Download or read book Wykked Wyves and the Woes of Marriage written by Katharina M. Wilson and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1990-01-01 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The distrust and hatred of matrimony is a recurring theme in Western literature. In this volume, Wilson and Makowski show that in their repeated imagery, continuous themes, and rhetorical devices, misogamous texts closely parallel and reflect economic and demographic shifts, and theological and legal innovation. Analysis of the literature demonstrates a link between the growing secularism and careerism of the late middle ages and the reduction of women's social status and public options.

Download or read book Wykked Wyves and the Woes of Marriage written by Katharina M. Wilson and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1990-08-27 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The distrust and hatred of matrimony is a recurring theme in Western literature. In this volume, Wilson and Makowski show that in their repeated imagery, continuous themes, and rhetorical devices, misogamous texts closely parallel and reflect economic and demographic shifts, and theological and legal innovation. Analysis of the literature demonstrates a link between the growing secularism and careerism of the late middle ages and the reduction of women’s social status and public options.

Download or read book De nuptiis written by Ralph Hanna and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The three medieval texts that make up Jankyn's Book of Wikked Wyves have formed a vital part of Chaucerian research for more than half a century. Integrated here for the first time, these texts now form a cornerstone volume of the Chaucer Library series. Near the end of her prologue, Chaucer's Wife of Bath tells how her fifth husband, Jankyn, a clerk of Oxford, taunted her by reading from a collection of antifeminist tracts. The contents of Jankyn's book include three texts that enjoyed wide distribution in the later Middle Ages: Walter Map's "Dissuasio Valerii," Theophrastus's "De Nuptiis," and Jerome's "Adversus Jovinianum." The first two are reproduced in their entirety in this volume, with selections from the third. The editors examine Jankyn's book from many angles, including the extensive manuscript sources from which it may be reconstructed, background information for its literary appreciation, and Chaucer's use of the materials. The publication of this volume, the fourth in the Chaucer Library, represents a major event for medievalists.

Download or read book A Cultural History of Gardens in the Medieval Age written by Michael Leslie and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-04-02 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Middle Ages was a time of great upheaval - the period between the seventh and fourteenth centuries saw great social, political and economic change. The radically distinct cultures of the Christian West, Byzantium, Persian-influenced Islam, and al-Andalus resulted in different responses to the garden arts of antiquity and different attitudes to the natural world and its artful manipulation. Yet these cultures interacted and communicated, trading plants, myths and texts. By the fifteenth century the garden as a cultural phenomenon was immensely sophisticated and a vital element in the way society saw itself and its relation to nature. A Cultural History of Gardens in the Medieval Age presents an overview of the period with essays on issues of design, types of gardens, planting, use and reception, issues of meaning, verbal and visual representation of gardens, and the relationship of gardens to the larger landscape.

Download or read book Common Women written by Ruth Mazo Karras and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1998-04-23 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through a sensitive use of a wide variety of imaginative and didactic texts, Ruth Karras shows that while prostitutes as individuals were marginalized within medieval culture, prostitution as an institution was central to the medieval understanding of what it meant to be a woman. This important work will be of interest to scholars and students of history, women's studies, and the history of sexuality.

Download or read book Historians on Chaucer written by Alastair Minnis and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2014-12-04 with total page 525 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As literary scholars have long insisted, an interdisciplinary approach is vital if modern readers are to make sense of works of medieval literature. In particular, rather than reading the works of medieval authors as addressing us across the centuries about some timeless or ahistorical 'human condition', critics from a wide range of theoretical approaches have in recent years shown how the work of poets such as Chaucer constituted engagements with the power relations and social inequalities of their time. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, medieval historians have played little part in this 'historical turn' in the study of medieval literature. The aim of this volume is to allow historians who are experts in the fields of economic, social, political, religious, and intellectual history the chance to interpret one of the most famous works of Middle English literature, Geoffrey Chaucer's 'General Prologue' to the Canterbury Tales, in its contemporary context. Rather than resorting to traditional historical attempts to see Chaucer's descriptions of the Canterbury pilgrims as immediate reflections of historical reality or as portraits of real life people whom Chaucer knew, the contributors to this volume have sought to show what interpretive frameworks were available to Chaucer in order to make sense of reality and how he adapted his literary and ideological inheritance so as to engage with the controversies and conflicts of his own day. Beginning with a survey of recent debates about the social meaning of Chaucer's work, the volume then discusses each of the Canterbury pilgrims in turn. Historians on Chaucer should be of interest to all scholars and students of medieval culture whether they are specialists in literature or history.

