The Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Culture

The Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Culture PDF Author: Darryll Grantley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Taking as its chronological starting-point the female body of late medieval devotional literature, the volume moves on to a consideration of the representation of gendered bodies in later literature. It then proceeds to examine sixteenth-century occupational orderings of the (male) body in education, the civil service and the army, and involves explorations into a variety of rituals for the purification, ordering and disciplining of the flesh. It includes enquiries into the miraculous royal body, demon bodies, the 'virtual' body of satire, and ends the late seventeenth century with dramatic representations of the diseased body, and the grotesque bodies of travellers' tales as signifiers of racial difference. It pushes forward post-modern notions of the body as a site for competing discourses. It provides new dimensions to fantasies, rituals and regulations in narratives ('fictions') of the body as identifications of forms of knowledge unique to the early modern period. Each of the essays sheds new light on how these late medieval and early modern narratives function to produce specialized and discrete languages of the body that cannot be understood simply in terms, say, of religion, philosophy or physiology, but produce their own discrete forms of knowledge. Thus the essays materially contribute to an understanding of the relationship between the body and spatial knowledge by giving new bearings on epistemologies built upon pre-modern perceptions about bodily spaces and boundaries. They address these issues by analysing forms of knowledge constructed through regulations of the body, fantasies about extensions to the body and creations of bodily, psychic, intellectual and spiritual space. The essays pose important questions about how these epistemologies offer different investments of knowledge into structures of power. What constitutes these knowledges? What are the politics of corporeal spaces? In what forms of knowledge about spatial and bodily perceptions and practices are these early modern narratives embedded? What ideologies shape and contain them? The collection deliberately incorporates a period range which encompasses considerable cultural and ideological shifts that impact upon perceptions of the body. The choice of essays in the volume recognizes both continuities and discontinuities between perceptions of the body in the medieval and early modern periods.

The Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Culture

The Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Culture PDF Author: Darryll Grantley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Get Book Here

Book Description
Taking as its chronological starting-point the female body of late medieval devotional literature, the volume moves on to a consideration of the representation of gendered bodies in later literature. It then proceeds to examine sixteenth-century occupational orderings of the (male) body in education, the civil service and the army, and involves explorations into a variety of rituals for the purification, ordering and disciplining of the flesh. It includes enquiries into the miraculous royal body, demon bodies, the 'virtual' body of satire, and ends the late seventeenth century with dramatic representations of the diseased body, and the grotesque bodies of travellers' tales as signifiers of racial difference. It pushes forward post-modern notions of the body as a site for competing discourses. It provides new dimensions to fantasies, rituals and regulations in narratives ('fictions') of the body as identifications of forms of knowledge unique to the early modern period. Each of the essays sheds new light on how these late medieval and early modern narratives function to produce specialized and discrete languages of the body that cannot be understood simply in terms, say, of religion, philosophy or physiology, but produce their own discrete forms of knowledge. Thus the essays materially contribute to an understanding of the relationship between the body and spatial knowledge by giving new bearings on epistemologies built upon pre-modern perceptions about bodily spaces and boundaries. They address these issues by analysing forms of knowledge constructed through regulations of the body, fantasies about extensions to the body and creations of bodily, psychic, intellectual and spiritual space. The essays pose important questions about how these epistemologies offer different investments of knowledge into structures of power. What constitutes these knowledges? What are the politics of corporeal spaces? In what forms of knowledge about spatial and bodily perceptions and practices are these early modern narratives embedded? What ideologies shape and contain them? The collection deliberately incorporates a period range which encompasses considerable cultural and ideological shifts that impact upon perceptions of the body. The choice of essays in the volume recognizes both continuities and discontinuities between perceptions of the body in the medieval and early modern periods.

Stages of Dismemberment

Stages of Dismemberment PDF Author: Margaret E. Owens
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874138887
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
"This study has essentially two focuses, two stories to tell. One story traces the secularization, theatricalization, and uncanny returns of suppressed religious culture in early modern drama. The other story concerns the tendency of the theater to expose contingencies and gaps in politico-judicial practices of spectacular violence." "The investigation covers a broad range of plays dating from the fifteenth century to the closing of the theatres in 1642; however, three chapters are devoted to extensive analysis of single plays: R.B.'s Apius and Virginia, Shakespeare's 2 Henry VI, and Marlowe's Doctor Faustus."--Jacket.

The Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Culture

The Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Culture PDF Author: Nina Taunton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351893866
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
Taking as its chronological starting-point the female body of late medieval devotional literature, the volume moves on to a consideration of the representation of gendered bodies in later literature. It then proceeds to examine sixteenth-century occupational orderings of the (male) body in education, the civil service and the army, and involves explorations into a variety of rituals for the purification, ordering and disciplining of the flesh. It includes enquiries into the miraculous royal body, demon bodies, the 'virtual' body of satire, and ends the late seventeenth century with dramatic representations of the diseased body, and the grotesque bodies of travellers’ tales as signifiers of racial difference. It pushes forward post-modern notions of the body as a site for competing discourses. It provides new dimensions to fantasies, rituals and regulations in narratives ('fictions') of the body as identifications of forms of knowledge unique to the early modern period. Each of the essays sheds new light on how these late medieval and early modern narratives function to produce specialized and discrete languages of the body that cannot be understood simply in terms, say, of religion, philosophy or physiology, but produce their own discrete forms of knowledge. Thus the essays materially contribute to an understanding of the relationship between the body and spatial knowledge by giving new bearings on epistemologies built upon pre-modern perceptions about bodily spaces and boundaries. They address these issues by analysing forms of knowledge constructed through regulations of the body, fantasies about extensions to the body and creations of bodily, psychic, intellectual and spiritual space. The essays pose important questions about how these epistemologies offer different investments of knowledge into structures of power. What constitutes these knowledges? What are the politics of corporeal spaces? In what forms of knowledge about spatial and bodily perceptions and p

Disembodied Heads in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

Disembodied Heads in Medieval and Early Modern Culture PDF Author: Barbara Baert
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004253556
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
Discussing medieval and early modern 'disembodied heads' this collection questions the why and how of the primacy of the head in the bodily hierarchy during the premodern period. On the basis of beliefs, mythologies and traditions concerning the head, they come to an ‘cultural anatomy’ of the head.

