rdf-syntax-grammar
mods:
  schema location: http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3 http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-3-2.xsd
  title info:
    title: Bad medievalism and the modernity problem
  name:
    name part: Lavezzo, Kathy
    role:
      role term: creator
    role:
      role term: author.
  type of resource: text
  genre: bibliography
  origin info:
    place:
      place term: nyu
    date issued: 2026
    copyright date: 2026
    issuance: monographic
  language:
    language term: eng
  physical description:
    form: print
    extent: ix, 331 pages : illustrations (black and white) ; 24 cm
  abstract: Challenges the assumptions made over the medieval/modern divide by examining the medieval roots of modern racism. Humanists have long insisted on a chasm separating modernity and the Middle Ages. In Bad Medi­evalism and the Modernity Problem, Kathy Lavezzo demonstrates how the temporal divide scholars typically accept is a fiction that has shaped racial discourse over a longue durée. The hard line drawn between "then" and "now" is of a piece with the line separating whiteness from humans deemed irrevocably other. Thus, Lavezzo advocates a "bad"--that is, depressing and disturbing, even nau­seating--historicism attuned to the interpenetration of race, whiteness, and periodicity in the "west.". Teasing out the dialectical invocation of both periods by figures as diverse as W. E. B. Du Bois, Carolyn Bynum, Stuart Hall, Johan Huizinga, Paule Marshall, Karl Marx, Gloria Naylor, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Sylvia Wynter, Lavezzo demonstrates how the tension between and across categories of the "medieval" and the "modern" has mobilized intense emotional and political responses. Inspired by Lavezzo's discovery that Hall, the beloved founder of cultural studies, planned as a student at Oxford to become a medievalist but was dissuaded from that path by his teacher Tolkien, Bad Medievalism and the Modernity Problem unpacks the implications of that charged encounter. Central chapters contrast Tolkien's white heritage medievalism with a speculative inquiry into the Piers Plowman dissertation that Hall never wrote. Other chapters assess the white "feel" of periodization by scholars, including Jacob Burckhardt, Huizinga, Fredric Jameson, and Bynum, and draw on theorists, including Du Bois and Wynter, to chart the medieval roots of a racialized discourse of progress and primitivism. Bad Medievalism and the Modernity Problem culminates in new readings of Gloria Naylor's Bailey's Cafe and Paule Marshall's The Fisher King, demonstrating their importance as productively pessimistic engagemen…
  note: Kathy Lavezzo.
  note: Includes bibliographical references and index.
  subject:
    topic: Civilization, Modern
  subject:
    topic: Medievalism
  subject:
    topic: Race relations
    topic: History
  subject:
    topic: Racism
    topic: History
  subject:
    topic: Médiévisme
  subject:
    topic: Medievalism (cultural movement)
  subject:
    topic: Civilization, Modern
  subject:
    topic: Medievalism
  subject:
    topic: Race relations
    topic: History
  subject:
    topic: Racism
    topic: History
  classification: HT1507 .L38 2026
  classification: 305.8009
  identifier: 9781531512408
  identifier: 1531512402
  identifier: 9781531512415
  identifier: 1531512410
  location:
    physical location: POD
  record info:
    record content source: UKMGB
    record creation date: 250828
    record change date: 20251108171047.2
    record identifier: in00005669076
    language of cataloging:
      language term: eng