Disturbing Times: Medieval Pasts, Reimagined Futures

From Kehinde Wiley to W.E.B. Du Bois, from Nubia to Cuba, Willie Doherty’s terror in ancient landscapes to the violence of institutional Neo-Gothic, Reagan’s AIDS policies to Beowulf fanfiction, this richly diverse volume brings together art historians and literature scholars to articulate a more inclusive, intersectional medieval studies. It will be of interest to students working on the diaspora and migration, white settler colonialism and pogroms, Indigenous studies and decolonial methodology, slavery, genocide, and culturecide. The authors confront the often disturbing legacies of medieval studies and its current failures to own up to those, and also analyze fascist, nationalist, colonialist, anti-Semitic, and other ideologies to which the medieval has been and is yoked, collectively formulating concrete ethical choices and aims for future research and teaching. In the face of rising global fascism and related ideological mobilizations, contemporary and past, and of cultural heritage and history as weapons of symbolic and physical oppression, this volume’s chapters on Byzantium, Medieval Nubia, Old English, Hebrew, Old French, Occitan, and American and European medievalisms examine how educational institutions, museums, universities, and individuals are shaped by ethics and various ideologies in research, collecting, and teaching

Multi-Cellular Logistics of Collective Cell Migration

During development, the formation of biological networks (such as organs and neuronal networks) is controlled by multicellular transportation phenomena based on cell migration. In multi-cellular systems, cellular locomotion is restricted by physical interactions with other cells in a crowded space, similar to passengers pushing others out of their way on a packed train. The motion of individual cells is intrinsically stochastic and may be viewed as a type of random walk. However, this walk takes place in a noisy environment because the cell interacts with its randomly moving neighbors. Despite this randomness and complexity, development is highly orchestrated and precisely regulated, following genetic (and even epigenetic) blueprints. Although individual cell migration has long been studied, the manner in which stochasticity affects multi-cellular transportation within the precisely controlled process of development remains largely unknown. To explore the general principles underlying multicellular migration, we focus on the migration of neural crest cells, which migrate collectively and form streams. We introduce a mechanical model of multi-cellular migration. Simulations based on the model show that the migration mode depends on the relative strengths of the noise from migratory and non-migratory cells. Strong noise from migratory cells and weak noise from surrounding cells causes “collective migration,” whereas strong noise from non-migratory cells causes “dispersive migration.” Moreover, our theoretical analyses reveal that migratory cells attract each other over long distances, even without direct mechanical contacts. This effective interaction depends on the stochasticity of the migratory and non-migratory cells. On the basis of these findings, we propose that stochastic behavior at the single-cell level works effectively and precisely to achieve collective migration in multi-cellular systems

Postcolonising the Medieval Image

Postcolonial theories have transformed literary, historical and cultural studies over the past three decades. Yet the study of medieval art and visualities has, in general, remained Eurocentric in its canon and conservative in its approaches. 'Postcolonising', as the eleven essays in this volume show, entails active intervention into the field of medieval art history and visual studies through a theoretical reframing of research. This approach poses and elicits new research questions, and tests how concepts current in postcolonial studies - such as diaspora and migration, under-represented artistic cultures, accented art making, displacement, intercultural versus transcultural, hybridity, presence/absence - can help medievalists to reinvigorate the study of art and visuality. Postcolonial concepts are deployed in order to redraft the canon of medieval art, thereby seeking to build bridges between medievalist and modernist communities of scholars. Among the varied topics explored in the volume are the appropriation of Roman iconography by early medieval Scandinavian metalworkers, multilingualism and materiality in Anglo-Saxon culture, the circulation and display of Islamic secular ceramics on Pisan churches, cultural negotiation by Jewish minorities in Central Europe and the Iberian peninsula, Holy Land maps and medieval imaginative geography, and the uses of Thomas Becket in the colonial imaginary of the Plantagenet court

Feasting at the Lord's Table

The miniature of the eschatological banquet of the Just in paradise pictured at the end of the Ambrosian Bible is read here through the lens of a cultural history or histoire des mentalités. The banquet motif is interpreted as a symbolic representation of transcendent order, by means of a bricolage of preexisting images and iconographies of social order. Ultimately, the eschatological setting of the aristocratic banquet involves a polemical critique of a society that excluded Jews, and a vision of the courtly, exclusionary hierarchies of aristocratic Europe subverted

Inscribing Piety in Late-Thirteenth-Century Perpignan

The essay continues my long-term quest to understand the involvement of high-status patrons in the actual writing of Hebrew manuscripts in medieval Aragon and its neighbouring polities. The signed scribe of BNF hebr. 7 is "unmasked" as an amateur scribe by means of the analysis of the errors he committed. This tabulation of errors leads to a reconsideration of the act of writing as a performance of piety