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This wide-ranging volume explores relationships between drama and pedagogy in the medieval and early modern periods, with contributions from an international ?eld of scholars including a number of leading authorities. Across the medieval and early modern periods, drama is seen to be a way of dissemi-nating theological and philosophical ideas. In medieval England, when literacy was low and the liturgy in Latin, drama translated and transformed spiritual truths, embodying them for a wider audience than could be reached by books alone. In Tudor England, humanist belief in the validity and potential of drama as a pedagogical tool informs the interlude, and examples of dramatized instruction abound on early modern stages. Academic drama is a particularly preg -nant locus for the exploration of drama and peda-gogy: universities and the Inns of Court trained some of the leading playwrights of the early theatre, but also supplied methods and materials that shaped professional playhouse compositions.
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.
Blood Matters explores blood as a distinct category of inquiry in medieval and early modern Europe and draws together scholars who might not otherwise be in conversation.
How do contemporary audiences engage with sacred music and what are its effects? This book explores examples of how the Christian story is still expressed in music and how it is received by those who experience that art form, whether in church or not. Through conversations with a variety of writers, artists, scientists, historians, atheists, church laity and clergy, the term post-secular emerges as an accurate description of the relationship between faith, religion, spirituality, agnosticism and atheism in the west today. In this context, faith does not just mean belief; as the book demonstrates, the temporal, linear, relational and communal process of experiencing faith is closely related t...
Hadewijch, c. 1210-160, commands increasing attention internationally. As an author, she is extremely creative and artistic. As a beguine, she belongs to a revolutionary women's movement formed by religious women who, conscious of their gender, did not wish to enter into either marriage or a convent. Spiritually and materially independent, these first beguines come into conflict with social order, and endure the reaction of clerics, religious and secular authorities, and those in orders. As a mystic, Hadewijch illuminates both the glorious aspects of the love-relationship with God and its painful aspect: with the enjoyment of love (minne) goes an increasingly intense desire; in unity, the alterity of the Beloved becomes all the stronger. Consequently, union with God is not a spiritual elevation by which a person is released from his or her being human: the authentic mystical being-one consists rather of the interplay between resting in God and working in this world, between being God with God and being man with the Man (Christ). You must live as a human being! - this is the kernel of Hadewijch's life and teaching.
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The study of medieval literature has experienced a revolution in the last two decades, which has reinvigorated many parts of the discipline and changed the shape of the subject in relation to the scholarship of the previous generation. 'New' texts (laws and penitentials, women's writing, drama records), innovative fields and objects of study (the history of the book, the study of space and the body, medieval masculinities), and original ways of studying them (the Sociology of the Text, performance studies) have emerged. This has brought fresh vigour and impetus to medieval studies, and impacted significantly on cognate periods and areas. The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English ...
Gower's use of the persona, the figure of the writer implicated in the text, is the main theme of this book. While it traces the development of Gower's voice through his major works, it concentrates on the dialogue of Amans and Genius in the Confessio Amantis. It argues that Gower negotiates problems of politics and problems of love by means of an analogy between political ethics and the rules of fin amour; Amans and Genius are both drawn from and occupied with amatory and ethical traditions, and their discourse produces a series of attempts to find a coherent and rational union of lover and ruler. The volume also argues that Gower's goal is poetic as well as political: through the personae,...