Book Launch for John Cressler's Shadows in the Shining City

John Cressler will celebrate the launch of his second novel Shadows in the Shining City. The evening will include a 50-minute presentation, a reading, Q/A, and a book signing, followed by a party with food and beverages. Come join us at the TSRB Auditorium, Tuesday July 22, 7pm

About the novel:

The Golden Age of Moorish Spain was during the 10th century, a time when the benevolent Arab Caliphs ruled Iberia from Córdoba, the site of the iconic Great Mosque and home to the Royal Library, one of the largest collections of ancient books ever assembled. 10th century Córdoba was the richest, most populous, and most cultured city in the western world. Under the tolerant Muslim Caliphs, the pinnacle of convivencia was attained, that unique period of Spanish history when Muslims, Jews and Christians lived together in relative harmony and peace. Multicultural Córdoba was an enlightened city that treasured its books, celebrated art and literature, advanced science and medicine, and its myriad accomplishments were envied by both the west and the east alike.
Shadows in the Shining City is a prequel to Emeralds of the Alhambra, and the second book in the Anthems of al-Andalus Series. Shadows tells the story of the forbidden love between Rayhana Abi Amir, a Muslim princess of the Royal Court, and Zafir Saffar, a freed slave. Young love blossoms in 10th century Madinat al-Zahra, the Shining City, the Caliph’s magnificent Royal Palace located just outside of Córdoba. Their love story is set against the backdrop of the epic rise to power of Rayhana’s ruthless father, a man history will come to both celebrate and revile for the role he plays in the collapse of Moorish Spain.

Georgia Medievalists' Group Fall Meeting CFP

CALL FOR PAPERS: 

2014 Fall Meeting of the Georgia Medievalists' Group

Where: Columbus State University, Columbus, GA

When: Saturday, November 8th, 2014, 10:00am-5:00pm

Columbus State University's new Medieval and Renaissance Studies program is very pleased to be hosting the Fall 2104 meeting of the Georgia Medievalists' Group on Saturday, November 8. The Georgia Medievalists' Group is a group of professional and student medievalists of all disciplines that meets twice a year, for a one day interdisciplinary conference of medievalists featuring about 6-8 presenters giving 30 minute presentations of their research. Please consider taking advantage of the chance to present your work and visit with your colleagues from across the state! 

We welcome proposals for papers by faculty or advanced graduate students working in the state of Georgia or nearby regions on any medieval subject or discipline, broadly construed.  Anyone interested in participating, please email an abstract of about 250 words or less along with the title of your proposed presentation and contact information to Shannon Godlove at godlove_shannon@columbusstate.edu by Monday, September 15th.

Please spread the word to any friends, colleagues or graduate students you think may be interested, and consider attending even if you have no plans to present. Should be a fun time in uptown Columbus!

We hope to hear from you and see you in November! 

Shannon Godlove

--
Shannon Godlove, PhD
Assistant Professor of English
Coordinator, Medieval and Renaissance Studies Certificate
Columbus State University
Woodall Hall 163
4225 University Avenue
Columbus, GA 31907
706-565-4026
godlove_shannon@columbusstate.edu
http://medren.columbusstate.edu/

John Cressler Publishes Shadows in the Shining City

Medieval@GeorgiaTech's John Cressler just published his most recent novel, Shadows in the Shining City, the second book in his Anthems of al-Andalus series. Shirin Ebadi, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, calls the novel "an aspiring and deeply moving novel on both the nature of love and the many beautiful possibilities brought to life when religions learn to coexist."

