Mostly Medieval: In Memory of Jacek Fisiak

413 Adapting Earlier English for Modern Times example in London’s East End, where underpaid laborers, including young children, were exploited in the production of cheap and shoddy clothes – which are a side-effect of rapid industrialization and increased mechanization (Carter NA 8.9: 212). The New Age was an important platform for medieval modernist ideas. So far scholars have studied it primarily for its contribution to the development of high modernism, as the first ever journal in Britain to publish a Cubist painting by Picasso, as well as publishing new, experimental avant-garde art and literature, and ground-breaking articles promoting new social, political, and cultural thought. Yet alongside, it published texts that were often anti-modernist, or even traditional and conservative, mocking and dismissing the new art and culture, urging for a return to tradition and the past. Ardis claims in her research on The New Age that publishing such strikingly oppositional content was deliberate on the part of Orage, its editor, who wanted to promote dialogism and vivid exchange of different opinions, in an effort to introduce modernism. Yet as Ardis’ essay has argued, there was a strong element of medieval modernist ideology in The New Age, and also in the biography of its editor, both of which should be the focus of a more extensive research. Medieval modernism was not anti-modernist, and it was strongly aware of modernism’s importance and necessity. Yet it embraced the new movement with a belief that art could not remain isolated in a sophisticated and elitist formalist understanding, but had to maintain connections with life and society, the ideal model of which was to be found in the Middle Ages— which it found inspiring and resourceful. References Primary sources Carter, Huntly (1910, November 3) “The Recovery of the Arts and Crafts.” [In:] The Supplement to The New Age 8(1); 8. Carter, Huntly (1910, November 10) “The Recovery of Art and Craft.” [In:] The New Age 8(2); 44–45. Carter, Huntly (1910, December 1) “The Recovery of Art and Craft.” [In:] The New Age 8(5); 116–117. Carter, Huntly (1910, December 29) “The Recovery of Art and Craft.” [In:] The New Age 8(9); 212–213. Carter, Huntly (1919, November 3) “The Coming of Beautiful Cities.” [In:] The Supplement to The New Age 8(1); 6–7.

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