Download or read book Glamorous Sorcery written by David Rollo and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "David Rollo considers a series of texts produced in England and the Angevin Empire to reassess the value and nature of literacy in the High Middle Ages. He does this by scrutinizing metaphors that represent writing as a form of sorcery or magic in Latin texts and in the work of the Old French writer Benoit de Sainte-Maure. Rollo then examines the ambiguous representation of literacy as a skill that can be exploited as a commodity.".
Download or read book The Routledge History of Medieval Magic written by Sophie Page and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge History of Medieval Magic brings together the work of scholars from across Europe and North America to provide extensive insights into recent developments in the study of medieval magic between c.1100 and c.1500. This book covers a wide range of topics, including the magical texts which circulated in medieval Europe, the attitudes of intellectuals and churchmen to magic, the ways in which magic intersected with other aspects of medieval culture, and the early witch trials of the fifteenth century. In doing so, it offers the reader a detailed look at the impact that magic had within medieval society, such as its relationship to gender roles, natural philosophy, and courtly culture. This is furthered by the book’s interdisciplinary approach, containing chapters dedicated to archaeology, literature, music, and visual culture, as well as texts and manuscripts. The Routledge History of Medieval Magic also outlines how research on this subject could develop in the future, highlighting under-explored subjects, unpublished sources, and new approaches to the topic. It is the ideal book for both established scholars and students of medieval magic.
Download or read book Arthurian Literature XXV written by Elizabeth Archibald and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 2008 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most recent research in matters Arthurian, by leading scholars in the field.
Download or read book Magic in the Middle Ages written by Richard Kieckhefer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-09 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revised and expanded edition of this fascinating interdisciplinary study of magic in the Middle Ages.
Download or read book Magic and Medieval Society written by Anne Lawrence-Mathers and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-05-30 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Magic and Medieval Society presents a thematic approach to the topic of magic and sorcery in Western Europe between the eleventh and the fifteenth century. It aims to provide readers with the conceptual and documentary tools to reach informed conclusions as to the existence, nature, importance and uses of magic in medieval society. Contrary to some previous approaches, the authors argue that magic is inextricably connected to other areas of cultural practice and was found across medieval society. Therefore, the book is arranged thematically, covering topics such as the use of magic at medieval courts, at universities and within the medieval Church itself. Each chapter and theme is supported by additional documents, diagrams and images to allow readers to examine the evidence side-by-side with the discussions in the chapters and to come to informed conclusions on the issues. This book puts forward the argument that the witch craze was not a medieval phenomenon but rather the product of the Renaissance and the Reformation, and demonstrates how the components for the early-modern prosecution of witches were put into place. This new Seminar Study is supported by a comprehensive documents section, chronology, who’s who and black-and-white plate section. It offers a concise and thought-provoking introduction for students of medieval history.
Download or read book Monks Miracles and Magic written by Helen L. Parish and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-29 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Helen L. Parish presents an innovative new study of Reformation attitudes to medieval Christianity, revealing the process by which the medieval past was rewritten by Reformation propagandists. This fascinating account sheds light on how the myths and legends of the middle ages were reconstructed, reinterpreted, and formed into a historical base for the Protestant church in the sixteenth century. Crossing the often artificial boundary between medieval and modern history, Parish draws upon a valuable selection of writings on the lives of the saints from both periods, and addresses ongoing debates over the relationship between religion and the supernatural in early modern Europe. Setting key case studies in a broad conceptual framework, Monks, Miracles and Magic is essential reading for all those with an interest in the construction of the Protestant church, and its medieval past.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West written by David J. Collins, S. J. and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-02 with total page 897 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents twenty chapters by experts in their fields, providing a thorough and interdisciplinary overview of the theory and practice of magic in the West. Its chronological scope extends from the Ancient Near East to twenty-first-century North America; its objects of analysis range from Persian curse tablets to US neo-paganism. For comparative purposes, the volume includes chapters on developments in the Jewish and Muslim worlds, evaluated not simply for what they contributed at various points to European notions of magic, but also as models of alternative development in ancient Mediterranean legacy. Similarly, the volume highlights the transformative and challenging encounters of Europeans with non-Europeans, regarding the practice of magic in both early modern colonization and more recent decolonization.
