Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Ethics written by Thomas Williams and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-06 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers historical and topical chapters on the whole range of medieval ethical thought in Christian, Jewish, and Islamic philosophy.
Download or read book Ethics and Enjoyment in Late Medieval Poetry written by Jessica Rosenfeld and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-12-02 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jessica Rosenfeld provides a history of the ethics of medieval vernacular love poetry by tracing its engagement with the late medieval reception of Aristotle. Beginning with a history of the idea of enjoyment from Plato to Peter Abelard and the troubadours, the book then presents a literary and philosophical history of the medieval ethics of love, centered on the legacy of the Roman de la Rose. The chapters reveal that 'courtly love' was scarcely confined to what is often characterized as an ethic of sacrifice and deferral, but also engaged with Aristotelian ideas about pleasure and earthly happiness. Readings of Machaut, Froissart, Chaucer, Dante, Deguileville and Langland show that poets were often markedly aware of the overlapping ethical languages of philosophy and erotic poetry. The study's conclusion places medieval poetry and philosophy in the context of psychoanalytic ethics, and argues for a re-evaluation of Lacan's ideas about courtly love.
Download or read book Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages written by Eleanor Johnson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-05-11 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary scholars often avoid the category of the aesthetic in discussions of ethics, believing that purely aesthetic judgments can vitiate analyses of a literary work’s sociopolitical heft and meaning. In Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages, Eleanor Johnson reveals that aesthetics—the formal aspects of literary language that make it sense-perceptible—are indeed inextricable from ethics in the writing of medieval literature. Johnson brings a keen formalist eye to bear on the prosimetric form: the mixing of prose with lyrical poetry. This form descends from the writings of the sixth-century Christian philosopher Boethius—specifically his famous prison text, Consolation of Philosophy—to the late medieval English tradition. Johnson argues that Boethius’s text had a broad influence not simply on the thematic and philosophical content of subsequent literary writing, but also on the specific aesthetic construction of several vernacular traditions. She demonstrates the underlying prosimetric structures in a variety of Middle English texts—including Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and portions of the Canterbury Tales, Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love, John Gower’s Confessio amantis, and Thomas Hoccleve’s autobiographical poetry—and asks how particular formal choices work, how they resonate with medieval literary-theoretical ideas, and how particular poems and prose works mediate the tricky business of modeling ethical transformation for a readership.
Download or read book The Ethical Poetic of the Later Middle Ages written by Judson Boyce Allen and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 1982-12-15 with total page 549 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of the definition of literature in the late medieval period is based on manuals of writing and on literary commentary and glosses. It defines a method of reading which may now profitably explain medieval texts, and identifies new primary medieval evidence which may ground and guide new reading. Allen chooses texts whose commentary tradition provides the greatest opportunity for completeness. The most important of these is Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Medieval readings of Ovid bring into focus a number of major literary questions—the problems of fable and fiction, of unity imposed by miscellany poetry, of allegorical commentary, and of Christian use of pagan culture—all in connection with text which furnished medieval authors with more stories than any other single source except possibly the Bible. Allen also studies commentaries on the Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius, the Thebaid of Statius, the De nuptiis of Martianus Capella, the medieval Christian hymn-book, and the Poetria nova of Geoffrey of Vinsauf. Together these texts represent the range of medieval literature—a literature which, Allen concludes, was taken as direct ethical discourse, logically conducted and artfully organized within a system of language that also assimilated the natural world and sought to absorb its audience.
Download or read book Medieval Market Morality written by James Davis and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-11-24 with total page 533 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This important study examines the market trade of medieval England by providing a wide-ranging critique of the moral and legal imperatives that underpinned retail trade. James Davis shows how market-goers were influenced not only by practical and economic considerations of price, quality, supply and demand, but also by the moral and cultural environment within which such deals were conducted. This book draws on a broad range of cross-disciplinary evidence, from the literary works of William Langland and the sermons of medieval preachers, to state, civic and guild laws, Davis scrutinises everyday market behaviour through case studies of small and large towns, using the evidence of manor and borough courts. From these varied sources, Davis teases out the complex relationship between morality, law and practice and demonstrates that even the influence of contemporary Christian ideology was not necessarily incompatible with efficient and profitable everyday commerce.
