Download or read book Roman de toute chevalerie written by Charles Russell Stone and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2019-03-07 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The medieval reception of Alexander the Great inspired a complicated literary corpus not simply because it involved so many source-texts and languages, but because it incorporated such diverse perspectives on the conqueror. Beginning with a discussion of the evolution of this corpus, this book examines the manuscripts, readership, and historical contexts of the earliest surviving Alexander romance in England, Thomas de Kent's Anglo-Norman Roman de toute chevalerie. To shed light on the origins and treatment of this romance, Charles Russell Stone reads each manuscript within the contexts of its production, scribal interpolations, and patronage and readership in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. While Thomas recalls a range of attitudes towards his protagonist in the late twelfth century, when the recovery of classical histories and composition of vernacular romance informed conflicting attitudes towards Alexander's legacy, scribes and readers of his poem appropriated it as a continuing commentary on power, politics, and the relevance of the Alexander legend in their own time. Each of the three major manuscripts of Thomas's poem thus offers a unique text informed by unique literary and political contexts, which this book situates within the ongoing debate over Alexander's reception as a paradigm of imperial authority or failure in late medieval England.
Download or read book Idols in the East written by Suzanne Conklin Akbari and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-08 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Representations of Muslims have never been more common in the Western imagination than they are today. Building on Orientalist stereotypes constructed over centuries, the figure of the wily Arab has given rise, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, to the "Islamist" terrorist. In Idols in the East, Suzanne Conklin Akbari explores the premodern background of some of the Orientalist types still pervasive in present-day depictions of Muslims-the irascible and irrational Arab, the religiously deviant Islamist-and about how these stereotypes developed over time. Idols in the East contributes to the recent surge of interest in European encounters with Islam and the Orient in the premodern world. Focusing on the medieval period, Akbari examines a broad range of texts including encyclopedias, maps, medical and astronomical treatises, chansons de geste, romances, and allegories to paint an unusually diverse portrait of medieval culture. Among the texts she considers are The Book of John Mandeville, The Song of Roland, Parzival, and Dante's Divine Comedy. From them she reveals how medieval writers and readers understood and explained the differences they saw between themselves and the Muslim other. Looking forward, Akbari also comes to terms with how these medieval conceptions fit with modern discussions of Orientalism, thus providing an important theoretical link to postcolonial and postimperial scholarship on later periods. Far reaching in its implications and balanced in its judgments, Idols in the East will be of great interest to not only scholars and students of the Middle Ages but also anyone interested in the roots of Orientalism and its tangled relationship to modern racism and anti-Semitism.
Download or read book Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages written by Ananya Jahanara Kabir and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-03-10 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of original essays exploring the intersections between medieval and postcolonial studies.
Download or read book The Medieval French Alexander written by Donald Maddox and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2002-07-17 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the significance of Alexander the Great in French medieval literature and culture.
Download or read book The Roman de toute chevalerie written by Charles Russell Stone and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2019-03-14 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The medieval reception of Alexander the Great inspired a complicated literary corpus not simply because it involved so many source-texts and languages, but because it incorporated such diverse perspectives on the conqueror. Beginning with a discussion of the evolution of this corpus, this book examines the manuscripts, readership, and historical contexts of the earliest surviving Alexander romance in England, Thomas de Kent’s Anglo-Norman Roman de toute chevalerie. To shed light on the origins and treatment of this romance, Charles Russell Stone reads each manuscript within the contexts of its production, scribal interpolations, and patronage and readership in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. While Thomas recalls a range of attitudes towards his protagonist in the late twelfth century, when the recovery of classical histories and composition of vernacular romance informed conflicting attitudes towards Alexander’s legacy, scribes and readers of his poem appropriated it as a continuing commentary on power, politics, and the relevance of the Alexander legend in their own time. Each of the three major manuscripts of Thomas’s poem thus offers a unique text informed by unique literary and political contexts, which this book situates within the ongoing debate over Alexander’s reception as a paradigm of imperial authority or failure in late medieval England.
Download or read book Alexander the Great in the Middle Ages written by Markus Stock and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2016-01-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Middle Ages, the life story of Alexander the Great was a well-traveled tale. Known in numerous versions, many of them derived from the ancient Greek Alexander Romance, it was told and re-told throughout Europe, India, the Middle East, and Central Asia. The essays collected in Alexander the Great in the Middle Ages examine these remarkable legends not merely as stories of conquest and discovery, but also as representations of otherness, migration, translation, cosmopolitanism, and diaspora. Alongside studies of the Alexander legend in medieval and early modern Latin, English, French, German, and Persian, Alexander the Great in the Middle Ages breaks new ground by examining rarer topics such as Hebrew Alexander romances, Coptic and Arabic Alexander materials, and early modern Malay versions of the Alexander legend. Brought together in this wide-ranging collection, these essays testify to the enduring fascination and transcultural adaptability of medieval stories about the extraordinary Macedonian leader.
Download or read book Romance and History written by Jon Whitman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-08 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wide-ranging account of the relationship between romance and history from the medieval to the early modern period.
