Download or read book Menacing Virgins written by Kathleen Coyne Kelly and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in Menacing Virgins: Representing Virginity in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance examine the nexus of religious, political, economic, and aesthetic values that produce the Western European myth of virginity, and explore how those complex cultural forces animate, empower, discipline, disclose, mystify, and menace the virginal body. As the title suggests, the virgin can be seen alternately or even simultaneously as menaced or menacing. To chart the history of virginity as a steady, evolutionary progression from a religious ideal in the Middle Ages toward a more secularized or sovereign ideal in the Renaissance would obscure how unstable a concept chastity is in both periods. What this collection demonstrates is that medieval and early modern attitudes toward virginity are not general and evolutionary, but specific, changeable, and often conflicted.
Download or read book Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity in the Middle Ages written by Kathleen Coyne Kelly and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-11-01 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book challenges the belief that female virginity can be reliably and unambiguously defined, tested and verified. Kelly analyses a variety of medieval Western European texts - including medical treatises and their Classical antecedents - and historical and legal documents. The main focus is the representation of both male and female virgins in saints' legends and romances. The author also makes a comparative study of examples from contemporary fiction, television and film in which testing virginity is a theme. Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity in the Middle Ages presents a compelling and provocative study of the parodox of bodily and spiritual integrity as both presence and absence.
Download or read book Chaucerian Ecopoetics written by Shawn Normandin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-06-12 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chaucerian Ecopoetics performs ecocritical close readings of Geoffrey Chaucer's poetry. Shawn Normandin explains how Chaucer's language demystifies the aesthetic charm of his narratives and calls into question the anthropocentrism they often depict. This text combines ecocriticism with reading techniques associated with deconstruction, to provide innovative interpretations of the General Prologue, the Knight's Tale, the Miller's Tale, the Reeve's Tale, the Franklin's Tale, the Physician's Tale, and the Monk's Tale. In stressing the importance of rhetorical nuance and literary form, Chaucerian Ecopoetics enables readers to better understand the ideological prehistory of today's environmental crisis.
Download or read book Enlightened Virginity in Eighteenth Century Literature written by C. Harol and published by Springer. This book was released on 2006-09-02 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Enlightened Virginity in Eighteenth-Century Literature analyzes the history of the English virgin at the height of her celebrity. In so doing, it presents new arguments about the early English novel and its relationship to science, religion, and feminist theory.
Download or read book Medieval Virginities written by Ruth Evans and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The variety of subjects and disciplines represented here testify both to the elusiveness of virginity and to its lasting appeal and importance. Medieval Virginities shows how virginity's inherent ambiguity highlights the problems, contradictions and discontinuities lurking within medieval ideologies.
Download or read book Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies written by Ania Loomba and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-12 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women’s Collaborative Book Prize 2017 Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies is a volume of essays by leading scholars in the field of early modern studies on the history, present state, and future possibilities of feminist criticism and theory. It responds to current anxieties that feminist criticism is in a state of decline by attending to debates and differences that have emerged in light of ongoing scholarly discussions of race, affect, sexuality, and transnationalism-work that compels us continually to reassess our definitions of ’women’ and gender. Rethinking Feminism demonstrates how studies of early modern literature, history, and culture can contribute to a reimagination of feminist aims, methods, and objects of study at this historical juncture. While the scholars contributing to Rethinking Feminism have very different interests and methods, they are united in their conviction that early modern studies must be in dialogue with, and indeed contribute to, larger theoretical and political debates about gender, race, and sexuality, and to the relationship between these areas. To this end, the essays not only analyze literary texts and cultural practices to shed light on early modern ideology and politics, but also address metacritical questions of methodology and theory. Taken together, they show how a consciousness of the complexity of the past allows us to rethink the genealogies and historical stakes of current scholarly norms and debates.
Download or read book Misconceptions About the Middle Ages written by Stephen Harris and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-05-26 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brought together by an impressive, international array of contributors this book presents a representative study of some of the many misinterpretations that have evolved concerning the medieval period.
