The Fate of Fortune in the Early Middle Ages PDF Download

Author: Jerold C. Frakes
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9789004085442
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Author: Frakes
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004451730
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Author: Gianni Guastella
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191036293
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 457

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The concept expressed by the Roman term fama, although strictly linked to the activity of speaking, recalls a more complex form of collective communication that puts diverse information and opinions into circulation by 'word of mouth', covering the spreading of rumours, expression of common anxieties, and sharing of opinions about peers, contemporaries, or long-dead personages within both small and large communities of people. This 'hearsay' method of information propagation, of chain-like transmission across a complex network of transfers of uncertain order and origin, often rapid and elusive, has been described by some ancient writers as like the flight of a winged word, provoking interesting contrasts with more recent theories that anthropologists and sociologists have produced about the same phenomenon. This volume proceeds from a brief discussion of the ancient concept to a detailed examination of the way in which fama has been personified in ancient and medieval literature and in European figurative art between the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries. Commenting on examples ranging from Virgil's Fama in Book 4 of the Aeneid to Chaucer's House of Fame, it addresses areas of anthropological, sociological, literary, and historical-artistic interest, charting the evolving depiction of fama from a truly interdisciplinary perspective. Following this theme, it is revealed that although the most important personifications were originally created to represent the invisible but pervasive diffusion of talk which circulates information about others, these then began to give way to embodiments of the abstract idea of the glory of illustrious men. By the end of the medieval period, these two different representations, of rumour and glory, were variously combined to create the modern icon of Fame with which we are more familiar today.

Author: Nicholas Scott Baker
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108922333
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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This innovative cultural history of financial risk-taking in Renaissance Italy argues that a new concept of the future as unknown and unknowable emerged in Italian society between the mid-fifteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries. Exploring the rich interchanges between mercantile and intellectual cultures underpinning this development in four major cities - Florence, Genoa, Venice, and Milan - Nicholas Scott Baker examines how merchants and gamblers, the futurologists of the pre-modern world, understood and experienced their own risk taking and that of others. Drawing on extensive archival research, this study demonstrates that while the Renaissance did not create the modern sense of time, it constructed the foundations on which it could develop. The new conceptions of the past and the future that developed in the Renaissance provided the pattern for the later construction a single narrative beginning in classical antiquity stretching to the now. This book thus makes an important contribution toward laying bare the historical contingency of a sense of time that continues to structure our world in profound ways.

Author: Chumaru Koyama
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004453172
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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This volume deals with the medieval concept of nature under various aspects ( such as natural law and the foundation of ethics, the metaphysical and theological understanding of nature, final causality and explanation, nature as the object of science) and from different perspectives : Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, Thierry of Chartres and the philosophy of nature in the 12th century, Henry Bate and William of Ockham, Duns Scotus. This publication is the result of a research project patronized by Waseda University in Tokyo which confronted Japanese and Western views on nature. It was assumed that an intercultural dialogue on nature, which still is a central concept in modern thought, both ecological and ethical, is not possible without an historical understanding of the formation of this concept in medieval culture. The various contributions of Japanese and Western scholars offer the medieval precedents for such a dialogue.

Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110609703
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 751

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Research on medieval and early modern travel literature has made great progress, which now allows us to take the next step and to analyze the correlations between the individual and space throughout time, which contributed essentially to identity formation in many different settings. The contributors to this volume engage with a variety of pre-modern texts, images, and other documents related to travel and the individual's self-orientation in foreign lands and make an effort to determine the concept of identity within a spatial framework often determined by the meeting of various cultures. Moreover, objects, images and words can also travel and connect people from different worlds through books. The volume thus brings together new scholarship focused on the interrelationship of travel, space, time, and individuality, which also includes, of course, women's movement through the larger world, whether in concrete terms or through proxy travel via readings. Travel here is also examined with respect to craftsmen's activities at various sites, artists' employment for many different projects all over Europe and elsewhere, and in terms of metaphysical experiences (catabasis).

Author: Marcía L. Colish
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9789004093270
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 478

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Author: J. Mitchell
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230620728
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Medieval writers were fascinated by fortune and misfortune, yet the critical problems raised by such explorations have not been adequately theorized. Allan Mitchell invites us to consider these contingencies in relation to an "ethics of the event." His book examines how Middle English writers including Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and Malory treat unpredictable events such as sexual attraction, political disaster, social competition, traumatic accidents, and the textual condition itself - locating in fortune the very potentiality of ethical life. While earlier scholarship has detailed the iconography of Lady Fortune, this book alters and advances the conversation so that we see fortune less as a negative exemplum than as a positive sign of radical phenomena.

Author: Aaron J Kleist
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442691328
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 441

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The question of whether or not our decisions and efforts make a difference in an uncertain and uncontrollable world had enormous significance for writers in Anglo-Saxon England. Striving with Grace looks at seven authors who wrote either in Latin or Old English, and the ways in which they sought to resolve this fundamental question. For Anglo-Saxon England, as for so much of the medieval West, the problem of individual will was complicated by a widespread theistic tradition that influenced writers, thinkers, and their hypotheses. Aaron J Kleist examines the many factors that produced strikingly different, though often complementary, explanations of free will in early England. Having first established the perspectives of Augustine, he considers two Church Fathers who rivalled Augustine's impact on early England, Gregory the Great and the Venerable Bede, and reconstructs their influence on later English writers. He goes on to examine Alfred the Great's Old English Boethius and Lantfred of Winchester's Carmen de libero arbitrio, and the debt that both texts owe to Boethius' classic De consolatione Philosophiae. Finally, Kleist discusses Wulfstan the Homilist and Ælfric of Eynsham, two seminal writers of late Anglo-Saxon England. Striving with Grace shows that all of these authors, despite striking differences in their sources and logic, underscore humanity's need for grace even as they labour to affirm the legitimacy of human effort.

Author: John Sellars
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317675827
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 564

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The ancient philosophy of stoicism has been a crucial and formative influence on the development of Western thought since its inception through to the present day. It is not only an important area of study in philosophy and classics, but also in theology and literature. The Routledge Handbook of the Stoic Tradition is the first volume of its kind, and an outstanding guide and reference source to the nature and continuing significance of stoicism. Comprising twenty-six chapters by a team of international contributors and organised chronologically, the Handbook is divided into four parts: Antiquity and the Middle Ages, including stoicism in Rome; stoicism in early Christianity; the Platonic response to stoicism; and stoic influences in the late Middle Ages Renaissance and Reformation, addressing the impact of stoicism on the Italian Renaissance, Reformation thought, and early modern English literature including Shakespeare Early Modern Europe, including stoicism and early modern French thought; the stoic influence on Spinoza and Leibniz; stoicism and the French and Scottish Enlightenment; and Kant and stoic ethics The Modern World, including stoicism in nineteenth century German philosophy; stoicism in Victorian culture; stoicism in America; stoic themes in contemporary Anglo-American ethics; and the stoic influence on modern psychotherapy. An invaluable resource for anyone interested in the philosophical history and impact of stoic thought, The Routledge Handbook of the Stoic Tradition is essential reading for all students and researchers working on the subject.