Openness in Medieval Europe

This volume challenges the persistent association of the Middle Ages with closure and fixity. Bringing together a range of disciplines and perspectives, it identifies and uncovers forms of openness which are often obscured by modern assumptions, and demonstrates how they coexist with, or even depend upon, enclosure and containment in paradoxical and unexpected ways. Explored through notions such as porosity, vulnerability, exposure, unfinishedness, and inclusivity, openness turns out to permeate medieval culture, unsettling boundaries, binaries, and clear-cut distinctions.

Introduction: Medieval Openness / MANUELE GRAGNOLATI AND ALMUT SUERBAUM

I. Texts
An Interminable Work? The Openness of Augustine's Confessions / FRANCESCO GIUSTI
What Was Open in/about Early Scholastic Thought? / PHILIPPA BYRNE
Speech-Wrangling: Shutting Up and Shutting Out the Oral Tradition in Some Icelandic Sagas / BRIAN MCMAHON
Interrupted and Unfinished: The Open-Ended Dante of the Commedia / NICOLÒ CRISAFI
Medieval Denmark and its Languages: The Case for a More Open Literary Historiography / ALASTAIR MATTHEWS

II. Experience and Subjectivity
Merlin's Open Mind: Madness, Prophecy, and Poetry in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Vita Merlini / MONIKA OTTER
Enclosure and Exposure: Locating the 'House without Walls' / ANNIE SUTHERLAND
Unlikely Matter: The Open and the Nomad in The Book of Margery Kempe and the Middle English Christina Mirabilis / JOHANNES WOLF
Including the Excluded: Strategies of Opening Up in Late Medieval Religious Writing / ALMUT SUERBAUM
Openness and Intensity: Petrarch's Becoming Laurel in Rerum vulgarium fragmenta 23 and 228 / MANUELE GRAGNOLATI AND FRANCESCA SOUTHERDEN

III. Community
Highest Openness: On Agamben's Promise / DAMIANO SACCO
The Monastic Enclosure / BENJAMIN THOMPSON
The Openness of the Enclosed Convent: Evidence from the Lüne Letter Collection / EDMUND WAREHAM
The Book Half Open: Humanist Friendship in Holbein's Portrait of Hermann von Wedigh III / OREN MARGOLIS