The Literature of Hope in the Middle Ages and Today

The Literature of Hope in the Middle Ages and Today PDF Author: Flo Keyes
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786425962
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
The influence of medieval literature is instantly apparent in modern fantasy literature, where knights and wizards populate castle-strewn landscapes. Less obvious but still recognizable is the influence in science fiction, which draws on medieval story structure and themes. Beyond these superficial similarities, deeper connections become evident through an analysis of the literature's social function. Like the fantasy and science fiction of today, the romances of the Middle Ages were written in times of extreme and prolonged social upheaval. In all three genres, the storytellers draw on the same archetypes--the hero, the quest, the transformation--for stories whose goal is to provide hope. Using Jungian theory and comparative analysis, this book explores the connections between the three genres. It finds common ground among them in plots that often reflect the recurring cycle of life and the elements of psychological rather than literal realism. Representative texts such as Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur, the Witch World series by Andre Norton and More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon are examined in depth, and the use of archetypes in each is thoroughly explored. Analysis reveals similarities in images, structures, and the pervasive belief that a perfectible universe is within man's capabilities--if not now, then someday.

The Literature of Hope in the Middle Ages and Today

The Literature of Hope in the Middle Ages and Today PDF Author: Flo Keyes
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786425962
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 207

Get Book Here

Book Description
The influence of medieval literature is instantly apparent in modern fantasy literature, where knights and wizards populate castle-strewn landscapes. Less obvious but still recognizable is the influence in science fiction, which draws on medieval story structure and themes. Beyond these superficial similarities, deeper connections become evident through an analysis of the literature's social function. Like the fantasy and science fiction of today, the romances of the Middle Ages were written in times of extreme and prolonged social upheaval. In all three genres, the storytellers draw on the same archetypes--the hero, the quest, the transformation--for stories whose goal is to provide hope. Using Jungian theory and comparative analysis, this book explores the connections between the three genres. It finds common ground among them in plots that often reflect the recurring cycle of life and the elements of psychological rather than literal realism. Representative texts such as Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur, the Witch World series by Andre Norton and More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon are examined in depth, and the use of archetypes in each is thoroughly explored. Analysis reveals similarities in images, structures, and the pervasive belief that a perfectible universe is within man's capabilities--if not now, then someday.

Toward a Global Middle Ages

Toward a Global Middle Ages PDF Author: Bryan C. Keene
Publisher: Getty Publications
ISBN: 160606598X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
This important and overdue book examines illuminated manuscripts and other book arts of the Global Middle Ages. Illuminated manuscripts and illustrated or decorated books—like today’s museums—preserve a rich array of information about how premodern peoples conceived of and perceived the world, its many cultures, and everyone’s place in it. Often a Eurocentric field of study, manuscripts are prisms through which we can glimpse the interconnected global history of humanity. Toward a Global Middle Ages is the first publication to examine decorated books produced across the globe during the period traditionally known as medieval. Through essays and case studies, the volume’s multidisciplinary contributors expand the historiography, chronology, and geography of manuscript studies to embrace a diversity of objects, individuals, narratives, and materials from Africa, Asia, Australasia, and the Americas—an approach that both engages with and contributes to the emerging field of scholarly inquiry known as the Global Middle Ages. Featuring more than 160 color illustrations, this wide-ranging and provocative collection is intended for all who are interested in engaging in a dialogue about how books and other textual objects contributed to world-making strategies from about 400 to 1600.

Old Age in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

Old Age in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance PDF Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110925990
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 585

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Book Description
After an extensive introduction that takes stock of the relevant research literature on Old Age in the Middle Ages and the early modern age, the contributors discuss the phenomenon of old age in many different fields of late antique, medieval, and early modern literature, history, and art history. Both Beowulf and the Hildebrandslied, both Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival and Titurel, both the figure of Merlin and the trans-European tradition of Perceval/Peredur/Parzival, then the figure of the vetula in a variety of medieval French, English, and Spanish texts, and of the Old Man in The Stricker's Daniel, both the treatment of old age in Langland's Piers the Plowman and in Jean Gerson's sermons are dealt with. Other aspects involve late-antique epistolary literature, early modern French farce in light of Disability Studies, the social role of old, impotent men in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Netherlandish paintings, and the scientific discourse of old age and health since the 1500s. The discourse of Old Age proves to have been of central importance throughout the ages, so the critical examination of the issues involved sheds intriguing light on the cultural history from late antiquity to the seventeenth century.

Lovesickness in the Middle Ages

Lovesickness in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Mary Frances Wack
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512809535
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
According to medieval physicians, lovesickness was an illness of mind and body caused by sexual desire and the sight of beauty. The notorious agony of an unhappy lover was treated as an ailment closely related to melancholia and potentially fatal if not treated. In Lovesickness in the Middle Ages, Mary F. Wack uses newly discovered texts and takes a fresh look at primary sources to offer the first comprehensive analysis of the forms and meanings of the lover's malady in medieval culture. She examines its importance in medieval literature and its role in the transformation of courtly love from literary convention to social practice. Drawing extensively from the Viaticum and its commentaries, studied for centuries in medical schools, Wack also addresses wider questions about the cultural construction of illness, the conflict between medicine and Church morality, the relations between lovesickness and gender, and the lover's malady as a form of behavior in late medieval society. The second part of the book contains annotated editions and translations of six important texts on lovesickness—the Viaticum and four commentaries on it. Forty-six black-and-white illustrations provide a striking visual perspective on medieval love and medicine. Lovesickness in the Middle Ages will interest literary scholars and students as well as historians of medicine, sexuality, psychology, and women's studies.

