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The 4th century BC Greek painter Parrhasius murdered his model--an old man who was his slave--to achieve, so the story goes, a more lifelike depiction of nature. The tale has inspired similar, more elaborate stories about both well known and obscure artists--including Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Rubens. Elements of the tale have appeared in theater, literature and film, as well as in comments by painters, historians, critics and anatomists. Challenging the archetype of the artist as a sympathetic lover of nature, this book examines the artist as cruel and murderous in service of art and ambition, and indirectly addresses a different understanding of the relationship between art and life.
This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license This book explores the magical and medical history of executions from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century by looking at the afterlife potency of criminal corpses, the healing activities of the executioner, and the magic of the gallows site. The use of corpses in medicine and magic has been recorded back into antiquity. The lacerated bodies of Roman gladiators were used as a source of curative blood, for instance. In early modern Europe, a great trade opened up in ancient Egyptian mummies and the fat of executed criminals, plundered as medicinal cure-alls. However, this is the first book to consider the demand for the blood of the executed, the desire for human fat, the resort to the hanged man’s hand, and the trade in hanging rope in the modern era. It ends by look at the spiritual afterlife of dead criminals.
The Consecration of the Writer is the definitive study of the first stages of a phenomenon that has profoundly affected world literature: the process by which modern writers ceased to speak as representatives of some religious or political power and instead seized the mantle of spiritual authority in their own right, speaking directly to and in the name of humanity. ø Paul Bänichou identifies three great moments in this process: the advent of the Enlightenment faith in philosophy and the rise of its literary concomitant, the man of letters; the literary creations of the counterrevolution and their surprising involvement in the elevation of the status of poetry; and, finally, the fusion of these tendencies in the early phases of romanticism in France. ø Bänichou deepens our understanding of romanticism by showing that it was a revision of the Enlightenment faith rather than a reaction against it. The extraordinary depth of Bänichou?s research, the originality of his conclusions, and the importance of his methodological reflections make this study an essential reference in the contemporary return to literary history.
This study follows the transmission and reception of Caesarius of Heisterbach's Dialogus miraculorum (1219–1223), one of the most compelling and successful Cistercian collections of miracles and memorable events, from the Middle Ages to the present day. It ranges across different media and within different interpretive communities and includes brief summaries of a number of the exempla.
In 1764 a peasant girl was killed and partially eaten while tending sheep. Eventually, over a hundred victims fell prey to a mysterious creature whose deadly efficiency mesmerized Europe. Monsters of the Gévaudan revisits this spellbinding tale and offers the definitive explanation for its mythic status in French folklore.