Author: Sarah Alison Miller
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136923500
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
The medieval monster is a slippery construct, and its referents include a range of religious, racial, and corporeal aberrations. In this study, Miller argues that one incarnation of monstrosity in the Middle Ages—the female body—exists in special relation to medieval teratology insofar as it resists the customary marginalization that defined most other monstrous groups in the Middle Ages. Though medieval maps located the monstrous races on the distant margins of the civilized world, the monstrous female body took the form of mother, sister, wife, and daughter. It was, therefore, pervasive, proximate, and necessary on social, sexual, and reproductive grounds. Miller considers several significant texts representing authoritative discourses on female monstrosity in the Middle Ages: the Pseudo-Ovidian poem, De vetula (The Old Woman); a treatise on human generation erroneously attributed to Albert the Great, De secretis mulierum (On the Secrets of Women), and Julian of Norwich’s Showings. Through comparative analysis, Miller grapples with the monster’s semantic flexibility while simultaneously working towards a composite image of late-medieval female monstrosity whose features are stable enough to define. Whether this body is discursively constructed as an Ovidian body, a medicalized body, or a mystical body, its corporeal boundaries fail to form properly: it is a body out of bounds.
Author: Sarah Alison Miller
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136923519
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
The medieval monster is a slippery construct, and its referents include a range of religious, racial, and corporeal aberrations. In this study, Miller argues that one incarnation of monstrosity in the Middle Ages—the female body—exists in special relation to medieval teratology insofar as it resists the customary marginalization that defined most other monstrous groups in the Middle Ages. Though medieval maps located the monstrous races on the distant margins of the civilized world, the monstrous female body took the form of mother, sister, wife, and daughter. It was, therefore, pervasive, proximate, and necessary on social, sexual, and reproductive grounds. Miller considers several significant texts representing authoritative discourses on female monstrosity in the Middle Ages: the Pseudo-Ovidian poem, De vetula (The Old Woman); a treatise on human generation erroneously attributed to Albert the Great, De secretis mulierum (On the Secrets of Women), and Julian of Norwich’s Showings. Through comparative analysis, Miller grapples with the monster’s semantic flexibility while simultaneously working towards a composite image of late-medieval female monstrosity whose features are stable enough to define. Whether this body is discursively constructed as an Ovidian body, a medicalized body, or a mystical body, its corporeal boundaries fail to form properly: it is a body out of bounds.
Author: Bettina Bildhauer
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802086679
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
The figure of the monster in medieval culture functions as a vehicle for a range of intellectual and spiritual inquiries, from questions of language and representation to issues of moral, theological, and cultural value. Monstrosity is bound up with questions of body image and deformity, nature and knowledge, hybridity and horror. To explore a culture's attitudes to the monstrous is to comprehend one of its most important symbolic tools. The Monstrous Middle Ages looks at both the representation of literal monsters and the consumption and exploitation of monstrous metaphors in a wide variety of high and late-medieval cultural productions, from travel writings and mystical texts to sermons, manuscript illuminations and maps. Individual essays explore the ways in which monstrosity shaped the construction of gender and sexual identity, religious symbolism, and social prejudice in the Middle Ages. Reading the Middle Ages through its monsters provides an opportunity to view medieval culture from fresh perspectives. The Monstrous Middle Ages will be essential reading for anyone interested in the concept of monstrosity and its significance for both medieval cultural production and contemporary critical practice.
Author: Charity Urbanski
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0429516150
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 314
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Book Description
This volume examines various manifestations and understandings of the concept of monstrosity in medieval Europe around 500-1500 ce through a collection of contextual chapters and primary sources. The main chapters focus on a specific theme, a type of monster or representation of monstrosity, and consist of a contextual essay synthesizing recent scholarship on that theme, excerpts from primary sources and a bibliography of additional primary and secondary sources on the topics addressed in the chapter. In addition to building upon the wealth of scholarship on monsters and monstrosity produced in recent decades, the book engages with the current fascination with monsters in popular culture, especially in movies, television, and video games. The book presents a survey of medieval monstrosity for a non-specialist audience and provides a theoretical framework for interpreting the monstrous. This book is ideal for undergraduate students working on the theme of monstrosity, as well as being useful for undergraduate courses that cover the supernatural and manifestations of the monstrous covered in the book. With materials drawn from a wide range of medieval sources, it will also appeal to courses in English, French, Art History, and Medieval Studies.
