Download or read book The Roman Castrati written by Shaun Tougher and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-11-12 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eunuchs tend to be associated with eastern courts, popularly perceived as harem personnel. However, the Roman empire was also distinguished by eunuchs – they existed as slaves, court officials, religious figures and free men. This book is the first to be devoted to the range of Roman eunuchs. Across seven chapters (spanning the third century BC to the sixth century AD), Shaun Tougher examines the history of Roman eunuchs, focusing on key texts and specific individuals. Subjects met include the Galli (the self-castrating devotees of the goddess the Great Mother), Terence's comedy The Eunuch (the earliest surviving Latin text to use the word 'eunuch'), Sporus and Earinus the eunuch favourites of the emperors Nero and Domitian, the 'Ethiopian eunuch' of the Acts of the Apostles (an early convert to Christianity), Favorinus of Arles (a superstar intersex philosopher), the Grand Chamberlain Eutropius (the only eunuch ever to be consul), and Narses the eunuch general who defeated the Ostrogoths and restored Italy to Roman rule. A key theme of the chapters is gender, inescapable when studying castrated males. Ultimately this book is as much about the eunuch in the Roman imagination as it is the reality of the eunuch in the Roman empire.
Download or read book The Roman Castrati written by Shaun Tougher and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-11-12 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eunuchs tend to be associated with eastern courts, popularly perceived as harem personnel. However, the Roman empire was also distinguished by eunuchs – they existed as slaves, court officials, religious figures and free men. This book is the first to be devoted to the range of Roman eunuchs. Across seven chapters (spanning the third century BC to the sixth century AD), Shaun Tougher examines the history of Roman eunuchs, focusing on key texts and specific individuals. Subjects met include the Galli (the self-castrating devotees of the goddess the Great Mother), Terence's comedy The Eunuch (the earliest surviving Latin text to use the word 'eunuch'), Sporus and Earinus the eunuch favourites of the emperors Nero and Domitian, the 'Ethiopian eunuch' of the Acts of the Apostles (an early convert to Christianity), Favorinus of Arles (a superstar intersex philosopher), the Grand Chamberlain Eutropius (the only eunuch ever to be consul), and Narses the eunuch general who defeated the Ostrogoths and restored Italy to Roman rule. A key theme of the chapters is gender, inescapable when studying castrated males. Ultimately this book is as much about the eunuch in the Roman imagination as it is the reality of the eunuch in the Roman empire.
Download or read book Surgery and Selfhood in Early Modern England written by Alanna Skuse and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-18 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Implements stories of surgical alteration to consider how early modern individuals conceived the relationship between body, mind, and self.
Download or read book Eunuchs and Castrati written by Piotr O. Scholz and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A social history of the role of eunuchs in the households and courts of Greece, Rome, China, Byzantine, medieval Europe and the East, which aims to challenge traditional preconceptions about their duties.
Download or read book Cry to Heaven written by Anne Rice and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 1995-04-01 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a sweeping saga of music and vengeance, the acclaimed author of The Vampire Chronicles draws readers into eighteenth-century Italy, bringing to life the decadence beneath the shimmering surface of Venice, the wild frivolity of Naples, and the magnetic terror of its shadow, Vesuvius. This is the story of the castrati, the exquisite and otherworldly sopranos whose graceful bodies and glorious voices win the adulation of royal courts and grand opera houses throughout Europe. These men are revered as idols—and, at the same time, scorned for all they are not. Praise for Anne Rice and Cry to Heaven “Daring and imaginative . . . [Anne] Rice seems like nothing less than a magician: It is a pure and uncanny talent that can give a voice to monsters and angels both.”—The New York Times Book Review “To read Anne Rice is to become giddy as if spinnning through the mind of time.”—San Francisco Chronicle “If you surrender and go with her . . . you have surrendered to enchantment, as in a voluptuous dream.”—The Boston Globe “Rice is eerily good at making the impossible seem self-evident.”—Time
Download or read book The Castrato written by Martha Feldman and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2016-08-02 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Castrato is a nuanced exploration of why innumerable boys were castrated for singing between the mid-sixteenth and late-nineteenth centuries. It shows that the entire foundation of Western classical singing, culminating in bel canto, was birthed from an unlikely and historically unique set of desires, public and private, aesthetic, economic, and political. In Italy, castration for singing was understood through the lens of Catholic blood sacrifice as expressed in idioms of offering and renunciation and, paradoxically, in satire, verbal abuse, and even the symbolism of the castrato’s comic cousin Pulcinella. Sacrifice in turn was inseparable from the system of patriarchy—involving teachers, patrons, colleagues, and relatives—whereby castrated males were produced not as nonmen, as often thought nowadays, but as idealized males. Yet what captivated audiences and composers—from Cavalli and Pergolesi to Handel, Mozart, and Rossini—were the extraordinary capacities of castrato voices, a phenomenon ultimately unsettled by Enlightenment morality. Although the castrati failed to survive, their musicality and vocality have persisted long past their literal demise.