Download or read book Law and Literature written by Brook Thomas and published by Gunter Narr Verlag. This book was released on 2002 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Wandering Women and Holy Matrons written by Leigh Ann Craig and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2009-03-16 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores women’s experiences of pilgrimage in Latin Christendom between 1300 and 1500 C.E. Later medieval authors harbored grave doubts about women’s mobility; literary images of mobile women commonly accused them of lust, pride, greed, and deceit. Yet real women commonly engaged in pilgrimage in a variety of forms, both physical and spiritual, voluntary and compulsory, and to locations nearby and distant. Acting within both practical and social constraints, such women helped to construct more positive interpretations of their desire to travel and of their experiences as pilgrims. Regardless of how their travel was interpreted, those women who succeeded in becoming pilgrims offer us a rare glimpse of ordinary women taking on extraordinary religious and social authority.

Download or read book English Printing Verse Translation and the Battle of the Sexes 1476 1557 written by Anne E.B. Coldiron and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing to light new material about early print, early modern gender discourses, and cultural contact between France and England in the revolutionary first phase of English print culture, this book focuses on a dozen or so of the many early Renaissance verse translations about women, marriage, sex, and gender relations. Anne Coldiron here analyzes such works as the Interlocucyon; the Beaute of Women; the Fyftene Joyes of Maryage; and the Complaintes of the Too Soone and Too Late Maryed as well as the printed translations of writings of Christine de Pizan. Her selections identify an insufficiently discussed strand of English poetry, in that they are non-elite, non-courtly, and non-romance writings on women's issues. She investigates the specific effects of translation on this alternative strand of poetry, showing how some French poems remain stable in the conversion, others subtly change emphasis in their new context, but some are completely transformed. Coldiron also emphasizes the formal and presentational dimensions of the early modern poetic book, assessing the striking differences the printers' paratexts and visual presentation strategies make to the meaning and value of the poems. A series of appendices presents the author's transcriptions of the texts that are otherwise inaccessible, never having been edited in modern times.

Download or read book Chaucer s Wife of Bath s Prologue and Tale written by Geoffrey Chaucer and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Chaucer Bibliography series aims to provide annotated bibliographies for all of Chaucer's work. This book summarizes 20th-century commentaries on Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Prologue" and "Tale."

Download or read book Sacred Fictions written by Lynda L. Coon and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2010-11-24 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Late antique and early medieval hagiographic texts present holy women as simultaneously pious and corrupt, hideous and beautiful, exemplars of depravity and models of sanctity. In Sacred Fictions Lynda Coon unpacks these paradoxical representations to reveal the construction and circumscription of women's roles in the early Christian centuries. Coon discerns three distinct paradigms for female sanctity in saints' lives and patristic and monastic writings. Women are recurrently figured as repentant desert hermits, wealthy widows, or cloistered ascetic nuns, and biblical discourse informs the narrative content, rhetorical strategies, and symbolic meanings of these texts in complex and multivalent ways. If hagiographers made their women saints walk on water, resurrect the dead, or consecrate the Eucharist, they also curbed the power of women by teaching that the daughters of Eve must make their bodies impenetrable through militant chastity or spiritual exile and must eradicate self-indulgence through ascetic attire or philanthropy. The windows the sacred fiction of holy women open on the past are far from transparent; driven by both literary invention and moral imperative, the stories they tell helped shape Western gender constructs that have survived into modern times.

Download or read book Celibacy and Religious Traditions written by Carl Olson and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2008 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For an educated, general readership and for use in college courses, this text introduces the role of celibacy, or a lack of it, in various religious traditions, and the contributors present the rationale for its observance (or not) within the context of each tradition.

