Turning Away from the World / The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture with Benjamin A. Saltzman

Coedited by Benjamin A. Saltzman, 'Thinking of the Medieval: Midcentury Intellectuals and the Middle Ages' gathers scholarship examining the ways mid-20th-century thinkers and intellectual movements interpreted and mobilized medieval history and culture. The volume highlights interdisciplinary engagements—in literature, history, and theory—showing how medievalism informed broader intellectual currents. Contributors analyze how the Middle Ages served as a conceptual resource for ideologies, aesthetics, and academic debates in the midcentury period. The book illuminates the continuing influence of medieval studies on modern thought and the reciprocal shaping of medieval scholarship by contemporary concerns.

Benjamin A. Saltzman's 'Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture' examines the gesture of turning away or covering the face across ancient and medieval literature and art, exploring its complex emotional and rhetorical meanings. Drawing on scenes from Genesis, classical painting, Plato, Augustine, Descartes, and later thinkers, Saltzman shows how the gesture resists simple categorization (shame, grief, disgust, performance) and functions rhetorically and philosophically. The book moves outward from focused readings to trace the gesture's ripples through intellectual history and modern media, arguing that turning away can be both morally fraught and necessary for reflection and grief. Saltzman also situates the gesture in contemporary media ecologies, questioning assumptions that looking away is always a moral failure.