The Contested Body of the King: Producing and Challenging Political Consensus in the Medieval Kingdom of León

In my contribution I will analyse the construction and development of political discourses in the kingdom of León between the mid-ninth and the mid-eleventh centuries. In early medieval north-western Spain the monarchy emerged as an encompassing political arena in which actors from different backgrounds interacted and negotiated their power relations. In spite of their differences, they shared a common interest in the existence and reproduction of the monarchy. By the end of the ninth-century the ideological foundations of this basic consensus, and thus of royal authority, were defined. However, as times of political tension and instability came that consensus was increasingly challenged, particularly by some aristocratic groups. At the end of the 10th century those in the ecclesiastical entourage of the kings of León, whose position was being threatened by the increasing power of certain aristocratic groups, sought to reinforce their political position by strengthening the image of the king while at the same time asserting their own authority, even over the king. The image of the Visigothic kings, already present in the late ninth-century chronicles, was then put forward as a model for royal behaviour. Which were the foundations of political consensus in the kingdom of León? How did the different actors use them in order to articulate their own political discourses? To what extent were the essential aspects of consensus modified by conflicting political discourses?

My doctoral dissertation entitled: Prayers for a King in the Roman Canon of the Mass. A Study in the Early Medieval Political Theology in Latin Christianity was written under the supervision of Prof. Roman Michałowski and defended at the Department of History, University of Warsaw. In this thesis, which I’m preparing for publication, I survey the history of the exceptional prayers for kings during the Eucharist and their importance for the sacralization of kingship in early medieval Europe, based on the analysis of over four hundred liturgical manuscripts. The dissertation provides statistical research on the dissemination of these prayers in the Latin liturgy throughout Europe and it focuses on specific ecclesiastical centers and figures by analyzing their causes for accepting or rejecting the tradition. My thesis questions generalizations about the desacralizing period of the so-called Gregorian Reform as contrasted with the sacralizing Ottonian and early Salian Church, and proposes that sacralization and desacralization seem to be less static characteristics of any one period, but rather dynamic interplays between various individual networks, and vivid relationships created through varied and individual negotiations.

I received my M.A. in history at the Institute of History, University of Warsaw (2011), MTS (Master of Theological Studies) at the Department of Theology, University of Notre Dame (2017), and PhD in history at the Department of History, University of Warsaw (2016). I have been awarded fellowships by the Fulbright Commission, Sonderforschungsbereich 496 (in Münster, Germany), the Foundation for Polish Science (FNP START), and Rome Global Gateway. I have also been a Fellow at Collegium Invisibile (collaboration with Grażyna Jurkowlaniec, Hagen Keller and Peter Jeffery), a Garstka Fellow at the Department of History, University of Notre Dame, and a Fellow at the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture.

My current book project, provisionally entitled Dangerous Prayers for Rulers: A Case Study in Medieval Political Theology, furthers the research of my dissertation exploring the liturgical roots of medieval political theology and influence of the Eucharist on political culture throughout the European Middle Ages. Moreover, within the grant OPUS of Prof. Michałowski I am analyzing Polish liturgical sources (until ca. 1300) in order to include this overlooked material into the narrative on political, social and religious history of medieval Polish culture. I enjoy teaching (many courses already taught both at the University of Warsaw and University of Notre Dame), swimming and watching soccer.

