Author: Thomas Honegger
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783039103928
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 236
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Book Description
This volume comprises selected papers of SEM IV & V (Studientag Englisches Mittelalter), held at Potsdam in 2002 & 2003, and provides a representative cross-section of topics in the field of English medieval studies in Germany and Switzerland. The spectrum ranges from cultural studies centring around the history of ideas, questions of gender and the reception of the Middle Ages, to philological and linguistic approaches focussing on manuscript studies, semantics and (textual) communication.
Author: Paul Szarmach
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442664584
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 369
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Book Description
The twelve essays in this collection advance the contemporary study of the women saints of Anglo-Saxon England by challenging received wisdom and offering alternative methodologies. The work embraces a number of different scholarly approaches, from codicological study to feminist theory. While some contributions are dedicated to the description and reconstruction of female lives of saints and their cults, others explore the broader ideological and cultural investments of the literature. The volume concentrates on four major areas: the female saint in the Old English Martyrology, genre including hagiography and homelitic writing, motherhood and chastity, and differing perspectives on lives of virgin martyrs. The essays reveal how saints’ lives that exist on the apparent margins of orthodoxy actually demonstrate a successful literary challenge extending the idea of a holy life.
Author: Malcolm Godden
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521883429
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 424
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Book Description
Anglo-Saxon England is the only publication which consistently embraces all the main aspects of study of Anglo-Saxon history and culture - linguistic, literary, textual, palaeographic, religious, intellectual, historical, archaeological and artistic - and which promotes the more unusual interests - in music or medicine or education, for example. Articles in volume 35 include: Record of the twelfth conference of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists at Bavarian-American Centre, University of Munich, 1-6 August 2005; Virgil the Grammarian and Bede: a preliminary study; Knowledge of whelk dyes and pigments in Anglo-Saxon England; The representation of the mind as an enclosure in Old English poetry; The origin of the numbered sections in Beowulf and in other Old English poems; An ethnic dating of Beowulf; Hrothgar's horses: feral or thoroughbred?; 'thelthryth of Ely in a lost calendar from Munich; Alfred's epistemological metaphors: eagan modes and scip modes; Bibliography for 2005.
Author: Patrick J. Murphy
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271078170
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274
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Book Description
The vibrant and enigmatic Exeter Riddles (ca. 960–980) are among the most compelling texts in the field of medieval studies, in part because they lack textually supplied solutions. Indeed, these ninety-five Old English riddles have become so popular that they have even been featured on posters for the London Underground and have inspired a sculpture in downtown Exeter. Modern scholars have responded enthusiastically to the challenge of solving the Riddles, but have generally examined them individually. Few have considered the collection as a whole or in a broader context. In this book, Patrick Murphy takes an innovative approach, arguing that in order to understand the Riddles more fully, we must step back from the individual puzzles and consider the group in light of the textual and oral traditions from which they emerged. He offers fresh insights into the nature of the Exeter Riddles’ complexity, their intellectual foundations, and their lively use of metaphor.
Author: Eva von Contzen
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526100274
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
This study places the Scottish compilation of saints' legends within the hagiographic landscape of medieval Britain.
Author: Jennifer Neville
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487552556
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
At the end of the tenth-century English manuscript the Exeter Book, there is a collection of almost one hundred riddles. They are notable for many reasons, but one feature in particular has challenged modern readers: their lack of solutions. In Truth Is Trickiest, Jennifer Neville argues that the absence of solutions, rather than being an unfortunate accident, uncovers an essential quality of these texts. In opposition to the general expectation that a successfully solved riddle will have one correct answer, Neville argues that the Exeter Book riddles are written to generate multiple solutions. The correct response to an Exeter Book riddle is not a single, elegant solution but instead an ongoing process of interpretation that leads readers to question what they think they know. Truth Is Trickiest contextualizes its readings within the larger field of Old English poetry, early medieval material culture, and Anglo-Latin riddles. The book pursues the central issue of interpretation in relation to social values, craftsmanship, hierarchical social structures, violence, irony, humour, and sexuality. It concludes with a full list of previously proposed solutions to document the history of the ongoing argument that the Exeter Book riddles have provoked.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900431069X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 904
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Book Description
The Egyptian Nonnus of Panopolis (5th century AD), author of both the ‘pagan’ Dionysiaca, the longest known poem from Antiquity (21,286 lines in 48 books, the same number of books as the Iliad and Odyssey combined), and a ‘Christian’ hexameter Paraphrase of St John’s Gospel (3,660 lines in 21 books), is no doubt the most representative poet of Greek Late Antiquity. Brill’s Companion to Nonnus of Panopolis provides a collection of 32 essays by a large international group of scholars, experts in the field of archaic, Hellenistic, Imperial, and Christian poetry, as well as scholars of late antique Egypt, Greek mythology and religion, who explore the various aspects of Nonnus’ baroque poetry and its historical, religious and cultural background.
