Journal articles on the topic 'Medieval Horror'

Jason Colavito (2007) descreve “horror corporal” como uma seção na ficção de horror que se ocupa das “inquietações relacionadas ao corpo físico e seu relacionamento com o mundo natural” (p. 113). Tais narrativas frequentemente emergem durante períodos nos quais há ansiedades sociais conectadas à expansão científica e algum desafio aos valores morais. O presente artigo propõe uma leitura da história “Math, son of Mathonwy” explorando a possibilidade de que esta narrativa apresenta aspectos de horror corporal. Olhando para o contexto histórico e social do manuscrito medieval Y Mabinogi (O Mabinogi), este estudo revisa os debates científicos que ocorreram na Grã-Bretanha durante o século XII, e os relaciona com as transformações corporais e punição física apresentadas no quarto ramo do Mabinogi. Esta análise foca principalmente na metamorfose da personagem Blodeuwedd, cujo corpo é permanentemente alterado como parte de um julgamento por suas ações morais. Por fim, a natureza fluida dos corpos nesta narrativa demonstra alguma semelhança com o horror corporal, por se aproximar de alguns dos debates e questionamentos introduzidos pelos estudos monásticos durante a Idade Média.

In Act Three of Shakespeare's King Richard III the Duke of Buckingham asks Cardinal Bourchier to try and persuade Elizabeth Woodville to release the young Duke of York from sanctuary at Westminster. In the event of such tactics failing, Buckingham wishes Lord Hastings to accompany the Cardinal to Westminster and ‘… from her jealous arms pluck him perforce.’ The Cardinal's initial reaction is one of horror:‘…if she be obdurateTo mild enteraties god in heaven forbidWe should infringe the holy privilgeOf blessed sanctuary not for all this landWould I be guilty of so deep a sin.’

Is security seen? Is security seen in images of peace and safety, or is it perceived in the troubled images of the horrors of violence and suffering? Vision has played a crucial role in shaping the modern Western preoccupation with, and prioritisation of security. Historically, security has been visually represented in a variety of ways, typically involving the depiction of its absence. In Medieval and Early Modern Europe especially, security and insecurity were presented as coterminous insofar as each represented separate conditions – their shared boundary envisioned in representations of the temporal threshold separating human mortality from divine salvation. This ocular demonstration of thresholds has been heightened by the ‘war on terror’ conducted by neo-liberal states since 2003. Neoliberalism operates as a discourse of constant global circulations (of money, goods and people) premised on a perpetual anticipation and pre-emption of insecurity. In the neoliberal scheme, security and insecurity are no longer coterminous, but mutually sustaining in perpetuity. In that sense, neoliberal security is ‘sight unseen’ - an uncanny presence that is not there. In the reiterated troubled images of horror amplified by the seemingly endless 'war on terror', neoliberal security operates as a terrifying visual reflex: we cannot see it but in new horrors.

AbstractAn Afrisc meowle (“African woman”) appears at the end of the Old English Exodus, a poem ostensibly celebrating religious freedom, migration, and divine justice. Amid the Hebrews’ final celebration, the explicit inclusion of the Afrisc meowle's racial difference from the Israelites exposes the horror and violence of the aftermath of war; a focus on her also invites questions about the poem's early medieval audience and how that audience could have understood her, especially since she does not appear in the source text of the Hebrew Bible. The scant critical analysis of this remarkable figure tends to provide a brief exegetical explanation before moving into more secure critical territory. My analysis of the Afrisc meowle reveals the limitations of source study and exegetical criticism for Exodus and for the field of medieval studies; she thus serves as a case study for this deeper theoretical problem in the field.

In contemporary Scottish culture the subject of predestination is guaranteed to evoke a variety of reactions ranging from horror and disgust on the one hand to laughter and ridicule on the other. It is viewed by some as a nightmare scenario devised by Christian theologians in their worst moments, while for odiers it is a ludicrous aberration of the medieval and Reformation mind. It is perceived frequently as the trademark of a theological mindset which is marked by harshness, legalism and a fatalistic attitude towards life. A clear example of this is Edwin Muir's biography of Knox which writes vitriolically of the oppression and tyranny of the predestinarian religion that was imported from Calvin's Geneva.

Even though as of late there has been a renewed interest in the aesthetic ideals in early Medieval England, the conceptualisation and experience of ugliness in Old English sources has been largely neglected. Drawing on the recent research carried out on aesthetic emotions and folk aesthetics, and despite the lack of academic materials on artistic and literary canons of ugliness, the purpose of this paper is to look into the terms that rendered the experience of ugliness and its closest emotional response, aesthetic horror, in order to examine how these are employed in poetic texts. The findings from this study evidence a lack of use of terms for negative aesthetic experience in Old English poetry that suggests that the lexical domain of ugliness and related emotional responses were not fundamental constituents of the Old English formulaic style, while the lexical domain of beauty and its responses were. Additionally, this study highlights the fundamentally moral character of the idea of ugliness.

Prior to Bram Stoker's Dracula, vampires were never represented in literature as reanimated or ‘undead’ humans capable of transforming into bats. The source of Stoker's innovation may be traced to his personal acquaintance Sir Richard Francis Burton, who in his adaptation of a South Asian anthology of ‘Gothic’ tales of horror and adventure had identified its hero's antagonist, called a vetāla in Sanskrit, as both a male vampire and a giant bat. This article surveys a number of ancient, medieval, and early modern Asian and European precursors of Stoker's vampire lore, noting that unlike Stoker's shape-shifting Transylvanian Count, predatory ‘vampires’ were most often female in gender in these traditions, and their victims male; and reviews the shifting interface between the taxonomical and cultural categories of ‘vampire’ and ‘bat’ in Europe, Asia, and the Americas.

Although the concept of the Absurd seems to be characteristic only of modernity, especially since WWII, we face the intriguing opportunity to investigate its likely first emergence in the early thirteenth century in Der Stricker’s Pfaffe Amîs (ca. 1220). While the narrative framework insinuates that meaning and relevance continue to be the key components of the priest’s life, especially because he constantly seeks new sources of income for his own generosity and hospitality, his various victims increasingly face absurd situations and are abandoned even to the threat of insanity and death. The analysis of the verse narrative suggests that the protagonist begins to embrace crime and violence as the norm for his operations as a fake merchant. Thus, in some of the episodes of this famous Schwankbuch, elements of the absurd become visible, creating considerable irritation and frustration, if not horror and desperation, among the priest’s innocent victims.

In a letter written to King Æthelred of Northumbria in or soon after 793, Alcuin bewails the appalling aftermath of the Viking attack on Lindisfarne. He writes, ‘vineam electam vulpes depredarunt, hereditas Domini data est populo non suo. Et ubi laus Domini, ibi ludus gentium. Festivitas sancta versa est in luctum.’1 Alcuin's horror at Viking merriment is shared by a great many other medieval historians in their accounts of the depredations of the Norsemen. Adam of Bremen, for instance, laments the Vikings' assault upon the Franks in 882, in which they made so bold as to attack King Charles III himself, and generally ‘made sport of our people‘.2 Florence of Worcester similarly deplores the brutality of Sveinn Forkbeard's men, who invaded East Mercia in 1013, all the while ‘revelling in acts of savagery‘.3 William of Malmesbury remarks on the ungentle sense of humour of Cnut the Great, who, after inviting Earl Uhtred of Northumbria to surrender himself into his custody, promptly had his hostage put to death, as William puts it, ‘with inhuman levity‘.4 In short, it is not unusual to find medieval chroniclers expressing their distaste for the evident pleasure invading Scandinavians occasionally derived from committing acts of atrocity.

Abstract This article proposes a philosophy of melodrama, following the example of Noël Carroll in The Philosophy of Horror (1990). Melodrama is defined by a distinctive mode of address in which morality is dramatized through an appeal to our emotions. More narrowly conceived as the “tearjerker,” it is designed to solicit tears through the orchestration of pathos. While melodrama is associated above all with a genre of nineteenth- century theater, it is considered here as a mode that persists from at least the medieval period into the present, encompassing discrete art forms, such as theater, opera, and film. Furthermore, as it evolves historically, it develops more complex idioms. Classical melodrama, or the melodrama of good versus evil, which dwells on the pathos of suffering innocence, is contrasted with romantic melodrama or the melodrama of moral antinomy (Singer), which explores the pathos of sacrifice. A series of distinctions are drawn between sympathy, pathos, empathy, and identification, and the relationship of each to the other and to our moral responses are briefly delineated. The article contests Murray Smith's theory of empathy as central or personal imagination and defends a distinctive concept of identification, based upon its roots in the medieval French “identifier,” to “regard as the same.” It concludes with a brief defense of melodrama against the charge that is emotionally contrived and exploits our moral sentiments for meretricious ends.

