Download or read book Cultures of Compunction in the Medieval World written by and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-10-15 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compunction was one of the most important emotions for medieval Christianity; in fact, through its confessional function, compunction became the primary means for an affective sinner to gain redemption. Cultures of Compunction in the Medieval World explores how such emotion could be expressed, experienced and performed in medieval European society. Using a range of disciplinary approaches – including history, philosophy, art history, literary studies, performance studies and linguistics – this book examines how and why emotions which now form the bedrock of modern western culture were idealized in the Middle Ages. By bringing together expertise across disciplines and medieval languages, this important book demonstrates the ubiquity and impact of compunction for medieval life and makes wider connections between devotional, secular and quotidian areas of experience.

Download or read book Cultures of Compunction in the Medieval World written by and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-10-15 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compunction was one of the most important emotions for medieval Christianity; in fact, through its confessional function, compunction became the primary means for an affective sinner to gain redemption. Cultures of Compunction in the Medieval World explores how such emotion could be expressed, experienced and performed in medieval European society. Using a range of disciplinary approaches – including history, philosophy, art history, literary studies, performance studies and linguistics – this book examines how and why emotions which now form the bedrock of modern western culture were idealized in the Middle Ages. By bringing together expertise across disciplines and medieval languages, this important book demonstrates the ubiquity and impact of compunction for medieval life and makes wider connections between devotional, secular and quotidian areas of experience.

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 Playing the Middle Ages written by Robert Houghton and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-08-24 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Middle Ages have provided rich source material for physical and digital games from Dungeons and Dragons to Assassin's Creed. This volume addresses the many ways in which different formats and genre of games represent the period. It considers the restrictions placed on these representations by the mechanical and gameplay requirements of the medium and by audience expectations of these products and the period, highlighting innovative attempts to overcome these limitations through game design and play. Playing the Middle Ages considers a number of important and timely issues within the field including: one, the connection between medieval games and political nationalistic rhetoric; two, trends in the presentation of religion, warfare and other aspects of medieval society and their connection to modern culture; three, the problematic representations of race; and four, the place of gender and sexuality within these games and the broader gaming community. The book draws on the experience of a wide-ranging and international group of academics across disciplines and from games designers. Through this combination of expertise, it provides a unique perspective on the representation of the Middle Ages in modern games and drives key discussions in the fields of history and game design.

Download or read book Gender and Medieval Mysticism from India to Europe written by Alexandra Verini and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-09-29 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book opens up a dialogue between pre-modern women identified as mystics in diverse locations from South Asia to Europe. It considers how women from the disparate religious traditions of Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity expressed devotion in parallel ways. The argument is that women’s mysticism demands to be compared not because of any essential "female" experience of the divine but because the parallel positions of marginalization that pre-modern women experienced led them to deploy intimate encounters with the divine to speak publicly and claim authority. The topics covered range from the Sufi devotional tradition of Sidis (Indians of African ancestry) to the Bhakti poet Mīrābaī and the nuns of Barking Abbey. Collectively the chapters show how mysticism allowed premodern women to speak and act by unsettling traditional gender roles and expectations for religious behavior. At the same time as uncovering connections, the juxtaposition of women from different traditions serves to highlight distinctive features. The book draws on a range of disciplinary expertise and will be of particular interest to scholars of medieval religion and theology as well as history and literary studies.

Download or read book New Medieval Literatures 24 written by Wendy Scase and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2024-03-12 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume continues the series' engagement with intellectual and cultural pluralism in the Middle Ages, showcasing the best new work in this field. New Medieval Literatures is an annual of work on medieval textual cultures Its scope is inclusive of work across the theoretical, archival, philological, and historicist methodologies associated with medieval literary studies, and embraces the range of European cultures, capaciously defined. Texts analysed here range in date from the late ninth or early tenth centuries to the fifteenth century, and in provenance from the eastern part of the Hungarian kingdom to the British Isles. European understandings of the world are explored in several essays, including historiographical perspectives on the Mongol Empire and "world-building" in the romances of the Round Table. In their consideration of translation - of English diplomatic texts into French, of the Latin Boethius into Old English, of Old Turkic and Mongolian into Latin - several contributors reveal complex medieval multilingual societies, while translatio is shown to be weaponised in international scholarly rivalries. Bibliophilia, book collection, and book production inform identity-formation, shaping both nationalisms and the many-layered identities of fifteenth-century merchants. Several essays engage revealingly with economic humanities. Account books provide traces of book production capacity in the unlikely location of Calais; credit finance provides metaphors for human relations with the divine in the Book of mystic Margery Kempe; and women broker credit in real-world scenarios too. Other essays engage with sensory studies: sight and optics are shown to inform ethnography, while smell and taste - often considered beyond the reach of language - emerge as surprisingly central in some religious and philosophical writings.

