Download or read book Ennobling Love written by C. Stephen Jaeger and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2010-08-03 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Richard, Duke of Aquitaine, son of the King of England, remained with Philip, the King of France, who so honored him for so long that they ate every day at the same table and from the same dish, and at night their beds did not separate them. And the King of France loved him as his own soul; and they loved each other so much that the King of England was absolutely astonished at the vehement love between them and marveled at what it could mean." Public avowals of love between men were common from antiquity through the Middle Ages. What do these expressions leave to interpretation? An extraordinary amount, as Stephen Jaeger demonstrates. Unlike current efforts to read medieval culture through modern mores, Stephen Jaeger contends that love and sex in the Middle Ages relate to each other very differently than in the postmedieval period. Love was not only a mode of feeling and desiring, or an exclusively private sentiment, but a way of behaving and a social ideal. It was a form of aristocratic self-representation, its social function to show forth virtue in lovers, to raise their inner worth, to increase their honor and enhance their reputation. To judge from the number of royal love relationships documented, it seems normal, rather than exceptional, that a king loved his favorites, and the courtiers and advisors, clerical and lay, loved their superiors and each other. Jaeger makes an elaborate, accessible, and certain to be controversial, case for the centrality of friendship and love as aristocratic lay, clerical, and monastic ideals. Ennobling Love is a magisterial work, a book that charts the social constructions of passion and sexuality in our own times, no less than in the Middle Ages.
Download or read book To One Shut in From One Shut Out Anchoritic Rules in England From The Eleventh To The Fourteenth Century written by Seda Erkoç Yeni and published by Sentez Yayıncılık. This book was released on with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study analyses anchoritic guides written in England from eleventh to fourteenth centuries to observe the changes in the attitudes of the authors towards their primary audiences and by this way concerns itself with the life in the anchorhold and the possible changes in the meaning and basic elements of the solitary religious pursuit for both the authors and the primary audience of the anchoritic rules. After a close analysis of the Images, motifs and some highly Important themes of the texts such as enclosure and virginity, the present study points out certain shifts in the discourses of the authors and comments on the possible reasons for these changes. The author in the end reaches the conclusion that the regulations for the life of an anchoress were shaped around the general tendencies and contemplative trends of the period, as well as the personal inclinations of the advisors.
Download or read book The history of emotions written by Rob Boddice and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2017-12-28 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book introduces students and professional historians to the main areas of concern in the history of emotions. It discusses how the emotions intersect with other lines of historical research relating to power, practice, society and morality. Addressing criticism from within and without the discipline of history, the book offers a rigorous defence of this new approach, demonstrating its potential centrality to historiographical practice, as well as the importance of this kind of historical work for our general understanding of the human brain and the meaning of human experience.
Download or read book Jewish Literary Eros written by Isabelle Levy and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2022-06-07 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Jewish Literary Eros, Isabelle Levy explores the originality and complexity of medieval Jewish writings. Examining medieval prosimetra (texts composed of alternating prose and verse), Levy demonstrates that secular love is the common theme across Arabic, Hebrew, French, and Italian texts. At the crossroads of these spheres of intellectual activity, Jews of the medieval Mediterranean composed texts that combined dominant cultures' literary stylings with biblical Hebrew and other elements from Jewish cultures. Levy explores Jewish authors' treatments of love in prosimetra and finds them creative, complex, and innovative. Jewish Literary Eros compares the mixed-form compositions by Jewish authors of the medieval Mediterranean with their Arabic and European counterparts to find the particular moments of innovation among textual practices by Jewish authors. When viewed in the comparative context of the medieval Mediterranean, the evolving relationship between the mixed form and the theme of love in secular Jewish compositions refines our understanding of the ways in which the Jewish literature of the period negotiates the hermeneutic and theological underpinnings of Islamicate and Christian literary traditions.
Download or read book Affections of the Mind written by Emma Lipton and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2011-08-15 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Affections of the Mind argues that a politicized negotiation of issues of authority in the institution of marriage can be found in late medieval England, where an emergent middle class of society used a sacramental model of marriage to exploit contradictions within medieval theology and social hierarchy. Emma Lipton traces the unprecedented popularity of marriage as a literary topic and the tensions between different models of marriage in the literature of the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by analyzing such texts as Chaucer's Franklin's Tale, The Book of Margery Kempe, and the N-Town plays. Affections of the Mind focuses on marriage as a fluid and contested category rather than one with a fixed meaning, and argues that the late medieval literature of sacramental marriage subverted aristocratic and clerical traditions of love and marriage in order to promote the values of the lay middle strata of society. This book will be of value to a broad range of scholars in medieval studies.
Download or read book A Companion to Celestina written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-07-10 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty-three hitherto unpublished contributions by leading experts that summarize and expand on the main areas of Celestina scholarship, offering a critical overview of the field together with innovative approaches and readings.
