The Power of a Woman's Voice in Medieval and Early Modern Literatures

The Power of a Woman's Voice in Medieval and Early Modern Literatures PDF Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110897776
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 461

Get Book Here

Book Description
The study takes the received view among scholars that women in the Middle Ages were faced with sustained misogyny and that their voices were seldom heard in public and subjects it to a critical analysis. The ten chapters deal with various aspects of the question, and the voices of a variety of authors - both female and male - are heard. The study opens with an enquiry into violence against women, including in texts by male writers (Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried von Straßburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach) which indeed describe instances of violence, but adopt an extremely critical stance towards them. It then proceeds to show how women were able to develop an independent identity in various genres and could present themselves as authorities in the public eye. Mystic texts by Hildegard of Bingen, Marie de France and Margery Kempe, the medieval conduct poem known as Die Winsbeckin, the Devout Books of Sisters composed in convents in South-West Germany, but also quasi-historical documents such as the memoirs of Helene Kottaner or Anna Weckerin's cookery book, demonstrate that far more women were in the public gaze than had hitherto been assumed and that they possessed the self-confidence to establish their positions with their intellectual and their literary achievements.

The Power of a Woman's Voice in Medieval and Early Modern Literatures

The Power of a Woman's Voice in Medieval and Early Modern Literatures PDF Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110897776
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 461

Get Book Here

Book Description
The study takes the received view among scholars that women in the Middle Ages were faced with sustained misogyny and that their voices were seldom heard in public and subjects it to a critical analysis. The ten chapters deal with various aspects of the question, and the voices of a variety of authors - both female and male - are heard. The study opens with an enquiry into violence against women, including in texts by male writers (Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried von Straßburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach) which indeed describe instances of violence, but adopt an extremely critical stance towards them. It then proceeds to show how women were able to develop an independent identity in various genres and could present themselves as authorities in the public eye. Mystic texts by Hildegard of Bingen, Marie de France and Margery Kempe, the medieval conduct poem known as Die Winsbeckin, the Devout Books of Sisters composed in convents in South-West Germany, but also quasi-historical documents such as the memoirs of Helene Kottaner or Anna Weckerin's cookery book, demonstrate that far more women were in the public gaze than had hitherto been assumed and that they possessed the self-confidence to establish their positions with their intellectual and their literary achievements.

The Chivalric Turn

The Chivalric Turn PDF Author: David Crouch
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191085812
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 343

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Chivalric Turn examines the medieval obsession with defining and practising superior conduct, and the social consequences that followed from it. Historians since the seventeenth century have tended to understand medieval conduct through the eyes of the writers of the Enlightenment, viewing superior conduct as 'knightly' behaviour, and categorising it as chivalry. Using, for the first time, the full range of the considerable twelfth- and thirteenth-century literature on conduct in the European vernaculars and in Latin, The Chivalric Turn describes and defines what superior lay conduct was in European society before chivalry, and maps how and why chivalry emerged and redefined superior conduct in the last generation of the twelfth century. The emergence of chivalry was only one part of a major social change, because it changed how people understood the concept of nobility, which had consequences for the medieval understanding of gender, social class, violence, and the limits of law.

Laughter in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times

Laughter in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times PDF Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110245485
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 864

Get Book Here

Book Description
Despite popular opinions of the ‘dark Middle Ages’ and a ‘gloomy early modern age,’ many people laughed, smiled, giggled, chuckled, entertained and ridiculed each other. This volume demonstrates how important laughter had been at times and how diverse the situations proved to be in which people laughed, and this from late antiquity to the eighteenth century. The contributions examine a wide gamut of significant cases of laughter in literary texts, historical documents, and art works where laughter determined the relationship among people. In fact, laughter emerges as a kaleidoscopic phenomenon reflecting divine joy, bitter hatred and contempt, satirical perspectives and parodic intentions. In some examples protagonists laughed out of sheer happiness and delight, in others because they felt anxiety and insecurity. It is much more difficult to detect premodern sculptures of laughing figures, but they also existed. Laughter reflected a variety of concerns, interests, and intentions, and the collective approach in this volume to laughter in the past opens many new windows to the history of mentality, social and religious conditions, gender relationships, and power structures.

