Satiric Advice on Women and Marriage

Satiric Advice on Women and Marriage PDF Author: Warren S. Smith
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472026291
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
Advice on sex and marriage in the literature of antiquity and the middle ages typically stressed the negative: from stereotypes of nagging wives and cheating husbands to nightmarish visions of women empowered through marriage. Satiric Advice on Women and Marriage brings together the leading scholars of this fascinating body of literature. Their essays examine a variety of ancient and early medieval writers' cautionary and often eccentric marital satire beginning with Plautus in the third century B.C.E. through Chaucer (the only non-Latin author studied). The volume demonstrates the continuity in the Latin tradition which taps into the fear of marriage and intimacy shared by ancient ascetics (Lucretius), satirists (Juvenal), comic novelists (Apuleius), and by subsequent Christian writers starting with Tertullian and Jerome, who freely used these ancient sources for their own purposes, including propaganda for recruiting a celibate clergy and the promotion of detachment and asceticism as Christian ideals. Warren S. Smith is Professor of Classical Languages at the University of New Mexico.

Satiric Advice on Women and Marriage

Satiric Advice on Women and Marriage PDF Author: Warren S. Smith
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472026291
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 311

Get Book Here

Book Description
Advice on sex and marriage in the literature of antiquity and the middle ages typically stressed the negative: from stereotypes of nagging wives and cheating husbands to nightmarish visions of women empowered through marriage. Satiric Advice on Women and Marriage brings together the leading scholars of this fascinating body of literature. Their essays examine a variety of ancient and early medieval writers' cautionary and often eccentric marital satire beginning with Plautus in the third century B.C.E. through Chaucer (the only non-Latin author studied). The volume demonstrates the continuity in the Latin tradition which taps into the fear of marriage and intimacy shared by ancient ascetics (Lucretius), satirists (Juvenal), comic novelists (Apuleius), and by subsequent Christian writers starting with Tertullian and Jerome, who freely used these ancient sources for their own purposes, including propaganda for recruiting a celibate clergy and the promotion of detachment and asceticism as Christian ideals. Warren S. Smith is Professor of Classical Languages at the University of New Mexico.

Women and Modesty in Late Antiquity

Women and Modesty in Late Antiquity PDF Author: Kate Wilkinson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316298515
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
This book offers a fresh approach to some of the most studied documents relating to Christian female asceticism in the Roman era. Focusing on the letters of advice to the women of the noble Anicia family, Kate Wilkinson argues that conventional descriptions of feminine modesty can reveal spaces of agency and self-formation in early Christian women's lives. She uses comparative data from contemporary ethnographic studies of Muslim, Hindu, and indigenous Pakistani women to draw out the possibilities inherent in codes of modesty. Her analysis also draws on performance studies for close readings of Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome and Pelagius. The book begins by locating itself within the complex terrain of feminist historiography, and then addresses three main modes of modest behavior - dress, domesticity and silence. Finally, it addresses the theme of false modesty and explores women's agency in light of Augustinian and Pelagian conceptions of choice.

Epicurean Ethics in Horace

Epicurean Ethics in Horace PDF Author: Sergio Yona
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191090131
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
Over the centuries leading up to their composition many genres and authors have emerged as influences on Horace's Satires, which in turn has led to a wide variety of scholarly interpretations. This study aims to expand the existing dialogue by exploring further the intersection of ancient satire and ethics, focusing on the moral tradition of Epicureanism through the lens of one source in particular: Philodemus of Gadara. Philodemus was an Epicurean philosopher who wrote for a Roman audience and was one of Horace's contemporaries and neighbours in Italy. His works, which were preserved by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 but have nevertheless not been widely read on account of their fragmentary nature, feature a range of ethical treatises on subjects including patronage, friendship, flattery, frankness, poverty, and wealth. Epicurean Ethics in Horace: The Psychology of Satire offers a serious consideration of the role of Philodemus' Epicurean teachings in Horace's Satires and argues that the central concerns of the philosopher's work not only lie at the heart of the poet's criticisms of Roman society and its shortcomings, but also lend to the collection a certain coherence and overall unity in its underlying convictions. The result is a ground-breaking study of the deep and pervasive influence of Epicurean ethical philosophy on Horace's Satires, which also reveals something of the poet behind the literary mask or persona by demonstrating the philosophical consistency of his position throughout the two books.

Wandering Women and Holy Matrons

Wandering Women and Holy Matrons PDF Author: Leigh Ann Craig
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047427726
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
This book explores women’s experiences of pilgrimage in Latin Christendom between 1300 and 1500 C.E. Later medieval authors harbored grave doubts about women’s mobility; literary images of mobile women commonly accused them of lust, pride, greed, and deceit. Yet real women commonly engaged in pilgrimage in a variety of forms, both physical and spiritual, voluntary and compulsory, and to locations nearby and distant. Acting within both practical and social constraints, such women helped to construct more positive interpretations of their desire to travel and of their experiences as pilgrims. Regardless of how their travel was interpreted, those women who succeeded in becoming pilgrims offer us a rare glimpse of ordinary women taking on extraordinary religious and social authority.

