Sacred Fictions of Medieval France

Sacred Fictions of Medieval France PDF Author: Maureen Barry McCann Boulton
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843844141
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
A study of the immensely popular "lives" of Christ and the Virgin in medieval France.

Sacred Fictions of Medieval France

Sacred Fictions of Medieval France PDF Author: Maureen Barry McCann Boulton
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843844141
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
A study of the immensely popular "lives" of Christ and the Virgin in medieval France.

Weaving Sacred Stories

Weaving Sacred Stories PDF Author: Laura Weigert
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801440083
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Spanning the backs of choir stalls above the heads of the canons and their officials, large-scale tapestries of saints' lives functioned as both architectural elements and pictorial narratives in the late Middle Ages. In an extensively illustrated book that features sixteen color plates, Laura Weigert examines the role of these tapestries in ritual performances. She situates individual tapestries within their architectural and ceremonial settings, arguing that the tapestries contributed to a process of storytelling in which the clerical elite of late medieval cities legitimated and defended their position in the social sphere.Weigert focuses on three of the most spectacular and little-studied tapestry series preserved from the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries: Lives of Saints Piat and Eleutherius (Notre-Dame, Tournai), Life of Saint Steven (Saint-Steven, Auxerre [now Musée du Moyen Age, Paris]), and Life of Saints Gervasius and Protasius (Saint-Julien, Le Mans). Each of these tapestries, measuring over forty meters in length, included elements that have traditionally been defined as either lay or clerical. On the prescribed days when the tapestries were displayed, the liturgical performance for which they were the setting sought to merge the history and patron saint of the local community with the universal history of the Christian church. Weigert combines a detailed analysis of the narrative structure of individual images with a discussion of the particular social circumstances in which they were produced and perceived. Weaving Sacred Stories is thereby significant not only to the history of medieval art but also to art history and cultural studies in general.

Sacred Fictions

Sacred Fictions PDF Author: Lynda L. Coon
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812201671
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
Late antique and early medieval hagiographic texts present holy women as simultaneously pious and corrupt, hideous and beautiful, exemplars of depravity and models of sanctity. In Sacred Fictions Lynda Coon unpacks these paradoxical representations to reveal the construction and circumscription of women's roles in the early Christian centuries. Coon discerns three distinct paradigms for female sanctity in saints' lives and patristic and monastic writings. Women are recurrently figured as repentant desert hermits, wealthy widows, or cloistered ascetic nuns, and biblical discourse informs the narrative content, rhetorical strategies, and symbolic meanings of these texts in complex and multivalent ways. If hagiographers made their women saints walk on water, resurrect the dead, or consecrate the Eucharist, they also curbed the power of women by teaching that the daughters of Eve must make their bodies impenetrable through militant chastity or spiritual exile and must eradicate self-indulgence through ascetic attire or philanthropy. The windows the sacred fiction of holy women open on the past are far from transparent; driven by both literary invention and moral imperative, the stories they tell helped shape Western gender constructs that have survived into modern times.

The Medieval French Ovide Moralisé

The Medieval French Ovide Moralisé PDF Author: K. Sarah-Jane Murray
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843846535
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1180

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Book Description
First English translation of one of the most influential French poems of the Middle Ages. The anonymous Ovide moralisé (Moralized Ovid), composed in France in the fourteenth century, retells and explicates Ovid's Metamorphoses, with generous helpings of related texts, for a Christian audience. Working from the premise that everything in the universe, including the pagan authors of Graeco-Roman Antiquity, is part of God's plan and expresses God's truth even without knowing it, the Ovide moralisé is a massive and influential work of synthesis and creativity, a remarkable window into a certain kind of medieval thinking. It is of major importance across time and across many disciplines, including literature, philosophy, theology, and art history. This three volume set offers an English translation of this hugely significant text - the first into any modern language. Based on the only complete edition to date, that by Cornelis de Boer and others completed in 1938, it also reflects more recent editions and numerous manuscripts. The translation is accompanied by a substantial introduction, situating the Ovide moralisé in terms of the reception of Ovid, the mythographical tradition, and its medieval French religious and intellectual milieu. Notes discuss textual problems and sources, and relate the text to key issues in the thought of theologians such as Bonaventure and Aquinas.

