Sexuality in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times PDF Download

Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110209403
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 913

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Book Description
Sexuality is one of the most influential factors in human life. The responses to and reflections upon the manifestations of sexuality provide fascinating insights into fundamental aspects of medieval and early-modern culture. This interdisciplinary volume with articles written by social historians, literary historians, musicologists, art historians, and historians of religion and mental-ity demonstrates how fruitful collaborative efforts can be in the exploration of essential features of human society. Practically every aspect of culture both in the Middle Ages and the early modern age was influenced and determined by sexuality, which hardly ever surfaces simply characterized by prurient interests. The treatment of sexuality in literature, chronicles, music, art, legal documents, and in scientific texts illuminates central concerns, anxieties, tensions, needs, fears, and problems in human society throughout times.

Author: Vern L. Bullough
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136512241
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
Like specialists in other fields in humanities and social sciences, medievalists have begun to investigate and write about sex and related topics such as courtship, concubinage, divorce, marriage, prostitution, and child rearing. The scholarship in this significant volume asserts that sexual conduct formed a crucial role in the lives, thoughts, hopes and fears both of individuals and of the institutions that they created in the middle ages. The absorbing subject of sexuality in the Middle Ages is examined in 19 original articles written specifically for this "Handbook" by the major authorities in their scholarly specialties. The study of medieval sexuality poses problems for the researcher: indices in standard sources rarely refer to sexual topics, and standard secondary sources often ignore the material or say little about it. Yet a vast amount of research is available, and the information is accessible to the student who knows where to look and what to look for. This volume is a valuable guide to the material and an indicator of what subjects are likely to yield fresh scholarly rewards.

Author: Ruth Mazo Karras
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351979906
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- List of figures -- Acknowledgments -- Publishers' acknowledgments -- 1 Sex and the Middle Ages -- 2 The sexuality of chastity -- 3 Sex and marriage -- 4 Women outside of marriage -- 5 Men outside of marriage -- Afterword: Medieval and modern sexuality -- Further reading -- Index

Author: Merry Wiesner-Hanks
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317723260
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
The book surveys the ways in which Christian ideas and institutions shaped sexual norms and conduct from the time of Luther and Columbus to that of Thomas Jefferson. It is global in scope and geographic in organization, with chapters on Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia, and North America. All the key topics are covered, including marriage and divorce, fornication and illegitimacy, clerical sexuality, same-sex relations, witchcraft and love magic, moral crimes, and inter-racial relationships. Each chapter in this second edition has been fully updated to reflect new scholarship, with expanded coverage of many of the key issues, particularly in areas outside of Europe. Other updates include extra analysis of the religious ideas and activities of ordinary people in Europe, and new material on the colonial world. The book sets its findings within the context of many historical fields- the history of sexuality and the body, women's history, legal and religious history, queer theory, and colonial studies- and provides readers with an introduction to key theoretical and methodological issues in each of these areas. Each chapter includes an extensive section on further reading, surveying and commenting on the newest English-language secondary literature.

Author: April Harper
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135866341
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Medieval Sexuality: A Casebook is a fascinating collection featuring both new and established experts in the field. The volume includes 11 original essays by Ross Balzaretti, Philip Crispin, Dominic Janes, Hugh Kennedy, A. Lynn Martin, Kim M. Phillips, Samantha J. E. Riches, Joyce E. Salisbury, David Santiuste, and the volume editors, April Harper and Caroline Proctor. The authors explore a variety of sources, contributing work on a diverse range of topics including: sources for sexuality in Late Lombard Italy; the problematic reception of early medieval penitentials by modern readers; sexuality as experienced by the desert fathers and mothers; connections between saints, monsters, and sexuality in medieval art and hagiography; the relationship between food, seduction, and adultery in the fabliaux; sex, alcohol, and the late medieval stereotype of the unruly woman; sex as a medical and moral concern in medieval regimens of health; ideas of sexuality in political discourse; sex and scandal in festive drama; debates on sexual orientation in Arabic court literature; and pre-colonial descriptions of sexuality in the Far East. The volume concludes with a useful selection of further reading.

Author: Ruth Evans
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350995703
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
Historians of sexuality have often assumed that medieval people were less interested in sex than we are. But people in the Middle Ages wrote a great deal about sex: in confessors' manuals, in virginity treatises, and in literary texts. This volume looks afresh at the cultural meanings that sex had throughout the period, presenting new evidence and offering new interpretations of known material. Acknowledging that many of the categories that we use today to talk about sexuality are inadequate for understanding sex in premodern times, the volume draws on important recent work in the historiography of medieval sexuality to address the conceptual and methodological challenges the period presents. A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Middle Ages presents an overview of the period with essays on heterosexuality, homosexuality, sexual variations, religious and legal issues, health concerns, popular beliefs about sexuality, prostitution and erotica.

Author: Katherine Weikert
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1800731566
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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Book Description
Status and gender are two closely associated concepts within medieval society, which tended to view both notions as binary: elite or low status, married or single, holy or cursed, male or female, or as complementary and cohesive as multiple parts of a societal whole. With contributions on topics ranging from medieval leprosy to boyhood behaviors, this interdisciplinary collection highlights the various ways “status” can be interpreted relative to gender, and what these two interlocked concepts can reveal about the construction of gendered identities in the Middle Ages.

Author: Kim M. Phillips
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745637264
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Sexuality in modern western culture is central to identity but the tendency to define by sexuality does not apply to the premodern past. Before the 'invention' of sexuality, erotic acts and desires were comprehended as species of sin, expressions of idealised love, courtship, and marriage, or components of intimacies between men or women, not as outworkings of an innermost self. With a focus on c. 1100–c. 1800, this book explores the shifting meanings, languages, and practices of western sex. It is the first study to combine the medieval and early modern to rethink this time of sex before sexuality, where same-sex and opposite-sex desire and eroticism bore but faint traces of what moderns came to call heterosexuality, homosexuality, lesbianism, and pornography. This volume aims to contribute to contemporary historical theory through paying attention to the particularity of premodern sexual cultures. Phillips and Reay argue that students of premodern sex will be blocked in their understanding if they use terms and concepts applicable to sexuality since the late nineteenth century, and modern commentators will never know their subject without a deeper comprehension of sex's history.

Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110245485
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 864

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Book Description
Despite popular opinions of the ‘dark Middle Ages’ and a ‘gloomy early modern age,’ many people laughed, smiled, giggled, chuckled, entertained and ridiculed each other. This volume demonstrates how important laughter had been at times and how diverse the situations proved to be in which people laughed, and this from late antiquity to the eighteenth century. The contributions examine a wide gamut of significant cases of laughter in literary texts, historical documents, and art works where laughter determined the relationship among people. In fact, laughter emerges as a kaleidoscopic phenomenon reflecting divine joy, bitter hatred and contempt, satirical perspectives and parodic intentions. In some examples protagonists laughed out of sheer happiness and delight, in others because they felt anxiety and insecurity. It is much more difficult to detect premodern sculptures of laughing figures, but they also existed. Laughter reflected a variety of concerns, interests, and intentions, and the collective approach in this volume to laughter in the past opens many new windows to the history of mentality, social and religious conditions, gender relationships, and power structures.

Author: Eukene Lacarra Lanz
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415936347
Category : Marriage
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
This volume is a comprehensive collection of critical essays on The Taming of the Shrew, and includes extensive discussions of the play's various printed versions and its theatrical productions. Aspinall has included only those essays that offer the most influential and controversial arguments surrounding the play. The issues discussed include gender, authority, female autonomy and unruliness, courtship and marriage, language and speech, and performance and theatricality.