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.

Water in Medieval Literature

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

Get Book

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.

Meanings of Water in Early Medieval England

Meanings of Water in Early Medieval England PDF Author: Daniel Anlezark
Publisher:
ISBN: 9782503588889
Category : Bodies of water
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Water is both a practical and symbolic element. Whether a drop blessed by saintly relics or a river flowing to the sea, water formed part of the natural landscapes, religious lives, cultural expressions, and physical needs of medieval women and men.00This volume adopts an interdisciplinary perspective to enlarge our understanding of the overlapping qualities of water in early England (c. 400 - c. 1100). Scholars from the fields of archaeology, history, literature, religion, and art history come together to approach water and its diverse cultural manifestations in the early Middle Ages. Individual essays include investigations of the agency of water and its inhabitants in Old English and Latin literature, divine and demonic waters, littoral landscapes of church archaeology and ritual, visual and aural properties of water, and human passage through water. As a whole, the volume addresses how water in the environment functioned on multiple levels, allowing us to examine the early medieval intersections between the earthly and heavenly, the physical and conceptual, and the material and textual within a single element.

Bodily and Spiritual Hygiene in Medieval and Early Modern Literature

Bodily and Spiritual Hygiene in Medieval and Early Modern Literature PDF Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110523388
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 614

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Book Description
While most people today take hygiene and medicine for granted, they both have had their own history. We can gain deep insights into the pre-modern world by studying its health-care system, its approaches to medicine, and concept of hygiene. Already the early Middle Ages witnessed great interest in bathing (hot and cold), swimming, and good personal hygiene. Medical activities grew over time, but even early medieval monks were already great experts in treating the sick. The contributions examine literary, medical, historical texts and images and probe the information we can glean from them. The interdisciplinary approach of this volume makes it possible to view this large field in a complex and diversified manner, taking into account both early medieval and early modern treatises on medicine, water, bathing, and health. Such a cultural-historical perspective creates a most valuable bridge connecting literary and scientific documents under the umbrella of the history of mentality and history of everyday life. The volume does not aim at idealizing the past, but it definitely intends to deconstruct modern myths about the 'dirty' and 'unhealthy' Middle Ages and early modern age.

Transformative Waters in Late-medieval Literature

Transformative Waters in Late-medieval Literature PDF Author: Hetta Elizabeth Howes
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843846128
Category : Literature, Medieval
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
A consideration of the metaphor of water in religious literature, especially in relation to women.

Writing on Water

Writing on Water PDF Author: Judit Niran Frigyesi
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9633862582
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Writing on Water is an attempt to grasp the phenomenon of sound in prayer, that is: a meaning in sounds and soundscapes, and a musical essence in the act of praying. The impetus for the book was the author's fieldwork among traditional Jews during the era of communism in Budapest and Prague. In that era the Jewish religion and Jewishness in general were supressed; the rituals were semi-secret and became inward-turning. The book is a witness to these communities and their rituals, but it goes beyond documentation. The uniqueness of the sounds of the rituals compelled the author to try to comprehend how melodies and soundscapes became the sustaining/protective environment, as well as the vehicle, for the expression of a world-orientation—in a situation where open discourse was inconceivable. The book is based on extensive interviews, musical recordings, photographs and scholarly analyses. It is unique in its choice of communities, its wealth of original documents, and in its novel interpretation of sound. Writing on Water is creative non-fiction. The presentation is evocative and poetic, but nevertheless, it transmits knowledge. Where this potential is understood, the book can aid research and serve in courses in philosophy, religion, music, ethnomusicology, anthropology, aesthetics, Jewish studies, folklore, oral history, and performance studies. At the same time it could be read as belles lettres.

Working with Water in Medieval Europe

Working with Water in Medieval Europe PDF Author: Paolo Squatriti
Publisher: Technology and Change in Histo
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
This collection of studies on the ways water was used and manipulated in Europe between AD 500 and 1500 provides complete coverage of the technologies related to water in a vital period of technological development. Fishing, water power, irrigation, and domestic supply receive attention.

