Cannibalism in High Medieval English Literature

Cannibalism in High Medieval English Literature PDF Author: H. Blurton
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137115793
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
This book reads the surprisingly widespread representations of cannibals and cannibalism in medieval English literature as political metaphors that were central to England's on-going process of articulating cultural and national identity.

Cannibalism in High Medieval English Literature

Cannibalism in High Medieval English Literature PDF Author: H. Blurton
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137115793
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
This book reads the surprisingly widespread representations of cannibals and cannibalism in medieval English literature as political metaphors that were central to England's on-going process of articulating cultural and national identity.

Eaters of the Dead

Eaters of the Dead PDF Author: Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1789144450
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Spanning myth, history, and contemporary culture, a terrifying and illuminating excavation of the meaning of cannibalism. Every culture has monsters that eat us, and every culture repels in horror when we eat ourselves. From Grendel to medieval Scottish cannibal Sawney Bean, and from the Ghuls of ancient Persia to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, tales of being consumed are both universal and universally terrifying. In this book, Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. explores the full range of monsters that eat the dead: ghouls, cannibals, wendigos, and other beings that feast on human flesh. Moving from myth through history to contemporary popular culture, Wetmore considers everything from ancient Greek myths of feeding humans to the gods, through sky burial in Tibet and Zoroastrianism, to actual cases of cannibalism in modern societies. By examining these seemingly inhuman acts, Eaters of the Dead reveals that those who consume corpses can teach us a great deal about human nature—and our deepest human fears.

Writing Regional Identities in Medieval England

Writing Regional Identities in Medieval England PDF Author: Emily Dolmans
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843845687
Category : English literature
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
An examination of how regional identities are reflected in texts from medieval England.

Writing Southern Italy Before the Renaissance

Writing Southern Italy Before the Renaissance PDF Author: Ronald G. Musto
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351767399
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
This volume traces the work of trecento historians of the Mezzogiorno, analyzing it through current methodological and theoretical frameworks. Questioning the current consensus, the book examines how the South as a cultural "other" began evolving over the fourteenth century, and reconsiders the nineteenth-century "Southern Question" concerning the Mezzogiorno’s history, culture and people and its lingering negative image in Europe and America. It also focuses on specific histories, authors and historiographical issues, and reviews how new understandings of the Mediterranean have begun to alter our perceptions of the South in a new global context and as the basis for new historical research.

White before whiteness in the late Middle Ages

White before whiteness in the late Middle Ages PDF Author: Wan-Chuan Kao
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526145790
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 533

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Book Description
This groundbreaking book analyses premodern whiteness as operations of fragility, precarity and racialicity across bodily and nonsomatic figurations. It argues that while whiteness participates in the history of racialisation in the late medieval West, it does not denote skin tone alone. The ‘before’ of whiteness, presupposing essence and teleology, is less a retro-futuristic temporisation – one that simultaneously looks backward and faces forward – than a discursive figuration of how white becomes whiteness. Fragility delineates the limits of ruling ideologies in performances of mourning as self-defence against perceived threats to subjectivity and desire; precarity registers the ruptures within normative values by foregrounding the unmarked vulnerability of the body politic and the violence of cultural aestheticisation; and racialicity attends to the politics of recognition and the technologies of enfleshment at the systemic edge of life and nonlife.

Wolves in Beowulf and Other Old English Texts

Wolves in Beowulf and Other Old English Texts PDF Author: Elizabeth Marshall
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843846403
Category : Beowulf
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
A fresh and sympathetic investigation of the depiction of wolves in early medieval literature, recuperating their reputation.

England in Europe

England in Europe PDF Author: Elizabeth Muir Tyler
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487513380
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
In England in Europe, Elizabeth Tyler focuses on two histories: the Encomium Emmae Reginae, written for Emma the wife of the Æthelred II and Cnut, and The Life of King Edward, written for Edith the wife of Edward the Confessor. Tyler offers a bold literary and historical analysis of both texts and reveals how the two queens actively engaged in the patronage of history-writing and poetry to exercise their royal authority. Tyler’s innovative combination of attention to intertextuality and regard for social networks emphasizes the role of women at the centre of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman court literature. In doing so, she argues that both Emma and Edith’s negotiation of conquests and factionalism created powerful models of queenly patronage that were subsequently adopted by individuals such as Queen Margaret of Scotland, Countess Adela of Blois, Queen Edith/Matilda, and Queen Adeliza. England in Europe sheds new lighton the connections between English, French, and Flemish history-writing and poetry and illustrates the key role Anglo-Saxon literary culture played in European literature long after 1066.

Blood

Blood PDF Author: Gil Anidjar
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231537255
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 463

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Book Description
Blood, according to Gil Anidjar, maps the singular history of Christianity. As a category for historical analysis, blood can be seen through its literal and metaphorical uses as determining, sometimes even defining Western culture, politics, and social practices and their wide-ranging incarnations in nationalism, capitalism, and law. Engaging with a variety of sources, Anidjar explores the presence and the absence, the making and unmaking of blood in philosophy and medicine, law and literature, and economic and political thought from ancient Greece to medieval Spain, from the Bible to Shakespeare and Melville. The prevalence of blood in the social, juridical, and political organization of the modern West signals that we do not live in a secular age into which religion could return. Flowing across multiple boundaries, infusing them with violent precepts that we must address, blood undoes the presumed oppositions between religion and politics, economy and theology, and kinship and race. It demonstrates that what we think of as modern is in fact imbued with Christianity. Christianity, Blood fiercely argues, must be reconsidered beyond the boundaries of religion alone.

Richard Coeur de Lion

Richard Coeur de Lion PDF Author: Katherine H. Terrell
Publisher: Broadview Press
ISBN: 1770486844
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
The Middle English romance of Richard Coeur de Lion transforms the historical Richard I of England—a Frenchman by upbringing, who spent only four months of his reign in England, and who once joked that he would sell London to finance his Crusade if he could only find a buyer—into an aggressively English king. This act of historical revision involves the invention of several fantastic elements that give Richard the superhuman force necessary to unite the English nation and elevate it above all others. Springing from a supernatural birth and endowed with exceptional strength and an insatiable and transgressive appetite, Richard embodies a vision of triumphant Englishness that humiliates and decimates England’s foes, whether they be French, German, or Muslim. Katherine Terrell’s faithful but poetic new modern English translation is fully annotated. Appendices include materials on cannibalism, the Crusades, and British national myths.

Religious Horror and Holy War in Viking Age Francia

Religious Horror and Holy War in Viking Age Francia PDF Author: Matthew Bryan Gillis
Publisher: Trivent Publishing
ISBN: 6156405216
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
Religious Horror and Holy War in Viking Age Francia explores how authorities in western Francia used horror rhetoric to cast Christian soldiers, who robbed the poor and the church, as monsters that devoured human flesh and drank human blood. Adapting modern literary horror approaches to medieval sources, this study reveals how such rhetoric served as a form of spiritual weaponry in the clergy's attempts to correct and condemn wayward military men. This investigation, therefore, unearths long-forgotten Carolingian thought about the dreadful spiritual reality of internal enemies during a time of political division and the Northmens depredations. Yet such horror also informed a new understanding of Christian heroism that developed in relation to the wars fought against the invaders. This vision of heroic soldiers, which included military martyrs, culminated in ideas about holy war against the pagans. Thus Carolingian religious horror and holy war together belonged to a body of ideas about the spiritual, unseen side of the church's cosmic conflict against evil that foreshadowed later medieval Crusading thought.