Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love

Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love PDF Author: R. Howard Bloch
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226059901
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Get Book Here

Book Description
Until now the advent of Western romantic love has been seen as a liberation from—or antidote to—ten centuries of misogyny. In this major contribution to gender studies, R. Howard Bloch demonstrates how similar the ubiquitous antifeminism of medieval times and the romantic idealization of woman actually are. Through analyses of a broad range of patristic and medieval texts, Bloch explores the Christian construction of gender in which the flesh is feminized, the feminine is aestheticized, and aesthetics are condemned in theological terms. Tracing the underlying theme of virginity from the Church Fathers to the courtly poets, Bloch establishes the continuity between early Christian antifeminism and the idealization of woman that emerged in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In conclusion he explains the likely social, economic, and legal causes for the seeming inversion of the terms of misogyny into those of an idealizing tradition of love that exists alongside its earlier avatar until the current era. This startling study will be of great value to students of medieval literature as well as to historians of culture and gender.

Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love

Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love PDF Author: R. Howard Bloch
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226059901
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Get Book Here

Book Description
Until now the advent of Western romantic love has been seen as a liberation from—or antidote to—ten centuries of misogyny. In this major contribution to gender studies, R. Howard Bloch demonstrates how similar the ubiquitous antifeminism of medieval times and the romantic idealization of woman actually are. Through analyses of a broad range of patristic and medieval texts, Bloch explores the Christian construction of gender in which the flesh is feminized, the feminine is aestheticized, and aesthetics are condemned in theological terms. Tracing the underlying theme of virginity from the Church Fathers to the courtly poets, Bloch establishes the continuity between early Christian antifeminism and the idealization of woman that emerged in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In conclusion he explains the likely social, economic, and legal causes for the seeming inversion of the terms of misogyny into those of an idealizing tradition of love that exists alongside its earlier avatar until the current era. This startling study will be of great value to students of medieval literature as well as to historians of culture and gender.

The Women Troubadours

The Women Troubadours PDF Author: Magda Bogin
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393009651
Category : English poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 196

Get Book Here

Book Description
An introduction to the women poets of the 12th-century Provence and a collection of their poems.

Renaissance Feminism

Renaissance Feminism PDF Author: Constance Jordan
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501721844
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Get Book Here

Book Description
Considering a wide range of Renaissance works of nonfiction, Jordan asserts that feminism as a mode of thought emerged as early as the fifteenth century in Italy, and that the main arguments for the social equality of the sexes were common in the sixteenth century. Renaissance feminism, she maintains, was a feature of a broadly revisionist movement that regarded the medieval model of creation as static and hierarchical and favored a model that was dynamic and relational. Jordan examines pro-woman arguments found in dozens of pan-European texts in the light of present-day notions of authority and subordination, particularly resistance theory, in an attempt to link gender issues to larger contemporary theoretical and institutional questions. Drawing on sources as varied as treatises on marriage and on education, defenses and histories of women, popular satires, moral dialogues, and romances, Renaissance Feminism illustrates the broad scope of feminist argument in early modern Europe, recovering prowoman arguments that had disappeared from the record of gender debates and transforming the ways in which early modern gender ideology has been understood. Renaissance scholars and feminist critics and historians in general will welcome this book, and medievalists and intellectual historians will also find it valuable reading.

The Making of Romantic Love

The Making of Romantic Love PDF Author: William M. Reddy
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226706265
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 450

Get Book Here

Book Description
Here, Reddy illuminates the birth of a cultural movement that managed to regulate selfish desire and render it innocent - or innocent enough. Reddy strikes out from this historical moment on an exploration of love, contrasting the medieval development of romantic love in Europe with contemporaneous eastern traditions in Bengal.

Sexuality in Medieval Europe

Sexuality in Medieval Europe PDF Author: Ruth Mazo Karras
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000859274
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book Here

Book Description
Now in its fourth edition, Sexuality in Medieval Europe provides a lively account of a society whose attitudes toward sexuality both were ancestral to, and differed from, contemporary ones. The volume is structured not by types of sexual interactions or deviance, but to reflect the difference in gendered experiences when sex is seen as an act one person does to another. Sexual activity, within and outside of marriage, as well as sexual inactivity, had different meanings based on gender, social status, religious affiliation, and more. This book considers these iterations of medieval sexuality in its effort to show there was no single medieval attitude towards sexuality. With an emphasis on Christian Western Europe over the entire course of the Middle Ages, it also includes comparative material on neighboring cultures at the time. Alongside being reworked for further clarity and readability, the fourth edition offers substantial new material on trans scholarship and methodological attempts to recoup a trans past; changes in the treatment of sex work and its terminology; and new material on Byzantine and Muslim culture. Sexuality in Medieval Europe is an essential resource for all those who study medieval history, medieval culture, and the history of sexuality in Europe.

Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance PDF Author: Mary Beth Rose
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Get Book Here

Book Description


Raymond Chandler, Romantic Ideology, and the Cultural Politics of Chivalry

Raymond Chandler, Romantic Ideology, and the Cultural Politics of Chivalry PDF Author: Anthony Dean Rizzuto
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 303088371X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 106

Get Book Here

Book Description
Raymond Chandler, Romantic Ideology, and the Cultural Politics of Chivalry responds to the general consensus that Philip Marlowe represents a chivalric knight out of romance. The book argues that this commonplace reading requires a stunningly rosy rewriting of Marlowe, knighthood, chivalry, and romance. The book offers a history of the cultural politics of chivalry from the Middle Ages through British Romanticism to the modern United States, exposing the elitism, violent masculinism, racism, and ethno-national othering harbored within. Rizzuto also considers the survival of the chivalric ideology after World War I, and argues that the narrative of the Great War destroying chivalry rewrites the ghastly history of warfare. Touching on Chandler throughout these cultural histories, the book then directly confronts the question of knighthood and romance in the Marlowe novels. Rizzuto identifies an explicit rejection of romance in the service of hardboiled gender, class, and genre norms, including a seldom-remarked pattern of violence against women and sexual assault. The volume concludes by offering some ideas about Chandler’s motivations and the reception of the Marlowe novels.

The Counts of Tripoli and Lebanon in the Twelfth Century

The Counts of Tripoli and Lebanon in the Twelfth Century PDF Author: Kevin James Lewis
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317052609
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 355

Get Book Here

Book Description
The county of Tripoli in what is now North Lebanon is arguably the most neglected of the so-called ‘crusader states’ established in the Middle East at the beginning of the twelfth century. The present work is the first monograph on the county to be published in English, and the first in any western language since 1945. What little has been written on the subject previously has focused upon the European ancestry of the counts of Tripoli: a specifically Southern French heritage inherited from the famous crusader Raymond IV of Saint-Gilles. Kevin Lewis argues that past historians have at once exaggerated the political importance of the counts’ French descent and ignored the more compelling signs of its cultural impact, highlighting poetry composed by troubadours in Occitan at Tripoli’s court. For Lewis, however, even this belies a deeper understanding of the processes that shaped the county. What emerges is an intriguing portrait of the county in which its rulers struggled to exert their power over Lebanon in the face of this region’s insurmountable geographical forces and its sometimes bewildering, always beguiling diversity of religions, languages and cultures. The counts of Tripoli and contemporary Muslim onlookers certainly viewed the dynasty as sons of Saint-Gilles, but the county’s administration relied upon Arabic, its stability upon the mixed loyalties of its local inhabitants, and its very existence upon the rugged mountains that cradled it. This book challenges prevailing knowledge of this little-known crusader state and by extension the medieval Middle East as a whole. .

The Writings of Teresa de Cartagena

The Writings of Teresa de Cartagena PDF Author: Teresa (de Cartagena)
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 9780859914468
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 172

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book presents two prose works written by Teresa de Cartagena: Grove of the infirm (Arbolea de los enfermos) and Wonder at the works of God (Admiración operum Dey).

Constructing Virtue and Vice

Constructing Virtue and Vice PDF Author: Olga V. Trokhimenko
Publisher: V&R unipress GmbH
ISBN: 3847101196
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 255

Get Book Here

Book Description
The study examines textual representations of women's laughter and smiling and their imagined connection to female virtue in a wide variety of discourses and contexts of the German Middle Ages, including medieval epic, ecclesiastical texts, conduct literature, lyric, and sculpture. By engaging with the competing, and at times contradictory, views of female laughter, it reaffirms a disputatious nature of medieval culture, in which multiple views of femininity, sexuality, and virtue stood in a conflicting, yet productive, dialogue with one another. The society that emerges when one looks at medieval German texts is always ambivalent: it thrives on and enjoys talking about sensuality and eroticism, while being constrained by the conventions of polite behavior and the fear of sin; it relies on the ritual use of laughter, while marking it as a sign of lust and perdition. Women's laughter thus offers an important way into understanding medieval views of gender because it combines physicality with shifting and conflicting cultural norms.