Gradual of Boleslaus II of Mazovia and the Political Theology of Medieval Europe

Presumably between 1310 and 1313, scribes produced a manuscript for Boleslaus II of Mazovia, which contained a prayer for the ruler. The intercession was formulated as “una cum papa, et episcopo, et duce,” which suggested that ducal power and ecclesiastical authority, while not explicitly equal, shared a similar importance. In a world dominated by rituals, this had quite an important meaning, especially in light of the fact that the chant was performed during the most solemn liturgy of the year, the Easter Vigil, which is meant to represent the deeds of Redemption. The text itself suggested that those who participated in the solemnities were a part of the history of salvation. The invocation of the political and ecclesiastical elite marked the path from Adam to the heavenly Jerusalem, where bishop John, duke Boleslaus and his sons Siemowit and Wańko should be present. The insertion of their names in gold was meant to grant them eternal presence with God. However, the name of the duke was written in gold majuscule script with the use of red ink, suggesting that the prayer was meant to reinforce political majesty of Boleslaus II even after the restoration of the Polish kingdom by other rulers. The prayer was also a part of the phenomenon of sacrality of ducal power in Mazovia which had a longer tradition. This phenomenon was modeled on the approaches used by Piast dynasty after the loss of their royal title in the second half of the eleventh century. The sacrality of ducal power in Mazovia, however, is not very different from that of other contemporary European duchies. Mazovia may have been located on the edge of the Christian world, but the course of its history in the Middle Ages – marked by crusades against Baltic pagans, preparations for campaigns against the Mongols, attempts at the unification of the kingdom of Ruthenia with Rome, and diplomatic relations with both the papacy and the most important rulers of Central Europe – demonstrates that it should not be marginalised in scholarship, especially in regard to the phenomenon of sacralised political power.

Apart from seeking new perspectives for elucidating medieval “international” politics, I am an aspiring professional in the field of teaching history in higher education. I have participated in a number of courses and trainings provided by the CEU Center for Teaching and Learning and I have completed its Program for Excellence in Teaching in Higher Education for CEU doctoral students. Besides, I cooperate with the Museum of John Paul II and Primate Wyszyński (a fairly new cultural initiative based in Warsaw) on the issues related to developing its permanent exhibition and its research and educational agenda.

Political Theology and “International” Conflict in the Thirteenth-Century Latin Christendom

Is the thirteenth-century “international” system of Latin Europe informed by political theology? To put it differently, is the concept of political theology in any way helpful to determine how the “international” order of the thirteenth-century Latin Christendom was organized, structured and justified by its agents? Was there, in fact, any organizational or legitimizing effort involved?

These research questions reveal a working assumption that underpins my research agenda for the “Rex nunquam moritur” project. Namely, however different the thirteenth-century “international” politics was in comparison to the contemporary world order, it is still possible to imagine Latin Christendom as by and large a community of lords (and lordships) that formed a certain type of international society. This society was essentially conceptualized as Christian society (a community of God) and therefore, it was powerfully constituted by religiously-driven mindset that remained the predominant element (or component) of the political culture.

Pursuing this religious component in all its possible aspects goes beyond the confines of this particular research project. Narrowing down its scope, I propose an inquiry that will address only the practical element of interaction between the culturally co-constructed “international” system and Christianity. This research utilizes the original understanding of political theology as a legal theory of political arrangements and aims to investigate what was the role of Christian religion in governing the “international” practices of Latin Christendom in the thirteenth century. More specifically, I will analyze how the thirteenth-century Christian society of lords (de)legitimized “international” conflict within its ranks (hence excluding conflicts with outside world). I am particularly interested in narratives that described causes of such conflicts, methods which were applied to resolve them, and the presence and significance of religious argument in recognizing or rejecting justifications of political (military) inter-lordly conflict.

In other words, my research will examine intra-Christian controversies and seek to determine whether (and if yes, then how) pious and religious reasoning (as a constituent of political culture) attempted to influence behaviors of lords on the “international” stage.

In order to arrive at more general conclusions, I will interrogate and compare two different sources that shed light on the problem from two different perspectives, macro and micro: „international” decisions and rulings of the thirteenth-century ecumenical councils (Latin Christendom-wide scale) and Chronicle of Great Poland (the Polish lands micro-scale).