Author: Dana Oswald
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843842327
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 245
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Book Description
A gendered reading of monster and the monstrous body in medieval literature. Monsters abound in Old and Middle English literature, from Grendel and his mother in Beowulf to those found in medieval romances such as Sir Gowther. Through a close examination of the way in which their bodies are sexed and gendered, and drawing from postmodern theories of gender, identity, and subjectivity, this book interrogates medieval notions of the body and the boundaries of human identity. Case studies of Wonders of the East, Beowulf, Mandeville's Travels, the Alliterative Morte Arthure, and Sir Gowther reveal a shift in attitudes toward the gendered and sexed body, and thus toward identity, between the two periods: while Old English authors and artists respond to the threat of the gendered, monstrous form by erasing it, Middle English writers allow transgressive and monstrous bodies to transform and therefore integrate into society. This metamorphosis enables redemption for some monsters, while other monstrous bodies become dangerously flexible and invisible, threatening the communities they infiltrate. These changing cultural reactions to monstrous bodies demonstrate the precarious relationship between body and identity in medieval literature. DANA M. OSWALD is Assistant Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Parkside.
Author: Marian Bleeke
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1783272503
Category : Motherhood
Languages : en
Pages : 218
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Book Description
An examination of women as mothers in medieval French sculpture.
Author: Linda Lomperis
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812213645
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278
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Book Description
Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature forges a new link between contemporary feminist and cultural theory and medieval history and literature. The essays establish crucial historical connections between feminist theorizing about the body and specific accounts of gendered bodies in medieval texts.
Author: Michael E. Heyes
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498550770
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 291
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Book Description
Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques examines the intersection of religion and monstrosity in a variety of different time periods in the hopes of addressing two gaps in scholarship within the field of monster studies. The first part of the volume—running from the medieval to the Early Modern period—focuses upon the view of the monster through non-majority voices and accounts from those who were themselves branded as monsters. Overlapping partially with the Early Modern and proceeding to the present day, the contributions of the second part of the volume attempt to problematize the dichotomy of secular/religious through a close look at the monsters this period has wrought.
Author: Monika Brenišínová
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1803273259
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 189
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Book Description
This volume focuses on the Catholic tradition of consecrated life (vita religiosa) from the High Middle Ages to the present. It gathers papers by authors from various disciplinary backgrounds, in particular art history, history, anthropology and translation studies.
Author: Tara Williams
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271081783
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 185
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Book Description
This multidisciplinary volume illustrates how representations of magic in fourteenth-century romances link the supernatural, spectacle, and morality in distinctive ways. Supernatural marvels represented in vivid visual detail are foundational to the characteristic Middle English genres of romance and hagiography. In Middle English Marvels, Tara Williams explores the didactic and affective potential of secular representations of magic and shows how fourteenth-century English writers tested the limits of that potential. Drawing on works by Augustine, Gervase of Tilbury, Chaucer, and the anonymous poets of Sir Orfeo and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, among others, Williams examines how such marvels might convey moral messages within and beyond the narrative. She analyzes examples from both highly canonical and more esoteric texts and examines marvels that involve magic and transformation, invoke visual spectacle, and invite moral reflection on how one should relate to others. Within this shared framework, Williams finds distinct concerns—chivalry, identity, agency, and language—that intersect with the marvelous in significant ways. Integrating literary and historical approaches to the study of magic, this volume convincingly shows how certain fourteenth-century texts eschewed the predominant trends and developed a new theory of the marvelous. Williams’s engaging, erudite study will be of special interest to scholars of the occult, the medieval and early modern eras, and literature.
