The Giant Hero in Medieval Literature

The Giant Hero in Medieval Literature PDF Author: Tina Marie Boyer
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004316418
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
In The Giant Hero in Medieval Literature Tina Boyer counters the monstrous status of giants by arguing that they are more broadly legible than traditionally believed. Building on an initial analysis of St. Augustine’s City of God, Bernard of Clairvaux’s deliberations on monsters and marvels, and readings in Tomasin von Zerclaere’s Welsche Gast provide insights into the spectrum of antagonistic and heroic roles that giants play in the courtly realm. This approach places the figure of the giant within the cultural and religious confines of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and allows an in-depth analysis of epics and romances through political, social, religious, and gender identities tied to the figure of the giant. Sources range from German to French, English, and Iberian works.

The Giant Hero in Medieval Literature

The Giant Hero in Medieval Literature PDF Author: Tina Marie Boyer
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004316418
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book Here

Book Description
In The Giant Hero in Medieval Literature Tina Boyer counters the monstrous status of giants by arguing that they are more broadly legible than traditionally believed. Building on an initial analysis of St. Augustine’s City of God, Bernard of Clairvaux’s deliberations on monsters and marvels, and readings in Tomasin von Zerclaere’s Welsche Gast provide insights into the spectrum of antagonistic and heroic roles that giants play in the courtly realm. This approach places the figure of the giant within the cultural and religious confines of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and allows an in-depth analysis of epics and romances through political, social, religious, and gender identities tied to the figure of the giant. Sources range from German to French, English, and Iberian works.

Pleasure and Leisure in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age

Pleasure and Leisure in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age PDF Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110623072
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 766

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Book Description
Jan Huizinga and Roger Caillois have already taught us to realize how important games and play have been for pre-modern civilization. Recent research has begun to acknowledge the fundamental importance of these aspects in cultural, religious, philosophical, and literary terms. This volume expands on the traditional approach still very much focused on the materiality of game (toys, cards, dice, falcons, dolls, etc.) and acknowledges that game constituted also a form of coming to terms with human existence in an unstable and volatile world determined by universal randomness and fortune. Whether considering blessings or horse fighting, falconry or card games, playing with dice or dolls, we can gain a much deeper understanding of medieval and early modern society when we consider how people pursued pleasure and how they structured their leisure time. The contributions examine a wide gamut of approaches to pleasure, considering health issues, eroticism, tournaments, playing music, reading and listening, drinking alcohol, gambling and throwing dice. This large issue was also relevant, of course, in non-Christian societies, and constitutes a critical concern both for the past and the present because we are all homines ludentes.

Visual Aggression

Visual Aggression PDF Author: Assaf Pinkus
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271087692
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
Why does a society seek out images of violence? What can the consumption of violent imagery teach us about the history of violence and the ways in which it has been represented and understood? Assaf Pinkus considers these questions within the context of what he calls galleries of violence, the torment imagery that flourished in German-speaking regions during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Exploring these images and the visceral bodily responses that they produced in their viewers, Pinkus argues that the new visual discourse on violence was a watershed in premodern conceptualizations of selfhood. Images of martyrdom in late medieval Germany reveal a strikingly brutal parade of passion: severed heads, split skulls, mutilated organs, extracted fingernails and teeth, and myriad other torments. Stripped from their devotional context and presented simply as brutal acts, these portrayals assailed viewers’ bodies and minds so violently that they amounted to what Pinkus describes as “visual aggressions.” Addressing contemporary discourses on violence and cruelty, the aesthetics of violence, and the eroticism of the tortured body, Pinkus ties these galleries of violence to larger cultural concerns about the ethics of violence and bodily integrity in the conceptualization of early modern personhood. Innovative and convincing, this study heralds a fundamental shift in the scholarly conversation about premodern violence, moving from a focus on the imitatio Christi and the liturgy of punishment to the notion of violence as a moral problem in an ethical system. Scholars of medieval and early modern art, history, and literature will welcome and engage with Pinkus’s research for years to come.

Single Combat and Warfare in German Literature of the High Middle Ages

Single Combat and Warfare in German Literature of the High Middle Ages PDF Author: Rachel E. Kellett
Publisher: MHRA
ISBN: 1905981481
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
Combat is one of the central themes of Middle High German narrative literature, and of significant interest to medievalists in general. Nevertheless, few studies to date have attempted a detailed analysis of the depiction of combat in literary texts. Rachel Kellett uses an inclusive approach to the details of combat descriptions in order to analyse minutely the scenes of single combat and battle presented in two major narrative works by Der Stricker, the epic Karl der Grosse and the Arthurian romance Daniel von dem Bluuml;henden Tal, written between 1220 and 1250. The author compares these works with a wide range of other texts, both French and German, and investigates the relationship between Stricker's depiction of combat and that found in the works of Hartmann von Aue and Wolfram von Eschenbach among others. She also draws on historical research into medieval warfare, tournament and the tradition of the judicial combat, which adds valuable depth to her analysis of literary texts. Overall, this study provides new insights into the depiction of combat in Middle High German literature as a whole, while at the same time highlighting hitherto unnoticed aspects of the writings of Der Stricker as an individual author, and bringing a new perspective on the ambiguous role played by combat in the equally ambiguous Daniel von dem Bluuml;henden Tal.

