Author: Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9004499695 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 306
Book Description
Examines depictions of grief in the Middle Ages by exploring how grief relates to gender and identity, as well as how men and women perform grief within the various constructions of both gender and grief established by medieval culture.
Author: Carol Lansing Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 1501732242 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 260
Book Description
The way in which a society expresses grief can reveal how it views both intense emotions and public order. In thirteenth-century Italian communes, a conscious effort to change appropriate public reaction to death threw into sharp relief connections among urban politics, gender expectations, and understandings of emotionality. In Passion and Order, Carol Lansing explores a dramatic change in thinking and practice about emotional restraint. This shift was driven by politics and understood in terms of gender. Thirteenth-century court cases reveal that male elites were accustomed to mourning loudly and demonstratively at funerals. As many as a hundred men might gather in a town's streets and squares to weep and cry out, even tear at their beards and clothing. Yet these elites enacted laws against such emotional display and proceeded to pay the fines levied against themselves for violating their own legislation. Political theorists used gender norms to urge men to restrain their passions; histrionic grieving, like lust, was now considered "womanish." Lawmakers drew on a complex of gendered ideas about grief and public order to characterize governance in ways that linked the self and the state. They articulated their beliefs in terms of rules of decorum, how men and women need to behave in order to live together in society. Lansing demonstrates this change through a rich combination of sources: archival records from Orvieto, Bologna, and Perugia; political treatises; literary works, notably Petrarch's letters; and representations of grief in painting and sculpture.
Author: Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9004465324 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 258
Book Description
Queering the Medieval Mediterranean analyzes the forgotten exchange of sexualities that was brought forth through the Mediterranean and its bordering landmasses. It highlights the importance of queerness and sexuality developed on the Mediterranean trade routes.
Author: Megan Moore Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 1501758403 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 258
Book Description
The Erotics of Grief considers how emotions propagate power by exploring whose lives are grieved and what kinds of grief are valuable within and eroticized by medieval narratives. Megan Moore argues that grief is not only routinely eroticized in medieval literature but that it is a foundational emotion of medieval elite culture. Focusing on the concept of grief as desire, Moore builds on the history of the emotions and Georges Bataille's theory of the erotic as the conflict between desire and death, one that perversely builds a sense of community organized around a desire for death. The link between desire and death serves as an affirmation of living communities. Moore incorporates literary, visual, and codicological evidence in sources from across the Mediterranean—from Old French chansons de geste, such as the Song of Roland and La mort le roi Artu and romances such as Erec et Enide, Philomena, and Floire et Blancheflor; to Byzantine and ancient Greek novels; to Middle English travel narratives such as Mandeville's Travels. In her reading of the performance of grief as one of community and remembrance, Moore assesses why some lives are imagined as mattering more than others and explores how a language of grief becomes a common language of status among the medieval Mediterranean elite.
Author: Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9004244468 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 242
Book Description
IIn premodern Europe, the gender identity of those waiting for Doomsday in their tombs could be reaffirmed, readjusted, or even neutralized. Testimonies of this renegotiation of gender at the encounter with death is detectable in wills, letters envisioning oneself as dead, literary narratives, provisions for burial and memorialization, the laws for the disposal of those executed for heinous crimes and the treatment of human remains as relics.
Author: Sharon A. Farmer Publisher: U of Minnesota Press ISBN: 9781452905563 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 398
Book Description
Nothing less than a rethinking of what we mean when we talk about "men" and "women" of the medieval period, this volume demonstrates how the idea of gender -- in the Middle Ages no less than now -- intersected in subtle and complex ways with other categories of difference. Responding to the insights of postcolonial and feminist theory, the authors show that medieval identities emerged through shifting paradigms -- that fluidity, conflict, and contingency characterized not only gender, but also sexuality, social status, and religion. This view emerges through essays that delve into a wide variety of cultures and draw on a broad range of disciplinary and theoretical approaches. Scholars in the fields of history as well as literary and religious studies consider gendered hierarchies in western Christian, Jewish, Byzantine, and Islamic areas of the medieval world.
Author: Michelle M. Sauer Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1441186948 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 219
Book Description
Gender in Medieval Culture provides a detailed examination of medieval society's views on both gender and sexuality, and shows how they are inextricably linked. Sex roles were clearly defined in the medieval world although there were exceptions to the rules, and this book examines both the commonplace world view and the exceptions to it. The volume looks not only at the social and economic considerations of gender but also the religious and legal implications, arguing that both ecclesiastical and secular laws governed behaviour. The book covers key topics, including femininity and masculinity and how medieval society constructed these terms; sexuality and sex; transgressive sexualities such as homosexuality, adultery and chastity; and the gendered body of Christ, including the idea of Jesus as mother and affective spirituality. Using a clear chapter structure for easy navigation and categorisation, as well as a glossary of terms, the book will be a vital resource for students of medieval history.
Author: Jennifer C. Vaught Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan ISBN: 9780312293819 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 310
Book Description
This collection of essays examines the relation of grief and gender in the literature and visual arts of England, France, Italy, and Germany from 700-1700.
Author: Amy N. Vines Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 161146286X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 223
Book Description
New Directions in Medieval Mystical and Devotional Literature honors the career and scholarship of Denise N. Baker. Contributors include both early career and established scholars, and the collected essays examine a broad range of medieval mystical and religious literature, such as the writings of Julian of Norwich and William Langland.
Author: J. Rider Publisher: Springer ISBN: 0230339336 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 272
Book Description
Exploration of the emotionologies of several medieval, romance emotional communities through both fictional and non-fictional narratives. The contributors analyze texts from different linguistic traditions and different periods, but they all focus on women characters.
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Author: Carol Lansing
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Author: Megan Moore
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Author: Sharon A. Farmer
Author: Michelle M. Sauer
Author: Jennifer C. Vaught
Author: Amy N. Vines
Author: J. Rider