And then they were Bodies: Medieval Royalties, from DNA Analysis to a Nation's Identity

On 28th of June 2012, the tomb of Vladislav Vlaicu (1364-1377), one of the first rulers of Wallachia was opened by a team of scientists, who took a left hand phalanx, a molar and a right metatarsal bone. The action was part of a multi-disciplinary project called GENESIS (Genetic Evolution: New Evidences for the Study of Interconnected Structures. A Biomolecular Journey around the Carpathians from Ancient to Medieval Times, 2013-2015), Romania. Their premise, as declared on their project website is that "Often, the image presented by molecular techniques completely challenges past suppositions. Archaeology and history [..] Being concerned with recounting and reconstructing past lives, they involve, at some point, the study of ... human remains, and thus, are also affected by the molecular revolution that sweeps other biological domains." (http://www.ibiol.ro/proiecte/PNII/GENESIS/rezumat.htm). Thus, history and archaeology are viewed as subjective discourses regarding the past, and it is time for an "objective", modern science to test these stories (through aDNA, genetic or isotopic analysis). In this context, the body of Vladislav Vlaicu becomes very important, along other Romanian princes' bodies, because it is expected to provide an "objective" testimony regarding his ethnic origin.

The question that such an endeavour raises is: what does it mean to be Romanian? What are the epistemological consequences of defining a ruler's identity in biologic or rather cultural terms? What is a legitimate way of writing a nation's history? My intention is to explore such issues, to see how the princes' bodies are turned into a political matter. Modernity has brought to the fore the concept of the body understood as a relative concept, open to change and historically, culturally, and socially constituted. Therefore, starting from the particular case of the Genesis project, it is my intention to analyse the way the king's body is understood in a contemporary scientific context. Concepts such as the foundations of the nation and its identity, ethnicity, the ownership over a territory, and the power of historical accounts are also brought forth by such a project. In this case, they all revolve around rulers' bodies, turning them into bones of contention.

My field of research is Italian and Neo-Latin literature and its connections to Old Hungarian culture. I am particularly interested in the spread of Francis Petrarch's, Giovanni Boccaccio's and Enea Silvio Piccolomini's works in East-Central Europe. I have already published articles on four different translations of Enea Silvio Piccolomini's best-selling early modern love story, the Historia de duobus amantibus (1444). I was also member of the editorial team publishing an early Hungarian translation of Francis Petrarch's De remediis utriusque fortunae: Petrarcha Ferenc, A jó szerencsének és a szerencsétlenségnek orvosságairól: Székely László fordítása (1760-1762), szerk. Lengyel Réka, Máté Ágnes, Bíró Csilla, 674 p., Szeged, Lazi Könyvkiadó, 2015.

I have two forthcoming books in Hungarian and in English, respectively: Fabula és história határán, Lazi Könyvkiadó, Szeged, 2018. The Early Reception of Eneas Silvius Piccolomini's Historia de duobus amantibus Across Europe.

Apart from my academic interests in philological investigations, I like all forms of crime stories and science fiction. My dream is to eventually see all the works of Sandro Botticelli which are on display in public collections all around the world.

Life and Afterlife of the Pontifical Indiscretions in the Renaissance

The Popes were among the most important figures of the European culture through the centuries. Both their private and public acts could turn out to be politically and religiously seminal. Therefore both their lives were a subject of constant and common attention. Disseminating the gossips and indiscretions about popes could advance one's career at the Papal court and other political centers of early modern times, but it could just as well exacerbate it.

The Popes were among the most important figures of the European culture through the centuries. Both their private and public acts could turn out to be politically and religiously seminal. Therefore both their lives were a subject of constant and common attention. Disseminating the gossips and indiscretions about popes could advance one's career at the Papal court and other political centers of early modern times, but it could just as well exacerbate it.

The circulation of these indiscretions did not use to end with the demise of a sinful pope. Posterity recycled them as an argument in the debate on the reform of the papal office and the whole mystical body of the Church; the question of celibacy in particular. Only the council of Trent cut this debate in Catholicism. The protestant apologists went on using pontiff's family lives to discredit the papal authority. Thus, the deeds of office holders' body physical became permanently entangled with the image and legitimization of the body politics.

