Christine Chism

Alliterative Revivals

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002

Alliterative Revivals is the first full-length study of the sophisticated historical consciousness of late medieval alliterative romance.  Drawing from historicism, feminism, performance studies, and postcolonial theory, Professor Christine Chism argues that those poems animate British history by reviving and acknowledging potentially threatening figures from the medieval past -- pagan judges, primeval giants, Greek knights, Jewish forefathers, Egyptian sorcerers, and dead ancestors.  In addressing the ways alliterative poems centralize history -- the dangerous but profitable commerce of the present with the past -- Chism's book shifts the emphasis from the philological questions that have preoccupied studies of alliterative romance and offers a new argument about the uses of alliterative poetry, how it appealed to its original producers and audiences, and why it deserves attention now.