Reconstructing Camelot

Reconstructing Camelot PDF

Author: Michael Glencross

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 9780859914635

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This book examines French Romantic medievalism through one of its many manifestations, the treatment of the Arthurian legends. Examining works of historiography and literary history, as well as literary texts proper, it assesses the place of the Arthurian material in French culture in the period up to 1860, the date of publication of Edgar Quinet's Merlin l'enchanteur. In so doing, it reveals key features of French Romanticism and traces the origins of some of the problems and contradictions which still affect the practice of medieval studies, the study of medieval literature, and the representation of the Middle Ages. The author argues that the depiction of Arthurian legends in French Romantic writing discloses some of the underlying ideological positions of the movement, such as the division between liberal and royalist views of the Middle Ages and the construction of a French national identity. He also explores the developing tensions between the interests of a general literary public and the ambitions of scholars seeking to define and promote medieval literature as an emerging field of study. In addition to scholars such as Claude Fauriel, Paulin Paris and Francisque Michel, other important figures in French Romanticism are considered, including Edgar Quinet and Michelet.

The Road to Camelot

The Road to Camelot PDF

Author: Thomas Oliphant

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2017-05-09

Total Pages: 528

ISBN-13: 1501105582

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A “provocative reconstruction of John F. Kennedy’s ‘five-year campaign’ for the White House” (The New Yorker), beginning with his bold, failed attempt to win the vice presidential nomination in 1956 and culminating when he plotted his way to the presidency and changed the way we nominate and elect presidents. John F. Kennedy and his young warriors invented modern presidential politics. They turned over accepted wisdom that his Catholicism was a barrier to winning an election. They hired Louis Harris to become the first presidential pollster. They twisted arms and they charmed. They turned the traditional party inside out. They invented The Missile Gap in the Cold War and out-glamoured Richard Nixon in the TV debates. Now “Thomas Oliphant and Curtis Wilkie, both veteran political journalists, retell the story of this momentous campaign, reminding us of now forgotten details of Kennedy’s path to the White House” (The Wall Street Journal). The authors have examined more than 1,600 oral histories at the John F. Kennedy library; they’ve interviewed surviving sources, including JFK’s sister Jean Smith, and they draw on their own interviews with insiders including Ted Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. From the start of the campaign in 1955, “The Road to Camelot brings much new insight to an important playbook that has echoed through the campaigns of other presidential aspirants as disparate as Barack Obama and Donald Trump. The authors take us step by step on the road to the Kennedy victory, leaving us with an appreciation for the maniacal attention to detail of both the candidate and his brother Robert, the best campaign manager in American political history” (The Washington Post). “A must-read for fans of presidential history” (USA TODAY), this is “an excellent chronicle of JFK’s innovations, his true personality, and how close he came to losing” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).

Songs, Scribes, and Society

Songs, Scribes, and Society PDF

Author: Jane Alden

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2010-09-28

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 0199700737

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A new kind of songbook emerged in the later fifteenth century: personalized, portable, and lavishly decorated. Five closely related chansonniers, copied in the Loire Valley region of central France c. 1465-c. 1475, are the earliest surviving examples of this new genre. The Loire Valley Chansonniers preserve the music of such renowned composers as Guillaume Du Fay, Johannes Ockeghem, and Antoine Busnoys. But their importance as musical sources has overshadowed the significance of these manuscripts as artifacts in their own right. This book places the physical objects at center, investigating the means by which they were produced and the broader culture in which they circulated. Jane Alden performs a codicological autopsy upon the manuscripts and reveals the hitherto unrecognized role of scribes in shaping the transmission and reception of the chanson repertory. Alden also challenges the long-held belief that the Loire Valley Chansonniers were intended for royal or noble patrons. Instead, she argues that a rising class of bureaucrats--notaries, secretaries, and other court officials--commissioned these exquisite objects. Active as writers and participants in poetry competitions, these individuals may even have written some of the chansons' texts. The unique integration of image, text, and music found in chansonniers extends their appeal to a broad readership. But for the nineteenth-century scholars who rediscovered these manuscripts, the larger literary and visual resonances were not of primary interest. Alden documents the tangle of motivations--national identity, populist politics, and the rise of the musical masterwork--that informed the earliest writings on these books. Only now is their multifaceted structure the inspiration for a new generation of readers.

The Continuations of Chrétien's Perceval

The Continuations of Chrétien's Perceval PDF

Author: Leah Tether

Publisher: DS Brewer

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 1843843161

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The Continuations of Chretien de Troyes' Perceval are here examined as constituting a discrete genre of medieval literature. The notion of Continuation in medieval literature is a familiar one - but difficult to define precisely. Despite the existence of important texts which are commonly referred to as Continuations, such as Le Roman de la Rose,Le Chevalier de la Charrette and, of course, the Perceval Continuations, the mechanics and processes involved in actually producing a Continuation have found themselves indistinguishable from those associated with other forms of medieval réécriture. The Perceval Continuations (composed c.1200-1230) constitute a vast body of material which incorporates four separately authored Continuations, each of which seeks to further,in some way, the unfinished Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes - though they are not merely responses to his work. Chronologically, they were composed one after the other, and the next in line picks up where the previous one left off; they thus respond intertextually to each other as well as to Chrétien, and only one actually furnishes the story as a whole with an ending. Here, these fascinating texts are used as a lens for examining, defining and distinguishing the whole concept of a Continuation; the author also employs theories as to what constitutes an "end" and what is "unfinished", alongside scrutiny of other medieval "ends" and Continuations. Dr Leah Tether isa Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Cultures of the Digital Economy Institute, Anglia Ruskin University.