Download or read book Eunuchs in Antiquity and Beyond written by Shaun Tougher and published by Classical Press of Wales. This book was released on 2002-12-31 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eunuchism was a subject which both intrigued and embarrassed the ancient world. The special virtue attributed to the castrated male at court, of undistracted loyalty to his ruler, aided the promotion of numerous eunuchs to positions of great power. A literary discourse developed, reviling and sometimes defending the eminence of these 'half-men'. Here, thirteen new studies from an international cast explore how eunuchs were perceived, and also reconstruct the realities of eunuchs' lives in Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Eastern culture.
Download or read book Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages written by Larissa Tracy and published by DS Brewer. This book was released on 2013 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays exploring medieval castration, as reflected in archaeology, law, historical record, and literary motifs. Castration and castrati have always been facets of western culture, from myth and legend to law and theology, from eunuchs guarding harems to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century castrati singers. Metaphoric castration pervadesa number of medieval literary genres, particularly the Old French fabliaux - exchanges of power predicated upon the exchange or absence of sexual desire signified by genitalia - but the plain, literal act of castration and its implications are often overlooked. This collection explores this often taboo subject and its implications for cultural mores and custom in Western Europe, seeking to demystify and demythologize castration. Its subjects includearchaeological studies of eunuchs; historical accounts of castration in trials of combat; the mutilation of political rivals in medieval Wales; Anglo-Saxon and Frisian legal and literary examples of castration as punishment; castration as comedy in the Old French fabliaux; the prohibition against genital mutilation in hagiography; and early-modern anxieties about punitive castration enacted on the Elizabethan stage. The introduction reflects on these topics in the context of arguably the most well-known victim of castration in the middle ages, Abelard. LARISSA TRACY is Associate Professor of Medieval Literature at Longwood University. Contributors: Larissa Tracy, Kathryn Reusch, Shaun Tougher, Jack Collins, Rolf H. Bremmer Jr, Jay Paul Gates, Charlene M. Eska, Mary A. Valante, Anthony Adams, Mary E. Leech, Jed Chandler, Ellen Lorraine Friedrich, Robert L.A. Clark, Karin Sellberg, LenaWånggren
Download or read book The World of the Castrati written by Patrick Barbier and published by Souvenir Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This entertaining, authoritative book is the first study of the phenomenon of the castrati in relation to the baroque period, covering the lives and triumphs of more than 60 singers over three centuries, when the fashion for castrati was at its peak.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Music and Queerness written by Fred Everett Maus and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-28 with total page 691 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Music and queerness interact in many different ways. The Oxford Handbook of Music and Queerness brings together many topics and scholarly disciplines, reflecting the diversity of current research and methodology. Each of the book's six sections exemplifies a particular rhetoric of queer music studies. The section "Kinds of Music" explores queer interactions with specific musics such as EDM, hip hop, and country. "Versions" explores queer meanings that emerge in the creation of a version of a pre-existing text, for instance in musical settings of Biblical texts or practices of karaoke. "Voices and Sounds" turns in various ways to the materiality of music and sound. "Lives" focuses on interactions of people's lives with music and queerness. "Histories" addresses moments in the past, beginning with times when present conceptualizations of sexuality had not yet developed and moving to cases studies of more recent history, including the creation of pop songs in response to HIV/AIDS and the Eurovision song contest. The final section, "Cross-cultural Queerness," asks how to understand gender and sexuality in locations where recent Euro-American concepts may not be appropriate.
