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Beginning with Diodorus Siculus's first-century BCE account and extending to early modern German Meisterlieder, this book explores the plethora of narratives about the ancient Babylonian queen Semiramis. The selected texts, most from continental Europe, cover a range of genres and languages. Organized thematically around issues of visual communication -- acts of seeing and being seen -- this study highlights the narrative fluidity in the matière de Sémiramide, ultimately revealing a figure of excess and surplus that defies classification and categorization. In its thematic focus, this study also draws on the competitive yet complementary relationship between the visual and the verbal.
This volume presents significant new research on several key aspects of the late mediaeval and early modern Bible. The essays in this collection deal with Bible scholarship and translation, illustration and production, Bible uses for lay devotion, and the role of Bibles in theological controversy. Inquiring into the ways in which scholars gave new forms to their Bibles and how their readers received their work, this book considers the contribution of key figures such as Castellio, Bibliander, Tremellius, Piscator and Calov. In addition, it examines the exegetical controversies between several centres of Reformed learning as well as among the theologians of Louvain. It encompasses biblical illustration in the Low Countries and the use of maps in the Geneva Bible, and considers the practice of Bible translation, and the strategies by which new versions were justified.
IIn premodern Europe, the gender identity of those waiting for Doomsday in their tombs could be reaffirmed, readjusted, or even neutralized. Testimonies of this renegotiation of gender at the encounter with death is detectable in wills, letters envisioning oneself as dead, literary narratives, provisions for burial and memorialization, the laws for the disposal of those executed for heinous crimes and the treatment of human remains as relics.
While Gender Studies has made its mark on literary studies, much scholarship on the German Middle Ages is largely inaccessible to the Anglo-American audience. With gender at its core as a category of analysis, "Gender Bonds, Gender Binds"uniquely opens up medieval German material to English speakers. Recognizing the impact of Ann Marie Rasmussen’s Mothers and Daughters in Medieval German Literature, this transatlantic volume expands on questions introduced in her 1997 book and subsequent work. More than a mere tribute, the collection moves the debates forward in new directions: it examines how gender bonds together people, practices, texts, and interpretive traditions, while constraining a...
Beginning in the twelfth century, clergy and laity alike started wondering with intensity about the historical and developmental details of Jesus' early life. Was the Christ Child like other children, whose characteristics and capabilities depended on their age? Was he sweet and tender, or formidable and powerful? Not finding sufficient information in the Gospels, which are almost completely silent about Jesus' childhood, medieval Christians turned to centuries-old apocryphal texts for answers. In The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages, Mary Dzon demonstrates how these apocryphal legends fostered a vibrant and creative medieval piety. Popular tales about the Christ Child ent...
A Companion to the Medieval Papacy brings together an international group of experts on various aspects of the medieval papacy. Each chapter provides an up-to-date introduction to and scholarly interpretation of topics of crucial importance to the development of the papacy’s thinking about its place in the medieval world and of its institutional structures. Topics covered include: the Papal States; the Gregorian Reform; papal artistic self-representation; hierocratic theory; canon law; decretals; councils; legates and judges delegate; the apostolic camera, chancery, penitentiary, and Rota; relations with Constantinople; crusades; missions. The volume includes an introductory chapter by Thomas F.X. Noble on the historiographical challenges of writing medieval papal history. Contributors are: Sandro Carocci, Atria A. Larson, Andrew Louth, Jehangir Malegam, Andreas Meyer, Harald Müller, Thomas F.X. Noble, Francesca Pomarici, Rebecca Rist, Kirsi Salonen, Felicitas Schmieder, Keith Sisson, Danica Summerlin, and Stefan Weiß.
Æthelflæd (c. 870–918), political leader, military strategist, and administrator of law, is one of the most important ruling women in English history. Despite her multifaceted roles and family legacy, however, her reign and relationship with other women in tenth-century England have never been the subject of a book-length study. This interdisciplinary collection of essays redresses a notable hiatus in scholarship of early medieval England. Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, and Women in Tenth-Century England argues for a reassessment of women’s political, military, literary, and domestic agency. It invites deeper reflection on the female kinships, networks, and communities that give meaning to Æthelflæd’s life, and through this shows how medieval history can invite new engagements with the past.
Despite the richness of its facets, the short religious epic has been largely neglected by scholars until now. This study explores this literary phenomenon using a multi-perspectival descriptive model. Extensive detailed case studies provide basic information and present the genre in its broader literary historical and systematic context.
This companion volume seeks to trace the development of ideas relating to death, burial, and the remembrance of the dead in Europe between ca. 1300 and 1700. Examining attitudes to death from a range of disciplinary perspectives, it synthesises current trends in scholarship, challenging the old view that the Black Death and the Protestant Reformations fundamentally altered ideas about death. Instead, it shows how people prepared for death; how death and dying were imagined in art and literature; and how practices and beliefs appeared, disappeared, changed, or strengthened over time as different regions and communities reacted to the changing world around them. Overall, it serves as an indispensable introduction to the subject of death, burial, and commemoration in thirteenth to eighteenth century Europe. Contributors: Ruth Atherton, Stephen Bates, Philip Booth, Zachary Chitwood, Ralph Dekoninck, Freddy C. Dominguez, Anna M. Duch, Jackie Eales, Madeleine Gray, Polina Ignatova, Robert Marcoux, Christopher Ocker, Gordon D. Raeburn, Ludwig Steindorff, Elizabeth Tingle, and Christina Welch.
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...