Download or read book The Medieval Underworld written by Andrew McCall and published by Hamish Hamilton. This book was released on 1979 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In medieval times there existed an insistence on conformity which bordered on the obsessive. This colourful account explores those times from the viewpoint of the men and women who were seen to be on the margins of society - who either would not, or could not, conform to the conventions of their era. The activities of outlaws, brigands, homosexuals, heretics, witches, Jews, prostitutes, thieves, vagabonds and other 'transgressors' are detailed here, as are the punishments - often barbarously savage - which were meted out to them by State and Church. Full of fascinating and unusual characters and facts which greatly enhance our view of the Middle Ages, The Medieval Underworld will enthral anyone interested in medieval social history or the history of crime and punishment. Book jacket.
Download or read book Journeys to the Underworld and Heavenly Realm in Ancient and Medieval Literature written by John C. Stephens and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2019-02-14 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Concepts of heaven and hell are among the oldest, most widespread religious beliefs in history. In Western literature, they are frequently embedded in stories of underworld explorations and celestial journeys--stories examining the nature of the universe, life on earth and the existence of the gods. The author analyzes tales of wonder in both ancient and medieval European literature. Other-worldly narratives appeared in literary contexts in the ancient world, including mythology, poetry and philosophical writings. In medieval times, they remained a popular form of literary expression. These stories are primarily religious in nature, describing fantastic worlds filled with miracles and supernatural beings.
Download or read book The Criminal Underworld in a Medieval Islamic Society written by Carl F. Petry and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The narrative histories generated during the Mamluk Period in Cairo and Damascus (648 922H/ 1250-1517CE) addressed a wide range of domestic issues, in addition to their commentaries on imperial politics and international events. Topics such as the local economy, relations between sectarian communities, and the conduct of civil litigation under Sharia statutes were elaborated in minute detail, and have attracted the attention of contemporary historians. Less studied have been the chroniclers numerous references to criminal activity committed at all levels of society, from its elite military echelons to individuals or groups who occupied its margins. The latter elements, despite their demographic visibility, have in many instances evaded the notice of modern scholarship on medieval Islamic cultures. This study aims at disclosing their impact on society in the two largest cities of the Mamluk State, as depicted by those who witnessed it at close range. These local chroniclers pursued an agenda when they dwelled on the criminal acts they observed. Rather than offering simple decrials of wrongdoing, their comments collectively targeted the agents charged with policing social interaction and upholding public security. Disclosure of collusion in crime by those formally pledged to suppress it emerged as a covert, yet signal, objective of these chroniclers. The book examines this objective as it was discerned in more than a thousand incidents of criminal activity in Cairo and Damascus during the Late Middle Ages. The complicity it exposed provides insights that revise current views about the working of government under the Mamluks, and the perspectives of groups whose voices have gone largely unheard in the Historiography of pre-modern Islamic societies.
Download or read book The Medieval Underworld written by Andrew McCall and published by Marboro Books. This book was released on 1991 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In medieval times there existed an insistence on conformity which bordered on the obsessive. This account explores those times from the viewpoint of the men and women who were seen to be on the margins of society - who either would not, or could not, conform to the conventions of their era. The activities of outlaws, brigands, homosexuals, heretics, witches, Jews, prostitutes, thieves, vagabonds and other 'transgressors' are detailed here, as are the punishments - often barbarously savage - which were meted out to them by State and Church. Full of fascinating and unusual characters and facts which greatly enhance our view of the Middle Ages, The Medieval Underworld will enthral anyone interested in medieval social history or the history of crime and punishment.
Download or read book The Mediaeval Islamic Underworld written by Clifford Edmund Bosworth and published by BRILL. This book was released on 1976 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Efficacious Underworld written by Cheeyun Lilian Kwon and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2019-02-28 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ten Kings hanging scrolls at Tokyo’s Seikadō Bunko Art Museum are among the most resplendent renderings of the Buddhist purgatory extant, but their origin and significance have yet to be fully explored. Cheeyun Kwon unfurls this exquisite set of scrolls within the existing Ten Kings painting tradition while investigating textual, scriptural, archaeological, and visual materials from East Asia to shed light on its possible provenance. She constructs a model scheme of the paintings’ evolution based on more than five hundred works and reveals channels of popularization, mass production, and agglomeration. The earliest images of the Ten Kings are found in the tenth-century sūtra The Scripture on the Ten Kings, known to be the work of the monk Zangchuan. By the mid-twelfth century, typological conventions associated with the Ten Kings were widely established, and paintings depicting them, primarily large-scale and stand-alone, became popular export commodities, spreading via land and sea routes to the Korean peninsula and the Japanese archipelago. An examination of materials in Korea suggests a unique development path for Ten Kings subject matter, and this—in conjunction with a close analysis of the Seikadō paintings—forms the core of Kwon’s book. Among the Korean works discussed is a woodblock edition of The Scripture on the Ten Kings from 1246. It is markedly different from its Chinese counterparts and provides strong evidence of the subject’s permutations during the Koryŏ period (918–1392), when Northern Song (960–1127) visual art and culture were avidly imported. In the Seikadō paintings, Northern Song figural, architectural, landscape, and decorative elements were acculturated to the Koryŏ milieu, situating them in the twelfth to early thirteenth centuries and among the oldest and most significant surviving examples of Koryŏ Buddhist painting. Efficacious Underworld fills major lacunae in Korean, East Asian, and Ten Kings painting traditions while illuminating Korea’s contribution to the evolution of a Buddhist theme on its trajectory across East Asia. With its rich set of color reproductions and detailed analysis of textual and visual materials, this volume will invite significant revision to previously held notions on Koryŏ painting.
