Download or read book Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French Verse Romance written by Roberta L. Krueger and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-02-17 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study challenges the view that all courtly literature promoted the social status of women. Unlike previous books which focused on knights, it starts from the perspective of the woman reader/listener. Using reader-response theory, feminist criticism and recent historical studies, it suggests that romances taught gender roles, often inviting readers to criticise and resist them.
Download or read book Arthurian Women written by Thelma S. Fenster and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty-nine collected essays represent a critical history of Shakespeare's play as text and as theater, beginning with Samuel Johnson in 1765, and ending with a review of the Royal Shakespeare Company production in 1991. The criticism centers on three aspects of the play: the love/friendship debate.
Download or read book The Medieval World written by Peter Linehan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 766 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking collection brings the Middle Ages to life and conveys the distinctiveness of this diverse, constantly changing period. Thirty-eight scholars bring together one medieval world from many disparate worlds, from Connacht to Constantinople and from Tynemouth to Timbuktu. This extraordinary set of reconstructions presents the reader with a vivid re-drawing of the medieval past, offering fresh appraisals of the evidence and modern historical writing. Chapters are thematically linked in four sections: identities beliefs, social values and symbolic order power and power-structures elites, organizations and groups. Packed full of original scholarship, The Medieval World is essential reading for anyone studying medieval history.
Download or read book God and the Goddesses written by Barbara Newman and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2016-01-14 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contrary to popular belief, the medieval religious imagination did not restrict itself to masculine images of God but envisaged the divine in multiple forms. In fact, the God of medieval Christendom was the Father of only one Son but many daughters—including Lady Philosophy, Lady Love, Dame Nature, and Eternal Wisdom. God and the Goddesses is a study in medieval imaginative theology, examining the numerous daughters of God who appear in allegorical poems, theological fictions, and the visions of holy women. We have tended to understand these deities as mere personifications and poetic figures, but that, Barbara Newman contends, is a mistake. These goddesses are neither pagan survivals nor versions of the Great Goddess constructed in archetypal psychology, but distinctive creations of the Christian imagination. As emanations of the Divine, mediators between God and the cosmos, embodied universals, and ravishing objects of identification and desire, medieval goddesses transformed and deepened Christendom's concept of God, introducing religious possibilities beyond the ambit of scholastic theology and bringing them to vibrant imaginative life. Building a bridge between secular and religious conceptions of allegorized female power, Newman advances such questions as whether medieval writers believed in their goddesses and, if so, in what manner. She investigates whether the personifications encountered in poetic fictions can be distinguished from those that appear in religious visions and questions how medieval writers reconcile their statements about the multiple daughters of God with orthodox devotion to the Son of God. Furthermore, she examines why forms of feminine God-talk that strike many Christians today as subversive or heretical did not threaten medieval churchmen. Weaving together such disparate texts as the writings of Latin and vernacular poets, medieval schoolmen, liturgists, and male and female mystics and visionaries, God and the Goddesses is a direct challenge to modern theologians to reconsider the role of goddesses in the Christian tradition.
Download or read book Orientalism in French Classical Drama written by Michèle Longino and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-03-16 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michèle Longino examines the ways in which Mediterranean exoticism inflects the themes represented in French classical drama. Longino explores plays by Corneille, Molière and Racine; Le Cid, Médée, and Le bourgeois gentilhomme among others. She offers a consideration of the role the staging of the near Orient played in shaping a sense of French colonial identity. Drawing on histories, travel journals, memoirs and correspondence, and bringing together literary and historical concerns, Longino considers these dramatisations in the context of French-Ottoman relations at the time of their production.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance written by Roberta L. Krueger and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-06-22 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Companion presents fifteen original and engaging essays by leading scholars on one of the most influential genres of Western literature. Chapters describe the origins of early verse romance in twelfth-century French and Anglo-Norman courts and analyze the evolution of verse and prose romance in France, Germany, England, Italy, and Spain throughout the Middle Ages. The volume introduces a rich array of traditions and texts and offers fresh perspectives on the manuscript context of romance, the relationship of romance to other genres, popular romance in urban contexts, romance as mirror of familiar and social tensions, and the representation of courtly love, chivalry, 'other' worlds and gender roles. Together the essays demonstrate that European romances not only helped to promulgate the ideals of elite societies in formation, but also held those values up for questioning. An introduction, a chronology and a bibliography of texts and translations complete this lively, useful overview.
