Download or read book Medieval Optics and Theories of Light in the Works of Dante written by Simon A. Gilson and published by Edwin Mellen Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study investigates Dante's knowledge of several traditions of the extensive medieval literature on light and optics and examines how he assimilates and reworks related imagery, themes, and motifs in his writing.
Download or read book Dante and Renaissance Florence written by Simon A. Gilson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-01-13 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Simon Gilson explores Dante's reception in his native Florence between 1350 and 1481. He traces the development of Florentine civic culture and the interconnections between Dante's principal 'Florentine' readers, from Giovanni Boccaccio to Cristoforo Landino, and explains how and why both supporters and opponents of Dante exploited his legacy for a variety of ideological, linguistic, cultural and political purposes. The book focuses on a variety of texts, both Latin and vernacular, in which reference was made to Dante, from commentaries to poetry, from literary lives to letters, from histories to dialogues. Gilson pays particular attention to Dante's influence on major authors such as Boccaccio and Petrarch, on Italian humanism, and on civic identity and popular culture in Florence. Ranging across literature, philosophy and art, across languages and across social groups, this study fully illuminates for the first time Dante's central place in Italian Renaissance culture and thought.
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 325 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 Ringleaders of Redemption written by Kathryn Dickason and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2021-01-15 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In popular thought, Christianity is often figured as being opposed to dance. Conventional scholarship traces this controversy back to the Middle Ages. Throughout the medieval era, the Latin Church denounced and prohibited dancing in religious and secular realms, often aligning it with demonic intervention, lust, pride, and sacrilege. Historical sources, however, suggest that medieval dance was a complex and ambivalent phenomenon. During the High and Late Middle Ages, Western theologians, liturgists, and mystics not only tolerated dance; they transformed it into a dynamic component of religious thought and practice. This book investigates how dance became a legitimate form of devotion in Christian culture. Sacred dance functioned to gloss scripture, frame spiritual experience, and imagine the afterlife. Invoking numerous manuscript and visual sources (biblical commentaries, sermons, saints' lives, ecclesiastical statutes, mystical treatises, vernacular literature, and iconography), this book highlights how medieval dance helped shape religious identity and social stratification. Moreover, this book shows the political dimension of dance, which worked in the service of Christendom, conversion, and social cohesion. In Ringleaders of Redemption, Kathryn Dickason reveals a long tradition of sacred dance in Christianity, one that the professionalization and secularization of Renaissance dance obscured, and one that the Reformation silenced and suppressed.
Download or read book Dante s Plurilingualism written by Sara Fortuna and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dante's conception of language is encompassed in all his works and can be understood in terms of a strenuous defence of the volgare in tension with the prestige of Latin. By bringing together different approaches, from literary studies to philosophy and history, from aesthetics to queer studies, from psychoanalysis to linguistics, this volume offers new critical insights on the question of Dantes language, engaging with both the philosophical works characterized by an original project of vulgarization, and the poetic works, which perform a new language in an innovative and self-reflexive way. In particular, Dantes Plurilingualism explores the rich and complex way in which Dantes linguistic theory and praxis both informs and reflects an original configuration of the relationship between authority, knowledge and identity that continues to be fascinated by an ideal of unity but is also imbued with a strong element of subjectivity and opens up towards multiplicity and modernity.
Download or read book Alhacen s Theory of Visual Perception written by Alhazen and published by American Philosophical Society. This book was released on 2001 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sometime between 1028 and 1038, Ibn al-Haytham completed his monumental optical synthesis, Kitab al-Manazir ("Book of Optics"). By no later than 1200, and perhaps somewhat earlier, this treatise appeared in Latin under the title De aspectibus. In that form it was attributed to a certain "Alhacen." These differences in title and authorial designation are indicative of the profound differences between the two versions, Arabic and Latin, of the treatise. In many ways, in fact, they can be regarded not simply as different versions of the same work, but as different works in their own right. Accordingly, the Arab author, Ibn al-Haytham, and his Latin incarnation, Alhacen, represent two distinct, sometimes even conflicting, interpretive voices. And the same holds for their respective texts. To complicate matters, "Alhacen" does not represent a single interpretive voice. There were at least two translators at work on the Latin text, one of them adhering faithfully to the Arabic original, the other content with distilling, even paraphrasing, the Arabic original. Consequently, the Latin text presents not one, but at least two faces to the reader. This two-volume critical edition represents fourteen years of work on Dr. Smith's part. Awarded the 2001 J. F. Lewis Award.
Download or read book Chaucer and Italian Culture written by Helen Fulton and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2021-01-15 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study offers a clear discussions of canonical Chaucerian works. It includes new accounts of Italian cultural influences on Chaucer’s writing. It has a contextualising introduction and comprehensive bibliography. It offers a comparative approaches to key texts.
