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 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 Imagination and Fantasy in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time written by Albrecht Classen and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-08-24 with total page 706 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The notions of other peoples, cultures, and natural conditions have always been determined by the epistemology of imagination and fantasy, providing much freedom and creativity, and yet have also created much fear, anxiety, and horror. In this regard, the pre-modern world demonstrates striking parallels with our own insofar as the projections of alterity might be different by degrees, but they are fundamentally the same by content. Dreams, illusions, projections, concepts, hopes, utopias/dystopias, desires, and emotional attachments are as specific and impactful as the physical environment. This volume thus sheds important light on the various lenses used by people in the Middle Ages and the early modern age as to how they came to terms with their perceptions, images, and notions. Previous scholarship focused heavily on the history of mentality and history of emotions, whereas here the history of pre-modern imagination, and fantasy assumes center position. Imaginary things are taken seriously because medieval and early modern writers and artists clearly reveal their great significance in their works and their daily lives. This approach facilitates a new deep-structure analysis of pre-modern culture.
Download or read book HEALING AND HARM written by and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2024 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Communication Translation and Community in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period written by Albrecht Classen and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-08-22 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Die neue englischsprachige Reihe zur Mediävistik strebt eine methodisch reflektierte, anspruchsvolle Verbindung von Text- und Kulturwissenschaft an. Sie widmet sich den kulturellen Grundthemen der mittelalterlichen Welt aus der Perspektive der Literatur- und Geschichtswissenschaft. ‚Grundthemen' sind die kulturprägenden Denkbilder, Weltanschauungen, Sozialstrukturen und Alltagsbedingungen des mittelalterlichen Lebens, also z. B. Kindheit und Alter, Sexualität, Religion, Medizin, Rituale, Arbeit, Armut und Reichtum, Aberglauben, Erde und Kosmos, Stadt und Land, Krieg, Emotionen, Kommunikation, Reisen usw. Die Reihe greift wichtige aktuelle Fachdiskussionen auf und stellt ein Forum der interdisziplinären Mittelalter-Forschung dar. Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture steht Sammelbänden ebenso offen wie Monographien. Intention ist immer, kompendienhafte Werke zu zentralen Fragen der mittelalterlichen Kulturgeschichte vorzulegen, die einen soliden Überblick über einen geschlossenen Themenkreis aus der Perspektive verschiedener Fachdisziplinen vermitteln. Im Ganzen bietet die Reihe so eine Enzyklopädie der mittelalterlichen Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte und ihrer Hauptthemen. Es werden ca. zwei Bände pro Jahr erscheinen.
Download or read book Pleasure and Leisure in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age written by Albrecht Classen and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-08-05 with total page 946 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jan Huizinga and Roger Caillois have already taught us to realize how important games and play have been for pre-modern civilization. Recent research has begun to acknowledge the fundamental importance of these aspects in cultural, religious, philosophical, and literary terms. This volume expands on the traditional approach still very much focused on the materiality of game (toys, cards, dice, falcons, dolls, etc.) and acknowledges that game constituted also a form of coming to terms with human existence in an unstable and volatile world determined by universal randomness and fortune. Whether considering blessings or horse fighting, falconry or card games, playing with dice or dolls, we can gain a much deeper understanding of medieval and early modern society when we consider how people pursued pleasure and how they structured their leisure time. The contributions examine a wide gamut of approaches to pleasure, considering health issues, eroticism, tournaments, playing music, reading and listening, drinking alcohol, gambling and throwing dice. This large issue was also relevant, of course, in non-Christian societies, and constitutes a critical concern both for the past and the present because we are all homines ludentes.
Download or read book Nature in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Times written by Albrecht Classen and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024-07-01 with total page 606 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of pre-modern anthropology requires the close examination of the relationship between nature and human society, which has been both precarious and threatening as well as productive, soothing, inviting, and pleasurable. Much depends on the specific circumstances, as the works by philosophers, theologians, poets, artists, and medical practitioners have regularly demonstrated. It would not be good enough, as previous scholarship has commonly done, to examine simply what the various writers or artists had to say about nature. While modern scientists consider just the hard-core data of the objective world, cultural historians and literary scholars endeavor to comprehend the deeper meaning of the concept of nature presented by countless writers and artists. Only when we have a good grasp of the interactions between people and their natural environment, are we in a position to identify and interpret mental structures, social and economic relationships, medical and scientific concepts of human health, and the messages about all existence as depicted in major art works. In light of the current conditions threatening to bring upon us a global crisis, it matters centrally to take into consideration pre-modern discourses on nature and its enormous powers to understand the topoi and tropes determining the concepts through which we perceive nature. Nature thus proves to be a force far beyond all human comprehensibility, being both material and spiritual depending on our critical approaches.
