Author: Nancy Vine Durling
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813014951
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
An extraordinary blend of realism and high artifice, unique in its combined use of songs and narrative, Jean Renart and the Art of Romance offers zestful dalliances in high places, handsome but self-serving knights, and a beautiful woman whose decisive intelligence allows her to triumph over daunting odds.
Author: E. Jane Burns
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812291247
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 335
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Book Description
Clothing was used in the Middle Ages to mark religious, military, and chivalric orders, lepers, and prostitutes. The ostentatious display of luxury dress more specifically served as a means of self-definition for members of the ruling elite and the courtly lovers among them. In Courtly Love Undressed, E. Jane Burns unfolds the rich display of costly garments worn by amorous partners in literary texts and other cultural documents in the French High Middle Ages. Burns "reads through clothes" in lyric, romance, and didactic literary works, vernacular sermons, and sumptuary laws to show how courtly attire is used to negotiate desire, sexuality, and symbolic space as well as social class. Reading through clothes reveals that the expression of female desire, so often effaced in courtly lyric and romance, can be registered in the poetic deployment of fabric and adornment, and that gender is often configured along a sartorial continuum, rather than in terms of naturally derived categories of woman and man. The symbolic identification of the court itself as a hybrid crossing place between Europe and the East also emerges through Burns's reading of literary allusions to the trade, travel, and pilgrimage that brought luxury cloth to France.
Author: Karen L. Taylor
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 0816074992
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 497
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Book Description
French novels such as "Madame Bovary" and "The Stranger" are staples of high school and college literature courses. This work provides coverage of the French novel since its origins in the 16th century, with an emphasis on novels most commonly studied in high school and college courses in world literature and in French culture and civilization.
Author:
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476694370
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 269
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Book Description
A high-stakes wager placed on a woman's virtue; men who spy on bathing women; tell-tale birthmarks; cross-dressing; dragons; tournaments; and aristocrats bursting into song--these features and more appear in the three stories translated here, all versions of the folktale known as "the wager tale." Such stories were especially popular in thirteenth-century France, when noblemen fulfilled their feudal duties far from home. Did their women remain faithful? A pressing question, for only female chastity guaranteed the legitimacy of heirs. This collection offers the first translations into English of The Romance of the Violet and The Count of Poitiers, along with a new version of The Tale of King Flore and the Fair Joan. The first paints a vivid portrait of thirteenth-century courtly life. The second, set in the eighth-century court of King Pepin, includes both a wager tale and a bride quest, the latter involving a shocking scene of female group nudity. Flore and Joan takes a different tack, presenting a clear-eyed heroine who overcomes daunting odds by posing as a man. These medieval tales portray strong women who gainsay social control of their bodies, thereby winning the respect of men--a scenario that resonates even today.
Author: Eglal Doss-Quinby
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300133758
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 301
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Book Description
This groundbreaking anthology brings together for the first time the works of women poet-composers, or trouveres, in northern France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Refuting the long-held notion that there are no extant Old French lyrics by women from this period, the editors of the volume present songs attributed to eight named female trouveres along with a varied selection of anonymous compositions in the feminine voice that may have been composed by women. The book includes the Old French texts of seventy-five compositions, extant music for eighteen monophonic songs and nineteen polyphonic motets, English translations, and a substantial introduction.
Author: Thomas Head
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317325141
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 892
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Book Description
This collection presents-through the medium of translated sources-a comprehensive guide to the development of hagiography and the cult of the saints in western Christendom during the middle ages. It provides an unparalleled resource for the study of the ideals of sanctity and the practice of religion in the medieval west. Intended for the classroom, for the medieval scholar who wishes to explore sources in unfamiliar languages, and for the general reader fascinated by the saints, this collection provides the reader a chance to explore in depth a full range of writings about the saints (the term hagiography is derived from Greek roots: hagios=holy and graphe=writing). The thirty-six chapters contain sources either in their entirety or in selections of substantial length. The great majority of the texts have never previously appeared in English translation. Those which have appeared in earlier translation, are here presented in versions based on significant new textual and historical scholarship which makes them significant improvements on the earlier versions. All the translations are accompanied by introductions, notes, and suggestions for further reading in order to help guide the reader. The first selections date to the fourth century, when the ideals of Christian sanctity were evolving to meet the demands of a world in which Christianity was an accepted religion and when the public veneration of relics was growing greatly in scope. The last selections date to the period immediately prior to the Reformation, a period in which the traditional concept of sanctity and acceptability of de cult of relics was being questioned. In addition to numerous works from the clerical languages of Latin and Greek, the selections include translations from Romance, Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic vernacular languages, s well as Hebrew texts concerning the martyrdom of Jews at the hands of Christians. Originating in lands from Iceland to Hungary and from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, they are taken from a full range of the many genres which constituted hagiography: lives of the saints, collections of miracle stories, accounts of the discovery or movement of relics, liturgical books, visions, canonization inquests, and even heresy trials.