In my research I draw on my background in Art History (MA 2010) and Classical Philology (MA 2009), which I studied at the University of Warsaw. I also studied and researched at the Central European University in Budapest (2012–2013, 2014), University of Oxford (2011–2012) and Freie Universität Berlin (2007–2008). I was a holder of scholarships from the KAAD (Katholischer Akademischer Ausländer-Dienst, 2007–2008) and the Polish Minister of Science and Higher Education (2008–2010). I participated in two collaborative research projects: Byzantium and Renaissances. Dialogue of Cultures, Heritage of Antiquity - Tradition and Modernity (headed by rev. prof. Michał Janocha) and Inter-cultural Transmission of Intellectual Traditions in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. A comparative perspective (led by dr. Adam Izdebski)

My research interests encompass mechanisms of visual communication, identity-building functions of texts and images, cultural memory and early printed books.

The King’s Immature Body: Representations of Child Coronations in Poland, Hungary and Bohemia (1382-1530)

‘All the laws were carefully preserved in the case of the noble king Ladislaus, and on the day on which his grace was exactly twelve weeks old. And you probably know that as the Archbishop placed the Holy Crown on the child’s head and held it there, he held up his head with the strength of a one-year-old, and that is rarely seen in children of twelve weeks.’ (The Memoirs of Helene Kottanner (1439-1440), transl. and ed. by Maya Bijvoet Williamson, Cambridge 1998, 43-44) – wrote in her diary a lady-in-waiting of Queen Elisabeth of Hungary, who was personally engaged in the arrangement of the ceremony. In her account Kottanner mentions not only that the king was mature beyond his age, but also that the colours of his ceremonial garments by chance corresponded to the dynastic colours of the Habsburgs. Many other circumstances of the enthronization seemed to further favour the newly crowned baby king.

In medieval and early modern Central Europe a child-monarch reached adulthood rather early. Despite this fact the region saw several rulers who were crowned at a very early age – in the first months of their lives (as Ladislaus the Posthumous) or before their fourteenth birthday (as Louis II of Hungary or Sigismund II Augustus). The phenomenon of children coronations, studied in detail in the case of French or Scottish history, remains on the margins of investigations on the history of Central European culture. Therefore, the main objective of my contribution is to fill this gap in scholarship by the examination of the corpus of literary and visual sources in order to demonstrate the ways in which the authority of the immature royal body was established and/or contested. In so doing, my research aims to answer the following questions: What strategies were developed to strengthen the authority of the child king? Were they similar in the case of female and male rulers? Who were the main authors and beneficiaries of the representations of the infant monarchs? Finally, in what ways did political theology serve the young rulers and their wardens?

I have also been working as a translator and a book editor. I co-translated Roberto Calasso’s La folie Baudelaire. I published the The Court Masques of Charles I Stuart. The Iconography and the Divine Right of Kings (2014), Chosen pages from the Joseph Czapski diaries (2010), Radiation. Zbigniew Herbert’s Sketchbooks (2009).

Embodied Kingdom: Royal Iconography and the Queen’s Body

The purpose of my research is to examine how the royal portraiture helped to create and sanctify the image of kingship and royal authority. I would like to read royal images as the visual representation of the king’s spiritual, sacred and immortal body that transcends the earthly and serves as a symbol of his office. The main subject of my analysis are representations of queen Elizabeth I – mainly visual, but also textual. The question I am trying to answer is how Elizabeth’s extensive iconographic repertoire helped establish her sacred majesty, her divine royal identity, both as the chaste, beautiful goddess and as the powerful Christian ruler. How she managed to create (self-fashion, as Stephen Greenblatt calls it) the image of herself as a super-natural creature using royal attributes and symbolic imagery.

The purpose of my research is to examine how the royal portraiture helped to create and sanctify the image of kingship and royal authority. I would like to read royal images as the visual representation of the king’s spiritual, sacred and immortal body that transcends the earthly and serves as a symbol of his office. The main subject of my analysis are representations of queen Elizabeth I – mainly visual, but also textual. The question I am trying to answer is how Elizabeth’s extensive iconographic repertoire helped establish her sacred majesty, her divine royal identity, both as the chaste, beautiful goddess and as the powerful Christian ruler. How she managed to create (self-fashion, as Stephen Greenblatt calls it) the image of herself as a super-natural creature using royal attributes and symbolic imagery.

