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Jan Ziolkowski

Nostalgia and the German(ic) Past: The Medieval Poem of Walthare
Ziolkowski, Jan M. 2024. Nostalgia and the German(ic) Past: The Medieval Poem of Walthare. Zürich: Chronos Verlag. Publisher's Version Abstract
Has nostalgia existed forever or only since a given date? The word is first attested in 1688, but the experience of homesickness for a specific place, time, or both may be universal among human beings. Today nostalgia receives extensive scrutiny, in mass media as well as in scholarship. Longing for the Middle Ages has been regarded as sometimes dangerous for political reasons. Suspicion has grown about nostalgia for and in the medieval period: consider the furor over the term Anglo-Saxon. The Medieval Latin Poem of Walthare, better known as the Waltharius, cries out for a share of attention. This essay situates the Poem of Walthare within nostalgia studies. The examination reviews the many different types of nostalgia that have been identified lately. Alongside private and collective, it touches on the role of consumerism and the politicization of nostalgia, especially by (neo-)Nazis, white supremacists, and their opponents. At the same time, the study delves into the earlier medical view of nostalgia: this syndrome was diagnosed among Swiss mercenaries in the late seventeenth century. The recent debates have interesting consequences for the short medieval epic, which is rooted in the events of a distant Germanic past, which produced legends of exiles who yearned for their homes and peoples. Yet the Latin of the Middle Ages does not fit naturally within modern national languages and literatures. Since the late eighteenth century, the poem has been coordinated with early medieval German culture. Jacob Grimm, who played a foundational role in this research, paid heed to the longing for a German homeland that he felt. Joseph Victor von Scheffel had his own nostalgia for long-ago Saint Gall.
Solomon and Marcolf: Vernacular Traditions
Ziolkowski, Jan M, ed. 2022. Solomon and Marcolf: Vernacular Traditions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Publisher's Version Abstract

The Latin prose Solomon and Marcolf, enigmatic in origins, has been a puzzle from long before the sixteenth-century French author François Rabelais through the twentieth-century Russian critic Bakhtin to today. Though often called a dialogue, the second of its two parts comprises a rudimentary novel with twenty episodes. In 2009 the “original” received at last an edition and translation with commentary as the first volume in the Harvard Studies in Medieval Latin series.

Solomon and Marcolf: Vernacular Traditions, the fourth volume in the series, displays the mysteries of the tradition. Solomon relates to the biblical king, but did Marcolf originate in Germanic or Eastern regions? Here lovers of literature and folklore may explore, in English for the first time, relevant texts, from the twelfth through the early eighteenth century. These astonishingly varied and fascinating pieces, from Iceland in the North and West through Russia in the East and Italy in the South, have been translated from medieval and early modern French, Russian, German, Icelandic, Danish, and Italian. The book opens with snapshots of two nineteenth-century polymaths, the Englishman John M. Kemble and Russian Aleksandr Veselovskii, whose hypotheses can now be evaluated. An appendix documents awareness of Solomon and Marcolf in late medieval and early modern times.

The Virgil Encyclopedia
Thomas, Richard F, and Jan M Ziolkowski, ed. 2014. The Virgil Encyclopedia. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 1600. Publisher's Version Abstract

The Virgil Encyclopedia is the first comprehensive reference volume to be published in English on Publius Vergilius Maro, the classical Roman poet whose works and thoughts have been at the center of Western literary, cultural, artistic, and pedagogical traditions for more than two millennia. Through more than 2,200 carefully researched entries, scholars and students alike are provided with an in-depth treatment of all aspects of Virgil’s poetry and his immeasurable influence that continues to the present day.

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