Studies of varied ways in which medieval people imagined the future, reasons behind such representations, and the implications for an understanding of medieval society as a whole.

From Kehinde Wiley to W.E.B. Du Bois, from Nubia to Cuba, Willie Doherty's terror in ancient landscapes to the violence of institutional Neo-Gothic, Reagan's AIDS policies to Beowulf fanfiction, this richly diverse volume brings together art historians and literature scholars to articulate a more inclusive, intersectional medieval studies. It will be of interest to students working on the diaspora and migration, white settler colonialism and pogroms, Indigenous studies and decolonial methodology, slavery, genocide, and culturecide. The authors confront the often disturbing legacies of medieval studies and its current failures to own up to those, and also analyze fascist, nationalist, colonialist, anti-Semitic, and other ideologies to which the medieval has been and is yoked, collectively formulating concrete ethical choices and aims for future research and teaching.In the face of rising global fascism and related ideological mobilizations, contemporary and past, and of cultural heritage and history as weapons of symbolic and physical oppression, this volume's chapters on Byzantium, Medieval Nubia, Old English, Hebrew, Old French, Occitan, and American and European medievalisms examine how educational institutions, museums, universities, and individuals are shaped by ethics and various ideologies in research, collecting, and teaching.

Essays on aspects of medieval French literature, celebrating the scholarship of Sarah Kay and her influence on the field.

This collection of essays argues that any valid theory of the modern should—indeed must—reckon with the medieval. Offering a much-needed correction to theorists such as Hans Blumenberg, who in his Legitimacy of the Modern Age describes the "modern age" as a complete departure from the Middle Ages, these essays forcefully show that thinkers from Adorno to Žižek have repeatedly drawn from medieval sources to theorize modernity. To forget the medieval, or to discount its continued effect on contemporary thought, is to neglect the responsibilities of periodization. In The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages, modernists and medievalists, as well as scholars specializing in eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century comparative literature, offer a new history of theory and philosophy through essays on secularization and periodization, Marx’s (medieval) theory of commodity fetishism, Heidegger’s scholasticism, and Adorno’s nominalist aesthetics. One essay illustrates the workings of medieval mysticism in the writing of Freud’s most famous patient, Daniel Paul Schreber, author of Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903). Another looks at Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire, a theoretical synthesis whose conscientious medievalism was the subject of much polemic in the post-9/11 era, a time in which premodernity itself was perceived as a threat to western values. The collection concludes with an afterword by Fredric Jameson, a theorist of postmodernism who has engaged with the medieval throughout his career. Contributors: Charles D. Blanton, Andrew Cole, Kathleen Davis, Michael Hardt, Bruce Holsinger, Fredric Jameson, Ethan Knapp, Erin Labbie, Jed Rasula, D. Vance Smith, Michael Uebel

"The future has attracted the interest of almost all scholars working on the history of Greek, but no satisfactory set of arguments for the developments prior to the emergence of the modern form has ever been produced. In this book Theodore Markopoulos explores and elucidates the stages that led up to the appearance of the modern future in the sixteenth century."--BOOK JACKET.

Nowadays, many take for granted that time is quantifiable and measurable; did the people of medieval Europe feel the same way? How was their perception of time influenced by their religious faith? How did their faith change over time? This book collects various attempts to trace changes to perceptions of time throughout medieval Europe by examining both how time was a spiritual experience for medieval people and how spiritual experiences changed over time in the Middle Ages. The essays in this volume demonstrate from a variety of perspectives that Christian faith was extremely malleable in the late-medieval period, and that various artists, scribes, and writers negotiated with their spiritual tradition. These are the “spiritual temporalities” of the medieval world, and by studying them we gain an understanding of how medieval culture was a dynamic gathering of different voices, movements, and beliefs, which constantly influenced and changed one another.