What is an Image in Medieval and Early Modern England?

What is an Image in Medieval and Early Modern England? PDF Author: Antoinina Bevan Zlatar
Publisher: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
ISBN: 382339150X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
The premise that Western culture has undergone a pictorial turn (W.J.T. Mitchell) has prompted renewed interest in theorizing the visual image. In recent decades researchers in the humanities and social sciences have documented the function and status of the image relative to other media, and have traced the history of its power and the attempts to disempower it. What is an Image in Medieval and Early Modern England? engages in this debate in two interrelated ways: by focusing on the (visual) image during a period that witnessed the Reformation and the invention of the printing press, and by exploring its status in relation to an array of texts including Arthurian romance, saints lives, stage plays, printed sermons, biblical epic, pamphlets, and psalms. This interdisciplinary volume includes contributions by leading authorities as well as younger scholars from the fields of English literature, art history, and Reformation history. As with all previous collections of essays produced under the auspices of the Swiss Association of Medieval and Early Modern English Studies, it seeks to foster dialogue between the two periods.

What is an Image in Medieval and Early Modern England?

What is an Image in Medieval and Early Modern England? PDF Author: Antoinina Bevan Zlatar
Publisher: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
ISBN: 382339150X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
The premise that Western culture has undergone a pictorial turn (W.J.T. Mitchell) has prompted renewed interest in theorizing the visual image. In recent decades researchers in the humanities and social sciences have documented the function and status of the image relative to other media, and have traced the history of its power and the attempts to disempower it. What is an Image in Medieval and Early Modern England? engages in this debate in two interrelated ways: by focusing on the (visual) image during a period that witnessed the Reformation and the invention of the printing press, and by exploring its status in relation to an array of texts including Arthurian romance, saints lives, stage plays, printed sermons, biblical epic, pamphlets, and psalms. This interdisciplinary volume includes contributions by leading authorities as well as younger scholars from the fields of English literature, art history, and Reformation history. As with all previous collections of essays produced under the auspices of the Swiss Association of Medieval and Early Modern English Studies, it seeks to foster dialogue between the two periods.

The Image and Perception of Monarchy in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

The Image and Perception of Monarchy in Medieval and Early Modern Europe PDF Author: Sean McGlynn
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443868523
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
Monarchy is an enduring institution that still makes headlines today. It has always been preoccupied with image and perception, never more so than in the period covered by this volume. The collection of papers gathered here from international scholars demonstrates that monarchical image and perception went far beyond cultural, symbolic and courtly display – although these remain important – and were, in fact, always deeply concerned with the practical expression of authority, politics and power. This collection is unique in that it covers the subject from two innovative angles: it not only addresses both kings and queens together, but also both the medieval and early modern periods. Consequently, this allows significant comparisons to be made between male and female monarchy as well as between eras. Such an approach reveals that continuity was arguably more important than change over a span of some five centuries. In removing the traditional gender and chronological barriers that tend to lead to four separate areas of studies for kings and queens in medieval and early modern history, the papers here are free to encompass male and female royal rulers ranging across Europe from the early-thirteenth to the late-seventeenth centuries to examine the image and perception of monarchy in England, Scotland, France, Burgundy, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire. Collectively this volume will be of interest to all those studying medieval and early modern monarchy and for those wishing to learn about the connections and differences between the two.

Experiencing God in Late Medieval and Early Modern England

Experiencing God in Late Medieval and Early Modern England PDF Author: David J. Davis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198834136
Category : England
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
Experiencing God in Late Medieval and Early Modern England demonstrates that experiences of divine revelation, both biblical and contemporary, were central to late medieval and early modern English religion. The book sheds light on previously under-explored notions about divine revelation andthe role these notions played in shaping large portions of English thought and belief. Bringing together a wide variety of source materials, from contemplative works and accounts of revelatory experiences to biblical commentaries, devotionals, and religious imagery, David J. Davis argues that in theperiod there was a collective representation of divine revelation as a source of human knowledge, which transcended other religious and intellectual divisions. Not only did most people think that divine revelation, through a ravishing encounter with God, was possible, but also divine revelation wasunderstood to be the pinnacle of religious experience and a source of pure understanding. The book highlights a common discourse running through the sources that underpinned this collective representation of how human beings experienced the divine, and it demonstrates a continual effort across largeswathes of English religion to prepare an individual's soul for an encounter with the divine, through different spiritual disciplines and devotional practices. Over a period of several centuries this discourse and the larger culture of revelation provided an essential structure and legitimacy bothto contemporary claims of divine revelation and the biblical precedents that contemporary experiences were modelled after. This discourse detailed the physical, metaphysical, and epistemological features of how a human being was understood to experience divine revelation, providing a means todelimit and define what happened when an individual was rapture by God. Finally, the book situates the experience of revelation within the wider context of knowledge and identifies the ways that claims to divine revelation were legitimated as well as stigmatized based on this common understanding ofthe experience of rapture.

The Image in Print

The Image in Print PDF Author: Martha W. Driver
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
This important new survey examines woodcuts in books and describes what they can tell us about how books were produced and why, about reading habits and developments in literacy and about the part they played in social, political and religious change.

