Download or read book Medieval Bodies written by Jack Hartnell and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2018-03-29 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A SUNDAY TIMES HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR 'A triumph' Guardian 'Glorious ... makes the past at once familiar, exotic and thrilling.' Dominic Sandbrook 'A brilliant book' Mail on Sunday Just like us, medieval men and women worried about growing old, got blisters and indigestion, fell in love and had children. And yet their lives were full of miraculous and richly metaphorical experiences radically different to our own, unfolding in a world where deadly wounds might be healed overnight by divine intervention, or the heart of a king, plucked from his corpse, could be held aloft as a powerful symbol of political rule. In this richly-illustrated and unusual history, Jack Hartnell uncovers the fascinating ways in which people thought about, explored and experienced their physical selves in the Middle Ages, from Constantinople to Cairo and Canterbury. Unfolding like a medieval pageant, and filled with saints, soldiers, caliphs, queens, monks and monstrous beasts, it throws light on the medieval body from head to toe - revealing the surprisingly sophisticated medical knowledge of the time in the process. Bringing together medicine, art, music, politics, philosophy and social history, there is no better guide to what life was really like for the men and women who lived and died in the Middle Ages. Medieval Bodies is published in association with Wellcome Collection.
Download or read book Medieval Bodies written by Jack Hartnell and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A SUNDAY TIMES HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEARDripping with blood and gold, fetishized and tortured, gateway to earthly delights and point of contact with the divine, forcibly divided and powerful even beyond death, there was no territory more contested than the body in the medieval world. In Medieval Bodies, art historian Jack Hartnell uncovers the complex and fascinating ways in which the people of the Middle Ages thought about, explored and experienced their physical selves. In paintings and reliquaries that celebrated the - sometimes bizarre - martyrdoms of saints, the sacred dimension of the physical left its mark on their environment. In literature and politics, hearts and heads became powerful metaphors that shaped governance and society in ways that are still visible today. And doctors and natural philosophers were at the centre of a collision between centuries of sophisticated medical knowledge, and an ignorance of physiology as profound as its results were gruesome. Like a medieval pageant, this striking and unusual history brings together medicine, art, poetry, music, politics, cultural and social history and philosophy to reveal what life was really like for the men and women who lived and died in the Middle Ages.Medieval Bodies is published in association with Wellcome Collection.
Download or read book Framing Medieval Bodies written by Sarah Kay and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, available at last in paperback, Kauppi develops a structural constructivist theory of the European Union and critically analyses, through French and Finnish empirical cases, the political practices that maintain the Union's 'democratic deficit'. Kauppi conceptualises the European Union as both an arena for political contention and a nascent political order. In this evolving, multi-levelled European political field, individuals and groups construct material and symbolic structures of political power, grounded in a variety of social resources such as nationality, culture, and gender. The author shows how the dominance of both executive political resources and domestic political cultures has prevented the development of European democracy. Supranational executive networks have become more autonomous, reinforcing the dominance of the resources they control. At the same time, national political cultures condition the political status of elected institutions such as the European parliament. The book is particularly suited for undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of European Politics, European Union Studies and International Relations.
Download or read book Body Language The Body in Medieval Art written by Wendelien van Welie-Vink and published by . This book was released on 2021-02-16 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Saints walking around headless, vagina-shaped wounds and a Jesus being crushed like a grape: welcome to medieval man's intriguing perception of the world. Thanks to a growing fixation on the body and body parts, some of the works of art created in the late Middle Ages meet with amazement and sometimes incomprehension today. How should we, from our position in the present, look at these works of art from so long ago? Body Language introduces you to the role of the body in devotion in the late Middle Ages (1300-1500) and to the surprising/sometimes bizarre works of art associated with it. Once you have finished this book, your view of the body will have changed forever. This publication concludes a multi-year research project on the body in the Middle Ages that was conducted at the University of Amsterdam. It will be presented at an exhibition of the same name that will feature at the Catharijne Convent Museum. Exhibition: Museum Catharijneconvent, Utrecht, The Netherlands (25.09.2020 – 17.01.2021).
