Download or read book Courtly Love Undressed written by E. Jane Burns and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2014-07-09 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Clothing was used in the Middle Ages to mark religious, military, and chivalric orders, lepers, and prostitutes. The ostentatious display of luxury dress more specifically served as a means of self-definition for members of the ruling elite and the courtly lovers among them. In Courtly Love Undressed, E. Jane Burns unfolds the rich display of costly garments worn by amorous partners in literary texts and other cultural documents in the French High Middle Ages. Burns "reads through clothes" in lyric, romance, and didactic literary works, vernacular sermons, and sumptuary laws to show how courtly attire is used to negotiate desire, sexuality, and symbolic space as well as social class. Reading through clothes reveals that the expression of female desire, so often effaced in courtly lyric and romance, can be registered in the poetic deployment of fabric and adornment, and that gender is often configured along a sartorial continuum, rather than in terms of naturally derived categories of woman and man. The symbolic identification of the court itself as a hybrid crossing place between Europe and the East also emerges through Burns's reading of literary allusions to the trade, travel, and pilgrimage that brought luxury cloth to France.
Download or read book Same Bodies Different Women written by Christopher Mielke and published by Trivent Publishing. This book was released on 2019-12-31 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is a collection of essays focusing on marginalized women mostly in Central and Eastern Europe from around 1350 to 1650. "Other" women are discussed in three different categories: women whose religious practices put them on the social margins, "common women" who are in society but not of society because they are in the sex trade, and women whose occupations were reason enough to shunt them. In order to fill a gap in gender history for countries east of the Rhine River, the studies included present how official city-funded brothels in medieval Austria worked, how a princess' disability affected her life as Byzantine empress, how one unmarried Transylvanian woman who got pregnant dealt with being the center of a court case, and how enslaved women in medieval Hungary were treated as sexual property. The hope with this volume is that it will show the many interdisciplinary ways that women on the margins can be studied in this region, and to diminish the taboo of discussing this topic to begin with.
Download or read book Comic Provocations written by H. Crocker and published by Springer. This book was released on 2006-08-19 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection explores how Old French fabliaux disrupt literal and figurative bodies. Essays cover theoretical issues including fragmentation and multiplication, social anxiety and excessive circulation, performative productions and creative formations, to trace the competing consequences that arise from this literary body's unsettling capacity.
Download or read book The narrative grotesque in medieval Scottish poetry written by Caitlin Flynn and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-05 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Narrative Grotesque examines late medieval narratology in two Older Scots poems: Gavin Douglas’s The Palyce of Honour (c.1501) and William Dunbar’s The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo (c.1507). The narrative grotesque is exemplified in these poems, which fracture narratological boundaries by fusing disparate poetic forms and creating hybrid subjectivities. Consequently, these poems interrogate conventional boundaries in poetic making. The narrative grotesque is applied as a framework to elucidate these chimeric texts and to understand newly late medieval engagement with poetics and narratology.
