Tuesday, August 4, 2015

Utz reviews Oexle, Die Gegenwart des Mittelalters

Otto Gerhard Oexle, Die Gegenwart des Mittelalters, Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2015, at Medievally Speaking, reviewed by yours truly:

This delightful cahier of 45 pages, published under the auspices of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, offers a revised version of a paper Otto Gerhard Oexle originally presented at the Academy's Mittelalterzentrum in 2012. To speak about the "Presence" or "Contemporaneity" of the Middle Ages, Oexle addresses three general areas:


1) An immediate presence visible in remains and monuments: Oexle quickly summarizes what we know about the fascination we moderns have with historical objects and buildings, and he likens the immediacy ("Unmittelbarkeit") of the pleasure experienced by lay visitors with that experienced by professional historians…. READ FULL REVIEW HERE