Download or read book Music Body and Desire in Medieval Culture written by Bruce W. Holsinger and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ranging chronologically from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries and thematically from Latin to vernacular literary modes, this book challenges standard assumptions about the musical cultures and philosophies of the European Middle Ages. Engaging a wide range of premodern texts and contexts, the author argues that medieval music was quintessentially a practice of the flesh. It will be of compelling interest to historians of literature, music, religion, and sexuality, as well as scholars of cultural, gender, and queer studies.
Download or read book The Ends of the Body written by Suzanne Conklin Akbari and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2013-01-29 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on Arabic, English, French, Irish, Latin and Spanish sources, the essays share a focus on the body’s productive capacity – whether expressed through the flesh’s materiality, or through its role in performing meaning. The collection is divided into four clusters. ‘Foundations’ traces the use of physical remnants of the body in the form of relics or memorial monuments that replicate the form of the body as foundational in communal structures; ‘Performing the Body’ focuses on the ways in which the individual body functions as the medium through which the social body is maintained; ‘Bodily Rhetoric’ explores the poetic linkage of body and meaning; and ‘Material Bodies’ engages with the processes of corporeal being, ranging from the energetic flow of humoural liquids to the decay of the flesh. Together, the essays provide new perspectives on the centrality of the medieval body and underscore the vitality of this rich field of study.
Download or read book Strong of Body Brave and Noble written by Constance Brittain Bouchard and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medieval society was dominated by its knights and nobles. The literature created in medieval Europe was primarily a literature of knightly deeds, and the modern imagination has also been captured by these leaders and warriors. This book explores the nature of the nobility, focusing on France in the High Middle Ages (11th-13th centuries). Constance Brittain Bouchard examines their families; their relationships with peasants, townspeople, and clerics; and the images of them fashioned in medieval literary texts. She incorporates throughout a consideration of noble women and the nobility's attitude toward women. Research in the last two generations has modified and expanded modern understanding of who knights and nobles were; how they used authority, war, and law; and what position they held within the broader society. Even the concepts of feudalism, courtly love, and chivalry, once thought to be self-evident aspects of medieval society, have been seriously questioned. Bouchard presents bold new interpretations of medieval literature as both reflecting and criticizing the role of the nobility and their behavior. She offers the first synthesis of this scholarship in accessible form, inviting general readers as well as students and professional scholars to a new understanding of aristocratic role and function.
Download or read book Medieval Monstrosity and the Female Body written by Sarah Alison Miller and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-07-02 with total page 495 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The medieval monster is a slippery construct, and its referents include a range of religious, racial, and corporeal aberrations. In this study, Miller argues that one incarnation of monstrosity in the Middle Ages—the female body—exists in special relation to medieval teratology insofar as it resists the customary marginalization that defined most other monstrous groups in the Middle Ages. Though medieval maps located the monstrous races on the distant margins of the civilized world, the monstrous female body took the form of mother, sister, wife, and daughter. It was, therefore, pervasive, proximate, and necessary on social, sexual, and reproductive grounds. Miller considers several significant texts representing authoritative discourses on female monstrosity in the Middle Ages: the Pseudo-Ovidian poem, De vetula (The Old Woman); a treatise on human generation erroneously attributed to Albert the Great, De secretis mulierum (On the Secrets of Women), and Julian of Norwich’s Showings. Through comparative analysis, Miller grapples with the monster’s semantic flexibility while simultaneously working towards a composite image of late-medieval female monstrosity whose features are stable enough to define. Whether this body is discursively constructed as an Ovidian body, a medicalized body, or a mystical body, its corporeal boundaries fail to form properly: it is a body out of bounds.
Download or read book Promised Bodies written by Patricia Dailey and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-27 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Christian tradition, especially in the works of Paul, Augustine, and the exegetes of the Middle Ages, the body is a twofold entity consisting of inner and outer persons that promises to find its true materiality in a time to come. A potentially transformative vehicle, it is a dynamic mirror that can reflect the work of the divine within and substantially alter its own materiality if receptive to divine grace. The writings of Hadewijch of Brabant, a thirteenth-century beguine, engage with this tradition in sophisticated ways both singular to her mysticism and indicative of the theological milieu of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Crossing linguistic and historical boundaries, Patricia Dailey connects the embodied poetics of Hadewijch's visions, writings, and letters to the work of Julian of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen, Marguerite of Oingt, and other mystics and visionaries. She establishes new criteria to more consistently understand and assess the singularity of women's mystical texts and, by underscoring the similarities between men's and women's writings of the time, collapses traditional conceptions of gender as they relate to differences in style, language, interpretative practices, forms of literacy, and uses of textuality.