Download or read book Laughter and Awkwardness in Late Medieval England written by David Watt and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-08-24 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'We live,' according to Adam Kotsko, 'in an awkward age.' While this condition may present some challenges, it may also help us to be more attuned to awkwardness in other ages. This book pairs medieval texts with twenty-first century films or television programmes to explore what the resonance between them can tell us about living together in an awkward age. In this nuanced and engaging study, David Watt focuses especially, but not exclusively, on the 15th century, which seems to intervene awkwardly in the literary trajectory between Chaucer and the Renaissance. This book's hypothesis is that the social discomfort depicted and engendered by writers as diverse as Thomas Hoccleve, Margery Kempe, and Sir Thomas Malory is a feature rather than a flaw. Laughter and Awkwardness in Late Medieval England explains that these authors have a great deal in common with other fifteenth-century authors, who generated embodied experiences of social discomfort in a range of genres by adopting and adapting literary techniques used by their predecessors and successors in slightly different ways. Like the twenty-first century texts with which they are paired, the late-medieval texts that feature in this book use the relationship between laughter and awkwardness to ask what it means to live with each other and how we can learn to live with ourselves.

Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Medieval English Literature written by Raluca Radulescu and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-12-30 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to Medieval English Literature offers a new, inclusive, and comprehensive context to the study of medieval literature written in the English language from the Norman Conquest to the end of the Middle Ages. Utilising a Trans-European context, this volume includes essays from leading academics in the field across linguistic and geographic divides. Extending beyond the traditional scholarly discussions of insularity in relation to Middle English literature and ‘isolationism’, this volume: Oversees a variety of genres and topics, including cultural identity, insular borders, linguistic interactions, literary gateways, Middle English texts and traditions, and modern interpretations such as race, gender studies, ecocriticism, and postcolonialism. Draws on the combined extensive experience of teaching and research in medieval English and comparative literature within and outside of anglophone higher education and looks to the future of this fast-paced area of literary culture. Contains an indispensable section on theoretical approaches to the study of literary texts. This Companion provides the reader with practical insights into the methods and approaches that can be applied to medieval literature and serves as an important reference work for upper-level students and researchers working on English literature.

Download or read book Sincerity in Medieval English Language and Literature written by Graham Williams and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-05-17 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the development of the ideal of sincerity from its origins in Anglo-Saxon monasteries to its eventual currency in fifteenth-century familiar letters. Beginning by positioning sincerity as an ideology at the intersection of historical pragmatics and the history of emotions, the author demonstrates how changes in the relationship between outward expression and inward emotions changed English language and literature. While the early chapters reveal that the notion of sincerity was a Christian intervention previously absent from Germanic culture, the latter part of the book provides more focused studies of contrition and love. In doing so, the author argues that under the rubric of courtesy these idealized emotions influenced English in terms of its everyday pragmatics and literary style. This fascinating volume will be of broad interest to scholars of medieval language, literature and culture.

Download or read book Medievalism in Finland and Russia written by Reima Välimäki and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-11-03 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the end of the Cold War, the Middle Ages has returned to debates about history, culture, and politics in Northern and Eastern Europe. This volume explores political medievalism in two language areas that are crucial to understanding global medievalism but are, due to language barriers, often inaccessible to the majority of Western scholars and students. The importance of Russian medievalism has been acknowledged, but little analysed until now. Medievalism in Finland and Russia offers a selection of chapters by Russian, Finnish and American scholars covering historiography, presidential speeches, participatory online discussions and the neo-pagan revival in Russia. Finland is currently even more poorly understood than Russia in the discussions about global medievalism. It is usually mentioned only as of the birthplace of the Soldiers of Odin. The street patrol is, however, a marginal phenomenon in Finnish medievalism as this volume demonstrates. Instead of merely adopting the medievalist interpretation of the international alt-right, even the right-wing populists in Finland refer more to the nationalistic medievalist tradition, where crusades do not mark a Western Christian victory over the Muslim East, but a Swedish occupation of Finnish lands. In addition to presenting particular cases of medievalism, the chapters here on Finland challenge and diversify today's prevailing interpretation of shared online medievalism of European and American right-wing populists. This book reveals that while medievalisms in Finland and Russia share many features with the contemporary Anglo-American medievalist imaginations, they also display many original characteristics due to particular political situations and indigenous medievalist traditions. They have their own meta-medievalisms, cumulative core ideas and interpretations about the medieval past that are thoroughly examined here in English for the very first time.