Este artigo discute aspectos da concepção sobre “raças monstruosas” que, no imaginário antigo e medieval, habitavam as bordas do mundo conhecido. Com isso, espera-se explicitar um tipo de construção do “outro” – sua identidade e representação –, via imaginário do monstro, isto é, a forma literal na qual estranhas criaturas incorporam a diferença/alteridade. Parte-se da premissa de que monstros operam primariamente em formas de imaginário que são mobilizadas por estratégias de representação. Dito de outra maneira, a corporeidade anormal e híbrida dos monstros inventados tem consequências reais para a percepção (horror e fascínio, rejeição e reconhecimento) nas relações eu-outro que se concretizam no mundo tangível. Desse modo, a conjugação entre fisicalidade, expressões de identidade e manutenção de fronteiras determina, entre outros comportamentos, visões pré-concebidas e distorcidas do outro e sua cultura, assim como cria certos estereótipos que são perpetuados pela cristalização do que uma vez fora apenas uma manifestação do imaginário.

In the mid-thirteenth century, the noted English Benedictine chronicler Matthew Paris produced a substantial corpus of regional maps. Especially famous is Paris’s Map of Britain, particularly the version preserved in British Library Cotton Claudius d. vi, known for its mimetic accuracy, artistic presentation, and striking level of detail. Another of Paris’s maps, however, a map of the eastern Mediterranean preserved on Oxford Corpus Christi MS 2*, though little studied, shares many of the features which made the Map of Britain so remarkable. Internal evidence strongly suggests that the Oxford Map and the Claudius Map of Britain derive from a common project which depicted England and the Holy Land as mirror images – a project which would have had profound meaning in the contemporary political context, serving to express horror at Jerusalem’s fall in 1244, articulate support for a new English-led crusade, and comment critically on King Henry III’s performative piety. The subsequent abandonment of the project is equally informative since it demonstrates that medieval maps, far from being formulaic expressions of set religious doctrine, could express political opinions so intensely topical that they could become outdated before they were even complete.

The article approaches the narrative strategy employed by a famous American horror-writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft in his only novel “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” (1927) and introduces new terms – “georeferencing” and “georeference.” By the latter we mean a toponymical allusion, i. e. an implicit reference to the precedential text incorporated in a toponym (e. g. the author mentions Transylvania to make a georeference to Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”). Lovecraft employs georeferencing and other forms of literary allusions to medieval legends, as well as to famous gothic novels written by his predecessors Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, Gustav Meyrink, Bram Stoker, etc. to create a meaningful context for his own novel. His goal is to create a common hypertextual universe, which can and will be productively navigated by a prepared reader. This strategy makes it possible for the reader to uncover hidden logics behind the fragmentary discourse and even foresee the outcome of the central battle between the principal characters. Lovecraft’s sophisticated intention and expert plot-structuring allows us to view “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” as a daring Modernist writing of the period, as well as to reassess Lovecraft’s reputation and cultural impact on the US literature of his time.

The paper reviews modern and contemporary images of the Middle Ages with emphasis on popular culture in the form of selected cases from literature, cinematography and video games in the context of the notion of historical anachronism. Erroneous statements that antedate or misplace events, objects or people basically constitute an “innocent” anachronistic transgression, which can be easily rectified using verifiable data. However, faulty projection of a set of features or characteristics to an age which did not know them represents a far more dangerous fallacy because it opens the question of interpretation – and interpretations vary. To understand past realities it is necessary to uncover how past people understood their own reality and why did they what they did. Projecting contemporary meanings onto the past, in this case the Middle Ages, is a genuinely perilous anachronism which is very difficult or even impossible to rectify. One example of such a historical “mistreatment” is the notion of the “Dark Ages”. Therefore, the paper traces the idea of the “Dark Ages” from the 14th century onward and considers the context in which it became quite widespread from the 18th and 19th centuries to the present day. However, the existence of a counter-myth in the form of the romantic idealization of the Middle Ages as a time of lost pre-modern innocence is also emphasized. The process of industrialization and modernization of (primarily English and Western) European societies in the 18th and 19th centuries and the enthronement of science and progress as leading social principles brought about an (only seemingly) unexpected consequence. Social change provoked nostalgia for an idealized and more simple pre-modern past which gave rise to the Gothic genre that introduced the (at that time socially subversive) element of “horror”. However, at the same time it engendered a romantic and nostalgic depiction of “olden times” which attracted a serious (mostly female) literary public. Even more important is the fact that the elements of the Gothic genre still exist in popular culture to this day through transmission into other popular culture venues, such as literature, cinematic and television content or video games. The extreme dual understanding of the Middle Ages between, metaphorically speaking, fairy tales and horror initially seems confusing, but in reality these images represent two opposite sides of the same coin. Finally, the paper seeks to answer the question of why the Middle Ages are imagined in the ways they are imagined, while notions about the Middle Ages are understood as an integral part of modern (secular) mythical discourse that legitimizes (post)modernity through the construction of extreme medieval otherness. Like it or not, the real or imagined medieval past is a recurrent and in some aspects even dominant feature of the (post)modern popular imagination. It would appear that it will remain so in the future, especially in the dynamic and newly developing post-COVID-19 world order.

La palabra “Grimorio” deviene del provenzal “Grammaire noir” traducible como “Gramática negra” o “Gramática de la oscuridad”. Estos son los libros de magia utilizados por brujas y hechiceros desde que el Diablo formó parte de la imaginería popular. Parecería contradictorio que un texto sagrado —siguiendo las ideas de Roger Caillois y James Frazer—, correspondería con la “escrituralidad”: la estructura de su mensaje debería ser puntual y científica; pero hay ejemplos donde no se respeta esto. Dentro de la literatura fantástica hispanoamericana encontramos manuscritos y libros sagrados con una gran carga de oralidad: el argentino Enrique Anderson Imbert con su cuento “El Grimorio” donde, más que una gramática, parece una historia dedicada a alguien. Para este estudio se utilizará la novela corta de Emiliano González: El discípulo; una novela de horror sobrenatural (1989); donde aparece una versión extraña de un grimorio. La estrategia de análisis parte de los estudios sobre la evolución y uso cotidiano de la lengua de Ignace Gelb, Peter Koch y Wulf Oesterreicher, para determinar si es una cuestión cultural o si es tan solo una curiosidad literaria el deconstruir así un texto sagrado al hacer que tenga elementos orales. ¿Se está reconfigurando o resemantizando el manuscrito como texto sagrado en la literatura mexicana del siglo xx? ¿Se puede llamar a estos escritos “grimorios” aunque no se traten de empastados con las mismas características del grimoire medieval? Estas respuestas esperan dilucidarse a partir de la literatura y de su estudio.

As terrible as wars have always been, for the losers as well as for the winners, considering the massive killings, destruction, and general horror resulting from it all, poets throughout time have responded to this miserable situation by writing deeply moving novels, plays, poems, epic poems, and other works. The history of Germany, above all, has been filled with a long series of wars, but those have also been paralleled by major literary works describing those wars, criticizing them, and outlining the devastating consequences, here disregarding those narratives that deliberately idealized the military events. While wars take place on the ground and affect people, animals, objects, and nature at large, poets have always taken us to imaginary worlds where they could powerfully reflect on the causes and outcomes of the brutal operations. This paper takes into view some major German works from the early fifteenth through the early twentieth century in order to identify a fundamental discourse that makes war so valuable for history and culture, after all. Curiously, as we will recognize through a comparative analysis, some of the worst conditions in human history have produced some of the most aesthetically pleasing and most meaningful artistic or literary texts. So, as this paper will illustrate, the experience of war, justified or not, has been a cornerstone of medieval, early modern, and modern literature. However, it is far from me to suggest that we would need wars for great literature to emerge. On the contrary, great literature serves as the public conscience fighting against wars and the massive violence resulting from it.

