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The Eve of Spain demonstrates how the telling and retelling of one of Spain’s founding myths played a central role in the formation of that country’s national identity. King Roderigo, the last Visigoth king of Spain, rapes (or possibly seduces) La Cava, the daughter of his friend and counselor, Count Julian. In revenge, the count travels to North Africa and conspires with its Berber rulers to send an invading army into Spain. So begins the Muslim conquest and the end of Visigothic rule. A few years later, in Northern Spain, Pelayo initiates a Christian resistance and starts a new line of kings to which the present-day Spanish monarchy traces its roots. Patricia E. Grieve follows the evol...
This comparative 1997 study examines a medieval love story, Floire and Blancheflor, and shows how writers from Spain, France, Italy, England and Scandinavia reworked the story from the twelfth to the sixteenth century to develop and emphasize social, political, religious and artistic goals, while maintaining its entertaining qualities. It shows the importance of a little-known medieval Spanish version to the development of the story throughout Europe, and especially as a precursor to Boccaccio's Il Filocolo, and examines important issues of the development of prose fiction in medieval and Renaissance Europe. This study is unique for its breadth of coverage of one story and for its inclusion of Spain as a significant participant in the development of medieval narrative.
The computer revolution is upon us. The future of books and of reading are debated. Will there be books in the next millennium? Will we still be reading? As uncertain as the answers to these questions might be, as clear is the message about the value of the book expressed by medieval writers. The contributors to the volume The Book and the Magic of Reading in the Middle Ages explore the significance of the written document as the key icon of a whole era. Both philosophers and artists, both poets and clerics wholeheartedly subscribed to the notion that reading and writing represented essential epistemological tools for spiritual, political, religious, and philosophical quests. To gain a deeper understanding of the cultural significance of the medieval book, the contributors to this volume examine pertinent statements by medieval philosophers and French, German, English, Spanish, and Italian poets.
Publisher description
This book analyses collaborative activities across the visual arts to show the power of non-verbal rhetoric in the Middle Ages.
Olivia Holmes explores the Decameron's sceptical and sexually permissive contents against the backdrop of medieval religion and didacticism.
Mark Miller's innovative study argues that Chaucer's Canterbury Tales represent an extended mediation on agency, autonomy and practical reason. This philosophical aspect of Chaucer's interests can help us understand what is both sophisticated and disturbing about his explorations of love, sex and gender. Partly through fresh readings of the Consolation of Philosophy and the Romance of the Rose, Miller charts Chaucer's position in relation to the association in the Christian West between problems of autonomy and problems of sexuality and reconstructs how medieval philosophers and literary writers approached psychological phenomena often thought of as distinctively modern. The literary experiments of the Canterbury Tales represent a distinctive philosophical achievement that remains vital to our own attempts to understand agency, desire and their histories.