Origin Legends in Early Medieval Western Europe

Origin Legends in Early Medieval Western Europe PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900452066X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 477

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Book Description
This volume contains work by scholars actively publishing on origin legends across early medieval western Europe, from the fall of Rome to the high Middle Ages. Its thematic structure creates dialogue between texts and regions traditionally studied in isolation.

Treason

Treason PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004400699
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
Set against the framework of modern political concerns, Treason: Medieval and Early Modern Adultery, Betrayal, and Shame considers the various forms of treachery in a variety of sources, including literature, historical chronicles, and material culture creating a complex portrait of the development of this high crime.

Paranormal Encounters in Iceland 1150–1400

Paranormal Encounters in Iceland 1150–1400 PDF Author: Ármann Jakobsson
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501513869
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 446

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Book Description
This anthology of international scholarship offers new critical approaches to the study of the many manifestations of the paranormal in the Middle Ages. The guiding principle of the collection is to depart from symbolic or reductionist readings of the subject matter in favor of focusing on the paranormal as human experience and, essentially, on how these experiences are defined by the sources. The authors work with a variety of medieval Icelandic textual sources, including family sagas, legendary sagas, romances, poetry, hagiography and miracles, exploring the diversity of paranormal activity in the medieval North. This volume questions all previous definitions of the subject matter, most decisively the idea of saga realism, and opens up new avenues in saga research.

Outsiders

Outsiders PDF Author: Sylvia Huot
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268081832
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Giants are a ubiquitous feature of medieval romance. As remnants of a British prehistory prior to the civilization established, according to the Historium regum Britannie, by Brutus and his Trojan followers, giants are permanently at odds with the chivalric culture of the romance world. Whether they are portrayed as brute savages or as tyrannical pagan lords, giants serve as a limit against which the chivalric hero can measure himself. In Outsiders: The Humanity and Inhumanity of Giants in Medieval French Prose Romance, Sylvia Huot argues that the presence of giants allows for fantasies of ethnic and cultural conflict and conquest, and for the presentation—and suppression—of alternative narrative and historical trajectories that might have made Arthurian Britain a very different place. Focusing on medieval French prose romance and drawing on aspects of postcolonial theory, Huot examines the role of giants in constructions of race, class, gender, and human subjectivity. She selects for study the well-known prose Lancelot and the prose Tristan, as well as the lesser known Perceforest, Le Conte du papegau, Guiron le Courtois, and Des Grantz Geants. By asking to what extent views of giants in Arthurian romance respond to questions that concern twenty-first-century readers, Huot demonstrates the usefulness of current theoretical concepts and the issues they raise for rethinking medieval literature from a modern perspective.

Ethics in the Arthurian Legend

Ethics in the Arthurian Legend PDF Author: Melissa Ridley Elmes
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 184384687X
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 421

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Book Description
An interdisciplinary and trans-historical investigation of the representation of ethics in Arthurian Literature. From its earliest days, the Arthurian legend has been preoccupied with questions of good kingship, the behaviours of a ruling class, and their effects on communities, societies, and nations, both locally and in imperial and colonizing contexts. Ethical considerations inform and are informed by local anxieties tied to questions of power and identity, especially where leadership, service, and governance are concerned; they provide a framework for understanding how the texts operate as didactic and critical tools of these subjects. This book brings together chapters drawing on English, Welsh, German, Dutch, French, and Norse iterations of the Arthurian legend, and bridging premodern and modern temporalities, to investigate the representation of ethics in Arthurian literature across interdisciplinary and transhistorical lines. They engage a variety of methodologies, including gender, critical race theory, philology, literature and the law, translation theory, game studies, comparative, critical, and close reading, and modern editorial and authorial practices. Texts interrogated range from Culhwch and Olwen to Parzival, Roman van Walewein, Tristrams Saga, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Malory's Morte Darthur. As a whole, the approaches and findings in this volume attest to the continued value and importance of the Arthurian legend and its scholarship as a vibrant field through which to locate and understand the many ways in which medieval literature continues to inform modern sensibilities and institutions, particularly where the matter of ethics is concerned.

«He should have listened to his wife!»

«He should have listened to his wife!» PDF Author: Annegret Oehme
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110624400
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 88

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Book Description
This publication uncovers two previously dismissed pre-modern adaptations of the Middle High German Wigalois (1215) by exploring their different approaches to female agency in comparison with the original Wigalois, the Yiddish Viduvilt (14th ct.) and the German Wigoleis (15th ct.). Traditionally, scholarship often concentrated on the Yiddish text presenting female figures as behaving in a "Jewish manner" or embodying famous Jewish mythical figures such as Lilith (see Achim Jaeger / Robert G. Warnock). Rather than trying to argue for or against a figure’s "Jewishness," I evaluate these interpretations from the perspective of Arthurian Literature by showing that the construction of female agency is at the center of all three adaptations of this important chapter of German-Jewish literature and culture.