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The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity. Volume 3: The American Middle Ages
Jan M. Ziolkowski 
Prof. Ziolkowski also featured in a podcast for Medievalists.net, called the Medieval Podcast hosted by Danièle 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.
By mapping out a peculiar kind of medieval trajectory, Ziolkowski provokes us to think about productive meanders that might be carried out in our own fields of interest. In that sense the book is not only an encyclopedic anatomy of the medieval in all its richness but a nursery of forms with the power to give life to any number of parallel endeavors. […] His book is continually awakening to new intriguing possibilities.
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
Jan Ziolkowski, the Arthur
Kinglsey Porter Professor of Medieval Latin at Harvard, has now
dedicated six volumes with some 1,500 illustrations to this tale. They
can all be downloaded free of charge and they take us to a new kind of
scholarship. [...] Ziolkowski explores the continuing revival of the
story of the Juggler of Notre Dame as evidence of how the Middle Ages
have been reinvented. He sees the tale of the Juggler, or Dancer, as
"holding out the hope of redemption to those who may feel rough around
the edges or unskilled in offering themselves [...]"
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.
—Richard Utz, The Medieval Review
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 3: The American Middle Ages hinges upon two figures influenced by the juggler: Henry Adams, scion of Presidents and distinguished cultural historian whose works contributed to the rise of medievalism in America during the Gilded Age, and Ralph Adams Cram, the architect whose vision of Gothic accounts directly or indirectly for the campuses of West Point, Princeton, Yale, Chicago, Notre Dame, and many other universities across America.
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 comprises six volumes: Vol. 1: The Middle Ages Vol. 2: Medieval Meets Medievalism Vol. 3: The American Middle Ages Vol. 4: Picture That: Making a Show of the Jongleur Vol. 5: Tumbling into the Twentieth Century Vol. 6: War and Peace, Sex and Violence Click here to purchase all six volumes of The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity at a discounted rate. |
The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity. Volume 3: The American Middle Ages
Jan M. Ziolkowski | August 2018
492 | 346 colour illustrations | 7" x 10" (178 x 254 mm)
ISBN Paperback: 9781783745210
ISBN Hardback: 9781783745227
ISBN Digital (PDF): 9781783745234
ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 9781783745241
ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 9781783745258
ISBN Hardback: 9781783745227
ISBN Digital (PDF): 9781783745234
ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 9781783745241
ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 9781783745258
ISBN Digital (XML): 9781783745265
DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0146
Categories: BIC: ACK (History of art: Byzantine and Medieval art c. 500 CE to c. 1400), JFHF (Folklore, myths and legends), D (Literature and literary studies), FW (Religious and spiritual fiction), AMX (History of architecture); BISAC: LIT022000 (LITERARY CRITICISM / Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology), LIT011000 (LITERARY CRITICISM / Medieval), LIT025040 (LITERARY CRITICISM / Subjects & Themes / Religion), ARC005070 (ARCHITECTURE / History / Modern (late 19th Century to 1945)).
Note to the Reader
1. The Tumbling Worlds of Henry Adams
2. Our Lady’s Tumbler in Mont Saint Michel and Chartres
3. Britain and the Making of the American Middle Ages
4. The Boston Bohemians
5. The Rise of Collegiate Gothic
6. Point Taken: Gothic Modernism and the Modern Middle Ages
Notes
2. Our Lady’s Tumbler in Mont Saint Michel and Chartres
3. Britain and the Making of the American Middle Ages
4. The Boston Bohemians
5. The Rise of Collegiate Gothic
6. Point Taken: Gothic Modernism and the Modern Middle Ages
Notes
Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Index
© 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 3: The American Middle Ages. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2018, http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0146
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