The Pagan, the Medieval, and Us
Sarah Salih, King's College London
The Twenty-Second Annual Rossell Hope Robbins Lecture
Friday, May 4
7:30
7:30
The Graduate Center of City University of New York
365 Fifth AvenueEnglish Department Lounge, Room 4406
Abstract:
Late medieval writers were fascinated by
the idea of the pagan; both ancestor and stranger, the pagan was an infinitely
flexible figure and the subject of various thought-experiments. Imagining
paganity enabled examination of questions of history, memory and time. Paganity
in Lydgate’s Troy Book is analysed as
a flawed system of memorialising, centred on the live and dead, glorious and
horrible preserved body of the hero Hector. Hagiography, meanwhile, tells the
story of how the world that pagans built came to be appropriated for Christian
use by the deployment of the live yet dead bodies of the saints. Yet paganity
is never quite over; traces of the pagan persist in the Christian world. The
pagan is to be found in the future as well as the past; indeed, the pagan may
even be identified with our own post-Christian present-day.