Department of Literature

This issue includes a cluster on medieval studies and secondary education, contributions on pedagogy and teaching and learning centers, as well as contributions to two regular features: “How I Teach” and “Conversations.”

This issue includes a cluster of brief essays on editing scholarly journals, three essays on teaching, and two columns: How I Teach and Conversations.

The topic for this issue’s primary cluster was inspired by The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study (2021) by Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan. The cluster presents four essays documenting the long-term influence of four medievalists: Aranye Fradenburg Joy, Clifford Flanigan, Joaquin Martínez Pizarro, and Derek Pearsall. This issue also includes of a recap of the longstanding undergraduate conference at Moravian University and short histories of three scholarly societies: the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship, the John Gower Society, and the International Piers Plowman Society. We continue our two standard features with “How I teach…” contributions on Christina Fitzgerald’s edition of The York Corpus Christi Play (2018) and David Lawton’s edition of The Norton Chaucer (2019), and a “Conversations” response to the Medieval Studies and Secondary Education cluster in New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession’s Fall 2022 issue.

This issue consists of two special clusters: “Retellings of Medieval Literature in the Classroom,” edited by Eva von Contzen and Sophia Philomena Wolf, and “The Social Relevance of Medieval Studies,” edited by Gregory Sadlek.

An interview by Lisa Lampert-Weissig of Kirk Ambrose, a scholar of medieval art history. Ambrose has authored many articles and four books, The Nave Sculpture of Vézelay: The Art of Monastic Contemplation; Current Directions in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Sculpture Studies (co-edited with Robert Maxwell); The Marvelous and the Monstrous in the Sculpture of Twelfth- Century Europe; and Urnes Stave Church and its Global Romanesque Connections (co-edited with Margrete Systad Andås and Griffin Murray).

"What did Annarella See?"analyzes Carlo Damasco's cinematic adaptation of Anna Maria Ortese's short story "Un paio di occhiali" and argues that the trope of the "insopportabilita' della realta'" constitutes the connective tissue between Ortese's story and Damasco's film.  This trope generates different options of "being in the world" for Eugenia and Annarella, the respective protagonists of short story and film. it is upon this contextualized and historicized notion of "being in the world" that Damasco's adaptation generates a powerful reflection of Ortese's estranged and estranging gaze, and the revolutionalty, if veiled, knowledge it envisioned.

Focusing on European colonial rivalry in Florida during the 1560s, including the massacre of French Huguenots there by Spanish forces, the article argues that our understanding of these events and of the texts that record the brief life of Fort Caroline should be situated within a broader network of imperial rivalry and religious conflict that connects Florida to Europe. It looks closely at two first-hand accounts—by René Goulaine de Laudonnière and by Nicolas Challeux.

In this excerpt from the annual letter reporting on the state of the Jesuit order in the Philippines, Fr. Juan de Bueras, the Jesuit provincial, relates the difficulties that the Church was experiencing among the indigenous communities of the island of Mindoro. Hoping to convert the Magayanes people of the mountains to Christianity, the Jesuits found that they had to redirect their efforts to the supposedly Catholic communities of the coast, which had reverted to pre-Christian beliefs and practices. Bueras’s letter provides insight into the limitations of the Church’s effort to convert native Filipinos, and the nature of Filipino religious life in the early colonial context. John Blanco places the letter in the broader context of religious and secular colonialism, and broader questions about the supposed Hispanization of the Philippines.