Playing the Man

Playing the Man PDF Author: Meriel Jones
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191612456
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Despite the growth of research on masculinity in both Gender and Classical Studies, and the resurgence of interest in ancient fiction, no volume has yet been devoted to exploring the representation of masculinity in ancient Greek novels. This ground-breaking study examines and contextualizes three key discourses of ancient Greek masculinity - paideia, andreia, and sexual ideology - as evidenced in the five 'ideal' Greek novels (namely those of Chariton, Xenophon of Ephesus, Achilles Tatius, Longus, and Heliodorus). Jones argues that while some of the narratives may be set in the classical past, the masculine concerns they display are inescapably symptomatic of the imperial present, reflecting some of the 'gender troubles' of the real world of their authors. Using modern theories of the 'performance' of gender as tools for analysis, the study finds that many of the novels' men betray an awareness that their masculine identities depend on the maintenance of their image before others - they are conscious of 'playing the man'. The book also puts forward the hypothesis that, while most of the authors uphold accepted scripts of masculinity, Achilles Tatius constructs Cleitophon as a 'misperformer' of masculinity as a means of challenging and subverting traditional codes of gender.

Lucretius and the End of Masculinity

Lucretius and the End of Masculinity PDF Author: Michael Pope
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009242350
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
From beginning to end, the De rerum natura upsets expectations. This book's premise is that Lucretius intentionally provokes his imagined male audience, playfully and forcefully proving to them that they are not the men they suppose themselves to be. From astral bodies to the magnetic draw of human sexuality to the social bonds linking parents to children, Lucretius shows that everything is compounded material, both a source of atomic issue and receptacle of atomic ingress. The universe, as Lucretius presents it, is a never-ending cycle of material interpenetration, connectivity, and dissolution. Roman men, in the vastness of it all, are only exceptional in their self-defeating fantasies. Close analysis of Lucretius' poetics reveals an unremitting assault upon the fictions that comprise Roman masculinity, from seminal conception in utero to existential decomposition in the grave. Nevertheless, Lucretius offers an Epicurean vision of masculinity that just might save the Republic.

In Bed with the Romans

In Bed with the Romans PDF Author: Paul Chrystal
Publisher: Amberley Publishing Limited
ISBN: 1445643529
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
An entertaining and intriguing account of sex in Rome and the exploits of some of Rome’s celebrated exponents of sexual permissiveness and perversion

Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale, Franklin’s Tale, and Physician’s Tale

Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale, Franklin’s Tale, and Physician’s Tale PDF Author: Kenneth Bleeth
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442667559
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 597

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Book Description
The latest volume in the Chaucer Bibliographies series, meticulously assembled by Kenneth Bleeth, is the most comprehensive record of scholarship on Chaucer's Squire's Tale, Franklin's Tale, and Physician's Tale.

Plautine Trends

Plautine Trends PDF Author: Ioannis N. Perysinakis
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110368927
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Plautine Trends: Studies in Plautine Comedy and its Reception, a collective volume published as a Festschrift in honour of Prof. D. Raios (University of Ioannina), aims to contribute to the current, intense discussion on Plautine drama and engage with most of the topics which lie at the forefront of recent scholarship on ‘literary Plautus’. 13 papers by experts on Roman Comedy address issues concerning a) the structure of Plautine plot in its social, historical and philosophical contexts, b) the interfaces between language and comic plot, and c) plot and language as signs of reception. Participants include (in alphabetical order): A. Augoustakis, R.R. Caston, D.M. Christenson, M. Fontaine, S. Frangoulidis, M. Hanses, E. Karakasis, D. Konstan, K. Kounaki–Philippides, S. Papaioannou, A. Sharrock, N.W. Slater, and J.T. Welsh. The papers of the volume are preceded by an introduction offering a review of the extensive literature on the subject in recent years and setting the volume in its critical context. The preface to the volume is written by R.L. Hunter. The book is intended for students or scholars working on or interested in Plautine Comedy and its reception.

Abject Eroticism in Northern Renaissance Art

Abject Eroticism in Northern Renaissance Art PDF Author: Yvonne Owens
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350190500
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Hans Baldung Grien, the most famous apprentice and close friend of German artist Albrecht Dürer, was known for his unique and highly eroticised images of witches. In paintings and woodcut prints, he gave powerful visual expression to late medieval tropes and stereotypes, such as the poison maiden, venomous virgin, the Fall of Man, 'death and the maiden' and other motifs and eschatological themes, which mingled abject and erotic qualities in the female body. Yvonne Owens reads these images against the humanist intellectual milieu of Renaissance Germany, showing how classical and medieval medicine and natural philosophy interpreted female anatomy as toxic, defective and dangerously beguiling. She reveals how Hans Baldung exploited this radical polarity to create moralising and titillating portrayals of how monstrous female sexuality victimised men and brought them low. Furthermore, these images issued from-and contributed to-the contemporary understanding of witchcraft as a heresy that stemmed from natural 'feminine defect,' a concept derived from Aristotle. Offering new and provocative interpretations of Hans Baldung's iconic witchcraft imagery, this book is essential reading for historians of art, culture and gender relations in the late medieval and early modern periods.