Medieval Hackers

Published: 01/16/2015

Medieval Hackers calls attention to the use of certain vocabulary terms in the Middle Ages and today: commonness, openness, and freedom. Today we associate this language with computer hackers, some of whom believe that information, from literature to the code that makes up computer programs, should be much more accessible to the general public than[…]

The South Station Hoard: Imagining, Creating and Empowering Violent Remains

Published: 12/27/2014

This collaborative arts research project compares the landmark discovery of the Staffordshire Hoard, the largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver metalwork discovered in 2009, with an imagined hoard from present day pre-adolescent girls. The collaborators constructed a subterranean installation, generated speculative historical documents, collected and embellished social networking “artifacts,” and photographed the entire process.[…]

In a Trance: On Paleo Art

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Published: 11/13/2014

In a Trance is just the sort of genre-defying work we at Peanut and punctum and, as it happens, Jeffrey Skoblow, revel in. It is a book-length essay by a fiction writer. It is a fictional essay by a literary scholar. It is a gallant assay by a smart man who thinks while he walks,[…]

Dotawo: A Journal of Nubian Studies 1

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Published: 06/23/2014

Nubian studies needs a platform in which the old meets the new, in which archaeological, papyrological, and philological research into Meroitic, Old Nubian, Coptic, Greek, and Arabic sources confront current investigations in modern anthropology and ethnography, Nilo-Saharan linguistics, and critical and theoretical approaches present in post-colonial and African studies. The journal Dotawo: A Journal of[…]

Cotton Nero A.x: The Works of the “Pearl” Poet

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Published: 04/24/2014

Manuscript Cotton Nero A.x takes its designation from the unique cataloging system of seventeenth-century British antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton’s library: busts of historical figures atop shelves provided the organizing principle, such that one found this particular codex under the bust of Roman Emperor Nero, on the top shelf, ten volumes over. (Another famous manuscript, containing Beowulf,[…]

Unless As Stone Is

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Published: 04/01/2014

The sestina is a form in which words repeat regularly, intricately, appearing and reappearing in new contexts with new meanings. Sam Lohmann’s Unless As Stone Is emerged from a few years of living with Dante’s sestina, “Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d’ombra.” He allowed the text to appear in its own new — if irregularly[…]

The Witch and the Hysteric

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Published: 08/08/2014

Benjamin Christensen’s 1922 Swedish/Danish film Häxan (known under its English title as Witchcraft Through the Ages) has entranced, entertained, shocked, and puzzled audiences for nearly a century. The film mixes documentary with fantasy, history with theatrics, religion and science, the medieval past and modern culture. This uncanny content is compounded by the film’s formal strangeness,[…]

Itinerant Spectator/Itinerant Spectacle

Published: 12/20/2013

Read Ayanna Thompson’s review of Itinerant Spectator/Itinerant Spectacle in Theatre Journal! Itinerant Spectator/Itinerant Spectacle moves across the landscape of European performance in late 20th and early 21st centuries, recounting performance in circulation across national borders and across the itinerant bodies of spectators who travel to meet performances that travel. Itinerant Spectator/Itinerant Spectacle suggests spectating is[…]