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Cannibalism is the breaking of the ultimate taboo. Yet during the later Middle Ages and early years of the Renaissance, mythological, historical, and contemporary accounts of cannibalism became particularly popular. Consuming Passions synthesizes and analyses the most interesting of those late medieval and early modern responses to Eucharistic teaching and debate that manifest themselves in the trope of cannibalism. This trope appears in texts as various as visions of the underworld, accounts of sacramental miracles, sermons, legal proceedings, and popular geographies. This book foregrounds the vexed role of the body in both late medieval and early modern religiosity, and the ways in which the boundaries of the endangered body in these narratives also reflect the rigorously defended borders of the body politic.
The study takes the received view among scholars that women in the Middle Ages were faced with sustained misogyny and that their voices were seldom heard in public and subjects it to a critical analysis. The ten chapters deal with various aspects of the question, and the voices of a variety of authors - both female and male - are heard. The study opens with an enquiry into violence against women, including in texts by male writers (Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried von Straßburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach) which indeed describe instances of violence, but adopt an extremely critical stance towards them. It then proceeds to show how women were able to develop an independent identity in various genres ...
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Theoretically savvy and polemical arguments about a broad range of French, Middle English, and Mediterranean romances, that will revise scholars' and students' understanding of what medieval romances are and, more importantly, what they do to and for their readers.
The first comprehensive exploration of women's multifaceted experiences of forced and consensual ravishment in medieval England.
This book examines the ways in which Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower appropriated their sources, paying particular attention to the theories of history and political agendas informing these appropriations. The study offers comparative readings of Chaucer's and Gower's works, framed by a concern with twentieth-century theories that explore the limits of historicist and deconstructive readings of late medieval texts. Starting with Gower's Vox Clamantis, the chapters offer largely chronological readings of texts such as Chaucer's dream visions, Troilus and Criseyde, the Tale of Melibee and the Physician's Tale, and a selection of tales from Gower's Confessio Amantis. The querying historicism pursued in these readings offers a new way of considering late medieval literature, focusing on close-reading and a dialogue between medieval and post-medieval cultural discourses.
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