Download or read book The Marqu s the Divas and the Castrati written by Louise K. Stein and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 793 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, author Louise K. Stein analyzes early modern opera as appreciated and produced by Gaspar de Haro y Guzmán (1629-87), Marqués de Heliche and del Carpio and a distinguished patron of the arts in Madrid, Rome, and Naples. It also reveals his lasting legacy in the Americas during a crucial period for the growth and development of opera and the history of singing.
Download or read book Italy s Eighteenth Century written by Paula Findlen and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the age of the Grand Tour, foreigners flocked to Italy to gawk at its ruins and paintings, enjoy its salons and cafés, attend the opera, and revel in their own discovery of its past. But they also marveled at the people they saw, both male and female. In an era in which castrati were "rock stars," men served women as cicisbei, and dandified Englishmen became macaroni, Italy was perceived to be a place where men became women. The great publicity surrounding female poets, journalists, artists, anatomists, and scientists, and the visible roles for such women in salons, academies, and universities in many Italian cities also made visitors wonder whether women had become men. Such images, of course, were stereotypes, but they were nonetheless grounded in a reality that was unique to the Italian peninsula. This volume illuminates the social and cultural landscape of eighteenth-century Italy by exploring how questions of gender in music, art, literature, science, and medicine shaped perceptions of Italy in the age of the Grand Tour.
Download or read book The Eunuch in Byzantine History and Society written by Shaun Tougher and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-06-02 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The existence of eunuchs was one of the defining features of the Byzantine Empire. Covering the whole span of the history of the empire, from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries AD, Shaun Tougher presents a comprehensive survey of the history and roles of eunuchs, making use of extensive comparative material, such as from China, Persia and the Ottoman Empire, as well as about castrato singers of the eighteenth century of Enlightenment Europe, and self-castrating religious devotees such as the Galli of ancient Rome, early Christians, the Skoptsy of Russia and the Hijras of India. The various roles played by eunuchs are examined. They are not just found as servile attendants; some were powerful political players – such as Chrysaphius who plotted to assassinate Attila the Hun – and others were prominent figures in Orthodoxy as bishops and monks. Furthermore, there is offered an analysis of how society thought about eunuchs, especially their gender identity - were they perceived as men, women, or a third sex? The broad survey of the political and social position of eunuchs in the Byzantine Empire is placed in the context of the history of the eunuch in general. An appendix listing key eunuchs of the Byzantine Empire describing their careers is included, and the text is fully illustrated.
Download or read book The Alteration written by Kingsley Amis and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2013-05-07 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: BOOKER PRIZE–WINNING AUTHOR Set in a world in which the Reformation failed, this award-winning science fiction tale is “one of the best . . . alternate-worlds novels in existence” (Philip K. Dick) In Kingsley Amis’s virtuoso foray into virtual history it is 1976, but the modern world is a medieval relic, frozen in intellectual and spiritual time ever since Martin Luther was promoted to pope back in the sixteenth century. Stephen the Third, the king of England, has just died, and Mass (Mozart’s second requiem) is about to be sung to lay him to rest. In the choir is our hero, Hubert Anvil, an extremely ordinary ten-year-old boy with a faultless voice. In the audience is a select group of experts whose job is to determine whether that faultless voice should be preserved by performing a certain operation. Art, after all, is worth any sacrifice. How Hubert realizes what lies in store for him and how he deals with the whirlpool of piety, menace, terror, and passion that he soon finds himself in are the subject of a classic piece of counterfactual fiction equal to Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. The Alteration won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best science-fiction novel in 1976.