Neoromanticism or the Neo romantic movement may be easier to define, than it is to frame within a strict time framework. Some see it as a 20th-century resurgence of romantic ideas which began around 1928 and lasted up to the mid-1950s, while others locate it within a larger framework going back to the 1880s (being a reaction against naturalism) and lasting up to today. Depending on which timeline one adopts, it is sometimes synonymous with post-romanticism and late romanticism. However, regardless of its timeline, the movement has had profound effects lasting well into the end of the 20th century, becoming a reaction against modernism and postmodernism, and spreading into areas such as painting, music, literature, cinema, as well as architecture. As a movement, neoromanticism seeks to revive both romanticism and medievalism (the influence and appearance of ‘the medieval’ in the society and culture of later ages) by promoting the power of imagination, the exotic, the unfamiliar, further characterized by the expression of strong emotions (such as terror, awe, horror and love) as well as the promotion of supernatural experiences, the use and interest in Jungian archetypes and the semi-mystical conjuring of home. Furthermore, neoromanticism feels strongly against industrialization and the disconnectedness from nature in the modern world, rejecting the dichotomy between society and nature. It also embodies a wish or desire for a Utopian connection to nature uncoupled from social expectations and tradition, and going back to nature that has not been victimized by human civilization and industry. Most of these ideas may be found embodied in both the life and the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien, who famously declared to his son that he was, in fact, a Hobbit. His writings abound in creatures who not only live in harmony with nature (the Elves, the Hobbits), but embody it as well (the Ents) because romanticism (and subsequently neoromanticism) is, in essence, all about nature. In contrast, the evil of the main antagonists in his mythology (Melkor/Morgoth, Sauron, Saruman) is seen through their destruction of nature. Tolkien actually reverses the romantic line of vision with the creation of the Shire, which is seen as a ‘post-medieval’ society that has developed out of the Middle Ages, making Tolkien a medievalist dreaming of an organic and harmonious continuation of transformed and ‘purified’ Middle Ages as found in the Shire. This essay will present several of these characteristics mentioned and how the creatures of Tolkien’s mythology present a reaction against the industrialization of his time and neighboring county, while showing how these are ideas are still (perhaps even more so) relevant in the 21st century as well.

This article describes the results of a pragmatic analysis of communicative units that were selected from different types of in-game text (spoken and written game plot-related text and interface text) taken from six video games of various game genres (action-shooter, action-adventure, role-playing game, simulator etc.) and narrative genres (fantasy, science fiction, horror, military, medieval, western). It further offers a model for classification of the abovementioned units based on the pragmatic aim of the utterance, i.e. to assist the player during gameplay or to express the artistic aspects of the game. The two main pragmatic types of utterances have respectively been labelled as ludic and narrative. It has also been noted that ludic utterances are widespread in any video game, while narrative ones can only appear in games with an in-depth virtual world, and their perception by the player does not usually affect the completion of the game. The article further suggests to use the following terms to describe the different kinds of ludic utterances: 1) identificatory (helping to recognise and distinguish between the different subjects and objects of the in-game world); 2) informative (giving practical information about those objects); 3) explicitly appellative (directly encouraging the player to act); 4) implicitly appellative (encouraging the player to act, but in an indirect manner); 5) feedback (responding to the player’s actions). Among the narrative functions, the following terms have been offered: 1) storytelling (depicting the in-game events); 2) descriptive (artistically describing the in-game world and its characters); 3) compositional (outlining the structure of the game and assisting the player to navigate through it). The study also suggests that an utterance can combine multiple communicative functions, and the abovementioned functions be expressed not just verbally, but also via the visual, auditory, haptic and other modes since videogame discourse is a multimodal type of discourse. The results of this study can help in training of localization specialists as this research should facilitate their understanding of the pragmatic purpose behind the translated fragments of text.

Money matters. In Act 2 of Spamalot, Eric Idle's Broadway musical based on the 1975 cult classic Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the show's star, Tim Curry, as King Arthur, comments that the characters are running around in a “dark and very expensive forest.” The joke, it turns out, is entirely on us. Monty Python and the Holy Grail was an inexpensive independent film, costing $250,000 to make, a bargain compared to the same year's The Rocky Horror Picture Show ($1,200,000) and Python's own 1979 Life of Brian ($4,000,000). From its release, Holy Grail ran continuously in many theatres, and large numbers of people could afford the price of a ticket; it still circulates widely in relatively inexpensive DVD and VHS editions. Fast-forward thirty years to March of 2005. Production costs for Spamalot, Eric Idle's Broadway musical “lovingly ripped off” from the film, top $14 million (not atypical start-up costs these days on Broadway). Playing in a single theatre that seats only about 1,600, the show commands ticket prices that begin around $100 and can cost $350 and up. According to the Wall Street Journal, Spamalot is setting the pace for the spiraling costs of Broadway entertainment. Many fewer people will see the musical than the film, and those who can will tend to be more affluent; Spamalot's target audience is Holy Grail's first audience “all grown up,” prosperous, middle-aged Monty Python fans (like the authors of this article). In their youth, Holy Grail denied this audience the pleasures of narrative cinema. It made fun of film, relentlessly disturbing the seamless illusion of reality that is the cornerstone of Hollywood cinema, refusing narrative coherence and narrative closure. A parody of the clichés of mass culture, it exposed the political conservatism of the various forms of nostalgia for a medieval past that never was, a past in which strange women lying around in ponds distributing swords could be a basis for a political system. Spamalot, on the other hand, adapts its cinematic original, repackaging the youthful rebellion of the 1975 film and offering the pleasures of nostalgia remarkably free from political consequences.

В последнее время набирает популярность изучение детского творчества. Издаются антологии, статьи и монографии, посвященные отдельным жанрам детского фольклора. Наиболее изучены такие специфически детские жанры, как считалки, страшилки, садистские стишки. Детскому песенно-поэтическому фольклору (ироническим стишкам и переделкам песен) уделяется незаслуженно мало внимания. Возможно, причина кроется в неспецифичности этих жанров: иронические пародии встречаются и во взрослой субкультуре. Тем не менее детские пародии существенно отличаются от взрослых. В статье анализируются детские переделки известной советской песни «Катюша», хорошо знакомой многим поколениям россиян. Рассматриваются различные варианты в порядке их удаления от сюжета и структуры оригинала. При их сравнении прослеживается некоторая корреляция между главным персонажем, в который трансформируется Катюша, и сюжетом текста. На основании структурно-семиотического анализа сюжетных линий и персонажей делаются выводы о довольно стройной знаковой системе переделок, которые на первый взгляд кажутся бессмысленными. Эти выводы позволяют сопоставить современное детское творчество со средневековой смеховой традицией, а также увидеть в нем отражение универсалий человеческого сознания. Recently, the study of children’s creativity has been gaining popularity. Anthologies, articles and monographs are published on various genres of children’s folklore. The most studied are such specifically children’s genres as counting rhymes, horror stories, and sadistic verses. Children’s song and poetic folklore - in this case, ironic rhymes and alterations of songs - undeservedly receive little attention. Perhaps the reason lies in the non-specificity of these genres. Ironic parodies are also found in adult subculture, yet children’s parodies are significantly different from adults. Thи article analyzes children’s alterations of the famous Soviet song “Katyusha,” well known to many generations of Russians. Children’s changes are considered in the order of their degree of divergence from the plot and structure of the original. When comparing the variants, some cor- relation is seen between the character into which Katusha is transformed and the plot of the text. Based on a structural-semiotic analysis, the author concludes that there exists an regular system of changes which at first glance might seem meaningless. This conclusion makes it possible to compare modern children’s creativity with the medieval tradition of laughter, and also to see it as a reflection of universal aspects of human consciousness.