Author: Katherine Lewis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134454600
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
Kingship and Masculinity in Late Medieval England explores the dynamic between kingship and masculinity in fifteenth century England, with a particular focus on Henry V and Henry VI. The role of gender in the rhetoric and practice of medieval kingship is still largely unexplored by medieval historians. Discourses of masculinity informed much of the contemporary comment on fifteenth century kings, for a variety of purposes: to praise and eulogise but also to explain shortcomings and provide justification for deposition. Katherine J. Lewis examines discourses of masculinity in relation to contemporary understandings of the nature and acquisition of manhood in the period and considers the extent to which judgements of a king’s performance were informed by his ability to embody the right balance of manly qualities. This book’s primary concern is with how these two kings were presented, represented and perceived by those around them, but it also asks how far Henry V and Henry VI can be said to have understood the importance of personifying a particular brand of masculinity in their performance of kingship and of meeting the expectations of their subjects in this respect. It explores the extent to which their established reputations as inherently ‘manly’ and ‘unmanly’ kings were the product of their handling of political circumstances, but owed something to factors beyond their immediate control as well. Consideration is also given to Margaret of Anjou’s manipulation of ideologies of kingship and manhood in response to her husband’s incapacity, and the ramifications of this for perceptions of the relational gender identities which she and Henry VI embodied together. Kingship and Masculinity in Late Medieval England is an essential resource for students of gender and medieval history.
Author: Dieter Bitterli
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 0802093523
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233
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Book Description
Perhaps the most enigmatic cultural artifacts that survive from the Anglo-Saxon period are the Old English riddle poems that were preserved in the tenth century Exeter Book manuscript. Clever, challenging, and notoriously obscure, the riddles have fascinated readers for centuries and provided crucial insight into the period. In Say What I Am Called, Dieter Bitterli takes a fresh look at the riddles by examining them in the context of earlier Anglo-Latin riddles. Bitterli argues that there is a vigorous common tradition between Anglo-Latin and Old English riddles and details how the contents of the Exeter Book emulate and reassess their Latin predecessors while also expanding their literary and formal conventions. The book also considers the ways in which convention and content relate to writing in a vernacular language. A rich and illuminating work that is as intriguing as the riddles themselves, Say What I Am Called is a rewarding study of some of the most interesting works from the Anglo-Saxon period.
Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666917877
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 295
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Book Description
The Secret in Medieval Literature: Alternative Worlds in the Middle Ages explores the many strange phenomena, both in the Middle Ages and today, that do not find any good rational explanations. Those do not pertain to magic or to religion in the traditional sense of the word; they are secrets of an epistemological kind and tend to defy human rationality, without being marginal or irrelevant. At first sight, we might believe that we face elements from fairy tales, but the medieval cases discussed here go far beyond such a simplistic approach to the mysterious dimension of secrets. In fact, as this book argues, medieval poets commonly engaged with alternative forces and described their workings within the human context (both in the Latin West and in the East), without being able to come to terms with them critically. Those mysteries appear both in heroic epics and courtly romances, among other genres, and they figure more frequently than we might have assumed. On the one hand, we could conceive of those secrets as the product of literary liberties and imagination; on the other, those secrets prove to be rather serious agents intervening in the lives of the fictional protagonists. By the same token, our modern world is not all rationality and material conditions either. The study of secrets in the Middle Ages thus opens the pathway toward a new epistemology both for the people in the pre-modern age and us today.