Download or read book Wings of the Doves written by Elena Lombardi and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2012 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The tragic love of Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta - a classic story of passion and death - revisited through the lenses of literature, philosophy, and theology.
Download or read book Venus and the Arts of Love in Renaissance Florence written by Rebekah Compton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-11 with total page 637 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume, Rebekah Compton offers the first survey of Venus in the art, culture, and governance of Florence from 1300 to 1600. Organized chronologically, each of the six chapters investigates one of the goddess's alluring attributes – her golden splendor, rosy-hued complexion, enchanting fashions, green gardens, erotic anatomy, and gifts from the sea. By examining these attributes in the context of the visual arts, Compton uncovers an array of materials and techniques employed by artists, patrons, rulers, and lovers to manifest Venusian virtues. Her book explores technical art history in the context of love's protean iconography, showing how different discourses and disciplines can interact in the creation and reception of art. Venus and the Arts of Love in Renaissance Florence offers new insights on sight, seduction, and desire, as well as concepts of gender, sexuality, and viewership from both male and female perspectives in the early modern era.
Download or read book Nonsense and Other Senses written by Elisabetta Tarantino with the collaboration of Carlo Caruso and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-07-24 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book deals with a topic that is gaining increasing critical attention, the literature of nonsense and absurdity. The volume gathers together twenty-one essays on various aspects of literary nonsense, according to criteria that are deliberately inclusive and eclectic. Its purpose is to offer a gallery of “nonsense practices” in literature across periods and countries, in the conviction that important critical insights can be gained from these juxtapositions. Most of the cases presented here deal with linguistic nonsense, but in a few instances the nonsense operates at the higher level of the interpretation of reality on the part of the subject—or of the impossibility thereof. The contributors to the volume are established and younger scholars from various countries. Chronologically, the chapters range widely from Dante to Václav Havel, and offer a large span of national literatures (Czech, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese) and literary genres (poetry, prose, and drama), inviting the readers to trace their own pathway and draw their own lines of connection. One point that emerges with particular force is the notion that what distinguishes literary nonsense is its somehow “regulated” nature. Literary nonsense thus sounds like a deliberate, last-ditch attempt to snatch order from the jaws of chaos—the speech of the “Fool” as opposed to the tale told by an idiot. It is this kind of post-Derridean retrieval of choice as the defining element in semantic transactions which is perhaps the most significant insight bequeathed by the study of nonsense to the analysis of poetry and literature in general.
Download or read book Dante s Enigmas written by Richard Kay and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-10-28 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dante's Comedy is a puzzling poem because the author wanted to lead his readers to understanding by engaging their curiosity. While many obscure matters are clarified in the course of the poem itself, others have remained enigmas that have fascinated Dantists for centuries. Over the last thirty-five years, Richard Kay has proposed original solutions to many of these puzzles; these are collected in the present volume. Historical context frames Kay's readings, which relate the poem to such standard sources as the Bible, Aristotle, Aquinas, and the Latin classics, but he also goes beyond these Scholastic sources to exploit Dante's use of less familiar aspects of Latin clerical culture, including physiognomy, Vitruvian proportions, and optics, and most especially astrology. Kay explores new ways to read the Comedy. For instance, he argues that Dante has embedded references to his authorities in a continuous series of acrostics formed by the initial letters of each tercet. Again, he shows how Dante returns to the theme of each infernal canto and develops it in the parallel cantos of Purgatorio and Paradiso. Particularly worthy of note are four essays on the poem's finale in the Empyrean.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies written by Gaetana Marrone and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-12-26 with total page 2258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies is a two-volume reference book containing some 600 entries on all aspects of Italian literary culture. It includes analytical essays on authors and works, from the most important figures of Italian literature to little known authors and works that are influential to the field. The Encyclopedia is distinguished by substantial articles on critics, themes, genres, schools, historical surveys, and other topics related to the overall subject of Italian literary studies. The Encyclopedia also includes writers and subjects of contemporary interest, such as those relating to journalism, film, media, children's literature, food and vernacular literatures. Entries consist of an essay on the topic and a bibliographic portion listing works for further reading, and, in the case of entries on individuals, a brief biographical paragraph and list of works by the person. It will be useful to people without specialized knowledge of Italian literature as well as to scholars.
