‘How I miss the good times we have lost': fourteenth-century longing for the past

Event details

Speaker(s): Dr Hannah Skoda (St John’s College, Oxford)

The fourteenth century was a period of profound structural changes, eerily resonant with some of the challenges faced in our own times: pandemic, climate change, warfare, rampant inflation, political instability.  In the fourteenth century, this produced an overwhelming sense that even time was speeding up – and this in turn generated a nostalgia for slower-paced, more predictable and apparently more prosperous times.

This lecture will explore this nostalgia and its expressions across Italy, France and England, across a range of media – from political petitions, to chronicles, lyric poetry, sermons and manuscript illuminations. Nostalgia was never singular: it could be reactionary and a mode of response to change which privileged established interests.  But for the exploited and oppressed, nostalgia could mobilise powerful, emotive and hopeful visions of the future.

_{Limbourg brothers - Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry - Juin (June) - WGA13023.jpg}

HYBRID EVENT:  Zoom registration link here

A co-sponsored event with the Centre for Medieval Studies at Fordham University, New York