Download or read book Imagining the Woman Reader in the Age of Dante written by Elena Lombardi and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-10 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagining the Woman Reader in the Age of Dante brings to light a new character in medieval literature: that of the woman reader and interlocutor. It does so by establishing a dialogue between literary studies, gender studies, the history of literacy, and the material culture of the book in medieval times. From Guittone d'Arezzo's piercing critic, the 'villainous woman', to the mysterious Lady who bids Guido Cavalcanti to write his grand philosophical song, to Dante's female co-editors in the Vita Nova and his great characters of female readers, such as Francesca and Beatrice in the Comedy, all the way to Boccaccio's overtly female audience, this particular interlocutor appears to be central to the construct of textuality and the construction of literary authority. This volume explores the figure of the woman reader by contextualizing her within the history of female literacy, the material culture of the book, and the ways in which writers and poets of earlier traditions imagined her. It argues that these figures are not mere veneers between a male author and a 'real' male readership, but that, although fictional, they bring several advantages to their vernacular authors, such as orality, the mother tongue, the recollection of the delights of early education, literality, freedom in interpretation, absence of teleology, the beauties of ornamentation and amplification, a reduced preoccupation with the fixity of the text, the pleasure of making mistakes, dialogue with the other, the extension of desire, original simplicity, and new and more flexible forms of authority.
Download or read book Literature Art and the Pursuit of Decay in Twentieth Century France written by Timothy Mathews and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-01-19 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mathews examines work by writers and painters working in France in the twentieth century.
Download or read book Singlewomen in the European Past 1250 1800 written by Judith M. Bennett and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2013-02-01 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When we think about the European past, we tend to imagine villages, towns, and cities populated by conventional families—married couples and their children. Although most people did marry and pass many of their adult years in the company of a spouse, this vision of a preindustrial Europe shaped by heterosexual marriage deceptively hides the well-established fact that, in some times and places, as many as twenty-five percent of women and men remained single throughout their lives. Despite the significant number of never-married lay women in medieval and early modern Europe, the study of their role and position in that society has been largely neglected. Singlewomen in the European Past opens up this group for further investigation. It is not only the first book to highlight the important minority of women who never married but also the first to address the critical matter of differences among women from the perspective of marital status. Essays by leading scholars—among them Maryanne Kowaleski, Margaret Hunt, Ruth Mazo Karras, Susan Mosher Stuard, Roberta Krueger, and Merry Wiesner—deal with topics including the sexual and emotional relationships of singlewomen, the economic issues and employment opportunities facing them, the differences between the lives of widows and singlewomen, the conflation of singlewomen and prostitutes, and the problem of female slavery. The chapters both illustrate the roles open to the singlewoman in the thirteenth through eighteenth centuries and raise new perspectives about the experiences of singlewomen in earlier times.
Download or read book Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England written by Sarah Salih and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2001 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medieval virginity theory explored through study of martyrs, nuns and Margery Kempe. This study looks at the question of what it meant to be a virgin in the Middle Ages, and the forms which female virginity took. It begins with the assumptions that there is more to virginity than sexual inexperience, and that virginity may be considered as a gendered identity, a role which is performed rather than biologically determined. The author explores versions of virginity as they appear in medieval saints' lives, in the institutional chastity of nuns, and as shown in the book of Margery Kempe, showing how it can be active, contested, vulnerable but also recoverable. SARAH SALIH teaches in the Department of English at King's College London.
Download or read book Gender Interpretation and Political Rule in Sidney s Arcadia written by Kathryn DeZur and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2013 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gender, Interpretation, and Political Rule in Sidney's Arcadia studies cultural ideologies regarding gender and monarchy in early modern England by examining transformations of a single text, Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, in their historical contexts. It reveals changing tensions in the ideological struggles over queenship, especially with respect to cultural debates focused on anxieties about gendered reception and interpretation of persuasive rhetoric. The cultural shift between about 1550 and 1650 regarding gendered interpretation and political rule--a shift that was by no means complete or homogenous--reflects the changing position of women and their relationship to language within early modern domestic and political ideological discourses. The book begins by investigating primary cultural, political, and historical sources in order to provide a cultural scaffolding helpful to the interpretation of Sidney's enormously popular work. These sources include conduct manuals, gynecocratic debates, paintings, poems, diaries, pamphlets, and letters. Gender, Interpretation, and Political Rule then considers the initial version of the Arcadia (the Old Arcadia) Sidney authored and argues that Sidney's involvement in the marriage debate regarding the Duke of Anjou's courtship of Elizabeth I in the late 1570s shaped his representations of female characters and their questionable ability to interpret persuasive rhetoric. Next, the book turns to Sidney's expanded and revised version (the New Arcadia), authorized and published by his sister the Countess of Pembroke Mary Sidney Herbert. The New Arcadia ultimately provides a more positive representation of women readers and rulers and reveals a shift in cultural understandings of women's relationship to the persuasive rhetoric that both describes and enacts political power and authority. The penultimate chapter examines paradigms of active reading and their political consequences in Lady Mary Wroth's The Countess of Montgomery's Urania that demonstrate a need for well-balanced identification with characters. Finally, this book focuses on a little-studied seventeenth-century continuation of Sidney's work by a young woman, Anna Weamys, who asserts her authority as an interpreter of Sidney's Arcadia and in the process creates a political commentary about the legitimacy of female authority and influence just after the English Civil War.
