The Masculine Self in Late Medieval England

The Masculine Self in Late Medieval England PDF Author: Derek G. Neal
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226569594
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
What did it mean to be a man in medieval England? Most would answer this question by alluding to the power and status men enjoyed in a patriarchal society, or they might refer to iconic images of chivalrous knights. While these popular ideas do have their roots in the history of the aristocracy, the experience of ordinary men was far more complicated. Marshalling a wide array of colorful evidence—including legal records, letters, medical sources, and the literature of the period—Derek G. Neal here plumbs the social and cultural significance of masculinity during the generations born between the Black Death and the Protestant Reformation. He discovers that social relations between men, founded on the ideals of honesty and self-restraint, were at least as important as their domination and control of women in defining their identities. By carefully exploring the social, physical, and psychological aspects of masculinity, The Masculine Self in Late Medieval England offers a uniquely comprehensive account of the exterior and interior lives of medieval men.

The Masculine Self in Late Medieval England

The Masculine Self in Late Medieval England PDF Author: Derek G. Neal
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226569594
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Get Book Here

Book Description
What did it mean to be a man in medieval England? Most would answer this question by alluding to the power and status men enjoyed in a patriarchal society, or they might refer to iconic images of chivalrous knights. While these popular ideas do have their roots in the history of the aristocracy, the experience of ordinary men was far more complicated. Marshalling a wide array of colorful evidence—including legal records, letters, medical sources, and the literature of the period—Derek G. Neal here plumbs the social and cultural significance of masculinity during the generations born between the Black Death and the Protestant Reformation. He discovers that social relations between men, founded on the ideals of honesty and self-restraint, were at least as important as their domination and control of women in defining their identities. By carefully exploring the social, physical, and psychological aspects of masculinity, The Masculine Self in Late Medieval England offers a uniquely comprehensive account of the exterior and interior lives of medieval men.

The Masculine Self in Late Medieval England

The Masculine Self in Late Medieval England PDF Author: Derek Neal
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
What did it mean to be a man in medieval England? Most would answer this question by alluding to the power and status men enjoyed in a patriarchal society, or they might refer to iconic images of chivalrous knights. While these popular ideas do have their.

Kingship and Masculinity in Late Medieval England

Kingship and Masculinity in Late Medieval England PDF 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.

The Masculine Self

The Masculine Self PDF Author: Christopher Kilmartin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781597380249
Category : Masculinity
Languages : en
Pages : 423

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Book Description


Looking Inward

Looking Inward PDF Author: Jennifer Bryan
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812201493
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
"You must see yourself." The exhortation was increasingly familiar to English men and women in the two centuries before the Reformation. They encountered it repeatedly in their devotional books, the popular guides to spiritual self-improvement that were reaching an ever-growing readership at the end of the Middle Ages. But what did it mean to see oneself? What was the nature of the self to be envisioned, and what eyes and mirrors were needed to see and know it properly? Looking Inward traces a complex network of answers to such questions, exploring how English readers between 1350 and 1550 learned to envision, examine, and change themselves in the mirrors of devotional literature. By all accounts, it was the most popular literature of the period. With literacy on the rise, an outpouring of translations and adaptations flowed across traditional boundaries between religious and lay, and between female and male, audiences. As forms of piety changed, as social categories became increasingly porous, and as the heart became an increasingly privileged and contested location, the growth of devotional reading created a crucial arena for the making of literate subjectivities. The models of private reading and self-reflection constructed therein would have important implications, not only for English spirituality, but for social, political, and poetic identities, up to the Reformation and beyond. In Looking Inward, Bryan examines a wide range of devotional and secular texts, from works by Walter Hilton, Julian of Norwich, and Thomas Hoccleve to neglected translations like The Chastising of God's Children and The Pricking of Love. She explores the models of identification and imitation through which they sought to reach the inmost selves of their readers, and the scripts for spiritual desire that they offered for the cultivation of the heart. Illuminating the psychological paradigms at the heart of the genre, Bryan provides fresh insights into how late medieval men and women sought to know, labor in, and profit themselves by means of books.

Bureaucratic Muse

Bureaucratic Muse PDF Author: Ethan Knapp
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271039876
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description


Kingship and Masculinity in Late Medieval England

Kingship and Masculinity in Late Medieval England PDF Author: Katherine Lewis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134454538
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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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.

Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London

Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London PDF Author: Shannon McSheffrey
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812203976
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Awarded honorable mention for the 2007 Wallace K. Ferguson Prize sponsored by the Canadian Historical Association How were marital and sexual relationships woven into the fabric of late medieval society, and what form did these relationships take? Using extensive documentary evidence from both the ecclesiastical court system and the records of city and royal government, as well as advice manuals, chronicles, moral tales, and liturgical texts, Shannon McSheffrey focuses her study on England's largest city in the second half of the fifteenth century. Marriage was a religious union—one of the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church and imbued with deep spiritual significance—but the marital unit of husband and wife was also the fundamental domestic, social, political, and economic unit of medieval society. As such, marriage created political alliances at all levels, from the arena of international politics to local neighborhoods. Sexual relationships outside marriage were even more complicated. McSheffrey notes that medieval Londoners saw them as variously attributable to female seduction or to male lustfulness, as irrelevant or deeply damaging to society and to the body politic, as economically productive or wasteful of resources. Yet, like marriage, sexual relationships were also subject to control and influence from parents, relatives, neighbors, civic officials, parish priests, and ecclesiastical judges. Although by medieval canon law a marriage was irrevocable from the moment a man and a woman exchanged vows of consent before two witnesses, in practice marriage was usually a socially complicated process involving many people. McSheffrey looks more broadly at sex, governance, and civic morality to show how medieval patriarchy extended a far wider reach than a father's governance over his biological offspring. By focusing on a particular time and place, she not only elucidates the culture of England's metropolitan center but also contributes generally to our understanding of the social mechanisms through which premodern European people negotiated their lives.

Voice in Later Medieval English Literature

Voice in Later Medieval English Literature PDF Author: David Lawton
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198792409
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
David Lawton approaches later medieval English vernacular culture in terms of voice. As texts and discourses shift in translation and in use from one language to another, antecedent texts are revoiced in ways that recreate them (as "public interiorities") without effacing their history or future. The approach yields important insights into the voice work of late medieval poets, especially Langland and Chaucer, and also their fifteenth-century successors, who treat their work as they have treated their precursors. It also helps illuminate vernacular religious writing and its aspirations, and it addresses literary and cultural change, such as the effect of censorship and increasing political instability in and beyond the fifteenth century. Lawton also proposes his emphasis on voice as a literary tool of broad application, and his book has a bold and comparative sweep that encompasses the Pauline letters, Augustine's Confessions, the classical precedents of Virgil and Ovid, medieval contemporaries like Machaut and Petrarch, extra-literary artists like Monteverdi, later poets such as Wordsworth, Heaney, and Paul Valery, and moderns such as Jarry and Proust. What justifies such parallels, the author claims, is that late medieval texts constitute the foundation of a literary history of voice that extends to modernity. The book's energy is therefore devoted to the transformative reading of later medieval texts, in order to show their original and ongoing importance as voice work.

Demonic Possession and Lived Religion in Later Medieval Europe

Demonic Possession and Lived Religion in Later Medieval Europe PDF Author: Sari Katajala-Peltomaa
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192591010
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
Demonic possession was a spiritual state that often had physical symptoms; however, in Demonic Possession and Lived Religion in Later Medieval Europe, Sari Katajala-Peltomaa argues that demonic possession was a social phenomenon which should be understood with regard to the community and culture. She focuses on significant case studies from canonization processes (c. 1240-1450) which show how each set of sources formed its own specific context, in which demonic presence derived from different motivations, reasonings, and methods of categorization. The chosen perspective is that of lived religion, which is both a thematic approach and a methodology: a focus on rituals, symbols, and gestures, as well as sensitivity to nuances and careful contextualizing of the cases are constitutive elements of the argumentation. The analysis contests the hierarchy between the 'learned' and the 'popular' within religion, as well as the existence of a strict polarity between individual and collective religious participation. Demonic presence disclosed negotiations over authority and agency; it shows how the personal affected the communal, and vice versa, and how they were eventually transformed into discourses and institutions of the Church; that is, definitions of the miraculous and the diabolical. Geographically, the volume covers Western Europe, comparing Northern and Southern material and customs. The structure follows the logic of the phenomenon, beginning with the background reasons offered as a cause of demonic possession, continuing with communities' responses and emotions, including construction of sacred caregiving methods. Finally, the ways in which demonic presence contributed to wider societal debates in the fields of politics and spirituality are discussed. Alterity and inversion of identity, gender, and various forms of corporeality and the interplay between the sacred and diabolical are themes that run all through the volume.