Download or read book Body and Sacred Place in Medieval Europe 1100 1389 written by Dawn Marie Hayes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-11-23 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Body and Sacred Place in Medieval Europe investigates the medieval understanding of sacred place, arguing for the centrality of bodies and bodily metaphors to the establishment, function, use, and power of medieval churches. Questioning the traditional division of sacred and profane jurisdictions, this book identifies the need to consider non-devotional uses of churches in the Middle Ages. Dawn Marie Hayes examines idealized visions of medieval sacred places in contrast with the mundane and profane uses of these buildings. She argues that by the later Middle Ages-as loyalties were torn by emerging political, economic, and social groups-the Church suffered a loss of security that was reflected in the uses of sacred spaces, which became more restricted as identities shifted and Europeans ordered the ambiguity of the medieval world.
Download or read book The Corpse in the Middle Ages written by Romedio Schmitz-Esser and published by Harvey Miller Publishers. This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To what extent are the dead truly dead? In medieval society, corpses were assigned special functions and meanings in several different ways. They were still present in the daily life of the family of the deceased, and could even play active roles in the life of the community. Taking the materiality of death as a point of departure, this book comprehensively examines the conservation, burial and destruction of the corpse in its specific historical context. A complex and ambivalent treatment of the dead body emerges, one which necessarily confronts established modern perspectives on death. New scientific methods have enabled archaeologists to understand the remains of the dead as valuable source material. This book contextualizes the resulting insights for the first time in an interdisciplinary framework, considering their place in the broader picture drawn by the written sources of this period, ranging from canon law and hagiography to medieval literature and historiography. It soon becomes obvious that the dead body is more than a physical object, since its existence only becomes relevant in the cultural setting it is perceived in. In analogy to the findings for the living body in gender studies, the corpse too, can best be understood as constructed. Ultimately, the dead body is shaped by society, i.e. the living. This book examines the mechanisms by which this cultural construction of the body took place in medieval Europe. The result is a fascinating story that leads deep into medieval theories and social practices, into the discourses of the time and the daily life experiences during this epoch.
Download or read book The Alchemical Body written by David Gordon White and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-07-10 with total page 616 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[A] brilliant disquisition on . . . mostly unpublished texts for three allied systems of tantric thought and praxis (sexual, alchemical, and hatha yogic).” —The Journal of Asian Studies The Alchemical Body excavates and centers within its Indian context the lost tradition of the medieval Siddhas. Working from previously unexplored alchemical sources, David Gordon White demonstrates for the first time that the medieval disciplines of Hindu alchemy and hatha yoga were practiced by one and the same people, and that they can be understood only when viewed together. White opens the way to a new and more comprehensive understanding of medieval Indian mysticism, within the broader context of south Asian Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Islam. “White proves a skillful guide in disentangling historical and theoretical complexities that have thus far bedeviled the study of these influential aspects of medieval Indian culture.” —Yoga World “Anyone seriously interested in finding out more about authentic tantra, original hatha yoga, embodied liberation . . . sacred sexuality, paranormal abilities, healing, and of course alchemy will find White’s extraordinary book as fascinating as any Tom Clancy thriller.” —Georg Feuerstein, Yoga Journal “Remarkable . . . a study of the language of mystic experience and expression—the multitudinous symbols, rituals, and doctrines of the medieval siddhis, yogis, and alchemists.” —Skeptic Meditations