Download or read book Emotional Practice in Old English Literature written by Alice Jorgensen and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2024-05-07 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of how emotions were practised and performed through Old English texts.Scholarship is increasingly interested in investigating concepts of emotion found in Old English literature. This study takes the next step, arguing that both heroic and religious texts were vehicles for emotional practice - that is, for doing things with emotion. Using case studies from heroic poetry (Beowulf, The Battle of Brunanburh and The Battle of Maldon), religious poetry (Christ I and Christ III) and homilies (selections from the Vercelli Book, Blickling Homilies and the works of Wulfstan), it shows via detailed close readings that texts could be used to act out emotional styles, manage the emotions arising from specific events, and negotiate relationships both within social groups and with God. Meanwhile, a chapter on the Old English Boethius explores how the control of unruly emotions is theorized as the transfer of attachment from the things of this world to the things of the divine. Overall, the volume offers new angles on the social functions of genres and questions of reception and performance; and it gives insight into how early medieval people used emotions to relate to their world, temporal and eternal. angles on the social functions of genres and questions of reception and performance; and it gives insight into how early medieval people used emotions to relate to their world, temporal and eternal. angles on the social functions of genres and questions of reception and performance; and it gives insight into how early medieval people used emotions to relate to their world, temporal and eternal. angles on the social functions of genres and questions of reception and performance; and it gives insight into how early medieval people used emotions to relate to their world, temporal and eternal.

Download or read book Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages written by E. Joy and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-12-09 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together contemporary popular entertainment, current political subjects, and medieval history and culture to investigate the intersecting and often tangled relations between politics, aesthetics, reality and fiction, in relation to issues of morality, identity, social values, power, and justice, both in the past and the present.

Download or read book Articulating the ij ba Cultural Patronage and Political Legitimacy in al Andalus written by Mariam Rosser-Owen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-12-20 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Articulating the Ḥijāba, Mariam Rosser-Owen analyses for the first time the artistic and cultural patronage of the ‘Amirid regents of the last Cordoban Umayyad caliph, Hisham II, a period rarely covered in the historiography of al-Andalus. Al-Mansur, the founder of this dynasty, is usually considered a usurper of caliphal authority, who pursued military victory at the expense of the transcendental achievements of the first two caliphs. But he also commissioned a vast extension to the Great Mosque of Cordoba, founded a palatine city, conducted skilled diplomatic relations, patronised a circle of court poets, and owned some of the most spectacular objects to survive from al-Andalus, in ivory and marble. This study presents the evidence for a reconsideration of this period.

Download or read book The Feeling Heart in Medieval and Early Modern Europe written by Katie Barclay and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-12-02 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The heart is an iconic symbol in the medieval and early modern European world. In addition to being a physical organ, it is a key conceptual device related to emotions, cognition, the self and identity, and the body. The heart is read as a metaphor for human desire and will, and situated in opposition to or alongside reason and cognition. In medieval and early modern Europe, the “feeling heart” – the heart as the site of emotion and emotional practices – informed a broad range of art, literature, music, heraldry, medical texts, and devotional and ritual practices. This multidisciplinary collection brings together art historians, literary scholars, historians, theologians, and musicologists to highlight the range of meanings attached to the symbol of the heart, the relationship between physical and metaphorical representations of the heart, and the uses of the heart in the production of identities and communities in medieval and early modern Europe.

Download or read book A Modern History of the Islamic World written by Reinhard Schulze and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2002-03 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Considering the Islamic world from Morocco to Indonesia, Somalia, and Bosnia, Schulze (Islamic studies, U of Berne) charts their histories during the 20th century. Rather than taking each one in turn, he narrates chronologically the political changes throughout the world where Islam is the dominant cultural force. He begins with the impact of colonialism and ends with struggle between Islamic culture and civil society in the 1990s. He includes several maps. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Download or read book Mental Health Spirituality and Religion in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age written by Albrecht Classen and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-07-28 with total page 744 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume continues the critical exploration of fundamental issues in the medieval and early modern world, here concerning mental health, spirituality, melancholy, mystical visions, medicine, and well-being. The contributors, who originally had presented their research at a symposium at The University of Arizona in May 2013, explore a wide range of approaches and materials pertinent to these issues, taking us from the early Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, capping the volume with some reflections on the relevance of religion today. Lapidary sciences matter here as much as medical-psychological research, combined with literary and art-historical approaches. The premodern understanding of mental health is not taken as a miraculous panacea for modern problems, but the contributors suggest that medieval and early modern writers, scientists, and artists commanded a considerable amount of arcane, sometimes curious and speculative, knowledge that promises to be of value and relevance even for us today, once again. Modern palliative medicine finds, for instance, intriguing parallels in medieval word magic, and the mystical perspectives encapsulated highly productive alternative perceptions of the macrocosm and microcosm that promise to be insightful and important also for the post-modern world.

Download or read book Crying in the Middle Ages written by Elina Gertsman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-02-20 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sacred and profane, public and private, emotive and ritualistic, internal and embodied, medieval weeping served as a culturally charged prism for a host of social, visual, cognitive, and linguistic performances. Crying in the Middle Ages addresses the place of tears in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic cultural discourses, providing a key resource for scholars interested in exploring medieval notions of emotion, gesture, and sensory experience in a variety of cultural contexts. Gertsman brings together essays that establish a series of conversations with one another, foregrounding essential questions about the different ways that crying was seen, heard, perceived, expressed, and transmitted throughout the Middle Ages. In acknowledging the porous nature of visual and verbal evidence, this collection foregrounds the necessity to read language, image, and experience together in order to envision the complex notions of medieval crying.