Rethinking the New Medievalism is an essay collection that revisits a special issue of Speculum entitled “The New Philology” (1990), a postmodern prospectus for medieval studies that was innovative if not provocative given the journal's conservative bent. If “old philology” had posited texts as scholarly editions, “new philology” finds most value in a textual form more recognizably medieval, the manuscript as fruitfully complicated by its variants, marginalia, visual components, status as a material object, authorial circumstances, and digitization.
The volume's introduction identifies five of the volume's 15 articles as concerned with religion and gives their summaries consecutively. However, it is not clear how this tacit emphasis informs the volume or, more broadly, how religion, itself a traditional component of medieval studies, informs “new philology.”
Nonetheless, Church History readers will find interesting the volume's excellent individual essays that apply postmodern reading practices to religious texts: Andreas Kablitz connects Petrarch's literary account of falling in love on Good Friday with John's gospel account of Christ's capture; Joachim Küpper describes a relationship between pagan and Christian conceptions of the divine world as a transcendental mirror of the human world; Deborah N. Losse explains Rabelais's interpretation of the Church Fathers' opinion on marriage as a social institution rather than as a disembodied religious ideal; Gerhard Regn shows how the “strongly individualized authorship” (51) of Dante's Commedia establishes links with scripture as well as the medieval divine cosmos; Kevin Brownlee likewise studies the Commedia, in particular, its “ongoing meditation on the problematic status of the mimetic artist and on the potentially salvific activity (for Dante-author)” of writing poetry (162). Despite the volume's indistinct agenda on religious studies, these examples demonstrate religion's importance to the “new philology” given how religious texts often subvert rational sense, combine diverse semiotic systems, and reflect human use of language to create and discover meaning.
