Gestures and Looks in Medieval Narrative

Gestures and Looks in Medieval Narrative PDF Author: J. A. Burrow
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139434756
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
In medieval society, gestures and speaking looks played an even more important part in public and private exchanges than they do today. Gestures meant more than words, for example, in ceremonies of homage and fealty. In this, the first study of its kind in English, John Burrow examines the role of non-verbal communication in a wide range of narrative texts, including Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Malory's Morte D'arthur, the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, the Prose Lancelot, Boccaccio's Il Filostrato, and Dante's Commedia. Burrow argues that since non-verbal signs are in general less subject to change than words, many of the behaviours recorded in these texts, such as pointing and amorous gazing, are familiar in themselves; yet many prove easy to misread, either because they are no longer common, like bowing, or because their use has changed, like winking.

Gestures and Looks in Medieval Narrative

Gestures and Looks in Medieval Narrative PDF Author: J. A. Burrow
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139434756
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 218

Get Book

Book Description
In medieval society, gestures and speaking looks played an even more important part in public and private exchanges than they do today. Gestures meant more than words, for example, in ceremonies of homage and fealty. In this, the first study of its kind in English, John Burrow examines the role of non-verbal communication in a wide range of narrative texts, including Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Malory's Morte D'arthur, the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, the Prose Lancelot, Boccaccio's Il Filostrato, and Dante's Commedia. Burrow argues that since non-verbal signs are in general less subject to change than words, many of the behaviours recorded in these texts, such as pointing and amorous gazing, are familiar in themselves; yet many prove easy to misread, either because they are no longer common, like bowing, or because their use has changed, like winking.

Gestures and Looks in Medieval Narrative

Gestures and Looks in Medieval Narrative PDF Author: J. A. Burrow
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521815642
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Gestures and looks played an even more important role in public and private exchanges of medieval society, than they do today. Gestures meant more than words, for example, in ceremonies of homage and fealty. In this compelling study, medievalist Burrow examines the role of non-verbal communication in a range of narrative texts, including Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Malory's Morte D'arthur, the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, the prose Lancelot, Boccaccio's Il Filostrato, and Dante's Commedia.

The Art of Mystical Narrative

The Art of Mystical Narrative PDF Author: Eitan Fishbane
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199948631
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 535

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Book Description
In the study of Judaism, the Zohar has captivated the minds of interpreters for over seven centuries, and continues to entrance readers in contemporary times. Yet despite these centuries of study, very little attention has been devoted to the literary dimensions of the text, or to formal appreciation of its status as one of the great works of religious literature. The Art of Mystical Narrative offers a critical approach to the zoharic story, seeking to explore the interplay between fictional discourse and mystical exegesis. Eitan Fishbane argues that the narrative must be understood first and foremost as a work of the fictional imagination, a representation of a world and reality invented by the thirteenth-century authors of the text. He claims that the text functions as a kind of dramatic literature, one in which the power of revealing mystical secrets is demonstrated and performed for the reading audience. The Art of Mystical Narrative offers a fresh, interdisciplinary perspective on the Zohar and on the intersections of literary and religious studies.

Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative

Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative PDF Author: Suzanne M. Yeager
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 052187792X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
An original study of the political, religious and literary uses of representations of the holy city in the fourteenth century.

Fleshly Things and Spiritual Matters

Fleshly Things and Spiritual Matters PDF Author: Nicole Nyffenegger
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443828203
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
This book offers fresh insights into the plethora of medieval bodies and the multiple perspectives that can be assumed in their discussion. The ten essays by internationally renowned scholars and young academics encompass diverse approaches to the body such as the function of gestures, the gendered gaze, the body’s spatial and geographical positioning, the (dis)integrity of the body or the connection between linguistic uses of ‘body’ and physical bodies. While most of the contributions of this collection are in the field of medieval English literature, they underline the value of interdisciplinary approaches which connect them with neighbouring disciplines such as modern literature and arts, history, theology and gender studies. Contributors: Katharina Berger-Meister, Guillemette Bolens, Leslie Dunton-Downer, Laurie Finke, Angelina Keller, Andy Kelly, Fabienne Michelet, R. Allen Shoaf, Lotta Sigurdsson, and Paul Taylor.

The Style of Gestures

The Style of Gestures PDF Author: Guillemette Bolens
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421405180
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
With a foreword by well-known neuroscientist Alain Berthoz, The Style of Gestures convincingly makes the case that embodied cognition is essential to the reception, understanding, and enjoyment of art and literature.

