Download or read book Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England 700 1400 written by Catherine A. M. Clarke and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2006 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pastoral and locus amoenus traditions in Medieval English literature, and the early mythologisation of English landscape, space and identity through pastoral topoi. In its exploration of literary representations of ideal landscapes and the production of English identity across Latin and vernacular texts from Bede to Chaucer, this study looks in particular at pastoral and locus amoenustraditions in Medieval English literature, and the early mythologisation of English landscape, space and identity through pastoral topoi. From Bede's Ecclesiastical History and its seminal interpretation of Britain as thedelightful island, the study moves through representations of landscape in Old English poetry to the exploitation of the symbolic potential of their local landscapes by regional monastic houses in twelfth- and thirteenth-century texts and pastoral conventions, performances and the idea of the city in the fourteenth century. Introductory and concluding sections form bridges to current scholarship on representations of Englishness through pastoral topoi in the Early Modern period. Catherine A.M. Clarke is Professor of English, University of Southampton.
Download or read book A Social History of England 900 1200 written by Julia Crick and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-21 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The years between 900 and 1200 saw transformative social change in Europe, including the creation of extensive town-dwelling populations and the proliferation of feudalised elites and bureaucratic monarchies. In England these developments were complicated and accelerated by repeated episodes of invasion, migration and changes of regime. In this book, scholars from disciplines including history, archaeology and literature reflect on the major trends which shaped English society in these years of transition and select key themes which encapsulate the period. The authors explore the landscape of England, its mineral wealth, its towns and rural life, the health, behaviour and obligations of its inhabitants, patterns of spiritual and intellectual life and the polyglot nature of its population and culture. What emerges is an insight into the complexity, diversity and richness of this formative period of English history.
Download or read book The Sea and Englishness in the Middle Ages written by Sebastian I. Sobecki and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 2011 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focuses on the literary origins of insular identity from local communities to the entire archipelago.
Download or read book A Handbook of Middle English Studies written by Marion Turner and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-01-30 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Handbook of Middle English Studies “This sharp-minded, coherent set of essays both maps and liberates: not only does it map the intellectual territory of contemporary cultural debate; it also liberates the extraordinary texts of later medieval England to move across that contemporary cultural terrain.” James Simpson, Harvard University “Marion Turner has skilfully choreographed an exciting ensemble of fresh accounts of the English Middle Ages. We see the period in a new light that shows with compassion and imagination, as well as thoughtful scholarship, how the literature of the past speaks to contemporary preoccupations.” Ardis Butterfield, Yale University “Strikingly original: theory-literate and materially-grounded ways of reading Middle English texts.” David Wallace, University of Pennsylvania A Handbook of Middle English Studies presents twenty-six original and accessible essays by leading scholars, analyzing the relationship between critical theory and late-medieval literature. The collection offers a range of entry points into the rich field of medieval literary studies, exploring subjects including the depiction of the self and the mind, the literature of conquest, ideas of beauty and aesthetics, and the relationship between place and literature. Topics that have long been central to the field, such as authorship, gender, and race, feature alongside areas only recently coming under critical scrutiny, such as globalization, the environment, and animality. Collectively, the essays demonstrate that the manuscript culture of late medieval literature raises key theoretical issues concerning the relationship between authors, texts, and readers. A Handbook of Middle English Studies models diverse approaches to medieval texts and stakes a claim in debates about topics ranging from class to the canon, from imagination to nationhood, from sexuality to the public sphere.
