The Mirror in Medieval and Early Modern Cultures PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download The Mirror in Medieval and Early Modern Cultures PDF full book. Access full book title The Mirror in Medieval and Early Modern Cultures by . Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Publisher: ISBN: 9782503565644 Category : Mirrors Languages : en Pages :
Book Description
This volume examines the intersections between material and metaphorical mirrors in medieval and early modern culture. 0Mirrors have always fascinated humankind. They collapse ordinary distinctions, making visible what is normally invisible, and promising access to hidden realities. Yet, these liminal objects also point to the limitations of human perception, knowledge, and wisdom. In this interdisciplinary volume, specialists in medieval and early modern science, cultural and political history, as well as art history, philosophy, and literature come together to explore the intersections between material and metaphysical mirrors in Europe and the Islamic world. During the time periods studied here, various technologies were transforming the looking glass as an optical device, scientific instrument, and aesthetic object, making it clearer and more readily available, though it remained a rare and precious commodity. While technical innovations spawned new discoveries and ways of seeing, belief systems were slower to change, as expressed in the natural sciences, mystical writings, literature, and visual culture. Mirror metaphors based on analogies established in the ancient world still retained significant power and authority, perhaps especially when related to Aristotelian science, the medieval speculum tradition, religious iconography, secular imagery, Renaissance Neoplatonism, or spectacular Baroque engineering, artistry, and self-fashioning. Mirror effects created through myths, metaphors, rhetorical strategies, or other devices could invite self-contemplation and evoke abstract or paradoxical concepts. Whether faithful or deforming, specular reflections often turn out to be ambivalent and contradictory: sometimes sources of illusion, sometimes reflections of divine truth, mirrors compel us to question the very nature of representation
Author: Publisher: ISBN: 9782503565644 Category : Mirrors Languages : en Pages :
Book Description
This volume examines the intersections between material and metaphorical mirrors in medieval and early modern culture. 0Mirrors have always fascinated humankind. They collapse ordinary distinctions, making visible what is normally invisible, and promising access to hidden realities. Yet, these liminal objects also point to the limitations of human perception, knowledge, and wisdom. In this interdisciplinary volume, specialists in medieval and early modern science, cultural and political history, as well as art history, philosophy, and literature come together to explore the intersections between material and metaphysical mirrors in Europe and the Islamic world. During the time periods studied here, various technologies were transforming the looking glass as an optical device, scientific instrument, and aesthetic object, making it clearer and more readily available, though it remained a rare and precious commodity. While technical innovations spawned new discoveries and ways of seeing, belief systems were slower to change, as expressed in the natural sciences, mystical writings, literature, and visual culture. Mirror metaphors based on analogies established in the ancient world still retained significant power and authority, perhaps especially when related to Aristotelian science, the medieval speculum tradition, religious iconography, secular imagery, Renaissance Neoplatonism, or spectacular Baroque engineering, artistry, and self-fashioning. Mirror effects created through myths, metaphors, rhetorical strategies, or other devices could invite self-contemplation and evoke abstract or paradoxical concepts. Whether faithful or deforming, specular reflections often turn out to be ambivalent and contradictory: sometimes sources of illusion, sometimes reflections of divine truth, mirrors compel us to question the very nature of representation
Author: Nancy M. Frelick Publisher: Brepols Publishers ISBN: 9782503564548 Category : Mirrors Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Mirrors have always fascinated humankind. They collapse ordinary distinctions, making visible what is normally invisible, and promising access to hidden realities. Yet, these liminal objects also point to the limitations of human perception, knowledge, and wisdom. In this interdisciplinary volume, specialists in medieval and early modern science, cultural and political history, as well as art history, philosophy, and literature come together to explore the intersections between material and metaphysical mirrors in Europe and the Islamic world. During the time periods studied here, various technologies were transforming the looking glass as an optical device, scientific instrument, and aesthetic object, making it clearer and more readily available, though it remained a rare and precious commodity. While technical innovations spawned new discoveries and ways of seeing, belief systems were slower to change, as expressed in the natural sciences, mystical writings, literature, and visual culture. Mirror metaphors based on analogies established in the ancient world still retained significant power and authority, perhaps especially when related to Aristotelian science, the medieval speculum tradition, religious iconography, secular imagery, Renaissance Neoplatonism, or spectacular Baroque engineering, artistry, and self-fashioning. Mirror effects created through myths, metaphors, rhetorical strategies, or other devices could invite self-contemplation and evoke abstract or paradoxical concepts. Whether faithful or deforming, specular reflections often turn out to be ambivalent and contradictory: sometimes sources of illusion, sometimes reflections of divine truth, mirrors compel us to question the very nature of representation.
Author: Maria Gerolemou Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 135010129X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 297
Book Description
This volume examines mirrors and mirroring through a series of multidisciplinary essays, especially focusing on the intersection between technological and cultural dynamics of mirrors. The international scholars brought together here explore critical questions around the mirror as artefact and the phenomenon of mirroring. Beside the common visual registration of an action or inaction, in a two dimensional and reversed form, various types of mirrors often possess special abilities which can produce a distorted picture of reality, serving in this way illusion and falsehood. Part I looks at a selection of theory from ancient writers, demonstrating the concern to explore these same questions in antiquity. Part II considers the role reflections can play in forming ideas of gender and identity. Beyond the everyday, we see in Part III how oracular mirrors and magical mirrors reveal the invisible divine – prosthetics that allow us to look where the eye cannot reach. Finally, Part IV considers mirrors' roles in displaying the visible and invisible in antiquity and since.
