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Clemency & Cruelty in the Roman World
Explores the formation of clemency as a human and social value in the Roman Empire
Laughter in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times
Despite popular opinions of the ‘dark Middle Ages’ and a ‘gloomy early modern age,’ many people laughed, smiled, giggled, chuckled, entertained and ridiculed each other. This volume demonstrates how important laughter had been at times and how diverse the situations proved to be in which people laughed, and this from late antiquity to the eighteenth century. The contributions examine a wide gamut of significant cases of laughter in literary texts, historical documents, and art works where laughter determined the relationship among people. In fact, laughter emerges as a kaleidoscopic phenomenon reflecting divine joy, bitter hatred and contempt, satirical perspectives and parodic intentions. In some examples protagonists laughed out of sheer happiness and delight, in others because they felt anxiety and insecurity. It is much more difficult to detect premodern sculptures of laughing figures, but they also existed. Laughter reflected a variety of concerns, interests, and intentions, and the collective approach in this volume to laughter in the past opens many new windows to the history of mentality, social and religious conditions, gender relationships, and power structures.
Theorizing Legal Personhood in Late Medieval England
Theorizing Legal Personhood in Late Medieval England is a collection of eleven essays that explore what might be distinctly medieval and particularly English about legal personhood vis-à-vis the jurisdictional pluralism of late medieval England. Spanning the mid-thirteenth to the mid-sixteenth centuries, the essays in this volume draw on common law, statute law, canon law and natural law in order to investigate emerging and shifting definitions of personhood at the confluence of legal and literary imaginations. These essays contribute new insights into the workings of specific literary texts and provide us with a better grasp of the cultural work of legal argument within the histories of ethics, of the self, and of Eurocentrism. Contributors are Valerie Allen, Candace Barrington, Conrad van Dijk, Toy Fung Tung, Helen Hickey, Andrew Hope, Jana Mathews, Anthony Musson, Eve Salisbury, Jamie Taylor and R.F. Yeager.
"The Poor, the Crippled, the Blind, and the Lame"
The New Testament gospels feature numerous social exchanges between Jesus and people with various physical and sensory disabilities. Despite this, traditional biblical scholarship has not seen these people as agents in their own right but existing only to highlight the actions of Jesus as a miracle worker. In this study, Louise A. Gosbell uses disability as a lens through which to explore a number of these passages anew. Using the cultural model of disability as the theoretical basis, she explores the way that the gospel writers, as with other writers of the ancient world, used the language of disability as a means of understanding, organising, and interpreting the experiences of humanity. Her investigation highlights the ways in which the gospel writers reinforce and reflect, as well as subvert, culturally-driven constructions of disability in the ancient world.
The Inner Lives of Medieval Inquisitors
Examines the motivations, inner spiritual lives, and religious commitments of seven key inquisitors of the Middle Ages.
Plato's Laughter
Counters the long-standing, solemn interpretation of Platos dialogues with one centered on the philosophical and pedagogical significance of Socrates as a comic figure. Plato was described as a boor and it was said that he never laughed out loud. Yet his dialogues abound with puns, jokes, and humor. Sonja Madeleine Tanner argues that in Platos dialogues Socrates plays a comical hero who draws heavily from the tradition of comedy in ancient Greece, but also reforms laughter to be applicable to all persons and truly shaming to none. Socrates introduces a form of self-reflective laughter that encourages, rather than stifles, philosophical inquiry. Laughter in the dialoguesboth explicit an...
Vanishing Voices
The nature of silence is hard to grasp. This book serves to systematize this concept and explore it in the works of three major poets of religious experience: namely, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot and R. S. Thomas. Since these poets worked within a Christian framework, the “silences” they refer to are mainly those emerging in the context of the relationship between God and man in a post-Christian climate. The book’s textual analyses place special attention on the dynamics between thematic and structural manifestations of silence, and are situated at the crossroads of the poetics, philosophy and theology. In this first study bringing together the poetry of Hopkins, Eliot and Thomas, the three poets, each in his unique way, emerge as poetic ministers, practitioners, and producers of silence, who try to find a new language to talk about the Ineffable God and one’s experience of the divine.
Gender Across Languages
This is the first of a three-volume comprehensive reference work on “Gender across Languages”, which provides systematic descriptions of various categories of gender (grammatical, lexical, referential, social) in 30 languages of diverse genetic, typological and socio-cultural backgrounds. Among the issues discussed for each language are the following: What are the structural properties of the language that have an impact on the relations between language and gender? What are the consequences for areas such as agreement, pronominalisation and word-formation? How is specification of and abstraction from (referential) gender achieved in a language? Is empirical evidence available for the as...
Philosophy in Dialogue
Traditional Plato scholarship, in the English-speaking world, has assumed that Platonic dialogues are merely collections of arguments. Inevitably, the question arises: If Plato wanted to present collections of arguments, why did he write dialogues instead of treatises? Concerned about this question, some scholars have been experimenting with other, more contextualized ways of reading the dialogues. This anthology is among the first to present these new approaches as pursued by a variety of scholars. As such, it offers new perspectives on Plato as well as a suggestive view of Plato scholarship as something of a laboratory for historians of philosophy generally. The essays gathered here each e...
All the King’s Women: Polygyny and Politics in Europe, 900–1250
Polygyny, in Europe? The grand narrative of Western history is the development of monogamous marriage, culminating in the central Middle Ages. Other kinds of relationships have often, perhaps too lightly, been dismissed as ‘just lust’. In this book, Jan Rüdiger investigates the plurality of man-woman relationships in medieval Scandinavia and analyses the social and political ‘uses’ of elite polygyny. By way of comparison the findings from the North are then applied to England, France, and the Iberian Peninsula, in order to propose a new overall image of elite polygyny, including marriage, in the medieval West. See inside the book.
