Download or read book A Companion to Middle English Hagiography written by Sarah Salih and published by DS Brewer. This book was released on 2006 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The saints were the superheroes and the celebrities of medieval England, bridging the gap between heaven and earth, the living and the dead. A vast body of literature evolved during the middle ages to ensure that everyone, from kings to peasants, knew the stories of the lives, deaths and afterlives of the saints. However, despite its popularity and ubiquity, the genre of the Saint's Life has until recently been little studied. This collection introduces the canon of Middle English hagiography; places it in the context of the cults of saints; analyses key themes within hagiographic narrative, including gender, power, violence and history; and, finally, shows how hagiographic themes survived the Reformation. Overall it offers both information for those coming to the genre for the first time, and points forward to new trends in research. Dr SARAH SALIH is a Lecturer in English at the University of East Anglia. Contributors: SAMANTHA RICHES, MARY BETH LONG, CLAIRE M. WATERS, ROBERT MILLS, ANKE BERNAU, KATHERINE J. LEWIS, MATTHEW WOODCOCK
Download or read book A Companion to Middle English Prose written by Anthony Stockwell Garfield Edwards and published by DS Brewer. This book was released on 2004 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this volume provide an up-to-date and authoritative guide to the major prose Middle English authors and genres. Each chapter is written by a leading authority on the subject and offers a succinct account of all relevant literary, history and cultural factors that need to considered, together with bibliographical references. Authors examined include the writers of the Ancrene Wisse, the Katherine Group and the Wohunge Group; Richard Rolle; Walter Hilton; Nicholas Love; Julian of Norwich; Margery Kempe; "Sir John Mandeville"; John Trevisa, Reginald Pecock; and John Fortescue. Genres discussed include romances, saints' lives, letters, sermon literature, historical prose, anonymous devotional writings, Wycliffite prose, and various forms of technical writing. The final chapter examines the treatment of Middle English prose in the first age of print. Contributors: BELLA MILLETT, RALPH HANNA III, AD PUTTER, KANTIK GHOSH, BARRY A. WINDEATT, A.C. SPEARING, IAN HIGGINS, A.S.G. EDWARDS, VINCENT GILLESPIE, HELEN L. SPENCER, ALFRED HIATT, FIONA SOMERSET, HELEN COOPER, GEORGE KEISER, OLIVER S. PICKERING, JAMES SIMPSON, RICHARD BEADLE, ALEXANDRA GILLESPIE.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Literature 1100 1500 written by Larry Scanlon and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-18 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wide-ranging survey of the most important medieval authors and genres, designed for students of English.
Download or read book A Companion to Old and Middle English Literature written by Laura Lambdin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2002-06-30 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Old and Middle English literature can be obscure and challenging. So, too, can the vast body of criticism it has elicited. Yet the masters of medieval literature often drew on similar texts, since imitation was admired. For this reason, recent scholarship has often focused on the importance of genre. The genre in which a work was written can illuminate the author's intentions and the text's meaning. Read in light of a genre's parameters, a given work can be considered in relation to other works within the same category. This reference is a comprehensive overview of Old and Middle English literature. Chapters focus on particular genres, such as Allegorical Verse, Balladry, Beast Fable, Chronicle, Debate Poetry, Epic and Heroic, Lyric, Middle English Parody/Burlesque, Religious and Allegorical Verse, and Romance. Expert contributors define the primary characteristics of each genre and discuss relevant literary works. Chapters provide extensive reviews of scholarship and close with detailed bibliographies. A more thorough bibliography of major scholarly studies closes the book.
