Download or read book Following Chaucer written by Lynn Staley and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following Chaucer: Offices of the Active Life explores three representative figures—the royal woman, the poet, and the merchant—in relation to the concept of “office,” which Cicero linked to the health of the republic, but Chaucer to that of the common good. Not usually conjoined to the term “office,” these three figures, situated in the active life, were not firmly mapped onto the body politic, which was used to figure a relational and ordered social body ruled by the king, the head. These figures are points of entry into a set of questions rooted in Chaucer’s understanding of his cultural and historical past and in his keen appraisal of the social dynamics of his own time that also reverberate in the centuries after Chaucer’s death. Following Chaucer does not trace influence but uses Chaucer’s likely reading, circumstances, and literary and social affiliations as guides to understanding his poetry, within the context of late medieval English culture and the reshaping of the concept of these particular offices that suited the needs of a future whose dynamics he anticipated. His understanding of the importance of the Ciceronian concept of office within the active life, his profound cultural awareness, and his probing of the foundations of social change provide him with a keen sense of the persistent tensions and inconsistencies that are fundamental to his poetry.

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 Transmission and Generation in Medieval and Renaissance Literature written by Karen Hodder and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These essays focus on intellectual transmission in medieval and Renaissance literature, paying particular attention to the ways in which knowledge passes from one generation to the next. Each essay considers the creative tensions inherent in the relationship between old and new, past and present, and master and student.

Download or read book The Medieval Chronicle 15 written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-07-31 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of medieval chronicles is firmly established as a focus of research in the whole range of disciplines comprising Medieval Studies: literature, history, art history, linguistics, book history, digital humanities, and so forth. Each article in this volume dedicated to Erik Kooper presents a case study, balancing the particulars of the chosen materials with more generalized conclusions about their significance. The resulting collection is an anthology of different approaches in Medieval Chronicle Studies, presenting a rich overview of the geographical, linguistic, chronological and methodological diversity of chronicle research as it has developed in no small part thanks to Erik’s rallying. Contributors are Marie Bláhová, Cristian Bratu, Beth Bryan, Godfried Croenen, Peter Damian-Grint, Kelly DeVries, Isabel Barros Dias, Graeme Dunphy, Márta Font, Chris Given-Wilson, Ryszard Grzesik, Isabelle Guyot-Bachy, Letty Ten Harkel, Michael Hicks, David Hook, Sjoerd Levelt, Julia Marvin, Charles Melville, Firuza Abdullaeva, Martine Meuwese, Sarah Peverley, Jaclyn Rajsic, Lisa Ruch, Françoise Le Saux, Carol Sweetenham, Grischa Vercamer, Alison Williams Lewin, and Jürgen Wolf.

Download or read book Literary Value and Social Identity in the Canterbury Tales written by Robert J. Meyer-Lee and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-24 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction: Canterbury tales IV-V and literary value -- Clerk -- Merchant -- Squire -- Franklin.

Download or read book Shakespeare s Once and Future Child written by Joseph Campana and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of Shakespeare's child figures in relation to their own political moment, as well as our own. Politicians are fond of saying that "children are the future." How did the child become a figure for our political hopes? Joseph Campana's book locates the source of this idea in transformations of childhood and political sovereignty during the age of Shakespeare, changes spectacularly dramatized by the playwright himself. Shakespeare's works feature far more child figures--and more politically entangled children--than other literary or theatrical works of the era. Campana delves into this rich corpus to show how children and childhood expose assumptions about the shape of an ideal polity, the nature of citizenship, the growing importance of population and demographics, and the question of what is or is not human. As our ability to imagine viable futures on our planet feels ever more limited, and as children take up legal proceedings to sue on behalf of the future, it behooves us to understand the way past child figures haunt our conversations about intergenerational justice. Shakespeare offers critical precedents for questions we still struggle to answer.

