Download or read book Medieval Obscenities written by Nicola F. McDonald and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 2014 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Medieval Obscenities examines the complex and contentious role of the obscene - what is offensive, indecent or morally repugnant - in medieval culture from late antiquity through to the end of the middle ages in western Europe. Its approach is multidisciplinary, its methodologies divergent and it seeks to formulate questions and stimulate debate." "The essays examine topics as diverse as Norse defecation taboos, the Anglo-Saxon sexual idiom, sheela-na-gigs, impotence in the church courts, bare ecclesiastical bottoms, rude sounds and dirty words, as well as the modern reception and representation of the medieval obscene. The volume demonstrates not only the vitality of medieval obscenity, but its centrality to our understanding of medieval life."--Jacket.
Download or read book Obscene Pedagogies written by Carissa M. Harris and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-15 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Obscene Pedagogies, Carissa M. Harris investigates the relationship between obscenity, gender, and pedagogy in Middle English and Middle Scots literary texts from 1300 to 1580 to show how sexually explicit and defiantly vulgar speech taught readers and listeners about sexual behavior and consent. Through innovative close readings of literary texts including erotic lyrics, single-woman's songs, debate poems between men and women, Scottish insult poetry battles, and The Canterbury Tales, Harris demonstrates how through its transgressive charge and galvanizing shock value, obscenity taught audiences about gender, sex, pleasure, and power in ways both positive and harmful. Harris's own voice, proudly witty and sharply polemical, inspires the reader to address these medieval texts with an eye on contemporary issues of gender, violence, and misogyny.
Download or read book Obscenity written by Jan M. Ziolkowski and published by BRILL. This book was released on 1998 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume makes most wide-ranging attempt ever to probe the natures, origins, and consequences of obscenity in medieval literature, art, theater, and law. One large section examines obscenity in medieval French literature, especially fabliaux; but the rest of the book explores obscenity in cultures and languages of other regions in Europe.
Download or read book Holy Sh t written by Melissa Mohr and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-30 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A humorous, trenchant and fascinating examination of how Western culture's taboo words have evolved over the millennia
Download or read book The Politics of Obscenity in the Age of the Gutenberg Revolution written by Peter Frei and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-30 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does obscene mean? What does it have to say about the means through which meaning is produced and received in literary, artistic and, more broadly, social acts of representation and interaction? Early modern France and Europe faced these questions not only in regard to the political, religious and artistic reformations for which the Renaissance stands, but also in light of the reconfiguration of its mediasphere in the wake of the invention of the printing press. The Politics of Obscenity brings together researchers from Europe and the United States in offering scholars of early modern Europe a detailed understanding of the implications and the impact of obscene representations in their relationship to the Gutenberg Revolution which came to define Western modernity.
Download or read book Chaucerotics written by Geoffrey W. Gust and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-07-12 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chaucerotics examines the erotic language in Chaucerian literature through a unique lens, utilizing the tools of “pornographic literary theory” to open up Chaucer’s ribald poetry to fresh modes of analysis. By introducing and applying the notion of “Chaucerotics,” this study argues for a more historically-nuanced and theoretically-sophisticated understanding of the obscene content in Chaucer’s fabliaux and Troilus and Criseyde. This book demonstrates that the sexually suggestive language of this magisterial Middle English poet could stimulate and titillate various literary audiences in late medieval England, and even goes so far as to suggest that Chaucer might well be understood as the “Father of English pornography” for playing a notable, liminal role in the development of porn as a literary genre. In making this case, Geoffrey W. Gust presents an insightful account of an important intellectual issue and opens up the subject of premodern pornography to consideration in a way that is new and highly provocative.
Download or read book A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Middle Ages written by Ruth Evans and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-03-01 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historians of sexuality have often assumed that medieval people were less interested in sex than we are. But people in the Middle Ages wrote a great deal about sex: in confessors' manuals, in virginity treatises, and in literary texts. This volume looks afresh at the cultural meanings that sex had throughout the period, presenting new evidence and offering new interpretations of known material. Acknowledging that many of the categories that we use today to talk about sexuality are inadequate for understanding sex in premodern times, the volume draws on important recent work in the historiography of medieval sexuality to address the conceptual and methodological challenges the period presents. A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Middle Ages presents an overview of the period with essays on heterosexuality, homosexuality, sexual variations, religious and legal issues, health concerns, popular beliefs about sexuality, prostitution and erotica.
Download or read book The Meanings of Nudity in Medieval Art written by Sherry C. M. Lindquist and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2012 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Addressing a strangely neglected key issue in the history of art, this volume engages the variety and complexity of medieval representations of the unclothed human body. The Meanings of Nudity in Medieval Art breaks ground by offering a variety of approaches to explore the meanings of both male and female nudity in European painting, manuscripts and sculpture ranging from the late antique era to the fifteenth century.
