Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages PDF Download

Author: E. Joy
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230610048
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
This volume brings together contemporary popular entertainment, current political subjects, and medieval history and culture to investigate the intersecting and often tangled relations between politics, aesthetics, reality and fiction, in relation to issues of morality, identity, social values, power, and justice, both in the past and the present.

Author: Louise D'Arcens
Publisher: Cambria Press
ISBN: 1604978643
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Today medievalism is increasingly intelligible as a cultural lingua franca, produced in trans- and international contexts with a view to reaching popular international audiences, some of mass scope. This book offers new perspectives on international relations and how global concerns are made available through contemporary medievalist texts. It questions how research in medievalism may help us rethink the terms of internationalism and globalism within popular cultures, ideologies, and political formations. It investigates how the diverse media of medievalism (print; film and television; arts and crafts; fashion; digital media; clubs and fandom) affect its cultural meaning and circulation, and its social function, and engage questions of desire, gender and identity construction. As a whole, International Medievalism and Popular Culture differs from those studies which have concentrated on imaginative appropriations of the middle ages for domestic cultural contexts. It investigates rather how contemporary cultures engage with medievalism to map and model ideas of the international, the trans-national, the cosmopolitan and the global. This book includes examples from Europe, Britain, North America, Australia and the Arab world. It discusses the formation and the impact of popular medievalism in the globalised worlds of Braveheart, Disney and Harry Potter, but it also explores how the contemporary medieval imaginary generates international cultural perspectives, for example in considering Middle Eastern reception of Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven, the Byzantinism of Julia Kristeva, and Hedley Bull's postnationalist 'new medievalism'. International Medievalism in Popular Culture is an important contribution to medieval studies, cultural studies, and historical studies. It will be of value to undergraduate, postgraduate and academic readers, as well as to all interested in popular culture or medievalism.

Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110434873
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 505

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Book Description
Death is not only the final moment of life, it also casts a huge shadow on human society at large. People throughout time have had to cope with death as an existential experience, and this also, of course, in the premodern world. The contributors to the present volume examine the material and spiritual conditions of the culture of death, studying specific buildings and spaces, literary works and art objects, theatrical performances, and medical tracts from the early Middle Ages to the late eighteenth century. Death has always evoked fear, terror, and awe, it has puzzled and troubled people, forcing theologians and philosophers to respond and provide answers for questions that seem to evade real explanations. The more we learn about the culture of death, the more we can comprehend the culture of life. As this volume demonstrates, the approaches to death varied widely, also in the Middle Ages and the early modern age. This volume hence adds a significant number of new facets to the critical examination of this ever-present phenomenon of death, exploring poetic responses to the Black Death, types of execution of a female murderess, death as the springboard for major political changes, and death reflected in morality plays and art.

Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110321513
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 828

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Book Description
This new volume explores the surprisingly intense and complex relationships between East and West during the Middle Ages and the early modern world, combining a large number of critical studies representing such diverse fields as literary (German, French, Italian, English, Spanish, and Arabic) and other subdisciplines of history, religion, anthropology, and linguistics. The differences between Islam and Christianity erected strong barriers separating two global cultures, but, as this volume indicates, despite many attempts to 'Other' the opposing side, the premodern world experienced an astonishing degree of contacts, meetings, exchanges, and influences. Scientists, travelers, authors, medical researchers, chroniclers, diplomats, and merchants criss-crossed the East and the West, or studied the sources produced by the other culture for many different reasons. As much as the theoretical concept of 'Orientalism' has been useful in sensitizing us to the fundamental tensions and conflicts separating both worlds at least since the eighteenth century, the premodern world did not quite yet operate in such an ideological framework. Even though the Crusades had violently pitted Christians against Muslims, there were countless contacts and a palpitable curiosity on both sides both before, during, and after those religious warfares.

Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110209403
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 913

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Book Description
Sexuality is one of the most influential factors in human life. The responses to and reflections upon the manifestations of sexuality provide fascinating insights into fundamental aspects of medieval and early-modern culture. This interdisciplinary volume with articles written by social historians, literary historians, musicologists, art historians, and historians of religion and mental-ity demonstrates how fruitful collaborative efforts can be in the exploration of essential features of human society. Practically every aspect of culture both in the Middle Ages and the early modern age was influenced and determined by sexuality, which hardly ever surfaces simply characterized by prurient interests. The treatment of sexuality in literature, chronicles, music, art, legal documents, and in scientific texts illuminates central concerns, anxieties, tensions, needs, fears, and problems in human society throughout times.

