Download or read book Water in Medieval Literature written by Albrecht Classen and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-08-15 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book uncovers the tremendous importance of water for European medieval literature, focusing on a large number of writers and poets. Water proves to be highly meaningful in religious, literary, and factual narratives insofar as it emerges as a central catalyst to bring about epiphany and epistemological and spiritual illumination.
Download or read book Transformative Waters in Late medieval Literature written by Hetta Elizabeth Howes and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2021 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A consideration of the metaphor of water in religious literature, especially in relation to women.
Download or read book Meanings of Water in Early Medieval England written by Daniel Anlezark and published by . This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Water is both a practical and symbolic element. Whether a drop blessed by saintly relics or a river flowing to the sea, water formed part of the natural landscapes, religious lives, cultural expressions, and physical needs of medieval women and men.00This volume adopts an interdisciplinary perspective to enlarge our understanding of the overlapping qualities of water in early England (c. 400 - c. 1100). Scholars from the fields of archaeology, history, literature, religion, and art history come together to approach water and its diverse cultural manifestations in the early Middle Ages. Individual essays include investigations of the agency of water and its inhabitants in Old English and Latin literature, divine and demonic waters, littoral landscapes of church archaeology and ritual, visual and aural properties of water, and human passage through water. As a whole, the volume addresses how water in the environment functioned on multiple levels, allowing us to examine the early medieval intersections between the earthly and heavenly, the physical and conceptual, and the material and textual within a single element.
Download or read book Bodily and Spiritual Hygiene in Medieval and Early Modern Literature written by Albrecht Classen and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-03-20 with total page 614 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While most people today take hygiene and medicine for granted, they both have had their own history. We can gain deep insights into the pre-modern world by studying its health-care system, its approaches to medicine, and concept of hygiene. Already the early Middle Ages witnessed great interest in bathing (hot and cold), swimming, and good personal hygiene. Medical activities grew over time, but even early medieval monks were already great experts in treating the sick. The contributions examine literary, medical, historical texts and images and probe the information we can glean from them. The interdisciplinary approach of this volume makes it possible to view this large field in a complex and diversified manner, taking into account both early medieval and early modern treatises on medicine, water, bathing, and health. Such a cultural-historical perspective creates a most valuable bridge connecting literary and scientific documents under the umbrella of the history of mentality and history of everyday life. The volume does not aim at idealizing the past, but it definitely intends to deconstruct modern myths about the 'dirty' and 'unhealthy' Middle Ages and early modern age.
Download or read book Writing on Water written by Judit Niran Frigyesi and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-10 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing on Water is an attempt to grasp the phenomenon of sound in prayer, that is: a meaning in sounds and soundscapes, and a musical essence in the act of praying. The impetus for the book was the author's fieldwork among traditional Jews during the era of communism in Budapest and Prague. In that era the Jewish religion and Jewishness in general were supressed; the rituals were semi-secret and became inward-turning. The book is a witness to these communities and their rituals, but it goes beyond documentation. The uniqueness of the sounds of the rituals compelled the author to try to comprehend how melodies and soundscapes became the sustaining/protective environment, as well as the vehicle, for the expression of a world-orientation—in a situation where open discourse was inconceivable. The book is based on extensive interviews, musical recordings, photographs and scholarly analyses. It is unique in its choice of communities, its wealth of original documents, and in its novel interpretation of sound. Writing on Water is creative non-fiction. The presentation is evocative and poetic, but nevertheless, it transmits knowledge. Where this potential is understood, the book can aid research and serve in courses in philosophy, religion, music, ethnomusicology, anthropology, aesthetics, Jewish studies, folklore, oral history, and performance studies. At the same time it could be read as belles lettres.
Download or read book The Water Supply System of Siena Italy written by Michael P. Kucher and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-10-28 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book reviews scholarly literature and archival sources including maps and diagrams, to better situate Siena's achievement in urban history and broadens our understanding of medieval technology and urban life.
