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Chaucerotics examines the erotic language in Chaucerian literature through a unique lens, utilizing the tools of “pornographic literary theory” to open up Chaucer’s ribald poetry to fresh modes of analysis. By introducing and applying the notion of “Chaucerotics,” this study argues for a more historically-nuanced and theoretically-sophisticated understanding of the obscene content in Chaucer’s fabliaux and Troilus and Criseyde. This book demonstrates that the sexually suggestive language of this magisterial Middle English poet could stimulate and titillate various literary audiences in late medieval England, and even goes so far as to suggest that Chaucer might well be understood as the “Father of English pornography” for playing a notable, liminal role in the development of porn as a literary genre. In making this case, Geoffrey W. Gust presents an insightful account of an important intellectual issue and opens up the subject of premodern pornography to consideration in a way that is new and highly provocative.
Street Scenes offers a theory of late medieval acting and performance through a fresh and original reading of the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge. The performance theory perspective employed here, along with the examination of actor/character dialectics, paves the way to understanding both religious theatre and the complexity of late medieval theatricalities. Sharon Aronson-Lehavi demonstrates the existence of a late medieval discourse about the double appeal of theatre performance: an artistic medium enacting sacred history while simultaneously referring to the present lives of its creators and spectators.
The twelve essays in Women and Wealth in Late Medieval Europe re-examine the vexing issue of women, money, wealth, and power from distinctive perspectives - literature, history, architectural history - using new archival sources. The contributors examine how money and changing attitudes toward wealth affected power relations between women and men of all ranks, especially the patriarchal social forces that constrained the range of women s economic choices. Employing theories on gender, culture, and power, this volume reveals wealth as both the motive force in gender relations and a precise indicator of other, more subtle, forms of power and influence mediated by gender.
Reinvigorating the scholarly debate surrounding approaches to one of Chaucer's most notorious tales
Drawing on new historical principles, this book examines literary and historical narratives, legal statutes and records, sermons, lyric poetry, and biblical exegesis circulating in medieval England in order to theorize the figure of the outlaw and uncover the legal, ethical, and social assumptions that underlie the practice of outlawry.
This study shows how contemporary theory can serve to clarify structures of identity and economies of desire in medieval texts. Bringing the resources of psychoanalytic and poststructuralist theory to bear on Chaucer's tales about women, this book addresses those registers of the Canterbury project that remain major concerns for recent feminist theory: the specificity of feminine desire, the cultural articulation of gender, the logic of sacrifice as a cultural ideal, the structure of misogyny and domestic violence. This book maps out the ways in which Chaucer's rhetoric is not merely an element of style or an instrument of persuasion but the very matrix for the representation of de-centered subjectivity.
The Argentinian writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was many things during his life, but what has gone largely unnoticed is that he was a medievalist, and his interest in Germanic medievalism was pervasive throughout his work. This study will consider the medieval elements in Borges creative work and shed new light on his poetry.
For many, the middle ages depicted in Walt Disney movies have come to figure as the middle ages, forming the earliest visions of the medieval past for much of the contemporary Western (and increasingly Eastern) imagination. The essayists of The Disney Middle Ages explore Disney's mediation and re-creation of a fairy-tale and fantasy past, not to lament its exploitation of the middle ages for corporate ends, but to examine how and why these medieval visions prove so readily adaptable to themed entertainments many centuries after their creation. What results is a scrupulous and comprehensive examination of the intersection between the products of the Disney Corporation and popular culture's fascination with the middle ages.
Considering a wide array of sources, this book reveals the tenacity with which Alfonso II (1162-1196) and his son Peter II (1196-1213) of the Crown of Aragon forged a tighter Mediterranean regional network and augmented their regional success.
Contrary to the widespread view that women exercised economic autonomy only in widowhood, Hutton argues that marital status was not the chief determinant of women's economic activities in the mid-fourteenth century and that women managed their own wealth to a far greater extent than previously recognized.