You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This book shows how Carnival under British colonial rule became a locus of resistance as well as an exercise and affirmation of power. Carnival is both a space of theatricality and a site of politics, where the playful, participatory aspects are appropriated by countervailing forces seeking to influence, control, channel or redirect power. Focusing specifically on the Maltese islands, a tiny European archipelago situated at the heart of the Mediterranean, this work links the contrast between play and power to other Carnival realities across the world. It examines the question of power and identity in relation to different social classes and environments of Carnival play, from streets to ballrooms. It looks at satire and censorship, unbridled gaiety and controlled celebration. It describes the ways Carnival was appropriated as a power channel both by the British and their Maltese subjects, and ultimately how it was manipulated in the struggle for Malta’s independence.
Sharon Farmer here investigates the ways in which three medieval communities—the town of Tours, the basilica of Saint-Martin there, and the abbey of Marmoutier nearby—all defined themselves through the cult of Saint Martin. She demonstrates how in the early Middle Ages the bishops of Tours used the cult of Martin, their fourthcentury predecessor, to shape an idealized image of Tours as Martin's town. As the heirs to Martin's see, the bishops projected themselves as the rightful leaders of the community. However, in the late eleventh century, she shows, the canons of Saint-Martin (where the saint's relics resided) and the monks of Marmoutier (which Martin had founded) took control of the ...
A study of romance and the Orient in Chaucer and in anonymous popular metrical romances. The idea of the Orient is a major motif in Chaucer and medieval romance, and this new study reveals much about its use and significance, setting the literature in its historical context and thereby offering fresh new readings of anumber of texts. The author begins by looking at Chaucer's and Gower's treatment of the legend of Constance, as told by the Man of Law, demonstrating that Chaucer's addition of a pattern of mercantile details highlights the commercial context of the eastern Mediterranean in which the heroine is placed; she goes on to show how Chaucer's portraits of Cleopatra and Dido from the Le...
Providing an alphabetical listing of sexual language and locution in 16th and 17th-century English, this book draws especially on the more immediate literary modes: the theatre, broadside ballads, newsbooks and pamphlets. The aim is to assist the reader of Shakespearean and Stuart literature to identify metaphors and elucidate meanings; and more broadly, to chart, through illustrative quotation, shifting and recurrent linguistic patterns. Linguistic habit is closely bound up with the ideas and assumptions of a period, and the figurative language of sexuality across this period is highly illuminating of socio-cultural change as well as linguistic development. Thus the entries offer as much to those concerned with social history and the history of ideas as to the reader of Shakespeare or Dryden.
The twenty studies collected in this volume focus on the transition from the Middle Ages to the modern world. The method leads from technical investigations on William Durant the Younger (ca. 1266-1330) and Hermann Conring (1606-1681) through reflection on the nature of historical knowledge to a break with historicism, an affirmation of anachronism, and a broad perspective on the history of Europe. The introduction explains when and why these studies were written, and places them in the context of contemporary historical thinking by drawing on Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. This book will appeal to historians with an interest in historical theory, historians of late medieval and early modern Europe, and students looking for the meaning of history.
A fresh look at the forgotten genocide of world history.