Here's what I think: "Cressler's suspenseful novel, set at a decisive moment in Spain's premodern history, challenges all too comfortable prejudices about medieval culture as the eternal dark "other," an allegedly primitive and less cultured period we have long left behind. Under the deceptive garment of an engaging love story, Cressler reveals the human continuities between the medieval past and the modern present, confronts twenty-first century religious intolerance with the decline of a relatively peaceful "convivencia" among tenth-century Spanish Muslims, Christians, and Jews, and celebrates the powerful role of learning and intellectual curiosity for interfaith dialogue." RU

For full information on the novel, please see HERE

Medievalism NOW

A special issue of The Year's Work in Medievalism is forthcoming in May. Entitled Medievalism NOW, and edited by Karl Fugelso, E. L. Risden, and Richard Utz, it will be available online and with full open access in May.  Contributors to this volume discuss areas in Medievalism studies that have received limited or no consideration in the past and make the case for future inclusion. To whet your appetite for reading the special issue, here is the TOC:

Introduction
Karl Fugelso,  E. L. Risden, and Richard Utz

Ecomedievalism: Medievalism's Potential Futures in Ecocriticism and Ecomaterialism
Valerie B. Johnson, Georgia Institute of Technology

Lowering the Drawbridge
Amy S. Kaufman, Middle Tennessee State University

A Long Parenthesis Begins
Elena Levy-Navarro, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater

There is No Word for Work in the Dragon Tongue
Kevin Moberly, Old Dominion University & Brent Moberly, Indiana University at Bloomington

Miyazaki's Medieval World:  Japanese Medievalism and the Rise of Anime
E. L. Risden, St. Norbert College

Embracing Our Marginalism:  Mitigating the Tyranny of a Central Paradigm
Karl Fugelso, Towson University

The Quest for a Deaf Lesbian Dwarf (or Anyone Else that Might Have Been Excluded) in Medievalist Video Games: A Response to Karl Fugelso’s ‘Manifesto’
Carol L. Robinson, Kent State University—Trumbull

Incipient Bureaucrat, Passionate Lover, and Amateur Medievalism of Early Modernity: The Example of Sir Henry Yelverton in the 1621 Parliament
Jesse Swan, University of Northern Iowa

Place and Time: Medievalism and Making Race
Helen Young, University of Sydney

Can We Talk About Religion, Please? Medievalism’s Eschewal of Religion, and Why it Matters
Richard Utz, Georgia Institute of Technology

Medievalism: Key Critical Terms

Here is information about a new and exciting venue in Medievalism Studies forthcoming with Boydell & Brewer later this year:

The discipline of medievalism has produced a great deal of scholarship acknowledging the "makers" of the Middle Ages: those who re-discovered the period from 500 to 1500 by engaging with its cultural works, seeking inspiration from them, or fantasizing about them. Yet such approaches - organized by time period, geography, or theme - often lack an overarching critical framework. This volume aims to provide such a framework, by calling into question the problematic yet commonly accepted vocabulary used in Medievalism Studies. The contributions, by leading scholars in the field, define and exemplify essential terms used when speaking of the later reception of medieval culture, in a lively and accessible style.

The terms: Archive, Authenticity, Authority, Christianity, Co-disciplinarity, Continuity, Feast, Gesture, Gothic, Heresy, Humor, Lingua, Love, Memory, Middle, Modernity, Monument, Myth, Play, Presentism, Primitive, Purity, Reenactment, Resonance, Simulacrum, Spectacle, Transfer, Trauma, Troubadour

Elizabeth Emery is Professor of French and Graduate Coordinator at Montclair State University (Montclair, NJ, USA); Richard Utz is Chair and Professor of Medievalism Studies in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech (Atlanta, GA, USA).

Contributors: Matthew Fisher, Pam Clements, Gwendolyn Morgan, William Calin, Jonathan Hsy, Karl Fugelso, Martha Carlin, Zrinka Stahuljak, Carol Robinson, Kevin Murphy and Lisa Reilly, Nadia Margolis, Clare A. Simmons, M. Jane Toswell, Juanita Feros Ruys, Vincent Ferré, David Matthews, Tom Shippey, Edward Risden, Martin Arnold, Brent Moberly and Kevin Moberly, Louise D'Arcens, Laura Morowitz, Amy Kaufman, Michael Cramer, Nils Holger Petersen, Lauren S. Mayer, Angela Weisl, Nadia Altschul, Kathleen Biddick, Elizabeth Fay

Chrissy Spencer a Cast Member for the Play of Herod in December

Medieval Atlanta's Chrissy Spencer will be part of the cast for this year's Atlanta Camerata Theater's The Play of Herod, which has come down to us in a manuscript produced around the year 1200. The play is sung in Latin, with English translations projected above the action. A consort of viols, recorders, krumm horn, hurdy-gurdy, and percussion accompanies the singers, i.e., an excellent example of the reenactment, recreation, and re-present-ation of medieval culture in contemporary Atlanta. FOR FULL INFORMATION and HOW TO GET TICKETS, SEE HERE.