Download or read book Miracles of Book and Body written by Charlotte Eubanks and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is an exciting exploration of the world of Buddhist attitudes towards religious texts, from Indian scriptures to Japanese medieval tales. Its emphasis on discursive strategies—how Buddhist texts function and what they expect of their readers/users (especially, the connection between books, their content, and their readers' bodies)—is a welcome new perspective."—Fabio Rambelli, author of Buddhist Materiality "Miracles of Book and Body is fluidly written and engaging. This book brings the reader to an awareness of the range and foci of medieval 'popular' readings of sutra literature, and Eubanks provides an important perspective to interpreting these narratives that is original and stimulating."—Thomas W. Hare, author of Zeami: Performance Notes "Charlotte Eubanks' sophisticated, insightful and readable study of the physicalities of sutra texts and sutra recitation makes sense of some of the strangest phenomena in medieval Japan. By disentangling the literal and metaphorical meanings in Buddhist setsuwa, Eubanks explains such things as how memorizing a text is an embodiment thereof, how texts can become sentient beings, and why the scroll is an appropriate format for recording dharma. Her work is both important and engaging."—Margaret H. Childs, University of Kansas "Drawing on an impressive range of Mahayana scriptures and medieval Japanese didactic tales, Eubanks unpacks recurrent tropes correlating text and flesh to reveal surprising connections among the literary, material, and ritual dimensions of Buddhist textual culture. Elegantly written and theoretically astute, this volume will be welcomed not only by specialists in Buddhist literature but also by readers interested in broader issues of text-based religious practice."—Jacqueline Stone, author of Original Enlightenment and the Transformation of Medieval Japanese Buddhism
Download or read book The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity 200 1336 written by Caroline Walker Bynum and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-21 with total page 712 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A classic of medieval studies, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 traces ideas of death and resurrection in early and medieval Christianity. Caroline Walker Bynum explores problems of the body and identity in devotional and theological literature, suggesting that medieval attitudes toward the body still shape modern notions of the individual. This expanded edition includes her 1995 article “Why All the Fuss About the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective,” which takes a broader perspective on the book’s themes. It also includes a new introduction that explores the context in which the book and article were written, as well as why the Middle Ages matter for how we think about the body and life after death today.
Download or read book Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature written by Linda Lomperis and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature forges a new link between contemporary feminist and cultural theory and medieval history and literature. The essays establish crucial historical connections between feminist theorizing about the body and specific accounts of gendered bodies in medieval texts.
Download or read book The Body Incantatory written by Paul Copp and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-09-09 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether chanted as devotional prayers, intoned against the dangers of the wilds, or invoked to heal the sick and bring ease to the dead, incantations were pervasive features of Buddhist practice in late medieval China (600–1000 C.E.). Material incantations, in forms such as spell-inscribed amulets and stone pillars, were also central to the spiritual lives of both monks and laypeople. In centering its analysis on the Chinese material culture of these deeply embodied forms of Buddhist ritual, The Body Incantatory reveals histories of practice—and logics of practice—that have until now remained hidden. Paul Copp examines inscribed stones, urns, and other objects unearthed from anonymous tombs; spells carved into pillars near mountain temples; and manuscripts and prints from both tombs and the Dunhuang cache. Focusing on two major Buddhist spells, or dhāraṇī, and their embodiment of the incantatory logics of adornment and unction, he makes breakthrough claims about the significance of Buddhist incantation practice not only in medieval China but also in Central Asia and India. Copp's work vividly captures the diversity of Buddhist practice among medieval monks, ritual healers, and other individuals lost to history, offering a corrective to accounts that have overemphasized elite, canonical materials.
Download or read book Allegorical Bodies written by Daisy Delogu and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2015-01-15 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Allegorical Bodies begins with the paradoxical observation that at the same time as the royal administrators of late fourteenth and early fifteenth-century France excluded women from the royal succession through the codification of Salic law, writers of the period adopted the female form as the allegorical personification of France itself. Considering the role of female allegorical figures in the works of Eustache Deschamps, Christine de Pizan, and Alain Chartier, as well as in the sermons of Jean Gerson, Daisy Delogu reveals how female allegories of the Kingdom of France and the University of Paris were used to conceptualize, construct, and preserve structures of power during the tumultuous reign of the mad king Charles VI (1380–1422). An impressive examination of the intersection between gender, allegory, and political thought, Delogu’s book highlights the importance of gender to the functioning of allegory and to the construction of late medieval French identity.
