Elf Queens and Holy Friars

Elf Queens and Holy Friars PDF Author: Richard Firth Green
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812248430
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Starting from the assumption of a far greater cultural gulf between the learned and the lay in the medieval world than between rich and poor, Elf Queens explores the church's systematic campaign to demonize fairies and infernalize fairyland and the responses this provoked in vernacular romance.

Elf Queens and Holy Friars

Elf Queens and Holy Friars PDF Author: Richard Firth Green
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812248430
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book

Book Description
Starting from the assumption of a far greater cultural gulf between the learned and the lay in the medieval world than between rich and poor, Elf Queens explores the church's systematic campaign to demonize fairies and infernalize fairyland and the responses this provoked in vernacular romance.

Elf Queens and Holy Friars

Elf Queens and Holy Friars PDF Author: Richard Firth Green
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812293169
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
In Elf Queens and Holy Friars Richard Firth Green investigates an important aspect of medieval culture that has been largely ignored by modern literary scholarship: the omnipresent belief in fairyland. Taking as his starting point the assumption that the major cultural gulf in the Middle Ages was less between the wealthy and the poor than between the learned and the lay, Green explores the church's systematic demonization of fairies and infernalization of fairyland. He argues that when medieval preachers inveighed against the demons that they portrayed as threatening their flocks, they were in reality often waging war against fairy beliefs. The recognition that medieval demonology, and indeed pastoral theology, were packed with coded references to popular lore opens up a whole new avenue for the investigation of medieval vernacular culture. Elf Queens and Holy Friars offers a detailed account of the church's attempts to suppress or redirect belief in such things as fairy lovers, changelings, and alternative versions of the afterlife. That the church took these fairy beliefs so seriously suggests that they were ideologically loaded, and this fact makes a huge difference in the way we read medieval romance, the literary genre that treats them most explicitly. The war on fairy beliefs increased in intensity toward the end of the Middle Ages, becoming finally a significant factor in the witch-hunting of the Renaissance.

The Selected Canterbury Tales: A New Verse Translation

The Selected Canterbury Tales: A New Verse Translation PDF Author: Geoffrey Chaucer
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 039334178X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 439

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Book Description
Fisher's work is a vivid, lively, and readable translation of the most famous work of England's premier medieval poet. Preserving Chaucer's rhyme and meter and faithfully articulating his poetic voice, Fisher makes Chaucer's tales accessible to a contemporary ear.

Poets and Princepleasers

Poets and Princepleasers PDF Author: Richard Firth Green
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description


Fairies, Demons, and Nature Spirits

Fairies, Demons, and Nature Spirits PDF Author: Michael Ostling
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113758520X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
This book examines the fairies, demons, and nature spirits haunting the margins of Christendom from late-antique Egypt to early modern Scotland to contemporary Amazonia. Contributions from anthropologists, folklorists, historians and religionists explore Christian strategies of encompassment and marginalization, and the ‘small gods’ undisciplined tendency to evade such efforts at exorcism. Lurking in forest or fairy-mound, chuckling in dark corners of the home or of the demoniac’s body, the small gods both define and disturb the borders of a religion that is endlessly syncretistic and in endless, active denial of its own syncretism. The book will be of interest to students of folklore, indigenous Christianity, the history of science, and comparative religion.

A Crisis of Truth

A Crisis of Truth PDF Author: Richard Firth Green
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812218091
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 520

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Book Description
"Green's work is of the greatest importance for the understanding of a crucial period in the history of English writing and institutions, and a crucial shift in patterns of cognition."—Derek Pearsall, Harvard University

Witches and Jesuits

Witches and Jesuits PDF Author: Garry Wills
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195102908
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
This book reinterprets Macbeth by returning it to the context of its own time, recreating the theological and political crises of Shakespeare's era.

The Civic Cycles

The Civic Cycles PDF Author: Nicole R. Rice
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780268039004
Category : PERFORMING ARTS
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Book traces an artisanal perspective on medieval and early modern civic relations, analyzing selected plays from York and Chester individually and from a comparative perspective.

The Hero's Quest and the Cycles of Nature

The Hero's Quest and the Cycles of Nature PDF Author: Rachel S. McCoppin
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476625751
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
This examination of the heroic journey in world mythology casts the protagonist as a personification of nature--a "botanical hero" one might say--who begins the quest in a metaphorical seed-like state, then sprouts into a period of verdant strength. But the hero must face a mythic underworld where he or she contends with mortality and sacrifice--embracing death as a part of life. For centuries, humans have sought superiority over nature, yet the botanical hero finds nothing is lost by recognizing that one is merely a part of nature. Instead, a cyclical promise of continuous life is realized, in which no element fully disappears, and the hero's message is not to dwell on death.

Strange Histories

Strange Histories PDF Author: Darren Oldridge
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134442157
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Strange Histories presents a serious account of some of the most extraordinary occurrences of European and North American history and explains how they made sense to people living at the time. Using case studies from the Middle Ages and the early modern period, this book provides fascinating insights into the world-view of a vanished age and shows how such occurences fitted in quite naturally with the "common sense" of the time. Explanations of these phenomena, riveting and ultimately rational, encourage further reflection on what shapes our beliefs today. What made reasonable, educated men and women behave in ways that seem utterly nonsensical to us today? This question and many more are answered in this fascinating book.