CFP: Sewanee Subtheme-Nostalgia in the Medieval World

The theme for this year’s Sewanee Medieval Colloquium, “Jubilee,” suggests a celebratory remembrance of the past. Yet, anniversaries are also opportunities to reflect on what has been lost and to compare a diminished present with a happier past. In a word, nostalgia. In crafting a history to be longed for, nostalgia, of course, edits, essentializes, (re)creates, and distorts its subject. Moreover, as a fundamentally emotive engagement with pasts distant or near, nostalgia conveys sorrow and grief over the contemporary world. The early-medieval English poem “The Ruin” with its poignant echo of bygone pleasures and meditation on the ravages of time exhibits what Renée Trilling describes as "an aesthetics of nostalgia," an ideological and formalist approach that likewise informs all poetry written in Old English. Stephen Jaeger has similarly characterized the twelfth century (supposedly a “renaissance”) as an age of pessimism in which people yearned for a more virtuous past amid rapid social and cultural change. More recently, Hannah Skoda has argued for another period of convulsion, the fourteenth century, as a time marked by seemingly “modern” nostalgia for a vanishing order: a century that opened with the first papal Jubilee, that of 1300. Nor is the study of nostalgia limited to the Western Middle Ages. Scholars such as Stephen West and Ari David Levine have explored how writers in Song-Dynasty China romanticized their former life in the imperial capital Kaifeng following the city’s destruction in the 1120s by the Jurchens and the flight of the remnant court to Hangzhou. This subtheme, organized by the Medieval Association of the Pacific, invites papers from all disciplines in medieval studies and from all areas of the globe to explore how nostalgia manifested itself in the Middle Ages. Papers might discuss imagined golden ages, perhaps to escape (and critique) a painful present, or how legal thinkers looked upon “old law” and custom in relation to modern novelty. In what ways did elderly letter writers and chroniclers reminisce about their youth as a better time? How were lost or destroyed monuments remembered in words and images? What was the role of ostensibly joyful celebrations in celebrating, masking, or combatting melancholic nostalgia?