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Explores a core medieval myth, the tale of an Arthurian knight called Wigalois, and the ways it connects the Yiddish-speaking Jews and the German-speaking non-Jews of the Holy Roman Empire.
Medieval literature is to a large degree shaped by orality, not only with regard to performance, but also to transmission and composition. Although problems of orality have been much discussed by medievalists, there is to date no comprehensive handbook on this topic. ‘Medieval Oral Literature’, a volume in the ‘De Gruyter Lexikon’ series, was written by an international team of twenty-five scholars and offers a thorough discussion of theoretical approaches as well as detailed presentations of individual traditions and genres. In addition to chapters on the oral-formulaic theory, on the interplay of orality and writing in the Early Middle Ages, on performance and performers, on oral poetics and on ritual aspects of orality, there are chapters on the Older Germanic, Romance, Middle High German, Middle English, Celtic, Greek-Byzantine, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian and Turkish traditions of oral literature. There is a special focus on epic and lyric, genres that are also discussed in separate chapters, with additional chapters on the ballad and on drama.
This volume concerns premodern understandings of vegetal nature that encompass multiple semantics and perspectives. Scholars from the disparate fields of art history, literature, and religious studies present tantalizing studies of trees and plants in sacred and secular thought. Some discuss the concept of the Book of Nature and its implications. Others explore narratives of symbiosis between humans and vegetal material, tree-dwelling hermits, spirits metamorphosing into wood, flowers or trees that sprout from bodies or the dissolution of the self into the natural world. Complementary to these approaches are studies that suggest a collapsing of time and space in spiritually charged yet ambiguous natural motifs or topographies where forests or groves are spaces of transformative experience.
Through its many and varied manifestations, authority has frequently played a role in the communication process in both manuscript and print. This volume explores how authority, whether religious, intellectual, political or social, has enforced the circulation of certain texts and text versions, or acted to prevent the distribution of books, pamphlets and other print matter. It also analyzes how readers, writers and printers have sometimes rebelled against the constraints and restrictions of authority, publishing controversial works anonymously or counterfeiting authoritative texts; and how the written or printed word itself has sometimes been perceived to have a kind of authority, which mig...
The present volume comprises 6 highly original studies on material text cultures in different nontypographic societies stretching from the 3rd millennium cuneiform textual record of Ancient Mesopotamia to 20th century Qur'anic boards of northern and central African provenience. It provides a multidisciplinary approach to material text cultures complementary to the interdisciplinary, strongly theory-grounded research scheme of the CRC 933. Six research fellowships were awarded to outstanding young researchers for innovative, high-risk research proposals pertinent to the CRC 933's overall research scheme. Their studies contained in this volume add multidisciplinary dimension to material text culture research, satisfy the curiosity as to the applicability of the theoretical premises and methodology developed and tested by the CRC 933 to research on inscribed artefacts carried out on an international level and in different research environments and contribute to anchoring material text culture research as proposed by the CRC 933 within the tradition and broader context of other research strategies devoted to the material dimension of writing, such as the filologia materiale.
Although it is fashionable among modernists to claim that globalism emerged only since ca. 1800, the opposite can well be documented through careful comparative and transdisciplinary studies, as this volume demonstrates, offering a wide range of innovative perspectives on often neglected literary, philosophical, historical, or medical documents. Texts, images, ideas, knowledge, and objects migrated throughout the world already in the pre-modern world, even if the quantitative level compared to the modern world might have been different. In fact, by means of translations and trade, for instance, global connections were established and maintained over the centuries. Archetypal motifs developed...
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This volume addresses Jewish, Christian and Muslim future visions on the end of the world, focusing on the respective allies and antagonists for each religious society. Spanning late Antiquity to the early modern period, the collected papers examine distinctive aspects represented by each religion’s approach as well as shared concepts.
Throughout history, manuscripts have been made and used for religious, artistic, and scientific performances, and this practice continues in most cultures today. By focusing on the role manuscripts have in different kinds of performances, this volume contributes to the evolving field of investigating written artefacts and their functions. The collected essays regard manuscripts as points of intersection where textual, material, and performative aspects converge. The contributors analyse manuscripts in their forms and functions as well as their positioning in the performances for which they were made. These aspects unfold across the volume's three sections, examining how manuscripts are (1) used backstage, for preparing and giving instructions for performances; (2) taken onstage, contributing to the enactment of performances; and (3) performers in their own right, producing an effect on the audience. The diversified, interdisciplinary, and innovative methodologies of the included papers carry great potential to expand the traditional approaches of manuscript studies and find application outside the contributors' respective fields.
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Literature and the Senses critically probes the role of literature in capturing and scrutinizing sensory perception. Organized around the five traditional senses, followed by a section on multisensoriality, the collection facilitates a dialogue between scholars working on literature written from the Middle Ages to the present day. The contributors engage with a variety of theorists from Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Michel Serres to Jean-Luc Nancy to foreground the distinctive means ...