The article examines ancient Ukrainian literary works about the life and tragic death in the Horde of Prince (Kniaz) Mykhailo of Chernihiv. The article aims to trace the process of literary transformation of the ancient story and to introduce this material into the circle of research in Ukrainian medieval studies. The content of the story reflects events from the life of Mykhailo of Chernihiv, focusing on his journey with boyar Fedir to the Horde in 1245 to obtain permission from Batu Khan to own lands in Rus. There, they refused to bow to the khan according to Mongolian custom, and were killed for it. Ancient authors saw this as a Christian feat, and Mykhailo was proclaimed a saint. This is how he appears in the «life» created by Dmytro Tuptalo. This life (early 18th century) does not fit into the Byzantine hagiographic canon because it does not tell the whole life of Mykhailo, but focuses only on his stay in the Horde, where tragic events occur that are intended to move the reader and evoke sympathy for the martyr, a faithful Christian. In addition, the hagiography was written in the Baroque period, so it is characterized by pomp and circumlocution, emblematic and symbolic images, rhetorical figures, authorial reflections, and quotations from other texts, which ultimately play a role in reinforcing the highly moral image of Mykhailo. The prince is portrayed differently in the Galician-Volhynian Chronicle: it does not emphasize Mykhailo’s feat, but praises Danylo Halytskyi, who obtained permission from the khan by obeying non-Christian customs. The deaths of Mykhailo of Chernihiv and his boyar Fedir in the Horde are striking, and historical events fade into the background, becoming the background for the depiction of strong personalities. It cannot be said that Mykhailo of Chernihiv is a strong personality. Rather, he is a victim of the circumstances. He was credited with heroism, and Danylo Halytskyi with diplomatic wisdom. This is despite the fact that the Mongol-Tatar invasion pushed back the development of the ancient Ukrainian lands for several centuries, bringing decline and languishing on the edge of Europe that survived that horror.

The King’s Two Bodies is, as has long been recognized, a genealogy of modern state power. But it is also something else less clearly recognized. The King’s Two Bodies is a lamentation. In Kantorowicz’s poignant eulogy, the sovereign that medieval lawyers had made in the imago dei, was revealed at last to be an idol. Profound reverence for the rule of law crumbled into absent-minded legality. The lawful sovereign became diabolical power, forever deciding exceptions but incapable of justice or grace. In The King’s Two Bodies, Kantorowicz mournfully shows how the death and tragic afterlife of a particular medieval concept of sovereignty helped to make possible the horrors of modern political absolutism and state idolatry.

The Gothic churches in Zolná and Horné Jaseno are among the medieval rural sacral buildings in two nearby regions – in Zvolen Hollow Basin and Turiec Hollow Basin, which are often considered to be architectural or art historian circles regions. The architecture of both churches remained somewhat in the shadow of their wall paintings or the problems of monument restoration. The research so far records the basic architectural contexts as well as the fact that they are characterized by certain common features. However, a deeper analysis is lacking and the dating of both buildings is ambiguous, ranging from the second half of the 13th century to the beginning of the 14th century. The church in Zolná is indeed one of the valuable examples of medieval sacral buildings, for which we have available written sources illuminating their origin. Paradoxically, however, this does not make the interpretation of architecture easier, but puts us in front of a methodological problem, whether we prefer the statement of building forms or documents. The purpose of the following post is a more detailed analysis of this problem.

En el valle de los ríos Trujala, Hornos y Guadalimar en la Sierra de Segura, al noreste de la provincia de Jaén, se conserva un articulado sistema de estructuras medievales que configuran un paisaje. Para orientarse en él, hace falta un mapa que represente con precisión los elementos que intervienen en su conformación. El objetivo de este trabajo es revelar esos puntos y trazar una cartografía que sirva para comprender e interpretar el palimpsesto del paisaje. Con ese fin se realiza una prospección intensiva del territorio que documente los vestigios existentes, elaborando posteriormente un modelo de evaluación basado en Sistemas de Información Geográfica. Este proceso permite cuantificar variables, obtener datos estadísticamente relevantes y clasificar la información obtenida en los lugares donde se conserva alguna preexistencia medieval. Los resultados suministran parámetros útiles en la lectura analítica del paisaje, aportan conocimiento cuantitativo sobre factores que intervienen en los emplazamientos y permiten la determinación de sus patrones de asentamiento. También revelan el modo de ocupación en un territorio perteneciente alʿamal Šaqūra como reflejo de la organización campesina en el mundo rural y el rol antropizador que han tenido en la configuración del paisaje los poblamientos asociados a unas estructuras construidas en tapia durante el siglo XII.

AbstractThis study details how the medieval Central Asian leader, Timur, looked upon by many in the Latin West as a potential savior, came to be vilified as British imperial interests moved from the Ottoman Porte to India and Central Asia. To the vast majority of those to whom his name means anything at all, it commemorates a militarist who perpetuated as many horrors in the span of twenty-four years as the last five Assyrian kings perpetrated in a hundred and twenty ... The crack-brained megalomania of [a] homicidal madman whose one idea is to impress the imagination of mankind with a sense of his military power by a hideous abuse of it ...2

Este trabajo pretende ser una aproximación más al conocimiento de un alimento fundamental en la dieta del hombre medieval -el pan- centrado en la ciudad de Córdoba durante el siglo xv. Analiza el proceso de producción del pan desde que el cereal llegaba a la ciudad hasta que, tras su molturación y cocción, era consumido bajo la forma de pan o de otros productos secundarios, describiendo detenidamente el funcionamiento de molinos y hornos. Se distingue entre el pan elaborado de manera profesional por parte de los panaderos y el de fabricación doméstica. Además, se abordan los lugares, precios y condiciones de venta, así como las modalidades de pan existentes y su índice de consumo. Se incluye también un apéndice con la relación de hornos documentados en la ciudad entre 1460 y 1525

En este trabajo se realiza una aproximación a los hornos y alfares islámicos cordobeses, especialmente a raíz de los hallazgos de los últimos años. Se han analizado aspectos como la distinta tipología de los hornos cordobeses, su evolución a través de los siglos islámicos –desde época emiral a almohade-, la ubicación de las distintas áreas alfareras en Madīnat Qurtuba, principalmente la zona de las Ollerías, y los elementos necesarios en un alfar. This paper presents a summary of the Islamic pottery craft areas and kilns in the medieval Cordoba, especially in the light of the recent findings. For this study, different types of kilns, its evolution through the Middle Ages -from the Emiral to the Almohad periods-, the location of the different pottery craft areas of Madīnat Qurtuba -mainly the Ollerías area- and the elements needed have been analysed.

La ciudad de Sevilla ha sido siempre una gran fuente de restos arqueológicos, pero el tema de los hornos islámicos se ha tratado de una manera marginal. Con el presente trabajo pretendemos, en primer lugar, constatar los hornos islámicos documentados en la ciudad de Sevilla y, a través de ellos, trataremos de establecer una secuencia cronológica de los diferentes lugares y momentos en los que estuvieron en producción. Todo ello nos proporcionará un conocimiento más profundo de la historia de la ciudad, y nos ayudará a comprender los cambios urbanísticos, tecnológicos y sociales ocurridos en la misma durante el dominio islámico.

Abstract Classen has recently edited a fine collection of articles on Incarceration and Slavery in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021), and in this monograph he widens his brief to consider medieval, Renaissance and Reformation ideas of freedom, and not just as release from prison or enslavement. As he admits, the book addresses “a highly convoluted yet meaningful topic,” so the three distinguished matters are “aspects” of the same subject “closely entwined” (p. 250), which makes it awkward for the author to follow a simple ordering of the materials. Classen’s chapters reveal how he has gone about untangling the mesh of things. After first considering Imprisonment, he deals with Freedom as a “complex topic through time” from Antiquity to the early Renaissance (ch. B), and returns to it at the end (in ch. G) in reflect­ing on sixteenth-century Protestant ideas of the Christian’s freedom. Imprisonment in itself, including exile, receives preliminary consideration (especially through the eyes of Boethius, whose Consolatio was an influential text during the Middle Ages), before slavery is then examined alongside incarceration, as twin devices for removing one’s freedom (pp. 93–99). From there the author takes us into literary and juridical themes of being imprisoned or enslaved (ch. D), through accounts of famous medieval figures who were prisoners (ch. E), and cases of evildoers punished in prison (ch. F), on to the horrors of early modern enslavement and removal of indigenes’ freedoms in the Iberian conquest of the Americas, as lamented by Bartolomé de las Casas (pp. 232–40).