Download or read book A Companion to Medieval Art written by Conrad Rudolph and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 1040 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fully updated and comprehensive companion to Romanesque and Gothic art history This definitive reference brings together cutting-edge scholarship devoted to the Romanesque and Gothic traditions in Northern Europe and provides a clear analytical survey of what is happening in this major area of Western art history. The volume comprises original theoretical, historical, and historiographic essays written by renowned and emergent scholars who discuss the vibrancy of medieval art from both thematic and sub-disciplinary perspectives. Part of the Blackwell Companions to Art History, A Companion to Medieval Art, Second Edition features an international and ambitious range of contributions covering reception, formalism, Gregory the Great, pilgrimage art, gender, patronage, marginalized images, the concept of spolia, manuscript illumination, stained glass, Cistercian architecture, art of the crusader states, and more. Newly revised edition of a highly successful companion, including 11 new articles Comprehensive coverage ranging from vision, materiality, and the artist through to architecture, sculpture, and painting Contains full-color illustrations throughout, plus notes on the book’s many distinguished contributors A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, Second Edition is an exciting and varied study that provides essential reading for students and teachers of Medieval art.
Download or read book The Reinvention of Obscenity written by Joan DeJean and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2002-06 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concept of obscenity is an ancient one. But as Joan DeJean suggests, its modern form, the same version that today's politicians decry and savvy artists exploit, was invented in seventeenth-century France. The Reinvention of Obscenity casts a fresh light on the mythical link between sexual impropriety and things French. Exploring the complicity between censorship, print culture, and obscenity, DeJean argues that mass market printing and the first modern censorial machinery came into being at the very moment that obscenity was being reinvented—that is, transformed from a minor literary phenomenon into a threat to society. DeJean's principal case in this study is the career of Moliére, who cannily exploited the new link between indecency and female genitalia to found his career as a print author; the enormous scandal which followed his play L'école des femmes made him the first modern writer to have his sex life dissected in the press. Keenly alert to parallels with the currency of obscenity in contemporary America, The Reinvention of Obscenity will concern not only scholars of French history, but anyone interested in the intertwined histories of sex, publishing, and censorship.
Download or read book Desire in Dante and the Middle Ages written by Manuele Gragnolati and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume takes Dante's rich and multifaceted discourse of desire, from the Vita Nova to the Commedia, as a point of departure in investigating medieval concepts of desire in all their multiplicity, fragmentation and interrelation. As well as offering several original contributions on this fundamental aspect of Dante's work, it seeks to situate the Florentine more effectively within the broader spectrum of medieval culture and to establish greater intellectual exchange between Dante scholars and those from other disciplines. The volume is also notable for its openness to diverse critical and methodological approaches. In considering the extent to which modern theoretical paradigms can be used to shed light upon the Middle Ages, it will interest those engaged with questions of critical theory as well as medieval culture.
Download or read book Monsters Gender and Sexuality in Medieval English Literature written by Dana Oswald and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2010 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gendered reading of monster and the monstrous body in medieval literature. Monsters abound in Old and Middle English literature, from Grendel and his mother in Beowulf to those found in medieval romances such as Sir Gowther. Through a close examination of the way in which their bodies are sexed and gendered, and drawing from postmodern theories of gender, identity, and subjectivity, this book interrogates medieval notions of the body and the boundaries of human identity. Case studies of Wonders of the East, Beowulf, Mandeville's Travels, the Alliterative Morte Arthure, and Sir Gowther reveal a shift in attitudes toward the gendered and sexed body, and thus toward identity, between the two periods: while Old English authors and artists respond to the threat of the gendered, monstrous form by erasing it, Middle English writers allow transgressive and monstrous bodies to transform and therefore integrate into society. This metamorphosis enables redemption for some monsters, while other monstrous bodies become dangerously flexible and invisible, threatening the communities they infiltrate. These changing cultural reactions to monstrous bodies demonstrate the precarious relationship between body and identity in medieval literature. DANA M. OSWALD is Assistant Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Parkside.
Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Medieval Iconography written by Colum Hourihane and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-12-19 with total page 588 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sometimes enjoying considerable favor, sometimes less, iconography has been an essential element in medieval art historical studies since the beginning of the discipline. Some of the greatest art historians – including Mâle, Warburg, Panofsky, Morey, and Schapiro – have devoted their lives to understanding and structuring what exactly the subject matter of a work of medieval art can tell. Over the last thirty or so years, scholarship has seen the meaning and methodologies of the term considerably broadened. This companion provides a state-of-the-art assessment of the influence of the foremost iconographers, as well as the methodologies employed and themes that underpin the discipline. The first section focuses on influential thinkers in the field, while the second covers some of the best-known methodologies; the third, and largest section, looks at some of the major themes in medieval art. Taken together, the three sections include thirty-eight chapters, each of which deals with an individual topic. An introduction, historiographical evaluation, and bibliography accompany the individual essays. The authors are recognized experts in the field, and each essay includes original analyses and/or case studies which will hopefully open the field for future research.