Author: Karl Alvestad
Publisher: New Directions in Medieval Stu
ISBN: 1350266000
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. Bringing together an international team of experts, The Middle Ages in Modern Culture considers the use of medieval models across a variety of contemporary media – ranging from television and film to architecture – and the significance of deploying an authentic medieval world to these representations. Rooted in this question of authenticity, this interdisciplinary study addresses three connected themes. Firstly, how does historical accuracy relate to authenticity, and whose version of authenticity is accepted? Secondly, how are the middle ages presented in modern media and why do inaccuracies emerge and persist in these works? Thirdly, how do creators of modern content attempt to produce authentic medieval environments, and what are the benefits and pitfalls of accurate portrayals? The result is nuanced study of medieval culture which sheds new light on the use (and misuse) of medieval history in modern media.

Author: David Metzger
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 9780859915670
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
The second part of Medievalism and the Academy identifies the four specific questions that have come to focus recent scholarship in medievalism: What is difference? what is theory? woman? God? The impact of cultural studies on contemporary medieval studies is investigated in this latest volume of Studies in Medievalism, which also offers an account of the developing interest of contemporary cultural theorists inthe medieval period. Rather than dismissing the connection between medieval studies and cultural criticism as an expression of academic self-interest, the essays identify specific questions which engage both, such as race, history, women, religion, and literature. Topics include the use of Augustine by postcolonial theorists; the influence of studies in medieval mysticism on the development of women's studies programs; and the influence of Foucault and NewHistoricism on the study of medieval history. Contributors: ELLIE RAGLAND, TIMOTHY RICHARDSON, MICHAEL BERNARD-DONALS, CLAY KINSNER, LINDA SEXSON, REBECCA DOUGLASS, LOUISE SYLVESTER, RICHARD GLEJZER, CHARLES WILSON, ANDREW J. DELL'OLIO

Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110623072
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 764

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Book Description
Jan Huizinga and Roger Caillois have already taught us to realize how important games and play have been for pre-modern civilization. Recent research has begun to acknowledge the fundamental importance of these aspects in cultural, religious, philosophical, and literary terms. This volume expands on the traditional approach still very much focused on the materiality of game (toys, cards, dice, falcons, dolls, etc.) and acknowledges that game constituted also a form of coming to terms with human existence in an unstable and volatile world determined by universal randomness and fortune. Whether considering blessings or horse fighting, falconry or card games, playing with dice or dolls, we can gain a much deeper understanding of medieval and early modern society when we consider how people pursued pleasure and how they structured their leisure time. The contributions examine a wide gamut of approaches to pleasure, considering health issues, eroticism, tournaments, playing music, reading and listening, drinking alcohol, gambling and throwing dice. This large issue was also relevant, of course, in non-Christian societies, and constitutes a critical concern both for the past and the present because we are all homines ludentes.

Author: Steven L. Kaplan
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110854309
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Understanding Popular Culture

Author: David Matthews
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 1843843927
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
An accessibly-written survey of the origins and growth of the discipline of medievalism studies. The field known as "medievalism studies" concerns the life of the Middle Ages after the Middle Ages. Originating some thirty years ago, it examines reinventions and reworkings of the medieval from the Reformation to postmodernity, from Bale and Leland to HBO's Game of Thrones. But what exactly is it? An offshoot of medieval studies? A version of reception studies? Or a new form of cultural studies? Can such a diverse field claim coherence? Should it be housed in departments of English, or History, or should it always be interdisciplinary? In responding to such questions, the author traces the history of medievalism from its earliest appearances in the sixteenth century to the present day, across a range of examples drawn from the spheres of literature, art, architecture, music and more. He identifies two major modes, the grotesque and the romantic, and focuses on key phases of the development of medievalism in Europe: the Reformation, the late eighteenth century, and above all the period between 1815 and 1850, which, he argues, represents the zenith of medievalist cultural production. He also contends that the 1840s were medievalism's one moment of canonicity in several European cultures at once. After that, medievalism became a minority form, rarely marked with cultural prestige, though always pervasive and influential. Medievalism: a Critical History scrutinises several key categories - space, time, and selfhood - and traces the impact of medievalism on each. It will be the essential guide to a complex and still evolving field of inquiry. David Matthews is Professor of Medieval and Medievalism Studies at the University of Manchester.