Author: James Turner
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300219951
Category : Art, Italian
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Focusing on the impact of the erotic revolution that swept through 16th-century Italy, Eros Visible presents a compendious, revisionist account of High Renaissance art. Through close visual analysis of artworks and careful reading of related texts, James Grantham Turner demonstrates the surprisingly close connection between explicitly pornographic art and the canonical works of masters such as Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo. Full of new discoveries, this volume explores the passionate response to antiquity and how a new sex-positive philosophy not only encouraged an increased accentuation of sensual and erotic themes in art, but influenced the sexual cultures of both the court and the art studio. With an interdisciplinary approach that draws on a wide array of visual and textual erotica, Turner offers the first broad, synthetic history of the classically inspired and unambiguously lascivious sensibilities behind some of the most sublime artistic achievements of the Renaissance.
Author: Claude Calame
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691159432
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
The Poetics of Eros in Ancient Greece offers the first comprehensive inquiry into the deity of sexual love, a power that permeated daily Greek life. Avoiding Foucault's philosophical paradigm of dominance/submission, Claude Calame uses an anthropological and linguistic approach to re-create indigenous categories of erotic love. He maintains that Eros, the joyful companion of Aphrodite, was a divine figure around which poets constructed a physiology of desire that functioned in specific ways within a network of social relations. Calame begins by showing how poetry and iconography gave a rich variety of expression to the concept of Eros, then delivers a history of the deity's roles within social and political institutions, and concludes with a discussion of an Eros-centered metaphysics. Calame's treatment of archaic and classical Greek institutions reveals Eros at work in initiation rites and celebrations, educational practices, the Dionysiac theater of tragedy and comedy, and in real and imagined spatial settings. For men, Eros functioned particularly in the symposium and the gymnasium, places where men and boys interacted and where future citizens were educated. The household was the setting where girls, brides, and adult wives learned their erotic roles--as such it provides the context for understanding female rites of passage and the problematics of sexuality in conjugal relations. Through analyses of both Greek language and practices, Calame offers a fresh, subtle reading of relations between individuals as well as a quick-paced and fascinating overview of Eros in Greek society at large.
Author:
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 0809386844
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 128
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Book Description
This collection of new translations of eighty poems provides a pleasant, thought-provoking reminder of love’s vagaries as captured through the wit, charm, and insight of the master poets of antiquity. All the emotions and experiences associated with love—rejection, infatuation, ecstasy, desperation, loneliness—are rendered accessible to contemporary readers through this lively, modern, yet faithful English translation of works that date from the seventh century B.C.to the sixth century A.D.Illustrations accompany the poetry of Plato, Sappho, Stratto, Meleagros, and others, capturing both the flavor of the age and the theme of the texts.
Author: Wouter J. Hanegraaff
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047443586
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 566
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Book Description
From rumours about gnostic orgies in antiquity to the explicit erotic symbolism of alchemical texts, from the subtly coded eroticism of medieval kabbalah to the sexual magic practiced by contemporary occultists and countercultural translations of Asian Tantra, the history of Western esotericism is rich in references to the domains of eros and sexuality. This volume, which brings together an impressive array of top-level specialists, is the first to analyze the eroticism of the esoteric without sensationalism or cheap generalizations, but on the basis of expert scholarship and attention to textual and historical detail. While there are few other domains where the imagination may so easily run wild, the various contributions seek to distinguish fact from fiction--only to find that historical realities are sometimes even stranger than the fantasies. In doing so, they reveal the outlines of a largely unknown history spanning more than twenty centuries.
