What happened to them in their new home? To focus on mobilities, however, is to pause on the road, not to reconstruct the means by which things arrive, but to examine the route itself. The trans in ‘transcultural’ certainly captures something about movement: How did coins minted in Samarkand end up in England? Christianity from the Eastern Mediterranean rim in China? A focus on the transcultural Middle Ages is often a focus on ideas, people and goods once they have arrived. This issue of postmedieval, then, asks a deceptively simple question: How did ‘things’ Footnote 1 circulate globally across borders during the Middle Ages and with what consequences for cultural interaction? The volume assumes the construct of a transcultural Middle Ages and puts that paradigm into dialogue with the emerging field of mobility studies. Archaeologists, numismatists and historians who study the remains of medieval material culture are constantly confronted with the reality of how often and how far goods traveled in the Middle Ages. As the ‘trail’ in the title suggests, the novel highlights flows across boundaries, both national and disciplinary: a temporal and geographical line that stretches back ‘from Essex to the North African deserts and the sphinx's smile’ ( Duffy, 2009, 123).ĭuffy's premise that an Anglo-Saxon grave might contain objects from the Middle East is not fiction. It requires a collaboration among experts from several disciplines to solve the murders by deciphering clues from the ancient past.
#Duffys menucal series
While the police sort out a series of grisly murders involving a pedophile ring exploiting migrant boys (another contemporary example of transcultural movement across borders), archaeologists and museum curators of Middle Eastern Studies, Egyptology, Anglo-Saxon England and, oddly, Victoriana, try to figure out how these antiquities fetched up in Essex.
The events of Maureen Duffy's Orpheus Trail are set in motion by the discovery in an Anglo-Saxon burial of several objects of Middle Eastern origin, including talismans representing Mithric and Orphic cults. The idea for a special issue on the transcultural Middle Ages with a focus on mobility came from a mystery novel.
0 kommentar(er)
