Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Marguerite de Navarre's Shifting Gaze
Reading between the lines: political allegory and metonymy in the Heptaméron -- Conclusion -- Selected bibliography -- Index
Rural Space in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age
Older research on the premodern world limited its focus on the Church, the court, and, more recently, on urban space. The present volume invites readers to consider the meaning of rural space, both in light of ecocritical readings and social-historical approaches. While previous scholars examined the figure of the peasant in the premodern world, the current volume combines a large number of specialized studies that investigate how the natural environment and the appearance of members of the rural population interacted with the world of the court and of the city. The experience in rural space was important already for writers and artists in the premodern era, as the large variety of scholarly...
A Twist in the Tail
A Twist in the Tail takes readers on a tantalising voyage through European and American gastronomic history, following the trail of a small but mighty fish: the anchovy. Whether in ubiquitous Roman garum, mass-produced British condiments, elaborate French haute cuisine or modern Spanish tapas, anchovies have been enhancing the flavour of many dishes for thousands of years. Yet, depending upon the time and place—and who was eating them—they have also been disdained as worthless little fish, deemed too small, bony and inconsequential for popular or elite consumption. From Western Europe to the USA, Christopher Beckman shows how the evolving and ambiguous position of anchovies provides surprising insights into the relationship between food, class and status throughout history. Drawing on cookbooks, literature and art, this is the hidden story of the diminutive anchovy, and its outsized role in shaping the West’s cuisine.
The Visionary Queen
The Visionary Queen affirms Marguerite de Navarre’s status not only as a political figure, author, or proponent of nonschismatic reform but also as a visionary. In her life and writings, the queen of Navarre dissected the injustices that her society and its institutions perpetuated against women. We also see evidence that she used her literary texts, especially the Heptaméron, as an exploratory space in which to generate a creative vision for institutional reform. The Heptaméron’s approach to reform emerges from statistical analysis of the text’s seventy-two tales, which reveals new insights into trends within the work, including the different categories of wrongdoing by male, institutional representatives from the Church and aristocracy, as well as the varying responses to injustice that characters in the tales employ as they pursue reform. Throughout its chapters, The Visionary Queen foregrounds the trope of the labyrinth, a potent symbol in early modern Europe that encapsulated both the fallen world and redemption, two themes that underlie Marguerite's project of reform.
Magic and Magicians in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Time
There are no clear demarcation lines between magic, astrology, necromancy, medicine, and even sciences in the pre-modern world. Under the umbrella term 'magic,' the contributors to this volume examine a wide range of texts, both literary and religious, both medical and philosophical, in which the topic is discussed from many different perspectives. The fundamental concerns address issue such as how people perceived magic, whether they accepted it and utilized it for their own purposes, and what impact magic might have had on the mental structures of that time. While some papers examine the specific appearance of magicians in literary texts, others analyze the practical application of magic in medical contexts. In addition, this volume includes studies that deal with the rise of the witch craze in the late fifteenth century and then also investigate whether the Weberian notion of disenchantment pertaining to the modern world can be maintained. Magic is, oddly but significantly, still around us and exerts its influence. Focusing on magic in the medieval world thus helps us to shed light on human culture at large.
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.
A Companion to François Rabelais
Twenty-two eminent scholars of Early Modernity offer a thorough examination of the art and the main themes of François Rabelais’s work in the larger context of European humanism.
Tricksters and Pranksters
This volume represents a contribution to comparative scholarship in Medieval and Renaissance studies in its investigation of the ingenious diversity of roguish practices found in Medieval and Renaissance literature and its recognition of the coherent normative function of tales of tricksters and pranksters. The wide variety of works analysed, from those forming part of the established canon of texts on undergraduate degree schemes to lesser-known works, makes the volume of interest to students and researchers alike. The roguish behaviour of women, priests, foxes and outlaws and the knavery of Eulenspiegel and Panurge are used to illustrate how rituals of inversion and humiliation typical of the medieval carnival are reflected in literary accounts of trickery, and to question whether the restorative function attributed to carnival celebration is equally to be found in the intra-textual and extra-textual outcomes of trickery. This analysis is supported by studies into the trickster in mythology, sociological investigations into the role of disorder, Bakhtinian theories of carnival and the carnivalesque, and theories of black humour.
Anne de Graville and Women's Literary Networks in Early Modern France
First detailed reconstruction of Anne de Graville's library, establishing her as one of the most well-read and erudite poets of the period. In the 1520s, the French noblewoman Anne de Graville composed two poetic works, based on older, canonical, male-authored texts: Giovanni Boccaccio's Teseida and Alain Chartier's Belle dame sans mercy. The first, the Beau roman, she offered to Claude, queen of France and wife of Francis I, and the second, the Rondeaux, to the king's mother, Louise of Savoy. With the pro-feminine spin of her rewritings, Anne developed the legacy of another woman writer from 100 years earlier, Christine de Pizan, by entering the on-going debate known as the querelle des fem...
Water in Medieval Literature
Ecocritical thinking has sensitized us more than ever before to the tremendous importance of water for human life, as it is richly reflected in the world of literature. The great relevance of water also in the Middle Ages might come as a surprise for many readers, but the evidence assembled here confirms that also medieval poets were keenly aware of the importance of water to sustain all life, to provide understanding of life’s secrets, to mirror love, and to connect the individual with God. In eleven chapters major medieval European authors and their works are discussed here, taking us from the world of Old Norse to Irish and Latin literature, to German, French, English, and Italian romances and other narratives.