Download or read book Mismapping the Underworld written by John Kleiner and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The three central chapters of the book each examine a different type of error or anomaly: a mismeasured giant, a self-defeating experiment, an erring citation of Virgil. These apparently trivial discrepancies are linked, the author suggests, to much larger questions. What is the status of mimetic realism in Dante's poem? By what right does a poet pretend to represent the order of God's mind? Where does aggressive allegoresis cross over into interpretive error? Through the study of error, the author offers an alternative account of Dante's poetic project, one that gives priority to wit and self-irony rather than didactic seriousness.
Download or read book Underworld written by David Saunders and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2022-01-11 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abundantly illustrated, this essential volume examines depictions of the Underworld in southern Italian vase painting and explores the religious and cultural beliefs behind them. What happens to us when we die? What might the afterlife look like? For the ancient Greeks, the dead lived on, overseen by Hades in the Underworld. We read of famous sinners, such as Sisyphus, forever rolling his rock, and the fierce guard dog Kerberos, who was captured by Herakles. For mere mortals, ritual and religion offered possibilities for ensuring a happy existence in the beyond, and some of the richest evidence for beliefs about death comes from southern Italy, where the local Italic peoples engaged with Greek beliefs. Monumental funerary vases that accompanied the deceased were decorated with consolatory scenes from myth, and around forty preserve elaborate depictions of Hades’s domain. For the first time in over four decades, these compelling vase paintings are brought together in one volume, with detailed commentaries and ample illustrations. The catalogue is accompanied by a series of essays by leading experts in the field, which provides a framework for understanding these intriguing scenes and their contexts. Topics include attitudes toward the afterlife in Greek ritual and myth, inscriptions on leaves of gold that provided guidance for the deceased; funerary practices and religious beliefs in Apulia, and the importance accorded to Orpheus and Dionysos. Drawing from a variety of textual and archaeological sources, this volume is an essential source for anyone interested in religion and belief in the ancient Mediterranean.
Download or read book Sex Dissidence and Damnation written by Jeffrey Richards and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the authorities in medieval Europe, dissent struck at the roots of an ordered, settled world. It was to be crushed - initially by reason and argument, eventually by torture. Jeffrey Richards examines the wretched lives of heretics, witches, Jews, lepers and homosexuals and uncovers a common motive for their persecution: sexual aberrance.
Download or read book Passage Through Hell written by David Lawrence Pike and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking the culturally resonant motif of the descent to the underworld as his guiding thread, David L. Pike traces the interplay between myth and history in medieval and modernist literature. Passage through Hell suggests new approaches to the practice of comparative literature, and a possible escape from the current morass of competing critical schools and ideologies. Pike's readings of Louis Ferdinand Céline and Walter Benjamin reveal the tensions at work in the modern appropriation of structures derived from ancient and medieval descents. His book shows how these structures were redefined in modernism and persist in contemporary critical practice. In order to recover the historical corpus of modernism, he asserts, it is necessary to acknowledge the attraction that medieval forms and motifs held for modernist literature and theory. By pairing the writings of the postwar German dramatist and novelist Peter Weiss with Dante's Commedia, and Christine de Pizan with Virginia Woolf, Pike argues for a new level of complexity in the relation between medieval and modern poetics. Pike's supple and persuasive reading of the Commedia resituates that text within the contradictions of medieval tradition. He contends that the Dantean allegory of conversion, altered to suit the exigencies of modernism, maintains its hold over current literature and theory. The postwar writers Pike treats--Weiss, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott--exemplify alternate strategies for negotiating the legacy of modernism. The passage through hell emerges as a way of disentangling images of the past from their interpretation in the present.
