Revealing New Perspectives

Illustrations

Figure 4.1 Theophilus window, Beauvais

Figure 4.2 Theophilus window, Beauvais

Figure 4.3 Theophilus window, Beauvais

Figure 4.4 Theophilus window, Beauvais

Figure 4.5 Miracles, Chartres

Figure 4.6 Theophilus, Souillac

Figure 4.7 Theophilus, Notre-Dame, Paris

Figure 4.8 Theophilus, Notre-Dame, Paris

Figure 4.9 Saint Stephen’s Portal, Notre-Dame, Paris

Figure 4.10 Saint Stephen’s Portal, Notre-Dame, Paris

Figure 4.11 Saint Stephen’s Portal, Notre-Dame, Paris

Figure 4.12 Notre-Dame, Paris

Figure 4.13 Notre-Dame, Paris

Figure 4.14 Notre-Dame, Paris

Figure 4.15 Notre-Dame, Paris

Figure 4.16 Notre-Dame, Paris

Figure 4.17 Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Notre-Dame, Paris

Figure 4.18 Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Notre-Dame, Paris

Figure 5.1 Col. A, min. 52, Fortune, Fauvel, and Vaine Gloire; col. B, min. 55, Le Palais de la Cité; col. C, min. 56, Seine River Scene

Figure 5.2 (left) The Royal Motets; (right) col. A, min. 16, The Narrator Reading His Book; (right) col. B, min 17, Fauvel Enthroned

Figure 5.3 Fol. 12r, col. B, min. 18, Charnalité

Figure 5.4 Min. 61, Fauvel’s Wedding Night, The Chalivali

Figure 5.5 Min. 26, Fauvel in Colloquy with the Vices←xi | xii→

Figure 5.6 (left) col. B; (right) col. A, Conditio / O Nacio / Mane; (left) col. C; (right) col. B, description of the wall painting

Figure 5.7 (left) The Creation of Eve; (right) Two Centaurs

Figure 5.8 Min. 46, Fortune, Fauvel, and Gilbert de Poitiers

Figure 6.1 Title page of the Discours facétieux des hommes qui font saller leurs femmes (1600)

Figure 15.1 Frontispiece, Paris, BnF, fr. 1553

Figure 15.2 Frontispiece, Richard de Saint Laurent’s De virtutibus (depicting Robert de Béthune, abbot of Clairmarias Abbey)

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge the contributors to this volume for their scholarly essays and for their deep-felt collegial recognition of Steve’s achievements. We also thank Cecilia Hsu and Samantha Pious for their essential editorial assistance. Our special thanks to Philip Dunshea, Senior Acquisitions Editor for the Humanities at Peter Lang, and to the fine work of the production team.

Introduction

This volume of studies in honor of Stephen G. Nichols by colleagues, friends, and students is called Revealing New Perspectives because that is what his career exemplifies. As both the verb and adjective forms suggest, Steve has undeniably changed the course of medieval studies in ways that have had a global impact that continues to be profound.

We are delighted to have this opportunity to celebrate this world-class medievalist whom we have had the great good fortune to know since the late 1970s when he hired us at Dartmouth fresh out of grad school. Since then we have enjoyed a truly special friendship, and thanks to Steve’s vision, indomitable energy, and generosity, we have collaborated on many innovative projects.

After completing his undergraduate days at Dartmouth and his graduate degree at Yale, Steve taught briefly at UCLA and the University of Wisconsin before joining the faculty at Dartmouth for 18 years, at Penn for 7, and at Johns Hopkins for another 18. While building French, Romance Languages, and Comparative Literature departments and programs at these institutions and others, he was also invited to teach and provide administrative advice at many other prestigious institutions both in the U.S. and abroad.

The wealth of contributions that he has authored in countless books, articles, and colloquia, as well as digital projects, is admirably daunting, and to do it justice would require a book in itself. So instead we would like to focus briefly on a few of Steve’s publications that articulate some of his most transformative ideas.

Romanesque Signs: Early Medieval Narrative and Iconography (1983),¹ winner of the James Russell Lowell Prize, showed how a medieval literary artifact must be analyzed along with the artistic, architectural, political, and historical currents that prevailed during the moment of the text’s production. By means of a reading of the Oxford Roland alongside art, hagiography, and history, Steve carefully charts how a historical figure can acquire the status of a martyr. Romanesque Signs illustrates the “multi-media literacy” at issue ←1 | 2→in medieval textuality and the fact that secular and sacred elements and ideas oftentimes, far from being antithetical, reinforce one another constructively.

Another inspired and inspiring insight was launched with his “Philology in a Manuscript Culture,” in a volume of Speculum coedited with Howard Bloch entitled The New Philology.²

Here Steve boldly proclaims that “In medieval studies, philology is the matrix from which all else stems” (1). What is revolutionary in this conception is that he invokes a new philology that “should seek to minimize the isolation between medieval studies and contemporary cognitive disciplines” (1). He has always been committed to not only contextualizing the intellectual and artistic production of the past in which a work was created but also considering it according to the current theoretical optics of our time, since each age has its own set of aesthetic and cultural realities and expectations.

It is this strong belief in the paradoxical “mutable stability” of the medieval text itself and of its readers over time that has also made Steve a trailblazer in exploring philology by means of digital tools. Paul Zumthor articulated the notion of mouvance, the instability particularly of anonymous medieval texts, and Bernard Cerquiglini focused on the variante, or varying articulations of vernacular works and their impact on textual authority. Yet Steve has taken these notions of textual instability and their implications for authorship and authority to a much higher level by creating a global network of possibilities for studying hundreds of texts and miniatures from many disciplinary angles. He has achieved this by spearheading the Digital Library of Medieval Manuscripts,³ an elegantly configured website that continues to grow and provide scholars with invaluable access to manuscripts worldwide.

Much more could be said of these and others of his visionary projects, but we will conclude by mentioning his 2016 monograph entitled From Parchment to Cyberspace: Medieval Literature in the Digital Age.⁴ This book considers the exciting possibilities of digital tools for medieval book history and the ideological mentalities that differentiate digitized manuscripts from critical editions. It is the narrative of a personal adventure, as is clear from the book’s introduction entitled “Why I Wrote this Book, or Medieval Manuscripts Unchained.” And it is an adventure from which we have all been enriched.

Kevin Brownlee

Marina S. Brownlee

Curriculum Vitae of Stephen G. Nichols