Hace aproximadamente cuatro años se procedió al derribo de un edificio situado en la actual Avenida de Pablo Iglesias, fuera del recinto fortificado de la ciudad medieval, asistiendo al hecho una serie de personas que pronto repararon en "los numerosos cacharros que sacaban las palas excavadoras". Varios de ellos recogieron cuanto pudieron y más tarde entraron en contacto con nosotros facilitándonos el material e informándonos de haber visto allí "hasta cinco hornos de parrilla con agujeros que se veían cargados de piezas y uno de ellos contenía sólo las jarras decoradas con manganeso-esgrafiado". Otro hecho a destacar, siempre por información oral de quienes lo vieron, es también la aparición en el lugar de restos humanos, cosa factible dado que el solar se ubica en el espacio que ocupó la necrópolis de Bab Bayyana.

Dialogue among the adherents of the major world religions has alwaystaken place, especially, but not only, among the Abrahamic faiths: Judaism,Christianity and Islam. Excellent examples of this may be found in themidst of shared histories where we are more often presented with a recordof conflicts. The high points must be the enormously rich and creative interactionswhich took place in medieval Islamic Spain and southern Italy andat various times in places as far apart as Central Asia, Baghdad, Delhi,Cairo and the Ottoman Empire.As a movement with its institutions and full-time professionals, andnetworks of activists, interreligious dialogue is primarily a phenomenonof the twentieth century. It is the pressures of this century which havedemanded that we mobilize the resources of the great religions for dialogueand peace, purposes which have historically often seemed marginal.In India, the realization that a reasonably unified independence wouldonly be achieved if religions could work together, actually provides asignificant impetus towards the cooperation of religious leaders andinstitutions.The horrors of Nazi genocide in Europe spurred post-war generationstowards a radical review of traditional Christian attitudes towards Judaism.Out of regional tragedies, like the wars in Lebanon and in the formerYugoslavia, have come strengthened efforts across the social spectrum todisarm religious hatreds. The resurgence, in the last couple of decades, ofpolitical radicalism motivated by religion and expressed in religious terms, ...

The increasing importance of oral history and folk sources (especially shezhire in Kazakhstanhistoriography)is one of the important trends in the development of historical science. In recent years, shezhire data has become one of the active sources capable of providing interesting facts on the medieval history of Kazakhstan. Using them opens up new horizons in the history of the Kazakh Khanate. The object of the study is the political and military confrontation between Yessim Khan and Tursun Khan in 1626-1627/28. The main directions of Tursun Khan's domestic policy and military actions in the war against Yessim Khan in the process of its beginning and development as an integral part of the domestic military tragedy were chosen as the subject of the study. This also determines the chronological framework of the study, which focuses on the most intense events in the first quarter of the XVII century. Kazakh shezhire, as well as oral history, has deeply and acutely preserved the consequences of the internecine war. Especially the horrors of war were experienced by the Dulats, Katagans and other tribes who suffered great human lossesand material costs. The materials of shezhire and the oral history of the Dulat (Shuyldak genus) tribe have preserved in people's memory some intrigues, secret conspiracies and insidious deeds of Tursun Khan. As a result, apparently they became some of the reasons for the ruptureof the relationship between the two rulers. The issues analyzed in the article are poorly studied and have not received comprehensive development in the domestic scientific literature until now.

En el límite entre ġarb al-Andalus y šharq al-Andalus se ubica el valle formado por los ríos Guadalimar, Hornos y Trujala en la Sierra de Segura (Jaén). Un territorio en el que se unían los antiguos caminos medievales que llegaban de Sevilla (Ishibiya) y Granada (Gharnatah) para partir hacia Valencia (Balansiyya). En ese lugar aún subsiste un articulado sistema de torres de origen musulmán construidas en tapial durante el siglo XII. Este trabajo se centra en analizar sus características territoriales, formales y constructivas con el objetivo de documentarlas, establecer su cronología y proponer hipótesis sobre cuáles fueron sus usos y criterios de implantación. Para ello se contextualizan en su ámbito histórico y geográfico, se comparan con ejemplos peninsulares similares, se examinan los hallazgos obtenidos en la investigación y se extraen conclusiones que podrán ser aplicadas a la caracterización de asentamientos y arquitecturas rurales del paisaje de al-Andalus.

Introduction. The purpose of the article is a detailed analysis of the assessments contained in the Jewish historical chronicles of the Khmelnytsky uprising period and related to the characteristics of the Crimean Tatars who took an active part in the uprising of B.M. Khmelnitsky. Based on these assessments, we can reconstruct the image of the Muslim Tatars that developed in the historical consciousness of the Jewish late medieval society under the influence of the experienced catastrophe. Methods. Since the peculiarity of this study is the exceptional attention to the text of the source, methods based on text analysis and methods based on contextual analysis of speech and semantic constructions used by Jewish publicists and comparing them with the facts of biographies and historical events that could possibly affect the texts of chronicles were widely used. To solve the tasks set in the work, such concrete historical methods as historical-comparative and historicaltypological were also used. Results. On the basis of the work done, it can be concluded that for Jewish authors – creators of historical chronicles of the period of the «Khmelnichiny», the Muslim Tatars act, though evil, but much less than the evil that the Orthodox Ukrainians carried to the Jewish population. In the image of the Crimean Tatars, to some extent, one can even find positive assessments showing pity and concern for those Jews who surrendered to them. The same cannot be said about the image of the Orthodox population that has developed in Jewish chronicles under the impression of the horrors of the People's Liberation war in Ukraine in the middle of the XVII century. Conclusion. The Crimean Tatars who took part in the uprising of Bohdan Khmelnytsky were perceived by Jews as enemies, but with a certain shade of respect, which we absolutely will not find in the current image of the Orthodox population of Ukraine.

O presente estudo, de natureza qualitativa e suportado em pesquisa documental, analisa o sistema de organização económica e a gestão do aro rural, nomeadamente a evolução das relações que se estabeleceram entre o Mosteiro de São Vicente de Fora e os particulares, assim como a diversificação e a expansão do seu património rural, mais intensas junto da cidade de Lisboa. Parte da conquista de Lisboa e da fundação do Mosteiro, em meados do século XII, seguindo-se uma análise do processo de formação e estruturação do património monástico, bem como das formas e estratégias de aquisição patrimonial, terminando com a composição da propriedade rural. Depois são apresentados os resultados, predominando na paisagem rural, por ordem decrescente, as herdades de ”pão”, as vinhas e os olivais, a par de outro tipo de propriedades rurais, assim como dos meios de transformação: moinhos e azenhas, lagares de vinho e azeite e fornos. Conclui que o Mosteiro adquirira e possuá­a um património concentrado na região de Lisboa, apesar da sua influência se estender a ná­vel nacional, dados os direitos e os privilégios que possuá­a no reino. Palavras-chave: História Medieval. Mosteiro de São Vicente de Fora. Património Rural. Propriedade rural. Paisagem rural. Portugal. Séculos XII-XIII.RURAL HERITAGE OF THE MONASTERY OF SáƒO VICENTE DE FORA (LISBOA): 12th-13th centuriesAbstract: This present study, of qualitative nature and based on documentary research, analyzes the economical organization system and the management of rural suburbs, namely the evolution of relationships fostered between the Monastery of São Vicente de Fora and individuals, as well as the diversification and expansion of its rural heritage, which had a higher intensity near the city of Lisbon. Tracing back from the conquest of Lisbon and the foundation of the monastery, in the middle of the twelfth century, conducting an analysis on the processes of formation and structuration of monastic heritage, as well as on the mechanisms and strategies of patrimony acquisition and, lastly, on rural property composition. Afterwards, it presents the results, predominantly in rural landscape, in a descending order, are bread farms, vineyards and olive groves, and other type of rural properties, as much as of means of processing: mills and watermills, wine and olive presses, and ovens. It concludes that the Monastery acquired and owned a concentrated heritage mostly in the region of Lisbon, although its influence reached a national level due to the rights and privileges that it possessed in the kingdom. Keywords: Medieval History. Monastery of São Vicente de Fora. Rural Heritage. Rural Heritage. Rural landscape. Portugal. 12th-13th centuries.PATRIMONIO RURAL DEL MONASTERIO DE SAN VICENTE DE FORA (LISBOA): siglos XII-XIIIResumen: El presente estudio, de naturaleza cualitativa y apoyado en investigación documental, analiza el sistema de organización económica y la gestión del aro rural, en particular la evolución de las relaciones que se establecieron entre el Monasterio de San Vicente de Fora y los particulares, asá­ como La diversificación y la expansión de su patrimonio rural, más intensas al redor de la ciudad de Lisboa. Parte de la conquista de Lisboa y de la fundación del Monasterio, a mediados del siglo XII, siguiendo un análisis del proceso de formación y estructuración del patrimonio monástico, asá­ como de las formas y estrategias de adquisición patrimonial, terminando con la composición de la propiedad rural. A continuación se presentan los resultados, predominando en el paisaje rural, por orden decreciente, las hereditates de "pan", las viñas y los olivares, junto a otro tipo de propiedades rurales, asá­ como de los medios de transformación: molinos y aceñas, lagares de vino y aceite y hornos de pan. Concluye que el Monasterio habá­a adquirido y poseá­a un patrimonio concentrado en la región de Lisboa, a pesar de su influencia extendida a ná­vel nacional, en virtud de los derechos y los privilegios que poseá­a en el reino.Palabras clave: Historia Medieval. Monasterio de San Vicente de Fora. Patrimonio Rural. Propiedad rural. Paisaje rural. Siglos XII-XIII.