The Early Modern idea of the empire (espérance imperiale, as Dame Frances A. Yates calls it) always had a strong religious subtext. To exercise royal authority wasn’t just a political aim – not in today’s meaning of the word. The king’s main obligation was to execute God’s plan of salvation: protect the perfect order God had established, defend true faith, uproot vices and make virtues flourish. In other words, to restore the perfect harmony of nature and men that the ancients called the Golden Age.

The aim of my research is, firstly, to analyze what visual means were used to define the sanctity of royal power and, secondly, how royal iconography in general was influenced by this religious vision of politics.

An imperial father restores an abducted girl from ‘barbarian’ hands back to his household where she is reunited with her mother Constantinople – thus an anonymous Byzantine poem, published recently by Foteini Spingou, symbolises the reconquest and refortification of the city of Dorylaion (Sultanyügi, present-day Eskişehir) in 1175, a century after the initial Turkic arrival in Asia Minor. The portrayal invites questions about how political institutions have been predicated on women’s corporeality, and how the ancient spousal axiom making woman into a phallic extension of man’s own body has prefigured the mystical unity between the ruler and the state. While celebrating the emperor’s invulnerability, the poem points to an imminent crack in the body armour of the patriarchal family: the daughter’s sexuality charged with political surplus value. What grounds the supreme authority of the father/emperor in one moment, in the next can turn into the prize of victory for the intruder. Patriarchal anxieties over the chastity of daughters, central to the aristocratic neo-Roman ethos of Kekaumenos and contemporaries, find their realisation in the epic of Digenis Akritis and ultimately in the medieval Turkic lore of a young Byzantine who betrays her father and assists the gazi hero announced to her in a dream in breaking her out from the paternal castle. The swashbuckling champion of the faith seemed to signify for the early Ottoman rulers what the ‘twyborn borderer’ Digenis did for the Komnenian dynasts – a political myth and the point of imaginary identification – and his ethos also fueled the imperial fantasy of Paul Wittek, an eminent historian of medieval Anatolia who shared intellectual ties to the George-Kreis with Ernst Kantorowicz. Wittek’s austerely mystical proclivities made him dismissive of the erotic dimension to the Anatolian Rapunzel tale which he treated in detail – but it is precisely by putting sex back in the body politic and by tracing the denial of desire and sexual difference to the psychoanalytic ‘holy family’ that the founding exception of the sovereign exempt from earthly passions and deriving power from the control and sublimation of female bodies can be better understood. My contribution aims to investigate the political theology enframing relations of power in medieval Anatolia, and to destabilise the perception of a unitary and static imperial order by focusing on the tensions and contradictions inherent in the frontier space, where the subsumed ‘good’ bodies of chaste women, tributary producers and dutiful citizens are forcibly segregated from their ‘evil’ counterparts – the dangerous jezebels, vagrants and savages – yet constantly threaten to slip away. The figure of the daughter, whose demanded sacrificial purity remains open to doubt and emancipation, will be my guide in the search for the patriarchal familial roots of imperial theology in the tributary (pre-capitalist) age.

Most of my published work focuses on literature between the 15th and 17th centuries (Thomas Malory, John Barclay, Pierre-Daniel Huet, Michael de Montaigne, Stanisław Herakliusz Lubomirski), but I already did some excursions into the superhero area (No name, no other alias: Twarz i maska w Batman Begins (2005) i The Dark Knight (2008) Christophera Nolana, an article published in the special „superhero” issue of „Maska” anthropological journal).

I’ve received a scholarship of the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education (2010/2011), a Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Foundation scholarship (2013/2014) and a „PRELUDIUM” research grant from the Polish National Science Centre (2013-2015).

