Animal Fables of the Courtly Mediterranean

Animal Fables of the Courtly Mediterranean PDF Author: Alison Noble
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780674271272
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 528

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Book Description
Animal Fables of the Courtly Mediterranean is a treasure trove of widely translated stories on how to conduct oneself and succeed in life. The new Byzantine Greek text and English translation presented here is based on a twelfth-century work that contains unique prefaces and reinstates stories omitted from the earliest Greek version.

Drugs in the Medieval Mediterranean

Drugs in the Medieval Mediterranean PDF Author: Petros Bouras-Vallianatos
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009389750
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 445

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Book Description
Adopts a pan-Mediterranean approach to the study of medieval medicine and pharmacology, which permits a deeper understanding of broader phenomena such as the transfer of scientific knowledge and cultural exchange. Of great importance to medical historians, medieval historians and scholars of Byzantine, Islamicate, Jewish, and Latin traditions.

The Routledge Handbook of Human-Animal Relations in the Byzantine World

The Routledge Handbook of Human-Animal Relations in the Byzantine World PDF Author: Przemysław Marciniak
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040157564
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 507

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Book Description
Animals have recently become recognized as significant agents of history as part of the ‘animal turn’ in historical studies. Animals in Byzantium were human companions, a source of entertainment and food – it is small wonder that they made their way into literature and the visual arts. Moreover, humans defined themselves and their activities by referring to non-human animals, either by anthropomorphizing animals (as in the case of the Cat-Mice War) or by animalizing humans and their (un)wanted behaviours. The Routledge Handbook of Human-Animal Relations in the Byzantine World offers an in-depth survey of the relationships between humans and non-human animals in the Byzantine Empire. The contributions included in the volume address both material (zooarchaeology, animals as food, visual representations of animals) and immaterial (semiotics, philosophy) aspects of human-animal coexistence in chapters written by leading experts in their field. This book will appeal to students and scholars alike researching Byzantine social and cultural history, as well as those interested in the history of animals. This book marks an important step in the development of animal studies in Byzantium, filling a gap in the wider research on the history of human-animal relations in the Middle Ages.

Centaurs and Snake-Kings

Centaurs and Snake-Kings PDF Author: Jeremy McInerney
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009459058
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 477

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Book Description
Griffins, centaurs and gorgons: the Greek imagination teems with wondrous, yet often monstrous, hybrids. Jeremy McInerney discusses how these composite creatures arise from the entanglement of humans and animals. Overlaying such enmeshment is the rich cultural exchange experienced by Greeks across the Mediterranean. Hybrids, the author reveals, capture the anxiety of cross-cultural encounter, where similarity and incongruity were conjoined. Hybridity likewise expresses instability of identity. The ancient sea, that most changeable ancient domain, was viewed as home to monsters like Skylla; while on land the centaur might be hypersexual yet also hypercivilized, like Cheiron. Medusa may be destructive, yet also alluring. Wherever conventional values or behaviours are challenged, there the hybrid gives that threat a face. This absorbing work unveils a mercurial world of shifting categories that offer an alternative to conventional certainties. Transforming disorder into images of wonder, Greek hybrids – McInerney suggests – finally suggest other ways of being human.

Variants and Variance in Classical Textual Cultures

Variants and Variance in Classical Textual Cultures PDF Author: Glenn W. Most
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3111054365
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 476

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Book Description
Given the limited durability of most textual supports, texts must be reproduced if they are to survive. And given the proliferation over time of users, practices, and places which need to have access to the texts that are important for cultural institutions, this is particularly true for authoritative texts. But the reproduction of texts by traditional means - either orally or by hand - inevitably produces variations. These variations can arise because of inattention, confusion, misunderstanding, deliberate modification, physical damage, and many other factors. In general, the more a text is reproduced, the more variations are likely to occur. But although the fact of textual variation in general is doubtless an anthropological universal, the specific forms it takes and the specific attitudes to its occurrence seem to vary widely from culture to culture. How variations develop in different cultures, on the basis of which forms of scholarly practices, collaborations, and institutional frameworks; what variants say about a culture's understandings of text, authorship, and collective authorship; what happens when variants become creative and generate their own strands of tradition; to what degree changes in transmission media and processes of distribution, translations, or the migration of texts into different cultural or institutional contexts can influence or be influenced by the development of variants - these are the questions that this book addresses in a historical and culturally comparative perspective.

Solomon and Marcolf

Solomon and Marcolf PDF Author: Jan M. Ziolkowski
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
In this work, Ziolkowski pits wise Solomon against a wily peasant named Marcolf. While it is widely known by name, until now it has not been translated into any modern language. This volume offers an introduction, followed by the Latin and English, detailed commentary, and reproductions of woodcut illustrations from the 1514 edition.

Animal Characters

Animal Characters PDF Author: Bruce Thomas Boehrer
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812201361
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
During the Renaissance, horses—long considered the privileged, even sentient companions of knights-errant—gradually lost their special place on the field of battle and, with it, their distinctive status in the world of chivalric heroism. Parrots, once the miraculous, articulate companions of popes and emperors, declined into figures of mindless mimicry. Cats, which were tortured by Catholics in the Middle Ages, were tortured in the Reformation as part of the Protestant attack on Catholicism. And sheep, the model for Agnus Dei imagery, underwent transformations at once legal, material, and spiritual as a result of their changing role in Europe's growing manufacturing and trade economies. While in the Middle Ages these nonhumans were endowed with privileged social associations, personal agency, even the ability to reason and speak, in the early modern period they lost these qualities at the very same time that a new emphasis on, and understanding of, human character was developing in European literature. In Animal Characters Bruce Thomas Boehrer follows five species—the horse, the parrot, the cat, the turkey, and the sheep—through their appearances in an eclectic mix of texts, from romances and poetry to cookbooks and natural histories. He shows how dramatic changes in animal character types between 1400 and 1700 relate to the emerging economy and culture of the European Renaissance. In early modern European culture, animals not only served humans as sources of labor, companionship, clothing, and food; these nonhuman creatures helped to form an understanding of personhood. Incorporating readings of Shakespeare's plays, Milton's Paradise Lost, Margaret Cavendish's Blazing World, and other works, Boehrer's series of animal character studies illuminates a fascinating period of change in interspecies relationships.

The Arundel Lyrics. The Poems of Hugh Primas

The Arundel Lyrics. The Poems of Hugh Primas PDF Author: Christopher J. McDonough
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674055578
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
This volume presents two complementary medieval anthologies containing lyrics by two outstanding Latin poets of the second half of the twelfth century. The collection is further augmented by verse as varied as Christmas poems and satires on the venality of the Roman Curia and immoral bishops.

The Middle Ages

The Middle Ages PDF Author: Tom Streissguth
Publisher: Greenhaven Publishing LLC
ISBN: 073774636X
Category : Young Adult Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
This encyclopedia provides an abundance of information on the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages began with the fall of the western Roman Empire in the fifth century and ended with the fifteenth century Renaissance. Readers will learn about important religious, political, social, and cultural transformations. Entries cover people, events, and philosophies of the medieval age.

Renaissance Transactions

Renaissance Transactions PDF Author: Valeria Finucci
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822322955
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Edited collection discusses the first historically important debate on what constitutes modern literature, which focused on two 16th century works: ORLANDO FURIOSO and GERUSALEMME LIBERATA.