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Medieval Studies Program | Lecture: “Laughter, Stupor, and the Limits of Medievalism”
October 1, 2021 @ 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
The Department of English, with the generous support of the Anonymous Fund and the Medieval Studies Program, invites you to the following events next week with Professor Thomas Prendergast of the University of Wooster:
Friday, October 1st
10:30am–12:00 pm: Workshop for faculty and graduate students with pre-circulated reading. Space is limited; please contact Lisa Cooper at lhcooper@wisc.edu to reserve a place.
4:00 pm, 7191 Helen C. White Hall
Public lecture (available online on the Medieval Studies Program website following the in-person event)
“Laughter, Stupor, and the Limits of Medievalism”
Understanding the meaning of medieval representations of affect has proved notoriously difficult. Medievalistic reimaginings of the Middle Ages can help us to interpret these representations, but there are limits—most tellingly when medievalism masquerades as historical work.
Thomas Prendergast is Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Film Studies at the College of Wooster. An expert in the reception of Chaucer in the centuries after his death up to the present day, as well as in medievalism more broadly, he is the author of Poetical Dust: Poet’s Corner and the Making of Britain (2018) and Chaucer’s Dead Body: From Corpse to Corpus (2004). With Stephanie Trigg of the University of Melbourne, he is co-author of Affective Medievalism: Love, Abjection, and Discontent (2019) and 30 Great Myths about Chaucer (2020), and he is the co-editor of Chaucer and the Subversion of Form (2018) and Rewriting Chaucer: Culture, Authority, and the Idea of the Authentic Text, 1400-1600 (1999).