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: How was magic practiced in medieval times? How did it relate to the diverse beliefs and practices that characterized this fascinating period? This much revised and expanded new edition of Magic in the Middle Ages surveys the growth and development of magic in medieval Europe. It takes into account the extensive new developments in the history of medieval magic in recent years, featuring new material on angel magic, the archaeology of magic, and the magical efficacy of words and imagination. Richard Kieckhefer shows how magic represents a crossroads in medieval life and culture, examining its relationship and relevance to religion, science, philosophy, art, literature, and politics. In surveying the different types of magic that were used, the kinds of people who practiced magic, and the reasoning behind their beliefs, Kieckhefer shows how magic served as a point of contact between the popular and elite classes, how the reality of magical beliefs is reflected in the fiction of medieval literature, and how the persecution of magic and witchcraft led to changes in the law.
Download or read book Empire and Underworld written by Miranda Frances Spieler and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The French Revolution invented the notion of the citizen, but it also invented the noncitizen—the person whose rights were nonexistent. The South American outpost of Guiana became a depository for these outcasts of the new French citizenry, and an experimental space for the exercise of new kinds of power and violence against marginal groups.
Download or read book Yakuza written by David E. Kaplan and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2003-02 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A fascinating study of how criminal enterprise can infect the very heart of modern capitalism. Here is the backstage world of political influence and organized crime in the world's second largest economy... by far the most detailed and even-handed study of this important and neglected subject."—John W. Dower, author of Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II Reviews of original edition: "A superb study of Japan's underworld that is both entertaining and revealing. The authors miss none of the color and curious detail of the yakuza style, but at the same time go far beyond surface observations."—Far Eastern Economic Review "The book is laden with fascinating information, some of it heretofore unavailable in English."—Washington Post "Blend the Mafia with the Masons. Let them simmer a while, then fold in the Ku Klux Klan and you'll have the yakuza…. Important and timely…Yakuza will serve for years as the source document on Japanese organized crime."—San Jose Mercury News "State-of-the-art investigative reporting…must reading for those who consider themselves already highly conversant with yakuza activities…disturbing."—Journal of Asian Studies
Download or read book The Preacher s Demons written by Franco Mormando and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1999-05 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "When the city was filled with these bonfires, he then combed the city, and whenever he received notice of some public sodomite, he had him immediately seized and thrown into the nearest bonfire at hand and had him burned immediately." This story, of an anonymous individual who sought to cleanse medieval Paris, was part of a sermon delivered in Siena, Italy, in 1427. The speaker, the friar Bernardino (1380-1444), was one of the most important public figures of the time, and he spent forty years combing the towns of Italy, instructing, admonishing, and entertaining the crowds that gathered in prodigious numbers to hear his sermons. His story of the Parisian vigilante was a recommendation. Sexual deviants were the objects of relentless, unconditional persecution in Bernardino's sermons. Other targets of the preacher's venom were witches, Jews, and heretics. Mormando takes us into the social underworld of early Renaissance Italy to discover how one enormously influential figure helped to dramatically increase fear, hatred, and intolerance for those on society's margins. This book is the first on Bernardino to appear in thirty-five years, and the first ever to consider the preacher's inflammatory role in Renaissance social issues.
Download or read book The Monstrous Child written by Francesca Simon and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stunning, operatic, epic drama, like no other. Meet Hel, an ordinary teenager - and goddess of the Underworld. Why is life so unfair? Hel tries to make the bets of it, creating gleaming halls in her dark kingdom and welcoming the dead who she is forced to host for eternity. Until eternity itself is threatened. Francesca's first and wonderful foray into teen.
Download or read book Medieval Justice written by Hunt Janin and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2009-10-15 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A primer on medieval justice, this book focuses on France, Germany and England and covers the thousand years between the transformation of the Roman world in Western Europe, which took place around the 4th and 5th centuries, and the European Renaissance of the 14th and 15th centuries. It highlights key elements in the intricate, overlapping legal systems of the Middle Ages and describes a wide range of contemporary laws and cases. A discussion of the modern legacies of medieval law is included, as are a brief overview of the Inquisition, the 27 articles of Joan of Arc and useful commentary on many other topics. Illustrations range from the earliest known depictions of English courts and illuminations of torture to pictures of important sites, events, and instruments of punishment in medieval law.
Download or read book The Margins of Society in Late Medieval Paris written by Bronislaw Geremek and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-04-27 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses the 'marginal' people of late medieval Paris, the large and shifting group of men and women who existed on the margins of conventional organized society. Professor Geremek examines the various groups which made up the marginal world - beggars, prostitutes, procuresses and pimps, petty criminals, casual workers and the unemployed - their haunts in and around Paris, their way of life, and their relation to 'normal' society. Professor Geremek has made with this book a major contribution to the study of late medieval society which illuminates the little-known area of the medieval underworld in a fascinating and very accessible manner. Translated by Jean Birrell from the French edition of 1976, this edition includes a new introduction by Jean-Claude Schmitt, which offers a frank appraisal of the author's life and career to date.