The Superman’s Two Bodies: Corporality, Costume and Power in the DC Universe

The main question of the research I would like to conduct: how do the DC Universe comic books, movies and video games depict the relationship between the superhero’s body and the community of which he is a defender or a ruler?

The main question of the research I would like to conduct: how do the DC Universe comic books, movies and video games depict the relationship between the superhero’s body and the community of which he is a defender or a ruler?

Some of the issues that the research project will focus on include: the analogy between the destruction of the body and the destruction of the community (The Death of Superman, Knightfall, Dark Knight Rises); the relationship between the mask and costume as reproducible means of becoming a superhero and the issue of ”democratization of superheroes” (Gotham City Impostors, Dark Knight, Batman Incorporated); elseworlds narratives depicting Batman or Superman as tyrannical rulers, objects of worship or national heroes (Injustice: Gods Among Us, I, Joker, Superman: Red Son and others).

I wrote a PhD dissertation at CEU's History Department on sex education, marriage counselling and premarital health examinations in twentieth-century Hungary between 2009 and 2014 and I will be a 2014/2015 Research Fellow at the Wiesenthal Institute in Vienna, focusing on race defilement cases in interwar Hungary. During my doctoral studies I spent 1 semester at Durham University in the U.K. and 1 month at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin and received a 6-month write-up grant at the end of my studies, all grants awarded by CEU.

I am the English-language proofreader of the bilingual Hungarian medical history periodical ”Kaleidoscope History” and I am an editor of the re-launched Hungarian sex education journal, ”AISZED Szemle” (AIDS and Sex Education Review).

I am interested in research on the history of sexuality, marriage and public health. In addition, I have a research track record in the history of denazification and anti-Semitism and my focus has been and remains 20th century Hungarian, German and Austrian history.

I enjoy films (both watching and discussing), sports (both watching and playing), and spontaneous conversations (both listening and speaking).

Bodies on the Threshold: Race Defilement as a Line of Sexual Demarcation in Interwar Hungary

Anti-Semitism is one of the concepts that define interwar Hungary's right-wing authoritarian regime. Social and economic policies and legislation, biological and health measures, but even Church-sponsored sex education were all infested with the ideology that saw the Jews of Hungary as “race” and as a “spirit” that needed to be contained and rolled back for the good of society. It is probably impossible to find the “core” of this ideology with various actors displaying a heterogeneity of approaches and the State gradually arriving at a more and more racial and biological definition of “Jewishness” but with race and its components remaining vague and floating until the fall of the regime in 1944/45.

One point of anchor can be an analysis of anti-Semitic laws that were passed in great number after 1938. In this project I will deal with the 1941 Marriage Law that became known as the “Third anti-Semitic Law” and the practice of race defilement in specific (race defilement being the prohibition of sexual contacts on a racial basis). I will treat it as a policy that reflected on national and individual health: a direct biopolitical intervention of a eugenic kind where certain bodies were seen as permanent dangers to the health and body of the nation. In the race defilement proceedings individual bodies became subject to public scrutiny and these bodies (both Jewish and non-Jewish) were then used to mark the boundaries of the nation using “respectable sexuality” as the threshold between belonging and otherness. Race defilement touched upon a long-standing tradition of sexual anti-Semitism and racial anti-miscegenation and stands at the intersection of the Foucauldian biopolitical normalization processes for race and (gendered) sexuality. I use Foucault's concept of the “confessional”, a modern transformation of the Christian practice, which has been utilized for sexual normalization. These race defilement cases elevated Foucault's sexual confessional to a new level: it was not just the individual giving the doctor information about health antecedents and sexual habits as in premarital counseling, but an extended group, a micro community got involved in scrutinizing the sexual life of certain individuals and searching for the boundaries of respectability.

These considerations lead to several research questions and there are two I wish to indicate here specifically:
1. How can we use the race defilement cases for understanding the Volkskörper in interwar Hungary? In what ways did these cases provide input to understanding the body of the nation in terms of physical/sexual bodies?
2. How do the Hungarian race defilement cases compare with Nazi race defilement in their scope, their psychological effect and their normalization of race and sexuality?

