Black Legacies

Black Legacies PDF Author: Lynn T. Ramey
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813055040
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 191

Get Book Here

Book Description
Black Legacies looks at color-based prejudice in medieval and modern texts in order to reveal key similarities. Bringing far-removed time periods into startling conversation, this book argues that certain attitudes and practices present in Europe’s Middle Ages were foundational in the development of the western concept of race. Using historical, literary, and artistic sources, Lynn Ramey shows that twelfth- and thirteenth-century discourse was preoccupied with skin color and the coding of black as “evil” and white as “good.” Ramey demonstrates that fears of miscegenation show up in all medieval European societies. She pinpoints these same ideas in the rhetoric of later centuries. Mapmakers and travel writers of the colonial era used medieval lore of “monstrous peoples” to question the humanity of indigenous New World populations, and medieval arguments about humanness were employed to justify the slave trade. Ramey even analyzes how race is explored in films set in medieval Europe, revealing an enduring fascination with the Middle Ages as a touchstone for processing and coping with racial conflict in the West today.

Black Legacies

Black Legacies PDF Author: Lynn T. Ramey
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813055040
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 191

Get Book Here

Book Description
Black Legacies looks at color-based prejudice in medieval and modern texts in order to reveal key similarities. Bringing far-removed time periods into startling conversation, this book argues that certain attitudes and practices present in Europe’s Middle Ages were foundational in the development of the western concept of race. Using historical, literary, and artistic sources, Lynn Ramey shows that twelfth- and thirteenth-century discourse was preoccupied with skin color and the coding of black as “evil” and white as “good.” Ramey demonstrates that fears of miscegenation show up in all medieval European societies. She pinpoints these same ideas in the rhetoric of later centuries. Mapmakers and travel writers of the colonial era used medieval lore of “monstrous peoples” to question the humanity of indigenous New World populations, and medieval arguments about humanness were employed to justify the slave trade. Ramey even analyzes how race is explored in films set in medieval Europe, revealing an enduring fascination with the Middle Ages as a touchstone for processing and coping with racial conflict in the West today.

Enduring Legacies

Enduring Legacies PDF Author: Phillip C. Boardman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780558228507
Category : Classical literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Wisdom of the World

The Wisdom of the World PDF Author: Rémi Brague
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226070773
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 316

Get Book Here

Book Description
When the ancient Greeks looked up into the heavens, they saw not just sun and moon, stars and planets, but a complete, coherent universe, a model of the Good that could serve as a guide to a better life. How this view of the world came to be, and how we lost it (or turned away from it) on the way to becoming modern, make for a fascinating story, told in a highly accessible manner by Rémi Brague in this wide-ranging cultural history. Before the Greeks, people thought human action was required to maintain the order of the universe and so conducted rituals and sacrifices to renew and restore it. But beginning with the Hellenic Age, the universe came to be seen as existing quite apart from human action and possessing, therefore, a kind of wisdom that humanity did not. Wearing his remarkable erudition lightly, Brague traces the many ways this universal wisdom has been interpreted over the centuries, from the time of ancient Egypt to the modern era. Socratic and Muslim philosophers, Christian theologians and Jewish Kabbalists all believed that questions about the workings of the world and the meaning of life were closely intertwined and that an understanding of cosmology was crucial to making sense of human ethics. Exploring the fate of this concept in the modern day, Brague shows how modernity stripped the universe of its sacred and philosophical wisdom, transforming it into an ethically indifferent entity that no longer serves as a model for human morality. Encyclopedic and yet intimate, The Wisdom of the World offers the best sort of history: broad, learned, and completely compelling. Brague opens a window onto systems of thought radically different from our own.

Legacies of the Past

Legacies of the Past PDF Author: Niamh Thornton
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781474480550
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Get Book Here

Book Description


Misconceptions About the Middle Ages

Misconceptions About the Middle Ages PDF Author: Stephen Harris
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135986673
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 309

Get Book Here

Book Description
Brought together by an impressive, international array of contributors this book presents a representative study of some of the many misinterpretations that have evolved concerning the medieval period.

Hadith

Hadith PDF Author: Jonathan A.C. Brown
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1786073080
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 307

Get Book Here

Book Description
Contrary to popular opinion, the bulk of Islamic law does not come from the Quran but from hadith, first-hand reports of the Prophet Muhammad’s words and deeds, passed from generation to generation. However, with varying accounts often only committed to paper a century after the death of Muhammad, Islamic scholars, past and present, have been faced with complex questions of historical authenticity. In this wide-ranging introduction, Jonathan A. C. Brown explores the collection and criticism of hadith, and the controversy surrounding its role in modern Islam. This edition, revised and updated with additional case studies and attention to the very latest scholarship, also features a new chapter on how hadiths have been used politically, both historically and in the Arab Spring and its aftermath. Informative and accessible, it is perfectly suited to students, scholars and general readers interested in this critical element of Islam.

Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages

Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages PDF Author: Stephen A. Mitchell
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812203712
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Get Book Here

Book Description
Stephen A. Mitchell here offers the fullest examination available of witchcraft in late medieval Scandinavia. He focuses on those people believed to be able—and who in some instances thought themselves able—to manipulate the world around them through magical practices, and on the responses to these beliefs in the legal, literary, and popular cultures of the Nordic Middle Ages. His sources range from the Icelandic sagas to cultural monuments much less familiar to the nonspecialist, including legal cases, church art, law codes, ecclesiastical records, and runic spells. Mitchell's starting point is the year 1100, by which time Christianity was well established in elite circles throughout Scandinavia, even as some pre-Christian practices and beliefs persisted in various forms. The book's endpoint coincides with the coming of the Reformation and the onset of the early modern Scandinavian witch hunts. The terrain covered is complex, home to the Germanic Scandinavians as well as their non-Indo-European neighbors, the Sámi and Finns, and it encompasses such diverse areas as the important trade cities of Copenhagen, Bergen, and Stockholm, with their large foreign populations; the rural hinterlands; and the insular outposts of Iceland and Greenland. By examining witches, wizards, and seeresses in literature, lore, and law, as well as surviving charm magic directed toward love, prophecy, health, and weather, Mitchell provides a portrait of both the practitioners of medieval Nordic magic and its performance. With an understanding of mythology as a living system of cultural signs (not just ancient sacred narratives), this study also focuses on such powerful evolving myths as those of "the milk-stealing witch," the diabolical pact, and the witches' journey to Blåkulla. Court cases involving witchcraft, charm magic, and apostasy demonstrate that witchcraft ideologies played a key role in conceptualizing gender and were themselves an important means of exercising social control.

Knight's Legacy

Knight's Legacy PDF Author: Trenae
Publisher: Medallion Media Group
ISBN: 1605420069
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Get Book Here

Book Description
On location in Scotland for a film shoot, stuntwoman Cat Terril is waiting to film an action scene when she takes a stroll through the ancient castle that is their set. Then she meets an old man in black robes who gives her a set of keys and directs her to "follow your heart." Thinking it is a harmless prank designed by fellow stuntmen, Cat follows the old man?s direction to a locked door around which swirls a strange, lavender mist. Using the set of keys, she opens the door, steps into the mist and falls, literally, into a frigid lake in thirteenth century Scotland. There was no ?harmless prank? involved. Cat is in desperate peril, finding herself suddenly the hostage of vicious, brutal clan leader, Calum Mackay. To obtain clemency from the Scottish king, the renegade Mackay must give his daughter, Brianna, to Englishman Roderic de Montwain in marriage. Brianna, however, in love with another, has run away. And Cat bears a striking resemblance to Mackay?s absent daughter. It is unbelievable enough to find herself in medieval Scotland. It is beyond comprehension to find herself abruptly married to a stranger. A stranger, moreover, who unlocks a passion and sensuality within her Cat never suspected she harbored. And Roderic, who has vowed to never lose his heart, finds himself falling for the mysterious, flame-haired bride he has taken to his bed. A bride some say is mad and others claim is an imposter.

Ancient and Medieval Memories

Ancient and Medieval Memories PDF Author: Janet Coleman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521411440
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 670

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book is an analysis of thinking, remembering and reminiscing according to ancient authors, and their medieval readers. The author argues that behind the various medieval methods in interpreting texts of the past lie two apparently incompatible theories of human knowledge and remembering, as well as two differing attitudes to matter and intellect. The book comprises a series of studies which take ancient texts as evidence of the past, and show how medieval readers and writers understood them. The studies confirm that medieval and renaissance interpretations and uses of the past differ greatly from modern interpretation and yet betray many startling continuities between modern and ancient and medieval theories.

The Legacy of Rome

The Legacy of Rome PDF Author: Richard Jenkyns
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780198219170
Category : Europe
Languages : en
Pages : 526

Get Book Here

Book Description
Long considered the standard introduction to Rome's influence on later centuries (the original was published in 1923), this completely new edition of the classic work brings together the latest scholarship in the field. Unlike the previous version, which focused on such narrow topics as commerce and administration, the new edition broadens the spectrum of influence, showing the impact, for example, of Roman literature, art, politics, law, and language on western civilization. With 24 pages of plates. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR