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Contrary to popular belief, the medieval religious imagination did not restrict itself to masculine images of God but envisaged the divine in multiple forms. In fact, the God of medieval Christendom was the Father of only one Son but many daughters—including Lady Philosophy, Lady Love, Dame Nature, and Eternal Wisdom. God and the Goddesses is a study in medieval imaginative theology, examining the numerous daughters of God who appear in allegorical poems, theological fictions, and the visions of holy women. We have tended to understand these deities as mere personifications and poetic figures, but that, Barbara Newman contends, is a mistake. These goddesses are neither pagan survivals nor ...
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These essays examine the central role played by Ovid in medieval amatory literature. In so doing, they address the theoretical problems of the entrenched "aesthetics of reception" long tied to the Ovidian Middle Ages, while they also seek at times to overturn many of the prior critical perceptions associated with Ovidian suasive discourse - in particular the unproblematized assertion of male will and the erasure of female voice. Responding to the great fund of critical work done on amatory literature in the Middle Ages - a literature thus far organized into an array of categories such as the rhetorical institution of persuasion and seduction, the Ovidian heritage, aetas ovidiana, the language of amatory trial, the genealogy of the romance, and the convention of courtly love - this volume seeks to provide a comprehensive look at the rhetorical and social conditions of desire.
Explores the representation of emotions as psychological concepts and cultural constructs in Geoffrey Chaucer's narrative poetry. McTaggart argues that Chaucer's main works including The Canterbury Tales are united thematically in their positive view of guilt and in their anxiety about the desire for sacrifice and vengeance that shame can provoke.
Drawing on a range of approaches in cultural, gender and literary studies, this book presents Chrétien de Troyes's Erec et Enide as a daring and playful exploration of scandal, terror and anxiety in court cultures. Through an interdisciplinary reading, it locates Erec et Enide, the first surviving Arthurian romance in French, in various contexts, from broad cultural and historical questionings such as medieval vernacular 'modernity's' engagement with the weight of its classical inheritance, to the culturally fecund and politically turbulent histories of the families of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II Plantagenet. Where previous accounts of the tale have not uncommonly presented Chrétien's poem as a decorous 'resolution' of tensions between dynastic marriage and fin'amors, between personal desire and social duty, this reading sees these forces as in permanent and irresolvable tension, the poem's key scenes haunted - whether mischievously or traumatically - by questions and skeletons from various closets.
This work of intellectual and cultural history seeks to understand the recurring connection of teaching with contradiction in some major texts of the European Middle Ages. It moves comfortably between patristic and monastic exegesis, the Paris schools of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and late medieval Spain; between Latin and vernacular, between religious and secular. It assimilates the methodologies of religious and erotic texts, thereby displaying the investment of each in the sensuality and analytical power of language. The book begins by exploring Christian exegesis, in which biblical contradiction is the textual incarnation of a Truth that is at once and paradoxically singular a...
Evidence from Records of Early English Drama, social, literary and cultural sources are drawn together in order to investigate how performances within the late Middle Ages were both shaped by, and shaped, the public image of women."--BOOK JACKET.
A formidable challenge to the study of Roma (Gypsy) music is the muddle of fact and fiction in determining identity. This book investigates "Gypsy music" as a marked and marketable exotic substance, and as a site of active cultural negotiation and appropriation between the real Roma and the idealized Gypsies of the Western imagination. David Malvinni studies specific composers-including Liszt, Brahms, Rachmaninov, Janacek, and Bartók-whose work takes up contested and varied configurations of Gypsy music. The music of these composers is considered alongside contemporary debates over popular music and film, as Malvinni argues that Gypsiness remains impervious to empirical revelations about the "real" Roma.
As students and scholars of Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Dante know, late medieval writers were influenced greatly by the work of peers that crossed historical, national, cultural, linguistic boundaries. Through a Classical Eye contains first-rate essays that demonstrate a range of strategies for undertaking transcultural and transhistorical studies of the late medieval period, and examines medieval literature and culture where English, Italian, and Latin materials overlap. Written in honour of the groundbreaking contributions that Winthrop Wetherbee made to this growing area of study, the volume's contributors advance his legacy and add to the burgeoning interest in setting medieval literary studies into wide intellectual and historical horizons. Divided into three illuminating sections on Medieval Latin authorship, Italy and the world, and England and beyond, and including a personal reminiscence of Wetherbee by the noted novelist Robert Morgan, Through a Classical Eye is an outstanding collection that provides key insights into medieval literature and culture.
These essays demonstrate John Gower's mastery of the three languages of medieval England - Latin, French and English. They examine the cultural re-definitions which his translations of literary traditions and languages achieved.