A new history of early global literature that treats translators as active agents mediating cultures. &nbsp; In this book, Zrinka Stahuljak challenges scholars in both medieval and translation studies to rethink how ideas and texts circulated in the medieval world. Whereas many view translators as mere conduits of authorial intention, Stahuljak proposes a new perspective rooted in a term from journalism: the fixer. With this language, Stahuljak captures the diverse, active roles medieval translators and interpreters played as mediators of entire cultures--insider informants, local guides, knowledge brokers, art distributors, and political players. Fixers offers nothing less than a new history of literature, art, translation, and social exchange from the perspective not of the author or state but of the fixer.

Fixers: Agency, Translation, and the Early Global History of Literature

Literature & Fiction

Stahuljak, Zrinka

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

In Pornographic Archaeology: Medicine, Medievalism, and the Invention of the French Nation, Zrinka Stahuljak explores the connections and fissures between the history of sexuality, nineteenth-century views of the Middle Ages, and the conceptualization of modern France. This cultural history uncovers the determinant role that the sexuality of the Middle Ages played in nineteenth-century French identity.
Stahuljak's provocative study of sex, blood, race, and love in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century medical and historical literature demonstrates how French medicine's obsession with the medieval past helped to define European sexuality, race, public health policy, marriage, family, and the conceptualization of the Middle Ages. Stahuljak reveals the connections between the medieval military order of the Templars and the 1830 colonization of Algeria, between a fifteenth-century French marshal and the development of Richard von Krafft-Ebing's theory of sadism, between courtly love and the 1884 law on divorce. Although the developing discipline of medieval studies eventually rejected the influence of these medical philologists, the convergence of medievalism and medicine shaped modern capitalist French society and established a vision of the Middle Ages that survives today.

Pornographic Archaeology: Medicine, Medievalism, and the Invention of the French Nation

University of Pennsylvania Press

Zrinka Stahuljak reevaluates, in Old French literature and art, two concepts fundamental for the medieval period: genealogy and translatio. She argues that literary criticism has inherited the definition of genealogy developed by historians, wherein genealogy is defined as a bloodline linking fathers and sons from generation to generation. Similarly, she maintains, literary criticism has interpreted medieval translatio, a concept fundamental for understanding all forms of intellectual and political transmission in the Middle Ages, as a genealogy. Through an analysis of the romances of antiquity, Arthurian prose romances, the Charlemagne window at Chartres, and the iconography of the Tree of Jesse, covering the period between 1150 and 1250, she challenges both these notions at the core of medieval scholarship.Because she addresses such basic concepts of medieval literature and culture that transcend national and linguistic boundaries, Stahuljak’s study, drawing on literary, historical, and visual sources, has implications well beyond French medieval studies. Her examination of canonical texts and traditional, long-held notions of how genealogy works in literature and of the medieval theory of translation will provide interesting, fresh analysis and methodology for the classroom and a significant contribution to our understanding of the relationship of linguistics, history, and anthropology in the 12th century.  

Bloodless Genealogies of the French Middle Ages: Translatio, Kinship, and Metaphor

Arts & Photography

University Press of Florida

One of the finest works from the golden era of Flemish manuscript illumination, the Getty’s copy of the Romance of Gillion de Trazegnies tells of the adventures of a medieval nobleman. Part travelogue, part romance, and part epic, the text traces the exciting exploits of Gillion as he journeys to Jerusalem on pilgrimage, is imprisoned in Egypt and rises to the command of the Sultan’s armies, mistakenly becomes a bigamist first with a Christian and then a Muslim wife, and dies in battle as a glorious hero. The tale encompasses the most thrilling elements of the Western romance genre — love, villainy, loyalty, and war — set against the backdrop of the East. This lavishly illustrated volume reveals for the first time the complexity of this illuminated romance. A complete reproduction of the book’s illustrations and a partial translation of the text appear along with essays that explore the manuscript’s vibrant cultural, historical, and artistic contexts. The innovative illuminations, by the renowned artist Lieven van Lathem, juxtapose the reality of medieval Europe with an idealized vision of the East. This unusual pairing, found in the text and illustrations, is the source of a rich discussion of the fifteenth-century political situation in the West and the Crusades in the East.

The Adventures of Gillion de Trazegnies: Chivalry and Romance in the Medieval East

MORRISON, Elizabeth

J.paul Getty Museum

This co-written, multi-stranded book challenges assumptions about Chrétien as the author of a canon of works. In a series of lively exchanges, its five authors reassess the relationship between lyric and romance, between individuality and social conditions, and between psychology and medieval philosophy. The idea of "logical time" is used to open up such topics as adventure, memory, imagination, and textual variation. Recent research on Troyes and on the political agency of women leads to the reappraisal of subjectivity and gender. Throughout, the medieval texts associated with the name of Chrétien are highlighted as sites where thought emerges; the implications of this thought are historicized and further conceptualized with the help of recent theoretical works, including those of Lacan. ZRINKA STAHULJAK, VIRGINIE GREENE, SARAH KAY, SHARON KINOSHITA and PEGGY McCRACKEN are professors at the University of California, Los Angeles, Harvard, New York University, the University of California, Santa Cruz and the University of Michigan respectively.

Thinking Through Chrétien de Troyes (Gallica, 19)

KAY, Sarah

Peggy McCracken, Sharon Kinoshita and

Virginie Greene

D.S.Brewer

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