Download or read book Timely Voices written by Goran Stanivukovic and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2017-11-13 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the fourteenth-century Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to In Parenthesis – an epic poem written in 1937 by painter and poet David Jones – English writers have looked to romance as a resource and a strategy to expand the imaginary reach of their writing. Rethinking the resilience, purpose, and place of romance in English literature, Timely Voices discusses moments that have altered how we read and interpret this ever-changing form. Addressing the various ways in which romance has absorbed and been absorbed by drama, prose, and poetry, contributors to this volume demonstrate that romance texts do not produce something defined or confined by a static genre, but rather express a repository of creative possibilities. Covering writers including the anonymous author of Sir Orfeo, Jane Austen, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Lucy Hutchinson, William Morris, Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, and Edmund Spenser, essays explore the magic and wonder of romance, Irish and Gaelic lore, how woodcuts in early books complement and extend printed text, how romance was dramatized, how it gives language to feminist politics and ideology, and how it becomes a counterpoint to finance in the fiction of the early Romantic period. A nuanced reinterpretation of romance in its own terms, Timely Voices inspires new appreciation of this form as a solution to textual, aesthetic, structural, ideological, and political problems in literature.
Download or read book Medieval Robots written by E. R. Truitt and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2015-04-22 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thousand years before Isaac Asimov set down his Three Laws of Robotics, real and imagined automata appeared in European courts, liturgies, and literary texts. Medieval robots took such forms as talking statues, mechanical animals, and silent metal guardians; some served to entertain or instruct while others performed disciplinary or surveillance functions. Variously ascribed to artisanal genius, inexplicable cosmic forces, or demonic powers, these marvelous fabrications raised fundamental questions about knowledge, nature, and divine purpose in the Middle Ages. Medieval Robots recovers the forgotten history of fantastical, aspirational, and terrifying machines that captivated Europe in imagination and reality between the ninth and fourteenth centuries. E. R. Truitt traces the different forms of self-moving or self-sustaining manufactured objects from their earliest appearances in the Latin West through centuries of mechanical and literary invention. Chronicled in romances and song as well as histories and encyclopedias, medieval automata were powerful cultural objects that probed the limits of natural philosophy, illuminated and challenged definitions of life and death, and epitomized the transformative and threatening potential of foreign knowledge and culture. This original and wide-ranging study reveals the convergence of science, technology, and imagination in medieval culture and demonstrates the striking similarities between medieval and modern robotic and cybernetic visions.
Download or read book Pleasure and Leisure 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 2019-08-05 with total page 764 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jan Huizinga and Roger Caillois have already taught us to realize how important games and play have been for pre-modern civilization. Recent research has begun to acknowledge the fundamental importance of these aspects in cultural, religious, philosophical, and literary terms. This volume expands on the traditional approach still very much focused on the materiality of game (toys, cards, dice, falcons, dolls, etc.) and acknowledges that game constituted also a form of coming to terms with human existence in an unstable and volatile world determined by universal randomness and fortune. Whether considering blessings or horse fighting, falconry or card games, playing with dice or dolls, we can gain a much deeper understanding of medieval and early modern society when we consider how people pursued pleasure and how they structured their leisure time. The contributions examine a wide gamut of approaches to pleasure, considering health issues, eroticism, tournaments, playing music, reading and listening, drinking alcohol, gambling and throwing dice. This large issue was also relevant, of course, in non-Christian societies, and constitutes a critical concern both for the past and the present because we are all homines ludentes.
Download or read book Love Cures written by Laine E. Doggett and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-11-09 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is love? Popular culture bombards us with notions of the intoxicating capacities of love or of beguiling women who can bewitch or heal—to the point that it is easy to believe that such images are timeless and universal. Not so, argues Laine Doggett in Love Cures. Aspects of love that are expressed in popular music—such as “love is a drug,” “sexual healing,” and “love potion number nine”—trace deep roots to Old French romance of the high Middle Ages. A young woman heals a poisoned knight. A mother prepares a love potion for a daughter who will marry a stranger in a faraway land. How can readers interpret such events? In contrast to scholars who have dismissed these women as fantasy figures or labeled them “witches,” Doggett looks at them in the light of medical and magical practices of the high Middle Ages. Love Cures argues that these practitioners, as represented in romance, have shaped modern notions of love. Love Cures seeks to engage scholars of love, marriage, and magic in disciplines as diverse as literature, history, anthropology, and philosophy.
