Rethinking the New Medievalism /

This collection serves as a follow-up, extension, and reassessment of two previous works: the 1990 special issue of Speculum titled "The New Philology," edited by Stephen Nichols, and The New Medievalism, a collection Nichols coedited with Marina Brownlee and Kevin Brownlee (1991). The present volume in many ways celebrates and continues Nichols's ideas and influence in the past 25 years, but it does much more than that. As Bloch (French and Romance philology, Columbia Univ.) puts it in his introduction, the essays "contain many elements belonging to the New Philology-an attention to the material conditions of the medieval work, especially to the givens of manuscripts and manuscript culture, a questioning of authorship and authority, an interrogation of the integrity of medieval texts, recognition of the relation between the verbal and the visual." This is the thread that runs through and connects essays on subjects as varied as Augustinian thought in Rabelais and the dialectic of the medieval course. Nichols's discussion of the challenges and opportunities for new philology in the digital age will be required reading in graduate seminars on digital humanities. --Douglas W. Hayes, Lakehead University