The Secret in Medieval Literature

The Secret in Medieval Literature PDF Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666917877
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
The Secret in Medieval Literature explores the many secret agents, actions, creatures, and other beings influencing human existence. Medieval poets had a clear sense of the alternative dimension (the secret) and allowed it to enter quite frequently into their texts.

The Secret in Medieval Literature

The Secret in Medieval Literature PDF Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666917877
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 295

Get Book

Book Description
The Secret in Medieval Literature explores the many secret agents, actions, creatures, and other beings influencing human existence. Medieval poets had a clear sense of the alternative dimension (the secret) and allowed it to enter quite frequently into their texts.

The Secret Middle Ages

The Secret Middle Ages PDF Author: Malcolm Jones
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780750938747
Category : Art, Medieval
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
Love, hatred, crime and punishment, proverbs, heaven on earth, husband-beating -- all feature in the jewellery, tableware, illustrations, carvings and textiles of the period. This book offers a major reassessment of the high medieval period. It will be essential reading for medievalists and those interested in the history of language and customs. ......

Water in Medieval Literature

Water in Medieval Literature PDF Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498539858
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
This book uncovers the tremendous importance of water for European medieval literature, focusing on a large number of writers and poets. Water proves to be highly meaningful in religious, literary, and factual narratives insofar as it emerges as a central catalyst to bring about epiphany and epistemological and spiritual illumination.

Science and the Secrets of Nature

Science and the Secrets of Nature PDF Author: William Eamon
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691214611
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 508

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Book Description
By explaining how to sire multicolored horses, produce nuts without shells, and create an egg the size of a human head, Giambattista Della Porta's Natural Magic (1559) conveys a fascination with tricks and illusions that makes it a work difficult for historians of science to take seriously. Yet, according to William Eamon, it is in the "how-to" books written by medieval alchemists, magicians, and artisans that modern science has its roots. These compilations of recipes on everything from parlor tricks through medical remedies to wool-dyeing fascinated medieval intellectuals because they promised access to esoteric "secrets of nature." In closely examining this rich but little-known source of literature, Eamon reveals that printing technology and popular culture had as great, if not stronger, an impact on early modern science as did the traditional academic disciplines.

The Secret of Secrets

The Secret of Secrets PDF Author: Steven J. Williams
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472113088
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
A compelling study of a "best-seller" from the Middle Ages

The Gilded Page

The Gilded Page PDF Author: Mary Wellesley
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 1541675096
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
A breathtaking journey into the hidden history of medieval manuscripts, from the Lindisfarne Gospels to the ornate Psalter of Henry VIII “A delight—immersive, conversational, and intensely visual, full of gorgeous illustrations and shimmering description.” –Helen Castor, author of She-Wolves Medieval manuscripts can tell us much about power and art, knowledge and beauty. Many have survived because of an author’s status—part of the reason we have so much of Chaucer’s writing, for example, is because he was a London-based government official first and a poet second. Other works by the less influential have narrowly avoided ruin, like the book of illiterate Margery Kempe, found in a country house closet, the cover nibbled on by mice. Scholar Mary Wellesley recounts the amazing origins of these remarkable manuscripts, surfacing the important roles played by women and ordinary people—the grinders, binders, and scribes—in their creation and survival. The Gilded Page is the story of the written word in the manuscript age. Rich and surprising, it shows how the most exquisite objects ever made by human hands came from unexpected places. “Mary Wellesley is a born storyteller and The Gilded Page is as good as historical writing gets. This is a sensational debut by a wonderfully gifted historian.” —Dan Jones, bestselling author of The Plantagenets and The Templars

Books of Knowledge in Late Medieval Europe

Books of Knowledge in Late Medieval Europe PDF Author: Pavlina Cermanova
Publisher:
ISBN: 9782503594637
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
This book provides a series of studies concerning unique medieval texts that can be defined as 'books of knowledge', such as medieval chronicles, bestiaries, or catechetic handbooks. Thus far, scholarship of intellectual history has focused on concepts of knowledge to describe a specific community, or to delimit intellectuals in society. However, the specific textual tool for the transmission of knowledge has been missing. Besides oral tradition, books and other written texts were the only sources of knowledge, and they were thus invaluable in efforts to receive or transfer knowledge. That is one reason why texts that proclaim to introduce a specific field of expertise or promise to present a summary of wisdom were so popular. These texts discussed cosmology, theology, philosophy, the natural sciences, history, and other fields. They often did so in an accessible way to maintain the potential to also attract a non-specialised public. The basic form was usually a narrative, chronologically or thematically structured, and clearly ordered to appeal to readers. Books of this kind could be disseminated in dozens or even hundreds of copies, and were often available (by translation or adaptation) in various languages, including the vernacular. In exploring these widely-disseminated and highly popular texts that offered a precise segment of knowledge that could be accessed by readers outside the intellectual and social elite, this volume intends to introduce books of knowledge as a new category within the study of medieval literacy.

Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts

Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts PDF Author: Elaine Treharne
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192843818
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts takes as its starting point an understanding that a medieval book is a whole object at every point of its long history. As such, medieval books can be studied most profitably in a holistic manner as objects-in-the-world. This means readers might profitably account for all aspects of the manuscript in their observations, from the main texts that dominate the codex to the marginal notes, glosses, names, and interventions made through time. This holistic approach allows us to tell the story of the book's life from the moment of its production to its use, collection, breaking-up, and digitization--all aspects of what can be termed 'dynamic architextuality'. The ten chapters include detailed readings of texts that explain the processes of manuscript manufacture and writing, taking in invisible components of the book that show the joy and delight clearly felt by producers and consumers. Chapters investigate the filling of manuscripts' blank spaces, presenting some texts never examined before, and assessing how books were conceived and understood to function. Manuscripts' heft and solidness can be seen, too, in the depictions of miniature books in medieval illustrations. Early manuscripts thus become archives and witnesses to individual and collective memories, best read as 'relics of existence', as Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes things. As such, it is urgent that practices fragmenting the manuscript through book-breaking or digital display are understood in the context of the book's wholeness. Readers of this study will find chapters on multiple aspects of medieval bookness in the distant past, the present, and in the assurance of the future continuity of this most fascinating of cultural artefacts.

Arts of Dying

Arts of Dying PDF Author: D. Vance Smith
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022664104X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
People in the Middle Ages had chantry chapels, mortuary rolls, the daily observance of the Office of the Dead, and even purgatory—but they were still unable to talk about death. Their inability wasn’t due to religion, but philosophy: saying someone is dead is nonsense, as the person no longer is. The one thing that can talk about something that is not, as D. Vance Smith shows in this innovative, provocative book, is literature. Covering the emergence of English literature from the Old English to the late medieval periods, Arts of Dying argues that the problem of how to designate death produced a long tradition of literature about dying, which continues in the work of Heidegger, Blanchot, and Gillian Rose. Philosophy’s attempt to designate death’s impossibility is part of a literature that imagines a relationship with death, a literature that intensively and self-reflexively supposes that its very terms might solve the problem of the termination of life. A lyrical and elegiac exploration that combines medieval work on the philosophy of language with contemporary theorizing on death and dying, Arts of Dying is an important contribution to medieval studies, literary criticism, phenomenology, and continental philosophy.

Manmade Marvels in Medieval Culture and Literature

Manmade Marvels in Medieval Culture and Literature PDF Author: S. Lightsey
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230605648
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
This book examines marvels as tangible objects in the literary, courtly, and artisanal cultures of medieval England, but these clever devices, neither wholly semiotic nor purely positivist objects, are imbued with diverse cultural significance that illuminates in new ways the familiar literature of the Ricardian period.