Obscenity

Obscenity PDF

Author: Jan M. Ziolkowski

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 9789004109285

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This volume makes most wide-ranging attempt ever to probe the natures, origins, and consequences of obscenity in medieval literature, art, theater, and law. One large section examines obscenity in medieval French literature, especially fabliaux; but the rest of the book explores obscenity in cultures and languages of other regions in Europe.

Medieval Obscenities

Medieval Obscenities PDF

Author: Nicola F. McDonald

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1903153506

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"Medieval Obscenities examines the complex and contentious role of the obscene - what is offensive, indecent or morally repugnant - in medieval culture from late antiquity through to the end of the middle ages in western Europe. Its approach is multidisciplinary, its methodologies divergent and it seeks to formulate questions and stimulate debate." "The essays examine topics as diverse as Norse defecation taboos, the Anglo-Saxon sexual idiom, sheela-na-gigs, impotence in the church courts, bare ecclesiastical bottoms, rude sounds and dirty words, as well as the modern reception and representation of the medieval obscene. The volume demonstrates not only the vitality of medieval obscenity, but its centrality to our understanding of medieval life."--Jacket.

A Companion to Medieval Art

A Companion to Medieval Art PDF

Author: Conrad Rudolph

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2019-05-07

Total Pages: 1040

ISBN-13: 1119077729

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A fully updated and comprehensive companion to Romanesque and Gothic art history This definitive reference brings together cutting-edge scholarship devoted to the Romanesque and Gothic traditions in Northern Europe and provides a clear analytical survey of what is happening in this major area of Western art history. The volume comprises original theoretical, historical, and historiographic essays written by renowned and emergent scholars who discuss the vibrancy of medieval art from both thematic and sub-disciplinary perspectives. Part of the Blackwell Companions to Art History, A Companion to Medieval Art, Second Edition features an international and ambitious range of contributions covering reception, formalism, Gregory the Great, pilgrimage art, gender, patronage, marginalized images, the concept of spolia, manuscript illumination, stained glass, Cistercian architecture, art of the crusader states, and more. Newly revised edition of a highly successful companion, including 11 new articles Comprehensive coverage ranging from vision, materiality, and the artist through to architecture, sculpture, and painting Contains full-color illustrations throughout, plus notes on the book’s many distinguished contributors A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, Second Edition is an exciting and varied study that provides essential reading for students and teachers of Medieval art.

Reading Women in Late Medieval Europe

Reading Women in Late Medieval Europe PDF

Author: Alfred Thomas

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-04-29

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 1137542608

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Although Chaucer is typically labeled as the "Father of English Literature," evidence shows that his work appealed to Europe and specifically European women. Rereading the Canterbury Tales , Thomas argues that Chaucer imagined Anne of Bohemia, wife of famed Richard II, as an ideal reader, an aspect that came to greatly affect his writing.

A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Middle Ages

A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Middle Ages PDF

Author: Ruth Evans

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2012-03-01

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 1350995304

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Historians of sexuality have often assumed that medieval people were less interested in sex than we are. But people in the Middle Ages wrote a great deal about sex: in confessors' manuals, in virginity treatises, and in literary texts. This volume looks afresh at the cultural meanings that sex had throughout the period, presenting new evidence and offering new interpretations of known material. Acknowledging that many of the categories that we use today to talk about sexuality are inadequate for understanding sex in premodern times, the volume draws on important recent work in the historiography of medieval sexuality to address the conceptual and methodological challenges the period presents. A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Middle Ages presents an overview of the period with essays on heterosexuality, homosexuality, sexual variations, religious and legal issues, health concerns, popular beliefs about sexuality, prostitution and erotica.

Obscene Pedagogies

Obscene Pedagogies PDF

Author: Carissa M. Harris

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-12-15

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 1501730428

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In Obscene Pedagogies, Carissa M. Harris investigates the relationship between obscenity, gender, and pedagogy in Middle English and Middle Scots literary texts from 1300 to 1580 to show how sexually explicit and defiantly vulgar speech taught readers and listeners about sexual behavior and consent. Through innovative close readings of literary texts including erotic lyrics, single-woman's songs, debate poems between men and women, Scottish insult poetry battles, and The Canterbury Tales, Harris demonstrates how through its transgressive charge and galvanizing shock value, obscenity taught audiences about gender, sex, pleasure, and power in ways both positive and harmful. Harris's own voice, proudly witty and sharply polemical, inspires the reader to address these medieval texts with an eye on contemporary issues of gender, violence, and misogyny.

