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This book examines actual processes of experiencing the imagined community, exploring its emotive force in a number of case studies.
This open access book studies breath and breathing in literature and culture and provides crucial insights into the history of medicine, health and the emotions, the foundations of beliefs concerning body, spirit and world, the connections between breath and creativity and the phenomenology of breath and breathlessness. Contributions span the classical, medieval, early modern, Romantic, Victorian, modern and contemporary periods, drawing on medical writings, philosophy, theology and the visual arts as well as on literary, historical and cultural studies. The collection illustrates the complex significance and symbolic power of breath and breathlessness across time: breath is written deeply into ideas of nature, spirituality, emotion, creativity and being, and is inextricable from notions of consciousness, spirit, inspiration, voice, feeling, freedom and movement. The volume also demonstrates the long-standing connections between breath and place, politics and aesthetics, illuminating both contrasts and continuities.
Difference in medieval France was not solely a marker for social exclusion, provoking feelings of disgust and disaffection, but it could also create solidarity and sympathy among groups. Contributors to this volume address inclusion and exclusion from a variety of perspectives, ranging from ethnic and linguistic difference in Charlemagne's court, to lewd sculpture in Béarn, to prostitution and destitution in Paris. Arranged thematically, the sections progress from the discussion of tolerance and intolerance, through the clearly defined notion of foreignness, to the complex study of stranger identity in the medieval period. As a whole the volume presents a fresh, intriguing perspective on questions of exclusion and belonging in the medieval world.
Who were the ancient Phoenicians—and did they actually exist? The Phoenicians traveled the Mediterranean long before the Greeks and Romans, trading, establishing settlements, and refining the art of navigation. But who these legendary sailors really were has long remained a mystery. In Search of the Phoenicians makes the startling claim that the "Phoenicians" never actually existed as such. Taking readers from the ancient world to today, this book argues that the notion of these sailors as a coherent people with a shared identity, history, and culture is a product of modern nationalist ideologies—and a notion very much at odds with the ancient sources.
Vernacular writers of late medieval England were engaged in global conversations about orthodoxy and heresy. Entering these conversations with a developing vernacular required lexical innovation. The Language of Heresy in Late Medieval English Literature examines the way in which these writers complemented seemingly straightforward terms, like heretic, with a range of synonyms that complicated the definitions of both those words and orthodoxy itself. This text proposes four specific terms that become collated with heretic in the parlance of medieval English writers of the 14th and 15th centuries: jangler, Jew, Saracen, and witch. These four labels are especially important insofar as they represent the way in which medieval Christianity appropriated and subverted marginalized or vulnerable identities to promote a false image of unassailable authority.
A consideration of the allegory of Christ the Divine Physician in medical and religious writings. Discourses of physical and spiritual health were intricately entwined in the Middle Ages, shaping intellectual concepts as well as actual treatment. The allegory of Christ as Divine Physician is an example of this intersection: it appears frequently in both medical and religious writings as a powerful figure of healing and salvation, and was invoked by dissidents and reformists in religious controversies. Drawing on previously unexplored manuscript material, this book examines the use of the Christus Medicus tradition during a period of religious turbulence. Via an interdisciplinary analysis of ...
A new exploration of the secular manuscripts and medieval medical texts associated with the York Guild and its members. Produced in 1486 and subsequently augmented, the Guild Book of the Barbers and Surgeons of York (British Library Egerton MS 2572) is a unique record of the knowledge, ambitions, activities and civic relationships maintained by the Barbers and Surgeons Guild over a period of 300 years. The manuscript's earliest folios contain images, astrological tracts, a plague treatise and a bloodletting poem. To these were added early modern ordinances and oaths, a series of royal portraits, and the names of the Guild's masters and apprentices. It is a rare survival of late medieval medi...
In Roads to Health, G. Geltner demonstrates that urban dwellers in medieval Italy had a keen sense of the dangers to their health posed by conditions of overcrowding, shortages of food and clean water, air pollution, and the improper disposal of human and animal waste. He consults scientific, narrative, and normative sources that detailed and consistently denounced the physical and environmental hazards urban communities faced: latrines improperly installed and sewers blocked; animals left to roam free and carcasses left rotting on public byways; and thoroughfares congested by artisanal and commercial activities that impeded circulation, polluted waterways, and raised miasmas. However, as Ge...
A groundbreaking new history of the shared legacy of expulsion among Jews and Christian moneylenders in late medieval Europe Winner of the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize, Canadian Historical Association Beginning in the twelfth century, Jewish moneylenders increasingly found themselves in the crosshairs of European authorities, who denounced the evils of usury as they expelled Jews from their lands. Yet Jews were not alone in supplying coin and credit to needy borrowers. Across much of Western Europe, foreign Christians likewise engaged in professional moneylending, and they too faced repeated threats of expulsion from the communities in which they settled. No Return examines how mass expulsion b...
The Routledge Handbook of Identity and the Environment in the Classical and Medieval Worlds explores how environment was thought to shape ethnicity and identity, discussing developments in early natural philosophy and historical ethnographies. Defining ‘environment’ broadly to include not only physical but also cultural environments, natural and constructed, the volume considers the multifarious ways in which environment was understood to shape the culture and physical characteristics of peoples, as well as how the ancients manipulated their environments to achieve a desired identity. This diverse collection includes studies not only of the Greco-Roman world, but also ancient China and t...