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Featuring three original and 14 classic essays, this volume examines literary representations of women in Arthuriana and how women artists have viewed them. The essays discuss the female characters in Arthurian legend, medieval and modern readers of the legend, modern critics and the modern women writers who have recast the Arthurian inheritance, and finally women visual artists who have used the material of the Arthurian story. All the essays concentrate interpretation on a female creator and the work. This collection contains a useful bibliography of material devoted to female characters in Arthurian literature.
In medieval Europe, the word fama denoted both talk (what was commonly said about a person or event) and an individual's ensuing reputation (one's fama). Although talk by others was no doubt often feared, it was also valued and even cultivated as a vehicle for shaping one's status. People had to think about how to "manage" their fama, which played an essential role in the medieval culture of appearances.At the same time, however, institutions such as law courts and the church, alarmed by the power of talk, sought increasingly to regulate it. Christian moral discourse, literary and visual representation, juristic manuals, and court records reflected concern about talk. This book's authors consider how talk was created and entered into memory. They address such topics as fama's relation to secular law and the preoccupations of the church, its impact on women's lives, and its capacity to shape the concept of literary authorship.
Since the mid-1970s men's studies, and gender studies has earned its place in scholarship. What's often missing from such studies, however, is the insight that the concept of gender in general, and that of masculinity in particular, can be understood only in relation to individual societies, examined at specific historical and cultural moments. An application of this insight, "Medieval Masculinities" is the first full-length collection to explore the issues of men's studies and contemporary theories of gender within the context of the Middle Ages. Interdisciplinary and multicultural, the essays range from matrimony in medieval Italy to bachelorhood in "Renaissance Venice", from friars and sa...
The lightheartedness of these works both masks and enhances their engagement with provocative issues of continuing interest today: conduct in society, literary practice and moral praxis, relations between men and women, the value of received wisdom. This volume offers texts of two medieval French poems by Christine de Pizan: the "Epistre au dieu d'amours" and "Dit de la Rose," together with the first translation of these poems into modern English. The medieval English adaptation of Christine's "Epistre," Thomas Hoccleve's "The Letter of Cupid," is likewise presented here, and provided with a modern English translation. Finally, an eighteenth-century version of Hoccleve's poem, George Sewell's "The Proclamation of Cupid," is edited here for the first time. The editions of these poems by Christine, last edited a century ago, are based on the most recent scholarly findings. The edition of Hoccleve's poem reproduces its authorial punctuation from manuscript for the first time, and thus sheds light on the vexed question of fifteenth- century English metrics. The lively modern English translations of both can be used by students, scholars, and the general reader.
Modern scholarship generally treats the "debate about women" (querelle des femmes) as a late medieval phenomenon, perhaps touched upon by canonic authors like Chaucer but truly begun by Christine de Pizan (1364-1429), and therefore primarily of English and French origin. That emphasis has obscured the ways in which both writers were participating in a much wider, much older cultural phenomenon with varied and intractable roots. Articles in this collection explore how gender is put into debate in Anglo-Saxon, German, Spanish and Italian cultures, and they re-examine French and Middle English debate literature. The collection is carefully planned to be accessible to students seeking an idea of the debate's motifs and contours while maintaining the high level of issue involvement necessary to commanding a more seasoned audience. Contributors include Pamela Benson, Alcuin Blamires, Margaret Franklin, Roberta Krueger, Clare Lees and Gillian Overing, Ann Matter, Karen Pratt, Helen Solterer, Julian Weiss, and Barbara Weissberger.
Fortalitium fidei is one of the central texts in the controversy surrounding the religious and social status of conversos in fifteenth-century Castile. This monograph provides a close analysis of the text itself and contextualizes this study through comparison with pro-converso texts and with reference to Alonso de Espina's career as an Observant Franciscan. After an outline of the development of the converso problem, it offers a biography of Espina and a discussion of the context of production of Fortalitium fidei. There is then a discussion of three works of theology in defence of conversos: Alonso de Cartagena's Defensorium unitatis christianae, Juan de Torquemada's Tractatus contra madianitas et ismaelitas, and Alonso de Oropesa's Lumen ad revelationem gentium. The rest of the work is detailed reading of Fortalitium fidei, with chapters on the image of the fortress, the treatment of Jews and Judaism, and of conversos. This volume addresses the extent and nature of the debate about conversos, the development of models of genealogical exclusion, and the role of Espina and his text in the ending of religious plurality in Spain.
Misogyny is of course not the whole story of medieval discourse on women: medieval culture also envisaged a case for women. But hitherto studies of profeminine attitudes in that periods culture have tended to concentrate on courtly literature or on female visionary writings or on attempts to transcend misogyny by major authors such as Christine de Pizan and Chaucer. This book sets out to demonstrate something different: that there existed from early in the Middle Ages a corpus of substantial traditions in defence of women, on which the more familiar authors drew, and that this corpus itself consolidated strands of profeminine thought that had been present as far back as the patristic literat...
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