Behaving Badly in Early and Medieval China

Behaving Badly in Early and Medieval China PDF Author: N. Harry Rothschild
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824867823
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Behaving Badly in Early and Medieval China presents a rogues’ gallery of treacherous regicides, impious monks, cutthroat underlings, ill-bred offspring, and disloyal officials. It plumbs the dark matter of the human condition, placing front and center transgressive individuals and groups traditionally demonized by Confucian annalists and largely shunned by modern scholars. The work endeavors to apprehend the actions and motivations of these men and women, whose conduct deviated from normative social, cultural, and religious expectations. Early chapters examine how core Confucian bonds such as those between parents and children, and ruler and minister, were compromised, even severed. The living did not always reverently pay homage to the dead, children did not honor their parents with due filiality, a decorous distance was not necessarily observed between sons and stepmothers, and subjects often pursued their own interests before those of the ruler or the state. The elasticity of ritual and social norms is explored: Chapters on brazen Eastern Han (25–220) mourners and deviant calligraphers, audacious falconers, volatile Tang (618–907) Buddhist monks, and drunken Song (960–1279) literati reveal social norms treated not as universal truths but as debated questions of taste wherein political and social expedience both determined and highlighted individual roles within larger social structures and defined what was and was not aberrant. A Confucian predilection to “valorize [the] civil and disparage the martial” and Buddhist proscriptions on killing led literati and monks alike to condemn the cruelty and chaos of war. The book scrutinizes cultural attitudes toward military action and warfare, including those surrounding the bloody and capricious world of the Zuozhuan (Chronicle of Zuo), the relentless violence of the Five Dynasties and Ten States periods (907–979), and the exploits of Tang warrior priests—a series of studies that complicates the rhetoric by situating it within the turbulent realities of the times. By the end of this volume, readers will come away with the understanding that behaving badly in early and medieval China was not about morality but perspective, politics, and power.

Dante, Artist of Gesture

Dante, Artist of Gesture PDF Author: Heather Webb
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192866990
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Dante, Artist of Gesture proposes a visual technique for reading Dante's Comedy, suggesting that the reader engages with Dante's striking images of souls as if these images were arranged in an architectural space. Art historians have shown how series of discrete images or scenes in medieval places of worship, such as the mosaics in the Baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence or the frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, establish not only narrative sequences but also parallelisms between registers, forging links between those registers by the use of colour and gestural forms. Heather Webb takes up those techniques to show that the Comedy likewise invites the reader to make visual links between disparate, non-sequential moments in the text. In other words, Webb argues that Dante's poem asks readers to view its verbally articulated sequences of images with a set of observational tools that could be acquired from the practice of engaging with and meditating on the bodily depictions of vice and virtue in fresco cycles or programmes of mosaics in places of worship. One of the most inherently visible aspects of the Comedy is the representation of signature gestures of the characters described in each of the realms. This book traces described gestures and bodily signs across the canticles of the poem to provide a key for identifying affective and devotional itineraries within the text.

Literature and the Senses

Literature and the Senses PDF Author: Annette Kern-Stähler
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019284377X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 540

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Book Description
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Literature and the Senses critically probes the role of literature in capturing and scrutinizing sensory perception. Organized around the five traditional senses, followed by a section on multisensoriality, the collection facilitates a dialogue between scholars working on literature written from the Middle Ages to the present day. The contributors engage with a variety of theorists from Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Michel Serres to Jean-Luc Nancy to foreground the distinctive means by which literary texts engage with, open up, or make uncertain dominant views of the nature of perception. Considering the ways in which literary texts intersect with and diverge from scientific, epistemological, and philosophical perspectives, these essays explore a wide variety of literary moments of sensation including: the interspecies exchange of a look between a swan and a young Indigenous Australian girl; the sound of bees as captured in an early modern poem; the noxious smell of the 'Great Stink' that recurs in the Victorian novel; the taste of an eggplant registered in a poetic performance; tactile gestures in medieval romance; and the representation of a world in which the interdependence of human beings with the purple hibiscus plant is experienced through all five senses. The collection builds upon and breaks new ground in the field of sensory studies, focusing on what makes literature especially suitable to engaging with, contributing to, and challenging our perennial understandings of, the senses.

Stone Fidelity

Stone Fidelity PDF Author: Jessica Barker
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1783272716
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
Medieval tombs often depict husband and wife lying side-by-side: demonstrating, as in the words of Philip Larkin's poem An Arundel Tomb, their "stone fidelity". This is the first book to address the phenomenon of the "double tomb", drawing the rich history of tomb sculpture into dialogue with discourses of power, marriage, gender and emotion, and placing them in the context of ecclesastical material culture of the time more broadly. It offers new interpretations of some of the most famous medieval monuments, such as those found in Westminster Abbey and Canterbury Cathedral, as well as drawing attention to a host of lesser-known memorials from throughout Europe. In turn, these monuments provide a vantage point from which to reconsider the culture of medieval marriage, from wedding rings and dresses, to the sacramental symbolism of matrimony, and embodied ritual practices. Whilst it is tempting to read these sculptures as straightforward expressions of romantic feeling, the author argues that a closer look reveals the artifice behind the emotion: the artistic, religious, political and legal agenda underlying the rhetoric of married love.