Download or read book Shaping Courtliness in Medieval France written by Laurie Shepard and published by DS Brewer. This book was released on 2013 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The question of what medieval "courtliness" was, both as a literary influence and as a historical "reality", is debated in this volume. The concept of courtliness forms the theme of this collection of essays. Focused on works written in the Francophone world between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, they examine courtliness as both an historical privilege and aliterary ideal, and as a concept that operated on and was informed by complex social and economic realities. Several essays reveal how courtliness is subject to satire or is the subject of exhortation in works intended for noblemen and women, not to mention ambitious bourgeois. Others, more strictly literary in their focus, explore the witty, thoughtful and innovative responses of writers engaged in the conscious process of elevating the new vernacular culture through the articulation of its complexities and contradictions. The volume as a whole, uniting philosophical, theoretical, philological, and cultural approaches, demonstrates that medieval "courtliness" is an ideal that fascinates us to this day. It is thus a fitting tribute to the scholarship of Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, in its exploration of the prrofound and wide-ranging ideas that define her contribution to the field. DANIEL E O'SULLIVAN is Associate Professor of French at the University of Mississippi; LAURIE SHEPHARD is Associate Professor of Italian at Boston College in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. Contributors: Peter Haidu, Donald Maddox, Michel-André Bossy, Kristin Burr, Joan Tasker Grimbert, David Hult, Virgine Greene, Logan Whalen, Evelyn Birge Vitz, Elizabeth W. Poe, Daniel E. O'Sullivan, William Schenck, Nadia Margolis, Laine Doggett, E. Jane Burns, Nancy FreemanRegalado, Laurie Shephard, Sarah White
Download or read book Historical Dictionary of French Literature written by John Flower and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2013-01-17 with total page 627 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Almost all of us know French literature, even if we don’t know French, because it is probably the second largest and certainly the most translated into English. And, even if we don’t read, we would have seen film and television versions (think Count of Monte-Cristo) and even a musical rendition (Les Mis). So this is a particularly interesting volume in the literature series, since it covers French literature from the earliest times to the present. It is also a particularly rich literature, espousing ever genre from poetry, to novel, to biography, to drama, and adopting every style, including realism and surrealism, and expressing the views of all classes and political stands, with recently strong feminist and gay strains. Obviously, the core dictionary section includes among its panoply of often substantial and detailed entries, hundreds of authors, dozens of significant works, the various styles mentioned above and many others, events that have impacted literature such as the Dreyfus Affair and the Algerian War, and literary prizes. The chronology manages to cover about 1,200 years of literary output. And the introduction sets it all out neatly from one historical and literary period to the next. The bibliography, broken down by period and author, directs us to further reading in both French and English.
Download or read book Weaving Narrative written by Monica L. Wright and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-11-09 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Enide’s tattered dress and Erec’s fabulous coronation robe; Yvain’s nudity in the forest, which prevents maidens who know him well clothed from identifying him; Lanval’s fairy-lady parading about in the Arthurian court, scantily dressed, for all to observe: just why is clothing so important in twelfth-century French romance? This interdisciplinary book explores how writers of this era used clothing as a signifier with multiple meanings for many narrative purposes. Clothing figured prominently in twelfth-century France, where exotic fabrics and furs came to define a social elite. Monica Wright shows that representations of clothing are not mere embellishments to the text; they help form the textual weave of the romances in which they appear. This book is about how these descriptions are constructed, what they mean, and how clothing becomes an active part of romance composition—the ways in which writers use it to develop and elaborate character, to advance or stall the plot, and to structure the narrative generally.
Download or read book The Four Modes of Seeing written by ElizabethCarson Pastan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Borrowing its title from Madeline Harrison Caviness's influential work on the modes of seeing articulated by the twelfth-century cleric Richard of Saint Victor, this interdisciplinary collection brings together the work of thirty scholars from England, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and the United States. Each author has contributed an original article that engages with ideas formulated in Caviness's wide-ranging scholarship. The historiographic introduction discusses themes in Caviness's publications and their importance for art historical and medieval studies today. The book's thematic matrix groups together essays concerned with: The Material Object, Documentary Reconstruction, Post-Disciplinary Approaches, Multiple Readings, Gender and Reception, Performativity, Text and Image, Collecting and Consumption, and Politics and Ideology. The contributors include curators, art historians, historians, and literary scholars. Their subjects range from medieval stained glass to the nineteenth-century Gothic Revival, the Sachsenspiegel, and Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. Many foreground issues of gender, reception, and textuality, which have permeated Caviness's scholarship. Some also present approaches to sites that have been the subject of important studies by Caviness, including Canterbury, Chartres, Reims, Saint-Denis, Sens, and Troyes. The volume offers a broad range of methodological approaches to key topics in the study of medieval imagery and thus highlights the vitality of the field today.