Download or read book Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe written by Lisa M. Bitel and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2013-03-26 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe, six historians explore how medieval people professed Christianity, how they performed gender, and how the two coincided. Many of the daily religious decisions people made were influenced by gender roles, the authors contend. Women's pious donations, for instance, were limited by laws of inheritance and marriage customs; male clerics' behavior depended upon their understanding of masculinity as much as on the demands of liturgy. The job of religious practitioner, whether as a nun, monk, priest, bishop, or some less formal participant, involved not only professing a set of religious ideals but also professing gender in both ideal and practical terms. The authors also argue that medieval Europeans chose how to be women or men (or some complex combination of the two), just as they decided whether and how to be religious. In this sense, religious institutions freed men and women from some of the gendered limits otherwise imposed by society. Whereas previous scholarship has tended to focus exclusively either on masculinity or on aristocratic women, the authors define their topic to study gender in a fuller and more richly nuanced fashion. Likewise, their essays strive for a generous definition of religious history, which has too often been a history of its most visible participants and dominant discourses. In stepping back from received assumptions about religion, gender, and history and by considering what the terms "woman," "man," and "religious" truly mean for historians, the book ultimately enhances our understanding of the gendered implications of every pious thought and ritual gesture of medieval Christians. Contributors: Dyan Elliott is John Evans Professor of History at Northwestern University. Ruth Mazo Karras is professor of history at the University of Minnesota, and the general editor of The Middle Ages Series for the University of Pennsyvlania Press. Jacqueline Murray is dean of arts and professor of history at the University of Guelph. Jane Tibbetts Schulenberg is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin—Madison.

Download or read book Female Voice Song and Women s Musical Agency in the Middle Ages written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-08-22 with total page 517 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection presents fresh evidence and new perspectives on the diverse ways in which women created and interacted with cultures of song between c. 600 and c. 1500.

Download or read book From Virile Woman to WomanChrist written by Barbara Newman and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-12-16 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did hagiographers of the late Middle Ages praise mothers for abandoning small children? How did a group of female mystics come to define themselves as "apostles to the dead" and end by challenging God's right to damn? Why did certain heretics around 1300 venerate a woman as the Holy Spirit incarnate and another as the Angelic Pope? In From Virile Woman to WomanChrist, Barbara Newman asks these and other questions to trace a gradual and ambiguous transition in the gender strategies of medieval religious women. An egalitarian strain in early Christianity affirmed that once she asserted her commitment to Christ through a vow of chastity, monastic profession, or renunciation of family ties, a woman could become "virile," or equal to a man. While the ideal of the "virile woman" never disappeared, another ideal slowly evolved in medieval Christianity. By virtue of some gender-related trait—spotless virginity, erotic passion, the capacity for intense suffering, the ability to imagine a feminine aspect of the Godhead—a devout woman could be not only equal, but superior to men; without becoming male, she could become a "womanChrist," imitating and representing Christ in uniquely feminine ways. Rooted in women's concrete aspirations and sufferings, Newman's "womanChrist" model straddles the bounds of orthodoxy and heresy to illuminate the farther reaches of female religious behavior in the Middle Ages. From Virile Woman to WomanChrist will generate compelling discussion in the fields of medieval literature and history, history of religion, theology, and women's studies.

Download or read book Household knowledges in late medieval England and France written by Glenn D. Burger and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-17 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection investigates how the late-medieval household acted as a sorter, user and disseminator of different kinds of ready information, from the traditional and authoritative to the innovative and newly made. Building on work on the noble and bourgeois medieval household, it considers bourgeois, gentry and collegiate households on both sides of the English Channel. The book argues that there is a dynamic and reciprocal relationship between domestic experience and its forms of cultural expression. Contributors address a range of cultural productions, including conduct texts, romances and comic writing, estates-management literature, medical writing, household music and drama and manuscript anthologies. Their studies provide a fresh illustration of the late-medieval household's imaginative scope, its extensive internal and external connections and its fundamental centrality to late-medieval cultural production.

Download or read book Women Laughter in Medieval Comic Literature written by Lisa Renée Perfetti and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Portrays a range of medieval heroines to ascertain how humor might have been used and enjoyed by medieval women