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Author: Peter J. A. Jones
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192581619
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
Towards the end of the twelfth century, powerful images of laughing kings and saints began to appear in texts circulating at the English royal court. At the same time, contemporaries began celebrating the wit, humour, and laughter of King Henry II (r.1154-89) and his martyred Archbishop of Canterbury, Saint Thomas Becket (d.1170). Taking a broad genealogical approach, Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century traces the emergence of this powerful laughter through an immersive study of medieval intellectual, literary, social, religious, and political debates. Focusing on a cultural renaissance in England, the study situates laughter at the heart of the defining transformations of the second half of the 1100s. With an expansive survey of theological and literary texts, bringing a range of unedited manuscript material to light in the process, Peter J. A. Jones exposes how twelfth-century writers came to connect laughter with spiritual transcendence and justice, and how this connection gave humour a unique political and spiritual power in both text and action. Ultimately, Jones argues that England's popular images of laughing kings and saints effectively reinstated a sublime charismatic authority, something truly rebellious at a moment in history when bureaucracy and codification were first coming to dominate European political life.
Author: Peter J. A. Jones
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192581619
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224
Get Book Here
Book Description
Towards the end of the twelfth century, powerful images of laughing kings and saints began to appear in texts circulating at the English royal court. At the same time, contemporaries began celebrating the wit, humour, and laughter of King Henry II (r.1154-89) and his martyred Archbishop of Canterbury, Saint Thomas Becket (d.1170). Taking a broad genealogical approach, Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century traces the emergence of this powerful laughter through an immersive study of medieval intellectual, literary, social, religious, and political debates. Focusing on a cultural renaissance in England, the study situates laughter at the heart of the defining transformations of the second half of the 1100s. With an expansive survey of theological and literary texts, bringing a range of unedited manuscript material to light in the process, Peter J. A. Jones exposes how twelfth-century writers came to connect laughter with spiritual transcendence and justice, and how this connection gave humour a unique political and spiritual power in both text and action. Ultimately, Jones argues that England's popular images of laughing kings and saints effectively reinstated a sublime charismatic authority, something truly rebellious at a moment in history when bureaucracy and codification were first coming to dominate European political life.
Author: Margaret Alexiou
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474403808
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 504
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Book Description
Explores the range and complexity of human emotions and their transmission across cultural traditionsWhat makes us laugh and cry, sometimes at the same time? How do these two primal, seemingly discrete and non-verbal modes of expression intersect in everyday life and ritual, and what range of emotions do they evoke? How may they be voiced, shaped and coloured in literature and liturgy, art and music?Bringing together scholars from diverse periods and disciplines of Hellenic and Byzantine studies, this volume explores the shifting shapes and functions of laughter and tears. With a focus on the tragic, the comic and the tragicomic dimensions of laughter and tears in art, literature and performance, as well as on their emotional, socio-cultural and religious significance, it breaks new ground in the study of ancient and Byzantine affectivity.Key featuresIncludes an international cast of 25 distinguished contributors Prominence is given to performative arts and to interactions with other cultures Transitions from Late Antiquity to Byzantium, and from Byzantium to the Renaissance, form focal points from which contributors look backwards, forwards and sidewaysHighlights the variety, audacity and quality of the finest Byzantine works and the extent to which they anticipated the renaissance
Author: Megan Moore
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501758403
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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Book Description
The Erotics of Grief considers how emotions propagate power by exploring whose lives are grieved and what kinds of grief are valuable within and eroticized by medieval narratives. Megan Moore argues that grief is not only routinely eroticized in medieval literature but that it is a foundational emotion of medieval elite culture. Focusing on the concept of grief as desire, Moore builds on the history of the emotions and Georges Bataille's theory of the erotic as the conflict between desire and death, one that perversely builds a sense of community organized around a desire for death. The link between desire and death serves as an affirmation of living communities. Moore incorporates literary, visual, and codicological evidence in sources from across the Mediterranean—from Old French chansons de geste, such as the Song of Roland and La mort le roi Artu and romances such as Erec et Enide, Philomena, and Floire et Blancheflor; to Byzantine and ancient Greek novels; to Middle English travel narratives such as Mandeville's Travels. In her reading of the performance of grief as one of community and remembrance, Moore assesses why some lives are imagined as mattering more than others and explores how a language of grief becomes a common language of status among the medieval Mediterranean elite.
Author: John Phillips
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783039105045
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
Laughter and power are here examined in a variety of contexts, ranging from the satires of Renaissance Humanism through to the polemics of contemporary journalism. How do the powerful use laughter as a cultural weapon which reinforces their position? How do the powerless use laughter as a last resort in their self-defence? Sixteenth-century intellectuals applied their satires to a campaign against intolerance. Seventeenth-century absolutism demanded of comedy that it serve its interests. Yet subversive humour survived, even at the court, and led through the Enlightenment to its apogee in the black humour of Sade. Twentieth-century experimental fiction owes that trend a conscious debt. Meanwhile an aesthetic tradition, represented here by Flaubert, Beckett and Queneau, incites a laughter which releases tension rather than raising awareness. As humour theorists, Bergson, Freud and Koestler help focus these concerns.