Download or read book The Chastity Plot written by Lisabeth During and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-04-23 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Chastity Plot, Lisabeth During tells the story of the rise, fall, and transformation of the ideal of chastity. From its role in the practice of asceticism to its associations with sovereignty, violence, and the purity of nature, it has been loved, honored, and despised. Obsession with chastity has played a powerful and disturbing role in our moral imagination. It has enforced patriarchy’s double standards, complicated sexual relations, and imbedded in Western culture a myth of gender that has been long contested by feminists. Still not yet fully understood, the chastity plot remains with us, and the metaphysics of purity continue to haunt literature, religion, and philosophy. Idealized and unattainable, sexual renunciation has shaped social institutions, political power, ethical norms, and clerical abuses. It has led to destruction and passion, to seductive fantasies that inspired saints and provoked libertines. As During shows, it should not be underestimated. Examining literature, religion, psychoanalysis, and cultural history from antiquity through the middle ages and into modernity, During provides a sweeping history of chastity and insight into its subversive potential. Instead of simply asking what chastity is, During considers what chastity can do, why we should care, and how it might provide a productive disruption, generating new ways of thinking about sex, integrity, and freedom.
Download or read book Sexuality in Premodern Europe written by Franz X. Eder and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-10-19 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did sexual relationships work before, in and outside of marriage in the pre-modern era? What problems did contraception and sexually transmitted diseases pose? How did people deal with prostitution and pornography back then? What were the possibilities for same-sex and queer desire and practice? Using numerous examples and sources from across the continent, Sexuality in Premodern Europe shows that even in earlier centuries, sexual life had an elementary significance for the coexistence of couples and communities. It was just as decisive for how individuals saw themselves and others as it was for maintaining the social, economic and political order. Franz X. Eder interestingly emphasises the socio-historical view of sexuality, offering an apt foil for the cultural perspective which is so prevalent in the field. In this book, sexual behaviour is understood and thought about as social practice. From this vantage point, Eder deals with the function of the sexual in upbringing and socialization, its significance for the image of men and women, its role in marriage initiation, and the importance of sexual life for marital relationships and concubinage. Deviant and discriminated sexual forms such as prostitution, pornography and same-sex acts are also addressed throughout. The book explores the ways in which many people gained sexual experiences before, besides or beyond marriage, even if these experiences were forbidden in former societies. While research into the history of sexuality has so far dealt with such forms of the sexual primarily from the point of view of regulation and sanctioning, here they are understood as 'positive' practices that allowed people to understand and take ownership of their sexual desire.
Download or read book Forging Chivalric Communities in Malory s Le Morte Darthur written by K. Hodges and published by Springer. This book was released on 2005-06-04 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Forging Chivalric Communities in Marlory's Morte D'Arthur shows that Malory treats chivalry not as a static institution but as a dynamic, continually evolving ideal. Le Morte D'arthur is structured to trace how communities and individuals adapt or create chivalric codes for their own purposes; in turn, codes of chivalry shape groups and their customs. Knights' loyalties are torn not just between lords and lovers but also between the different codes of chivalry and between different communities. Women, too, choose among the different roles they are asked to play as queens, counsellors, and even quasi-knights.
Download or read book Practising shame written by Mary C. Flannery and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-01 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Practicing shame investigates how the literature of medieval England encouraged women to safeguard their honour by cultivating hypervigilance against the possibility of sexual shame. A combination of inward reflection and outward comportment, this practice of ‘shamefastness’ was believed to reinforce women’s chastity of mind and body, and to communicate that chastity to others by means of conventional gestures. The book uncovers the paradoxes and complications that emerged from these emotional practices, as well as the ways in which they were satirised and reappropriated by male authors. Working at the intersection of literary studies, gender studies and the history of emotions, it transforms our understanding of the ethical construction of femininity in the past and provides a new framework for thinking about honourable womanhood now and in the years to come.
Download or read book Language as the Site of Revolt in Medieval and Early Modern England written by M. C. Bodden and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-08-14 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite attempts to suppress early women's speech, this study demonstrates that women were still actively engaged in cultural practices and speech strategies that were both complicit with the patriarchal ideology whilst also undermining it.
