The Body and the Soul in Medieval Literature

The Body and the Soul in Medieval Literature PDF Author: Piero Boitani
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 9780859915458
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
The theme of the body-and-soul relationship in medieval texts and in modern reworkings of medieval matter is explored in the articles here, specifically the representation of the body in romance; the relevance of bawdy tales to the cultural experience of authors and readers in the middle ages; the function of despair, or melancholy, in medieval and Renaissance literature; and the political significance of late medieval representations of `bodies' in the chroniclers' accounts of the Rising and in Gower's poems. Two articles are devoted to modern retellings of medieval themes: John Foxe's 'Acts and Monuments', seen in relation to the traditional 'acta martyrum', and the medieval revival in Tory Britain exemplified in Douglas Oliver's 'The Infant and the Pearl'. Contributors: PAMELA JOSEPH BENSON, NIGEL S. THOMPSON, JON WHITMAN, JEROME MANDEL, BARBARA NOLAN, YASUNARI TAKADA, YVETTE MARCHAND, ROBERT F. YEAGER, JOERG O. FICHTE, JOHN KERRIGAN

The Body and the Soul in Medieval Literature

The Body and the Soul in Medieval Literature PDF Author: Piero Boitani
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 9780859915458
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
The theme of the body-and-soul relationship in medieval texts and in modern reworkings of medieval matter is explored in the articles here, specifically the representation of the body in romance; the relevance of bawdy tales to the cultural experience of authors and readers in the middle ages; the function of despair, or melancholy, in medieval and Renaissance literature; and the political significance of late medieval representations of `bodies' in the chroniclers' accounts of the Rising and in Gower's poems. Two articles are devoted to modern retellings of medieval themes: John Foxe's 'Acts and Monuments', seen in relation to the traditional 'acta martyrum', and the medieval revival in Tory Britain exemplified in Douglas Oliver's 'The Infant and the Pearl'. Contributors: PAMELA JOSEPH BENSON, NIGEL S. THOMPSON, JON WHITMAN, JEROME MANDEL, BARBARA NOLAN, YASUNARI TAKADA, YVETTE MARCHAND, ROBERT F. YEAGER, JOERG O. FICHTE, JOHN KERRIGAN

Body and Spirit in the Middle Ages

Body and Spirit in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Gaia Gubbini
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110615932
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
A crucial question throughout the Middle Ages, the relationship between body and spirit cannot be understood without an interdisciplinary approach – combining literature, philosophy and medicine. Gathering contributions by leading international scholars from these disciplines, the collected volume explores themes such as lovesickness, the five senses, the role of memory and passions, in order to shed new light on the complex nature of the medieval Self.

Body Against Soul

Body Against Soul PDF Author: Masha Raskolnikov
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780814211021
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
In medieval allegory, Body and Soul were often pitted against one another in debate. In Body Against Soul: Gender and Sowlehele in Middle English Allegory, Masha Raskolnikov argues that such debates function as a mode of thinking about psychology, gender, and power in the Middle Ages. Neither theological nor medical in nature, works of sowlehele (“soul-heal”) described the self to itself in everyday language—moderns might call this kind of writing “self-help.” Bringing together contemporary feminist and queer theory along with medieval psychological thought, Body Against Soul examines Piers Plowman, the “Katherine Group,” and the history of psychological allegory and debate. In so doing, it rewrites the history of the Body to include its recently neglected fellow, the Soul. The topic of this book is one that runs through all of Western history and remains of primary interest to modern theorists—how “my” body relates to “me.” In the allegorical tradition traced by this study, a male person could imagine himself as a being populated by female personifications, because Latin and Romance languages tended to gender abstract nouns as female. However, since Middle English had ceased to inflect abstract nouns as male or female, writers were free to gender abstractions like “Will” or “Reason” any way they liked. This permitted some psychological allegories to avoid the representational tension caused by placing a female soul inside a male body, instead creating surprisingly queer same-sex inner worlds. The didactic intent driving sowlehele is, it turns out, complicated by the erotics of the struggle to establish a hierarchy of the self's inner powers.

Body and Soul

Body and Soul PDF Author: Elizabeth Petroff
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 9780195084559
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
Opening a window onto a long-neglected world of women's experience, this text features eleven essays that examine the writings of medieval women mystics from England, France, Germany, Italy, and the Low Countries, providing close readings of a number of important texts from the viewpoint ofdifferent literary theories. Surveying various styles of hagiographical writing, the author offers ground-breaking scholarship on a broad range of topics such as how medieval holy women may have appeared to their contemporaries, medieval antifeminism, comparisons between earlier and later Christianmystical writing, the relationship between male confessors and female penitents in the Middle Ages, and the process by which these extraordinary women produced their work. For courses in religious, medieval, or women's studies, this unique text fills a conspicuous gap in an important and fascinatingfield of literature.