John Cressler's Historical Romance on al-Andalus

Publisher's abstract: How could we forget? Our world is stained with the blood of religious conflict and fanaticism, yet we managed to forget that for hundreds of years in medieval Spain, Christians, Muslims and Jews lived together in relative peace, sharing languages and customs, whispering words of love across religious boundaries, embracing a level of mutual acceptance and respect unimaginable today. Together, they launched one of the great intellectual and cultural flowerings of history. Our world aches for a future graced with tolerance and peace. Let us join together in reawakening the glory of medieval Muslim Spain, of al-Andalus.

Emeralds of the Alhambra is a love story set in the resplendent Alhambra Palace in Granada, Spain, during the Castilian Civil War (1367-1369), a time when Muslims took up their swords to fight alongside Christians. Here is the story of William Chandon, a Christian knight, and the Sufi Muslim princess, Layla al-Khatib. As Chandon’s influence at court grows, he becomes trapped between his forbidden love for Layla and his Christian heritage, the demands of chivalry and political expediency. Chandon and Layla must make choices between love and honor, war and peace, life and death, choices which ultimately will seal Granada’s fate as the last surviving stronghold of Muslim Spain. For full information, including interviews, reviews, etc., PLEASE SEE HERE.

Dina Khapaeva on the 'Gothic' Renaissance in Russia

Here is the publisher's abstract: Si Poutine n'a pas créé la surprise en se succédant à lui-même après l'intermède Medvedev, le soulèvement populaire à Moscou et à Saint-Pétersbourg était plus imprévu, quelques mois après le printemps arabe. Ce Portrait critique de la Russie nous permet d'aller aux sources de ces mouvements contradictoires. Dina Khapaeva éclaire les ravages causé par l'absence d'un travail de mémoire sur la terreur stalinienne et par la contamination  des rapports sociaux par le monde de la criminalité. Elle dépeint une "société gothique", parce que tout y est à l'image des monstres gothiques ayant relégué l'Homme à la périphérie. Elle montre comment le mal russe est loin d'avoir déposé les armes et quels symptômes peuvent être annonciateurs d'un bouleversement de la morale qui a fondé nos sociétés. Et elle nous met en garde : si nous n'y prenons garde, nous allons assiter à la déshumanisation progressive de nos sociétés démocratiques, à l'instar de ce que vit la société russe d'aujourd'hui. Une lecture salutaire.

Traduit du russe par Nina Kéhayan.

Can We Talk About Religion, Please?

Richard Utz recently delivered a conference paper, "Can We Talk About Religion, Please? Medievalism's Exclusion of Religion and Why it Matters," in a session on "Marginalized Medievalisms" at the 28th International Congress on Medievalism, at St. Norbert College, in De Pere, WI. Here is the abstract for the paper:

