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Death and Dying in the Middle Ages examines medical facts and communal arrangements, as well as religious and popular beliefs and rituals concerning the end of life in Western societies. It studies literary and artistic imaging and the underlying philosophical and theological convictions that shaped medieval attitudes toward death. A collection of eighteen articles by contributors in the Western hemisphere, this new compendium on death and its implications will interest the specialist, the student and teacher of cultural history, religion, folklore, psychology, literature, and art, and also the general public.
The Shroud at the Court analyses, through various essays characterized by a multidisciplinary and diachronic perspective, the strict ties created between the Shroud and the Savoy court from the fifteenth to twentieth centuries. Presented as proof of the divine legitimacy of Savoy lineage, the Shroud (of which the Savoy dynasty came into possession in 1453, keeping it first in Chambéry and then from 1578 in Turin) was central to their propagandistic strategies. The court – its spaces, protagonists, and rituals – became the natural setting for a relationship reinforced over time through customs, ceremonies, and images intended to celebrate the excellence of the Savoy, both within their own state and in Europe’s “society of princes”. Contributors are Paola Caretta, Paolo Cornaglia, Paolo Cozzo, Davide De Franco, Bernard Dompnier, Laura Gaffuri, Pierangelo Gentile, Luisella Giachino, Andrea Merlotti, Frédéric Meyer, Andrea Nicolotti, Almudena Pérez de Tudela, Laurent Ripart, Alessandro Serra and Franca Varallo.
This volume of Fifteenth-Century Studies is derived from the 1995 Fifteenth-Century Symposium, held in Kaprun, Austria. As usual, it includes essays on numerous aspects of life during the time:interdisciplinary in approach, topics include Piers Plowman, Christine de Pizan, and Ovid in the Florentine renaissance. Examinations of the recent critical attention given to late-medieval drama and to Villon complete the volume.
A sequel to her seminal book on Chaucer’s House of Fame, Sheila Delany’s elegant and innovative study of Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women explores what it meant to be a reader and a writer, and to be English and a courtier, in the late fourteenth century. The richness of late medieval art, philosophy, and history are powerfully brought to bear on one of Chaucer’s most controversial works. So too are the insights of modern critical theory—semiotics, historicism, and gender studies especially—making this a unique achievement in medieval and Chaucerian studies. Delany’s strikingly original readings of Chaucer’s Orientalism, his sexual wordplay, his theological attitudes, and his treatment of sex and gender have given us a Chaucer for our time. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.
This study examines tales from The Metamorphoses by the Roman poet Ovid (43 BC-18 AD) and from The Lais by the French poet Marie de France (fl. mid-to late twelfth century) to explore a paradox: how can a vibrant, complex, and timeless vision be conveyed in convention-informed and time-bound language? Marie plays against Ovid’s tales to probe the dilemma, thereby echoing Ovid who does the same to the canonical literary monuments of his day. Both poets suggest that poetry can avoid the flattening effect of monumental canonizing not only by the creative use of literary echoes, but also by shifting perspectives on the conventional, which in turn, can encourage readers to see reflections of many stories in any given tale. Ovid and Marie suggest and encourage in this manner by presenting literary love’s topoi and traditional lovers from a variety of metaliterary perspectives, thereby eliciting active readerly memory as well as providing the opportunity to see the conventional afresh, activity that allows even canonical texts to become living memorials.
Although the city as a central entity did not simply disappear with the Fall of the Roman Empire, the development of urban space at least since the twelfth century played a major role in the history of medieval and early modern mentality within a social-economic and religious framework. Whereas some poets projected urban space as a new utopia, others simply reflected the new significance of the urban environment as a stage where their characters operate very successfully. As today, the premodern city was the locus where different social groups and classes got together, sometimes peacefully, sometimes in hostile terms. The historical development of the relationship between Christians and Jews...
"Royal and saintly women are well-represented here, with the welcome addition of women from the Mediterranean arc...Garland has done a solid job of presenting this book." -- Arthuriana "The Anthology gives a fine sense of the great range of women's writing in the Middle Ages." -- Medium Aevum
This volume considers women's roles in the conflicts and negotiations of the early modern world. Essays explore the ways that gender shapes women's agency in times of war, religious strife, and economic change. How were conflict and concord gendered in histories, literature, music, and political, legal, didactic, and religious treatises? Four interdisciplinary plenary topics ground this exploration: Negotiations, Economies, Faiths & Spiritualities, and Pedagogies. Scholars focus upon many regions of the early modern world--the Atlantic world, the Mediterranean world, Granada, Indonesia, the Low Countries, England, and Italy--inflected by such religions as Islam, Catholicism, and Reformed Pro...
Annual volume of essays treating topics ranging from physical impairment to narrative afterlife and time.
This study examines the sociocultural context of Bern's ten Reformation plays, authored by Niklaus Manuel and Hans von Rute, and argues that Protestant theater was instrumental in creating cultural community among an urban populace estranged from Catholic tradition.