New Podcast Episode on the New Books Network: Jacob Abell

Medieval Institute Publications partners with the New Books Network, a consortium of author-interview podcast channels dedicated to introducing scholars to a wide public via new media, to produce podcast episodes featuring interviews with MIP authors.

In this episode on the New Books Network, we talk to Jacob Abell about his new book, Spiritual and Material Boundaries in Old French Verse: Contemplating the Walls of the Earthly Paradise. Abell tells us about the three poems he analyzes in the book—"The Voyage of St. Brendan the Abbot," "The Purgatory of St. Patrick," and "The Romance of the Rose"—and explains why he makes a “shift from a historical and intertextual mode of analysis to a more speculative approach” by the end of the book. This is an incredibly wide-ranging book, and in the episode we talk about everything from biblical images of idealized community to medieval gem theory! Finally, Abell offers what he thinks the book can tell us about what it meant to be human in the French-speaking Middle Ages. 

The Earthly Paradise was a vibrant symbol at the heart of medieval Christian geographies of the cosmos. As humanity’s primal home now lost through the sins of Adam of Eve, the Earthly Paradise figured prominently in Old French tales of lands beyond the mundane world. This study proposes a fresh look at the complex roles played by the Earthly Paradise in three medieval French poems: Marie de France’s "The Purgatory of St. Patrick," Benedeit’s "Voyage of Saint Brendan the Abbot," and Guillaume de Lorris’s "The Romance of the Rose." By examining the literary, cultural, and artistic components that informed each poem, this book advances the thesis that the exterior walls of the Earthly Paradise served evolving purposes as contemplative objects that implicitly engaged complex notions of economic solidarity and idealized community. These visions of the Earthly Paradise stand to provide a striking contribution to a historically informed response to the contemporary legacies of colonialism and the international refugee crisis.

ISBN 978-1-50152-057-0 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-50151-425-8 (PDF), ISBN 978-1-50151-427-2 (EPUB) © 2023