Nothing Natural Is Shameful

Nothing Natural Is Shameful PDF

Author: Joan Cadden

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2013-09-17

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0812208587

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In his Problemata, Aristotle provided medieval thinkers with the occasion to inquire into the natural causes of the sexual desires of men to act upon or be acted upon by other men, thus bringing human sexuality into the purview of natural philosophers, whose aim it was to explain the causes of objects and events in nature. With this philosophical justification, some late medieval intellectuals asked whether such dispositions might arise from anatomy or from the psychological processes of habit formation. As the fourteenth-century philosopher Walter Burley observed, "Nothing natural is shameful." The authors, scribes, and readers willing to "contemplate base things" never argued that they were not vile, but most did share the conviction that they could be explained. From the evidence that has survived in manuscripts of and related to the Problemata, two narratives emerge: a chronicle of the earnest attempts of medieval medical theorists and natural philosophers to understand the cause of homosexual desires and pleasures in terms of natural processes, and an ongoing debate as to whether the sciences were equipped or permitted to deal with such subjects at all. Mining hundreds of texts and deciphering commentaries, indices, abbreviations, and marginalia, Joan Cadden shows how European scholars deployed a standard set of philosophical tools and a variety of rhetorical strategies to produce scientific approaches to sodomy.

Creating the "Divine" Artist: From Dante to Michelangelo

Creating the

Author: Patricia Emison

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2004-05-01

Total Pages: 468

ISBN-13: 9047404890

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An investigation of why Michelangelo first, and then many other, Renaissance artists and works were called "divine" by contemporaries, this study ranges from fourteenth-century praise of Dante to a variety of sixteenth-century habits of courtly compliment.

The Making of Manners and Morals in Twelfth-Century England

The Making of Manners and Morals in Twelfth-Century England PDF

Author: Fiona Whelan

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2017-01-12

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1315524880

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How different are we from those in the past? Or, how different do we think we are from those in the past? Medieval people were more dirty and unhygienic than us – as novels, TV, and film would have us believe – but how much truth is there in this notion? This book seeks to challenge some of these preconceptions by examining medieval society through rules of conduct, and specifically through the lens of a medieval Latin text entitled The Book of the Civilised Man – or Urbanus magnus – which is attributed to Daniel of Beccles. Urbanus magnus is a twelfth-century poem of almost 3,000 lines which comprehensively surveys the day-to-day life of medieval society, including issues such as moral behaviour, friendship, marriage, hospitality, table manners, and diet. Currently, it is a neglected source for the social and cultural history of daily life in medieval England, but by incorporating modern ideas of disgust and taboo, and merging anthropology, sociology, and archaeology with history, this book aims to bring it to the fore, and to show that medieval people did have standards of behaviour. Although they may seem remote to modern ‘civilised’ people, there is both continuity and change in human behaviour throughout the centuries.

Sin and Filth in Medieval Culture

Sin and Filth in Medieval Culture PDF

Author: Martha Bayless

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-07-03

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 1136490833

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This important new contribution to the history of the body analyzes the role of filth as the material counterpart of sin in medieval thought. Using a wide range of texts, including theology, historical documents, and literature from Augustine to Chaucer, the book shows how filth was regarded as fundamental to an understanding of human history. This theological significance explains the prominence of filth and dung in all genres of medieval writing: there is more dung in theology than there is in Chaucer. The author also demonstrates the ways in which the religious understanding of filth and sin influenced the secular world, from town planning to the execution of traitors. As part of this investigation the book looks at the symbolic order of the body and the ways in which the different aspects of the body were assigned moral meanings. The book also lays out the realities of medieval sanitation, providing the first comprehensive view of real-life attempts to cope with filth. This book will be essential reading for those interested in medieval religious thought, literature, amd social history. Filled with a wealth of entertaining examples, it will also appeal to those who simply want to glimpse the medieval world as it really was.