Medieval Bodies

Medieval Bodies PDF Author: Jack Hartnell
Publisher: Profile Books
ISBN: 178283270X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
A SUNDAY TIMES HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR 'A triumph' Guardian 'Glorious ... makes the past at once familiar, exotic and thrilling.' Dominic Sandbrook 'A brilliant book' Mail on Sunday Just like us, medieval men and women worried about growing old, got blisters and indigestion, fell in love and had children. And yet their lives were full of miraculous and richly metaphorical experiences radically different to our own, unfolding in a world where deadly wounds might be healed overnight by divine intervention, or the heart of a king, plucked from his corpse, could be held aloft as a powerful symbol of political rule. In this richly-illustrated and unusual history, Jack Hartnell uncovers the fascinating ways in which people thought about, explored and experienced their physical selves in the Middle Ages, from Constantinople to Cairo and Canterbury. Unfolding like a medieval pageant, and filled with saints, soldiers, caliphs, queens, monks and monstrous beasts, it throws light on the medieval body from head to toe - revealing the surprisingly sophisticated medical knowledge of the time in the process. Bringing together medicine, art, music, politics, philosophy and social history, there is no better guide to what life was really like for the men and women who lived and died in the Middle Ages. Medieval Bodies is published in association with Wellcome Collection.

Imagining the Soul in Premodern Literature

Imagining the Soul in Premodern Literature PDF Author: Abe Davies
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030663337
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
This book is a study of ghostly matters - of the soul - in literature spanning the tenth century and the age of Shakespeare. All people, according to John Donne, ‘constantly beleeve’ that they have an immortal soul. But he also reflects that in fact there is nothing ‘so well established as constrains us to beleeve, both that the soul is immortall, and that every particular man hath such a soul’. In understanding the question of man's disembodied part as at once fundamental and fundamentally uncertain he was entirely of his time, and Imagining the Soul in Premodern Literature considers this fraught, shifting, yet uniquely compelling entity in the context of the literary forms and effects involved in its representation. Gruesome medieval dialogues between damned souls and worm-eaten bodies; verse and prose works by Donne, René Descartes, Margaret Cavendish and Andrew Marvell; a profusion of sonnet sequences, sermons, manuals of instruction and travelogues; Hamlet and its natural philosophical thinking about the apparently disembodied soul haunting Elsinore: these chapters range across all this and more, offering a rigorous yet accessible account of an essential aspect of premodern literature that will be of interest to scholars, students and the general reader alike.

Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature

Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature PDF Author: Linda Lomperis
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812213645
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature forges a new link between contemporary feminist and cultural theory and medieval history and literature. The essays establish crucial historical connections between feminist theorizing about the body and specific accounts of gendered bodies in medieval texts.

The Unity of Body and Soul in Patristic and Byzantine Thought

The Unity of Body and Soul in Patristic and Byzantine Thought PDF Author: Anna Usacheva
Publisher: Brill Schoningh
ISBN: 9783506703392
Category : Christian heresies
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
This volume explores the long-standing tensions between such notions as soul and body, spirit and flesh, in the context of human immortality and bodily resurrection. The discussion revolves around late antique views on the resurrected human body and the relevant philosophical, medical and theological notions that formed the background for this topic. Soon after the issue of the divine-human body had been problematized by Christianity, it began to drift away from vast metaphysical deliberations into a sphere of more specialized bodily concepts, developed in ancient medicine and other natural sciences. To capture the main trends of this interdisciplinary dialogue, the contributions in this volume range from the 2nd to the 8th centuries CE, and discuss an array of figures and topics, including Justin, Origen, Bar Daisan, and Gregory of Nyssa.

The Disease of the Soul

The Disease of the Soul PDF Author: Saul Nathaniel Brody
Publisher: Ithaca [N.Y.] : Cornell University Press
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description


Experiencing the Afterlife

Experiencing the Afterlife PDF Author: Manuele Gragnolati
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Civilization, Medieval, in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Experiencing the Afterlife provides the first sustained analysis of popular, vernacular depictions of the afterlife written in Italy before the Divine Comedy by authors such as Uguccione da Lodi, Giacomino da Verona, and Bonvesin da la Riva. Manuele Gragnolati uses his readings of these poets to provide a new interpretation of Dante's work. Combining elements from several disciplines, he investigates the richness of high medieval eschatology and the concept of personal identity it expresses. Gragnolati is particularly concerned with how the notions of body and pain characteristic of medieval spirituality and devotion inform the eschatological representations of the time, especially in their paradoxical urge to stress at once the physical experience of the separated soul and the final necessity of bodily resurrection. By integrating lesser-known texts and scholarship from other disciplines into the specialized field of Dante studies, Gragnolati sheds new light on some of the most vigorously debated and crucial questions raised by the Divine Comedy, including the embryological discourse of Purgatorio 25, the relation between the soul's experience of pain in Purgatory and the devotion that late medieval culture expressed toward Christ's suffering, and the significance of the audacious vision of resurrected bodies that Dante the pilgrim enjoys at the end of his journey. At the same time, Gragnolati brings these questions back into contemporary discussions of medieval eschatology and opens new perspectives for current and future work on embodiment and identity. Scholars and students of Dante and Italian studies, as well as those in medieval history, religion, culture, and art history, will be rewarded by the fresh insights contained in Experiencing the Afterlife.