Download or read book Writing Society and Culture in Early Rus c 950 1300 written by Simon Franklin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-08-29 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a thorough survey and analysis of the emergence and functions of written culture in Rus (covering roughly the modern East Slav lands of European Russia, Ukraine and Belarus). Part I introduces the full range of types of writing: the scripts and languages, the materials, the social and physical contexts, ranging from builders' scratches on bricks through to luxurious parchment manuscripts. Part II presents a series of thematic studies of the 'socio-cultural dynamics' of writing, in order to reveal and explain distinctive features in the Rus assimilation of the technology. The comparative approach means that the book may also serve as a case-study for those with a broader interest either in medieval uses of writing or in the social and cultural history of information technologies. Overall, the impressive scholarship and idiosyncratic wit of this volume commend it to students and specialists in Russian history and literature alike. Awarded the Alec Nove Prize, given by the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies for the best book of 2002 in Russian, Soviet or Post-Soviet studies.
Download or read book Violence and the Writing of History in the Medieval Francophone World written by Noah D. Guynn and published by D. S. Brewer. This book was released on 2013 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of medieval historican writings through the prism of violence. The concept of medieval historiography as "usable past" is here challenged and reassessed. The contributors' shared claim is that the value of medieval historiographical texts lies not only in the factual information the texts contain but also in the methods and styles they use to represent and interpret the past and make it ideologically productive. Violence is used as the key term that best demonstrates the making of historical meaning in the Middle Ages, through the transformation of acts of physical aggression and destruction into a memorable and usable past. The twelve chapters assembled here explore a wide range of texts emanating from throughout the francophone world. They cover a range of genres (chansons de geste, histories, chronicles, travel writing, and lyric poetry), and range from the late eleventh to the fifteenth century. Through examination of topics as varied as rhetoric, imagery, humor, gender, sexuality, trauma, subversion, and community formation, each chapter strives to demonstrate how knowledge of the medieval past can be enhanced by approaching medieval modes of historical representation and consciousness on their own terms, and by acknowledging - and resisting - the desire to subject them to modern conceptions of historical intelligibility. Noah D. Guynn is Associate Professor of French at the University of California, Davis; Zrinka Stahuljak is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. Contributors: Noah D. Guynn, Zrinka Stahuljak, James Andrew Cowell, Jeff Rider, Leah Shopkow, Matthew Fisher, Karen Sullivan, David Rollo, Deborah McGrady, Rosalind Brown-Grant, Simon Gaunt
Download or read book Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance written by Corinne J. Saunders and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2010 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This study looks at a wide range of medieval Englisih romance texts, including the works of Chaucer and Malory, from a broad cultural perspective, to show that while they employ magic in order to create exotic, escapist worlds, they are also grounded in a sense of possibility, and reflect a complex web of inherited and current ideas." --Book Jacket.
Download or read book Violence in Medieval Courtly Literature written by Albrecht Classen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-10-12 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although courtly literature is often associated with a chivalrous and idyllic life, the fifteen original essays in this collection demonstrate that the quest for love in the world of medieval courtly literature was underpinned by violence. Lovers were rejected, mistrust ruled, rape was a rampant problem, and marriage was often characterized by brutality. Albrecht Classen brings together an outstanding group of historical, cultural, and literary scholars in this volume to investigate the complicated, nuanced, and often surprising unions of love and violence in courtly medieval literature.
Download or read book An Intimate Affair written by Jill Fields and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents the history of twentieth-century lingerie. This book examines the ways cultural meanings are orchestrated by the 'fashion-industrial complex, ' and the ways in which individuals and groups embrace, reject, or derive meaning from these everyday, yet significant, intimate articles of clothing.
Download or read book Magical Thinking written by Stuart McWilliams and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2011-12-08 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we write about magic? Responding to a renewed interest in the history of the occult, this volume examines the role of magic in a series of methodological controversies in the humanities. In case studies ranging from the 'necromancy' of historiography to the strident rationalism of the 'New Atheism,' Magical Thinking sets out the surprising ways in which scholars and critics have imagined the occult. The volume argues that thinking and writing about magic has engendered multiple epistemological crises, profoundly unsettling the understanding of history and knowledge in Western culture. By examining how scholarly writing has contended and conspired with discourses of enchantment, the book reveals the implications of magic - and its scholarship - for intellectual history.