Thirst

Thirst PDF Author: Steven Mithen
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674072197
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
Water is an endangered resource, imperiled by population growth, mega-urbanization, and climate change. Scientists project that by 2050, freshwater shortages will affect 75 percent of the global population. Steven Mithen puts our current crisis in historical context by exploring 10,000 years of humankind’s management of water. Thirst offers cautionary tales of civilizations defeated by the challenges of water control, as well as inspirational stories about how technological ingenuity has sustained communities in hostile environments. As in his acclaimed, genre-defying After the Ice and The Singing Neanderthals, Mithen blends archaeology, current science, and ancient literature to give us a rich new picture of how our ancestors lived. Since the Neolithic Revolution, people have recognized water as a commodity and source of economic power and have manipulated its flow. History abounds with examples of ambitious water management projects and hydraulic engineering—from the Sumerians, whose mastery of canal building and irrigation led to their status as the first civilization, to the Nabataeans, who created a watery paradise in the desert city of Petra, to the Khmer, who built a massive inland sea at Angkor, visible from space. As we search for modern solutions to today’s water crises, from the American Southwest to China, Mithen also looks for lessons in the past. He suggests that we follow one of the most unheeded pieces of advice to come down from ancient times. In the words of Li Bing, whose waterworks have irrigated the Sichuan Basin since 256 BC, “Work with nature, not against it.”

The Water Supply System of Siena, Italy

The Water Supply System of Siena, Italy PDF Author: Michael P. Kucher
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000143694
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
The book reviews scholarly literature and archival sources including maps and diagrams, to better situate Siena's achievement in urban history and broadens our understanding of medieval technology and urban life.

How Water Makes Us Human

How Water Makes Us Human PDF Author: Luci Attala
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 178683412X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
This book is about how water becomes people – or, put another way, how people and water flow together and shape each other. While the focus of the book is on the relationships held between water and people, it also has a broader message about human relationships with the environment generally – a message that illustrates not only that people are existentially entangled with the material world, but that the materials of the world shape, determine and enable humans to be ‘humans’ in the ways that they are. Offering a selection of anthropological examples from Kenya, Wales and Spain to illustrate how water’s materiality coproductively generates the way people are able to engage with water, this book uses cross-disciplinary perspectives to provide and promote a new analytic – one that encourages ethical, holistic and sustainable relationships with the world around us. This approach challenges representations that ignore, sidestep or are blind to the fleshy materiality of being human, and aims to encourage a re-imagining of the world that acknowledges humanity as intrinsically active-with and part of the fabric of the collection of materials we call planet Earth.

The Nature and Function of Water, Baths, Bathing, and Hygiene from Antiquity Through the Renaissance

The Nature and Function of Water, Baths, Bathing, and Hygiene from Antiquity Through the Renaissance PDF Author: Cynthia Kosso
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004173579
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 547

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Book Description
These essays offer scholars, teachers, and students a new basis for discussing attitudes toward, and technological expertise concerning, water in antiquity through the early Modern period, and they examine historical water use and ideology both diachronically and cross regionally. Topics include gender roles and water usage; attitudes, practices, and innovations in baths and bathing; water and the formation of identity and policy; ancient and medieval water sources and resources; and religious and literary water imagery. The authors describe how ideas about the nature and function of water created and shaped social relationships, and how religion, politics, and science transformed, and were themselves transformed by, the manipulation of, uses of, and disputes over water in daily life, ceremonies, and literature. Contributors are Rabun Taylor, Sandra Lucore, Robert F. Sutton, Jr., Cynthia K Kosso, Kevin Lawton, Evy Johanne HA land, HA(c)lA]ne Cazes, Alexandra Cuffel, Mark Munn, Brenda Longfellow, Gretchen Meyers, Sara Saba, Scott John McDonough, Etienne Dunant, E. J. Owens, Mehmet TaAlAalan, Deborah Chatr Aryamontri, John Stephenson, Lin A. Ferrand, Paul Trio, Anne Scott, Misty Rae Urban, Ruth Stevenson, Charles Connell, Alyce Jordan, Ronald Cooley, and Irene Matthews.