Download or read book Transforming Tales written by Miranda Griffin and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transforming Tales argues that the study of transformation is crucial for understanding a wide range of canonical work in medieval French literature. From the lais and Arthurian romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, through the Roman de la Rose and its widespread influence, to the fourteenth-century Ovide moralise and the vast prose cycles of the late Middle Ages, metamorphosis is a recurrent theme, resulting in some of the best-known and most powerful literature of the era. Transforming Tales is the first book in English to explore in detail the importance of ideas of metamorphosis in French literature from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. This book's purpose is twofold: it traces a series of figures (the werewolf, the snake-woman, the nymph, the magician, amongst others) as they are transformed within individual texts; and it also examines the way in which the stories of transformation themselves become rewritten during the course of the Middle Ages. Griffin's approach combines close readings and comparisons of literary texts with readings informed by modern critical theories which are grounded in many of the ideas raised by medieval metamorphosis: the body, gender, identity and categories of life. Literary depictions and reworkings of transformation raise questions about medieval understandings of the differences between human and animal, man and woman, God and man, life and death--these are the questions explored in Transforming Tales.
Download or read book The Erotic in the Literature of Medieval Britain written by Amanda Hopkins and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2007 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the erotic in medieval literature which includes articles on the role of clothing and nudity, the tension between eroticism and transgression and religion and the erotic.
Download or read book Power and Pleasure written by Hugh M. Thomas and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-19 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although King John is remembered for his political and military failures, he also resided over a magnificent court. Power and Pleasure reconstructs life at the court of King John and explores how his court produced both pleasure and soft power. Much work exists on courts of the late medieval and early modern periods, but the jump in record keeping under John allows a detailed reconstruction of court life for an earlier period. Power and Pleasure: Court Life under King John, 1199-1216 examines the many facets of John's court, exploring hunting, feasting, castles, landscapes, material luxury, chivalry, sexual coercion, and religious activities. It explains how John mishandled his use of soft power, just as he failed to exploit his financial and military advantages, and why he received so little political benefit from his magnificent court. John's court is viewed in comparison to other courts of the time, and in previous and subsequent centuries.
Download or read book Illuminating the Borders of Northern French and Flemish Manuscripts 1270 1310 written by Elizabeth Moore Hunt and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2007 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study first examines the marginal repertoire in two well-known manuscripts, the Psalter of Guy de Dampierre and an Arthurian Romance, within their material and codicological contexts. This repertoire then provides a template for an extended study of the marginal motifs that appear in eighteen related manuscripts, which range from a Bible to illustrated versions of the encyclopedias of Vincent de Beauvais and Brunetto Latini. Considering the manuscript as a whole work of art, the marginalia's physical relationship to nearby texts and images can shed light on the reception of these illuminated books by their medieval viewers.
Download or read book La pathologie du pouvoir vices crimes et d lits des gouvernants written by Patrick Gilli and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-02-02 with total page 571 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: La singularité de la criminalité des gouvernants ou de leurs actes peccamineux réside dans la rareté des condamnations qu’ils ont subies. En examinant sur la longue durée, les formes de dénonciation de ces délits des hommes de pouvoir, le livre essaie de comprendre les raisons qui aboutissent à la rupture du consensus et à la remise en cause de l’acceptation sociale des traditions jusqu’alors tolérées (corruption, extorsion, abus en tout genre). Les différentes contributions examinent les conditions de ces condamnations, morales et politiques, et dessinent un tableau nuancé de ces pathologies du pouvoir qui loin d’être invariables dans le temps sont articulées aux paradigmes moraux de chaque société historique. Les contributeurs sont: Nathalie Barrandon, Anne-Catherine Baudoin, Franck Collard, Kathleen Crowther, Angela De Benedictis, Silvia Di Paolo, Julien Dubouloz, Patrick Gilli, Cedric Giraud, Thomas Granier, Laurent Guitton, Charles Guerin, Corinne Manchio, Nancy McLoughin, Hélène Ménard, Richard Newhauser, Flocel Sabaté, Armand Strubel, Julien Théry et Silvana Vecchio English: What is singular about the criminality of rulers or their sinful acts is how rarely they are convicted. Through a long-term study of the forms of denunciation of crimes committed by those who hold power, this book tries to understand the reasons that lead to breaking the consensus and calling into question the social acceptance of traditions which had hitherto been tolerated (corruption, extortion, different types of abuse). The various contributions investigate the moral and political conditions of these convictions, and give a well-balanced account of these pathologies of power: far from being invariable over time, they are consistent with the moral paradigms of each society in history.
