Sunday, May 12, 2019

Open Accesss Journal: Interfaces: A Journal of Medieval European Literatures

Interfaces: A Journal of Medieval European Literatures
ISSN: 2421-5503
The Journal Interfaces opens an interdisciplinary and multilingual forum for the study of medieval European literatures. These literatures are broadly conceived as the products of the interconnected textual cultures which flourished between Late Antiquity and the Renaissance in a region extending from the North Atlantic to the Eastern Mediterranean. Interfaces envisages the study of the textual culture of medieval Europe as situated at the intersection of a number of modern disciplines, including history, literature, philology, codicology, philosophy, sociolinguistics, and theology.

Contributions are invited which cross linguistic or disciplinary boundaries in the recognition that the vitality of medieval texts in present-day scholarship and culture demands a space not confined by single philologies, national research traditions, confessions, or disciplinary canons. Interfaces strives to combine methodological questioning of hermeneutic and didactic practices with the opening up of new common themes, new connections between literatures, and new transdisciplinary conceptualisations of the modern understanding of medieval literatures, including regional and global challenges to claims of European unity.

It is the ambition of Interfaces to publish the best new scholarship which will contribute to a redefining of how the medieval textual heritage Europe is read, researched, taught and disseminated in the 21st century. European medieval civilization – of which Greek, Hebrew, Slavonic, and Arabic textual cultures form an integral but often neglected part – will continue to be an important source of cultural identity in a globalised world and the global perspectives of the 21st century impel us to ask new questions of the medieval past. The changing forms and technologies of literature and historical writing in the present also urges us to engage with pre-modern writing in new ways. The texts transmitted to us from the Middle Ages and how we read them are a crucial site for negotiating the relationship between modernity and the past.

Interfaces will promote new types of high quality scholarship as well as make the case for the historical, intellectual, and aesthetic value of the literatures of a broadly conceived medieval Europe.

No 5 (2018)

Biblical Creatures: The Animal as an Object of Interpretation in Pre-Modern Christian and Jewish Hermeneutic Traditions

This issue of Interfaces explores the question of how Jewish and Christian authors in pre-modern Latin Europe thought and wrote about some of the animals mentioned in the Bible. To them, thinking about animals was a way of thinking about what it means to be human, to perceive the world, and to worship God and his creation. Animals' nature, animals' actions and animals' virtues or shortcomings were used as symbols and metaphors for describing human behavior, human desires, human abilities and disabilities, and positive or negative inclinations or traits of character.
Both Christian and Jewish medieval and early modern scholars wondered about how they could possibly delve into the deeper layers of meaning they assumed any textual or extra-textual animal to convey. Not surprisingly, they often had to deal with the fact that a specific animal was of interest to members of both religious communities. A comparison between Jewish and Christian ways of reading and interpreting biblical passages featuring animals shows what the two hermeneutic traditions had in common, what separated them, and how they influenced each other, depending on the historical context in which the authors worked.
The papers in this issue of Interfaces cover a wide range of animal species, such as the dove, the stag, the unicorn, the elephant, the crocodile, the lion, the hyena, the raven, the hare, and the dog as medieval and early modern authors and illuminators portrayed and interpreted them. Since several themes come up in more than one paper concerning different kinds of animals, this issue groups its papers in three sections. These sections deal with divine creatures (mediators between humankind and God, symbols for the human believer, agents of heaven); exotic creatures (animals in different parts of the world, encounters between humans and animals in past times, animals with extraordinary appearances and properties); and social creatures (transgressive and pious animals, animals used to demonstrate obedience or to facilitate transgression, animals as symbols for conflict or cooperation).

Table of Contents

Full Issue

Astrid Lembke, Beatrice Trînca, Elke Koch, Julia Weitbrecht, David Rotman, Johannes Traulsen, Oren Roman, Andreas Kraß, Sara Offenberg, Bernd Roling, Kenneth Stow
PDF
193 p.

Individual Articles

Astrid Lembke
PDF
1-15
Beatrice Trînca
PDF
16-30
Elke Koch
PDF
31-48
Julia Weitbrecht
PDF
49-64
David Rotman
PDF
65-77
Johannes Traulsen
PDF
78-89
Oren Roman
PDF
90-110
Andreas Kraß
PDF
111-128
Sara Offenberg
PDF
129-153
Bernd Roling
PDF
154-174
Kenneth Stow
PDF
175-193

2015

No 1 (2015): Histories of Medieval European Literatures: New Patterns of Representation and Explanation

Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, 1968: idropittura su tela, 73 x 92 cm
cat. gen. 68 B 16
© Fondazione Lucio Fontana, Milano

2016

No 2 (2016): The Theory and Phenomenology of Love

Mark Rothko, Untitled (Violet, Black, Orange, Yellow on White and Red), 1949: oil on canvas, 81 ½ x 66 inches (207 x 167.6 cm)
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York: Gift, Elaine and Werner Dannheisser and The Dannheisser Foundation, 1978: 78.2461

No 3 (2016): Rediscovery and Canonization: The Roman Classics in the Middle Ages

Alberto Burri, Sacco L.A., 1953: burlap and acrylic on canvas, 39 5/16 x 33 7/8 inches (101 x 87 cm), inv. 5337
© Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Collezione Burri, Città di Castello – by SIAE 2016

2017

No 4 (2017): Open Issue

Max Ernst, Fleur Bleue, non datée, vers 1964: huile sur bois, 21,2 x 27 cm
Inv. Fondation des Treilles 990.110 - Photographie par Jacqueline Hyde (1922-2013) – by SIAE 2017



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