Medieval Christian Literary Imagery

Medieval Christian Literary Imagery PDF Author: Robert Earl Kaske
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802066633
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
If a reader of Chaucer suspects that an echo of a biblical verse may somehow depend for its meaning on traditional commentary on that verse, how does he or she go about finding the relevant commentaries? If one finds the word 'fire' in a context that suggests resonances beyond the literal, how does that reader go about learning what the traditional figurative meanings of fire were? It was to the solution of such difficulties that R.E. Kaske addressed himself in this volume setting out and analyzing the major repositories of traditional material: biblical exegesis, the liturgy, hymns and sequences, sermons and homilies, the pictorial arts, mythography, commentaries on individual authors, and a number of miscellaneous themes. An appendix deals with medieval encyclopedias. Kaske created a tool that will revolutionize research in its designated field: the discovery and interpretation of the traditional meanings reflected in medieval Christian imagery.

Medieval Christian Literary Imagery

Medieval Christian Literary Imagery PDF Author: Robert Earl Kaske
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802066633
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Get Book Here

Book Description
If a reader of Chaucer suspects that an echo of a biblical verse may somehow depend for its meaning on traditional commentary on that verse, how does he or she go about finding the relevant commentaries? If one finds the word 'fire' in a context that suggests resonances beyond the literal, how does that reader go about learning what the traditional figurative meanings of fire were? It was to the solution of such difficulties that R.E. Kaske addressed himself in this volume setting out and analyzing the major repositories of traditional material: biblical exegesis, the liturgy, hymns and sequences, sermons and homilies, the pictorial arts, mythography, commentaries on individual authors, and a number of miscellaneous themes. An appendix deals with medieval encyclopedias. Kaske created a tool that will revolutionize research in its designated field: the discovery and interpretation of the traditional meanings reflected in medieval Christian imagery.

Translating Truth

Translating Truth PDF Author: Aden Kumler
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300164930
Category : Christian art and symbolism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Translating Truth is a novel and compelling account of how illuminated vernacular manuscripts transformed conceptions of Christian excellence in the later Middle Ages. Following the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), which legislated a broad pastoral outreach to the laity, new forms of religious instruction played a decisive role in the lives of Christians throughout Europe. For royal and aristocratic laypeople, luxury manuscripts of spiritual instruction made sacred truths and religious knowledge accessible--and authorizing--as never before. In this beautifully illustrated book, Aden Kumler examines how manuscript paintings collaborated and, at times, competed with texts as they translated the rudiments of Christian belief as well as complex theological teachings to new audiences on both sides of the English Channel. In the illuminations in these books, Kumler argues, elite laypeople were offered an ambitious vision of spiritual excellence and a greater role in the pursuit of their salvation.

Translating Christ in the Middle Ages

Translating Christ in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Barbara Zimbalist
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268202214
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 426

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Book Description
This study reveals how women’s visionary texts played a central role within medieval discourses of authorship, reading, and devotion. From the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, women across northern Europe began committing their visionary conversations with Christ to the written word. Translating Christ in this way required multiple transformations: divine speech into human language, aural event into textual artifact, visionary experience into linguistic record, and individual encounter into communal repetition. This ambitious study shows how women’s visionary texts form an underexamined literary tradition within medieval religious culture. Barbara Zimbalist demonstrates how, within this tradition, female visionaries developed new forms of authorship, reading, and devotion. Through these transformations, the female visionary authorized herself and her text, and performed a rhetorical imitatio Christi that offered models of interpretive practice and spoken devotion to her readers. This literary-historical tradition has not yet been fully recognized on its own terms. By exploring its development in hagiography, visionary texts, and devotional literature, Zimbalist shows how this literary mode came to be not only possible but widespread and influential. She argues that women’s visionary translation reconfigured traditional hierarchies and positions of spiritual power for female authors and readers in ways that reverberated throughout late-medieval literary and religious cultures. In translating their visionary conversations with Christ into vernacular text, medieval women turned themselves into authors and devotional guides, and formed their readers into textual communities shaped by gendered visionary experiences and spoken imitatio Christi. Comparing texts in Latin, Dutch, French, and English, Translating Christ in the Middle Ages explores how women’s visionary translation of Christ’s speech initiated larger transformations of gendered authorship and religious authority within medieval culture. The book will interest scholars in different linguistic and religious traditions in medieval studies, history, religious studies, and women’s and gender studies.

The Grief of God

The Grief of God PDF Author: Ellen M. Ross
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 019510451X
Category : Christian art and symbolism
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Analyzing a wide range of textual and pictorial evidence, the author finds that the bleeding flesh of the wounded Savior manifests divine presence; in the intensified corporeality of the suffering Jesus whose flesh not only condemns, but also nurtures, heals, and feeds, believers meet a trinitarian God of mercy.

The Mutable Glass

The Mutable Glass PDF Author: Herbert Grabes
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521222036
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
A comprehensive survey of mirror-imagery in English literature from the thirteenth to the end of the seventeenth century.