Download or read book To the Glory of Her Sex written by Joan M. Ferrante and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ferranate (English and comparative literature, Columbia U.) describes medieval women's activities as correspondents, readers, writers, and literary patrons from antiquity through the 14th century. The writings she considers range through virtually every field in historical and literary studies. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Courtly Love Undressed written by E. Jane Burns and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2014-07-09 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Clothing was used in the Middle Ages to mark religious, military, and chivalric orders, lepers, and prostitutes. The ostentatious display of luxury dress more specifically served as a means of self-definition for members of the ruling elite and the courtly lovers among them. In Courtly Love Undressed, E. Jane Burns unfolds the rich display of costly garments worn by amorous partners in literary texts and other cultural documents in the French High Middle Ages. Burns "reads through clothes" in lyric, romance, and didactic literary works, vernacular sermons, and sumptuary laws to show how courtly attire is used to negotiate desire, sexuality, and symbolic space as well as social class. Reading through clothes reveals that the expression of female desire, so often effaced in courtly lyric and romance, can be registered in the poetic deployment of fabric and adornment, and that gender is often configured along a sartorial continuum, rather than in terms of naturally derived categories of woman and man. The symbolic identification of the court itself as a hybrid crossing place between Europe and the East also emerges through Burns's reading of literary allusions to the trade, travel, and pilgrimage that brought luxury cloth to France.
Download or read book Women and Medieval Literary Culture written by Corinne Saunders and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-07-31 with total page 880 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on England but covering a wide range of European and global traditions and influences, this authoritative volume examines the central role of medieval women in the production and circulation of books and considers their representation in medieval literary texts, as authors, readers and subjects, assessing how these change over time. Engaging with Latin, French, German, Welsh and Gaelic literary culture, it places British writing in wider European contexts while also considering more distant influences such as Arabic. Essays span topics including book production and authorship; reception; linguistic, literary, and cultural contexts and influences; women's education and spheres of knowledge; women as writers, scribes and translators; women as patrons, readers and book owners; and women as subjects. Reflecting recent trends in scholarship, the volume spans the early Middle Ages through to the eve of the Reformation and emphasises the multilingual, multicultural and international contexts of women's literary culture.
Download or read book Through the Reading Glass written by Suellen Diaconoff and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2006-06-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that women's relationship to books and their promotion of reading contributed greatly to the cultural and intellectual vitality of the Enlightenment.
Download or read book Sex and Gender in Medieval and Renaissance Texts written by Barbara K. Gold and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1997-03-13 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection reclaims a vast body of long-neglected Latin texts from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and examines how they represent the feminine and the female body. The authors explore the ideological values explicitly encoded by the feminine in these texts, other, less articulated values implied by the feminine, and the role of the classical tradition in communicating those values. The examination of women both as subjects and as rhetorical constructions in Medieval and Renaissance Latin literature sheds light on the larger dialogue about feminism occurring throughout the humanities. In addition, the inclusion of a new body of texts and the rescue of others from their present isolation will expand the reach of classical and humanist scholarship. Traditional studies of Latin literature end around the beginning of the fifth century C.E. despite the fact that Latin continued to be the dominant literary and intellectual language until at least the latter half of the sixteenth century. Thus most classicists ignore over one thousand years of the Latin literary tradition. Few non-classicists read Latin comfortably and fewer still have a detailed understanding of the history of classical Latin literature. Nevertheless, a knowledge of this history was assumed by most Neo-Latin writers as well as their contemporaries who wrote in the vernacular. This collection supplies tools to examine more completely the construction and application of gender in both Latin and vernacular texts of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
Download or read book The Poetry of Fran ois Villon written by Jane H. M. Taylor and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-05-21 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taylor explores the work of François Villon and his relationship to his predecessors and contemporaries.