Download or read book Sexuality in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times written by Albrecht Classen and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2008-12-10 with total page 913 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sexuality is one of the most influential factors in human life. The responses to and reflections upon the manifestations of sexuality provide fascinating insights into fundamental aspects of medieval and early-modern culture. This interdisciplinary volume with articles written by social historians, literary historians, musicologists, art historians, and historians of religion and mental-ity demonstrates how fruitful collaborative efforts can be in the exploration of essential features of human society. Practically every aspect of culture both in the Middle Ages and the early modern age was influenced and determined by sexuality, which hardly ever surfaces simply characterized by prurient interests. The treatment of sexuality in literature, chronicles, music, art, legal documents, and in scientific texts illuminates central concerns, anxieties, tensions, needs, fears, and problems in human society throughout times.
Download or read book Medieval Allegory as Epistemology written by Marco Nievergelt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-03-21 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Medieval Allegory as Epistemology, Marco Nievergelt argues that late medieval dream-poetry was able to use the tools of allegorical fiction to explore a set of complex philosophical questions regarding the nature of human knowledge. The focus is on three of the most widely read and influential poems of the later Middle Ages: Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose; the Pélerinages trilogy of Guillaume de Deguileville; and William Langland's vision of Piers Plowman in its various versions. All three poets grapple with a collection of shared, closely related epistemological problems that emerged in Western Europe during the thirteenth century, in the wake of the reception of the complete body of Aristotle's works on logic and the natural sciences. This study therefore not only examines the intertextual and literary-historical relations linking the work of the three poets, but takes their shared interest in cognition and epistemology as a starting point to assess their wider cultural and intellectual significance in the context of broader developments in late medieval philosophy of mind, knowledge, and language. Vernacular literature more broadly played an extremely important role in lending an enlarged cultural resonance to philosophical ideas developed by scholastic thinkers, but it is also shown that allegorical narrative could prompt philosophical speculation on its own terms, deliberately interrogating the dominance and authority of scholastic discourses and institutions by using first-person fictional narrative as a tool for intellectual speculation.
Download or read book Medieval Women and Their Objects written by Jennifer Adams and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2021-03-11 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays gathered in this volume present multifaceted considerations of the intersection of objects and gender within the cultural contexts of late medieval France and England. Some take a material view of objects, showing buildings, books, and pictures as sites of gender negotiation and resistance and as extensions of women’s bodies. Others reconsider the concept of objectification in the lives of fictional and historical medieval women by looking closely at their relation to gendered material objects, taken literally as women’s possessions and as figurative manifestations of their desires. The opening section looks at how medieval authors imagined fictional and legendary women using particular objects in ways that reinforce or challenge gender roles. These women bring objects into the orbit of gender identity, employing and relating to them in a literal sense, while also taking advantage of their symbolic meanings. The second section focuses on the use of texts both as objects in their own right and as mechanisms by which other objects are defined. The possessors of objects in these essays lived in the world, their lives documented by historical records, yet like their fictional and legendary counterparts, they too used objects for instrumental ends and with symbolic resonances. The final section considers the objectification of medieval women’s bodies as well as its limits. While this at times seems to allow for a trade in women, authorial attempts to give definitive shapes and boundaries to women’s bodies either complicate the gender boundaries they try to contain or reduce gender to an ideological abstraction. This volume contributes to the ongoing effort to calibrate female agency in the late Middle Ages, honoring the groundbreaking work of Carolyn P. Collette.
Download or read book Rape Culture and Female Resistance in Late Medieval Literature written by Sarah Baechle and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2022-05-03 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Centering on the difficult and important subject of medieval rape culture, this book brings Middle English and Scots texts into conversation with contemporary discourses on sexual assault and the #MeToo movement. The book explores the topic in the late medieval lyric genre known as the pastourelle and in related literary works, including chivalric romance, devotional lyric, saints’ lives, and the works of major authors such as Margery Kempe and William Dunbar. By engaging issues that are important to feminist activism today—the gray areas of sexual consent, the enduring myth of false rape allegations, and the emancipatory potential of writing about survival—this volume demonstrates how the radical terms of the pastourelle might reshape our own thinking about consent, agency, and survivors’ speech and help uncover cultural scripts for talking about sexual violence today. In addition to embodying the possibilities of medievalist feminist criticism after #MeToo, Rape Culture and Female Resistance in Late Medieval Literature includes an edition of sixteen Middle English and Middle Scots pastourelles. The poems are presented in a critical framework specifically tailored to the undergraduate classroom. Along with the editors, the contributors to this volume include Lucy M. Allen-Goss, Suzanne M. Edwards, Mary C. Flannery, Katharine W. Jager, Scott David Miller, Elizabeth Robertson, Courtney E. Rydel, and Amy N. Vines.