Author: Ioan P. Culianu
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226123162
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286
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Book Description
It is a widespread prejudice of modern, scientific society that "magic" is merely a ludicrous amalgam of recipes and methods derived from primitive and erroneous notions about nature. Eros and Magic in the Renaissance challenges this view, providing an in-depth scholarly explanation of the workings of magic and showing that magic continues to exist in an altered form even today. Renaissance magic, according to Ioan Couliano, was a scientifically plausible attempt to manipulate individuals and groups based on a knowledge of motivations, particularly erotic motivations. Its key principle was that everyone (and in a sense everything) could be influenced by appeal to sexual desire. In addition, the magician relied on a profound knowledge of the art of memory to manipulate the imaginations of his subjects. In these respects, Couliano suggests, magic is the precursor of the modern psychological and sociological sciences, and the magician is the distant ancestor of the psychoanalyst and the advertising and publicity agent. In the course of his study, Couliano examines in detail the ideas of such writers as Giordano Bruno, Marsilio Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola and illuminates many aspects of Renaissance culture, including heresy, medicine, astrology, alchemy, courtly love, the influence of classical mythology, and even the role of fashion in clothing. Just as science gives the present age its ruling myth, so magic gave a ruling myth to the Renaissance. Because magic relied upon the use of images, and images were repressed and banned in the Reformation and subsequent history, magic was replaced by exact science and modern technology and eventually forgotten. Couliano's remarkable scholarship helps us to recover much of its original significance and will interest a wide audience in the humanities and social sciences.
Author: Kathy L. Gaca
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520296176
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380
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Book Description
This provocative work provides a radical reassessment of the emergence and nature of Christian sexual morality, the dominant moral paradigm in Western society since late antiquity. While many scholars, including Michel Foucault, have found the basis of early Christian sexual restrictions in Greek ethics and political philosophy, Kathy L. Gaca demonstrates on compelling new grounds that it is misguided to regard Greek ethics and political theory—with their proposed reforms of eroticism, the family, and civic order—as the foundation of Christian sexual austerity. Rather, in this thoroughly informed and wide-ranging study, Gaca shows that early Christian goals to eradicate fornication were derived from the sexual rules and poetic norms of the Septuagint, or Greek Bible, and that early Christian writers adapted these rules and norms in ways that reveal fascinating insights into the distinctive and largely non-philosophical character of Christian sexual morality. Writing with an authoritative command of both Greek philosophy and early Christian writings, Gaca investigates Plato, the Stoics, the Pythagoreans, Philo of Alexandria, the apostle Paul, and the patristic Christians Clement of Alexandria, Tatian, and Epiphanes, freshly elucidating their ideas on sexual reform with precision, depth, and originality. Early Christian writers, she demonstrates, transformed all that they borrowed from Greek ethics and political philosophy to launch innovative programs against fornication that were inimical to Greek cultural mores, popular and philosophical alike. The Septuagint's mandate to worship the Lord alone among all gods led to a Christian program to revolutionize Gentile sexual practices, only for early Christians to find this virtually impossible to carry out without going to extremes of sexual renunciation. Knowledgeable and wide-ranging, this work of intellectual history and ethics cogently demonstrates why early Christian sexual restrictions took such repressive ascetic forms, and casts sobering light on what Christian sexual morality has meant for religious pluralism in Western culture, especially among women as its bearers.
Author: Ingela Nilsson
Publisher: Museum Tusculanum Press
ISBN: 8763507900
Category : Erotic literature, Greek
Languages : en
Pages : 294
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Book Description
This volume aims at providing both students and scholars with a series of discussions of the long tradition of reading and writing the erotic, seen from a number of different perspectives.
Author: Antonia Mulas
Publisher: Random House Value Pub
ISBN: 9780517275733
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
Author: Ed Sanders
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199605505
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 365
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Book Description
This volume brings together 18 articles which examine eros as an emotion in ancient Greek culture. Taking into account all important thinking about the nature of eros from the 8th century BCE to the 3rd century CE, it covers a very broad range of sources and theoretical approaches, both in the chronological and the generic sense.
Author: Moshe Idel
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 030010832X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 381
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Book Description
In this book, the world's foremost scholar of Kabbalah explores the understanding of erotic love in Jewish mystical thought. Encompassing Jewish mystical literatures from those of late antiquity to works of Polish Hasidism, Moshe Idel highlights the diversity of Kabbalistic views on eros and distinguishes between the major forms of eroticism. The author traces the main developments of a religious formula that reflects the union between a masculine divine attribute and a feminine divine attribute, and he asks why such an "erotic formula" was incorporated into the Jewish prayer book. Idel shows how Kabbalistic literature was influenced not only by rabbinic literature but also by Greek thought that helped introduce a wider understanding of eros. Addressing topics ranging from cosmic eros and androgyneity to the affinity between C. J. Jung and Kabbalah to feminist thought, Idel's deeply learned study will be of consuming interest to scholars of religion, Judaism, and feminism.