Download or read book Mapping the Medieval City written by Catherine A M Clarke and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2011-05-15 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ground-breaking volume brings together contributions from scholars across a range of disciplines (including literary studies, history, geography and archaeology) to investigate questions of space, place and identity in the medieval city. Using Chester as a case study – with attention to its location on the border between England and Wales, its rich multi-lingual culture and surviving material fabric – the essays seek to recover the experience and understanding of the urban space by individuals and groups within the medieval city, and to offer new readings from the vantage-point of twenty-first century disciplinary and theoretical perspectives. The volume includes new interpretations of well-known sources and features such as the Chester Whistun Plays and the city’s Rows and walls, but also includes discussions of less-studied material such as Lucian’s In Praise of Chester – one of the earliest examples of urban encomium from England and an important text for understanding the medieval city – and the wealth of medieval Welsh poetry relating to Chester. Certain key themes emerge across the essays within this volume, including relations between the Welsh and English, formulations of centre and periphery, nation and region, different kinds of ‘mapping’ and the visual and textual representation of place, borders and boundaries, uses of the past in the production of identity, and the connections between discourses of gender and space. The volume seeks to generate conversation and debate amongst scholars of different disciplines, working across different locations and periods, and to open up directions for future work on space, place and identity in the medieval city.
Download or read book Imagination and Fantasy in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time written by Albrecht Classen and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-08-24 with total page 820 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The notions of other peoples, cultures, and natural conditions have always been determined by the epistemology of imagination and fantasy, providing much freedom and creativity, and yet have also created much fear, anxiety, and horror. In this regard, the pre-modern world demonstrates striking parallels with our own insofar as the projections of alterity might be different by degrees, but they are fundamentally the same by content. Dreams, illusions, projections, concepts, hopes, utopias/dystopias, desires, and emotional attachments are as specific and impactful as the physical environment. This volume thus sheds important light on the various lenses used by people in the Middle Ages and the early modern age as to how they came to terms with their perceptions, images, and notions. Previous scholarship focused heavily on the history of mentality and history of emotions, whereas here the history of pre-modern imagination, and fantasy assumes center position. Imaginary things are taken seriously because medieval and early modern writers and artists clearly reveal their great significance in their works and their daily lives. This approach facilitates a new deep-structure analysis of pre-modern culture.
Download or read book Lords and Towns in Medieval Europe written by Howard B. Clarke and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-07-14 with total page 575 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is the first publication to draw upon the mass of information provided by the Historic Towns Atlases in order to explore comparative questions in medieval urban history. The volume addresses the wider question of comparative urban studies, the processes that determined the morphological formation of towns, and the symbolic meaning of large-scale town plans in their cultural context.
Download or read book Reflections 50 Years of Medieval Archaeology 1957 2007 No 30 written by Roberta Gilchrist and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-13 with total page 689 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Society for Medieval Archaeology (established in 1957), presenting reflections on the history, development and future prospects of the discipline. The papers are drawn from a series of conferences and workshops that took place in 2007-08, in addition to a number of contributions that were commissioned especially for the volume. They range from personal commentaries on the history of the Society and the growth of the subject (see papers by David Wilson and Rosemary Cramp), to historiographical, regional and thematic overviews of major trends in the evolution and current practice of medieval archaeology. All the publications are fully refereed with the aim of publishing at the highest academic level reports on sites of national and international importance, and of encouraging the widest debate. The series’ objectives are to cover the broadest chronological and geographical range and to assemble a series of volumes which reflect the changing intellectual and technical scope of the discipline.
Download or read book Physical and Cultural Space in Pre Industrial Europe written by Marko Lamberg and published by Nordic Academic Press. This book was released on 2011-01-11 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by 19 scholars of history, archaeology, and ethnology, this book takes a multidisciplinary approach to European spaces of the past and the human agents within them. Prior to the Industrial Era, the geography of Europe posed problems but also offered possibilities for its people. Distances created obstacles to communication and state formation, but at the same time, inhabitants and officials in peripheral areas gained room to pursue more independent action, allowing unique customs to flourish. Focusing on northern Europe, this history answers how early modern Europeans - rulers, officials, aristocrats, scholars, priests, and commoners - perceived, utilized, and organized the space around them.
Download or read book Power and Pleasure written by Hugh M. Thomas and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-11-19 with total page 284 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. This book uses records of his reign to reconstruct his life at court, and explore how it produced both pleasure and soft power for the king.
