Mirrors and Mirroring from Antiquity to the Early Modern Period

Mirrors and Mirroring from Antiquity to the Early Modern Period PDF Author: Maria Gerolemou
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135010129X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume examines mirrors and mirroring through a series of multidisciplinary essays, especially focusing on the intersection between technological and cultural dynamics of mirrors. The international scholars brought together here explore critical questions around the mirror as artefact and the phenomenon of mirroring. Beside the common visual registration of an action or inaction, in a two dimensional and reversed form, various types of mirrors often possess special abilities which can produce a distorted picture of reality, serving in this way illusion and falsehood. Part I looks at a selection of theory from ancient writers, demonstrating the concern to explore these same questions in antiquity. Part II considers the role reflections can play in forming ideas of gender and identity. Beyond the everyday, we see in Part III how oracular mirrors and magical mirrors reveal the invisible divine – prosthetics that allow us to look where the eye cannot reach. Finally, Part IV considers mirrors' roles in displaying the visible and invisible in antiquity and since.

Mirrors and Mirroring from Antiquity to the Early Modern Period

Mirrors and Mirroring from Antiquity to the Early Modern Period PDF Author: Maria Gerolemou
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781350101319
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
"This volume examines mirrors and mirroring through a series of multidisciplinary essays, especially focusing on the intersection between technological and cultural dynamics of mirrors. The international scholars brought together here explore critical questions around the mirror as artefact and the phenomenon of mirroring. Beside the common visual registration of an action or inaction, in a two dimensional and reversed form, various types of mirrors often possess special abilities which can produce a distorted picture of reality, serving in this way illusion and falsehood. Part I looks at a selection of theory from ancient writers, demonstrating the concern to explore these same questions in antiquity. Part II considers the role reflections can play in forming ideas of gender and identity. Beyond the everyday, we see in Part III how oracular mirrors and magical mirrors reveal the invisible divine - prosthetics that allow us to look where the eye cannot reach. Finally, Part IV considers mirrors' roles in displaying the visible and invisible in antiquity and since"--...

Byzantine Media Subjects

Byzantine Media Subjects PDF Author: Glenn A. Peers
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501775030
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 319

Get Book Here

Book Description
Byzantine Media Subjects invites readers into a world replete with images—icons, frescoes, and mosaics filling places of worship, politics, and community. Glenn Peers asks readers to think themselves into a world where representation reigned and humans followed, and indeed were formed. Interrogating the fundamental role of representation in the making of the Byzantine human, Peers argues that Byzantine culture was (already) posthuman. The Byzantine experience reveals the extent to which media like icons, manuscripts, music, animals, and mirrors fundamentally determine humans. In the Byzantine world, representation as such was deeply persuasive, even coercive; it had the power to affect human relationships, produce conflict, and form self-perception. Media studies has made its subject the modern world, but this book argues for media having made historical subjects. Here, it is shown that media long ago also made Byzantine humans, defining them, molding them, mediating their relationship to time, to nature, to God, and to themselves.

The Allegory of Love in the Early Renaissance

The Allegory of Love in the Early Renaissance PDF Author: James Calum O’Neill
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100091190X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Get Book Here

Book Description
Described as ‘the most beautiful book ever printed’ previous research has focused on the printing history of the Hypnerotomachia and its copious literary sources. This monograph critically engages with the narrative of the Hypnerotomachia and with Poliphilo as a character within this narrative, placing it within its European literary context. Using narratological analysis, it examines the journey of Poliphilo and the series of symbolic, allegorical, and metaphorical experiences narrated by him that are indicative of his metamorphosing interiority. It analyses the relationship between Poliphilo and his external surroundings in sequences of the narrative pertaining to thresholds; the symbolic architectural, topographical, and garden forms and spaces; and Poliphilo’s transforming interior passions including his love of antiquarianism, language, and Polia, the latter of which leads to his elegiac description of lovesickness, besides examinations of numerosophical symbolism in number, form, and proportion of the architectural descriptions and how they relate to the narrative.

Public Feminism in Times of Crisis

Public Feminism in Times of Crisis PDF Author: Leila Easa
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793648115
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Get Book Here

Book Description
Public Feminism in Times of Crisis examines the public practice of feminism in the age of social media. While their concept of public feminism emerges from a moment of acute crisis (the Trump years and the Covid-19 pandemic), Leila Easa and Jennifer Stager locate its foundations in history, journeying through broad swatches of time looking for connections between the centuries through art and literature and culture. Each chapter focuses on what public feminists do in the world: Public feminists gain control over an archive that otherwise contains or excludes them; they recover their own stories and subjective experiences, sometimes for activist use; they examine images and language that construct women in patriarchal texts; they situate the individual within a collective and the collective within an individual; they confront the limitations of such situating due to the containment of patriarchy and reclaim new systems of power in response; and they resurface a deep history for the alternative strategies of memorializing they employ. In navigating these practices, the authors also attend to the material conditions of writing histories as well as those shaping and enabling public feminist acts and protests more broadly.