Download or read book Armour and Masculinity in the Italian Renaissance written by Carolyn Springer and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Italian Wars of 1494 to 1559, with innovations in military technology and tactics, armour began to disappear from the battlefield. Yet as field armour was retired, parade and ceremonial armour grew increasingly flamboyant. Displaced from its utilitarian function of defense but retained for symbolic uses, armour evolved in a new direction as a medium of artistic expression. Luxury armour became a chief accessory in the performance of elite male identity, coded with messages regarding the owner's social status, genealogy, and political alliances. Carolyn Springer decodes Renaissance armour as three-dimensional portraits through the case studies of three patrons of luxury armourers, Guidobaldo II della Rovere (1514-75), Charles V Habsburg (1500-58 and Holy Roman Emperor from 1519-56), and Cosimo I de'Medici (1519-74). A fascinating exposition of male self-representation, Armour and Masculinity in the Italian Renaissance explores the significance of armour in early modern Italy as both cultural artefact and symbolic form.
Download or read book Routledge Revivals Women and Gender in Medieval Europe 2006 written by Margaret Schaus and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-12 with total page 2033 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 2006, Women and Gender in Medieval Europe examines the daily reality of medieval women from all walks of life in Europe between 450 CE and 1500 CE. This reference work provides a comprehensive understanding of many aspects of medieval women and gender, such as art, economics, law, literature, sexuality, politics, philosophy and religion, as well as the daily lives of ordinary women. Masculinity in the middle ages is also addressed to provide important context for understanding women's roles. Additional up-to-date bibliographies have been included for the 2016 reprint. Written by renowned international scholars and easily accessible in an A-to-Z format, students, researchers, and scholars will find this outstanding reference work to be a valuable resource on women in Medieval Europe.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe written by Judith M. Bennett and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-08-22 with total page 1199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe provides a comprehensive overview of the gender rules encountered in Europe in the period between approximately 500 and 1500 C.E. The essays collected in this volume speak to interpretative challenges common to all fields of women's and gender history - that is, how best to uncover the experiences of ordinary people from archives formed mainly by and about elite males, and how to combine social histories of lived experiences with cultural histories of gendered discourses and identities. The collection focuses on Western Europe in the Middle Ages but offers some consideration of medieval Islam and Byzantium. The Handbook is structured into seven sections: Christian, Jewish, and Muslim thought; law in theory and practice; domestic life and material culture; labour, land, and economy; bodies and sexualities; gender and holiness; and the interplay of continuity and change throughout the medieval period. It contains material from some of the foremost scholars in this field, and it not only serves as the major reference text in medieval and gender studies, but also provides an agenda for future new research.
Download or read book Marrying Jesus in Medieval and Early Modern Northern Europe written by Rabia Gregory and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-09-17 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first full-length study of the notion of marriage to Jesus in late medieval and early modern popular culture, this book treats the transmission and transformation of ideas about this concept as a case study in the formation of religious belief and popular culture. Marrying Jesus in Medieval and Early Modern Northern Europe provides a history of the dispersion of theology about the bride of Christ in the period between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries and explains how this metaphor, initially devised for a religious elite, became integral to the laity's pursuit of salvation. Unlike recent publications on the bride of Christ, which explore the gendering of sanctity or the poetics of religious eroticism, this is a study of popular religion told through devotional media and other technologies of salvation. Marrying Jesus argues against the heteronormative interpretation that brides of Christ should be female by reconstructing the cultural production of brides of Christ in late medieval Europe. A central assertion of this book is that by the fourteenth century, worldly, sexually active brides of Christ, both male and female, were no longer aberrations. Analyzing understudied vernacular sources from the late medieval period - including sermons, early printed books, spiritual diaries, letters, songs, and hagiographies - Rabia Gregory shows how marrying Jesus was central to late medieval lay piety, and how the 'chaste' bride of Christ developed out of sixteenth-century religious disputes.
