The Saracens in English Literature PDF Download

Author: Raymond Burnette Pease
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Author: Siobhain Bly Calkin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135471711
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
This book explores the ways in which discourses of religious, racial, and national identity blur and engage each other in the medieval West. Specifically, the book studies depictions of Muslims in England during the 1330s and argues that these depictions, although historically inaccurate, served to enhance and advance assertions of English national identity at this time. The book examines Saracen characters in a manuscript renowned for the variety of its texts, and discusses hagiographic legends, elaborations of chronicle entries, and popular romances about Charlemagne, Arthur, and various English knights. In these texts, Saracens engage issues such as the demarcation of communal borders, the place of gender norms and religion in communities' self-definitions, and the roles of violence and history in assertions of group identity. Texts involving Saracens thus serve both to assert an English identity, and to explore the challenges involved in making such an assertion in the early fourteenth century when the English language was regaining its cultural prestige, when the English people were increasingly at odds with their French cousins, and when English, Welsh, and Scottish sovereignty were pressing matters.

Author: Aman Y. Nadhiri
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317059506
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
Saracens and Franks in 12th - 15th Century European and Near Eastern Literature examines the tension between two competing discourses in the medieval Muslim Mediterranean and medieval Christian Europe: one rooted in the desire to understand the world and one's place in it, and another promoting an ethnocentric narrative. To this end, it examines the construction of an image of the Other for Muslims in the Eastern Mediterranean and for Christians in Western Europe in works of literature, particularly in the works produced in the centuries preceding the Crusades; and it explores the ways in which both Muslim and Christian writers depicted the Enemy in historical accounts of the Crusades. The author focuses on medieval works of ethnography and geography, travel literature, Muslim and Christian accounts of the Crusades, and the romances of Western Europe to trace the evolution of the image of the Eastern Mediterranean Muslim in medieval Western Europe and the Western European Christian in the medieval Muslim world, first to understand the construct in the respective scholarly communities, and then to analyze the ways in which this conception informs subsequent works of non-fiction and fiction (in the Western European context) in which this Muslim or Christian Other plays a prominent role. In its analysis of the medieval Mediterranean Muslim and European Christian approaches to difference, this book interrogates the premises underlying the concept of the Other, challenging formulations of binary opposition such as the West versus Islam/Muslims.

Author: John Victor Tolan
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231123337
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Medieval Christian writers distorted the teachings of Islam and caricatured its believers in a variety of ways. This book provides a comprehensive study of Christian polemical responses to Islam in the Middle Ages.

Author: Erin K. Wagner
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501512099
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Vernacular writers of late medieval England were engaged in global conversations about orthodoxy and heresy. Entering these conversations with a developing vernacular required lexical innovation. The Language of Heresy in Late Medieval English Literature examines the way in which these writers complemented seemingly straightforward terms, like heretic, with a range of synonyms that complicated the definitions of both those words and orthodoxy itself. This text proposes four specific terms that become collated with heretic in the parlance of medieval English writers of the 14th and 15th centuries: jangler, Jew, Saracen, and witch. These four labels are especially important insofar as they represent the way in which medieval Christianity appropriated and subverted marginalized or vulnerable identities to promote a false image of unassailable authority.

Author: Ruth Mabel Arthur
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780575004122
Category : Children's stories, English
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
Three mistresses of an English manor, each living in a different era, relate the influence on their lives of the Saracen lamp given to the first mistress as a wedding present in 1300.

Author: Elaine Treharne
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191613592
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 792

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Book Description
The study of medieval literature has experienced a revolution in the last two decades, which has reinvigorated many parts of the discipline and changed the shape of the subject in relation to the scholarship of the previous generation. 'New' texts (laws and penitentials, women's writing, drama records), innovative fields and objects of study (the history of the book, the study of space and the body, medieval masculinities), and original ways of studying them (the Sociology of the Text, performance studies) have emerged. This has brought fresh vigour and impetus to medieval studies, and impacted significantly on cognate periods and areas. The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English brings together the insights of these new fields and approaches with those of more familiar texts and methods of study, to provide a comprehensive overview of the state of medieval literature today. It also returns to first principles in posing fundamental questions about the nature, scope, and significance of the discipline, and the directions that it might take in the next decade. The Handbook contains 44 newly commissioned essays from both world-leading scholars and exciting new scholarly voices. Topics covered range from the canonical genres of Saints' lives, sermons, romance, lyric poetry, and heroic poetry; major themes including monstrosity and marginality, patronage and literary politics, manuscript studies and vernacularity are investigated; and there are close readings of key texts, such as Beowulf, Wulf and Eadwacer, and Ancrene Wisse and key authors from Ælfric to Geoffrey Chaucer, Langland, and the Gawain Poet.

Author: Debra Higgs Strickland
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691057194
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
These images, which reached a broad and socially varied audience across Western Europe, appeared in virtually all artistic media, including illuminated manuscripts, stained glass, sculpture, metalwork, and tapestry.".

Author: Jan-Peer Hartmann
Publisher: Interventions: New Studies Med
ISBN: 9780814214749
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Examines how medieval and early modern British texts use descriptions of archaeological objects to produce aesthetic and literary responses to questions of historicity and epistemology.

Author: Peter Brown
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1405195525
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 692

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Book Description
A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture, c.1350-c.1500 challenges readers to think beyond a narrowly defined canon and conventional disciplinary boundaries. A ground-breaking collection of newly-commissioned essays on medieval literature and culture. Encourages students to think beyond a narrowly defined canon and conventional disciplinary boundaries. Reflects the erosion of the traditional, rigid boundary between medieval and early modern literature. Stresses the importance of constructing contexts for reading literature. Explores the extent to which medieval literature is in dialogue with other cultural products, including the literature of other countries, manuscripts and religion. Includes close readings of frequently-studied texts, including texts by Chaucer, Langland, the Gawain poet, and Hoccleve. Confronts some of the controversies that exercise students of medieval literature, such as those connected with literary theory, love, and chivalry and war.