Medieval Writings on Secular Women

Medieval Writings on Secular Women PDF Author:
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141968699
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 372

Get Book Here

Book Description
'Woman, who is equal to the moon in the flower of youth, Is equal to a little old ape after the onset of old age' This remarkable collection brings together a host of writings from across different regions and cultures of the Middle Ages, from the ninth to the fifteenth century. They are arranged to follow the life stages of a Medieval woman living a secular existence, from infancy and girlhood, through marriage and motherhood, to widowhood and old age. Some women are famous or captured in exceptional circumstances, many more are anonymous: an abandoned baby in Italy, or an epitaph for the female leader of a Synagogue, speaking across the ages. This selection contains an introduction discussing the Medieval woman's status, separate introductions to each chapter, notes and a bibliography.

Bodytalk

Bodytalk PDF Author: E. Jane Burns
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812214055
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Bodytalk, E. Jane Burns contends that female protagonists in medieval texts authored by men can be heard to talk back against the stereotyped and codified roles that their fictive anatomy is designed to convey.

Literary Invention and the Cartographic Imagination

Literary Invention and the Cartographic Imagination PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004520287
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Get Book Here

Book Description
A wide-ranging, inter- and transdisciplinary approach grounded in the twin rigors of theory and history, which, through close readings assesses and analyses the significance of maps to literary texts, and which examines the ways in which the literary maps imaginary and real worlds.

Friendship in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age

Friendship in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age PDF Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110253984
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 813

Get Book Here

Book Description
Although it seems that erotic love generally was the prevailing topic in the medieval world and the Early Modern Age, parallel to this the Ciceronian ideal of friendship also dominated the public discourse, as this collection of essays demonstrates. Following an extensive introduction, the individual contributions explore the functions and the character of friendship from Late Antiquity (Augustine) to the 17th century. They show the spectrum of variety in which this topic appeared ‐ not only in literature, but also in politics and even in painting.

Sexuality in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times

Sexuality in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times PDF Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110209403
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 913

Get Book Here

Book Description
Sexuality is one of the most influential factors in human life. The responses to and reflections upon the manifestations of sexuality provide fascinating insights into fundamental aspects of medieval and early-modern culture. This interdisciplinary volume with articles written by social historians, literary historians, musicologists, art historians, and historians of religion and mental-ity demonstrates how fruitful collaborative efforts can be in the exploration of essential features of human society. Practically every aspect of culture both in the Middle Ages and the early modern age was influenced and determined by sexuality, which hardly ever surfaces simply characterized by prurient interests. The treatment of sexuality in literature, chronicles, music, art, legal documents, and in scientific texts illuminates central concerns, anxieties, tensions, needs, fears, and problems in human society throughout times.

Gender and Voice in Medieval French Literature and Song

Gender and Voice in Medieval French Literature and Song PDF Author: Rachel May Golden
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813069036
Category : LITERARY CRITICISM
Languages : en
Pages : 310

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume brings together literary and musical compositions of medieval France, identifying the use of voice in these works as a way of articulating gendered identities.

Reading Heresy

Reading Heresy PDF Author: Gregory Erickson
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110556820
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Get Book Here

Book Description
Heresy studies is a new interdisciplinary, supra-religious, and humanist field of study that focuses on borderlands of dogma, probes the intersections between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, and explores the realms of dissent in religion, art, and literature. Free from confessional agendas and tolerant of both religious and non-religious perspectives, heresy studies fulfill an important gap in scholarly inquiry and artistic production. Divided into four parts, the volume explores intersections between heresy and modern literature, it discusses intricacies of medieval heresies, it analyzes issues of heresy in contemporary theology, and it demonstrates how heresy operates as an artistic stimulant. Rather than treating matters of heresy, blasphemy, unbelief, dissent, and non-conformism as subjects to be shunned or naively championed, the essays in this collection chart a middle course, energized by the dynamics of heterodoxy, dissent, and provocation, yet shining a critical light on both the challenges and the revelations of disruptive kinds of thinking and acting.