Download or read book Cannibalism in High Medieval English Literature written by H. Blurton and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-09-23 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reads the surprisingly widespread representations of cannibals and cannibalism in medieval English literature as political metaphors that were central to England's on-going process of articulating cultural and national identity.
Download or read book Medieval Narratives of Alexander the Great written by Venetia Bridges and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2018 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An investigation into the depiction and reception of the figure of Alexander in the literatures of medieval Europe.
Download or read book The Medieval Alexander written by George Cary and published by CUP Archive. This book was released on with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Classicist Writings of Thomas Walsingham written by Sylvia Federico and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2016 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comparative reading of the "literary" works of Thomas Walsingham, highlighting his reaction to contemporary historical events.
Download or read book The Faces of Time written by Jean Blacker and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2014-06-30 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The twelfth century witnessed the sudden appearance and virtual disappearance of an important literary genre—the Old French verse chronicle. These poetic histories of the British kings, which today are treated as fiction, were written contemporaneously with Latin prose narratives, which are regarded as historical accounts. In this pathfinding study, however, Jean Blacker asserts that twelfth-century authors and readers viewed both genres as factual history. Blacker examines four Old French verse chronicles—Gaimar's Estoire des Engleis (c. 1135), Wace's Roman de Brut (c. 1155) and Roman de Rou (c. 1160–1174), and Benoît de Sainte-Maure's Chronique des Ducs de Normandie (c. 1174–1180) and four Latin narratives—William of Malmesbury's Gesta Regum (c. 1118–1143) and Historia Novella (c. 1140–1143), Orderic Vitalis's Historia Ecclesiastica (c. 1118–1140), and Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1138). She compares their similarity in three areas—the authors' stated intentions, their methods of characterization and narrative development, and the possible influences of patronage and audience expectation on the presentation of characters and events. This exploration reveals remarkable similarity among the texts, including their idealization of historical and even legendary figures, such as King Arthur. It opens fruitful lines of inquiry into the role these writers played in the creation of the Anglo-Norman regnum and suggests that the Old French verse chronicles filled political, psychic, and aesthetic needs unaddressed by Latin historical writing of the period.
Download or read book A Cultural History of Race in the Middle Ages written by Thomas Hahn and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-06-01 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents a comprehensive and collaborative survey of how people, individually and within collective entities, thought about, experienced, and enacted racializing differences. Addressing events, texts, and images from the 5th to the 16th centuries, these essays by ten eminent scholars provide broad, multi-disciplinary analyses of materials whose origins range from the British Isles, Western Iberia, and North Africa across Western and Eastern Europe to the Middle East. These diverse communities possessed no single word equivalent to modern race, a term (raza) for genetic, religious, cultural, or territorial difference that emerges only at the end of the medieval period. Chapter by chapter, this volume nonetheless demonstrates the manifold beliefs, practices, institutions, and images that conveyed and enforced difference for the benefit of particular groups and to the detriment of others. Addressing the varying historiographical self-consciousness concerning race among medievalist scholars themselves, the separate analyses make use of paradigms drawn from social and political history, religious, environmental, literary, ethnic, and gender studies, the history of art and of science, and critical race theory. Chapters identify the eruption of racial discourses aroused by political or religious polemic, centered upon conversion within and among Jewish, Christian, and Islamic communions, and inspired by imagined or sustained contact with alien peoples. Authors draw their evidence from Hebrew, Latin, Arabic, and a profusion of European vernaculars, and provide searching examinations of visual artefacts ranging from religious service books to maps, mosaics, and manuscript illuminations
Download or read book The Auchinleck Manuscript written by Susanna Fein and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2016 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fresh examinations of the manuscript which is one of the chief compendiums of literature in the Middle English period.
Download or read book Otherworlds written by Aisling Byrne and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-17 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a new perspective on the otherworlds of medieval literature. These fantastical realms are among the most memorable places in medieval writing, by turns beautiful and monstrous, alluring and terrifying. Passing over a river or sea, or entering into a hollow hill, heroes come upon strange and magical realms. These places are often very beautiful, filled with sweet music and adorned with precious stones and rich materials. There is often no darkness, time may pass at a different pace, and the people who dwell there are usually supernatural. Sometimes such a place is exactly what it appears to be-the land of heart's desire-but, the otherworld can also have a sinister side, trapping humans and keeping them there against their will. Otherworlds: Fantasy and History in Medieval Literature takes a fresh look at how medieval writers understood these places and why they found them so compelling. It focuses on texts from England, but places this material in the broader context of literary production in medieval Britain and Ireland. The narratives examined in this book tell a rather surprising story about medieval notions of these fantastical places. Otherworlds are actually a lot less 'other' than they might initially seem. Authors often use the idea of the otherworld to comment on very serious topics. It is not unusual for otherworld depictions to address political issues in the historical world. Most intriguing of all are those texts where locations in the real world are re-imagined as otherworlds. The regions on which this book focuses, Britain, Ireland and the surrounding islands, prove particularly susceptible to this characterization.
Download or read book The English Works of John Gower Confessio amantis lib v 1971 lib VIII and In praise of peace written by John Gower and published by . This book was released on 1901 with total page 690 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The English Works of John Gower written by John Gower and published by . This book was released on 1901 with total page 682 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