Download or read book Medieval Hagiography written by Thomas Head and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-24 with total page 892 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection presents-through the medium of translated sources-a comprehensive guide to the development of hagiography and the cult of the saints in western Christendom during the middle ages. It provides an unparalleled resource for the study of the ideals of sanctity and the practice of religion in the medieval west. Intended for the classroom, for the medieval scholar who wishes to explore sources in unfamiliar languages, and for the general reader fascinated by the saints, this collection provides the reader a chance to explore in depth a full range of writings about the saints (the term hagiography is derived from Greek roots: hagios=holy and graphe=writing). The thirty-six chapters contain sources either in their entirety or in selections of substantial length. The great majority of the texts have never previously appeared in English translation. Those which have appeared in earlier translation, are here presented in versions based on significant new textual and historical scholarship which makes them significant improvements on the earlier versions. All the translations are accompanied by introductions, notes, and suggestions for further reading in order to help guide the reader. The first selections date to the fourth century, when the ideals of Christian sanctity were evolving to meet the demands of a world in which Christianity was an accepted religion and when the public veneration of relics was growing greatly in scope. The last selections date to the period immediately prior to the Reformation, a period in which the traditional concept of sanctity and acceptability of de cult of relics was being questioned. In addition to numerous works from the clerical languages of Latin and Greek, the selections include translations from Romance, Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic vernacular languages, s well as Hebrew texts concerning the martyrdom of Jews at the hands of Christians. Originating in lands from Iceland to Hungary and from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, they are taken from a full range of the many genres which constituted hagiography: lives of the saints, collections of miracle stories, accounts of the discovery or movement of relics, liturgical books, visions, canonization inquests, and even heresy trials.
Download or read book Annotated Chaucer bibliography written by Mark Allen and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2015-11-01 with total page 886 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An extremely thorough, expertly compiled and crisply annotated comprehensive bibliography of Chaucer scholarship between 1997 and 2010
Download or read book Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages written by Larissa Tracy and published by DS Brewer. This book was released on 2013 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays exploring medieval castration, as reflected in archaeology, law, historical record, and literary motifs. Castration and castrati have always been facets of western culture, from myth and legend to law and theology, from eunuchs guarding harems to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century castrati singers. Metaphoric castration pervadesa number of medieval literary genres, particularly the Old French fabliaux - exchanges of power predicated upon the exchange or absence of sexual desire signified by genitalia - but the plain, literal act of castration and its implications are often overlooked. This collection explores this often taboo subject and its implications for cultural mores and custom in Western Europe, seeking to demystify and demythologize castration. Its subjects includearchaeological studies of eunuchs; historical accounts of castration in trials of combat; the mutilation of political rivals in medieval Wales; Anglo-Saxon and Frisian legal and literary examples of castration as punishment; castration as comedy in the Old French fabliaux; the prohibition against genital mutilation in hagiography; and early-modern anxieties about punitive castration enacted on the Elizabethan stage. The introduction reflects on these topics in the context of arguably the most well-known victim of castration in the middle ages, Abelard. LARISSA TRACY is Associate Professor of Medieval Literature at Longwood University. Contributors: Larissa Tracy, Kathryn Reusch, Shaun Tougher, Jack Collins, Rolf H. Bremmer Jr, Jay Paul Gates, Charlene M. Eska, Mary A. Valante, Anthony Adams, Mary E. Leech, Jed Chandler, Ellen Lorraine Friedrich, Robert L.A. Clark, Karin Sellberg, LenaWånggren
Download or read book An Introduction to Medieval English Literature written by Anna Baldwin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-11-15 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a comprehensive guide to a literary period characterized by great variety and imagination, and vividly alert to the social transformations overtaking society. Spanning almost two centuries, it introduces the reader to a diverse range of authors writing for a fast-developing readership of both men and women. Each chapter focuses on a group of genres primarily associated with a particular social class – from the Drama and Saints' Lives accessible to the illiterate, to the sophisticated Romances of Love savoured by the aristocracy and the Court. Lively historical narratives place each group of texts in their social, political and cultural contexts. Significant or typical texts are given more detailed analysis that includes critical issues and questions to guide the reader's own approach, and each section is supported by a detailed bibliography of further reading.
