The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity. Volume 2: Medieval Meets Medievalism

Prof. Ziolkowski also featured in a podcast for Medievalists.net, called the Medieval Podcast hosted by Daničle Cybulskie. To listen to this podcast for free, visit here. You can also watch the talk he delivered about this study at the American Philosophical Society here.

A lifetime’s knowledge has been poured into these pages with passion and dedication, and the reader feels, and shares, the author’s enthusiasm along the Juggler’s journey from the Middle Ages to the present. From medieval French manuscripts we follow the tale through early modern religious literature, post-Romantic editorial endeavours, anthologies of national literature and children’s fiction, to modern adaptations in ballet, opera, and the visual arts. Such wide-ranging enterprise is matched by a fluent, witty narrative which succeeds in making complex terminology and concepts accessible to non-specialist readers. As such, the work is a major achievement.

—Prof. Barbara Ravelhofer, Durham University

Funny, erudite, compelling, The Juggler of Notre Dame stretches every boundary of what an academic book is. It has given me—and will give all its readers—further permission to extend the definition of the scholarly book. Imaginative, well-researched, genre-bending, this book makes multiple contributions to the fields of medieval history, philology, art history, performance studies, reception theory, and medievalism.

—Prof. Kathryn Rudy, University of St Andrews

— David Ganz, The Times Literary Supplement, available online

The current political climate and the related outrage culture in social media often silence nuanced voices and elide the emergence of stories that focus on benign forms of medievalism. In addition, most scholars prefer the study of more straightforwardly readable (political) medievalisms and avoid investigating the influential omnipresent residual medievalist continuities related to religion and secularized religious beliefs. Ziolkowski's study is a welcome exception to these current tendencies, engaging with a subject that demonstrates the complex modern web of layers of reception in which religion continues to play a powerful role.

This ambitious and vivid study in six volumes explores the journey of a single, electrifying story, from its first incarnation in a medieval French poem through its prolific rebirth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Juggler of Notre Dame tells how an entertainer abandons the world to join a monastery, but is suspected of blasphemy after dancing his devotion before a statue of the Madonna in the crypt; he is saved when the statue, delighted by his skill, miraculously comes to life.

Jan Ziolkowski tracks the poem from its medieval roots to its rediscovery in late nineteenth-century Paris, before its translation into English in Britain and the United States. The visual influence of the tale on Gothic revivalism and vice versa in America is carefully documented with lavish and inventive illustrations, and Ziolkowski concludes with an examination of the explosion of interest in The Juggler of Notre Dame in the twentieth century and its place in mass culture today.

Volume 2: Medieval Meets Medievalism deals with the influence of the tale in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe and America, and the development of literary medievalism at this time.

Presented with great clarity and simplicity, Ziolkowski's work is accessible to the general reader, while its many new discoveries will be valuable to academics in such fields and disciplines as medieval studies, medievalism, philology, literary history, art history, folklore, performance studies, and reception studies.

The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity. Volume 2: Medieval Meets Medievalism
Jan M. Ziolkowski | July 2018

354 | 190 colour illustrations | 7" x 10" (178 x 254 mm)

ISBN Paperback: 9781783745067
ISBN Hardback: 9781783745074
ISBN Digital (PDF): 9781783745081
ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 9781783745098
ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 9781783745104
DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0143

Note to the Reader

1. Tumbling Back into France, by Way of Philology

2. Notre Dame: The Virgin in Nineteenth-Century France

3. Franglais Juggling

4. Anatole France

5. Le Jongleur de Notre Dame

Notes

Bibliography

List of Illustrations

Index

Jan Ziolkowski is the Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Medieval Latin at Harvard University and Director of the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. His scholarship has focused on the literature of the Latin Middle Ages.

Ziolkowski’s books include critical editions and translations of medieval Latin texts, such as Jezebel: A Norman Latin Poem of the Early Eleventh Century, as well as wide-ranging studies in literary and intellectual history, such as Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales: The Medieval Latin Past of Wonderful Lies. He has also co-edited two anthologies of translations, The Medieval Craft of Memory (with Mary Carruthers) and The Virgilian Tradition: The First Fifteen Hundred Years (with Michael C.J. Putnam).

© 2018 Jan M. Ziolkowski

The text of this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the text; to adapt the text and to make commercial use of the text providing attribution is made to the author(s), but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work. Attribution should include the following information:

Jan M. Ziolkowski, The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity. Volume. 2: The Middle Ages. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2018, http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0143

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