Sin and Filth in Medieval Culture

Sin and Filth in Medieval Culture PDF Author: Martha Bayless
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136490825
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
This important new contribution to the history of the body analyzes the role of filth as the material counterpart of sin in medieval thought. Using a wide range of texts, including theology, historical documents, and literature from Augustine to Chaucer, the book shows how filth was regarded as fundamental to an understanding of human history. This theological significance explains the prominence of filth and dung in all genres of medieval writing: there is more dung in theology than there is in Chaucer. The author also demonstrates the ways in which the religious understanding of filth and sin influenced the secular world, from town planning to the execution of traitors. As part of this investigation the book looks at the symbolic order of the body and the ways in which the different aspects of the body were assigned moral meanings. The book also lays out the realities of medieval sanitation, providing the first comprehensive view of real-life attempts to cope with filth. This book will be essential reading for those interested in medieval religious thought, literature, amd social history. Filled with a wealth of entertaining examples, it will also appeal to those who simply want to glimpse the medieval world as it really was.

John Trevisa's Information Age

John Trevisa's Information Age PDF Author: Emily Steiner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192896903
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
What would medieval English literature look like if we viewed it through the lens of the compendium? In that case, John Trevisa might come into focus as the major author of the fourteenth century. Trevisa (d. 1402) made a career of translating big informational texts from Latin into English prose. These included Ranulph Higden's Polychronicon, an enormous universal history, Bartholomaeus Anglicus's well-known natural encyclopedia De proprietatibus rerum, and Giles of Rome's advice-for-princes manual, De regimine principum. These were shrewd choices, accessible and on trend: De proprietatibus rerum and De regimine principum had already been translated into French and copied in deluxe manuscripts for the French and English nobility, and the Polychronicon had been circulating England for several decades. This book argues that John Trevisa's translations of compendious informational texts disclose an alternative literary history by way of information culture. Bold and lively experiments, these translations were a gamble that the future of literature in England was informational prose. This book argues that Trevisa's oeuvre reveals an alternative literary history more culturally expansive and more generically diverse than that which we typically construct for his contemporaries, Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland. Thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century European writers compiled massive reference books which would shape knowledge well into the Renaissance. This study maintains that they had a major impact on English poetry and prose. In fact, what we now recognize to be literary properties emerged in part from translations of medieval compendia with their inventive ways of handling vast quantities of information.

The Divine Office in the Latin Middle Ages

The Divine Office in the Latin Middle Ages PDF Author: Margot E. Fassler
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780195352382
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 668

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Book Description
The Divine Office--the cycle of daily worship other than the Mass--is the richest source of liturgical texts and music from the Latin Middle Ages. However, its richness, the great diversity of its manuscripts, and its many variations from community to community have made it difficult to study, and it remains largely unexplored terrain. This volume is a practical guide to the Divine Office for students and scholars throughout the field of medieval studies. The book surveys the many questions related to the Office and presents the leading analytical tools and research methods now used in the field. Beginning with the Office in the early Middle Ages, the book covers manuscript sources and their contents; regional developments and variations; the relationship between the Office, the Mass, and other ceremonies and repertories; and the deep links between the Office and medieval hagiography. The book concludes with a discussion of recent technical advances for handling the enormous amounts of evidence on the Office and its performance, in particular CANTUS, the vast electronic database developed by Ruth Steiner of Catholic University for the analysis of chant repertories. The Divine Office in the Latin Middle Ages is an essential resource for anyone studying medieval liturgy. Its accessible style and broad coverage make it an important basic reference for a wide range of students and scholars in art history, religious studies, social history, literature, musicology, and theology.

The Anonymous Old English Homily: Sources, Composition, and Variation

The Anonymous Old English Homily: Sources, Composition, and Variation PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004439285
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
The Anonymous Old English Homily: Sources, Composition, and Variation offers important essays on the origins, textual transmission, and (re)use of early English preaching texts between the ninth and the late twelfth centuries. Associated with the Electronic Corpus of Anonymous Homilies in Old English project, these studies provide fresh insights into one of the most complex textual genres of early medieval literature. Contributions deal with the definition of the anonymous homiletic corpus in Old English, the history of scholarship on its Latin sources, and the important unedited Pembroke and Angers Latin homiliaries. They also include new source and manuscript identifications, and in-depth studies of a number of popular Old English homilies, their themes, revisions, and textual relations. Contributors are: Aidan Conti, Robert Getz, Thomas N. Hall, Susan Irvine, Esther Lemmerz, Stephen Pelle, Thijs Porck, Winfried Rudolf, Donald G. Scragg, Robert K. Upchurch, Jonathan Wilcox, Charles D. Wright, Samantha Zacher. See inside the book.

The Discarded Image

The Discarded Image PDF Author: C. S. Lewis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107604702
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
Paints a lucid picture of the medieval world view, providing the historical and cultural background to the literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. This, Lewis's last book, has been hailed as 'the final memorial to the work of a great scholar and teacher and a wise and noble mind'.