Rethinking the New Medievalism

R. Howard Bloch is chair of the Department of French and Romance Philology at Columbia University. He is author of several books, including Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, cowritten with Stephen Nichols, and published by Johns Hopkins. Alison Calhoun is a new faculty fellow and visiting assistant professor of French at Indiana University. Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet is a professor of French literature at the Sorbonne. Joachim Kupper is a professor of philology at Freie Universitat Berlin. Jeanette Patterson is a new faculty fellow of French and Italian at Princeton University.

• Introduction. The New Philology Comes of AgeChapter 1. New Challenges for the New MedievalismChapter 2. Reflections on The New PhilologyChapter 3. Virgil's "Perhaps": Mythopoiesis and Cosmogony in Dante's Commedia (Remarks on Inf. 34, 106–26)Chapter 4. Dialectic of the Medieval CourseChapter 5. Religious Horizon and Epic Effect: Considerations on the Iliad, the Chanson de Roland, and the NibelungenliedChapter 6. The Possibility of Historical Time in the Crónica SarracinaChapter 7. Good Friday Magic: Petrarch's Canzoniere and the Transformation of Medieval Vernacular PoetryChapter 8. The Identity of a TextChapter 9. Conceiving the Text in the Middle AgesChapter 10. Dante's Transfigured Ovidian Models: Icarus and Daedalus in the CommediaChapter 11. Ekphrasis in the Knight's TaleChapter 12. Montaigne's Medieval Nominalism and Meschonnic's Ethics of the SubjectChapter 13. The Pèlerinage Corpus in the European Middle Ages: Processes of Retextualization Reflected in the ProloguesChapter 14. Narrative Frames of Augustinian Thought in the Renaissance: The Case of RabelaisChapter 15. From Romanesque Architecture to RomanceList of Contributors Index

The present volume in many ways celebrates and continues Nichols's ideas and influence in the past 25 years, but it does much more than that. As Bloch (French and Romance philology, Columbia Univ.) puts it in his introduction, the essays "contain many elements belonging to the New Philology-an attention to the material conditions of the medieval work, especially to the givens of manuscript culture, a questioning of authorship and authority, an interrogation of the integrity of medieval texts, recognition of the relation between the verbal and the visual."... Nichols's discussion of the challenges and opportunities for new philology in the digital age will be required reading in graduate seminars on digital humanities. Choice The essays ranged here by German and American scholars, in homage to Nichols and his cohort of new materialists, new philologists, new medievalists, are strong and ambitious attempts to revisit the twenty-year-old call for methodological reinvention. Common Knowledge