Dreams, Visions, and the Rhetoric of Authority PDF Download

Author: John Bickley
Publisher: Medieval Interventions
ISBN: 9781433154492
Category : Authority in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Introduction: Dreams, Visions, and the Rhetoric of Authority - The Authority of Form: Dream and Vision Genres - Authorizing Strategies in the Dreams and Visions of Daniel - Macrobius: Establishing the Authoritative Philosophical Form - Julian of Norwich: The Authorizing Discourses of the Medieval Visionary - Fractured Authority: Chaucer's Ironic Dream Vision - Conclusion: The Rhetoric of Authority - Appendix: Dream and Vision Genres - Index

Author: Isabel Moreira
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801474671
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
In early medieval Europe, dreams and visions were believed to reveal divine information about Christian life and the hereafter. No consensus existed, however, as to whether all Christians, or only a spiritual elite, were entitled to have a relationship of this sort with the supernatural. Drawing on a rich variety of sources—histories, hagiographies, ascetic literature, and records of dreams at saints' shrines—Isabel Moreira provides insight into a society struggling to understand and negotiate its religious visions. Moreira analyzes changing attitudes toward dreams and visionary experiences beginning in late antiquity, when the church hierarchy considered lay dreamers a threat to its claims of spiritual authority. Moreira describes how, over the course of the Merovingian period, the clergy came to accept the visions of ordinary folk—peasants, women, and children—as authentic. Dream literature and accounts of visionary experiences infiltrated all aspects of medieval culture by the eighth century, and the dreams of ordinary Christians became central to the clergy's pastoral concerns. Written in clear and inviting prose, this book enables readers to understand how the clerics of Merovingian Gaul allowed a Christian culture of dreaming to develop and flourish without compromising the religious orthodoxy of the community or the primacy of their own authority.

Author: Elizabeth DePalma Digeser
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0755605578
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
Late Antiquity, the period of transition from the crisis of Roman Empire in the third century to the Middle Ages, has traditionally been considered only in terms of the 'decline' from classical standards. Recent classical scholarship strives to consider this period on its own terms. Taking the reign of Constantine the Great as its starting point, this book examines the unique intersection of rhetoric, religion and politics in Late Antiquity. Expert scholars come together to examine ancient rhetorical texts to explore the ways in which late antique authors drew upon classical traditions, presenting Roman and post-Roman religious and political institutions in order to establish a desired image of a 'new era'. This book provides new insights into how the post-Roman Germanic West, Byzantine East and Muslim South appropriated and transformed the political, intellectual and cultural legacy inherited from the late Roman Empire and its borderlands.

Author: Zita Eva Rohr
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030250415
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
Is the world of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and HBO’s Game of Thrones really medieval? How accurately does it reflect the real Middle Ages? Historians have been addressing these questions since the book and television series exploded into a cultural phenomenon. For scholars of medieval and early modern women, they offer a unique vantage point from which to study the intersections of elite women and popular understandings of the premodern world. This volume is a wide-ranging study of those intersections. Focusing on female agency and the role of advice, it finds a wealth of continuities and contrasts between the many powerful female characters of Martin’s fantasy world and the strategies that historical women used to exert influence. Reading characters such as Daenerys Targaryen, Cersei Lannister, and Brienne of Tarth with a creative, deeply scholarly eye, Queenship and the Women of Westeros makes cutting-edge developments in queenship studies accessible to everyday readers and fans.

Author: Craig E. Bertolet
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040120644
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 678

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Book Description
The Routledge Companion to Global Chaucer offers 40 chapters by leading scholars working with contemporary, theoretical, and textual approaches to the poetry and prose of Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340–1400) in a global context. This volume is an ideal starting point for beginners, offering contemporary perspectives to Chaucer both geographically and intellectually, including: • Exploration of major and lesser-known works, translations, and lyrics, such as The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde • Spatial intersections and external forms of communication • Discussion of identities, cognitions, and patterns of thought, including gender, race, disability, science, and nature. The Routledge Companion to Global Chaucer also includes a section addressing ways of incorporating its material in the classroom to integrate global questions in the teaching of Chaucer’s works. This guide provides post-pandemic, twenty-first century readers a way to teach, learn, and write about Chaucer’s works complete with awareness of their reach, their limitations, and occlusions on a global field of culture.