Author: Katie Barclay Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG ISBN: 1501513273 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 260
Book Description
The heart is an iconic symbol in the medieval and early modern European world. In addition to being a physical organ, it is a key conceptual device related to emotions, cognition, the self and identity, and the body. The heart is read as a metaphor for human desire and will, and situated in opposition to or alongside reason and cognition. In medieval and early modern Europe, the “feeling heart” – the heart as the site of emotion and emotional practices – informed a broad range of art, literature, music, heraldry, medical texts, and devotional and ritual practices. This multidisciplinary collection brings together art historians, literary scholars, historians, theologians, and musicologists to highlight the range of meanings attached to the symbol of the heart, the relationship between physical and metaphorical representations of the heart, and the uses of the heart in the production of identities and communities in medieval and early modern Europe.
Author: Meg Roland Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 9780367560584 Category : Cartography Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
With evidence from prose romance, book illustration, theatrical performance, cosmological ceilings, and almanacs, Mirror of the World proposes a new, interdisciplinary literary and cartographic history of the influence of Ptolemaic geography in England.
Author: Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9004367438 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 602
Book Description
This book explores the spatial, material, and affective dimensions of solitude in the late medieval and early modern periods, a hitherto largely neglected topic. Its focus is on the dynamic qualities of “space” and “place”, which are here understood as being shaped, structured, and imbued with meaning through both social and discursive solitary practices such as reading, writing, studying, meditating, and praying. Individual chapters investigate the imageries and imaginaries of outdoor and indoor spaces and places associated with solitude and its practices and examine the ways in which the space of solitude was conceived of, imagined, and represented in the arts and in literature, from about 1300 to about 1800. Contributors include Oskar Bätschmann, Carla Benzan, Mette Birkedal Bruun, Dominic E. Delarue, Karl A.E. Enenkel, Christine Göttler, Agnès Guiderdoni, Christiane J. Hessler, Walter S. Melion, Raphaèle Preisinger, Bernd Roling, Paul Smith, Marie Theres Stauffer, Arnold A. Witte, and Steffen Zierholz.
Author: Daniel E. O'Sullivan Publisher: Walter de Gruyter ISBN: 3110288818 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 264
Book Description
The game of chess was wildly popular in the Middle Ages, so much so that it became an important thought paradigm for thinkers and writers who utilized its vocabulary and imagery for commentaries on war, politics, love, and the social order. In this collection of essays, scholars investigate chess texts from numerous traditions – English, French, German, Latin, Persian, Spanish, Swedish, and Catalan – and argue that knowledge of chess is essential to understanding medieval culture. Such knowledge, however, cannot rely on the modern game, for today’s rules were not developed until the late fifteenth century. Only through familiarity with earlier incarnations of the game can one fully appreciate the full import of chess to medieval society. The careful scholarship contained in this volume provides not only insight into the significance of chess in medieval European culture but also opens up avenues of inquiry for future work in this rich field.
Author: A. Petrina Publisher: Springer ISBN: 0230307264 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 291
Book Description
The volume explores Elizabeth I's impact on English and European culture during her life and after her death, through her own writing as well as through contemporary and later writers. The contributors are codicologists, historians and literary critics, offering a varied reading of the Queen and of her cultural inheritance.
Author: Chloe Porter Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1351602039 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 247
Book Description
‘Prosthesis’ denotes a rhetorical ‘addition’ to a pre-existing ‘beginning’, a ‘replacement’ for that which is ‘defective or absent’, a technological mode of ‘correction’ that reveals a history of corporeal and psychic discontent. Recent scholarship has given weight to these multiple meanings of ‘prosthesis’ as tools of analysis for literary and cultural criticism. The study of pre-modern prosthesis, however, often registers as an absence in contemporary critical discourse. This collection seeks to redress this omission, reconsidering the history of prosthesis and its implications for contemporary critical responses to, and uses of, it. The book demonstrates the significance of notions of prosthesis in medieval and early modern theological debate, Reformation controversy, and medical discourse and practice. It also tracks its importance for imaginings of community and of the relationship of self and other, as performed on the stage, expressed in poetry, charms, exemplary and devotional literature, and as fought over in the documents of religious and cultural change. Interdisciplinary in nature, the book engages with contemporary critical and cultural theory and philosophy, genre theory, literary history, disability studies, and medical humanities, establishing prosthesis as a richly productive analytical tool in the pre-modern, as well as the modern, context. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Textual Practice journal.
Author: 
Author: 
Author: Nancy M. Frelick
Author: Maria Gerolemou
Author: Katie Barclay
Author: Meg Roland
Author: 
Author: Katherine Butler
Author: Daniel E. O'Sullivan
Author: A. Petrina
Author: Chloe Porter