You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
In Medieval Manuscripts in Transition, various scholars investigate the ways in which the study of manuscripts can contribute to interpretation or provide insight.
Descriptions of imaginary buildings abound in late medieval and early modern texts in France. This book examines the reasons for their popularity and analyzes the way in which metaphors of the building were used by writers as a tools of persuasion. One such writer was Jean Lemaire (c.1473-after 1515) who used architectural metaphor both to praise his patrons and to advertise his own talents, while drawing on and transforming a tradition of writing popularized by his rh toriqueur predecessors.
"Virgil's works, principally the Bucolics, the Georgics, and above all the Aeneid, were frequently read, translated and rewritten by authors of the French Renaissance. The contributors to this volume show how readers and writers entered into a dialogue with the texts, using them to grapple with such difficult questions as authorial, political and communitarian identities. It is demonstrated how Virgil's works are more than Ancient models to be imitated. They reveal themselves, instead, to be part of a vibrant moment of exchange central to the definition of literature at the time."--Back cover.
History is a love story: a tale of desire and jealousy, abandonment and fidelity, abduction and theft, rupture and reconciliation. This contention is central to Grafting Helen, Matthew Gumpert's original and dazzling meditation on Helen of Troy as a crucial anchor for much of Western thought and literature. Grafting Helen looks at "classicism"—the privileged rhetorical language for describing cultural origins in the West—as a protracted form of cultural embezzlement. No coin in the realm has been more valuable, more circulated, more coveted, or more counterfeited than the one that bears the face of Helen of Troy. Gumpert uncovers Helen as the emblem for the past as something to be stolen, appropriated, imitated, extorted, and coveted once again. Tracing the figure of Helen from its classical origins through the Middle Ages, the French Renaissance, and the modern era, Gumpert suggests that the relation of current Western culture to the past is not like the act of coveting; it is the act of coveting, he argues, for it relies on the same strategies, the same defenses, the same denials, and the same delusions.
Historical thought, whether it is expressed in writing or through works of art, inevitably contains elements of fiction. Thus in every phase of the development of historical thinking the question arises: were these fictional elements recognized and if so, how was their function perceived? Was any effort made to distinguish between a documented fact and any assumptions or deductions related to it? In examining the past, was it deemed important to curb the free play of imagination or was it thought that any explanation, no matter how fanciful and irrational, was better than none? This is the question that this book attempts to answer. In doing so, it examines a rich variety of texts and also some works of art ranging from the Ancient Near East to the nineteenth century.
Pathologies of Love examines the role of medicine in the debate on women, known as the querelle des femmes, in early modern France. Questions concerning women’s physical makeup and its psychological and moral consequences played an integral role in the querelle. This debate on the status of women and their role in society began in the fifteenth century and continued through the sixteenth and, as many critics would say, well beyond. In querelle works early modern medicine, women’s sexual difference, literary reception, and gendered language often merge. Literary authors perpetuated medical ideas such as the notion of allegedly fatal lovesickness, and physicians published works that includ...