“Medieval War in Modern Memory”, Professor Andrew Lynch (UWA)

Date: 18 April 2016
Time: 6:00-7:00pm
Venue: Fox Lecture Theatre, Arts Building, The University of Western Australia
Cost: Free, but RSVP is required
RSVP: Online via: https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/medieval-war-in-modern-memory-registration-21509657966

War is perhaps the predominant theme in what is called ‘medievalism’ – the imaginative reception and reconstruction of the medieval period in modernity – but with ambvalent effects. While war has been central to many positive evocations of the medieval past, it has also served as an image of regressive barbarism: recent military atrocities, such as in the 1990s conflicts in former Yugoslavia, are readily described as ‘medieval’; on the other hand, the Gulf War of 1990-91 was positively branded as a ‘crusade’ by its proponents. This talk will take up various possibilities of providing this perceived contradiction in modern cultural memory with a genealogy. One way is to invoke the long-term side-effects of the subjection of medieval intellectual and religious practices to humanist, Reformation and Enlightenment attacks, and the related nature of cultural defences of the medieval against such attacks: the glory of war (often symbolically adapted) became an important but sometimes fragile element of continuity and respectability allowed to the middle ages. Another way is to trace the use of medieval military history, chronicle and romance in Romantic medievalism and nationalist image-building, causing an identification of the middle ages with militarism which was later negatively reconfigured.

A third method examines how literature, film and other cultural products have treated war in their demarcation of the medieval from the period in relation to modernity. In investigating these matters, this illustrated talk ranges selectively from the immediate post-medieval period to the present day, but with an emphasis on the period 1800-2000, and will attempt to analyse some long-term trends in the discourse of war in both high-culture and popular medievalism.

Andrew Lynch is a Professor in English and Cultural Studies at UWA, and Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, Europe 1100-1800. He has written extensively on war in medieval and modern medievalist literature and culture.