Medieval America: Traditions, Folklore, Identity
Sponsoring Organization(s)
Special Session
Organizer Name
Alice Hutton Sharp
Organizer Affiliation
McGill Univ.
Presider Name
Alice Hutton Sharp
Paper Title 1
Medieval Louisiana: Understanding Medieval French Literature through Cajun Carnivalesque Strategies
Presenter 1 Name
Monica L. Wright
Presenter 1 Affiliation
Univ. of Louisiana-Lafayette
Paper Title 2
The Truth Is Up There: UFOs and National Identity from Medieval Europe to Antebellum America
Presenter 2 Name
Kaitlin Heller
Presenter 2 Affiliation
Univ. of Toronto
Paper Title 3
Parliamentary Gothic: Collecting and Creating the Medieval in Canada's Parliament Buildings
Presenter 3 Name
Laurel Ryan
Presenter 3 Affiliation
Univ. of Louisiana-Lafayette
Paper Title 4
"The Improbable Medieval World" of Newfoundland: Desiring Medieval Filiation
Presenter 4 Name
Michael Collins
Presenter 4 Affiliation
Univ. of Toronto
Start Date
12-5-2016 7:30 PM
Session Location
Fetzer 1060
Description
The pejorative use of the word "medieval" is a common theme among medievalists dismayed by its casual deployment in news articles and editorials. Even among specialists to whom the medieval period is familiar, the adjective describes something understood as temporally distant or otherwise foreign. This is particularly true in the Americas, where the Middle Ages, as traditionally understood, are both temporally and geographically distant. Research on the ground, looking at buildings or manuscripts, usually entails trans-Atlantic trips and their accompanying grant applications. What medieval buildings there are—like the twelfth-century Spanish church apse found in the Cloisters of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's— were transported across the ocean, stone by stone, in the earlier part of the twentieth century.
While this distance provides much of the intellectual appeal of medieval studies, the resulting isolation of medieval cultural practices masks the threads of continuity that still influence the cultures of North and South America. Little can be done about the physical distance, but the goal of this session is to break down this rhetorical and temporal distance by discussing the continuation of medieval cultural artifacts in the folklore and traditions found on the western side of the Atlantic. In understanding these not as primitive holdovers of a past age but as components of a changing and continuously-developing society, the medieval heritage of the Americas will be shown to endure as a part of modern history.
-Alice Hutton Sharp
Medieval America: Traditions, Folklore, Identity
Fetzer 1060
The pejorative use of the word "medieval" is a common theme among medievalists dismayed by its casual deployment in news articles and editorials. Even among specialists to whom the medieval period is familiar, the adjective describes something understood as temporally distant or otherwise foreign. This is particularly true in the Americas, where the Middle Ages, as traditionally understood, are both temporally and geographically distant. Research on the ground, looking at buildings or manuscripts, usually entails trans-Atlantic trips and their accompanying grant applications. What medieval buildings there are—like the twelfth-century Spanish church apse found in the Cloisters of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's— were transported across the ocean, stone by stone, in the earlier part of the twentieth century.
While this distance provides much of the intellectual appeal of medieval studies, the resulting isolation of medieval cultural practices masks the threads of continuity that still influence the cultures of North and South America. Little can be done about the physical distance, but the goal of this session is to break down this rhetorical and temporal distance by discussing the continuation of medieval cultural artifacts in the folklore and traditions found on the western side of the Atlantic. In understanding these not as primitive holdovers of a past age but as components of a changing and continuously-developing society, the medieval heritage of the Americas will be shown to endure as a part of modern history.
-Alice Hutton Sharp