The Epistemology of the Monstrous in the Middle Ages PDF Download

Author: Lisa Verner
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135873062
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
This book studies the phenomena of monsters and marvels from the time of Pliny the Elder through the 14th century.

Author: Bettina Bildhauer
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1786831759
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
The figure of the monster in medieval culture functions as a vehicle for a range of intellectual and spiritual inquiries, from questions of language and representation to issues of moral, theological and cultural value. Monsters embody cultural tensions that go far beyond the idea of the monster as simply an unintelligible and abject other. This text looks at both the representation of literal monsters and the consumption and exploitation of monstrous metaphors in a wide variety of high and late-medieval cultural productions, from travel writing and mystical texts, to sermons, manuscript illuminations and maps. Individual essays explore the ways in which monstrosity shaped the construction of gendered and racial identities, religious symbolism and social prejudice in the Middle Ages. Reading the Middle Ages through its monsters provides an opportunity to view medieval culture from fresh perspectives. It should be of interest in the concept of monstrosity and its significance for medieval cultural production.

Author: John Block Friedman
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 9780815628262
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
Beyond the boundaries of the known Christian world during the Middle Ages, there were alien cultures that intrigued, puzzled, and sometimes frightened the people of Europe. The reports of travelers in Africa and Asia revealed that "monstrous" races of men lived there, whose appearance and customs were quite different from the European norm. This book examines the impact of these races upon Western art, literature, and philosophy, from their earliest mention until the age of exploration. Friedman furnishes a descriptive catalog of the races, most of which were real, geographically remote peoples, some of which were fabled creatures that served as symbols. He traces the evolution of European attitudes toward them, with particular emphasis on the high Middle Ages, when they seem most strongly to have captured the Western imagination. Ranging through literature, the arts, cartography, canon law, and theology, he considers the widely varying ways in which Christians viewed and depicted strange races of men. Finally, he examines transformations in European consciousness brought about by the discoveries of the exotic peoples of the Americas. Whatever their form—pygmy, giant, hirsute cave—dweller, cyclops, or Amazon-the monstrous races clearly challenged the traditional concept of man in the Christian world scheme. It is the medieval thinking about this challenge that Mr. Friedman addresses in this revealing account.

Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110693666
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 820

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Book Description
The notions of other peoples, cultures, and natural conditions have always been determined by the epistemology of imagination and fantasy, providing much freedom and creativity, and yet have also created much fear, anxiety, and horror. In this regard, the pre-modern world demonstrates striking parallels with our own insofar as the projections of alterity might be different by degrees, but they are fundamentally the same by content. Dreams, illusions, projections, concepts, hopes, utopias/dystopias, desires, and emotional attachments are as specific and impactful as the physical environment. This volume thus sheds important light on the various lenses used by people in the Middle Ages and the early modern age as to how they came to terms with their perceptions, images, and notions. Previous scholarship focused heavily on the history of mentality and history of emotions, whereas here the history of pre-modern imagination, and fantasy assumes center position. Imaginary things are taken seriously because medieval and early modern writers and artists clearly reveal their great significance in their works and their daily lives. This approach facilitates a new deep-structure analysis of pre-modern culture.

Author: David Williams
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 9780773518711
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
Adult survivors of children's stories can be forgiven for thinking the only function of medieval monsters was to fail, just barely, to eat virgins and to die, just barely, under the hero's ministrations. Williams (English, McGill U.) enlarges the view, tracing the poetics of teratology, the study of monsters, to Christian neoplatonic theology, especially the concept that God cannot be known except by knowing what he is not. He also provides a taxonomy of monsters with glosses, and examines the monstrous and deformed in three heroic sagas and three saints' lives. Includes many reproductions. Canadian card order number: C96-900457-5. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Author: Charity Urbanski
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0429516150
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
This volume examines various manifestations and understandings of the concept of monstrosity in medieval Europe around 500-1500 ce through a collection of contextual chapters and primary sources. The main chapters focus on a specific theme, a type of monster or representation of monstrosity, and consist of a contextual essay synthesizing recent scholarship on that theme, excerpts from primary sources and a bibliography of additional primary and secondary sources on the topics addressed in the chapter. In addition to building upon the wealth of scholarship on monsters and monstrosity produced in recent decades, the book engages with the current fascination with monsters in popular culture, especially in movies, television, and video games. The book presents a survey of medieval monstrosity for a non-specialist audience and provides a theoretical framework for interpreting the monstrous. This book is ideal for undergraduate students working on the theme of monstrosity, as well as being useful for undergraduate courses that cover the supernatural and manifestations of the monstrous covered in the book. With materials drawn from a wide range of medieval sources, it will also appeal to courses in English, French, Art History, and Medieval Studies.

Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110321513
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 827

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Book Description
This new volume explores the surprisingly intense and complex relationships between East and West during the Middle Ages and the early modern world, combining a large number of critical studies representing such diverse fields as literary (German, French, Italian, English, Spanish, and Arabic) and other subdisciplines of history, religion, anthropology, and linguistics. The differences between Islam and Christianity erected strong barriers separating two global cultures, but, as this volume indicates, despite many attempts to 'Other' the opposing side, the premodern world experienced an astonishing degree of contacts, meetings, exchanges, and influences. Scientists, travelers, authors, medical researchers, chroniclers, diplomats, and merchants criss-crossed the East and the West, or studied the sources produced by the other culture for many different reasons. As much as the theoretical concept of 'Orientalism' has been useful in sensitizing us to the fundamental tensions and conflicts separating both worlds at least since the eighteenth century, the premodern world did not quite yet operate in such an ideological framework. Even though the Crusades had violently pitted Christians against Muslims, there were countless contacts and a palpitable curiosity on both sides both before, during, and after those religious warfares.

Author: J. Cohen
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113708670X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
This study examines the monsters that haunt twelfth-century British texts, arguing that in these strange bodies are expressed fears and fantasies about community, identity and race during the period. Cohen finds the origins of these monsters in a contemporary obsession with blood, both the literal and metaphorical kind.

Author: Richard H. Godden
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030254585
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
This collection examines the intersection of the discourses of “disability” and “monstrosity” in a timely and necessary intervention in the scholarly fields of Disability Studies and Monster Studies. Analyzing Medieval and Early Modern art and literature replete with images of non-normative bodies, these essays consider the pernicious history of defining people with distinctly non-normative bodies or non-normative cognition as monsters. In many cases throughout Western history, a figure marked by what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has termed “the extraordinary body” is labeled a “monster.” This volume explores the origins of this conflation, examines the problems and possibilities inherent in it, and casts both disability and monstrosity in light of emergent, empowering discourses of posthumanism.

Author: Michael E. Heyes
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498550770
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
This book explores the intersection of religion and monstrosity. The first section contains fresh research on the Middle Ages and Early Modern period, and the second explores the topic of religion and monstrosity from the Early Modern to Modern period.