Overview

The sacred and the secular in medieval literature have too often been perceived as opposites, or else relegated to separate but unequal spheres. In Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular against the Sacred, Barbara Newman offers a new approach to the many ways that sacred and secular interact in medieval literature, arguing that (in contrast to our own cultural situation) the sacred was the normative, unmarked default category against which the secular always had to define itself and establish its niche. Newman refers to this dialectical relationship as ""crossover""-which is not a genre in itself, but a mode of interaction, an openness to the meeting or even merger of sacred and secular in a wide variety of forms. Newman sketches a few of the principles that shape their interaction: the hermeneutics of ""both/and,"" the principle of double judgment, the confluence of pagan material and Christian meaning in Arthurian romance, the rule of convergent idealism in hagiographic romance, and the double-edged sword in parody. Medieval Crossover explores a wealth of case studies in French, English, and Latin texts that concentrate on instances of paradox, collision, and convergence. Newman convincingly and with great clarity demonstrates the widespread applicability of the crossover concept as an analytical tool, examining some very disparate works. These include French and English romances about Lancelot and the Grail; the mystical writing of Marguerite Porete (placed in the context of lay spirituality, lyric traditions, and the Romance of the Rose); multiple examples of parody (sexually obscene, shockingly anti-Semitic, or cleverly litigious); and Rene of Anjou's two allegorical dream visions. Some of these texts are scarcely known to medievalists; others are rarely studied together. Newman's originality in her choice of these primary works will inspire new questions and set in motion new fields of exploration for medievalists working in a large variety of disciplines, including literature, religious studies, history, and cultural studies.

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Understanding these texts in conversation as crossover works, as Newman does, enriches and complicates our reading of each. . . . This book will be essential reading for any student of religion, history, or literary studies and will doubtless inspire much scholarship to come. --Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Volume 45, August 2014 In the conclusion, Newman generously identifies her work as laying a path to be pursued by others. In addition to the method it outlines, Medieval Crossover provides the ground for exploring why so many medieval texts and genres--in serious and playful registers--construct an inextricable relationship between the secular and the sacred, even when they seem most antithetical to one another. --Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Volume 36, 2014 Beyond the field of late medieval literary studies, Medieval Crossover is a must-read for scholars in any discipline concerned with secularization and passage to modernity. Medieval Crossover is the most powerful book about the interaction of pre-modern sacred and secular literary cultures since D.W. Robertson's A Preface to Chaucer. --Modern Philology, vol. 113, no. 2, Nov. 2015 Newman's book works against the effects of Robertson's totalizing program, and on that score alone its contribution is considerable. . . Newman thus reveals a strain in medieval literary history with long antecedents and wide application. It would seem to have been waiting a long time to be revealed. On this view, then, Newman's book is revelatory. -- Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 52, no. 3, 2015 [Newman] aptly reminds us of the distance between the modern and the medieval, noting how sometime between 1600 and 1900 the secular rather than the sacred becomes the default category of Western culture. . . . Having herself 'crossed over' from English literature to French, and from religious texts to secular romance, Newman's enthusiasm for this 'crossover' will fruitfully enrich the contacts between these academic fields. --Speculum, Vol. 91, No. 3. July 2016

In Medieval Crossover, Barbara Newman highlights the ways in which the premodern reader understood 'sacred' and 'secular' not as opposing points on a continuum but as what Newman calls a state of 'double judgment, ' where transcendent truths could be understood through paradox or hermeneutic inversion. Exquisitely written, grounded in thoughtful readings of some of the most enigmatic texts of the Middle Ages, Medieval Crossover charts a new course in our understanding of premodern modes of interpretation. --Suzanne Conklin Akbari, University of Toronto

Author Information

Barbara Newman is professor of English, religious studies, and classics at Northwestern University. She is the author of a number of books, including God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages and Frauenlob’s Song of Songs: A Medieval German Poet and His Masterpiece.

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