Joshua Davies 
Visions and ruins 
Cultural memory and the untimely Middle Ages

Visions and ruins explores the production of cultural memory in the Middle Ages and the uses the medieval past has been put to in modernity. Working with texts in Old English, Middle English and Latin, as well as visual and material culture, it traces connections in time, place, language and media to explore the temporal complexities of cultural production and subject formation. The book interrogates critical, poetic, artistic and political archives to reveal exchanges of cultural energy and influence between past and present, offering new ways of knowing the medieval past and the contemporary moment.

Table of Content

Introduction
1 Ruins and wonders: the politics of cultural memory in and of early medieval England
2 Queen Eleanor and her crosses: trauma and memory, medieval and modern
3 Medievalist double consciousness and the production of difference: medieval bards, cultural memory and nationalist fantasy
4 The language of gesture: untimely bodies and contemporary performance
Afterword: migrations
Index

About the author

Dr Anke Bernau is Lecturer in Medieval Literature and Culture at the University of Manchester