The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary

The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary PDF Author: S. Chaganti
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230615384
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 245

Book Description
Through interdisciplinary readings of medieval literature and devotional artifacts, The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary shows how reliquaries shaped ideas about poetry and poetics in late-medieval England.

Negotiating Boundaries in Medieval Literature and Culture

Negotiating Boundaries in Medieval Literature and Culture PDF Author: Valerie B. Johnson
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501514210
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 372

Book Description
Thomas Hahn’s work laid the foundations for medieval romance studies to embrace the study of alterity and hybridity within Middle English literature. His contributions to scholarship brought Robin Hood studies into the critical mainstream, normalized the study of historically marginalized literature and peoples, and encouraged scholars to view medieval readers as actively encountering others and exploring themselves. This volume employs his methodologies – careful attention to texts and their contexts, cross-cultural readings, and theoretically-informed analysis – to highlight the literary culture of late medieval England afresh. Addressing long-established canonical works such as Chaucer, Christine de Pizan, and Malory alongside understudied traditions and manuscripts, this book will be of interest to literary scholars of the later Middle Ages who, like Hahn, work across boundaries of genre, tradition, and chronology.

Relics and Writing in Late Medieval England

Relics and Writing in Late Medieval England PDF Author: Robyn Malo
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 144266326X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 401

Book Description
Relics and Writing in Late Medieval England uncovers a wide-ranging medieval discourse that had an expansive influence on English literary traditions. Drawing from Latin and vernacular hagiography, miracle stories, relic lists, and architectural history, this study demonstrates that, as the shrines of England’s major saints underwent dramatic changes from c. 1100 to c. 1538, relic discourse became important not only in constructing the meaning of objects that were often hidden, but also for canonical authors like Chaucer and Malory in exploring the function of metaphor and of dissembling language. Robyn Malo argues that relic discourse was employed in order to critique mainstream religious practice, explore the consequences of rhetorical dissimulation, and consider the effect on the socially disadvantaged of lavish expenditure on shrines. The work thus uses the literary study of relics to address issues of clerical and lay cultures, orthodoxy and heterodoxy, and writing and reform.

Strange Beauty

Strange Beauty PDF Author: Cynthia Jean Hahn
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271050780
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Book Description
"A study of reliquaries as a form of representation in medieval art. Explores how reliquaries stage the importance and meaning of relics using a wide range of artistic means from material and ornament to metaphor and symbolism"--Provided by publisher.

Music and the Making of Medieval Venice

Music and the Making of Medieval Venice PDF Author: Jamie L. Reuland
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009424998
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Book Description
Introducing a new geographical paradigm for the study of medieval music, this path-breaking book uncovers the role of music, liturgy, and ritual in building Venice's empire in the eastern Mediterranean, activating the city's material culture, and shaping its state-craft of the imagination.

Toward a Medieval Poetics

Toward a Medieval Poetics PDF Author: Paul Zumthor
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816618453
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 536

Book Description
A translation of the 1972 French analysis of the dynamics of textual production in the Middle Ages that marked a major shift in scholarly discourse about medieval literature. Integrating the tools of linguistics and textual criticism, does not come to conclusions, but proposes approaches and methods for investigation. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Medieval Poetics and Social Practice

Medieval Poetics and Social Practice PDF Author: Seeta Chaganti
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823243249
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
This collection responds to the critical legacy of Penn R. Szittya. Its contributors investigate how medieval poetic language reflects and shapes social, political, and religious worlds. In addition to new readings of canonical poetic texts, it includes readings of texts that have previously not held a central place in critical attention.

Dismemberment in the Medieval and Early Modern English Imaginary

Dismemberment in the Medieval and Early Modern English Imaginary PDF Author: Frederika Elizabeth Bain
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501513230
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

Book Description
The medieval and early modern English imaginary encompasses a broad range of negative and positive dismemberments, from the castration anxieties of Turk plays to the elite practices of distributive burial. This study argues that representations and instances of bodily fragmentation illustrated and performed acts of exclusion and inclusion, detaching not only limbs from bodies but individuals from identity groups. Within this context it examines questions of legitimate and illegitimate violence, showing that such distinctions largely rested upon particular acts’ assumed symbolic meanings. Specific chapters address ways dismemberments manifested gender, human versus animal nature, religious and ethnic identity, and social rank. The book concludes by examining the afterlives of body parts, including relics and specimens exhibited for entertainment and education, contextualized by discussion of the resurrection body and its promise of bodily reintegration. Grounded in dramatic works, the study also incorporates a variety of genres from midwifery manuals to broadside ballads.

Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages

Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Eleanor Johnson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022652745X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Book Description
Literary scholars often avoid the category of the aesthetic in discussions of ethics, believing that purely aesthetic judgments can vitiate analyses of a literary work’s sociopolitical heft and meaning. In Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages, Eleanor Johnson reveals that aesthetics—the formal aspects of literary language that make it sense-perceptible—are indeed inextricable from ethics in the writing of medieval literature. Johnson brings a keen formalist eye to bear on the prosimetric form: the mixing of prose with lyrical poetry. This form descends from the writings of the sixth-century Christian philosopher Boethius—specifically his famous prison text, Consolation of Philosophy—to the late medieval English tradition. Johnson argues that Boethius’s text had a broad influence not simply on the thematic and philosophical content of subsequent literary writing, but also on the specific aesthetic construction of several vernacular traditions. She demonstrates the underlying prosimetric structures in a variety of Middle English texts—including Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and portions of the Canterbury Tales, Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love, John Gower’s Confessio amantis, and Thomas Hoccleve’s autobiographical poetry—and asks how particular formal choices work, how they resonate with medieval literary-theoretical ideas, and how particular poems and prose works mediate the tricky business of modeling ethical transformation for a readership.

Approaches to Teaching the Middle English Pearl

Approaches to Teaching the Middle English Pearl PDF Author: Jane Beal
Publisher: Modern Language Association
ISBN: 1603292934
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 262

Book Description
The moving, richly allegorical poem Pearl was likely written by the anonymous poet who also penned Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In it, a man in a garden, grieving the loss of a beloved pearl, dreams of the Pearl-Maiden, who appears across a stream. She teaches him the nature of innocence, God's grace, meekness, and purity. Though granted a vision of the New Jerusalem by the Pearl-Maiden, the dreamer is pained to discover that he cannot cross the stream himself and join her in bliss--at least not yet. This extraordinary poem is a door into late medieval poetics and Catholic piety. Part 1 of this volume, "Materials," introduces instructors to the many resources available for teaching the canonical yet challenging Pearl, including editions, translations, and scholarship on the poem as well as its historical context. The essays in part 2, "Approaches," offer instructors tools for introducing students to critical issues associated with the poem, such as its authorship, sources and analogues, structure and language, and relation to other works of its time. Contributors draw on interdisciplinary approaches to outline ways of teaching Pearl in a variety of classroom contexts.