Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Rohr, Zita Eva
• Spangler, Jonathan W.

Titel

Introduction: Significant others: aspects of deviance and difference in premodern court cultures Tales of the unexpected?

Ist Teil von

• Significant Others, 2022, p.1-26

Auflage

1

Ort / Verlag

United Kingdom: Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2022

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Should we, as Zrinka Blažević posits, 1 begin our collection’s journey with L.P. Hartley’s well-worn, ‘witty insight’ that “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”? 2 Or, should we instead regard the alterities of the past more unambiguously as David Lowenthal does when he observes, “The past was not only weirder than we realize; it was weirder than we can imagine”? 3 Neither Hartley’s ‘foreignness’ of the past, nor Lowenthal’s ‘weirdness’ of it, should discourage us in our attempts to arrive at more nuanced understandings of the past and the people and groups who populated it. Instead, it ought to inspire us to rummage around yet more determinedly in our methodological tool-boxes for precision lenses with which to locate the premodern past in all its ‘foreignness’, ‘weirdness’, and alterity. This collection aims to do just that: to share our methodological tools and fresh insights to open new avenues of thought and pose new questions of aspects of premodern court cultures and indeed the premodern past more generally. It is our intention to call into question long-held misunderstandings as to how certain significant ‘others’ used their deviance and/or difference to leave indelible marks on premodern spaces, marks that appear abstruse, ‘other’, and even weird in light of our contemporary abstractions and concerns.