims challenged the legal authorities’ prohibitions against crossing religious and cultural boundaries when they engaged in mixed marriages between Muslims and Christians or converted from one religion to the other. By examining the topics of conversion and mixed marriages in legal texts of Muslim and Christian origin, Pluralism in the Middle Ages explores the construction of boundaries as well as the reasons explaining such constructions. It demonstrates that the religious and social boundaries were not static, nor were they similarly defined by Islamic and Christian medieval cultures. Moreover, the book argues that Muslims and Christians in medieval Iberia did not constitute clearly separated groups, since various categories of people haunted the boundaries between them: false converts employing taqiya strategy (taking on an outward Christian identity while practicing Islam in secret), those engaged in mixed marriages or interreligious sexual relations (and their children), and converts, whose conversion may be perceived as sincere or insincere, total or partial.

Introduction: Calculating Time: Eosturmonath, Nisan, and the Paschal Table -- Just In Time: Sacrificial Gifts, Rotting Corpses, and Annus Domini -- An (Un)Common Era: Passionate Narratives, Temporal Clashes-Jewish and Christian -- Taking Jews out and Putting Them Back in: Christian Chronometry, the York Massacre, and a Cycle of Mystery Plays -- A Time of Many Layers: Feasting on the Temporalities of The Siege of Jerusalem -- Repressing a Perpetually Resurfacing Temporality: Four Authorial Orphans and The Fifteenth-Century 'Tale of the Litel Clergeon and the Jews' -- Epilogue: The Empire of Common Time.