Forging Boethius in Medieval Intellectual Fantasies PDF Download

Author: Brooke Hunter
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429763271
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
Forging Boethius in Medieval Intellectual Fantasies reconsiders the influence of the thirteenth-century Pseudo-Boethian forgery De disciplina scolarium on medieval understandings of Boethius (d. 524). Tracing the medieval popularity of De disciplina’s reimagined vision of Boethius alongside the current scholarly neglect of this forged Boethian persona offers insight into how medieval schoolmen saw themselves and the past, and how modern scholars imagine the medieval past. In exploring this alternate Boethian persona through a variety of different works including texts of translatio studii et imperii, common school texts, the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer, and humanist writings, this book reveals a new vein of medieval Boethianism that is earthy, practical, and even humorous. Forging Boethius is an essential reference book for students and researchers in the fields of medieval literature and philosophy, as well as for anyone interested in gaining a better understanding of one the most significant authors of the Middle Ages.

Author: Catalin Taranu
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000349667
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
In a provocative take on Germanic heroic poetry, Taranu reads texts like Beowulf, Maldon, and the Waltharius as participating in alternative modes of history-writing that functioned in a larger ecology of narrative forms, including Latinate Christian history and the biblical epic. These modes employed the conceit of their participating in a tradition of oral verse for a variety of purposes: from political propaganda to constructing origin myths for early medieval nationhood or heroic masculinity, and sometimes for challenging these paradigms. The more complex of these historical visions actively meditated on their own relationship to truthfulness and fictionality while also performing sophisticated (and often subversive) cultural and socio-emotional work for its audiences. By rethinking canonical categories of historiographical discourse from within medieval textual productions, Vernacular Verse Histories in Early Medieval England and Francia: The Bard and the Rag-Picker aims to recover a part of the wide array of narrative poetic forms through which medieval communities made sense of their past and structured their socio-emotional experience.

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.

Author: Jonathan Fruoco
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000391086
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Polyphony and the Modern asks one fundamental question: what does it mean to be modern in one’s own time? To answer that question, this volume focuses on polyphony as an index of modernity. In The Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch showed that each moment in time is potentially fractured: people living in the same country can effectively live in different centuries – some making their alliances with the past and others betting on the future – but all of them, at least technically, enclosed in the temporal moment. But can a claim of modernity also mean something more ambitious? Can an artist, by accident or design, escape the limits of his or her own time, and somehow precociously embody the outlook of a subsequent age? This book sees polyphony as a bridge providing a terminology and a stylistic practice by which the period barrier between Medieval and Early Modern can be breached. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781003129837

Author: Piotr Spyra
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100009281X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
Examining the fairies of medieval romance as liminal beings, this book draws on anthropological and philosophical studies of liminality to combine folkloristic insights into the nature of fairies with close readings of selected romance texts. Tracing different meanings and manifestations of liminality in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Sir Orfeo, Sir Launfal, Thomas of Erceldoune and Robert Henryson’s Orpheus and Eurydice, the volume offers a comprehensive theory of liminality rooted in structuralist anthropology and poststructuralist theory. Arguing that romance fairies both embody and represent the liminal, The Liminality of Fairies posits and answers fundamental theoretical questions about the limits of representation and the relationship between romance hermeneutics and criticism. The interdisciplinary nature of the argument will appeal not just to medievalists and literary critics but also to anthropologists, folklorists as well as scholars working within the fields of cultural history and contemporary literary theory.

Author: Karl Reichl
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000409201
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
This book focuses on the performance of oral epics and explores the significance of performance features for the interpretation of epic poetry. The leading question of the book is how the socio-cultural context of performance and the various performance elements contribute to the meaning of oral epics. This is a question which not only concerns epics collected from living oral tradition, but which is also of importance for the understanding of the epics of antiquity and the Middle Ages which originated and flourished in an oral milieu. The book is based on fieldwork in the still vibrant oral traditions of the Turkic peoples of Central Asia and Siberia. The discussion combines fieldwork with theory; it is not limited to Turkic epics but branches out into other oral traditions.

Author: William H. Norman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000415805
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
This book explores accounts in the Sagas of Icelanders of encounters with foreign peoples, both abroad and in Iceland, who are portrayed according to stereotypes which vary depending on their origins. Notably, inhabitants of the places identified in the sagas as Írland, Skotland and Vínland are portrayed as being less civilized than the Icelanders themselves. This book explores the ways in which the Íslendingasögur emphasize this relative barbarity through descriptions of diet, material culture, style of warfare and character. These characteristics are discussed in relation to parallel descriptions of Icelandic characters and lifestyle within the Íslendingasögur, and also in the context of a tradition in contemporary European literature, which portrayed the Icelanders themselves as barbaric. Comparisons are made with descriptions of barbarians in classical Roman texts, primarily Sallust, but also Caesar and Tacitus, showing striking similarities between Roman and Icelandic ideas about barbarians.

Author: Maria H. Oen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000703096
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
Birgitta of Sweden (Birgitta Birgersdotter, 1302/03-1373) and her younger contemporary Catherine of Siena (Caterina Benincasa, 1347-1380) form the most powerful and influential female duo in European history. Both enjoyed saintly reputations in life, while acting as the charismatic leaders of a considerable group of followers consisting of clergy as well as mighty secular men and women. They are also among the very few women of the Trecento to leave a substantial body of written work which was widely disseminated in their original languages and in translations. Copies of Birgitta’s Liber celestis revelacionum (The Heavenly Book of Revelations) and compilations of Catherine's letters (Le lettere), prayers Le orazioni) and her theological work, Il Dialogo della divina Provvidenza (The Dialogue) found their way into monastic, royal, and humanist libraries all over Europe. After their deaths, Birgitta’s and Catherine’s respective groups of supporters sought to have them formally canonized. In both cases, however, their political and theological outspokenness, orally and in text, and their public authority represented obstacles. In this comparative study, leading scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds offer, for the very first time, a comprehensive exploration of the lives and activities of Birgitta and Catherine in tandem. Particular attention is given to their literary works and the complex process of negotiating their sanctity and authorial roles. Above all, what the chapters reveal is the many points of connections between two of the most influential women of the Trecento, and how they were related to one another by their peers and successors.

Author: John Arthur Passmore
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Human beings
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
A careful examination and critique of various forms of the search for perfection in Western history from a liberal humanistic point of view which values diversity and caring.

Author: Christopher G. White
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674984293
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
Christopher White points to ways that both spiritual practices and scientific speculation about multiverses and invisible dimensions are efforts to peer into the hidden elements and even existential meaning of the universe. Creatively appropriated, these ideas can restore a spiritual sense that the world is greater than anything our eyes can see.