Affective medievalism

Introduction

“…Trigg and Prendergast argue that both fields have every reason to engage with contemporary debates about politics, meaning and culture; to articulate the power of literary and cultural texts, and patterns of historical change; to inform the way we track social change, the way our feelings of and knowledge about the past can change, and the relation between politics, society and the imagination. 13 This characteristic process of intellectual inquiry also informs Trigg's interest in the relationship between emotions and cultural practices. The history of emotions is a vibrant area of inquiry for the humanities and, as Trigg notes, 'the "affective turn" in the domain of academic study also refers to scholarship that foregrounds the emotional work performed by cultural and social commentary as well as our variable degrees of emotional investment in our chosen objects of study'.…”

“…In Affective Medievalism (2018), Trigg and co-author Thomas A. Prendergast construct a more local, personal and affective historical framework through which to explore the concept of 'medievalism as pretext to the medieval' in a pointed inversion of traditional critical approaches. 11 In their final chapter, the authors call for an end to the 'mutual exclusion' between medieval studies and medievalism studies, arguing that such separateness 'is not only intellectually misleading but also politically damaging', 12 especially considering the current climate in Western universities in which the humanities are increasingly threatened. Trigg and Prendergast argue that both fields have every reason to engage with contemporary debates about politics, meaning and culture; to articulate the power of literary and cultural texts, and patterns of historical change; to inform the way we track social change, the way our feelings of and knowledge about the past can change, and the relation between politics, society and the imagination.…”