Download or read book Telltale Women written by Allison Machlis Meyer and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Telltale Women fundamentally reimagines the relationship between the history play and its source material as an intertextual one, presenting evidence for a new narrative about how—and why—these genres disparately chronicle the histories of royal women. Allison Machlis Meyer challenges established perceptions of source study, historiography, and the staging of gender politics in well-known drama by arguing that chronicles and political histories frequently value women’s political interventions and use narrative techniques to invest their voices with authority. Dramatists who used these sources for their history plays thus encountered a historical record that offered surprisingly ample precedents for depicting women’s perspectives and political influence as legitimate, and writers for the commercial theater grappled with such precedents by reshaping source material to create stage representations of royal women that condemned queenship and female power. By tracing how the sanctioning of women’s political participation changes from the narrative page to the dramatic stage, Meyer demonstrates that gender politics in both canonical and noncanonical history plays emerge from playwrights’ intertextual engagements with a rich alternative view of women in the narrative historiography of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Download or read book The Transformations of Magic written by Frank Klaassen and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Explores two principal genres of illicit learned magic in late Medieval manuscripts: image magic, which could be interpreted and justified in scholastic terms, and ritual magic, which could not"--Provided by publisher.

Download or read book The Generation of Identity in Late Medieval Hagiography written by Gail Ashton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-09-10 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this interdisciplinary and boundary-breaking study, Gail Ashton examines the portrayals of women saints in a wide range of medieval texts. She deploys the French feminist critical theory of Cixous and Iriguray to illuminate these depictions of women by men and to further our understanding of both the lives and deeds of female saints and the contemporary, and almost always male, attitudes to them.

Download or read book Medieval Oral Literature written by Karl Reichl and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-11-30 with total page 768 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medieval literature is to a large degree shaped by orality, not only with regard to performance, but also to transmission and composition. Although problems of orality have been much discussed by medievalists, there is to date no comprehensive handbook on this topic. ‘Medieval Oral Literature’, a volume in the ‘De Gruyter Lexikon’ series, was written by an international team of twenty-five scholars and offers a thorough discussion of theoretical approaches as well as detailed presentations of individual traditions and genres. In addition to chapters on the oral-formulaic theory, on the interplay of orality and writing in the Early Middle Ages, on performance and performers, on oral poetics and on ritual aspects of orality, there are chapters on the Older Germanic, Romance, Middle High German, Middle English, Celtic, Greek-Byzantine, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian and Turkish traditions of oral literature. There is a special focus on epic and lyric, genres that are also discussed in separate chapters, with additional chapters on the ballad and on drama.

Download or read book The Transmission of Beowulf written by Leonard Neidorf and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-16 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beowulf, like The Iliad and The Odyssey, is a foundational work of Western literature that originated in mysterious circumstances. In The Transmission of Beowulf, Leonard Neidorf addresses philological questions that are fundamental to the study of the poem. Is Beowulf the product of unitary or composite authorship? How substantially did scribes alter the text during its transmission, and how much time elapsed between composition and preservation? Neidorf answers these questions by distinguishing linguistic and metrical regularities, which originate with the Beowulf poet, from patterns of textual corruption, which descend from copyists involved in the poem’s transmission. He argues, on the basis of archaic features that pervade Beowulf and set it apart from other Old English poems, that the text preserved in the sole extant manuscript (ca. 1000) is essentially the work of one poet who composed it circa 700. Of course, during the poem’s written transmission, several hundred scribal errors crept into its text. These errors are interpreted in the central chapters of the book as valuable evidence for language history, cultural change, and scribal practice. Neidorf’s analysis reveals that the scribes earnestly attempted to standardize and modernize the text’s orthography, but their unfamiliarity with obsolete words and ancient heroes resulted in frequent errors. The Beowulf manuscript thus emerges from his study as an indispensible witness to processes of linguistic and cultural change that took place in England between the eighth and eleventh centuries. An appendix addresses J. R. R. Tolkien’s Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, which was published in 2014. Neidorf assesses Tolkien’s general views on the transmission of Beowulf and evaluates his position on various textual issues.

