You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
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 ...
The collapse of the supposedly ‘civilized’ German nation into the ‘barbarism’ of Hitler’s Third Reich has cast a long shadow over interpretations of German culture and society. In the remarkable work of Norbert Elias, himself a refugee from Nazi Germany, a deep concern with the distinctiveness of ‘the Germans’ is linked with an ambitious attempt to work out more general relations between broad historical processes – patterns of state formation, changing social structures – and the character of the individual self, as evidenced in changing thresholds of shame and embarrassment. In critical engagement with Elias’s notion of the ‘civilizing process’, the essays collected...
Wolfram von Eschenbach's Willehalm (c. 1210-20) is one of the great epic creations of the Middle Ages. Its account of conflict between Christian and Muslim cultures, centering on the warrior-saint Willehalm and his wife Gyburc, a convert from Islam, challenges the ideology of the Crusades. It celebrates the heroism, faith, and family solidarity of the Christians, but also displays the suffering of both sides in the war and questions the justification of all killing. Gyburc, whose abandonment of her Muslim family and conversion to Christianity are the immediate cause of the war, bears a double burden of sorrow, and it is from her that springs a vision of humanity transcending religious differ...
This book explores the metaphor of topography as a mechanism for the inscription of gender roles in Arthurian romance.
This new Companion provides a broad and perceptive overview of the most important vernacular literary genre of the Middle Ages. Freshly commissioned, original chapters from seventeen leading scholars introduce students and general readers to the form's poetics, narrative voice and manuscript contexts, as well as its relationship to the Mediterranean world, race, gender and the emotions, among many other topics. Providing fresh perspectives on the first pan-European literary movement, essays range across a broad geographical area, including England, France, Italy, Germany and the Iberian Peninsula, as well as a varied linguistic spectrum, including Arabic, Hebrew and Yiddish. Exploring the celebration of chivalric ideals and courtly refinements, the volume excavates the tensions and traumas lying beneath decorous surface appearances. An introduction, bibliography of texts and translations as well as chapter-by-chapter reading lists complete this essential guide.
Drastic changes in lay religiosity during the High Middle Ages spurred anxiety about women forsaking their secular roles as wives and mothers for religious ones as nuns and beguines. This anxiety and the subsequent need to model an ideal of feminine behavior for the laity is particularly expressed in the German versions of Latin and French narratives. Using thirteenth-century penitentials, monastic exempla, and sermons, Karina Marie Ash clarifies how secular wifehood was recast as a quasi-religious role and, in German epics and romances from the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, how female characters are adapted to promote the salvific nature of worldly love in ways that echo the ...
Intended as "the other bookend" to Jessie Weston's work some eighty years earlier, this essay collection provides a careful overview of recent scholarship on possible overlap between Arthurian literature and Christianity. From Ritual to romance and Notes, taken together, bracket contemporary inquiry into the relationship (if any) between Jesus and Arthur. T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" is here regarded as one strand joining this matter to many a recent literary riddle (such as the meaning of the term "postmodernism"). Without reprinting work readily available elsewhere and no longer subject to revision through dialogue with fellow contributors, Notes attempts to do justice to all sides in twentieth century exploration of christianity's contribution to an art form which is also grounded in early European polytheism ("paganism").
This fourth volume of entries, culled in the main from BBSIA, covers the years 1933 to 1998 inclusive. The cumulative volumes of the Bibliography offer an exhaustive author and title database of the burgeoning scholarship in this field.
This volume examines mutual ethnic and national perceptions and stereotypes in the Middle Ages by analysing a range of narrative historical sources, such as chronicles, hagiography, and literary material, with a particular focus on the mutual history of Germany and Poland. What sorts of stereotypes and prejudices existed in the Middle Ages, and how widespread were they? Or what other types of differentiating features were considered, and why? The majority of the contributions clearly shows that medieval authors in general displayed only limited interest in the activities of neighbouring lands, and only then when it concerned their own interests – such as matters of conflict, diplomacy, or marriage – while criticism usually focused on individuals, rather than being generalised to bordering regions as a whole. Contributors are Isabelle Chwalka, Jarochna Dąbrowska-Burkhardt, Stephan Flemmig, Sławomir Gawlas, Georg Jostkleigrewe, David Kalhous, Norbert Kersken, Paul Martin Langner, Roman Michałowski, Wojciech Mrozowicz, Piotr Okniński, Andrzej Pleszczyński, Volker Scior, Florian M. Schmid, Marcin Starzyński, Adam Szweda, Kristin Skottki, Grischa Vercamer, and Thomas Wünsch.