Medieval Cosmology and Middle-earth: A Lewisian Walk Under Tolkienian Skies

A nearly identical version of this paper was delivered at the 30th Annual International Conference on Medievalism in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on October 2, 2015, as part of a session on the Inklings and Medievalism

Performing class, performing genre : The squire of low degree as fifteenth-century drag

Despite the expansion of Judith Butler's theories of performativity which have proliferated since the publication of Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity in 1990, few scholars have examined the implications that performativity may have for social class. Fewer still have considered how social class might be performed in the premodern text. In this thesis, I examine how the economic language which pervades the little-studied fifteenth-century romance The Squire of Low Degree enacts a socioeconomic iteration of Butler's theory of performativity. This performance of social class occurs primarily in the speeches of this romance's courtly characters and at the site of the squire's body, as he attempts to rise above his ascribed social class to become a knight and qualify as a suitable partner for his beloved, born of royalty. Finally, this thesis demonstrates not only the social performativity within the poem's narrative, but also the classed performance enacted by the genre of the romance itself, producing a medievalist fantasy of social mobility for the increasingly prominent late medieval gentry classes itself, producing a medievalist fantasy of social mobility for the increasingly prominent late medieval gentry classes.Englis

Institutional consequentialism and global governance

Elsewhere we have responded to the so-called demandingness objection to consequentialism – that consequentialism is excessively demanding and is therefore unacceptable as a moral theory – by introducing the theoretical position we call institutional consequentialism. This is a consequentialist view that, however, requires institutional systems, and not individuals, to follow the consequentialist principle. In this paper, we first introduce and explain the theory of institutional consequentialism and the main reasons that support it. In the remainder of the paper, we turn to the global dimension where the first and foremost challenge is to explain how institutional consequentialism can deal with unsolved global problems such as poverty, war and climate change. In response, following the general idea of institutional consequentialism, we draw up three alternative routes: relying on existing national, transnational and supranational institutions; promoting gradual institutional reform; and advocating radical changes to the status quo. We evaluate these routes by describing normatively relevant properties of the existing global institutional system, as well as by showing what institutional consequentialism can say about alternatives to it: a world government; and multi-layered sovereignty/neo-medieval system

Dreaming Denationalized Law: Scholarship on Autonomous International Arbitration as Utopian Literature

A completely denationalised law is of course a utopia. But it is a utopia not just in the broad sense of being unrealistic, at least for the present, and perhaps also for the future. No, it is a utopia in the very literal sense of the word. Recall what utopia means in Greek: no place. Delocalised arbitration, non-state law, is, quite literally, no-place law. It thus makes up a utopia in the central meaning of the term. International Commercial Arbitration should be just about money. But its scholarship is full of invocations of dreams, visions, faith, utopia. These are not merely ornamental. Rather, they invite us to read the scholarship as utopian literature. Doing so yields unexpected insights into the state of globalised law, and the precarious place of arbitration within i

The Return of the Ring (2016), edited by Lynn Forest-Hill

Book review, by Dennis Wilson Wise, of The Return of the Ring (2 vols, 2016), ed. by Lynn Forest-Hil

The future of sovereignty in multilevel governance Europe: a constructivist reading

Multilevel governance presents a depiction of contemporary structures in EU Europe as consisting of overlapping authorities and competing competencies. By focusing on emerging non-anarchical structures in the international system, hence moving beyond the conventional hierarchy/anarchy dichotomy to distinguish domestic and international arenas, this seems a radical transformation of the familiar Westphalian system and to undermine state sovereignty. Paradoxically, however, the principle of sovereignty proves to be resilient despite its alleged empirical decline. This article argues that social constructivism can explain the paradox, by considering sovereign statehood as a process-dependent institutional fact, and by showing that multilevel governance can feed into this process

The Inklings and King Arthur (2017), edited by Sørina Higgins

Book review by Gabriel Schenk of The Inklings and King Arthur (2017) ed, by Sørina Higgin

Славістична медієвістика української діаспори: баланс власної традиції й зовнішніх впливів (Slavic Medievalism of the Ukrainian Diaspora: Balance between its Own Tradition and External Influence)

Автором розглянуто питання стану славістичної медієвістики у дослідженнях українських діаспорних істориків. Зазначено, що останні тяжіли до традиційної схеми історії східних слов’ян М. Грушевського, та звертали недостатньо уваги на тенденції світової медієвістики, представленої працями М. Блока, Л. Февра, Ж. Ле Гофа, А. Гуревича. Як винятки розглянуто праці відомих дослідників О. Пріцака та С. Плохія, які у своїх ґрунтовних роботах з вітчизняної медієвістики активно поєднували український історичний матеріал з теоретичними напрацюваннями світових вчених. (The author examines the question of the Slavic Medievalism in the studies of Ukrainian foreign historians. It is noted that they preferred the traditional system of the history of Eastern Europe by Mykhailo Hrushevskyi and paid insufficient attention to the tendencies of the world Medievalism, presented by the works of M. Blok, L. Fevr, J. Le Gof, A. Hurevych. The paper also considers the works of well-known scholars like Omelian Pritsak and S. Plokhii, who actively combined Ukrainian historical material with theoretical achievements of world scholars in their thorough works on Slavic Medievalism.