C. S. Lewis, Eamon Duffy, and the Medieval Spirit
by John DugganThe medieval outlook on life and the cosmos still has contributions for the modern age. Continue Reading »
A Bookish Christmas Gift Guide
by John WilsonThe purpose of this column is to suggest books (some from 2022, some published earlier) that might appeal to various people on your Christmas gift list. Continue Reading »
Briefly Noted
by VariousAndrew Willard Jones follows his masterful study of the “sacramental kingdom” of Louis IX with this sweeping historiography of the Church, from its foundations in Eden up to the present moment. The plot assumes that Christianity is in fact true and that the protagonist is the Church. He opens . . . . Continue Reading »
Loving and Hating the Middle Ages
by John DugganModern people, despite being drawn to medieval aesthetics and artificats, cannot seem to bear to examine what those artifacts are modeled on: the intelligible order glimpsed by the eye of faith. Continue Reading »
The Moral Heart of The Green Knight
by Justin LeeCritics who bemoan the film’s departures from its source material misapprehend the nature of adaptation, which requires interpreting and resituating a work of art. Continue Reading »
The Myth of Medieval Paganism
by Francis YoungThey don’t look very Christian—those strange faces made of leaves, and those women displaying cartoonishly enlarged genitals on the walls of medieval churches. Most people who have explored the medieval architecture of Western Europe have heard a tour guide explain that a particular carving . . . . Continue Reading »
In the Academic Sandbox
by Charlotte AllenDuring the late summer and early fall of 2017, Rachel Fulton Brown, a fifty-two-year-old associate professor of medieval history at the University of Chicago, found herself a pariah among many of her fellow medievalists in academia. A member of the Chicago faculty since 1994, Brown had won two . . . . Continue Reading »
The Age of Concentration
by Eugene VodolazkinMany regard Russia as backward, lagging behind the West. This is not so. Our shared civilization is changing, and because of our raw experience of the twentieth century, my country is in some respects ahead of the West. I have described the coming epoch as a new medievalism (“The New Middle . . . . Continue Reading »
The Music of the Spheres
by Nathaniel PetersLate one night, a young scholar at Cambridge named Michael Ward reads “The Planets,” a minor poem by C.S. Lewis. In it he encounters a curious phrase about the influence of Jupiter: winter passed / And guilt forgiv’n. This, he notices, is exactly what happens in one of Lewis’s most . . . . Continue Reading »
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