Body Technologies in the Greco-Roman World

Body Technologies in the Greco-Roman World PDF Author: Maria Gerolemou
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1835536433
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 195

Get Book Here

Book Description
A collection of papers that introduces the notion of the technosoma (techno body) into discussions on the representations of the body in classical antiquity. By applying the category of the technosoma to the ‘natural’ body, this volume explicitly narrows down the discussion of the technical and the natural to the physiological body. In doing so, the present collection focuses on body technologies in the specific form of beautification and body enhancement techniques, as well as medical and surgical treatments. The volume elucidates two main points. Firstly, ancient techno bodies show that the categories of gender and sexuality are at the core of the intersection of the natural and the technical, and intersect with notions of race, age, speciesism, class and education, and dis/ability. Secondly, the collection argues that new body technologies have in fact a very ancient history that can help to address the challenges of contemporary technological innovation. To this end, the volume showcases the intersection of ‘natural’ bodies with technology, gender, sexuality and reproduction. On the one hand, techno bodies tend to align with normative ideas about gender, and sexuality. On the other hand, body modification and/or enhancement techniques work hand in hand with economic and political power and knowledge, thus they often produce techno bodies that are shaped according to individual needs, i.e. according to a certain lifestyle. Consequently, techno bodies threaten to alter traditional ideas of masculinity, femininity, male and female sexuality and beauty.

The Moon in the Greek and Roman Imagination

The Moon in the Greek and Roman Imagination PDF Author: Karen ní Mheallaigh
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108603181
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Moon exerted a powerful influence on ancient intellectual history, as a playground for the scientific imagination. This book explores the history of the Moon in the Greco-Roman imaginary from Homer to Lucian, with special focus on those accounts of the Moon, its attributes, and its 'inhabitants' given by ancient philosophers, natural scientists and imaginative writers including Pythagoreans, Plato and the Old Academy, Varro, Plutarch and Lucian. ní Mheallaigh shows how the Moon's enigmatic presence made it a key site for thinking about the gaze (erotic, philosophical and scientific) and the relation between appearance and reality. It was also a site for hoax in antiquity as well as today. Central issues explored include the view from elsewhere (selēnoskopia), the relation of science and fiction, the interaction between the beginnings of science in the classical polis and the imperial period, and the limits of knowledge itself.

Sculpture, weaving, and the body in Plato

Sculpture, weaving, and the body in Plato PDF Author: Zacharoula Petraki
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3111178757
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 439

Get Book Here

Book Description
Plato’s Timaeus is unique in Greek Antiquity for presenting the creation of the world as the work of a divine demiurge. The maker bestows order on sensible things and imitates the world of the intellect by using the Forms as models. While the creation-myth of the Timaeus seems unparalleled, this book argues that it is not the first of Plato’s dialogues to use artistic language to articulate the relationship of the objects of the material world to the world of the intellect. The book adopts an interpretative angle that is sensitive to the visual and art-historical developments of Classical Athens to argue that sculpture, revolutionized by the advent of the lost-wax technique for the production of bronze statues, lies at the heart of Plato’s conception of the relation of the human soul and body to the Forms. It shows that, despite the severe criticism of mimēsis in the Republic, Plato’s use of artistic language rests on a positive model of mimēsis. Plato was in fact engaged in a constructive dialogue with material culture and he found in the technical processes and the cultural semantics of sculpture and of the art of weaving a valuable way to conceptualise and communicate complex ideas about humans’ relation to the Forms.

Classical Literature and Posthumanism

Classical Literature and Posthumanism PDF Author: Giulia Maria Chesi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350069523
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 481

Get Book Here

Book Description
The subject of the posthuman, of what it means to be or to cease to be human, is emerging as a shared point of debate at large in the natural and social sciences and the humanities. This volume asks what classical learning can bring to the table of posthuman studies, assembling chapters that explore how exactly the human self of Greek and Latin literature understands its own relation to animals, monsters, objects, cyborgs and robotic devices. With its widely diverse habitat of heterogeneous bodies, minds, and selves, classical literature again and again blurs the boundaries between the human and the non-human; not to equate and confound the human with its other, but playfully to highlight difference and hybridity, as an invitation to appraise the animal, monstrous or mechanical/machinic parts lodged within humans. This comprehensive collection unites contributors from across the globe, each delving into a different classical text or narrative and its configuration of human subjectivity-how human selves relate to other entities around them. For students and scholars of classical literature and the posthuman, this book is a first point of reference.

Theories of Colour from Democritus to Descartes

Theories of Colour from Democritus to Descartes PDF Author: Véronique Decaix
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040150853
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 377

Get Book Here

Book Description
Theories of Colour from Democritus to Descartes investigates issues of the ontological status and perception of colours, such as: What is the nature of colours? Do they exist independently of the subjects who perceive them? And if so, how are they generated and how do they differ from one another? These are some of the questions raised by philosophers, but what has been lacking is an account of the various theories about colours through different periods of the history of philosophy. Exploring philosophical debates on the nature and perception of colours from a historical perspective, this book presents how different theories from Antiquity through the Middle Ages to the early modern era explain the nature of colours, their generation, and the way they are perceived. Twelve eminent historians of philosophy analyse the theories of colours prevailing at critical points in the history of Western philosophy, from its beginnings with Democritus to Descartes and the early modern period. This book will appeal to students and scholars working on the history of philosophy (ancient, medieval, Arabic and Latin, and early modern) as well as those interested in contemporary philosophy: philosophy of the mind, philosophy of perception, phenomenology, metaphysics, and neurosciences. A broader audience may also include researchers in psychology, cultural history, and the history of art.