Download or read book Levinas and Medieval Literature written by Ann W. Astell and published by Duquesne. This book was released on 2009 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Twelve essays take the unique approach of connecting Christian allegory, talmudic hermeneutics, and Levinasian interpretation, as authors put into dialogue the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas with a variety of English and rabbinic writings from the Middle Ages, thus illuminating what it means to classify medieval texts as profoundly ethical"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Sleep and its spaces in Middle English literature written by Megan G. Leitch and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-06 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Middle English literature is intimately concerned with sleep and the spaces in which it takes place. In the medieval English imagination, sleep is an embodied and culturally determined act. It is both performed and interpreted by characters and contemporaries, subject to a particular habitus and understood through particular hermeneutic lenses. While illuminating the intersecting medical and moral discourses by which it is shaped, sleep also sheds light on subjects in favour of which it has hitherto been overlooked: what sleep can enable (dreams and dream poetry) or what it can stand in for or supersede (desire and sex). This book argues that sleep mediates thematic concerns and questions in ways that have ethical, affective and oneiric implications. At the same time, it offers important contributions to understanding different Middle English genres: romance, dream vision, drama and fabliau.
Download or read book Ethics and Power in Medieval English Reformist Writing written by Edwin D. Craun and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-18 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The late medieval Church obliged all Christians to rebuke the sins of others, especially those who had power to discipline in Church and State: priests, confessors, bishops, judges, the Pope. This practice, in which the injured party had to confront the wrong-doer directly and privately, was known as fraternal correction. Edwin Craun examines how pastoral writing instructed Christians to make this corrective process effective by avoiding slander, insult, and hypocrisy. He explores how John Wyclif and his followers expanded this established practice to authorize their own polemics against mendicants and clerical wealth. Finally, he traces how major English reformist writing - Piers Plowman, Mum and the Sothsegger, and The Book of Margery Kempe - expanded the practice to justify their protests, to protect themselves from repressive elements in the late Ricardian and Lancastrian Church and State, and to urge their readers to mount effective protests against religious, social, and political abuses.
Download or read book Ethics and Medievalism written by Karl Fugelso and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 2014 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays on the modern reception of the Middle Ages, built round the central theme of the ethics of medievalism.
Download or read book Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages written by Eleanor Johnson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-12-20 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary scholars often avoid the category of the aesthetic in discussions of ethics, believing that purely aesthetic judgments can vitiate analyses of a literary work’s sociopolitical heft and meaning. In Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages, Eleanor Johnson reveals that aesthetics—the formal aspects of literary language that make it sense-perceptible—are indeed inextricable from ethics in the writing of medieval literature. Johnson brings a keen formalist eye to bear on the prosimetric form: the mixing of prose with lyrical poetry. This form descends from the writings of the sixth-century Christian philosopher Boethius—specifically his famous prison text, Consolation of Philosophy—to the late medieval English tradition. Johnson argues that Boethius’s text had a broad influence not simply on the thematic and philosophical content of subsequent literary writing, but also on the specific aesthetic construction of several vernacular traditions. She demonstrates the underlying prosimetric structures in a variety of Middle English texts—including Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and portions of the Canterbury Tales, Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love, John Gower’s Confessio amantis, and Thomas Hoccleve’s autobiographical poetry—and asks how particular formal choices work, how they resonate with medieval literary-theoretical ideas, and how particular poems and prose works mediate the tricky business of modeling ethical transformation for a readership.
Download or read book Medieval Literature and Historical Inquiry written by David Aers and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2000 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historicist readings of the politics and ethics exhibited in a range of medieval texts including Chaucer, Malory and the York Corpus Christi plays. Critical historicist readings engage with the politics and ethics of selected medieval texts, addressing a wide range of literature and topics of enquiry: Langland, Chaucer, and the Pearl-poet, Malory and the York Corpus Christi plays; chivalric cultures, their forms of identity and mourning; and the politics, ethics and theology of some of the most fascinating writing in late medieval England. Intended as a tribute to Professor Derek Pearsall, andreflecting his major contribution to medieval literary criticism, they are an important addition to the critical and historical study of the period.DAVID AERS is James B. Duke Professor of English and Professor of Historical Theology at Duke University.