Author: E. Jane Burns
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812291255
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
The story of silk is an old and familiar one, a tale involving mercantile travel and commercial exchange along the broad land mass that connects ancient China to the west and extending eventually to sites on the eastern Mediterranean and along sea routes to India. But if we shift our focus from economic histories that chart the exchange of silk along Asian and Mediterranean trade routes to medieval literary depictions of silk, a strikingly different picture comes into view. In Old French literary texts from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, emphasis falls on production rather than trade and on female protagonists who make, decorate, and handle silk. Sea of Silk maps a textile geography of silk work done by these fictional women. Situated in northern France and across the medieval Mediterranean, from Saint-Denis to Constantinople, from North Africa to Muslim Spain, and even from the fantasy realm of Arthurian romance to the historical silkworks of the Norman kings in Palermo, these medieval heroines provide important glimpses of distant economic and cultural geographies. E. Jane Burns argues, in brief, that literary portraits of medieval heroines who produce and decorate silk cloth or otherwise manipulate items of silk outline a metaphorical geography that includes France as an important cultural player in the silk economics of the Mediterranean. Within this literary sea of silk, female protagonists who "work" silk in a variety of ways often deploy it successfully as a social and cultural currency that enables them to traverse religious and political barriers while also crossing lines of gender and class.
Author: Robert Mullally
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351545779
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 172
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Book Description
The carole was the principal social dance in France and England from c. 1100 to c. 1400 and was frequently mentioned in French and English medieval literature. However, it has been widely misunderstood by contributors in recent citations in dictionaries and reference books, both linguistic and musical. The carole was performed by all classes of society - kings and nobles, shepherds and servant girls. It is described as taking place both indoors and outdoors. Its central position in the life of the people is underlined by references not only in what we might call fictional texts, but also in historical (or quasi-historical) writings, in moral treatises and even in a work on astronomy. Dr Robert Mullally's focus is very much on details relevant to the history, choreography and performance of the dance as revealed in the primary sources. This methodology involves attempting to isolate the term carole from other dance terms not only in French, but also in other languages. Mullally's groundbreaking study establishes all the characteristics of this dance: etymological, choreographical, lyrical, musical and iconographical.
Author: Sahar Amer
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812201086
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 267
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Book Description
Given Christianity's valuation of celibacy and its persistent association of sexuality with the Fall and of women with sin, Western medieval attitudes toward the erotic could not help but be vexed. In contrast, eroticism is explicitly celebrated in a large number of theological, scientific, and literary texts of the medieval Arab Islamicate tradition, where sexuality was positioned at the very heart of religious piety. In Crossing Borders, Sahar Amer turns to the rich body of Arabic sexological writings to focus, in particular, on their open attitude toward erotic love between women. By juxtaposing these Arabic texts with French works, she reveals a medieval French literary discourse on same-sex desire and sexual practices that has gone all but unnoticed. The Arabic tradition on eroticism breaks through into French literary writings on gender and sexuality in often surprising ways, she argues, and she demonstrates how strategies of gender representation deployed in Arabic texts came to be models to imitate, contest, subvert, and at times censor in the West. Amer's analysis reveals Western literary representations of gender in the Middle Ages as cross-cultural, hybrid discourses as she reexamines borders—cultural, linguistic, historical, geographic—not as elements of separation and division but as fluid spaces of cultural exchange, adaptation, and collaboration. Crossing these borders, she salvages key Arabic and French writings on alternative sexual practices from oblivion to give voice to a group that has long been silenced.
Author: Katherine C. Little
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192514369
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
Medieval romances with their magic fountains, brave knights, and beautiful maidens have come to stand for the Middle Ages more generally. This close connection between the medieval and the romance has had consequences for popular conceptions of the Middle Ages, an idealized fantasy of chivalry and hierarchy, and also for our understanding of romances, as always already archaic, part of a half-forgotten past. And yet, romances were one of the most influential and long-lasting innovations of the medieval period. To emphasize their novelty is to see the resources medieval people had for thinking about their contemporary concern and controversies, whether social order, Jewish/ Christian relations, the Crusades, the connectivity of the Mediterranean, women's roles as mothers, and how to write a national past. This volume takes up the challenge to 'think romance', investigating the various ways that romances imagine, reflect, and describe the challenges of the medieval world.