Download or read book The Matter of Virtue written by Holly A. Crocker and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2019-08-30 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If material bodies have inherent, animating powers—or virtues, in the premodern sense—then those bodies typically and most insistently associated in the premodern period with matter—namely, women—cannot be inert and therefore incapable of ethical action, Holly Crocker contends. In The Matter of Virtue, Crocker argues that one idea of what it means to be human—a conception of humanity that includes vulnerability, endurance, and openness to others—emerges when we consider virtue in relation to modes of ethical action available to premodern women. While a misogynistic tradition of virtue ethics, from antiquity to the early modern period, largely cast a skeptical or dismissive eye on women, Crocker seeks to explore what happened when poets thought about the material body not as a tool of an empowered agent whose cultural supremacy was guaranteed by prevailing social structures but rather as something fragile and open, subject but also connected to others. After an introduction that analyzes Hamlet to establish a premodern tradition of material virtue, Part I investigates how retellings of the demise of the title female character in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Henryson's Testament of Cresseid, and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida among other texts structure a poetic debate over the potential for women's ethical action in a world dominated by masculine violence. Part II turns to narratives of female sanctity and feminine perfection, including ones by Chaucer, Bokenham, and Capgrave, to investigate grace, beauty, and intelligence as sources of women's ethical action. In Part III, Crocker examines a tension between women's virtues and household structures, paying particular attention to English Griselda- and shrew-literatures, including Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew. She concludes by looking at Chaucer's Legend of Good Women to consider alternative forms of virtuous behavior for women as well as men.
Download or read book English Identity and Political Culture in the Fourteenth Century written by Andrea Ruddick and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-21 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the nature of national sentiment in fourteenth-century England, in its political and constitutional context.
Download or read book Women s Literary Cultures in the Global Middle Ages written by Kathryn Loveridge and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2023-04-04 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Initiates a wider development of inquiries into women's literary cultures to move the reader beyond single geographical, linguistic, cultural and period boundaries. Since the closing decades of the twentieth century, medieval women's writing has been the subject of energetic conversation and debate. This interest, however, has focused predominantly on western European writers working within the Christian tradition: the Saxon visionaries, Mechthild of Hackeborn, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Gertrude the Great, for example, and, in England, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe are cases in point. While this present book acknowledges the huge importance of such writers to women's literary history, it also argues that they should no longer be read solely within a local context. Instead, by putting them into conversation with other literary women and their cultures from wider geographical regions and global cultures - women from eastern Europe and their books, dramas and music; the Welsh gwraig llwyn a pherth (woman of bush and brake); the Indian mystic, Mirabai; Japanese women writers from the Heian period; women saints from across Christian Europe and those of eleventh-century Islam or late medieval Ethiopia; for instance - much more is to be gained in terms of our understanding of the drivers behind and expressions of medieval women's literary activities in far broader contexts. This volume considers the dialogue, synergies, contracts and resonances emerging from such new alignments, and to help a wider, multidirectional development of this enquiry into women's literary cultures.
Download or read book Faces of Charisma Image Text Object in Byzantium and the Medieval West written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-07-26 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Faces of Charisma: Image, Text, Object in Byzantium and the Medieval West, a multi-disciplinary group of scholars advances the theory that charisma may be a quality of art as well as of person. Beginning with the argument that Weberian charisma of person is itself a matter of representation, this volume shows that to study charismatic art is to experiment with a theory of representation that allows for the possibility of nothing less than a breakdown between art and viewer and between art and lived experience. The volume examines charismatic works of literature, visual art, and architecture from England, Northern Europe, Italy, Ancient Greece, and Constantinople and from time periods ranging from antiquity to the beginning of the early modern period. Contributors are Joseph Salvatore Ackley, Paul Binski, Paroma Chatterjee, Andrey Egorov, Erik Gustafson, Duncan Hardy, Stephen Jaeger, Jacqueline E. Jung, Lynsey McCulloch, Martino Rossi Monti, Gavin Richardson, and Andrew Romig.