Download or read book Globalism in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age written by Albrecht Classen and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-09-04 with total page 652 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although it is fashionable among modernists to claim that globalism emerged only since ca. 1800, the opposite can well be documented through careful comparative and transdisciplinary studies, as this volume demonstrates, offering a wide range of innovative perspectives on often neglected literary, philosophical, historical, or medical documents. Texts, images, ideas, knowledge, and objects migrated throughout the world already in the pre-modern world, even if the quantitative level compared to the modern world might have been different. In fact, by means of translations and trade, for instance, global connections were established and maintained over the centuries. Archetypal motifs developed in many literatures indicate how much pre-modern people actually shared. But we also discover hard-core facts of global economic exchange, import of exotic medicine, and, on another level, intensive intellectual debates on religious issues. Literary evidence serves best to expose the extent to which contacts with people in foreign countries were imaginable, often desirable, and at times feared, of course. The pre-modern world was much more on the move and reached out to distant lands out of curiosity, economic interests, and political and military concerns. Diplomats crisscrossed the continents, and artists, poets, and craftsmen traveled widely. We can identify, for instance, both the Vikings and the Arabs as global players long before the rise of modern globalism, so this volume promises to rewrite many of our traditional notions about pre-modern worldviews, economic conditions, and the literary sharing on a global level, as perhaps best expressed by the genre of the fable.
Download or read book Travel Time and Space in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time written by Albrecht Classen and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-10-22 with total page 811 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Research on medieval and early modern travel literature has made great progress, which now allows us to take the next step and to analyze the correlations between the individual and space throughout time, which contributed essentially to identity formation in many different settings. The contributors to this volume engage with a variety of pre-modern texts, images, and other documents related to travel and the individual's self-orientation in foreign lands and make an effort to determine the concept of identity within a spatial framework often determined by the meeting of various cultures. Moreover, objects, images and words can also travel and connect people from different worlds through books. The volume thus brings together new scholarship focused on the interrelationship of travel, space, time, and individuality, which also includes, of course, women's movement through the larger world, whether in concrete terms or through proxy travel via readings. Travel here is also examined with respect to craftsmen's activities at various sites, artists' employment for many different projects all over Europe and elsewhere, and in terms of metaphysical experiences (catabasis).
Download or read book Magic and Magicians in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Time written by Albrecht Classen and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-10-23 with total page 742 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are no clear demarcation lines between magic, astrology, necromancy, medicine, and even sciences in the pre-modern world. Under the umbrella term 'magic,' the contributors to this volume examine a wide range of texts, both literary and religious, both medical and philosophical, in which the topic is discussed from many different perspectives. The fundamental concerns address issue such as how people perceived magic, whether they accepted it and utilized it for their own purposes, and what impact magic might have had on the mental structures of that time. While some papers examine the specific appearance of magicians in literary texts, others analyze the practical application of magic in medical contexts. In addition, this volume includes studies that deal with the rise of the witch craze in the late fifteenth century and then also investigate whether the Weberian notion of disenchantment pertaining to the modern world can be maintained. Magic is, oddly but significantly, still around us and exerts its influence. Focusing on magic in the medieval world thus helps us to shed light on human culture at large.
Download or read book Incarceration and Slavery in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age written by Albrecht Classen and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: People in the Middle Ages and the early modern age more often suffered from imprisonment and enslavement than we might have assumed. Incarceration and Slavery in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age approaches these topics from a wide variety of perspectives and demonstrates collectively the great relevance of the issues involved. Both incarceration and slavery were (and continue to be) most painful experiences, and no one was guaranteed exemption from it. High-ranking nobles and royalties were often the victims of imprisonment and, at times, had to wait many years until their ransom was paid. Similarly, slavery existed throughout Christian Europe and in the Arab world. However, while imprisonment occasionally proved to be the catalyst for major writings and creativity, slaves in the Ottoman empire and in Egypt succeeded in rising to the highest position in society (Janissaries, Mamluks, and others).
Download or read book Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England written by Dr Jennifer C Vaught and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-04-28 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Susan Sontag in Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors points to the vital connection between metaphors and bodily illnesses, though her analyses deal mainly with modern literary works. This collection of essays examines the vast extent to which rhetorical figures related to sickness and health-metaphor, simile, pun, analogy, symbol, personification, allegory, oxymoron, and metonymy-inform medieval and early modern literature, religion, science, and medicine in England and its surrounding European context. In keeping with the critical trend over the past decade to foreground the matter of the body and the emotions, these essays track the development of sustained, nuanced rhetorics of bodily disease and health — physical, emotional, and spiritual. The contributors to this collection approach their intriguing subjects from a wide range of timely, theoretical, and interdisciplinary perspectives, including the philosophy of language, semiotics, and linguistics; ecology; women's and gender studies; religion; and the history of medicine. The essays focus on works by Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton among others; the genres of epic, lyric, satire, drama, and the sermon; and cultural history artifacts such as medieval anatomies, the arithmetic of plague bills of mortality, meteorology, and medical guides for healthy regimens.
Download or read book Prostitution in Medieval and Early Modern Literature written by Albrecht Classen and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-07-18 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prostitution is known as the oldest profession in the history of humanity. While historians have already given due consideration to the profession’s social and cultural meanings across time periods, little has been written about literary representations of prostitution. Prostitution in Medieval and Early Modern Literature analyses the work of writers from an array of social positions, including courtly poets and even religious writers, dealing with the topic during the medieval and early modern periods. Its study shows that prostitutes and brothel owners were present on the literary stage far more often than we might have assumed. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach and incorporating relevant sources from across the entire European continent dating from the early Middle Ages to the sixteenth century, it examines the phenomenon of prostitution in a variety of contexts and highlights the extent to which the institution mattered for both the higher and the lower classes.
Download or read book Fleshly Things and Spiritual Matters written by Nicole Nyffenegger and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2011-01-18 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers fresh insights into the plethora of medieval bodies and the multiple perspectives that can be assumed in their discussion. The ten essays by internationally renowned scholars and young academics encompass diverse approaches to the body such as the function of gestures, the gendered gaze, the body’s spatial and geographical positioning, the (dis)integrity of the body or the connection between linguistic uses of ‘body’ and physical bodies. While most of the contributions of this collection are in the field of medieval English literature, they underline the value of interdisciplinary approaches which connect them with neighbouring disciplines such as modern literature and arts, history, theology and gender studies. Contributors: Katharina Berger-Meister, Guillemette Bolens, Leslie Dunton-Downer, Laurie Finke, Angelina Keller, Andy Kelly, Fabienne Michelet, R. Allen Shoaf, Lotta Sigurdsson, and Paul Taylor.
Download or read book Sin and Filth in Medieval Culture written by Martha Bayless and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-07-03 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This important new contribution to the history of the body analyzes the role of filth as the material counterpart of sin in medieval thought. Using a wide range of texts, including theology, historical documents, and literature from Augustine to Chaucer, the book shows how filth was regarded as fundamental to an understanding of human history. This theological significance explains the prominence of filth and dung in all genres of medieval writing: there is more dung in theology than there is in Chaucer. The author also demonstrates the ways in which the religious understanding of filth and sin influenced the secular world, from town planning to the execution of traitors. As part of this investigation the book looks at the symbolic order of the body and the ways in which the different aspects of the body were assigned moral meanings. The book also lays out the realities of medieval sanitation, providing the first comprehensive view of real-life attempts to cope with filth. This book will be essential reading for those interested in medieval religious thought, literature, amd social history. Filled with a wealth of entertaining examples, it will also appeal to those who simply want to glimpse the medieval world as it really was.
Download or read book To Live Like a Moor written by Olivia Remie Constable and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2018-02-02 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To Live Like a Moor traces the many shifts in Christian perceptions of Islam-associated ways of life which took place across the centuries between early Reconquista efforts of the eleventh century and the final expulsions of Spain's converted yet poorly assimilated Morisco population in the seventeenth.
Download or read book Medicine and the Seven Deadly Sins in Late Medieval Literature and Culture written by Virginia Langum and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-09-15 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book considers how scientists, theologians, priests, and poets approached the relationship of the human body and ethics in the later Middle Ages. Is medicine merely a metaphor for sin? Or can certain kinds of bodies physiologically dispose people to be angry, sad, or greedy? If so, then is it their fault? Virginia Langum offers an account of the medical imagery used to describe feelings and actions in religious and literary contexts, referencing a variety of behavioral discussions within medical contexts. The study draws upon medical and theological writing for its philosophical basis, and upon more popular works of religion, as well as poetry, to show how these themes were articulated, explored, and questioned more widely in medieval culture.
