| Abstract | Paper -a:
The essential experiences of any human life in the Middle Ages can be analysed in terms of a philosophy of itinerancy. Similarly to Jacopo de Voragine, the medieval protagonist imagines himself to be a pilgrim and a stranger in this world, which he perceives almost exclusively in terms of preparation for the afterlife one. This is reason why, in the extremely troubled Romanian Middle Ages, become widespread the texts which narrate, in a compensatory way, symbolic travels of some extraordinary characters in spaces of a world beyond the common one, spaces that remind them of the peacefulness and harmony of the heavenly realms. Three typologies of texts may enter in this category: firstly, the popular tales originated in the Middle Ages, telling a story about travelling in search of a perfect realm where death does not exist. We intend to take into analysis such tales, focusing on the correspondences of motifs and imaginary elements that appear also in the Ukrainian, Italian, and Japanese folklores. Further on some particular texts as the mourn laments and the ritual funeral songs will be taken into consideration. We shall also analyse the paths of the soul and the sacred toponymy (making reference to the Orphic mysteries, but also to similar texts from the Gallic, Italian, and oriental cultural spaces) - sailing seas of longing, passing through the frightening aerial toll-houses, choosing the right path, enjoying the beautiful fields, searching for St Peter's apple, arriving to the waters of forgetfulness etc. - in parallel with the iconographic representations of the motif of travel of the soul on the exterior wall paintings of the Romanian medieval churches. A third category of texts discussed in this paper is represented by the apocrypha and the hagiographic legends, adapted to the Romanian reality of that period, which describe some transcendental spaces such as heaven, hell, the Blajinilor island, etc. We shall therefore focus on the meaning of these symbolic travels, which is that of the protagonist's turning back to his world, in order to bring - sometimes through written proofs, the way Moses does when he descends from Mount Sinai - the essential message: the undeniable evidence of God's 'neighbourhood' and the meaning of a new knowledge so as to share the experience of the revelation, preserving thus the initiation path through the others too.
Paper-b:
Ekphrasis of the medieval dream vision is far from static; unlike the more general but limited understandings of ekphrasis that define it as a poem about an artwork, medieval ekphrasis relies heavily on memoria and moves dynamically through landscapes and back and forth in time. Dream visions travel, through reference, allusion, prolepsis, and allegory, among biblical time and spiritual history, human history and historical moment, narrative time and experiential individual time. Through considering the work of Mary Carruthers, Bruno Latour, and recent ekphrastic theory by feminist scholars, this paper will explore the polytemporal journeys of Purgatorio, Pearl, and Piers Plowman.
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