Download or read book Thirst written by Steven Mithen and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-26 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Water is an endangered resource, imperiled by population growth, mega-urbanization, and climate change. Scientists project that by 2050, freshwater shortages will affect 75 percent of the global population. Steven Mithen puts our current crisis in historical context by exploring 10,000 years of humankind’s management of water. Thirst offers cautionary tales of civilizations defeated by the challenges of water control, as well as inspirational stories about how technological ingenuity has sustained communities in hostile environments. As in his acclaimed, genre-defying After the Ice and The Singing Neanderthals, Mithen blends archaeology, current science, and ancient literature to give us a rich new picture of how our ancestors lived. Since the Neolithic Revolution, people have recognized water as a commodity and source of economic power and have manipulated its flow. History abounds with examples of ambitious water management projects and hydraulic engineering—from the Sumerians, whose mastery of canal building and irrigation led to their status as the first civilization, to the Nabataeans, who created a watery paradise in the desert city of Petra, to the Khmer, who built a massive inland sea at Angkor, visible from space. As we search for modern solutions to today’s water crises, from the American Southwest to China, Mithen also looks for lessons in the past. He suggests that we follow one of the most unheeded pieces of advice to come down from ancient times. In the words of Li Bing, whose waterworks have irrigated the Sichuan Basin since 256 BC, “Work with nature, not against it.”
Download or read book Working with Water in Medieval Europe written by Paolo Squatriti and published by Technology and Change in Histo. This book was released on 2000 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of studies on the ways water was used and manipulated in Europe between AD 500 and 1500 provides complete coverage of the technologies related to water in a vital period of technological development. Fishing, water power, irrigation, and domestic supply receive attention.
Download or read book Water written by Giulio Boccaletti and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spanning millennia and continents, a revealing history that “tackles the most important story of our time: our relationship with water in a world of looming scarcity” (Kelly McEvers, NPR Host). "Far more than a biography of its nominal subject ... The book stands as a compelling history of civilization itself." —The Wall Street Journal Book Review Writing with authority and brio, Giulio Boccaletti—honorary research associate at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford—shrewdly combines environmental and social history, beginning with the earliest civilizations of sedentary farmers on the banks of the Nile, the Tigris, and the Euphrates Rivers. Even as he describes how these societies were made possible by sea-level changes from the last glacial melt, he incisively examines how this type of farming led to irrigation and multiple cropping, which, in turn, led to a population explosion and labor specialization. We see with clarity how irrigation’s structure informed social structure (inventions such as the calendar sprung from agricultural necessity); how in ancient Greece, the communal ownership of wells laid the groundwork for democracy; how the Greek and Roman experiences with water security resulted in systems of taxation; and how the modern world as we know it began with a legal framework for the development of water infrastructure. Extraordinary for its monumental scope and piercing insightfulness, Water: A Biography richly enlarges our understanding of our relationship to—and fundamental reliance on—the most elemental substance on earth.
Download or read book The Secret in Medieval Literature written by Albrecht Classen and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-11-15 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Secret in Medieval Literature explores the many secret agents, actions, creatures, and other beings influencing human existence. Medieval poets had a clear sense of the alternative dimension (the secret) and allowed it to enter quite frequently into their texts.
Download or read book Bodily and Spiritual Hygiene in Medieval and Early Modern Literature written by Albrecht Classen and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-03-20 with total page 622 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While most people today take hygiene and medicine for granted, they both have had their own history. We can gain deep insights into the pre-modern world by studying its health-care system, its approaches to medicine, and concept of hygiene. Already the early Middle Ages witnessed great interest in bathing (hot and cold), swimming, and good personal hygiene. Medical activities grew over time, but even early medieval monks were already great experts in treating the sick. The contributions examine literary, medical, historical texts and images and probe the information we can glean from them. The interdisciplinary approach of this volume makes it possible to view this large field in a complex and diversified manner, taking into account both early medieval and early modern treatises on medicine, water, bathing, and health. Such a cultural-historical perspective creates a most valuable bridge connecting literary and scientific documents under the umbrella of the history of mentality and history of everyday life. The volume does not aim at idealizing the past, but it definitely intends to deconstruct modern myths about the 'dirty' and 'unhealthy' Middle Ages and early modern age.
