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Kingship and Love in Scottish Poetry, 1424–1540
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 213

Kingship and Love in Scottish Poetry, 1424–1540

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2016-04-22
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  • Publisher: Routledge

Looking at late medieval Scottish poetic narratives which incorporate exploration of the amorousness of kings, this study places these poems in the context of Scotland's repeated experience of minority kings and a consequent instability in governance. The focus of this study is the presence of amatory discourses in poetry of a political or advisory nature, written in Scotland between the early fifteenth and the mid-sixteenth century. Joanna Martin offers new readings of the works of major figures in the Scottish literature of the period, including Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, and Sir David Lyndsay. At the same time, she provides new perspectives on anonymous texts, among them The Thre Prestis of Peblis and King Hart, and on the works of less well known writers such as John Bellenden and William Stewart, which are crucial to our understanding of the literary culture north of the Border during the period under discussion.

Making Contact
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 324

Making Contact

When civilizations first encounter each other a cascade of change is triggered that both challenges and reinforces the identities of all parties. Making Contact revisits key encounters between cultures in the medieval and early modern world. Contributors cross disciplinary boundaries to explore the implications of contact. Scott D. Westrem examines the imagined Africa depicted in the Bell Mappamundi. Day-to-day accommodations between the religious identities of Vilnius, in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, are explored by David Frick. Steven F. Kruger argues that medieval Christian identity was destabilized by the living Talmudic tradition. Individual Jesuits who were critical to the succe...

Writing on Skin in the Age of Chaucer
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 282

Writing on Skin in the Age of Chaucer

Owing to its relatedness to parchment as the primary writing matter of the Middle Ages, human skin was not only a topic to write about in medieval texts, it was also conceived of as an inscribable surface, both in the material and in the figurative sense. This volume explores the textuality of human skin as discussed by Geoffrey Chaucer and other writers (medical, religious, philosophical, and literary) of the fourteenth and fifteenth century. It presents four main aspects of the complex relations between text, parchment, and human skin as they have been discussed in recent scholarship. These four aspects are, first, the (mostly figurative) resonances between parchment-making and transformations of human skin, second, parchment as a space of contact between animal and human spheres, third, human skin and parchment as sites where (gender) identities are negotiated, and fourth, the place of medieval skin studies within cultural studies and its relationship to the major concerns of cultural studies: the difficult demarcation of skin from body, the instability of any inscription, and the skin’s precarious state as an entity of its own.

Europe and the Eastern Other
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 152

Europe and the Eastern Other

Europe and the Eastern Other critically evaluates and supports the argument for adopting an intercultural or comparative approach in western political theory. Hassan Bashir examines the encounters between Europeans and their eastern others before the European Enlightenment and illustrates that the West's cultural others have played a foundational role in developing a distinct western cultural self-understanding. This analysis includes records of eyewitness accounts of European visitors in Eastern lands during the medieval and early modern periods, including William of Rubruck's account of the Mongol lands in mid-thirteenth century, observations of the first Jesuit mission in the court of Mughal Indian emperor Akbar the Great, and circumstances in late Ming China as recorded in the journals of Jesuit missionary and scholar Matteo Ricci. This work illustrates the dynamism and complexity involved in an inter-cultural encounter and highlights the fact that cultural self-understanding is often deeply rooted in how we understand our cultural others.

The End Times, Again?
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 196

The End Times, Again?

From the Middle Eastern politics of Donald Trump to the UK's 2016 EU Referendum, large numbers of Christians are making decisions based on the alleged "end-times" aspects of modern politics. Such apocalyptic views often operate beneath "the radar" of much Christian thought and expression. In this book, historian Martyn Whittock argues that while the New Testament does indeed teach the second coming of Christ, complications occur when Christians seek to confidently identify contemporary events as fulfilments of prophecy. Such believers are usually unaware that they stand in a long line of such well-intended but failed predictions. In this book, Whittock explores the history of end-times speculations over two thousand years, revealing how these often reflect the ideologies and outlooks of contemporary society in their application of Scripture. When Christians ignore such past mistakes, they are in danger of repeating them. Jesus, Whittock argues, taught a different way.

The Female Voice in The Assembly of Ladies
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 219

The Female Voice in The Assembly of Ladies

The Assembly of Ladies is a fifteenth-century secular love poem in Middle English that adheres closely to conventional poetic structures, but throws these conventions into relief as it presents the narrative from a woman’s point of view, a rare occurrence for poetry of this period. Who wrote it, for whom and why, are questions about which we can speculate, but never ultimately answer–the poem itself gives us few clues. Yet the poem has had a remarkable shelf-life; in subsequent centuries the poem has continued to be noticed, read, and debated, as a small but significant artefact from fifteenth-century England. This book examines how fifteenth-century English social conventions impact upon gender relations in The Assembly of Ladies. By drawing on contemporary (and clearly influential) texts from the fifteenth century as a comparison, Marshall shows how The Assembly of Ladies has integrated social conventions into its themes and structure, elevating for the reader the ways that social and literary conventions impact on women in the production and consumption of literature.

A Critical Companion to Old Norse Literary Genre
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 390

A Critical Companion to Old Norse Literary Genre

A comprehensive guide to a crucial aspect of Old Norse literature.

Picturing Experience in the Early Printed Book
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 532

Picturing Experience in the Early Printed Book

  • Categories: Art

Bernhard von Breydenbach’s Peregrinatio in terram sanctam (Journey to the Holy Land), first published in 1486, is one of the seminal books of early printing and is especially renowned for the originality of its woodcuts. In Picturing Experience in the Early Printed Book, Elizabeth Ross considers the Peregrinatio from a variety of perspectives to explain its value for the cultural history of the period. Breydenbach, a high-ranking cleric in Mainz, recruited the painter Erhard Reuwich of Utrecht for a religious and artistic adventure in a political hot spot—a pilgrimage to research the peoples, places, plants, and animals of the Levant. The book they published after their return ambitiousl...

The Sea and Medieval English Literature
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 234

The Sea and Medieval English Literature

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2008
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  • Publisher: DS Brewer

A fresh and invigorating survey of the sea as it appears in medieval English literature, from romance to chronicle, hagiography to autobiography. As the first cultural history of the sea in medieval English literature, this book traces premodern myths of insularity from their Old English beginnings to Shakespeare's Tempest. Beginning with a discussion of biblical, classical and pre-Conquest treatments of the sea, it investigates how such works as the Anglo-Norman Voyage of St Brendan, the Tristan romances, the chronicles of Matthew Paris, King Horn, Patience, The Book of Margery Kempe and The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye shape insular ideologies of Englishness. Whether it is Britain's privile...

John Trevisa's Information Age
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 300

John Trevisa's Information Age

Explores reference books in the medieval period including informational texts, encyclopedias, histories, and manuals, with particular attention to John Trevisa's translations and how these influenced the form and development of vernacular English literature.