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In The Identities of Catherine de' Medici, Susan Broomhall provides an innovative analysis of the representational strategies that constructed Catherine de’ Medici and sought to explain her behaviour and motivations. Through her detailed exploration of the identities that the queen, her allies, supporters, and clients sought to project, and how contemporaries responded to them, Broomhall establishes a new vision of this important sixteenth-century protagonist, a clearer understanding of the dialogic and dynamic nature of identity construction and reception, and its consequences for Catherine de' Medici’s legacy, memory, and historiography.
This collection of essays focuses on how women born before the nineteenth century have claimed a place in history and how they have been represented in the collective memory from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century.
Mining the rich documentary sources housed in Tuscan archives and taking advantage of the breadth and depth of scholarship produced in recent years, the seventeen essays in this Companion to Cosimo I de' Medici provide a fresh and systematic overview of the life and career of the first Grand Duke of Tuscany, with special emphasis on Cosimo I's education and intellectual interests, cultural policies, political vision, institutional reforms, diplomatic relations, religious beliefs, military entrepreneurship, and dynastic concerns. Contributors: Maurizio Arfaioli, Alessio Assonitis, Nicholas Scott Baker, Sheila Barker, Stefano Calonaci, Brendan Dooley, Daniele Edigati, Sheila ffolliott, Catherine Fletcher, Andrea Gáldy, Fernando Loffredo, Piergabriele Mancuso, Jessica Maratsos, Carmen Menchini, Oscar Schiavone, Marcello Simonetta, and Henk Th. van Veen.
There were many surprising accessions in the early modern period, including Mary I of England, Henry III of France, Anne Stuart, and others, but this is the first book dedicated solely to evaluating their lives and the repercussions of their reigns. By comparing a variety of such unexpected heirs, this engaging history offers a richer portrait of early modern monarchy. It shows that the need for heirs and the acquisition and preparation of heirs had a critical impact on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century culture and politics, from the appropriation of culture to the influence of language, to trade and political alliances. It also shows that securing a dynasty relied on more than just political agreements and giving birth to legitimate sons, examining how relationships between women could and did forge alliances and dynastic continuities.
This collection of seventeen essays newly identifies contributions to musical culture made by women before 1500 across Europe. You will learn about repertoire from such diverse locations as Iceland, Spain, and Italy, and encounter examples of musicianship from the gender-fluid professional musicians at the Islamicate courts of Syria to the nuns of Barking Abbey in England. The book shows that women drove musical patronage, dissemination, composition, and performance, including within secular and ecclesiastical contexts, and also reflects on the reception of medieval women’s musical agency by both medieval poets and by modern recording artists. Contributors are David Catalunya, Lisa Colton, Helen Dell, Annemari Ferreira, Rachel Golden, Gillian L. Gower, Anna Kathryn Grau, Carissa M. Harris, Louise McInnes, Lisa Nielson, Lauren Purcell-Joiner, Megan Quinlan, Leah Stuttard, Claire Taylor Jones, Melissa Tu, Angelica Vomera, and Anne Bagnall Yardley.
Charting important new territory within medieval gender studies, Megan Moore explores the vital role that women played in transmitting knowledge and empire within Mediterranean cross-cultural marriages. Whereas cross-cultural exchange has typically been understood through the lens of male-centered translation work, this study, which is grounded in the relations between the west and Byzantium, examines cross-cultural marriage as a medium of literary and cultural exchange, one in which women's work was equally important as men's. Moore's readings of Old French and Medieval Greek texts reveal the extent to which women challenged the cultures into which they married and shaped their new courtly environments. Through the lens of medieval gender and postcolonial theory, Exchanges in Exoticism demonstrates how the process of cultural exchange and empire building extends well beyond our traditional assumptions about gender roles in the medieval Mediterranean.
Song, Landscape, and Identity in Medieval Northern France offers a new perspective on how medieval song expressed relationships between people and their environments. Informed by environmental history and harnessing musicological and ecocritical approaches, author Jennifer Saltzstein draws connections between the nature imagery that pervades songs written by the trouvères of northern France to the physical terrain and climate of the lands on which their authors lived. In doing so, she analyzes the different ways in which composers' lived environments related to their songs and categorizes their use of nature imagery as realistic, aspirational, or nostalgic. Demonstrating a cycle of mutual i...
Heather Hirschfeld recovers the historical specificity and the conceptual vigor of the term "satisfaction" as used in dramas of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, new ways of storytelling and inventing fictions appeared in the French-speaking areas of Europe. This new art still influences our global culture of fiction. Virginie Greene explores the relationship between fiction and the development of neo-Aristotelian logic during this period through a close examination of seminal literary and philosophical texts by major medieval authors, such as Anselm of Canterbury, Abélard, and Chrétien de Troyes. This study of Old French logical fictions encourages a broader theoretical reflection about fiction as a universal human trait and a defining element of the history of Western philosophy and literature. Additional close readings of classical Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle, and modern analytic philosophy including the work of Bertrand Russell and Rudolf Carnap, demonstrate peculiar traits of Western rationalism and expose its ambivalent relationship to fiction.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries secular French scholars started re-engaging with religious ideas, particularly mystical ones. Mysticism in the French Tradition introduces key philosophical undercurrents and trajectories in French thought that underpin and arise from this engagement, as well as considering earlier French contributions to the development of mysticism. Filling a gap in the literature, the book offers critical reflections on French scholarship in terms of its engagement with its mystical and apophatic dimensions. A multiplicity of factors converge to shape these encounters with mystical theology: feminist, devotional and philosophical treatments as well as literary, historical, and artistic approaches. The essays draw these into conversation. Bringing together an international and interdisciplinary range of contributions from both new and established scholars, this book provides access to the melting pot out of which the mystical tradition in France erupted in the twenty-first century, and from which it continues to challenge theology today.