Author: Damien Boquet
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 9781509514663
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
What do we know of the emotional life of the Middle Ages? Though a long-neglected subject, a multitude of sources – spiritual and secular literature, iconography, chronicles, as well as theological and medical works – provide clues to the central role emotions played in medieval society. In this work, historians Damien Boquet and Piroska Nagy delve into a rich variety of texts and images to reveal the many and nuanced experiences of emotion during the Middle Ages – from the demonstrative shame of a saint to a nobleman's fear of embarrassment, from the enthusiasm of a crusading band to the fear of a town threatened by the approach of war or plague. Boquet and Nagy show how these outbursts of joy and pain, while universal expressions, must be understood within the specific context of medieval society. During the Middle Ages, a Christian model of affectivity was formed in the ‘laboratory’ of the monasteries, one which gradually seeped into wider society, interacting with the sensibilities of courtly culture and other forms of expression. Bouqet and Nagy bring a thousand years of history to life, demonstrating how the study of emotions in medieval society can also allow us to understand better our own social outlooks and customs.
Author: Saint Aelred (of Rievaulx)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Scotland
Languages : en
Pages : 510
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Book Description
Author: Jeroen Deploige
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
ISBN: 9053567674
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297
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Book Description
The power of monarchs has traditionally been as much symbolic as actual, rooted in popular imagery of sovereignty, divinity, and authority. In Mystifying the Monarch, a distinguished group of contributors explores the changing nature of that imagery—and its political and social effects—in Europe from the Middle Ages to the present day. They demonstrate that, rather than a linear progression where perceptions of rulers moved inexorably from the sacred to the banal, in reality the history of monarchy has been one of constant tension between mystification and demystification.
Author: Barry Sanders
Publisher: Beacon Press (MA)
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360
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Book Description
Sudden Glory presents the history of one of the most evanescent but powerful forms of human expression - laughter. Here is the first book to look not at humor or comedy, but it laughter itself - and specifically at the way laughter evolved into an effective weapon for political subversion. Barry Sanders asks What did people laugh at? And why? What was the Church's attitude? The Rabbis'? Who could do it, when, and at whom? When did the joke first appear? Sudden Glory records the changes in attitudes toward laughter from the ancient world down to the present, with specific emphasis on cultural shifts from the late Middle Ages, when the Church's reach into the realm of the body was felt throughout society, through the end of the eighteenth century, when only deviants and derelicts laughed freely. Along the way, Sanders imagines the voices of women and peasants, whose laughter often went unrecorded, but surely not unheard. Sanders concludes with a brilliant chapter on contemporary laughter, beginning with "sick" comic Lenny Bruce (with whom he was personally acquainted), and ending with women stand-up comics, who seem to be finding their voices while male comics are mired in adolescent shtick. Sudden Glory, which contains an extensive bibliography on the subject of laughter, is an important study from one of our most penetrating and playful public intellectuals.
Author: Dorinda Outram
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813942020
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
Unveiling the nearly lost world of the court fools of eighteenth-century Germany, Dorinda Outram shows that laughter was an essential instrument of power. Whether jovial or cruel, mirth altered social and political relations. Outram takes us first to the court of Frederick William I of Prussia, who emerges not only as an administrative reformer and notorious militarist but also as a "master of fools," a ruler who used fools to prop up his uncertain power. The autobiography of the itinerant fool Peter Prosch affords a rare insider’s view of the small courts in Catholic south Germany, Austria, and Bavaria. Full of sharp observations of prelates and princes, the autobiography also records episodes of the extraordinary cruelty for which the German princely courts were notorious. Joseph Fröhlich, court fool in Dresden, presents more appealing facets of foolery. A sharp salesman and hero of the Meissen factories, he was deeply attached to the folk life of fooling. The book ends by tying the growth of Enlightenment skepticism to the demise of court foolery around 1800. Outram’s book is invaluable for giving us such a vivid depiction of the court fool and especially for revealing how this figure can shed new light on the wielding of power in Enlightenment Europe.
Author: Constance Brittain Bouchard
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501716646
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 234
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Book Description
In high medieval France, men and women saw the world around them as the product of tensions between opposites. Imbued with a Christian culture in which a penniless preacher was also the King of Kings and the last were expected to be first, twelfth-century thinkers brought order to their lives through the creation of opposing categories. In a highly original work, Constance Brittain Bouchard examines this poorly understood component of twelfth-century thought, one responsible, in her view, for the fundamental strangeness of that culture to modern thinking.Scholars have long recognized that dialectical reasoning was the basic approach to philosophical, legal, and theological matters in the high Middle Ages. Bouchard argues that this way of thinking and categorizing—which she terms a "discourse of opposites"—permeated all aspects of medieval thought. She rejects suggestions that it was the result of imprecision, and provides evidence that people of that era sought not to reconcile opposing categories but rather to maintain them. Bouchard scrutinizes the medieval use of opposites in five broad areas: scholasticism, romance, legal disputes, conversion, and the construction of gender. Drawing on research in a series of previously unedited charters and the earliest glossa manuscripts, she demonstrates that this method of constructing reality was a constitutive element of the thought of the period.
