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Beyond the boundaries of the known Christian world during the Middle Ages, there were alien cultures that intrigued, puzzled, and sometimes frightened the people of Europe. The reports of travelers in Africa and Asia revealed that "monstrous" races of men lived there, whose appearance and customs were quite different from the European norm. This book examines the impact of these races upon Western art, literature, and philosophy, from their earliest mention until the age of exploration. Friedman furnishes a descriptive catalog of the races, most of which were real, geographically remote peoples, some of which were fabled creatures that served as symbols. He traces the evolution of European a...
This annotated bibliography will help researchers to accurately interpret motifs in medieval art and literature. Five chapters describe overview studies and identify and briefly annotate journal articles in English and all major European languages. "Medieval Art" treats library catalogs of illuminated medieval manuscripts, and genres such as glass, sculpture, and wood carving by country. "Other Tools" covers medieval encyclopedias, preaching handbooks, and sermon and exempla collections as repositories of imagery. "The Natural World" surveys imagery of land and water animals, plants, stones, and illustrated bestiaries. "The Christian Tradition" discusses the Bible and its apocrypha, saints' legends, and material on specific biblical figures, such as the horns believed to be given Cain or Moses. "Learned Imagery" includes sections on alchemy, astrology, famous persons such as Arthur, Alexander the Great, and Roland, and mythology, both mythographic commentaries and treatments of individual myths. Finally, "Daily Life" covers topics such as medieval ideas of beauty and the body, color symbolism, costumes, feasts, and specific images like the symbolism of mirrors.
What do Brueghel’s mid-sixteenth-century portrayals of "heavy" wedding dancers and feasters have in common with many late medieval poems and manuscript illustrations? Certain of his paintings, with their obsessive social detail, have often been treated as if they heralded a set of cultural attitudes peculiar to the Early Modern period. Yet the way that the painter combines, in a single scene, scurrilous behavior with dress not only unsuited to the rustic status of the wearers but often sexually revealing, reflects attitudes toward clothing, class, and culture that are deeply medieval. In this expansive and highly original book, Friedman reveals how portrayals of peasants from the literatur...
Orpheus, the Thracian signer who charmed nature with the music of his lyre and traveled to the underworld to win back his wife, Ewydice, is a familiar figure in Western culture. Yet, as each age modified his deeds and altered the narrative to make the Orpheus myth conform to the values of the day, his legend acquired many new and surprising meanings. Friedman examines the various reshaping's of the myth from the Hellenistic age through the late Middle Ages. He presents primarily a literary study, but draws as well upon art and iconography, indicating how literary characterizations of Orpheus gave rise to new iconographical details for his portrayals in art, which in turn led to different por...
"The friendship between Elizabeth Waugh and the influential literary critic and novelist Edmund Wilson developed in the early 1930s and lasted until Waugh's death in 1944. Despite the cultural differences between them - Waugh as a self-educated and emotional visual artist and Wilson an analytical and learned critic with a historical bent - they developed a bond that was close if often troubled." "The present volume contains eighty-eight letters from Waugh to Wilson, plus several from him to her and to her mother after her death. Their correspondence - now at Yale University - is presented here with meticulously detailed annotation of persons and events referred to in the letters, providing a...
An invaluable resource guide and a groundbreaking tool for further social change, this title is a must-have book for anyone yearning to expand his understanding of the past, and the past's tenacious hold on the present.
In this book, Robert Leeson and Charles Palm have assembled an amazing collection of Milton Friedman's best works on freedom. Even more amazing is that the selection represents only 1 percent of the 1,500 works by Friedman that Leeson and Palm have put online in a user-friendly format—and an even smaller percentage if you include their archive of Friedman's audio and television recordings, correspondence, and other writings. This book and the larger online collection are sorely needed and very welcome. Milton Friedman deserves to be read in the original by generation after generation. These days, many people channel Friedman to support their own views, which sometimes are quite contrary to his actual views. With so much of it now readily available, everyone will find it easier to remember and learn from what he actually wrote and said. Readers will find the book refreshing whether or not they are already familiar with Friedman's work.
The Making of New World Slavery argues that independent commerce, geared to burgeoning consumer markets, was the driving force behind the rise of plantation slavery. The baroque state sought—successfully—to feed upon this commerce and—with markedly less success—to regulate slavery and racial relations. To illustrate this thesis, Blackburn examines the deployment of slaves in the colonial possessions of the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch, the English and the French. Plantation slavery is shown to have emerged from the impulses of civil society, not from the strategies of individual states. Robin Blackburn argues that the organization of slave plantations placed the West on a destructive path to modernity and that greatly preferable alternatives were both proposed and rejected. Finally, he shows that the surge of Atlantic trade, predicated on the murderous toil of the plantations, made a decisive contribution to both the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the West.
This interdisciplinary study explores the relationship between play and mimesis in the constitution and dissolution of the individual and social self. The volume is divided into three sections, the first of which focuses on the mimetic-ludic foundations of mind, memory, and desire; the second on the social and psychological self as agent of playful performance and product of cultural codes; and the third on the interplay of psyche, image, and power in literary and artistic representations of the self. The subjects of the individual studies vary widely, from the interrelation of power and play in Orlando Furioso to the ludic foundations of cognition to the concept of the self in Foucault and Deleuze.
From early modern times rulers and politicians have sought to ground their legitimacy in ancient tradition - which they have often invented or rewritten for their own purposes. This issue of Studies in Medievalism presents a number of such cases.