Download or read book A Cultural History of Race in the Middle Ages written by Thomas Hahn and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-06-01 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents a comprehensive and collaborative survey of how people, individually and within collective entities, thought about, experienced, and enacted racializing differences. Addressing events, texts, and images from the 5th to the 16th centuries, these essays by ten eminent scholars provide broad, multi-disciplinary analyses of materials whose origins range from the British Isles, Western Iberia, and North Africa across Western and Eastern Europe to the Middle East. These diverse communities possessed no single word equivalent to modern race, a term (raza) for genetic, religious, cultural, or territorial difference that emerges only at the end of the medieval period. Chapter by chapter, this volume nonetheless demonstrates the manifold beliefs, practices, institutions, and images that conveyed and enforced difference for the benefit of particular groups and to the detriment of others. Addressing the varying historiographical self-consciousness concerning race among medievalist scholars themselves, the separate analyses make use of paradigms drawn from social and political history, religious, environmental, literary, ethnic, and gender studies, the history of art and of science, and critical race theory. Chapters identify the eruption of racial discourses aroused by political or religious polemic, centered upon conversion within and among Jewish, Christian, and Islamic communions, and inspired by imagined or sustained contact with alien peoples. Authors draw their evidence from Hebrew, Latin, Arabic, and a profusion of European vernaculars, and provide searching examinations of visual artefacts ranging from religious service books to maps, mosaics, and manuscript illuminations
Download or read book A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Middle Ages written by Ruth Evans and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-03-01 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historians of sexuality have often assumed that medieval people were less interested in sex than we are. But people in the Middle Ages wrote a great deal about sex: in confessors' manuals, in virginity treatises, and in literary texts. This volume looks afresh at the cultural meanings that sex had throughout the period, presenting new evidence and offering new interpretations of known material. Acknowledging that many of the categories that we use today to talk about sexuality are inadequate for understanding sex in premodern times, the volume draws on important recent work in the historiography of medieval sexuality to address the conceptual and methodological challenges the period presents. A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Middle Ages presents an overview of the period with essays on heterosexuality, homosexuality, sexual variations, religious and legal issues, health concerns, popular beliefs about sexuality, prostitution and erotica.
Download or read book Medieval Literature written by Holly Crocker and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-05-31 with total page 755 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medieval Literature: Criticism and Debates combines classic critical essays alongside new voices and approaches, highlighting vibrant debates on medieval literature that will continue to shape critical conversations for the coming decades. Holly A. Crocker and D. Vance Smith present a fascinating collection of essays from leading contemporary scholars of medieval literature and culture, examining topics including gender, sexuality, politics, belief, language, nationhood, science and desire. The volume sheds light on critical discussions of the medieval period and shows the continuing relevance and vivacity of Medieval English literature in the twenty-first century. Each section is thoroughly introduced and the essays develop various debates in key areas, providing a springboard for readers to establish their own study, arguments and opinions. Further reading sections make this volume an accessible and important resource for those studying literature from the Medieval period and beyond. Contributors: Anthony Bale, Sarah Beckwith, Anke Bernau, Glenn Burger, Ardis Butterfield, Christopher Cannon, Christine Chism, Lisa H. Cooper, Susan Crane, Holly A. Crocker, George Edmondson, Ruth Evans, Sylvia Federico, Laurie Finke, Aranye Fradenburg, Frank Grady, Richard Firth Green, Patricia Clare Ingham , Hannah Johnson, Steven Justice, David Lawton, Robert Mills, J. Allan Mitchell, Nicholas Perkins, Tison Pugh, Elizabeth Robertson, Kellie Robertson, Jessica Rosenfeld, Sarah Salih, Corinne Saunders, Martin Shichtman, D. Vance Smith, Emily Steiner, Jennifer Summit, Stephanie Trigg, Marion Turner, David Wallace, Angela Jane Weisl, Nicolette Zeeman
Download or read book The Scottish Legendary written by Eva von Contzen and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study places the Scottish compilation of saints' legends within the hagiographic landscape of medieval Britain.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer written by Suzanne Conklin Akbari and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-07 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the 'father' of the English literary canon, one of a very few writers to appear in every 'great books' syllabus, Chaucer is seen as an author whose works are fundamentally timeless: an author who, like Shakespeare, exemplifies the almost magical power of poetry to appeal to each generation of readers. Every age remakes its own Chaucer, developing new understandings of how his poetry intersects with contemporary ways of seeing the world, and the place of the subject who lives in it. This Handbook comprises a series of essays by established scholars and emerging voices that address Chaucer's poetry in the context of several disciplines, including late medieval philosophy and science, Mediterranean Studies, comparative literature, vernacular theology, and popular devotion. The volume paints the field in broad strokes and sections include Biography and Circumstances of Daily Life; Chaucer in the European Frame; Philosophy and Science in the Universities; Christian Doctrine and Religious Heterodoxy; and the Chaucerian Afterlife. Taken as a whole, The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer offers a snapshot of the current state of the field, and a bold suggestion of the trajectories along which Chaucer studies are likely to develop in the future.