Printed Images in Early Modern Britain

Printed Images in Early Modern Britain PDF Author: Michael Hunter
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351908863
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
Printed images were ubiquitous in early modern Britain, and they often convey powerful messages which are all the more important for having circulated widely at the time. Yet, by comparison with printed texts, these images have been neglected, particularly by historians to whom they ought to be of the greatest interest. This volume helps remedy this state of affairs. Complementing the online digital library of British Printed Images to 1700 (www.bpi1700.org.uk), it offers a series of essays which exemplify the many ways in which such visual material can throw light on the history of the period. Ranging from religion to politics, polemic to satire, natural science to consumer culture, the collection explores how printed images need to be read in terms of the visual syntax understood by contemporaries, their full meaning often only becoming clear when they are located in the context in which they were produced and deployed. The result is not only to illustrate the sheer richness of material of this kind, but also to underline the importance of the messages which it conveys, which often come across more strongly in visual form than through textual commentaries. With contributions from many leading exponents of the cultural history of early modern Britain, including experts on religion, politics, science and art, the book's appeal will be equally wide, demonstrating how every facet of British culture in the period can be illuminated through the study of printed images.

Queens and Power in Medieval and Early Modern England

Queens and Power in Medieval and Early Modern England PDF Author: Carole Levin
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803229682
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
In Queens and Power in Medieval and Early Modern England, Carole Levin and Robert Bucholz provide a forum for the underexamined, anomalous reigns of queens in history. These regimes, primarily regarded as interruptions to the ?normal? male monarchy, have been examined largely as isolated cases. This interdisciplinary study of queens throughout history examines their connections to one another, their constituents? perceptions of them, and the fallacies of their historical reputations. The contributors consider historical queens as well as fictional, mythic, and biblical queens and how they were represented in medieval and early modern England. They also give modern readers a glimpse into the early modern worldview, particularly regarding order, hierarchy, rulership, property, biology, and the relationship between the sexes. Considering topics as diverse as how Queen Elizabeth?s unmarried status affected the perception of her as a just and merciful queen to a reevaluation of ?good Queen Anne? as more than just an obese, conventional monarch, this volume encourages readers to reexamine previously held assumptions about the role of female monarchs in early modern history.

Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England

Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England PDF Author: Dr Jennifer C Vaught
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1409476235
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Susan Sontag in Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors points to the vital connection between metaphors and bodily illnesses, though her analyses deal mainly with modern literary works. This collection of essays examines the vast extent to which rhetorical figures related to sickness and health-metaphor, simile, pun, analogy, symbol, personification, allegory, oxymoron, and metonymy-inform medieval and early modern literature, religion, science, and medicine in England and its surrounding European context. In keeping with the critical trend over the past decade to foreground the matter of the body and the emotions, these essays track the development of sustained, nuanced rhetorics of bodily disease and health — physical, emotional, and spiritual. The contributors to this collection approach their intriguing subjects from a wide range of timely, theoretical, and interdisciplinary perspectives, including the philosophy of language, semiotics, and linguistics; ecology; women's and gender studies; religion; and the history of medicine. The essays focus on works by Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton among others; the genres of epic, lyric, satire, drama, and the sermon; and cultural history artifacts such as medieval anatomies, the arithmetic of plague bills of mortality, meteorology, and medical guides for healthy regimens.

Crafting the Witch

Crafting the Witch PDF Author: Heidi Breuer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135868220
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
This book analyzes the gendered transformation of magical figures occurring in Arthurian romance in England from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. In the earlier texts, magic is predominantly a masculine pursuit, garnering its user prestige and power, but in the later texts, magic becomes a primarily feminine activity, one that marks its user as wicked and heretical. This project explores both the literary and the social motivations for this transformation, seeking an answer to the question, 'why did the witch become wicked?' Heidi Breuer traverses both the medieval and early modern periods and considers the way in which the representation of literary witches interacted with the culture at large, ultimately arguing that a series of economic crises in the fourteenth century created a labour shortage met by women. As women moved into the previously male-dominated economy, literary backlash came in the form of the witch, and social backlash followed soon after in the form of Renaissance witch-hunting. The witch figure serves a similar function in modern American culture because late-industrial capitalism challenges gender conventions in similar ways as the economic crises of the medieval period.

Private Honour and Noble Masculine Image in Early Modern England

Private Honour and Noble Masculine Image in Early Modern England PDF Author: Erika D'Souza
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000774287
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 171

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Book Description
Robert Sidney, the first Earl of Leicester (1563–1626), serves as an exemplar of an Elizabethan nobleman who had in his collection a body of work pertinent to the subject of masculine honour in the private realm. Understanding the nuances and evolution of the term private honour as it is represented in Sidney’s artefacts, as well as in the public discourse of the era, is the work and contribution of this book. The permeability between the private and public spheres led to an emergence of new forms of masculine representation. In a time when manhood was intertwined with militaristic qualities (such as courage, strength and fortitude), my investigation shows that in the domestic sphere, a gentler version of masculinity, encouraging humility, constancy and modesty, was fostered amongst the nobility. While worries of effeminacy certainly existed, there also was a strong discourse that encourage men to adopt so-called feminine virtues within the private sphere.

Memory and the Dissolution of the Monasteries in Early Modern England

Memory and the Dissolution of the Monasteries in Early Modern England PDF Author: Harriet Lyon
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009034618
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
The dissolution of the monasteries was recalled by individuals and communities alike as a seismic rupture in the religious, cultural, and socio-economic fabric of early modern England. It was also profoundly important in shaping contemporary historical consciousness, the topographical imagination, and local tradition. Memory and the Dissolution is a book about the dissolution of the monasteries after the dissolution. Harriet Lyon argues that our understanding of this historical moment is enriched by taking a long chronological view of the suppression, by exploring how it was remembered to those who witnessed it and how this memory evolved in subsequent generations. Exposing and repudiating the assumptions of a conventional historiography that has long been coloured by Henrician narratives and sources, this book reveals that the fall of the religious houses was remembered as one of the most profound and controversial transformations of the entire English Reformation.