France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart

France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart PDF Author: Raymond Jonas
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520924010
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
In a richly layered and beautifully illustrated narrative, Raymond Jonas tells the fascinating and surprisingly little-known story of the Sacré-Coeur, or Sacred Heart. The highest point in Paris and a celebrated tourist destination, the white-domed basilica of Sacré-Coeur on Montmartre is a key monument both to French Catholicism and to French national identity. Jonas masterfully reconstructs the history of the devotion responsible for the basilica, beginning with the apparition of the Sacred Heart to Marguerite Marie Alacoque in the seventeenth century, through the French Revolution and its aftermath, to the construction of the monumental church that has loomed over Paris since the end of the nineteenth century. Jonas focuses on key moments in the development of the cult: the founding apparition, its invocation during the plague of Marseilles, its adaptation as a royalist symbol during the French Revolution, and its elevation to a central position in Catholic devotional and political life in the crisis surrounding the Franco-Prussian War. He draws on a wealth of archival sources to produce a learned yet accessible narrative that encompasses a remarkable sweep of French politics, history, architecture, and art.

Marguerite de Navarre

Marguerite de Navarre PDF Author: Emily Butterworth
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843846268
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
A new exploration of the complexities and resolutions at play in the writings of Marguerite de Navarre, offering insights into how her work reflected the turbulence, uncertainties, and assurances of her historical period. Marguerite de Navarre was a Renaissance princess, diplomat, and mystical poet. She is arguably best known for The Heptameron, an answer to Boccaccio's Decameron, a brilliant and open-ended collection of short stories told by a group of men and women stranded in a monastery. The stories explore love, desire, male and female honour, individual salvation, and the iniquity of Franciscan monks, while the discussions between the storytellers enact and embody the tensions, ideologies, and prejudices underlying the stories. Marguerite herself was deeply involved in the debates and conflicts of her time. Her work reflects the turbulence, uncertainties, and assurances of her historical period, as the Renaissance re-imagined the past and the Reformation re-made the church, and represents her original and sometimes provocative position on these questions. This book presents The Heptameron and its investigations into gender relations, the nature of love, and the nature of religious faith in the context of the intellectual, religious, and political questions of the sixteenth century, setting it alongside Marguerite's other writings: her poetry, plays, and diplomatic letters. In chapters on communities, religion, politics, gender relationships, desire, and literary technique, it explores the complexities and resolutions of Marguerite's writing and her world. It aims to offer a guide to the critical tradition on Marguerite's work along with new readings of her texts, revealing both the historical specificity of her writing and its continuing relevance.

The Futures of Medieval French

The Futures of Medieval French PDF Author: Jane Gilbert
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843845954
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
Essays on aspects of medieval French literature, celebrating the scholarship of Sarah Kay and her influence on the field.

The Face and Faciality in Medieval French Literature, 1170-1390

The Face and Faciality in Medieval French Literature, 1170-1390 PDF Author: Alice Hazard
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843845873
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Modern theoretical approaches throw new light on the concepts of face and faciality in the Roman de la Rose and other French texts from the Middle Ages.

The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew and the Nativity of Mary

The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew and the Nativity of Mary PDF Author: Brandon W. Hawk
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 0227177282
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew is one of the most important witnesses in Western Europe to apocryphal stories about the lives of Mary, Joseph, Jesus, and Mary’s parents, Anna and Joachim. This apocryphon was also used as the basis for another, the Nativity of Mary, which gained equal popularity. As bestsellers of medieval Christianity, these Latin apocrypha are major witnesses to the explosion of extra-biblical literature in the Western Middle Ages. Despite their apocryphal status, the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew and the Nativity of Mary proved influential throughout the Middle Ages and into the early modern period, as their popularity and influences may be traced in Christian literature, visual arts, liturgy, and theological perspectives still revered by Roman Catholic theologians. These apocrypha also remain significant works for considering the history of monasticism and the cult of the Virgin Mary. The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew and the Nativity of Mary draws upon a range of manuscript sources to present comprehensive English translations of the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew and the Nativity of Mary with full introductions and commentaries, as well as translations of related works with accompanying commentaries.

The Permeable Self

The Permeable Self PDF Author: Barbara Newman
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812253345
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
The Permeable Self offers medievalists new insight into the appeal and dangers of the erotics of pedagogy; the remarkable influence of courtly romance conventions on hagiography and mysticism; and the unexpected ways that pregnancy—often devalued in mothers—could be positively ascribed to men, virgins, and God.