Pre-Islamic India had a great tradition in creating magnificent and sensual sculptures, and building wondrous architectures. After the coming of Muslim invaders, Indian builders and craftsmen mixed Islamic ideas to their own, creating a new Indo-Islamic mosaic in the new building and architecture, which became integrated into the “heritage” of the self-declared Islamic civilization. Apart from India’s intellectual and scientific achievements, Said alAndalusi noted: ‘The Indians, as known to all nations for many centuries, are the metal (essence) of wisdom, the source of fairness and objectivity. They are peoples of sublime pensiveness, universal apologue…1’ Indeed, India was not only a distinguished civilization in its achievements in science, literature, philosophy, arts, and architecture but also had distinguished itself from the invading Muslims in terms of its humanity, chivalry and ethical behavior. Prior to Islamic invasions, Hindu kings and princes of India used to engage in wars, like in any major civilization of the time, but such wars were relatively infrequent. Affirming this, Muslim traveler Merchant Sulaiman writes in his Salsilatut Tawarikh : ‘The Indians sometimes go to war for conquest, but the occasions are rare.2’ Ibn Battutah, while traveling with Sultan Muhammad Tughlaq’s diplomatic convoy to the Chinese emperor, was surprised to observe that the Hindu rulers of Malabar showed great respect for each other’s territory and exercised restraint against warfare. In Malabar, he wrote, ‘there are twelve infidel sultans, some of them strong with armies numbering fifty thousand men, and others weak with armies of three thousand. Yet there is no discord whatever between them and the strong does not desire to seize the possessions of the weak.’ Muslim invaders had unfurled continuous warfare in India (and everywhere else) not only against the Hindus but amongst themselves; there were ceaseless revolts by Muslim generals, chiefs and princes all over India during their entire period of Islamic rule. Battutah’s astonishment is then quite understandable. Sulaiman adds that the Indian kings even did not maintain troops in regular pays. They used to be paid only when they were called in for fighting. Once the war is over, ‘They then come out (to civilian life), and maintain themselves without receiving anything from the king.3’ It is evident from the discussion so far that the Islamic invaders of India brought a totally different code of war, based on the Quran and the Sunnah. Contemporary Muslim historians inform us that, as a general rule, they used to slay all enemy soldiers on the battlefield. After the victory, they often fell upon the civilian villages and towns often slaughtering the men of fighting age. They sacked and plundered the households for booty, and sometimes burned down the villages and towns. Of the civilian population, the Buddhist monks and priestly Brahmins, in whom the common people reposed their trust, became special targets for extermination. The centers of infidel religion and learning—namely Hindu and Jain temples, Buddhist monasteries, Sikh Gurdwaras and indigenous educational institutions—were their prime targets for desecration, destruction and plunder. The women and children were captured as slaves in large numbers.

The paper attempts to analyse the gothic element in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). The paper presents the study in the essay form and it begins with a presentation of the gothic romance and its significance, characteristics and nature as a genre and in the novel of this study. The paper points out the types of the gothic school for Radcliffe is a representative of the school of terror while Lewis the school of horror. The study concentrates on Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho as a gothic romance which narrates the story of Emily St. Aubert, and Valencourt, who faced a thousand obstacles, and perils thrown in their way. The heroine finds herself separated from the man she loves, and confined within the medieval castle of her aunt's new husband, Montoni. Inside the castle, she must cope with an unwanted suitor, Montoni's threats, and the wild imaginings and terrors that threaten to overwhelm her. The study ends with a conclusion that states the main ideas in the study. Key words: Gothic element, Gothic Romamce, Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, terror, horror

This presentation uses Victorian science to examine the racial conflict between Dracula and England in Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula. The novel’s horror situates itself in the context of Late Victorian England and its contemporary fear of Reverse Colonization: the fear that England’s empire, already in its onset of decline, will be invaded and colonized by an uncivilized other people. The development of evolutionary theory stimulated concern that the opposite of evolution – degeneration – was not only possible, but already in effect. Stoker expresses England’s decline in accord with degeneration theory by portraying English men as weary. He establishes fear of Reverse Colonization by portraying Dracula to possess the animalistic vitality England lacks. Dracula invades and disrupts notions of English identity by mirroring the nation’s intelligence and consuming its women’s blood. Blood symbolizes racial identity, political allegiance, and, according to persisting medieval medical theory, semen. Thus, Dracula effectively consumes English racial identity, causes his victims to politically defect, and proliferates the vampire race through rape when sucking women’s blood. The lattermost invasion tactic is facilitated, according to contemporary studies of craniology, by women’s latent sexuality and criminality. Despite critics’ assertions that Dracula portrays miscegenation (the interbreeding of different races) as racial annihilation, the birth of Quincey Harker from mixed racial inputs at the novel’s end symbolizes the revitalization of the English race. The novel thus responds to contemporary degeneration theory by proposing miscegenation (with vital races and in which England remains the dominant racial input) as a solution to Late Victorian decline.

Jerusalem has been a centre of attraction since the earliest historical periods of the Middle East, and because it is an important location for three monotheistic religions, the dominant states wanted to dominate this city during the medieval period. The Crusaders, who were hit hard by the loss of Jerusalem during the period of Saladin Eyyubi, organised new expeditions to regain their lost position in the Middle East. Still, these failed if short-term successes were left aside. After the Ayyubid State withdrew from the history stage, the Mamluks dominated most of the lands they conquered and ended the Mongolian military advance, which left the whole world in horror, in the Battle of Ain Jalut in 1260. The inadequacy of the armed forces and tactics of the Mongols against this new enemy, despite the military support of the Armenians and Georgians in the region, forced them to seek new allies. The inadequacy of the armed forces and tactics of the Mongols against this new enemy, despite the military support of the Armenians and Georgians in the region, forced them to seek new allies. In this way, the efforts of the Ilkhanate to ally with the Europeans and their extensions in the Middle East, the Crusader States, against the Mamluks began. Starting from the Hulagu period until the collapse of the Ilkhanate, ambassadors were sent to powerful rulers of Europe, such as the kings of England and France, especially the Papacy, to organise a joint expedition against the Mamluks. Similarly, ambassadors came from Europe to Iran. During these contacts, the Ilkhanate offered to take the Christian holy city of Jerusalem and give it to them to get the support of Europe and to organise a new Crusade. Still, the Europeans have always looked at a non-Christian society with suspicion. Despite all the embassy exchanges between Europe and the Mongols, it was not possible to organise a joint operation against the Mamluks due to political turmoil, distance problems and synchronisation difficulties in Europe. This study deals with the Ilkhanid-European relations on the axis of Jerusalem.