Professionally I am interested in the methodology of the humanities, especially history and art history. My research on art history is based on Piotr Piotrowski's ”horizontal art history,” the idea of non-hierarchical comparison between art from the Central European periphery and great artistic centers.

Apart from the humanities, I am a big fan of the cinematographic work of Woody Allen, Michael Haneke, Stanley Kubrick, Roman Polański and Quentin Tarantino. I find very enjoyable is a piece of good literature, as well, like Janusz Głowacki or Stanisław Lem's books.

Ambivalent Appeal to Communist Theology: the Case of Marek Włodarski

It is commonly accepted that social realism, established in the Soviet Union c. 1932 and introduced in the ”satellite states” of the Communist Bloc from the late 1940’s onward, should be perceived not as one of the artistic genres or ‘styles’, but rather as a rhetorical tool of political propaganda. Therefore, far from being located within autonomous processes of modern art, it turns one's attention to a wide range of inevitable tensions between avant-garde, politics and ethics, including such issues as representations of power, artists' engagement versus strategic retreat and, finally, fluid (dis)belief in political theology (and teleology) of Communist utopia.

The aim of the following project is to put the above mentioned questions in relation to one particular case study – a socialrealist fragment of the postwar oeuvre of Marek Włodarski, Polish-Jewish avant-garde painter, active in the People's Republic of Poland (PRL) between 1945 and 1960.

Such a frame of the subject is understandable for at least two reasons. Firstly, although socrealism remained a relatively short period of Polish art (c. 1949–1955), there are no doubts that – as, among many, Piotr Piotrowski and Andrzej Turowski persuasively argued – it deeply affected the whole field of visual arts throughout the history of the PRL. Secondly, Marek Włodarski can definitely be regarded as a vivid example of a profoundly ambivalent response to socrealism or – by and large – the teleology of Communism. On the one hand, in the PRL of the 1940’s Włodarski was remembered to be an interwar Communist activist, who tried to create the visual language that would be truly understandable for masses (so called ‘realism of facts’, Polish: faktorealizm). Not surprisingly, at the time the Party saw him as a Communist painter and gave a prize for his Barykada, the replica of an interwar fact-realist canvas, proudly presented at the very first socialrealist exhibition in Warsaw in 1949. On the other hand his socialrealist works from 1949–1951, in which Włodarski consequently combined socialist propaganda, contain an extremely modern visual form. Meanwhile, being labeled as ‘abstractionist’ and ‘formalist’, he quit public activities at the turn of 1950/1951 and conducted an undisturbed socialist experiment of his own accord. 

Therefore, what seems to be the most valuable in the following case study is ambivalence in relation to political power, its ideology and representation. Being situated in the middle between apparatchiks and the “uncompromising” (as Wojciech Włodarczyk called this group of opposition artists), Włodarski allows us to obtain new, non-simplistic answers to the questions already addressed both to social realism(s) in particular and art/power relations in general.

Regarding this subject, the following research questions arise: what is the relationship between interwar and postwar communist engagement? Similarly, what is the relationship between these two realizations of socio-political art? How is the avant-garde visual language used to replace (socialist) realism? Finally, how, based on the daily artistic practice and its results, can we trace the course of negotiation between political doctrine and autonomy of art? In other words, where within the artwork can we locate the ambivalence of engagement?

The King, the Gift, and the Bribe: Medieval Political Gifts and Modern Bribes

Both Louis VII and Manuel I Komnenos became the most unexpected heirs to the throne (French and Byzantine respectively), as they were the youngest sons of the former kings. Although in their reigns education and learning were flourishing, they are remembered for great military defeats and their anxiety for acquiring a male heir. Their parallel lives met at the engagement of their children in 1179 — although the two rulers died a year later. I will discuss how their parallel reigns are reflected in gifts (objects and literary works) from political friends and enemies. I will examine what kind of gifts they received, who offered them, what was the motivation of the donor, when was the appropriate moment to offer a gift, and what was the ritual of gift-giving in medieval times.