Author: J. Stephen Russell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Author: Bernard Faure
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691029412
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
Bernard Faure's previous works are well known as guides to some of the more elusive aspects of the Chinese tradition of Chan Buddhism and its outgrowth, Japanese Zen. Continuing his efforts to look at Chan/Zen with a full array of postmodernist critical techniques, Faure now probes the imaginaire, or mental universe, of the Buddhist Soto Zen master Keizan Jokin (1268-1325). Although Faure's new book may be read at one level as an intellectual biography, Keizan is portrayed here less as an original thinker than as a representative of his culture and an example of the paradoxes of the Soto school. The Chan/Zen doctrine that he avowed was allegedly reasonable and demythologizing, but he lived in a psychological world that was just as imbued with the marvelous as was that of his contemporary Dante Alighieri. Drawing on his own dreams to demonstrate that he possessed the magical authority that he felt to reside also in icons and relics, Keizan strove to use these "visions of power" to buttress his influence as a patriarch. To reveal the historical, institutional, ritual, and visionary elements in Keizan's life and thought and to compare these to Soto doctrine, Faure draws on largely neglected texts, particularly the Record of Tokoku (a chronicle that begins with Keizan's account of the origins of the first of the monasteries that he established) and the kirigami, or secret initiation documents.

Author: Amira Mittermaier
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520258509
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
"This brilliant study presents contemporary anthropology at its best. Whether one's goal is understanding the permeability of traditions and modernities or the changing shape of religious imagination and thought in one of the most pivotal countries of the Middle East, this book is an outstanding point of departure."—Dale F. Eickelman, author of The Middle East and Central Asia: An Anthropological Approach, 4th ed. "Dreams That Matter is an insightful and well-crafted study of the practice of dreaming in contemporary Egypt. Mittermaier provides a superb analysis of the imaginative repertoires of Islamic traditions and shows how the dream has remained not only a site of Muslim scholarly interest, but an important part of the way ordinary Muslims encounter and engage with the divine."—Charles Hirschkind, author of Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors "Amira Mittermaier has given us the most complete anthropological study of dream culture in the Middle East—perhaps in any culture. It is a sensitive, intellectually challenging, indeed a courageous, investigation of the psychological, ontological, and ethical assumptions that lie behind dreams, visions, and dream-visitations in contemporary Egypt—where the dream is a vibrant site of political, religious, and interpretive contest. Dreams That Matter will rank among the most important contributions to the anthropology of the imagination for years to come."—Vincent Crapanzano, author of The Harkis: The Wound That Never Heals

Author: Isobel Armstrong
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136322019
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
This collection of new feminist essays represents the work of young critics researching and teaching in British Universities. Aiming to set the agenda for feminist criticism in the nineties, the essays debate themes crucial to the development of feminist thought: among them, the problems of gendered knowledge and the implications of accounts of gendered language, cultural restraints on the representation of sexuality, women’s agency, cultural and political change, a feminist aesthetics and new readings of race and class. This variety is given coherence by a unity of aim – to forge new feminist discourses by addressing conceptual and cultural questions central to problems of gender and sexual difference. The topics of discussion range from matrilinear thought to seventeenth-century prophecy; the poetry of Amelia Lanyer to Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs; from Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf to eighteenth-century colonial painting of the South Pacific; from medieval romance to feminist epistemology. The essays utilise and question the disciplines of literary criticism, art history, photography, psychoanalysis, Marxist history and post-structuralist theory.

Author: Mimi Hanaoka
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316785246
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Intriguing dreams, improbable myths, fanciful genealogies, and suspect etymologies. These were all key elements of the historical texts composed by scholars and bureaucrats on the peripheries of Islamic empires between the tenth and fifteenth centuries. But how are historians to interpret such narratives? And what can these more literary histories tell us about the people who wrote them and the times in which they lived? In this book, Mimi Hanaoka offers an innovative, interdisciplinary method of approaching these sorts of local histories from the Persianate world. By paying attention to the purpose and intention behind a text's creation, her book highlights the preoccupation with authority to rule and legitimacy within disparate regional, provincial, ethnic, sectarian, ideological and professional communities. By reading these texts in such a way, Hanaoka transforms the literary patterns of these fantastic histories into rich sources of information about identity, rhetoric, authority, legitimacy, and centre-periphery relations.