Medievalism Studies which, for the first 25 years of its existence as an academic field, suffered from its subaltern status in relation to its dominant academic sister, Medieval Studies, has since dared touch upon all kinds of topics, from trauma (Kathleen Biddick), 'Gothic' Russia (Dina Khapaeva), orientalism (John Ganim), theory (Bruce Holsinger), psychoanalysis (Erin Felicia Labbie), the creole (Michelle R. Warren), philology (Nadia Altschul), the gothic (Stephanie Trigg), popular culture (Clare Simmons), movies (Nickolas Haydock), Australian literature (Louise D'Arcens), romanticism (Elizabeth Fay), multilingualism (Mary Catherine Davidson), modernism (Michael Alexander), the war on terror (Bruce Holsinger), and medicine (Zrinka Stahuljak), to name but a few of the topics from a list of recent books. Similarly and most recently, Tyson Pugh and Angela Jane Weisl, in the first attempt to produce a volume that could become a widely used introduction to the various Medievalisms (2012) out there, include chapters on major authors and figures (Dante; Arthur; Robin Hood), major genres or discourses (literature; movies; politics), and major audiences or groups (children’s literature; experiential medievalisms). While Pugh and Weisl speak of religious architecture, the Antioch Chalice, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Hildegard von Bingen, Chris Newby’s 1993 movie The Anchoress, and the afterlife of liturgical music and performance, they too, bypass Catholicism, which formed and institutionalized during the medieval period, and Protestantism, which came about in critical reformational response to medieval Catholicism. This general tendency in Medievalism Studies is unfortunate because religious movements have over the centuries developed some of the most sophisticated strategies for bridging the otherwise noncontiguous historical moments of Christ’s birth and death, saints’ miracles, the writings of church fathers, church councils, Thomas Aquinas’ synthesis between faith and reason, or Martin Luther’s views on transubstantiation, to name but a few examples, with their adherents’ postmedieval lifetimes. Prayer, ritual, mnemonic and rhetorical devices, visual communication, architecture, and aesthetics play essential roles in overcoming the temporal and cultural gaps which would otherwise make us discard with beliefs that hail from five hundred, one thousand, or two thousand years ago. Religion, thus, should be an essential part of medievalism’s domain, and scholars of medievalism should put it at the center of their discussions, even at the danger of offending some of their audiences in the process.

Year's Work in Medievalism Finds New Electronic Open Access Home at Georgia Tech

The journal The Year's Work in Medievalism, a publication of the International Society for the Study of Medievalism, will soon find its new electronic home at Georgia Tech. With the support of the School of Literature, Media, and Communication and the GT Library & Information Center, YWiM will publish its first electronic issue, volume 27 (2012) on October 18. Please watch for a public announcement online and at the 28th International Congress on Medievalism, St. Norbert College, WI.

Past Present: Resonances of Medieval and Early Modern Culture in Atlanta

Project Proposal

Georgia Tech Fund for Innovation in Research and Education (GT-FIRE) Mini-Program: Small Funding Requests for Big Ideas

Past Present: Resonances of Medieval and Early Modern Culture in Atlanta

This project unites those on our campus interested in medieval and early modern culture for discussions of various recreations, resonances, reenactments, representations, and receptions of the medieval and early modern past in a city founded during modern times. It follows up on the “Tech Gets Medieval Symposium” organized in the fall of 2012, this time using Atlanta as a lab space within which to observe the survival and recreation of past cultural practices and ideas. Discussions may include buildings (Rhodes Hall; cathedrals and churches); organizations (Knights of Columbus; KKK; ATL Early Music Alliance); events (DragonCon; RenFest); enterprises (Medieval Times); institutions (University; Churches); and the presence of the medieval and early modern in popular and general culture (Gaming; Public Relations; AJC; CNN). 

Tech Gets Medieval: A Symposium

In the fall semester of 2012, Brittain fellow Dr. Kellie Meyer and colleagues from different areas of specialty at Georgia Tech organized a symposium, Tech Gets Medieval: How Medieval Technology Can Teach the Past.

The complete symposium is now available at Georgia Tech's SmarTech repository: https://smartech.gatech.edu/handle/1853/46004/browse?type=title

Here is a list of the presenters and their paper titles:

• Opening Remarks: Burnett, Rebecca;  Meyer, Kellie;  Utz, Richard
• The Afterlives of Gawain: Illustration as Annotation in the Cotton Nero Ax Manuscript: Haught, Leah
• Biology and Germ Warfare: Spencer, Chrissy 
• Blacksmithing and Timber-Framed Houses: Pedagogy of Risk: Crawford, T. Hugh 
• Medieval Construction – Foundation of Today's Industry: Bowen, Brian 
• Neo-Medieval Fantasy in Video Games: Pearce, Celia  
• Tried and True Methods: Madej, Krystina 
• Your Mission is to Rescue Lorenzo di Medici: A Demonstration of the Pedagogical Potentials of Using Assassin's Creed II for Teaching the Italian Renaissance: Madden, Amanda