Download or read book The Nature and Function of Water Baths Bathing and Hygiene from Antiquity Through the Renaissance written by Cynthia Kosso and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2009 with total page 547 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These essays offer scholars, teachers, and students a new basis for discussing attitudes toward, and technological expertise concerning, water in antiquity through the early Modern period, and they examine historical water use and ideology both diachronically and cross regionally. Topics include gender roles and water usage; attitudes, practices, and innovations in baths and bathing; water and the formation of identity and policy; ancient and medieval water sources and resources; and religious and literary water imagery. The authors describe how ideas about the nature and function of water created and shaped social relationships, and how religion, politics, and science transformed, and were themselves transformed by, the manipulation of, uses of, and disputes over water in daily life, ceremonies, and literature. Contributors are Rabun Taylor, Sandra Lucore, Robert F. Sutton, Jr., Cynthia K Kosso, Kevin Lawton, Evy Johanne HA land, HA(c)lA]ne Cazes, Alexandra Cuffel, Mark Munn, Brenda Longfellow, Gretchen Meyers, Sara Saba, Scott John McDonough, Etienne Dunant, E. J. Owens, Mehmet TaAlAalan, Deborah Chatr Aryamontri, John Stephenson, Lin A. Ferrand, Paul Trio, Anne Scott, Misty Rae Urban, Ruth Stevenson, Charles Connell, Alyce Jordan, Ronald Cooley, and Irene Matthews.
Download or read book How Water Makes Us Human written by Luci Attala and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2019-04-01 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about how water becomes people – or, put another way, how people and water flow together and shape each other. While the focus of the book is on the relationships held between water and people, it also has a broader message about human relationships with the environment generally – a message that illustrates not only that people are existentially entangled with the material world, but that the materials of the world shape, determine and enable humans to be ‘humans’ in the ways that they are. Offering a selection of anthropological examples from Kenya, Wales and Spain to illustrate how water’s materiality coproductively generates the way people are able to engage with water, this book uses cross-disciplinary perspectives to provide and promote a new analytic – one that encourages ethical, holistic and sustainable relationships with the world around us. This approach challenges representations that ignore, sidestep or are blind to the fleshy materiality of being human, and aims to encourage a re-imagining of the world that acknowledges humanity as intrinsically active-with and part of the fabric of the collection of materials we call planet Earth.
Download or read book Studies in Medieval Literature and Languages written by William Rothwell and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1973 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As son of the second president of the United States, father to the minister to the Court of St. James, and grandfather to author Henry Adams, John Quincy Adams was part of an American dynasty. In his own career as secretary of state, President, senator, and congressman, Adams was an actor in some of the most dramatic events of the nineteenth century. In this biography, Lynn Hudson Parsons chronicles the life of one of America's most absorbing figures. From the day in 1778 when as a boy he accompanied his father on a diplomatic mission to France, to his last years as an eloquent opponent of his country's foreign and domestic policies, Adams was rarely detached from public affairs. And yet, this biography reveals Adams as a man never truly at home anywhere - in Washington he was stubborn and reclusive, in Europe he was a phlegmatic ideologue, a bulldog among spaniels. His story parallels America's own.
Download or read book Water and fire written by Daniel Anlezark and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-30 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Noah’s Flood is one of the Bible’s most popular stories, and flood myths survive in many cultures today. This book presents the first comprehensive examination of the incorporation of the Flood myth into the Anglo-Saxon imagination. Focusing on literary representations, it contributes to our understanding of how Christian Anglo-Saxons perceived their place in the cosmos. For them, history unfolded between the primeval Deluge and a future – perhaps imminent – flood of fire, which would destroy the world. This study reveals both an imaginative diversity and shared interpretations of the Flood myth. Anglo-Saxons saw the Flood as a climactic event in God’s ongoing war with his more rebellious creatures, but they also perceived the mystery of redemption through baptism. Anlezark studies a range of texts against their historical background, and discusses shifting emphases in the way the Flood was interpreted for diverse audiences. The book concludes with a discussion of Beowulf, relating the epic poem’s presentation of the Flood myth to that of other Anglo-Saxon texts.
Download or read book Water and Society in Early Medieval Italy AD 400 1000 written by Paolo Squatriti and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-08-22 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A discussion of the relationship between people and water in medieval Italy, first published in 1998.
Download or read book A World Lit Only by Fire written by William Manchester and published by Back Bay Books. This book was released on 2009-09-26 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A "lively and engaging" history of the Middle Ages (Dallas Morning News) from the acclaimed historian William Manchester, author of The Last Lion. From tales of chivalrous knights to the barbarity of trial by ordeal, no era has been a greater source of awe, horror, and wonder than the Middle Ages. In handsomely crafted prose, and with the grace and authority of his extraordinary gift for narrative history, William Manchester leads us from a civilization tottering on the brink of collapse to the grandeur of its rebirth: the dense explosion of energy that spawned some of history's greatest poets, philosophers, painters, adventurers, and reformers, as well as some of its most spectacular villains. "Manchester provides easy access to a fascinating age when our modern mentality was just being born." --Chicago Tribune