Download or read book Cultural Reformations written by Brian Cummings and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-24 with total page 702 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The deepest periodic division in English literary history has been between the medieval and the early modern. 'Cultural Reformations' initiates discussion on many fronts in which both periods look different in dialogue with each other.
Download or read book Shakespeare s Plants and Gardens A Dictionary written by Vivian Thomas and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-02-27 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare lived when knowledge of plants and their uses was a given, but also at a time of unique interest in plants and gardens.His lifetime saw the beginning of scientific interest in plants, the first large-scale plant introductions from outside the country since Roman times, and the beginning of gardening as a leisure activity. Shakespeare's works show that he engaged with this new world to illuminate so many facets of his plays and poems. This dictionary offers a complete companion to Shakespeare's references to landscape, plants and gardens, including both formal and rural settings.It covers plants and flowers, gardening terms, and the activities that Shakespeare included within both cultivated and uncultivated landscapes as well as encompassing garden imagery in relation to politics, the state and personal lives. Each alphabetical entry offers an definition and overview of the term discussed in its historical context, followed by a guided tour of its use in Shakespeare's works and finally an extensive bibliography, including primary and secondary sources, books and articles.
Download or read book Forcing Nature written by Kai Friedhoff and published by Göttingen University Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the dominant world-view of the Western Middle Ages, natura evoked divine power as manifested in creation. Nature was an all-pervasive force, synonymous with God and his visible handiwork, but also a cosmic principle associated with fate and predestination in the Neoplatonic tradition. This volume of student essays tackles nature in a range of physical and metaphysical guises, always centred on its representation in medieval English literature. It contains studies of the visible natural world in elegiac, homiletic, and apocalyptic literature, but it also addresses other faces of nature, from the naked human form to the medieval reception of ancient ideas about free will, and closes with a comparative analysis of the nature of wisdom in Old English and The Lord of the Rings.
Download or read book Writing Regional Identities in Medieval England written by Emily Dolmans and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2020 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of how regional identities are reflected in texts from medieval England.
Download or read book Edmund Spenser and the romance of space written by Tamsin Badcoe and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-30 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edmund Spenser and the romance of space seeks to gauge the roles that aesthetic subjectivity and the imagination play in early modern spatial and textual practices.
Download or read book Trees in Anglo Saxon England written by Della Hooke and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2010 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trees played a particularly important part in the rural economy of Anglo-Saxon England, both for wood and timber and as a wood-pasture resource, with hunting gaining a growing cultural role. But they are also powerful icons in many pre-Christian religions, with a degree of tree symbolism found in Christian scripture too. This wide-ranging book explores both the "real", historical and archaeological evidence of trees and woodland, and as they are depicted in Anglo-Saxon literature and legend. Place-name and charter references cast light upon the distribution of particular tree species (mapped here in detail for the first time) and also reflect upon regional character in a period that was fundamental for the evolution of the present landscape. Della Hooke is Honorary Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Research in Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Birmingham.
Download or read book Materializing Englishness in Early Medieval Texts written by Jacqueline Fay and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-06-02 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The aim of this book is to restore to the story of Englishness the lively material interactions between words, bodies, plants, stones, metals, and soil, among other things, that would have characterized it for the early medieval English themselves. In particular, each chapter demonstrates how a productive collapse, or fusion, between place and history happens not only in the intellectual realm, in ideas, but is also a material concern, becoming enfleshed in encounters between early medieval bodies and a host of material entities. Through readings of texts in a wide variety of genres including hagiography, heroic poetry, and medical and historical works, the book argues that Englishness during this period is an embodied identity emergent at the frontier of material and textual interactions that serve productively to occlude history, religion, and geography. The early medieval English body thus results from the rich encounter between the lived environment—climate, soil, landscape features, plants—and the textual-discursive realm that both determines what that environment means and is also itself determined by the material constraints of everyday life.