Download or read book Moving Women Moving Objects 400 1500 written by Tracy Chapman Hamilton and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-08-12 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection forges new ground in the discussion of aristocratic and royal women, their relationships with their objects, and medieval geography. It explores how women’s geographic and familial networks spread well beyond the borders that defined men’s sense of region and how the movement of their belongings can reveal essential information about how women navigated these often-disparate spaces. Beginning in early medieval Scandinavia, ranging from Byzantium to Rus', and multiple lands in Western Europe up to 1500, the essays span a great spatio-temporal range. Moreover, the types of objects extend from traditionally studied works like manuscripts and sculpture to liturgical and secular ceremonial instruments, icons, and articles of personal adornment, such as textiles and jewelry, even including shoes.

Download or read book Folklore and Literature written by Manuel da Costa Fontes and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2000-03-09 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores how modern folklore, through its preservation of ballads and folktales, supplements our understanding of the oral tradition and enhances our knowledge of early literature.

Download or read book Intertextual Masculinity in French Renaissance Literature written by David P. LaGuardia and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-06 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intertextual Masculinity in French Renaissance Literature is an in-depth analysis of normative masculinity in a specific corpus from pre-modern Europe: narrative literature devoted to the subject of adultery and cuckoldry. The text begins with a set of general questions that serve as a conceptual framework for the literary analyses that follow: why were early modern readers so fascinated by the figure of the cuckold? What was his relation to the real world of sexual behavior and gender relations? What effect did he have on the construction of actual masculinities? To respond to these questions, David LaGuardia develops a theoretical approach that is based both on modern critical theory and on close readings of records and documents from the period. Reading early modern legal texts, penance manuals, criminal registers, and exempla collections in relation to the Cent nouvelles nouvelles, Rabelais's Tiers Livre, and Brantôme's Dames galantes, LaGuardia formulates a definition of masculinity in this historical context as a set of intertextual practices that men used to relay and to reinforce their gender identities. By examining legal and literary artifacts from this particular period and culture, this study highlights the extent to which this supposedly normative masculinity was historically contingent and materially conditioned by generic practices.

Download or read book A Brief Introduction to Astronomy in the Middle East written by John M. Steele and published by Saqi. This book was released on 2012-03-12 with total page 115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Middle East is the birthplace of astronomy and the centre for its development during the medieval period. In this brief introduction John Steele offers an intriguing insight into Middle Eastern achievements in astronomy and their profound influence on the rest of the world. Amongst other things, the book traces the Late Babylonians' ingenious schemes for modelling planetary motion. It also reveals how medieval Islamic advances in the study of the heavens, and the design of precise astronomical instruments, led to breakthroughs by Renaissance practitioners such as Copernicus and Kepler. An invaluable introduction to one of the oldest sciences in the world.

Download or read book A Guide to Early Jewish Texts and Traditions in Christian Transmission written by Gabriele Boccaccini and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-04 with total page 559 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Jewish culture of the Hellenistic and early Roman periods established a basis for all monotheistic religions, but its main sources have been preserved to a great degree through Christian transmission. This Guide is devoted to problems of preservation, reception, and transformation of Jewish texts and traditions of the Second Temple period in the many Christian milieus from the ancient world to the late medieval era. It approaches this corpus not as an artificial collection of reconstructed texts--a body of hypothetical originals--but rather from the perspective of the preserved materials, examined in their religious, social, and political contexts. It also considers the other, non-Christian, channels of the survival of early Jewish materials, including Rabbinic, Gnostic, Manichaean, and Islamic. This unique project brings together scholars from many different fields in order to map the trajectories of early Jewish texts and traditions among diverse later cultures. It also provides a comprehensive and comparative introduction to this new field of study while bridging the gap between scholars of early Judaism and of medieval Christianity.

Download or read book Cultural Reformations written by Brian Cummings and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-24 with total page 702 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The deepest periodic division in English literary history has been between the medieval and the early modern. 'Cultural Reformations' initiates discussion on many fronts in which both periods look different in dialogue with each other.