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Until now the advent of Western romantic love has been seen as a liberation from—or antidote to—ten centuries of misogyny. In this major contribution to gender studies, R. Howard Bloch demonstrates how similar the ubiquitous antifeminism of medieval times and the romantic idealization of woman actually are. Through analyses of a broad range of patristic and medieval texts, Bloch explores the Christian construction of gender in which the flesh is feminized, the feminine is aestheticized, and aesthetics are condemned in theological terms. Tracing the underlying theme of virginity from the Church Fathers to the courtly poets, Bloch establishes the continuity between early Christian antifeminism and the idealization of woman that emerged in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In conclusion he explains the likely social, economic, and legal causes for the seeming inversion of the terms of misogyny into those of an idealizing tradition of love that exists alongside its earlier avatar until the current era. This startling study will be of great value to students of medieval literature as well as to historians of culture and gender.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1989.
This book by one of our most admired and influential medievalists offers a fundamental reconception of the person generally assumed to be the first woman writer in French, the author known as Marie de France. The Anonymous Marie de France is the first work to consider all of the writing ascribed to Marie, including her famous Lais, her 103 animal fables, and the earliest vernacular Saint Patrick's Purgatory. Evidence about Marie de France's life is so meager that we know next to nothing about her-not where she was born and to what rank, who her parents were, whether she was married or single, where she lived and might have traveled, whether she dwelled in cloister or at court, nor whether in...
"Mr. Bloch has attempted to establish what he calls a 'literary anthropology.' The project is important and ambitious. It seems to me that Mr. Bloch has completely achieved this ambition." –Michel Foucault "Bloch's Study is a genuinely interdisciplinary one, bringing together elements of history, ethnology, philology, philosophy, economics and literature, with the undoubted ambition of generating a new synthesis which will enable us to read the Middle Ages in a different light. Stated simply, and in terms which do justice neither to the density nor the subtlety of his argument, Bloch's thesis is this: that medieval society perceived itself in terms of a vertical mode of descent from origin...
The Bayeux Tapestry is the world’s most famous textile–an exquisite 230-foot-long embroidered panorama depicting the events surrounding the Norman Conquest of 1066. It is also one of history’s most mysterious and compelling works of art. This haunting stitched account of the battle that redrew the map of medieval Europe has inspired dreams of theft, waves of nationalism, visions of limitless power, and esthetic rapture. In his fascinating new book, Yale professor R. Howard Bloch reveals the history, the hidden meaning, the deep beauty, and the enduring allure of this astonishing piece of cloth. Bloch opens with a gripping account of the event that inspired the Tapestry: the swift, bloo...
Migne harnessed a will of iron and boundless personal energy to the latest innovations in print technology and marketing. Most famous for his massive 469-volume edition of the Church Fathers, Migne was the founder of the Ateliers catholiques of Paris and owned a total of ten newspapers during the course of his life. Bloch shows how closely Migne's activities in the newspaper world coincided with his editing and marketing of the Church Fathers. He sold the Fathers by means of advertising and merchandising ploys so creative and modern that Bloch is able to link Migne and his methods to the rise of wholesale exchange and large department stores in Paris. Migne's assembly-line production and innovative pyramid sales schemes placed him a the forefront of France's new commerce.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1977.
In the tradition of The Swerve comes this thrilling, detective-like work of literary history that reveals how a poem created the world we live in today. It was, improbably, the forerunner of our digital age: a French poem about a shipwreck published in 1897 that, with its mind-bending possibilities of being read up and down, backward and forward, even sideways, launched modernism. Stéphane Mallarmé’s "One Toss of the Dice," a daring, twenty-page epic of ruin and recovery, provided an epochal “tipping point,” defining the spirit of the age and anticipating radical thinkers of the twentieth century, from Albert Einstein to T. S. Eliot. Celebrating its intrinsic influence on our culture...
Cover -- Contents -- Introduction. The New Philology Comes of Age -- 1 New Challenges for the New Medievalism -- 2 Reflections on The New Philology -- 3 Virgil's "Perhaps": Mythopoiesis and Cosmogony in Dante's Commedia (Remarks on Inf. 34, 106-26) -- 4 Dialectic of the Medieval Course -- 5 Religious Horizon and Epic Effect: Considerations on the Iliad, the Chanson de Roland, and the Nibelungenlied -- 6 The Possibility of Historical Time in the Crónica Sarracina -- 7 Good Friday Magic: Petrarch's Canzoniere and the Transformation of Medieval Vernacular Poetry -- 8 The Identity of a Text
Winner • Modern Language Association’s Scaglione Prize for Translation Bawdier than The Canterbury Tales, The Fabliaux is the first major English translation of the most scandalous and irreverent poetry in Western literature. Composed between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, these virtually unknown erotic and satiric poems lie at the root of the Western comic tradition. Passed down by the anticlerical middle classes of medieval France, The Fabliaux depicts priapic priests, randy wives, and their cuckolded husbands in tales that are shocking even by today’s standards. Chaucer and Boccaccio borrowed heavily from these riotous tales, which were the wit of the common man rebelling against the aristocracy and Church in matters of food, money, and sex. Containing 69 poems with a parallel Old French text, The Fabliaux comes to life in a way that has never been done in nearly eight hundred years.