Years have come and gone and Bob is still around He’s tied up by his ankles and he’s hanging upside downA lifetime of infection and his lungs all filled with phlegmThe CF would’ve killed him if it weren’t for S&M Supermasochistic Bob has Cystic Fibrosis by Bob Flanagan. Soundtrack from 1997 documentary, Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan In the 1997 film, Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist, artist Bob Flanagan quite literally lays himself bare to the viewer. This is a wrenching documentary which charts the dying Flanagan’s battles with cystic fibrosis (CF), and also explores the impact of this on his art and life. Sick also explores to an explicit degree the sadomasochist practices that permeated Flanagan’s private life and performance art practice, and which he used as a means of asserting control of the chronic pain and infirmity of his medical condition. Sick is not an easy watch. The film evokes feelings of fear, empathy, and horror. It challenges notions of taste and bad taste. It subjects the viewer to witness the vulnerability of the repeatedly tortured and invaded body of the artist, and of his eventual confrontation with death. As performance pieces go, this is an extreme example of body-based art. Where does this extraordinary piece stem from? From which traditions in art does it draw? To answer these questions, it is necessary to examine the framework of disability art, transgressive art, and also the tradition of medical Gothic, or the history of the Gothic body as a site of art—art that involves reading the body as carnivalesque, as degenerate, as ab-human, as abject entity. The Gothic Body as Site of Art The body has long been a site of exploration in medical practice and in artistic practice. The body has been displayed and examined in various forms, as subject, object, or abject entity through ossories, medical collections, museums of pathology, and freak shows. Paintings of crucifixions and martyrdoms, and practices of flagellation have glorified the tortured body of Christians as physical reminders of extreme piety. The abnormal or monstrous body has been a trope in art since the medieval period, often identified with ideas of evil or sin. Anatomical bodies have been referenced and explored by artists since the Renaissance. With the popular explosion of performance art in the 1960’s, bodily practices have been incorporated into site specific art. Artists’ bodies are offered for our gaze, and sometimes for interaction with, all within the context of performance. Although performance art originates in the early 20th century, it was exponents of the 1960’s that firmly aligned this practice with the site of the artist’s body. At this time, the body became a new focus of culture, with the rise in sexual freedom and the accepted use of nudity in performances and happenings. This resulted in the performance of body-based pieces such as Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy (1964) and Interior Scroll (1975), Hermann Nitsch and the Viennese Actionists and their Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries (1962), and Vito Acconci’s Seedbed (1971). This legacy of sexual, violent, or abject performances results in the creation of provocative and disturbing contemporary pieces such as Sick that confront the spectator with the vulnerabilities and limits of the living body. Today, contemporary culture is suffused with images of the body, both the idealised bodies of advertising and music videos, and the grotesque and transfigured bodies of contemporary art. Spooner has commented, “Contemporary Gothic is more obsessed with bodies than in any of its previous phases: bodies become spectacle, provoking disgust, modified, reconstructed and artificially augmented” (63). Today, culture’s preoccupation with the body runs the gamut from horror films obsessed with the penetrated body, to subcultural style and body manipulation, and the increasing popularity of plastic surgery makeovers on mainstream television. The body has never been so exposed, so open to the audience’s gaze. Key artists such as Damien Hirst, Mat Collishaw, the Chapman Brothers, Gabriela Friðriksdóttir, and Sue de Beer respond to this contemporary preoccupation by exploring the body in its manifold Gothic forms. This is a rich body of work that uses abject materials, references slasher movies, and plays with notions of identity, societal violence, body-horror, and the grotesque. This article looks specifically at works by contemporary transgressive artists that utilise their own bodies as site of performance, and the challenges to accepted tastes that this work poses. Performances by Bob Flanagan, Ron Athey, and Marina Abramovic are analysed in terms of boundaries, identity, and other implications in using the body of the artist as the site of art. Tropes of torture, pain. and body modification are examined as contesting the parameters of what body limits and of what is acceptable in contemporary art practice. An Intimate Canvas: The Artist’s Body as Site So what does it mean to use your own body as site of exploration? The work of artists who use their own bodies as a site of spectacle, as a medium of art, has several interesting implications. By its very nature, such an act is transgressive. It blurs the boundaries between artwork and artist. This creates an interesting tension between self and other and, indeed, arguably explores the notion of self as other. This work has an autobiographical function, in that it not only reveals universal themes of significance to the artist but, given the intimacy of the canvas, it also betrays personal preoccupations, and signifies the artist’s own relationship with the body and bodily practices. The use of the human body as canvas brings an intense physical and emotional proximity to the piece. The bodily traumas that are witnessed via performance art—whether it is Chris Burden being nailed to a Volkswagen (Trans-fixed, 1974) or Marina Abramović and Ulay collapsing, unconscious, lungs filled with carbon dioxide from reciprocal exchange of breaths (Breathing In/Breathing Out, 1977)—constitute an intimate link with the audience that arises from the shock of witnessing these transgressive acts. The body of the artist exposed in this way—a body normally only viewed by a partner, doctor or close family member—creates immediacy, giving the individual spectator in an intimate connection with the artist. Francesca Gavin, in her introductory essay to Hellbound: New Gothic Art, cites this voyeurism as essential to the experience of viewing Gothic art: “By looking at the violence or horror we become complicit in its creation, part of the cause—hence part of the discomfort in looking” (7). The first of these areas of discomfort to consider is the association of the body with pain, torture and mutilation, and the use of the artist’s body to explore this theme. Pushing the Limits: The Artist’s Body as Site of Pain The work of Marina Abramović has had a powerful effect on the contemporary landscape of body-based performance art that tests the limits of endurance of the corporeal body. Her past projects have focused on the uneasy power exchange between audience and performer. In Rhythm 0 (1974), her first long durational performance, Abramović offered her audience a choice of 72 objects including a gun, a hammer, sugar, and scissors, to be used on her own body, without any limitations on their deployment. This six-hour performance featured a motionless Abramović offering her body passively to the spectators to interact with. The intensity of the resulting video piece is remarkable; the recording of the performance captures the potential dissolution of the societal contract between artist and audience, a mutable discourse of agency and power. Abramović spoke of the sense of fear she experienced during this performance— “I felt really violated: they cut up my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and another took it away. It created an aggressive atmosphere” (quoted, Danieri 30). Her work plays constantly with the idea of boundaries and limits, often pushing her physical self past extraordinary barriers of pain and exertion, as in Rhythm 5 (1974) where she lost consciousness as a result of smoke inhalation and had to be rescued by the spectators. Amelia Jones has analysed these performances of pain as central to the artist’s desire to establish a connection with the audience during performances: “While pain cannot be shared, its effects can be projected onto others such that they become the site of suffering […] and the original sufferer can attain some semblance of self-containment (paradoxically, through the very penetration and violation of the body” (230). One could also argue that this sharing of experience also effectively normalises the abnormal body by establishing a common bond between viewer and performer. However, this work raises questions for the viewer. Is what these artists do self-harm, presented on a public stage? Is this ethical? And, importantly, is it within the bounds of taste? The answer, it would seem, lies in issues of agency and control and, of course, in the separation of art from life that occurs due to the act of performing itself. As Coogan puts it “[t]he performance frame is contingent and temporary, holding the performer in a liminal, provisional and suspended place” (1). While Abramović’s work experiments with bodily endurance and performative limits, other artists who produce autobiographical, body-based performance can be located within the world of medical discourse and performed disability. An artist who subverts the boundaries of the body, and taste alike, is Ron Athey, the HIV-positive artist who makes performance work based on blood rituals, torture, and cutting. His use of blood is central to his practice, and the fact that this blood, which is let through performances, contains the HIV virus, gives it a doubly abject aspect. His performance Excerpted Rites Transformation (1995) which took place at the Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis caused an extreme reaction. During this performance Athey pierced own his skin with needles, and also cut into the skin of black artist Daryl Carlton in a mimicry of tribal scarification rituals that highlighted issues of race, then hung handkerchiefs dipped in Carlton’s blood on clotheslines that ran over the heads of the audience. Mary Abbe, an art critic with the Minneapolis Star Tribune who had not attended the performance, wrote an article about the danger posed to the audience by what she wrongly termed Athey’s blood. (Carlton is not HIV positive). It is clear from the tone of this response that such disease causes a profound dis-ease in the beholder. Bob Flanagan’s oeuvre also locates him in this tradition of artists who perform their disability on a public stage. Critics such as Kuppers consider Athey and Flanagan as artists who subvert the medical gaze (Foucault), refusing to accept the passive role of ‘patient’, and defiantly flaunting their abnormal bodies in the public arena. These bodies can also be considered as modified bodies. Sandahl has contextualised Athey’s performance as going beyond the parameters of the human body: “Athey’s radical cyborg identity is a temporary mode of survival, an alternative way of being in there here and now. A body not interested solely in cure nor submissive to medical interventions” (59). Kuppers, in The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art, reflects on Flanagan and Athey’s careers as disabled artists. She examines how Flanagan constructs his identity as a chronically ill artist, and his pain performances that allowed him to avoid attracting the sentimental pity associated with illness; replacing audience empathy with shock and often revulsion. Kuppers highlights Flanagan’s use of dark humour in his performances through songs like Fun to be Dead (1997), which work to subvert the dominance of his illness. In fact, Flanagan’s work often asserts his central belief that his relative longevity (he lived to be 43, a decade longer than most CF sufferers) was achieved by his ability to counter the pain of his chronic condition with the pain of his masochistic suffering. The stereotype that the masochist is snivelling and weak is actually not true. The masochist has to know his or her own body perfectly well and be in full control of their body, in order to give control to somebody else or to give control to pain. So the masochist is actually a very strong person. I think some of that strength is what I use to combat the illness. (Dick) Athey’s description of his relief at the act of cutting echoes Flanagan’s identification of these rites as way of asserting control over a dysfunctional body: “The sight of your own blood, brought forth from your own hand, spells an almost immediate relief, a release to the pressure valve. It’s a violation that you yourself now control.” What effect does this painful and masochistic art have on the audience? On the act of viewing? On taste itself? Taste and Transgression: Beyond the Parameters of the Body The notion of taste is a hotly debated area in contemporary art practice—arguments rage as to what constitutes good or bad taste. Woodward argues that “[B]ad taste often passes for avant-garde taste these days—so long as the artist signals ‘transgressive’ intent” (1). Grunenberg (1997) has addressed the problematic notion of the audience engagement with this mode of Gothic art, asking whether it has ilost its power to shock. He contends that with the contemporary saturation of all media with violent and shocking imagery, “the ability to be shocked and moved by real or fictitious images of horror has been showing positive signs of attrition.” Nevertheless, the proximity of performance, the immediacy of the artist’s body as canvas, the feelings of horror, empathy, and even wonder occasioned by the manipulation and excesses of the body, continue to draw audiences. The artist’s body as site of performance becomes a space in which the audience may inscribe their own narratives. The body is a locus of projection, almost ab-human, “a not-quite-human subject, characterised by its morphic variability, continually in danger of becoming not-itself, becoming other” (Hurley 3–4). As the artist’s body becomes ever more manipulated and pushed beyond boundaries of taste and pain, it forces artist and audience alike to ask what lies beyond the parameters of the body. Experimentation with torture methods, with cutting, with abject materials, seems to lead back inevitably to the notion of Gothic, othered body, and a desire to pass beyond the boundaries of the repeatedly invaded and wracked body. Once you transgress the boundaries of the body, the logical locus that lies beyond is death. Dick’s Sick documents Bob Flanagan’s death, which formed part of the agreement between documentary maker and artist before shooting. Flanagan hoped his body art would continue beyond death: “I want a wealthy collector to finance an installation in which a video camera will be placed in the coffin with my body, connected to a screen on the wall, and whenever he wants to, the patron can see how I’m coming along” (Dick). Playing with the shadow of death becomes a mode of performance itself. Abramović recalls her acceptance of this fact in her early performance pieces: “When I was in Yugoslavia I was always thinking that art was a kind of question between life and death and some of my performances really included the possibility of dying, you know, during the piece, it could happen” (quoted in McEvilley 15). She also records her fear experienced during Rhythm 0 (1974), stating “What I learned was that [... ]if you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you” (quoted in Danieri 29). Death has receded from us in the 21st century. Death happens in hospitals, in the antiseptic confines of the Intensive Care Unit, it is medicated and mediated by medical staff. Traditional rituals of deathbed conversations and posthumous wakes are gradually disappearing. The discourse of death has grown silent except through the medium of the Gothic and especially the Gothic body, as the Gothic “consistently attempts to speak about the unspeakable—that is, death” (McGrath 154). Artists such as Abramović, Flanagan, and Athey function within this Gothic tradition. By insistently presenting their Gothic bodies, they force the audience to acknowledge death, transgression, and decay as realities. With collaborative partners, they mediate the process of surgery, torture, dying, and even the moment of death through photography and lens-based media. This use of media in capturing the moment also functions in a contemporary post-religious society as a mode of replication and, even, perhaps, of immortality. Bold, provocative, and challenging, the work of these transgressive artists continues to challenge the idea of bodily limits and boundaries and highlight the notion of the body as site of transformation. They continue to challenge our taste, our definition of art, and our comfort as audience. The words of Gavin come again to mind: “By looking at the violence or horror we become complicit in its creation, part of the cause—hence part of the discomfort in looking” (7). Using the artist’s body as site of performance forces us to challenge our conception of art, illness, life and death and leads to a reappraisal of taste itself. References Abbe, Mary. “Bloody Performance Draws Criticism.” Star Tribune 24 Mar. 1994. 1A. Abramovic, Marina. [website] 4 Feb. 2014. ‹http://www.marinaabramovicinstitute.org›. Athey, Ron. [website] 4 Feb. 2014. ‹http://ronatheynews.blogspot.ie›. Coogan, Amanda. “What is Performance Art?.” Irish Museum of Modern Art [website] (2011). 4 Feb. 2014 ‹http://www.imma.ie/en/page_212496.htm›. Daneri, Anna, Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, L. Hegyi, SR Sanzio, & A. Vettese. Eds. Marina Abramović. Milan: Charta, 2002. Dick, Kirby. Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist. Dir. Kirby Dick. 1997. Flanagan, Bob. [website] 4 Feb. 2014. ‹http://vv.arts.ucla.edu/terminals/flanagan/flanagan.html›. Gavin, Francesca. Hellbound: New Gothic Art. London: Laurence King Publishing, 2008. Grunenberg, Christoph. “Unsolved Mysteries: Gothic Tales from Frankenstein to the Hair Eating Doll.” Gothic: Transmutations of Horror in Late Twentieth Century Art. Ed. Christoph Grunenberg. Boston: MIT Press, 1997. Hurley, Kelly. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. 160–212. Kuppers, Petra. The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. Mc Grath, Patrick. “Transgression and Decay.” Gothic: Transmutations of Horror in Late Twentieth Century Art. Ed. Christoph Grunenberg. Boston: MIT Press, 1997. 153–58. Spooner, Catherine. Contemporary Gothic. London: Reaktion Books, 2006. Sandahl, Carrie. “Performing Metaphors: Aids, Disability and Technology.” Contemporary Theatre Review 11.3–4 (2001): 49–60. Woodward, Richard B. “When Bad is Good.” ARTnews [website] (2012). 4 Feb. 2014. ‹http://www.artnews.com/2012/04/12/when-bad-is-good›. Zylinska, Joanna. The Cyborg Experiments: The Extensions of the Body in the Media Age. London: Continuum, 2002.