Download or read book Visions in Late Medieval England written by Gwenfair Walters Adams and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2007-02-01 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Visions were highly popular in the late Middle Ages, whether preached as vivid stories from the pulpit, illuminated in saint-filled manuscripts, or experienced during the breathless anticipation of a Mass or eerie darkness of a Yorkshire graveyard. This volume is the first to map out the wide range of vision types in late medieval English lay piety. Analyzing 1000 visionary accounts gathered from sermon and exempla collections, religious devotional works, saints’ legends, and lay stories, it explores five central dynamics of spirituality that visions shaped and sustained: Transactions of Satisfaction (visits to and from purgatory and hell), Reciprocated Devotion (visitations of the saints), Spiritual Warfare (attacks by demons), Supra-Sacramental Sight (Mass and Passion sightings), and Mediated Revelation (prophetic visions).
Download or read book Imagine Math 8 written by Michele Emmer and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-09-07 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This eighth volume of Imagine Math is different from all the previous ones. The reason is very clear: in the last two years, the world changed, and we still do not know what the world of tomorrow will look like. Difficult to make predictions. This volume has a subtitle Dreaming Venice. Venice, the dream city of dreams, that miraculous image of a city on water that resisted for hundreds of years, has become in the last two years truly unreachable. Many things tie this book to the previous ones. Once again, this volume also starts like Imagine Math 7, with a homage to the Italian artist Mimmo Paladino who created exclusively for the Imagine Math 8 volume a new series of ten original and unique works of art dedicated to Piero della Francesca. Many artists, art historians, designers and musicians are involved in the new book, including Linda D. Henderson and Marco Pierini, Claudio Ambrosini and Davide Amodio. Space also for comics and mathematics in a Disney key. Many applications, from Origami to mathematical models for world hunger. Particular attention to classical and modern architecture, with Tullia Iori. As usual, the topics are treated in a way that is rigorous but captivating, detailed and full of evocations. This is an all-embracing look at the world of mathematics and culture.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Dante written by Manuele Gragnolati and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 778 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Dante contains forty-four specially written chapters that provide a thorough and creative reading of Dante's oeuvre. It gathers an intergenerational and international team of scholars encompassing diverse approaches from the fields of Anglo-American, Italian, and continental scholarship and spanning several disciplines: philology, material culture, history, religion, art history, visual studies, theory from the classical to the contemporary, queer, post- and de-colonial, and feminist studies. The volume combines a rigorous reassessment of Dante's formation, themes, and sources, with a theoretically up-to-date focus on textuality, thereby offering a new critical Dante. The volume is divided into seven sections: 'Texts and Textuality'; 'Dialogues'; 'Transforming Knowledge'; Space(s) and Places'; 'A Passionate Selfhood'; 'A Non-linear Dante'; and 'Nachleben'. It seeks to challenge the Commedia-centric approach (the conviction that notwithstanding its many contradictions, Dante's works move towards the great reservoir of poetry and ideas that is the Commedia), in order to bring to light a non-teleological way in which these works relate amongst themselves. Plurality and the openness of interpretation appear as Dante's very mark, coexisting with the attempt to create an all-encompassing mastership. The Handbook suggests what is exciting about Dante now and indicate where Dante scholarship is going, or can go, in a global context.
Download or read book On Light written by K.P. Clarke and published by Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature. This book was released on 2014-12-30 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays assembled in this new volume explore the fascination of the Middle Ages with the mystery of light, and its central role in the period's thought and creativity. Spanning medieval theology, literature, science and material culture, the topics covered include the history of light (and, inseparably, darkness) as a literary figure, from the Latin Bible to Geoffrey Chaucer; theoretical speculations on colour, sight and blindness, and their unexpected fertilization of fields such as poetic imagery; medieval preachers' evocations of light as much more than merely figuring the moral and religious, from St. Simeon in the ninth century to John Fisher in the early sixteenth; indeed the belief that light possessed not only reality but physical materality, as manifested in artefacts such as the Gloucester Candlestick. On Light thereby reveals not only the importance of this phenomenon to diverse aspects of medieval culture, but profound and unremarked ways in which it helped to bind these into a whole.
Download or read book Dante and Epicurus written by George Corbett and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-12-02 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Dante and Epicurus seem poles apart. Dante, a committed Christian, depicted in the Commedia a vision of the afterlife and God's divine justice. Epicurus, a pagan philosopher, taught that the soul is mortal and that all religion is vain superstition. And yet Epicurus is, for Dante, not only the quintessential heretic but an ethical ally. The key to this apparent paradox lies in the heterodox dualism - between man's two goals of secular felicity and spiritual beatitude - at the heart of Dante's ethical, political and theological thought. Corbett's full-length treatment of Dante's reception and polemical representation of Epicurus addresses a major gap in the scholarship. Furthermore the study's focus on fault lines in Dante's vision of the afterlife- where the theological tensions implicit in his dualism surface - opens a new way to read the Commedia as a whole in dualistic terms."