All these question are most relevant to our modern era. Gifts and bribes are often separated by a thin line which is easy to cross or mis-present. I will compare medieval gifts to the moderns gifts, bribes familiar to us and I will try to elucidate the difference between a gift and a bribe using the medieval comparison.

The 'Exultet' of Bolesław II of Mazovia and the Sacralisation of Political Power in the High Middle Ages

My contribution Finis regnorum will be devoted to the politico-theological aspects of the visions of falling kingdoms and republics in the early modern times. I will attempt to approach this phenomenon from a comparative perspective, focusing on the regions which early modern writers dubbed Sarmatia and Illyria and contemporary scholars research in the framework of national philologies and histories; respectively in the Old-Polish and Old-Croatian departments. These two geographical areas produced similar ideologies (like antemurale christianitatis in confrontation with the non-Christian world) and according to many scholars (most notably by the Italian Slavist Giovanna Brogi-Bercoff) even shared a “Slavic” vision of history. I would like to investigate the functions of evoking the real, fictional and professed ends of political bodies in the ideology of power. I will show how the politico-theological thinking was triggered by a variety of internal and external crises faced by a community (eg. in debating the execution movement of Polish 16th-century gentry, opposing or backing the reformation, mobilizing against the Ottoman threat and retrospectively justifying the successes of the Sublime Porte). The title of this project states that “king never dies”, however often this statement about the body politic was only proved true by propagating a vision of its death that helped to consolidate it, steer it and secure its continued existence.

From Tolkien to Martin. Secularising Theology of Power in Contemporary Fantasy Literature

As a literary genre, fantasy has long been on the margins of literary research, mainly due to its categorization as popular literature of rather low quality. Still, regardless of the scholars’ increasing interest, the general audience rarely recognizes the noble origins of high (epic) fantasy: the epic form, medieval romance and Scandinavian sagas. The most prominent example of the sophisticated fantasy are J. R. R. Tolkien’s works – the model and source of continuous inspiration for generations of writers, and, even though his novels were and still are meticously analysed as regards the literary, linguistic and historical influence, it is only recently that the same research, covering the borrowings from and inspiration with the medieval tradition, is being performed on the works of other fantasy authors.

The research may cover issues coming from the classical literary questionnaire, as well as the reception of past perspectives on the order of the world, expressed by means of archetypical characters present in quasi-medieval societies of fantasy. In such manner, fantasy co-creates contemporary stereotypes about the Middle Ages, and, at the same time, projects modern imaginary and social nostalgia onto the secondary world. Among these, one of the key topics is presenting power and its different aspects, as contemporary society’s ideas about medieval sovereigns and authority, often coming via fantasy, become the point of reference for popular visions of politics. Thus, the aim of my contribution/work is to investigate the nature and function of medieval symbolic attached to the person and institution of a ruler as described by Ernst Kantorowicz in the King’s Two Bodies in literary works classified as high fantasy.

Kantorowicz describes the based on chrystological dispute division of the royal persona into the natural, biological body (corpus naturale), and the social and mystical one (corpus mysticum). While the physical body of a king could suffer from a disease, or simply die, the social, political one was more of an abstract-spiritual nature, and functioned as the symbol of justice and order. Since the character of a king is often a key one in fantasy narration, it seems obvious to ask whether the dichotomy described by Kantorowicz is present (preserved) in the genre. Which components of contemporary visions of power, adapted in fantasy, react with Katorowicz’s ones? Or, maybe, is fantasy creating its own political theologies, using the fictitious religious systems described in its texts? Do the perception and archetype of a ruler in fantasy literature change along with contemporary society, or do they remain unchangeable?

The text corpus for the analysis of royal characters and the perception of royal obligations in fantasy that is the core of this study will include the literary works of two classical authors: professor J. R. R. Tolkien, first and foremost an English philologist and medievalist, and G. R. R. Martin, an American epic-historical fantasy author, often compared to Tolkien.