The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory

The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory PDF

Author: P. J. C. Field

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 9780859915663

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This volume constitutes a search for the identity of Malory, author of the Morte Darthur. Field considers all arguments and gives an account of the life of the man identified, setting him in his historical context.

The Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism

The Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism PDF

Author: Stephen C. Meyer

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-03-02

Total Pages: 844

ISBN-13: 0190658460

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The Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism provides a snapshot of the diverse ways in which medievalism--the retrospective immersion in the images, sounds, narratives, and ideologies of the European Middle Ages--powerfully transforms many of the varied musical traditions of the last two centuries. Thirty-three chapters from an international group of scholars explore topics ranging from the representation of the Middle Ages in nineteenth-century opera to medievalism in contemporary video game music, thereby connecting disparate musical forms across typical musicological boundaries of chronology and geography. While some chapters focus on key medievalist works such as Orff's Carmina Burana or Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, others explore medievalism in the oeuvre of a single composer (e.g. Richard Wagner or Arvo Pärt) or musical group (e.g. Led Zeppelin). The topics of the individual chapters include both well-known works such as John Boorman's film Excalibur and also less familiar examples such as Eduard Lalo's Le Roi d'Ys. The authors of the chapters approach their material from a wide array of disciplinary perspectives, including historical musicology, popular music studies, music theory, and film studies, examining the intersections of medievalism with nationalism, romanticism, ideology, nature, feminism, or spiritualism. Taken together, the contents of the Handbook develop new critical insights that venture outside traditional methodological constraints and provide a capstone and point of departure for future scholarship on music and medievalism.

New Directions in Arthurian Studies

New Directions in Arthurian Studies PDF

Author: Alan Lupack

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 182

ISBN-13: 0859916421

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Eleven essays bring Arthurian studies into the 21st century, including film and black popular culture. Eleven essays by leading Arthurians lead off with an overview of the field suggesting directions that Arthurian studies must take to remain vital. Other essays contain innovative approaches, overviews of specific areas of Arthurian studies, and suggestions for new ways to approach Arthurian material; they range over Malory, Latin Arthurian literature, Gawain and the Green Knight, Merlin in the twenty-first century, Tennyson's Idylls, Arthur in African-American culture, current trends in criticism, Arthurian fiction, and Arthurian film. Contributors: ROBERT BLANCH, DEREK BREWER, P.J.C. FIELD, SIAN ECHARD, PETER GOODRICH, KEVIN HARTY, NORRIS J. LACY, BARBARATEPA LUPACK, DAVID STAINES, RAYMOND THOMPSON, JULIAN WASSERMAN, BONNIE WHEELER.

A Companion to Chrétien de Troyes

A Companion to Chrétien de Troyes PDF

Author: Norris J. Lacy

Publisher: DS Brewer

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9781843841616

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A fine collection...an excellent introduction to Chrétien's world and work. Highly recommended. CHOICE Chrétien de Troyes is arguably the creator of Arthurian romance, and it is on his work that later writers have based their interpretations. This book offers both crucial information on, and a comprehensive coverage of, all aspectsof the work of Chrétien de Troyes - the literary and historical background, patronage, his influence on other writers, manuscripts and editions of his work and, at the heart of the volume, major essays on the themes, techniques and artistic achievements in each of his compositions; the contributions, all from leading experts in Chrétien and related studies, have been commissioned especially for this volume and are designed to remain accessible to studentswhile also addressing specialists in Arthurian studies and Chrétien de Troyes. They reflect the most current critical and scholarly views on one of the greatest of medieval authors. CONTRIBUTORS: JOHN W. BALDWIN, JUNEHALL MCCASH, LAURENCE HARF-LANCNER, NORRIS J. LACY, DOUGLAS KELLY, KEITH BUSBY, PETER F. DEMBOWSKI, ROBERTA L. KRUEGER, DONALD MADDOX, SARA STURM-MADDOX, JOAN TASKER GRIMBERT, MATILDA TOMARYN BRUCKNER, TONY HUNT, RUPERT T. PICKENS, ANNIE COMBES, MICHELLE SZKILNIK, EMMANUELE BAUMGARTNER

Pornographic Archaeology

Pornographic Archaeology PDF

Author: Zrinka Stahuljak

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2012-10-08

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 0812207319

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In Pornographic Archaeology: Medicine, Medievalism, and the Invention of the French Nation, Zrinka Stahuljak explores the connections and fissures between the history of sexuality, nineteenth-century views of the Middle Ages, and the conceptualization of modern France. This cultural history uncovers the determinant role that the sexuality of the Middle Ages played in nineteenth-century French identity. Stahuljak's provocative study of sex, blood, race, and love in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century medical and historical literature demonstrates how French medicine's obsession with the medieval past helped to define European sexuality, race, public health policy, marriage, family, and the conceptualization of the Middle Ages. Stahuljak reveals the connections between the medieval military order of the Templars and the 1830 colonization of Algeria, between a fifteenth-century French marshal and the development of Richard von Krafft-Ebing's theory of sadism, between courtly love and the 1884 law on divorce. Although the developing discipline of medieval studies eventually rejected the influence of these medical philologists, the convergence of medievalism and medicine shaped modern capitalist French society and established a vision of the Middle Ages that survives today.