In Symptomatic Subjects, Orlemanski investigates the use of “terms of physik” in literary writing in the fourteenth and fifteenth century, a time which saw an enormous proliferation of medical material. The later Middle Ages, she argues, is a time of “etiological imagination”(the way people think about medicine and causation)– a greater interest in causal chains… Continue reading Symptomatic Subjects by Julie Orlemanski
Category: Blog
Mourning and Melancholia by Sigmund Freud
Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia distinguishes between the two on the basis of self-knowledge. Melancholia is related to an “object loss which is lost from consciousness”– the melancholic might know rationally what they have lost, but not what specifically was lost to them. In mourning, there is “nothing about the loss which is unconscious” (245). In… Continue reading Mourning and Melancholia by Sigmund Freud
The Melancholy Assemblage by Drew Daniel
In The Melancholy Assemblage, Drew Daniel claims that melancholy in the early modern period constitutes an epistemological-affective assemblage, a collection of factors that is always plural; it emerges in individuals and yet is also a “social and material assemblage of bodies being together” (15). In being both interior and exterior, melancholy can be recognized but… Continue reading The Melancholy Assemblage by Drew Daniel
Image on the Edge by Michael Camille
I am returning to Michael Camille’s work after some time, and reading the entirety of Image on the Edge for the first time. Camille’s central argument is fairly simple: that margins and their relationship to central images in medieval illuminated manuscripts are the site of an engagement between societal margins and centers. In other words,… Continue reading Image on the Edge by Michael Camille
Amy Hollywood, Acute Melancholia
Amy Hollywood’s collection of essays is about the experiences of medieval mystics and other religious women, and modern attempts to reckon with and define their experiences. As she mentions in the first section of the introduction, she is interested in determining “what it might mean to say that the Virgin is real– actual, present, palpable–… Continue reading Amy Hollywood, Acute Melancholia
Lydgate, “The Fifteen Joys and Sorrows of Mary”
This poem appears in a volume titled “The Minor Poems of John Lydgate”, and it is indeed minor (about 12 pages). I know next to nothing about Lydgate, but learned that he was a prodigious poet and friends with Chaucer’s son, Thomas. I’m reading Book of the Duchess in a few months and think I… Continue reading Lydgate, “The Fifteen Joys and Sorrows of Mary”
Discorrelated Images by Shane Denson
This book was my first (purposeful) departure into cinema studies since reading Lynda Nead in undergrad. It is also a book about new media (useful for my other work as a freelancer writing about new media), and about the affective and aesthetic potential of invisibilized technology. Its central focus is how the move from cinema… Continue reading Discorrelated Images by Shane Denson
Despayr in Margery Kempe and Rosenwein
Following the advice of my colleague Olivia Wood, I’ve decided to blog about the contents of my orals lists as I read. I haven’t decided yet whether everything will make it up here, nor whether the contents will stay public after I’m done, but we’ll see. For this week, I read The Book of Margery… Continue reading Despayr in Margery Kempe and Rosenwein
