Matthias Friedrich

Scholarship often treats the post-Roman art produced in central and north-western Europe as representative of the pagan identities of the new 'Germanic' rulers of the early medieval world. In this book, Matthias Friedrich offers a critical reevaluation of the ethnic and religious categories of art that still inform our understanding of early medieval art and archaeology. He scrutinises early medieval visual culture by combining archaeological approaches with art historical methods based on contemporary theory. Friedrich examines the transformation of Roman imperial images, together with the contemporary, highly ornamented material culture that is epitomized by 'animal art.' Through a rigorous analysis of a range of objects, he demonstrates how these pathways produced an aesthetic that promoted variety (varietas), a cross-cultural concept that bridged the various ethnic and religious identities of post-Roman Europe and the Mediterranean worlds.

New Perspectives on Post-Roman Art

Image and Ornament in the Early Medieval West

Anna Hetzer

Tobias Roth

Christian Wöllecke

Rick Reuther

Timo Brandt

Lena Mareen Bruns

Carla Hegerl

Moritz Gause

Laura Lichtblau

Martin Piekar

Tobias Herold

Magda Kotzurek

Anthologien, die Stimmen der Gegenwartslyrik versammeln, gehen derzeit glücklicherweise noch regelmäßig in Druck. Gespräche über einzelne Gedichte dagegen nicht, wie wir finden. Deshalb ist die vierzehnte Ausgabe der metamorphosen ein Lyrik-Spezial geworden: Die Rubrik Ein Gedicht von ... haben wir diesmal auf Heftlänge ausgedehnt, dreizehn junge LyrikerInnen um ein Gespräch gebeten. Dabei sollten nicht so sehr bestimmte Poetiken herausgestellt werden oder gar der "Lektüreschlüssel" gereicht; "Verständlichkeit", heißt es in einem der Gespräche, sei "kein Qualitätsmerkmal." Die Währung des Gedichts ist die Gesamtheit seiner Zugänge, im besten Fall ist die Anzahl der LeserInnen das Maß. Das Gespräch über den einzelnen Text, so die Hoffnung, s(t)imuliert das Gespräch zwischen LeserIn und Gedicht. So bleiben letztlich Gedichte, die man im besten Fall auch allesamt ohne das Gespräch lesen kann oder sollte.

Magazin für Literatur und Kultur

metamorphosen 14 – Ein Gedicht von ...

James M. Harland

Any reader of scholarship on the ancient and early medieval world will be familiar with the term 'Germanic', which is frequently used as a linguistic category, ethnonym, or descriptive identifier for a range of forms of cultural and literary material. But is the term meaningful, useful, or legitimate? The term, frequently applied to peoples, languages, and material culture found in non-Roman north-western and central Europe in classical antiquity, and to these phenomena in the western Roman Empire’s successor states, is often treated as a legitimate, all-encompassing name for the culture of these regions. Its usage is sometimes intended to suggest a shared social identity or ethnic affinity among those who produce these phenomena. Yet, despite decades of critical commentary that have highlighted substantial problems, its dominance of scholarship appears not to have been challenged. This edited volume, which offers contributions ranging from literary and linguistic studies to archaeology, and which span from the first to the sixteenth centuries AD, examines why the term remains so pervasive despite its problems, offering a range of alternative interpretative perspectives on the late and post-Roman worlds.

A Category and its Use in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages

Interrogating the 'Germanic'

Matthias Friedrich

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