Suchergebnisse

"Antimercantilism in Late Medieval English Literature explores the relationship between ideology and subjectivity surrounding a single class/estate group and its characteristic sins in the context of literary texts influenced by estates satire. This book focuses in depth on both large works by well-known authors and lesser-studied works, including The Canterbury Tales, Piers Plowman, Gower's Mirour de l'Omme, The Book of Margery Kempe, The York Plays, The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye, "The Childe of Bristowe," and the Pseudo-Chaucerian "Tale of Beryn." Its approach documents the trajectory of antimercantile ideology under the pressures of the major developments made in economic theory and practice in the later Middle Ages"--

The spectacle of the wounded body figured prominently in the Middle Ages, from images of Christ's wounds on the cross, to the ripped and torn bodies of tortured saints who miraculously heal through divine intervention, to graphic accounts of battlefield and tournament wounds—evidence of which survives in the archaeological record—and literary episodes of fatal (or not so fatal) wounds. This volume offers a comprehensive look at the complexity of wounding and wound repair in medieval literature and culture, bringing together essays from a wide range of sources and disciplines including arms and armaments, military history, medical history, literature, art history, hagiography, and archaeology across medieval and early modern Europe. Contributors are Stephen Atkinson, Debby Banham, Albrecht Classen, Joshua Easterling, Charlene M. Eska, Carmel Ferragud, M.R. Geldof, Elina Gertsman, Barbara A. Goodman, Máire Johnson, Rachel E. Kellett, Ilana Krug, Virginia Langum, Michael Livingston, Iain A. MacInnes, Timothy May, Vibeke Olson, Salvador Ryan, William Sayers, Patricia Skinner, Alicia Spencer-Hall, Wendy J. Turner, Christine Voth, and Robert C. Woosnam-Savage.

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.

Disability and Medieval Law: History, Literature and Society is an intervention in the growing and complex field of medieval disability studies. The size of the field and the complexity of the subject lend themselves to the use of case studies: how a particular author imagines an injury, how a particular legal code deals with (and sometimes creates) injury to the human body. While many studies have fruitfully insisted on theoretical approaches, Disability and Medieval Law considers how medieval societies directly dealt with crime, punishment, oath-taking, and mental illness. When did medieval law take disability into account in setting punishment or responsibility? When did medieval law choose to cause disabilities? How did medieval authors use disability to discuss not only law, but social relationships and the nature of the human?The volume includes essays on topics as diverse as Francis of Assissi, Margery Kempe, La Manekine, Geoffrey Chaucer, early medieval law codes, and the definition of mental illness in English legal records, by Irina Metzler, Wendy J. Turner, Amanda Hopkins, Donna Trembinski, Marian Lupo and Cory James Rushton.

Section I: Introduction -- 1. Embodied Difference: Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman -- Section II: Discourses of Bodily Difference -- 2. From Monstrosity to Postnormality: Montaigne, Canguilhem, Foucault -- 3. "If in Other Respects He Appears to be Effectively Human": Defining Monstrosity in Medieval English Law -- 4. (Dis)functional Faces: Signs of the Monstrous? -- 5. Grendel and Goliath: Monstrous Superability and Disability in the Old English Corpus -- 6. E(race)ing the Future: Imagined Medieval Reproductive Possibilities and the Monstrosity of Power -- Section III: Dis/Identifying the Other -- 7. "Blob Child" Revisited: Conflations of Monstrosity, Disability, and Race in King of Tars -- 8. Attending to "Beasts Irrational" in Gower's Visio Anglie -- 9. How a Monster Means: The Significance of Bodily Difference in the Christopher Cynocephalus Tradition -- 10. Lycanthropy and Lunacy: Cognitive Disability in The Duchess of Malfi -- 11. Eschatology for Cannibals: A System of Aberrance in the Old English Andreas -- 12. The Monstrous Womb of Early Modern Midwifery Manuals -- Section IV: Queer Couplings -- 13. Blindness and Posthuman Sexuality in Paradise Lost -- 14. Dwelling Underground in The Book of John Mandeville: Monstrosity, Disability, Ecology -- Section V: Coda -- 15. Muteness and Disembodied Difference: Three Case Studies

"In this volume, scholars of pre-modern Europe and the Arab world examine the issues of incarceration and slavery. The emphasis rests on religious, literary, philosophical, and historical narratives, buttressed by art-historical evidence, all of which demonstrates the true importance of these painful problems"--