![]() Taken together, the interest in these figures suggests a growing infatuation with medieval forms of devotion, characterised by corporeal and psychic intensity. A similar urge can be seen in the copious literary reanimations of Simone Weil, who, despite living in the twentieth century, had a curiously medieval approach to faith and spirituality – one in rapture to sacrifice and suffering. Hildegard von Bingen, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe keep recurring in contemporary texts, usually symbolic of an urge towards alternative female authority, power and sources of knowledge. ![]() Yet, here too, a particular strain of neo-medievalism has been rising to the surface, often in the form of an ongoing obsession with female mystics. While all this has been seething, it might seem like literary fiction has been lagging somewhat behind – its gaze resolutely set on grappling with text-speak, or, in cultural criticism, circling the unending debate over which books men and women should read. Artists merging emergent technologies such as AI and machine learning with myth and mysticism to imagine alternative worlds, which seem to hover and glitch between the ancient and the futuristic. ![]() Ravers dressed as medieval forest dwellers, dancing to fantasy-inspired techno. Arrows raining down on models at Paris Fashion Week. The worlds of music, fashion and visual art have been flirting with folklore and pagan iconography for some time now. Perhaps this feeling is partly why she has, in the past, chosen chainmail, plate armour, and fantastical, elven costuming to accompany her vocals – which themselves have been described as ‘diaphanous and otherworldly, somewhere between the call of a siren and the religious arias of an eleventh-century abbess.’ And she’s far from the only one at it. ‘It feels like music is returning to some kind of medieval folk medium where we are bards again, self-promoting in the streets or taking the occasional commission from patrons,’ pop-cyborg Caroline Polachek said last summer. ![]() Courtesy Flickr, Creative Commons photo: Erin Mc CC BY 2.0 Lapvona is landing at a time when, from the club to the catwalk, neo-medieval fashion, Catholic aesthetics, mysticism, chamber chorals, and pagan ritual are all the rage.Ĭaroline Polachek, 2021. Indeed, the second reason why we should have expected Moshfegh to go medieval, is precisely because the contemporary popularity of grotesque, absurdist fables like hers points to a wider resurgence of medieval tropes and trends. While it might be convenient to think of these qualities as unique to literature of the post-internet, and certainly the post-Reformation age, in truth they are closely aligned to many of the affective and aesthetic traditions of the Middle Ages. Firstly, because Moshfegh’s novels are abject and pervy deviant and corporally charged. So, despite the fact Rest and Relaxation was in fact a work of historical fiction (an eccentric yet meticulous account of New York’s pre-9/11 culture its downtown art scene and existential ennui), and that her debut, McGlue (2014), takes place on a nineteenth-century pirate ship, when it was announced her new novel, Lapvona, was set in a medieval fiefdom, there was an undeniable frisson of surprise.Īlthough, really, we should have seen this coming. Alcoholic divorcees, catatonic party girls. Heralded as the ‘laureate of lockdown’ for her depiction of a socialite in social hibernation – sleeping through a year in a narcotic-induced haze-cum-frenzy – Moshfegh is often thought of spearheading the modern trend for fictions of alienation and disaffection, featuring a cast of recognisably contemporary outsiders. Ottessa Moshfegh is…a medievalist?įor those who know Moshfegh mainly through the cultural commentary that sprung up in the wake of the mind-boggling success of her second novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), the thought of the author as anything other than an oracle of the contemporary might seem strange. Ottessa Moshfegh is walking in New York Fashion Week. On Ottessa Moshfegh’s Lapvona and the medieval turn
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