Cilj rada je da rasvetli vezu između prošlosti isadašnjosti ostvarenu u Otrantskom zamku Horasa Volpola(Horace Walpole), način na koji je ta veza uspostavljena, te udeonostalgije u stvaranju gotskog romana nazvanog novom vrstomromanse. Horas Volpol bio je engleski plemić i kolekcionarfasciniran gotskom arhitekturom, srednjovekovnim životom iprošlošću uopšte. U ovom duhu napisao je 1764. godine svojroman prvenac, Otrantski zamak, čiji žnačaj ne leži toliko unjegovoj umetničkoj vrednosti, koliko u činjenici da je u pitanjupionirski gotski roman iz kog su pisci crpli inspiraciju dugonakon njegovog objavljivanja. Elementi poput smrti, ludila,propadanja, proročanstava i natprirodnih događaja koje jeVolpol spojio u Otrantu, mogu se bez većih poteškoća uočiti unaučno-fantastičnim i delima horor žanra današnjice,prvenstveno u književnosti i kinematografiji, a zatim i upopularnoj kulturi uopšte. Imajući ovo u vidu, mišljenja smo daOtrantskom zamku valja posvetiti pažnju, čime bi se moglodoprineti potpunijem razumevanju savremenih umetničkihdostignuća nastalim po ugledu na njega, kao i obogaćivanju onihkoja će tek uslediti.