Author: Phyllis Gaffney
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317161351
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 245
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Book Description
What do we know of medieval childhood? Were boundaries always clear between childhood and young adulthood? Was medieval childhood gendered? Scholars have been debating such questions over half a century. Can evidence from imaginative literature test the conclusions of historians? Phyllis Gaffney's innovative book reveals contrast and change in the portrayal of childhood and youth by looking at vernacular French narratives composed between 1100 and 1220. Covering over sixty poems from two major genres - epic and romance - she traces a significant evolution. While early epics contain only a few stereotypical images of the child, later verse narratives display a range of arguably timeless motifs, as well as a growing awareness of the special characteristics of youth. Whereas juvenile epic heroes contribute to the adult agenda by displaying precocious strength and wisdom, romance children are on the receiving end, requiring guidance and education. Gaffney also profiles the intriguing phenomenon of enfances poems, singing the youthful deeds of established heroes: these 'prequels' combine epic and romance features in distinctive ways. Approaching the history of childhood and youth through the lens of literary genre, this study shows how imaginative texts can both shape and reflect the historical development and cultural construction of emotional values.
Author: Phyllis Gaffney
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754696223
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236
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Book Description
Examining the portrayal of childhood and youth in a large sample of medieval French verse narratives, this study analyzes representations of childhood in two genres: chansons de geste, or Old French epic poems, and romances. Phyllis Gaffney identifies differences in, and relationships between, portrayals of the young in the two genres, and demonstrates the significance of developments in twelfth- and thirteenth-century poetry for changing cultural perspectives on childhood and youth.
Author: Matthew Koval
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900446106X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 230
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Book Description
This book shows that childhood was an essential element in the arguments and purposes of authors in medieval Poland from 1050-1300 CE. This role of childhood in medieval mindsets has salient parallels throughout Europe and this is also explored in this volume.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004355952
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 451
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Book Description
In Melusine’s Footprint: Tracing the Legacy of a Medieval Myth, editors Misty Urban, Deva Kemmis, and Melissa Ridley Elmes offer an invigorating international and interdisciplinary examination of the legendary fairy Melusine. Along with fresh insights into the popular French and German traditions, these essays investigate Melusine’s English, Dutch, Spanish, and Chinese counterparts and explore her roots in philosophy, folklore, and classical myth. Combining approaches from art history, history, alchemy, literature, cultural studies, and medievalism, applying rigorous critical lenses ranging from feminism and comparative literature to film and monster theory, this volume brings Melusine scholarship into the twenty-first century with twenty lively and evocative essays that reassess this powerful figure’s multiple meanings and illuminate her dynamic resonances across cultures and time. Contributors are Anna Casas Aguilar, Jennifer Alberghini, Frederika Bain, Anna-Lisa Baumeister, Albrecht Classen, Chera A. Cole, Tania M. Colwell, Zoë Enstone, Stacey L. Hahn, Deva F. Kemmis, Ana Pairet, Pit Péporté, Simone Pfleger, Caroline Prud’Homme, Melissa Ridley Elmes, Renata Schellenberg, Misty Urban, Angela Jane Weisl, Lydia Zeldenrust, and Zifeng Zhao.
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
Examining the portrayal of childhood and youth in a large sample of medieval French verse narratives, this study analyzes representations of childhood in two genres: chansons de geste, or Old French epic poems, and romances. Phyllis Gaffney identifies differences in, and relationships between, portrayals of the young in the two genres, and demonstrates the significance of developments in twelfth- and thirteenth-century poetry for changing cultural perspectives on childhood and youth.
Author: Emily Joan Ward
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108975739
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361
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Book Description
Refining adult-focused perspectives on medieval rulership, Emily Joan Ward exposes the problematic nature of working from the assumption that kingship equated to adult power. Children's participation and political assent could be important facets of the day-to-day activities of rule, as this study shows through an examination of royal charters, oaths to young boys, cross-kingdom diplomacy and coronation. The first comparative and thematic study of child rulership in this period, Ward analyses eight case studies across northwestern Europe from c.1050 to c.1250. The book stresses innovations and adaptations in royal government, questions the exaggeration of political disorder under a boy king, and suggests a ruler's childhood posed far less of a challenge than their adolescence and youth. Uniting social, cultural and political historical methodologies, Ward unveils how wider societal changes between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries altered children's lived experiences of royal rule and modified how people thought about child kingship.
Author: Patricia Clare Ingham
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812291239
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
Despite the prodigious inventiveness of the Middle Ages, the era is often characterized as deeply suspicious of novelty. But if poets and philosophers urged caution about the new, Patricia Clare Ingham contends, their apprehension was less the result of a blind devotion to tradition than a response to radical expansions of possibility in diverse realms of art and science. Discovery and invention provoked moral questions in the Middle Ages, serving as a means to adjudicate the ethics of invention and opening thorny questions of creativity and desire. The Medieval New concentrates on the preoccupation with newness and novelty in literary, scientific, and religious discourses of the twelfth through sixteenth centuries. Examining a range of evidence, from the writings of Roger Bacon and Geoffrey Chaucer to the letters of Christopher Columbus, and attending to histories of children's toys, the man-made marvels of romance, the utopian aims of alchemists, and the definitional precision of the scholastics, Ingham analyzes the ethical ambivalence with which medieval thinkers approached the category of the new. With its broad reconsideration of what the "newfangled" meant in the Middle Ages, The Medieval New offers an alternative to histories that continue to associate the medieval era with conservation rather than with novelty, its benefits and liabilities. Calling into question present-day assumptions about newness, Ingham's study demonstrates the continued relevance of humanistic inquiry in the so-called traditional disciplines of contemporary scholarship.
Author: Janay Nugent
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1783270438
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 253
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Book Description
Essays exploring childhood and youth in Scotland before the nineteenth century.
Author: E. Bond
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137292539
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 251
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Book Description
This timely volume offers an in-depth theoretical analysis of children's experiences growing up with mobile internet technologies. Drawing on up-to-date research, it explores the relationship between childhood as a social and cultural construction and the plethora of mobile internet technologies which have become ubiquitous in everyday life.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004458263
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 376
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Book Description
Kids Those Days is a collection of interdisciplinary research into medieval childhood. Contributors investigate abandonment and abuse, fosterage and guardianship, criminal behavior and child-rearing, child bishops and sainthood, disabilities and miracles, and a wide variety of other subjects related to medieval children.