Download or read book Celibacies written by Benjamin Kahan and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-25 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this innovative study, Benjamin Kahan traces the elusive history of modern celibacy. Arguing that celibacy is a distinct sexuality with its own practices and pleasures, Kahan shows it to be much more than the renunciation of sex or a cover for homosexuality. Celibacies focuses on a diverse group of authors, social activists, and artists, spanning from the suffragettes to Henry James, and from the Harlem Renaissance's Father Divine to Andy Warhol. This array of figures reveals the many varieties of celibacy that have until now escaped scholars of literary modernism and sexuality. Ultimately, this book wrests the discussion of celibacy and sexual restraint away from social and religious conservatism, resituating celibacy within a history of political protest and artistic experimentation. Celibacies offers an entirely new perspective on this little-understood sexual identity and initiates a profound reconsideration of the nature and constitution of sexuality.
Download or read book John Capgrave s Fifteenth Century written by Karen A. Winstead and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Britain of the fifteenth century was rife with social change, religious dissent, and political upheaval. Amid this ferment lived John Capgrave—Austin friar, doctor of theology, leading figure in East Anglian society, and noted author. Nowhere are the tensions and anxieties of this critical period, spanning the close of the medieval and the dawn of early modern eras, more eloquently conveyed than in Capgrave's works. John Capgrave's Fifteenth Century is the first book to explore the major themes of Capgrave's writings and to relate those themes to fifteenth-century political and cultural debates. Focusing on Capgrave's later works, especially those in English and addressed to lay audiences, it teases out thematic threads that are closely interwoven in Capgrave's Middle English oeuvre: piety, intellectualism, gender, and social responsibility. It refutes the still-prevalent view of Capgrave as a religious and political reactionary and shows, rather, that he used traditional genres to promote his own independent viewpoint on some of the most pressing controversies of his day, including debates over vernacular theology, orthodoxy and dissent, lay (and particularly female) spirituality, and the state of the kingdom under Henry VI. The book situates Capgrave as a figure both in the vibrant literary culture of East Anglia and in European intellectual history. John Capgrave's Fifteenth Century offers a fresh view of orthodoxy and dissent in late medieval England and will interest students of hagiography, religious and cultural history, and Lancastrian politics and society.
Download or read book Echoes of Women s Voices written by Kelley Harness and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2006-02-15 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Harness argues very convincingly that through their patronage of the figurative arts, musical theater, and early opera, the Medici women reinforced their position and their image as powerful women and capable rulers.
Download or read book Constructing Virtue and Vice written by Olga V. Trokhimenko and published by V&R unipress GmbH. This book was released on 2014 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study examines textual representations of women's laughter and smiling and their imagined connection to female virtue in a wide variety of discourses and contexts of the German Middle Ages, including medieval epic, ecclesiastical texts, conduct literature, lyric, and sculpture. By engaging with the competing, and at times contradictory, views of female laughter, it reaffirms a disputatious nature of medieval culture, in which multiple views of femininity, sexuality, and virtue stood in a conflicting, yet productive, dialogue with one another. The society that emerges when one looks at medieval German texts is always ambivalent: it thrives on and enjoys talking about sensuality and eroticism, while being constrained by the conventions of polite behavior and the fear of sin; it relies on the ritual use of laughter, while marking it as a sign of lust and perdition. Women's laughter thus offers an important way into understanding medieval views of gender because it combines physicality with shifting and conflicting cultural norms.
Download or read book About Sieves and Sieving written by Barbara Baert and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-04-15 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The sieve exhibits a wide-ranging symbolism that extends across art history, philosophy, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and gender studies. Barbara Baert looks at the sieve from an interdisciplinary perspective and from four different innovative methodological angles: as motif and symbol, as technique and as paradigm. The sieve as motif goes back to Roman stories the Vestal Virgins. In later times, their impermeable sieve, which - according to legend - they used to fetch water from the River Tiber, was iconographically transferred to Elisabeth I as a sign of her integrity. Furthermore, the long durée life of sieves as symbolic-technical utilitarian object is investigated: in examples from the Jewish folklore, the Berber culture, and ancient Egypt.
