Death and the Noble Body in Medieval England

Death and the Noble Body in Medieval England PDF Author: Danielle Westerhof
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781846156250
Category : FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
We all die, but how we perceive death as an event, process or state is inextricably connected to our experiences and the social and environmental culture in which we live. During the early middle ages, the body was used to demonstrate a whole range of concepts and assumptions: the ideal aristocrat possessed a strong, whole and virile body which reflected his inner virtues, and nobility of birth was understood to presuppose and enhance nobility of character and action. Here, the author examines how contemporary ideas about death and dying disrupted this abstract ideal. She explores the meaning of aristocratic funerary practices such as embalming and heart burial, and, conversely, looks at what the gruesomely elaborate executions of aristocratic traitors in England around the turn of the fourteenth century reveal about the role of the body in perceptions of group identity and society at large. Dr DANIELLE WESTERHOF is Honorary Visiting Fellow, School of Historical Studies, University of Leicester.

Death and the Noble Body in Medieval England

Death and the Noble Body in Medieval England PDF Author: Danielle Westerhof
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781846156250
Category : FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS
Languages : en
Pages : 204

Get Book Here

Book Description
We all die, but how we perceive death as an event, process or state is inextricably connected to our experiences and the social and environmental culture in which we live. During the early middle ages, the body was used to demonstrate a whole range of concepts and assumptions: the ideal aristocrat possessed a strong, whole and virile body which reflected his inner virtues, and nobility of birth was understood to presuppose and enhance nobility of character and action. Here, the author examines how contemporary ideas about death and dying disrupted this abstract ideal. She explores the meaning of aristocratic funerary practices such as embalming and heart burial, and, conversely, looks at what the gruesomely elaborate executions of aristocratic traitors in England around the turn of the fourteenth century reveal about the role of the body in perceptions of group identity and society at large. Dr DANIELLE WESTERHOF is Honorary Visiting Fellow, School of Historical Studies, University of Leicester.

Death and the Noble Body in Medieval England

Death and the Noble Body in Medieval England PDF Author: Danielle Westerhof
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN:
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Death and the cadaver : visions of corruption -- Embodying nobility : aristocratic men and the ideal body -- Here lies nobility : aristocratic bodies in death -- Shrouded in ambiguity : decay and the incorruptibility of the body -- Corruption of nobility : treason and the aristocratic traitor -- Dying in shame : destroying aristocratic identities.

Medieval Bodies: Life and Death in the Middle Ages

Medieval Bodies: Life and Death in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Jack Hartnell
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324002174
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
With wit, wisdom, and a sharp scalpel, Jack Hartnell dissects the medieval body and offers a remedy to our preconceptions. Just like us, medieval men and women worried about growing old, got blisters and indigestion, fell in love, and had children. And yet their lives were full of miraculous and richly metaphorical experiences radically different from our own, unfolding in a world where deadly wounds might be healed overnight by divine intervention, or where the heart of a king, plucked from his corpse, could be held aloft as a powerful symbol of political rule. In this richly illustrated and unusual history, Jack Hartnell uncovers the fascinating ways in which people thought about, explored, and experienced their physical selves in the Middle Ages, from Constantinople to Cairo and Canterbury. Unfolding like a medieval pageant, and filled with saints, soldiers, caliphs, queens, monks and monstrous beasts, this book throws light on the medieval body from head to toe—revealing the surprisingly sophisticated medical knowledge of the time. Bringing together medicine, art, music, politics, philosophy, religion, and social history, Hartnell's work is an excellent guide to what life was really like for the men and women who lived and died in the Middle Ages. Perfumed and decorated with gold, fetishized or tortured, powerful even beyond death, these medieval bodies are not passive and buried away; they can still teach us what it means to be human.

A Companion to Death, Burial, and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, c. 1300–1700

A Companion to Death, Burial, and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, c. 1300–1700 PDF Author: Philip Booth
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004443436
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 529

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Book Description
This companion volume seeks to trace the development of ideas relating to death, burial, and the remembrance of the dead in Europe from ca.1300-1700.

The English Execution Narrative, 1200–1700

The English Execution Narrative, 1200–1700 PDF Author: Katherine Royer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317319788
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Royer examines the changing ritual of execution across five centuries and discovers a shift both in practice and in the message that was sent to the population at large. She argues that what began as a show of retribution and revenge became a ceremonial portrayal of redemption as the political, religious and cultural landscape of England evolved.

Death in Medieval Europe

Death in Medieval Europe PDF Author: Joelle Rollo-Koster
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1315466848
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Death in Medieval Europe: Death Scripted and Death Choreographed explores new cultural research into death and funeral practices in medieval Europe and demonstrates the important relationship between death and the world of the living in the middle ages. This volume explores overarching topics such as burials, commemorations, revenants, mourning practices and funerals, capital punishment, suspiscious death and death registrations using case studies from across Europe including England, Iceland and Spain. Drawing together and building upon the latest scholarship, this book is essential reading for all students and academics of death in the medieval period.

Arts of Dying

Arts of Dying PDF Author: D. Vance Smith
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022664104X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
People in the Middle Ages had chantry chapels, mortuary rolls, the daily observance of the Office of the Dead, and even purgatory—but they were still unable to talk about death. Their inability wasn’t due to religion, but philosophy: saying someone is dead is nonsense, as the person no longer is. The one thing that can talk about something that is not, as D. Vance Smith shows in this innovative, provocative book, is literature. Covering the emergence of English literature from the Old English to the late medieval periods, Arts of Dying argues that the problem of how to designate death produced a long tradition of literature about dying, which continues in the work of Heidegger, Blanchot, and Gillian Rose. Philosophy’s attempt to designate death’s impossibility is part of a literature that imagines a relationship with death, a literature that intensively and self-reflexively supposes that its very terms might solve the problem of the termination of life. A lyrical and elegiac exploration that combines medieval work on the philosophy of language with contemporary theorizing on death and dying, Arts of Dying is an important contribution to medieval studies, literary criticism, phenomenology, and continental philosophy.

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

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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.

Death in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times

Death in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times PDF Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110434873
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 505

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Book Description
Death is not only the final moment of life, it also casts a huge shadow on human society at large. People throughout time have had to cope with death as an existential experience, and this also, of course, in the premodern world. The contributors to the present volume examine the material and spiritual conditions of the culture of death, studying specific buildings and spaces, literary works and art objects, theatrical performances, and medical tracts from the early Middle Ages to the late eighteenth century. Death has always evoked fear, terror, and awe, it has puzzled and troubled people, forcing theologians and philosophers to respond and provide answers for questions that seem to evade real explanations. The more we learn about the culture of death, the more we can comprehend the culture of life. As this volume demonstrates, the approaches to death varied widely, also in the Middle Ages and the early modern age. This volume hence adds a significant number of new facets to the critical examination of this ever-present phenomenon of death, exploring poetic responses to the Black Death, types of execution of a female murderess, death as the springboard for major political changes, and death reflected in morality plays and art.

The Death of Kings

The Death of Kings PDF Author: Michael Evans
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 9781852855857
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
A King's death was a critical and highly dramatic moment, often with major political consequences. This is an account of what is known about the deaths of all medieval English kings.