In the rich history of Icelandic literature, the most famous literary genres are undoubtedly the medieval sagas and the contemporary criminal novels. However, those genres are as not as far from each other as one may think, since masterpieces of Icelandic medieval literature are sometimes summoned by contemporary authors, as is shown in The Flatey Enigma (Icelandic: Flateyjargáta), a criminal novel by Viktor Arnar Ingólfsson which is built around the story and the contents of the Book of Flatey, a famous fourteenth Icelandic manuscript. The present article provides an analysis of the place and function of the manuscripts and the medieval texts it contains: the results obtained show that their main function is to help the development of the plot, although some intertextual references also have a didactic dimension, whereas others provide information about the relations between the characters and the Book of Flatey.

There appear to be quite a few parallels between Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy (Consolatio Philosophiae), and they seem to concern particularly, though not only, the character drawing in Tolkien’s book. Those parallels are preeminently connected with the fact that both Boethius and Tolkien like to think of the most extreme situations that can befall a human. And both are attached to the idea of not giving in to despair, and of finding a source of hope in seemingly desperate straits. The idea that there is some link between Boethius and Tolkien is naturally not new. T.A. Shippey talks about it in his The Road to Middle Earth, but he concentrates on the Boethian conception of good and evil, which is also of course an important matter, but surely not the only one that links Tolkien and Boethius. On the other hand, it is not my intention to claim that there is something in Tolkien’s book of which it can be said that it would have been absolutely impossible without Boethius. Still, I think it may be supposed that just like Boethian motifs are natural in the medieval literature of the West, so they can be thought of as natural in the work of such dedicated a medievalist as J.R.R. Tolkien.

Arthuriana has a long history of adaptation and appropriation in medieval and contemporary works, and the tradition of such textual borrowing and reworking continues in contemporary “genre” novels, particularly those that invoke associations with knights, honor, and codes of chivalry. One such example are the novels and short stories of the Dragonlance setting. Sturm Brightblade is positioned as a knight who adheres to a code of honor and is given Arthurian character traits, narrative arcs, and a backstory by the various authors that have fleshed out his history. The texts in the Dragonlance setting knowingly use appropriated elements from Middle English Arthurian works and assign them to Sturm Brightblade to give him proper positioning as a knight that would fit in with Arthur’s legendary Round Table.

Both Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Joyce Carol Oates’s Carthage are set in times of war, the Trojan War and the Iraq War, respectively, and both are associated with love on the one hand, and loss on the other. In fact, Carthage contains many echoes of the past, with the main characters of the novel, Juliet and Cressida Mayfield, bringing connotations with Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s works, their father compared to an old Roman general, and Corporal Brett Kincaid likened to the hero of chivalric romances. The aim of this article is to argue that Oates’s Carthage may be seen as a modern Troilus and Cressida story in that it presents aspects of medieval reality in a modern guise, with the most poignant and recurrent association being that between the “war on terror” and medieval crusades and the emotion dominating the characters’ reactions being rage, an emotion which occurs in relation to the fires of passion and war in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, and Joyce Carol Oates’s Carthage.

Declamatio sub forma judicii can be found in the Graudenz Codex (1731–1740). It is an interlude that jokingly reports an animal trial. The interlude is a humorous treatment of the historical trials on animals that continued from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century. On
the one hand, such eighteenth-century discussions of animal trials continued the medieval tradition. This would confirm the diagnosis about the existence of the “long Middle Ages”, especially in Central and Eastern Europe, where the cultural trends could be somehow belated in comparison to those in the West. On the other hand, perhaps writing about animal trials in the eighteenth century was already a form of medievalism. High culture propagated anthropocentrism in its thinking about animals, while folk culture entailed anthropomorphism. In animal trials animals are treated as subjects to the same regulations as humans, which means that they were seen as very much similar to humans. The eighteenth-century interlude recreates this tradition, but it is a source of satirical laughter.

Dis/ability is a dynamic category produced in a complex constellation of factors that includes not only stigmatised mental and physical constraints or physiological differences, but also a manifestation of incapacity that is recognised or produced by law, social norms and the very way of thinking about the nature of bodily vulnerability. The meanings of dis/ability are thus culturally and historically dependent. Therefore, the manner in which dis/ability is presented on a theatrical stage can be considered not only as an important factor influencing the interpretation of a given production but also as a test for the dominant thinking of disability at a given point of time, in a given culture. The departure point for this paper is a brief discussion of the visibility of medieval models of dis/ability in Shakespeare’s plays and a reflection on how the reception of these dramatic texts has changed over time depending on the paradigmatic shifts in thinking about dis/ability, especially with the emergence of disability studies and the growing theoretical reflection on the position of dis/ability in theatre. An especially interesting case in point is the reception of Caliban as a character whose stigmatisation can be expressed through bodily difference. Thus, the paper focuses on what seems to be a systematic aberrant decoding of The Tempest in three twenty-first century Polish productions of the play.

The purpose of this essay is to analyse a forgotten work by Sylvain Maréchal, a French political writer of the Enlightenment. Written on the eve of the French Revolution, his Apologues modernes heavily criticize the socio-political system of the French monarchy of Louis XVI. The analysis of his work proves that the author does not limit himself to criticising the situation before 1789, but he clearly predicts events of the forthcoming revolution and the resulting change. One could say that, like a true prophet, he foresees the end of the monarchy as such and proclaims the arrival of a new social and political order, a universal republic, not only in France, but in Europe in general.