Obscene Pedagogies

Obscene Pedagogies PDF Author: Carissa M. Harris
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501730428
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
In Obscene Pedagogies, Carissa M. Harris investigates the relationship between obscenity, gender, and pedagogy in Middle English and Middle Scots literary texts from 1300 to 1580 to show how sexually explicit and defiantly vulgar speech taught readers and listeners about sexual behavior and consent. Through innovative close readings of literary texts including erotic lyrics, single-woman's songs, debate poems between men and women, Scottish insult poetry battles, and The Canterbury Tales, Harris demonstrates how through its transgressive charge and galvanizing shock value, obscenity taught audiences about gender, sex, pleasure, and power in ways both positive and harmful. Harris's own voice, proudly witty and sharply polemical, inspires the reader to address these medieval texts with an eye on contemporary issues of gender, violence, and misogyny.

Medieval Wisdom for Modern Christians

Medieval Wisdom for Modern Christians PDF Author: Chris R. Armstrong
Publisher: Brazos Press
ISBN: 1493401971
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
Many Christians today tend to view the story of medieval faith as a cautionary tale. Too often, they dismiss the Middle Ages as a period of corruption and decay in the church. They seem to assume that the church apostatized from true Christianity after it gained cultural influence in the time of Constantine, and the faith was only later recovered by the sixteenth-century Reformers or even the eighteenth-century revivalists. As a result, the riches and wisdom of the medieval period have remained largely inaccessible to modern Protestants. Church historian Chris Armstrong helps readers see beyond modern caricatures of the medieval church to the animating Christian spirit of that age. He believes today's church could learn a number of lessons from medieval faith, such as how the gospel speaks to ordinary, embodied human life in this world. Medieval Wisdom for Modern Christians explores key ideas, figures, and movements from the Middle Ages in conversation with C. S. Lewis and other thinkers, helping contemporary Christians discover authentic faith and renewal in a forgotten age.

Mental Health, Spirituality, and Religion in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age

Mental Health, Spirituality, and Religion in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age PDF Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110361647
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 744

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Book Description
This volume continues the critical exploration of fundamental issues in the medieval and early modern world, here concerning mental health, spirituality, melancholy, mystical visions, medicine, and well-being. The contributors, who originally had presented their research at a symposium at The University of Arizona in May 2013, explore a wide range of approaches and materials pertinent to these issues, taking us from the early Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, capping the volume with some reflections on the relevance of religion today. Lapidary sciences matter here as much as medical-psychological research, combined with literary and art-historical approaches. The premodern understanding of mental health is not taken as a miraculous panacea for modern problems, but the contributors suggest that medieval and early modern writers, scientists, and artists commanded a considerable amount of arcane, sometimes curious and speculative, knowledge that promises to be of value and relevance even for us today, once again. Modern palliative medicine finds, for instance, intriguing parallels in medieval word magic, and the mystical perspectives encapsulated highly productive alternative perceptions of the macrocosm and microcosm that promise to be insightful and important also for the post-modern world.

The Brave Learner

The Brave Learner PDF Author: Julie Bogart
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143133225
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Publishers Weekly bestseller · A joyful and accessible homeschool guide to making learning a part of everyday life Parents who are deeply invested in their children's education can be hard on themselves and their kids. When exhausted parents are living the day-to-day grind, it can seem impossible to muster enough energy to make learning fun or interesting. How do parents nurture a love of learning amid childhood chaos, parental self-doubt, the flu, and state academic standards? In this book, Julie Bogart distills decades of experience--homeschooling her five now grown children, developing curricula, and training homeschooling families around the world--to show parents how to make education an exciting, even enchanting, experience for their kids, whether they're in elementary or high school. Enchantment is about ease, not striving. Bogart shows parents how to make room for surprise, mystery, risk, and adventure in their family's routine, so they can create an environment that naturally moves learning forward. If a child wants to pick up a new hobby or explore a subject area that the parent knows little about, it's easy to simply say "no" to end the discussion and the parental discomfort, while dousing their child's curious spark. Bogart gently invites parents to model brave learning for their kids so they, too, can approach life with curiosity, joy, and the courage to take learning risks.

Tracing the Trails in the Medieval World

Tracing the Trails in the Medieval World PDF Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000205029
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Every human being knows that we are walking through life following trails, whether we are aware of them or not. Medieval poets, from the anonymous composer of Beowulf to Marie de France, Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried von Strassburg, and Guillaume de Lorris to Petrarch and Heinrich Kaufringer, predicated their works on the notion of the trail and elaborated on its epistemological function. We can grasp here an essential concept that determines much of medieval and early modern European literature and philosophy, addressing the direction which all protagonists pursue, as powerfully illustrated also by the anonymous poets of Herzog Ernst and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Dante’s Divina Commedia, in fact, proves to be one of the most explicit poetic manifestations of the fundamental idea of the trail, but we find strong parallels also in powerful contemporary works such as Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de la vie humaine and in many mystical tracts.

Faith, Hope, and Love in the Kingdom of God

Faith, Hope, and Love in the Kingdom of God PDF Author: Robert Hernan Cubillos
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1498222838
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
We live in a world full of challenges. The three graces can almost be seen as motors for Christian life in today's world, but the words faith, hope, and love have so many everyday uses that their technical, theological meanings are, for many, difficult to appreciate. Modern life also leaves many yearning for authenticity and meaning. Many religions have answered that need by calling to mind the image of a path. Always profound progressions, religious paths tend to be motivated either by practices (the act of walking the path) or focal points. Christianity has a focal point, an object, and it sees the three graces as distinctively content filled. The heart of this book is about helping people find the Christian path and their intellectual, emotional, and spiritual balance--an equilibrium that is sustained by a strong personal faith, an enduring hope for the future, and genuine love that will withstand the worst of times. It contributes to the category of Christian literature that provides a pattern for Christian living without surrendering the intellect to the more popular side of this genre.