Download or read book Medicine and the Seven Deadly Sins in Late Medieval Literature and Culture written by Virginia Langum and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-09-15 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book considers how scientists, theologians, priests, and poets approached the relationship of the human body and ethics in the later Middle Ages. Is medicine merely a metaphor for sin? Or can certain kinds of bodies physiologically dispose people to be angry, sad, or greedy? If so, then is it their fault? Virginia Langum offers an account of the medical imagery used to describe feelings and actions in religious and literary contexts, referencing a variety of behavioral discussions within medical contexts. The study draws upon medical and theological writing for its philosophical basis, and upon more popular works of religion, as well as poetry, to show how these themes were articulated, explored, and questioned more widely in medieval culture.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Virtue Ethics written by Daniel C. Russell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-14 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume addresses the history, future and contemporary application of virtue ethics.
Download or read book Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages written by Glending Olson and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-15 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book studies attitudes toward secular literature during the later Middle Ages. Exploring two related medieval justifications of literary pleasure—one finding hygienic or therapeutic value in entertainment, and another stressing the psychological and ethical rewards of taking time out from work in order to refresh oneself—Glending Olson reveals that, contrary to much recent opinion, many medieval writers and thinkers accepted delight and enjoyment as valid goals of literature without always demanding moral profit as well. Drawing on a vast amount of primary material, including contemporary medical manuscripts and printed texts, Olson discusses theatrics, humanist literary criticism, prologues to romances and fabliaux, and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. He offers an extended examination of the framing story of Boccaccio's Decameron. Although intended principally as a contribution to the history of medieval literary theory and criticism, Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages makes use of medical, psychological, and sociological insights that lead to a fuller understanding of late medieval secular culture.
Download or read book Ethics Nationalism and Just War written by Henrik Syse and published by CUA Press. This book was released on 2007-09 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book covers a wide range of topics and raises issues rarely touched on in the ethics-of-war literature, such as environmental concerns and the responsibility of bystanders.
Download or read book Tropologies written by Ryan McDermott and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2016-04-15 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tropologies is the first book-length study to elaborate the medieval and early modern theory of the tropological, or moral, sense of scripture. Ryan McDermott argues that tropology is not only a way to interpret the Bible but also a theory of literary and ethical invention. The “tropological imperative” demands that words be turned into works—books as well as deeds. Beginning with Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory the Great, then treating monuments of exegesis such as the Glossa ordinaria and Nicholas of Lyra, as well as theorists including Thomas Aquinas, Erasmus, Martin Luther, and others, Tropologies reveals the unwritten history of a major hermeneutical theory and inventive practice. Late medieval and early Reformation writers adapted tropological theory to invent new biblical poetry and drama that would invite readers to participate in salvation history by inventing their own new works. Tropologies reinterprets a wide range of medieval and early modern texts and performances—including the Patience-Poet, Piers Plowman, Chaucer, the York and Coventry cycle plays, and the literary circles of the reformist King Edward VI—to argue that “tropological invention” provided a robust alternative to rhetorical theories of literary production. In this groundbreaking revision of literary history, the Bible and biblical hermeneutics, commonly understood as sources of tumultuous discord, turn out to provide principles of continuity and mutuality across the Reformation’s temporal and confessional rifts. Each chapter pursues an argument about poetic and dramatic form, linking questions of style and aesthetics to exegetical theory and theology. Because Tropologies attends to the flux of exegetical theory and practice across a watershed period of intellectual history, it is able to register subtle shifts in literary production, fine-tuning our sense of how literature and religion mutually and dynamically informed and reformed each other.
Download or read book Rethinking Medieval Translation written by Emma Campbell and published by D. S. Brewer. This book was released on 2012 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays examining both the theory and practice of medieval translation.