Download or read book From Pompeii written by Ingrid D. Rowland and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-24 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, the force of the explosion blew the top right off the mountain, burying nearby Pompeii in a shower of volcanic ash. Ironically, the calamity that proved so lethal for Pompeii's inhabitants preserved the city for centuries, leaving behind a snapshot of Roman daily life that has captured the imagination of generations. The experience of Pompeii always reflects a particular time and sensibility, says Ingrid Rowland. From Pompeii: The Afterlife of a Roman Town explores the fascinating variety of these different experiences, as described by the artists, writers, actors, and others who have toured the excavated site. The city's houses, temples, gardens--and traces of Vesuvius's human victims--have elicited responses ranging from awe to embarrassment, with shifting cultural tastes playing an important role. The erotic frescoes that appalled eighteenth-century viewers inspired Renoir to change the way he painted. For Freud, visiting Pompeii was as therapeutic as a session of psychoanalysis. Crown Prince Hirohito, arriving in the Bay of Naples by battleship, found Pompeii interesting, but Vesuvius, to his eyes, was just an ugly version of Mount Fuji. Rowland treats readers to the distinctive, often quirky responses of visitors ranging from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain to Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman. Interwoven throughout a narrative lush with detail and insight is the thread of Rowland's own impressions of Pompeii, where she has returned many times since first visiting in 1962.
Download or read book The Perfect Servant written by Kathryn M. Ringrose and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Perfect Servant reevaluates the place of eunuchs in Byzantium. Kathryn Ringrose uses the modern concept of gender as a social construct to identify eunuchs as a distinct gender and to illustrate how gender was defined in the Byzantine world. At the same time she explores the changing role of the eunuch in Byzantium from 600 to 1100. Accepted for generations as a legitimate and functional part of Byzantine civilization, eunuchs were prominent in both the imperial court and the church. They were distinctive in physical appearance, dress, and manner and were considered uniquely suited for important roles in Byzantine life. Transcending conventional notions of male and female, eunuchs lived outside of normal patterns of procreation and inheritance and were assigned a unique capacity for mediating across social and spiritual boundaries. This allowed them to perform tasks from which prominent men and women were constrained, making them, in essence, perfect servants. Written with precision and meticulously researched, The Perfect Servant will immediately take its place as a major study on Byzantium and the history of gender.
Download or read book The Supernatural Voice written by Simon Ravens and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 2014 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The use of high male voices in the past has long been one of the most seriously misunderstood areas of musical scholarship and practice. In opening up this rich subject (to readers of all sorts) with refreshingly clear perspectives and plenty of new material, Simon Ravens' well-researched book goes a very long way to rectifying matters. Ravens writes damnably well, and if the story that emerges is necessarily a complex one, his treatment of it is always engagingly comprehensible.' ANDREW PARROTT Tracing the origins, influences and development of falsetto singing in Western music, Simon Ravens offers a revisionist history of high male singing from the Ancient Greeks to Michael Jackson. This history embraces not just singers of counter-tenor and alto parts up to and including our own time but the castrati of the Ancient world, the male sopranists of late Medieval and Renaissance Europe, and the dual-register tenors of the Baroque and Classical periods. Musical aesthetics aside, to understand the changing ways men have sung high, it is also vital to address extra-musical factors - which are themselves in a state of flux. To this end, Ravens illuminates his chronological survey by exploring topics as diverse as human physiology, the stereotyping of national characters, gender identity, and the changing of boys' voices. The result is a complex and fascinating history sure to appeal not only to music scholars but to performers and all those with an interest particularly in early music. Simon Ravens is a performer, writer, and director of Musica Contexta, with whom he has performed in Britain and Europe, regularly broadcast, and made numerous acclaimed recordings. Ravens had previously founded and directed Australasia's foremost early music choir, the Tudor Consort. Between 2002 and 2007 his regular monthly column Ravens View appeared in the Early Music Review, to which he still regularly contributes.
