The King's Fool

The King's Fool PDF Author: Dana Fradon
Publisher: Dutton Childrens Books
ISBN: 9780525450740
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 40

Get Book Here

Book Description
Examines the role of fools or jesters in medieval and Renaissance society and describes such individuals as Will Sommers of sixteenth-century England and Querno of sixteenth-century Italy.

The King's Fool

The King's Fool PDF Author: Dana Fradon
Publisher: Dutton Childrens Books
ISBN: 9780525450740
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 40

Get Book Here

Book Description
Examines the role of fools or jesters in medieval and Renaissance society and describes such individuals as Will Sommers of sixteenth-century England and Querno of sixteenth-century Italy.

Fools and folly during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

Fools and folly during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance PDF Author: Barbara Swain
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Fools' Journey

The Fools' Journey PDF Author: Yona Pinson
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book Here

Book Description
Tracing the evolution of the newly emerging iconographical patterns of fools and folly, this book sheds light on the original and innovative invention that was an exclusive creation of northern Renaissance art and culture. The novel theme of the fools' journey, as expressed mainly through prints in Germany and later in the Netherlands in the sixteenth century is revealed as an ironical paraphrase, parodying the well established Christian topos, the Pilgrimage of Life or the Pilgrimage of the Human Soul, which offered the believer the opportunity to travel on the road toward redemption. The new mythical image of the fools' journey, however, confronts the contemporary reader/viewer with the image of the fool on his voyage that leads him, instead, to his doomed fate, thereby reflecting a pessimistic world-view. The newly emerging visual vocabulary is considered in relation to analogical contemporary didactic and satirical theatrical performances such as the rederijkers plays, the sotties, and also carnival processions. Proposing a new reading of Sebastian Brant's The Ship of Fools (Das Narrenschiff, Basel 1494), a landmark in the new iconography of the allegorical journey, this study recognizes as well the power of the visual image employed in the woodcuts-illustrations accompanying the treatise as a tool of moral teaching, used as a means of influencing the larger urban audience for whom word and image were sometimes interchangeable. Concomitantly, the divergence between verbal expression and visual language may be seen to define the inherent codes of the visual expressions. It is precisely the gap between literary sources and visualization, the very moment when visual vocabulary crystallizes, and image departs from word creating its own autonomous expression and language, that attracts our attention. The range and diversity of visual material related to the fools' journey topos, addresses a wide spectrum of audiences. This study also takes into consideration the strategies of communicating meanings and values to various publics. Addressing the wider urban public that was not necessarily lettered, notably women, illustrated-books and images were envisaged first of all as didactic tools. In accordance, the painters-engravers attended their public with rather simple visual elaborations that could be easily deciphered. Paintings, drawings, and prints intended for highly cultivated elite circles of urban society, among them works by Albrecht Durer and Hieronymus Bosch, demanded greater intellectual involvement on the part of the beholder, challenging the sophisticated viewer to re-create a meaningful ensemble out of the various scenes and motifs presented within complex compositions.

A Fool's Errand

A Fool's Errand PDF Author: Albion Winegar Tourgee
Publisher: Cosimo, Inc.
ISBN: 1616402334
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 410

Get Book Here

Book Description
Subtitled "A Novel of the South During Reconstruction," this 1879 bestseller, by a participant in that great social experiment, is the barely fictionalized account of the career of a Northern lawyer in North Carolina after the Civil War. A champion of the poor and landless of any race, and a keen observer of the dilemmas facing uneducated Negroes in the postwar period, Tourge offers us an important eyewitness account of one of the most tumultuous eras of American history, one that continues to influence the course of the American experiences of race and class to this day.

A Social History of the Fool

A Social History of the Fool PDF Author: Sandra Billington
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571299997
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Get Book Here

Book Description
Who is the Fool and what does he mean to us? Pre-1900 scholars thought him a Renaissance fashion, a continental import of note in the British Isles only between 1486 and the 1630s, per his appearances in Shakespeare's plays. However, as Sandra Billington shows in this pioneering study, the Fool has been with us from medieval times and has worn many guises: village idiot and sophisticated comedian, embodiment of Satan and God's own jester. He has managed, as Billington notes, 'to inspire or infect our thinking for at least eight hundred years'.

Sacred Folly

Sacred Folly PDF Author: Max R. Harris
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801461936
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Get Book Here

Book Description
For centuries, the Feast of Fools has been condemned and occasionally celebrated as a disorderly, even transgressive Christian festival, in which reveling clergy elected a burlesque Lord of Misrule, presided over the divine office wearing animal masks or women's clothes, sang obscene songs, swung censers that gave off foul-smelling smoke, played dice at the altar, and otherwise parodied the liturgy of the church. Afterward, they would take to the streets, howling, issuing mock indulgences, hurling manure at bystanders, and staging scurrilous plays. The problem with this popular account—intriguing as it may be— is that it is wrong.In Sacred Folly, Max Harris rewrites the history of the Feast of Fools, showing that it developed in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries as an elaborate and orderly liturgy for the day of the Circumcision (1 January)—serving as a dignified alternative to rowdy secular New Year festivities. The intent of the feast was not mockery but thanksgiving for the incarnation of Christ. Prescribed role reversals, in which the lower clergy presided over divine office, recalled Mary's joyous affirmation that God "has put down the mighty from their seat and exalted the humble." The "fools" represented those chosen by God for their lowly status.The feast, never widespread, was largely confined to cathedrals and collegiate churches in northern France. In the fifteenth century, high-ranking clergy who relied on rumor rather than firsthand knowledge attacked and eventually suppressed the feast. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historians repeatedly misread records of the feast; their erroneous accounts formed a shaky foundation for subsequent understanding of the medieval ritual. By returning to the primary documents, Harris reconstructs a Feast of Fools that is all the more remarkable for being sanctified rather than sacrilegious.

Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond

Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond PDF Author: Sergey A. Ivanov
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191515140
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 492

Get Book Here

Book Description
There are saints in Orthodox Christian culture who overturn the conventional concept of sainthood. Their conduct may be unruly and salacious, they may blaspheme and even kill - yet, mysteriously, those around them treat them with even more reverence. Such saints are called 'holy fools'. In this pioneering study Sergey A. Ivanov examines the phenomenon of holy foolery from a cultural standpoint. He identifies its prerequisites and its development in religious thought, and traces the emergence of the first hagiographic texts describing these paradoxical saints. He describes the beginnings of holy foolery in Egyptian monasteries of the fifth century, followed by its high point in the cities of Byzantium, with an eventual decline in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. He also compares the important Russian tradition of holy fools, which in some form has survived to this day.

Fool's Talk

Fool's Talk PDF Author: Os Guinness
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 0830898506
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 278

Get Book Here

Book Description
Our world is changing dramatically, yet many Christians still rely on cookie-cutter approaches to evangelism and apologetics. In his magnum opus, Os Guinness presents the art and power of creative persuasion—the ability to talk to people who are closed to what we are saying. Discover afresh the persuasive power of Christian witness.

The Space Opera Renaissance

The Space Opera Renaissance PDF Author: David G. Hartwell
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780765306180
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 958

Get Book Here

Book Description
The best-ever anthology of one of science fiction's most vigorous subgenres

Rabelais and His World

Rabelais and His World PDF Author: Mikhail Mikhaĭlovich Bakhtin
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253203410
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 520

Get Book Here

Book Description
This classic work by the Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) examines popular humor and folk culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. One of the essential texts of a theorist who is rapidly becoming a major reference in contemporary thought, Rabelais and His World is essential reading for anyone interested in problems of language and text and in cultural interpretation.