Download or read book Law as Profession and Practice in Medieval Europe written by Kenneth Pennington and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2011 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together a set of papers by international scholars, distinguished in their own right, in honor of James Brundage. Each contribution corresponds to an important focus of Brundage's own work. The connection between the development of medieval legal thought and constitutional ideas is the theme that marks the first section, while the second centres on the growth of the legal profession. The following papers explore the intersection of law and marriage and finally the influence of legal thinking on the crusading movement.
Download or read book The Haskins Society Journal 23 written by Herbert Kessler and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 2014-04-17 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of the Haskins Society Journal furthers the Society's commitment to historical and interdisciplinary research on the early and central Middle Ages, especially in the Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Norman, and Angevin worlds but also on the continent. The topics of the essays it contains range from the curious place of Francia in the historiography of medieval Europe to strategies of royal land distribution in tenth-century Anglo-Saxon England to the representation of men and masculinity in the works of Anglo-Norman historians. Essays on the place of polemical literature in Frutolf of Michelsberg's Chronicle, exploration of the relationship between chivalry and crusading in Baudry of Bourgeuil's History, and Cosmas of Prague's manipulation of historical memory in the service of ecclesiastical privilege and priority each extend the volume's engagement with medieval historiography, employing rich continental examples to do so. Investigations of comital personnel in Anjou and Henry II's management of royal forests and his foresters shed new light on the evolving nature of secular governance in the twelfth centuries and challenge and refine important aspects of our view of medieval rule in this period. The volume ends with a wide-ranging reflection on the continuing importance of the art object itself in medieval history and visual studies. Contributors: H.F. Doherty, Kathryn Dutton, Kirsten Fenton, Paul Fouracre, Herbert Kessler, Ryan Lavelle, Thomas J.H. McCarthy, Lisa Wolverton, Simon Yarrow.
Download or read book Straightforward written by Marcus Attwater and published by Mijnbestseller.nl. This book was released on 2020-07-29 with total page 786 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When asked to name an archetypal love story, most people will reply 'Romeo & Juliet', although some say 'Tristan & Isolde' instead. Very few will come up with a classical example, and the reason for this is simple: when you say archetypal, it is assumed you mean love between a man and a woman, and instances of this in classical accounts are rare. The reason for this is also not hard to find: as it does now, 'love' in the ancient world meant the affection of equals, and given the inferior position of women in Greek and Roman society, between the sexes is not usually where love is to be found. Straightforward examines how we got from there to here. It is a study not of the loves of real people, but of the ideal of love as it found expression in stories, stories which were often retold and reimagined by new generations and new cultures. By following these stories and the changes they underwent through the centuries Straightforward attempts to answer two related questions: 'When and why did the heterosexual ideal become normative in our narrative tradition?' and 'What was there before?' We begin in archaic Greece, with a story which was already old when Homer composed his epics...
Download or read book Conflicting Femininities in Medieval German Literature written by Karina Marie Ash and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-23 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drastic changes in lay religiosity during the High Middle Ages spurred anxiety about women forsaking their secular roles as wives and mothers for religious ones as nuns and beguines. This anxiety and the subsequent need to model an ideal of feminine behavior for the laity is particularly expressed in the German versions of Latin and French narratives. Using thirteenth-century penitentials, monastic exempla, and sermons, Karina Marie Ash clarifies how secular wifehood was recast as a quasi-religious role and, in German epics and romances from the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, how female characters are adapted to promote the salvific nature of worldly love in ways that echo the pastoral reevaluation of women at that time. Then she argues that mid and late thirteenth-century German literature not only reflects this impulse to idealize women's roles in lay society but also to promote an alternative model of femininity that deploys ways of privileging secular roles for women over religious ones. These continuously evolving readaptations of female protagonists across cultures and across centuries reflect fictive solutions for real historical concerns about women that not only complement contemporary pastoral and legal reforms but are also unique to medieval German literature.
Download or read book The Making of Romantic Love written by William M. Reddy and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-08-30 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here, Reddy illuminates the birth of a cultural movement that managed to regulate selfish desire and render it innocent - or innocent enough. Reddy strikes out from this historical moment on an exploration of love, contrasting the medieval development of romantic love in Europe with contemporaneous eastern traditions in Bengal.
Download or read book The Nature of Love Volume 2 written by Irving Singer and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2009-02-20 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of ideas and ideals of medieval courtly love and the transition into later Romantic love, analyzing the work of Dante, Shakespeare, and Schopenhauer, among many others. Review), "monumental" (Boston Globe), "one of the major works of philosophy in our century" (Nous), "wise and magisterial" (Times Literary Supplement), and a "masterpiece of critical thinking [that] is a timely, eloquent, and scrupulous account of what, after all, still makes the world go round" (Christian Science Monitor). In the second volume, Singer studies the ideas and ideals of medieval courtly love and nineteenth-century Romantic love, as well as the transition between these two perspectives. According to the traditions of courtly love in the twelfth century and thereafter, not only God but also human beings in themselves are capable of authentic love. The pursuit of love between man and woman was seen as a splendid ideal that ennobles both the lover and the beloved. It was something more than libidinal sexuality and involved sophisticated and highly refined courtliness that emulated religious love in its ability to create a holy union between the participants. Adherents to Romantic love in later centuries, affirmed the capacity of love to effect a merging between two people who thus became one. Singer analyzes the transition from courtly to Romantic by reference to the writings of many artists beginning with Dante and ending with Richard Wagner, as well as Neoplatonist philosophers of the Italian Renaissance, Descartes, Spinoza, Rousseau, Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer. In relation to romanticism itself, he distinguishes between two aspects—"benign romanticism" and "Romantic pessimism"—that took on renewed importance in the twentieth century.
