Dante Forever
Nigel F. Palmer, Emeritus Professor of Medieval German, St Edmund Hall, Oxford will make a report 'Gospel Meditations in Late Medieval Europe: Three Voices from the Upper and Lower Rhine' at the HSE on September 24, 2013. The leading professor on medieval issues gave a special interview for the HSE news service.
— What’s so attractive for researchers about the Middle Ages, and what inspires young people to concentrate on this period?
— For serious students of medieval literature, which is my subject, the objects you study aren’t just abstract texts, multiplied in hundreds of copies, but individual original objects from anything between five hundred and a thousand years ago. Students find it fascinating when they discover that to understand medieval literature you need to confront - and if they are lucky to handle - the material objects, the actual books that were used for reading all that time ago. Philology becomes material philology.
— Are there many researchers of this period in Russia? Do you co-operate with them as you are engaged in collaborative research with colleagues in Germany, Switzerland and the United States?
— A few years ago my answer would have had to be no. But that has changed in the last few years, principally as a product of the co-operation between the Lomonosov Moscow State University and the Philipps University in Marburg. Professor Ekaterina Esquires and Dr Natalija Ganina and I have collaborated on a set of interlocking publications on the newly discovered Moscow manuscript of the writings of the German mystic Mechthild von Magdeburg. So the answer is yes, because my collaboration with Moscow is now for me just the same as my collaboration with colleagues in Freiburg im Breisgau, Fribourg (CH) and Harvard.
— What can you recommend for reading on medieval literature and art to non-specialist in this area?
— I wouldn’t recommend starting with a book about medieval literature, I would recommend reading just two or three of the wonderful texts, perhaps in translation. A good place to start, if I may give German examples, would be the ‘Nibelungenlied’ (in Russian translation: Pesn’ o Nibelungakh. Leningrad, 1972) or the ‘Tristan’ romance by Gottfried von Strassburg. I haven’t found a straight Russian translation of Gottfried’s text (which is easy to find in English translations), but one could use the old translation of J. Bédier’s retelling, Roman o Tristane i Izol’de. Moscow, 1955, or Legenda o Tristane i Izol’de, edited by A. D. Mikhailov. Moscow, 1976. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales was translated by Ivan Kashkin and J. B. Rumor in 1946. But perhaps there are other Russian-language resources that I don’t know. And there is always Dante! For medieval art a good place to start would be the book publications about medieval manuscript illumination by Christopher de Hamel.
Anna Chernyakhovskaya, specially for the HSE News Service
See also:
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