The Interaction of Art and Relics in Late Medieval and Early Modern Art

The Interaction of Art and Relics in Late Medieval and Early Modern Art PDF Author: Livia Stoenescu
Publisher:
ISBN: 9782503583983
Category : Christian art and symbolism
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
The collection of essays gathered in this volume investigates the interaction between art and relics as a distinct historical relevance for devotional art of Early Modernity and the Renaissance. Recent studies in the material culture of artifacts from these periods have drawn increasing attention to a sense of material tangibility derived from relics. Putting that conclusion into perspective, this edited collection focuses on the aesthetic meaning generated by a specific material culture of sanctity - one in which artists based their practice upon the nature, variety, and history of relics. Works of art that contained relics shared in the aura of the relics, defining themselves as non-substitutable signs, or signs that preserved the physical relationship to the immutable nature and origin of relics. As studied in this volume, funerary monuments, chapel decorations, altarpieces, liturgical objects, and sacred sites yielded an unordinary aesthetic meaning, one that captured and at the same time transmitted the histories linked to a relic. Each chapter emphasizes the specific history contained within works of art premised upon relics and thus forever embedded in the relics' status as sacred originals..

A Companion to Death, Burial, and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, c. 1300–1700

A Companion to Death, Burial, and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, c. 1300–1700 PDF Author: Philip Booth
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004443436
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 529

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Book Description
This companion volume seeks to trace the development of ideas relating to death, burial, and the remembrance of the dead in Europe from ca.1300-1700.

The Viewer and the Printed Image in Late Medieval Europe

The Viewer and the Printed Image in Late Medieval Europe PDF Author: DavidS. Areford
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351539671
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 622

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Book Description
Structured around in-depth and interconnected case studies and driven by a methodology of material, contextual, and iconographic analysis, this book argues that early European single-sheet prints, in both the north and south, are best understood as highly accessible objects shaped and framed by individual viewers. Author David Areford offers a synthetic historical narrative of early prints that stresses their unusual material nature, as well as their accessibility to a variety of viewers, both lay and monastic. This volume represents a shift in the study of the early printed image, one that mirrors the widespread movement in art history away from issues of production, style, and the artist toward issues of reception, function, and the viewer. Areford's approach is intensely grounded in the object, especially the unacknowledged material complexity of the print as a portable, malleable, and accessible image that depended on a response that was not only visual but often physical, emotional, and psychological. Recognizing that early prints were not primarily designed for aesthetic appreciation, the author analyzes how their meanings stemmed from specific functions involving private devotion, protection, indulgences, the cult of saints, pilgrimage, exorcism, the art of memory, and anti-Semitic propaganda. Although the medium's first century was clearly transitional and experimental, Areford explores how its potential to impact viewers in new ways?both positive and negative?was quickly realized.

The Reproductive Unconscious in Late Medieval and Early Modern England

The Reproductive Unconscious in Late Medieval and Early Modern England PDF Author: Jennifer Wynne Hellwarth
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136720928
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
Drawing together social and medical history and literary studies, The Reproductive Unconscious in Late Medieval and Early Modern England studies the social practices and metaphorical representations of childbirth in medieval and early modern texts and argues for the existence of a reproductive unconscious. Discussing midwifery treatises, obstetrical and gynecological manuals, and devotional texts written for or by women, the author illustrates the ways in which medieval and early modern men and women negotiated a conflict between the ideological and material need of the culture for them to procreate, and an ideological injunction that they remain virginal and non-procreative.

The Ends of the Body

The Ends of the Body PDF Author: Jill Ross
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442644702
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
Drawing on Arabic, English, French, Irish, Latin and Spanish sources, the essays share a focus on the body's productive capacity - whether expressed through the flesh's materiality, or through its role in performing meaning. The collection is divided into four clusters. 'Foundations' traces the use of physical remnants of the body in the form of relics or memorial monuments that replicate the form of the body as foundational in communal structures; 'Performing the Body' focuses on the ways in which the individual body functions as the medium through which the social body is maintained; 'Bodily Rhetoric' explores the poetic linkage of body and meaning; and 'Material Bodies' engages with the processes of corporeal being, ranging from the energetic flow of humoural liquids to the decay of the flesh. Together, the essays provide new perspectives on the centrality of the medieval body and underscore the vitality of this rich field of study.

The Place of the Dead

The Place of the Dead PDF Author: Bruce Gordon
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521645188
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
This volume of essays provides a comprehensive treatment of a very significant component of the societies of late medieval and early modern Europe: the dead. It argues that to contemporaries the 'placing' of the dead, in physical, spiritual and social terms, was a vitally important exercise, and one which often involved conflict and complex negotiation. The contributions range widely geographically, from Scotland to Transylvania, and address a spectrum of themes: attitudes towards the corpse, patterns of burial, forms of commemoration, the treatment of dead infants, the nature of the afterlife and ghosts. Individually the essays help to illuminate several current historiographical concerns: the significance of the Black Death, the impact of the protestant and catholic Reformations, and interactions between 'elite' and 'popular' culture. Collectively, by exploring the social and cultural meanings of attitudes towards the dead, they provide insight into the way these past societies understood themselves.