Download or read book Making Love in the Twelfth Century written by Barbara Newman and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2016-06-13 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can the Letters of Two Lovers be the previously lost love letters of Abelard and Heloise? Making Love in the Twelfth Century presents a new literary translation of the collection, along with a full commentary and two extended essays that parse its literary and intellectual contexts and chart the course of the doomed affair.
Download or read book Medieval Chivalry written by Richard W. Kaeuper and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-19 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emerging in the medieval period, chivalry embodied ideals that elite warriors cherished and practices that formed their profession. In this major new overview, Richard Kaeuper examines how chivalry made sense of violence and war, making it tolerable for elite fighters rather than non-knightly or sub-knightly populations. He discusses how chivalry buttressed status and profession, shaped active piety, and fostered intense warrior attachments and heterosexual relationships. Though showing regional and chronological variations, chivalry at its core enshrined the practice of prowess in securing honor, with this process significantly blessed by religion. Both kingship and church authority sought to direct the great force of chivalry and, despite tensions, finally came to terms with rising knightly status and a burgeoning military role. Kaeuper engages with a wide range of evidence in his analysis, drawing on the chivalric literature, manuscript illumination, and sermon exempla and moral tales.
Download or read book The Power of a Woman s Voice in Medieval and Early Modern Literatures written by Albrecht Classen and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2012-02-13 with total page 461 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study takes the received view among scholars that women in the Middle Ages were faced with sustained misogyny and that their voices were seldom heard in public and subjects it to a critical analysis. The ten chapters deal with various aspects of the question, and the voices of a variety of authors - both female and male - are heard. The study opens with an enquiry into violence against women, including in texts by male writers (Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried von Straßburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach) which indeed describe instances of violence, but adopt an extremely critical stance towards them. It then proceeds to show how women were able to develop an independent identity in various genres and could present themselves as authorities in the public eye. Mystic texts by Hildegard of Bingen, Marie de France and Margery Kempe, the medieval conduct poem known as Die Winsbeckin, the Devout Books of Sisters composed in convents in South-West Germany, but also quasi-historical documents such as the memoirs of Helene Kottaner or Anna Weckerin's cookery book, demonstrate that far more women were in the public gaze than had hitherto been assumed and that they possessed the self-confidence to establish their positions with their intellectual and their literary achievements.
Download or read book Christina of Markyate written by Samuel Fanous and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-09-16 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Samuel Fanous and Henrietta Leyser present a vivid interdisciplinary study devoted to the life, work and extant vita of Christina of Markyate, which draws on research from a wide range of disciplines. This fascinating and comprehensive collection surveys the life of an extraordinary medieval woman. Christina of Markyate made a vow of chastity at an early age, against the wishes of her parents who intended her to marry. When forced into wedlock, she fled in disguise and went into hiding, receiving refuge in a network of hermitages. Christina became a religious recluse and eventually founded a priory of nuns attached to St. Albans. Beautifully illustrated, this book provides students who regularly encounter Christina with a research compendium from which to begin their studies, and introduces Christina to a wider audience.
Download or read book From She Wolf to Martyr written by Elizabeth Casteen and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-19 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1343 a seventeen-year-old girl named Johanna (1326–1382) ascended the Neapolitan throne, becoming the ruling monarch of one of medieval Europe’s most important polities. For nearly forty years, she held her throne and the avid attention of her contemporaries. Their varied responses to her reign created a reputation that made Johanna the most notorious woman in Europe during her lifetime. In From She-Wolf to Martyr, Elizabeth Casteen examines Johanna’s evolving, problematic reputation and uses it as a lens through which to analyze often-contradictory late-medieval conceptions of rulership, authority, and femininity. When Johanna inherited the Neapolitan throne from her grandfather, many questioned both her right to and her suitability for her throne. After the murder of her first husband, Johanna quickly became infamous as a she-wolf—a violent, predatory, sexually licentious woman. Yet, she also eventually gained fame as a wise, pious, and able queen. Contemporaries—including Francesco Petrarch, Giovanni Boccaccio, Birgitta of Sweden, and Catherine of Siena—were fascinated by Johanna. Drawing on a wide range of textual and visual sources, Casteen reconstructs the fourteenth-century conversation about Johanna and tracks the role she played in her time’s cultural imaginary. She argues that despite Johanna’s modern reputation for indolence and incompetence, she crafted a new model of female sovereignty that many of her contemporaries accepted and even lauded.
