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This volume offers a new theoretical approach to cultural production inspired by the metaphor of culture as a virtual network. Following a thorough outline of this approach, the theoretical framework is elucidated in a second part through examples drawn from early modern European drama. A third and final part then presents a critical discussion of the concept of "national" culture and literature, from its first formulation by Johann Gottfried Herder to its current developments, including postcolonial studies.
The main question addressed in this comparative analysis was how we should and/or could interpret the socio-cultural and political role of late medieval Eucharistic marches in the context of Central European, especially in both residential and capital urban communities. One might conclude in the case of Vienna that concerning the form of Eucharistic processions the regulations and orders of marches always involved acts of power from external authorities imposing their political, social and cultural agenda on non-individualized groups of people.
Art historians have long looked to letters to secure biographical details; clarify relationships between artists and patrons; and present artists as modern, self-aware individuals. This book takes a novel approach: focusing on Albrecht Dürer, Shira Brisman is the first to argue that the experience of writing, sending, and receiving letters shaped how he treated the work of art as an agent for communication. In the early modern period, before the establishment of a reliable postal system, letters faced risks of interception and delay. During the Reformation, the printing press threatened to expose intimate exchanges and blur the line between public and private life. Exploring the complex tra...
The real history and meaning of the Feast of Fools—usually misunderstood as a sacrilegious festival.
"The origins of Christmas lie in an Egyptian festival on 6 January, which spread to much of the Christian world as a celebration of the birth and/or baptism of Christ and known as the Epiphany or Theophany. The church at Rome did not adopt this festival but later instituted a celebration of the nativity of Christ on 25 December, which gradually supplanted its observance on 6 January in other churches, leaving this latter occasion as a commemoration of Christ's baptism alone, or of the visit of the Magi in those churches like Rome that had not observed that date previously. This essay traces that evolution and examines the merits of the two competing scholarly theories that have sought to explain the original choice of these particular dates"--
Newly-discovered evidence underpins this comprehensive account of the creation and staging of the earliest surviving 'opera', Euridice.
The concepts of genre and ritual are central for the overall occupation with the relationship between the History of the Arts and the History of Christianity in Western Culture. The present volume was planned on the basis of the first annual international conferences at the Centre for the Study of the Cultural Heritage of Medieval Rituals, University of Copenhagen: a collection of 15 essays with a wide range of topics both in terms of chronology and subject matter written. The book is a special issue of the journal TRANSfiguration.
Following in the tradition of recent work by cultural geographers and historians of maps, this collection examines the apparently familiar figure of Robin Hood as he can be located within spaces that are geographical, cultural, and temporal. The volume is divided into two sections: the first features an interrogation of the literary and other textually transmitted spaces to uncover the critical grounds in which the Robin Hood ’legend’ has traditionally operated. The essays in Part Two take up issues related to performative and experiential space, demonstrating the reciprocal relationship between page, stage, and lived experience. Throughout the volume, the contributors contend with, among other things, modern theories of gender, literary detective work, and the ways in which the settings that once advanced court performances now include digital gaming and the enactment of ’real’ lives.
Far from teleological historiography, the pan-European perspective on Early Modern drama offered in this volume provides answers to why, how, where and when the given phenomena of theatre appear in history. Using theories of circulation and other concepts of exchange, transfer and movement, the authors analyze the development and differentiation of European secular and religious drama, within the disciplinary framework of comparative literature and the history of literature and concepts. Within this frame, aspects of major interest are the relationship between tradition and innovation, the status of genre, the proportion of autonomous and heteronomous creational dispositions within the artef...
Early Modern Histories of Time examines how a range of chronological modes intrinsic to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries shaped the thought-worlds of those living during this time and explores how these temporally indigenous models can productively influence our own working concepts of historical period. This innovative approach thus moves beyond debates about where we should divide linear time (and what to call the ensuing segments) to reconsider the very concept of "period." Bringing together an eminent cast of literary scholars and historians, the volume develops productive historical models by drawing on the very texts and cultural contexts that are their objects of study. What ha...