The Erotic in the Literature of Medieval Britain

The Erotic in the Literature of Medieval Britain PDF

Author: Amanda Hopkins

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 1843841193

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An examination of the erotic in medieval literature which includes articles on the role of clothing and nudity, the tension between eroticism and transgression and religion and the erotic.

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.

Sodomy, Masculinity and Law in Medieval Literature

Sodomy, Masculinity and Law in Medieval Literature PDF

Author: William E. Burgwinkle

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2004-07-08

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 1139454765

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William Burgwinkle surveys poetry and letters, histories and literary fiction - including Grail romances - to offer a historical survey of attitudes towards same-sex love during the centuries that gave us the Plantagenet court of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, courtly love, and Arthurian lore. Burgwinkle illustrates how 'sodomy' becomes a problematic feature of narratives of romance and knighthood. Most texts of the period denounce sodomy and use accusations of sodomitical practice as a way of maintaining a sacrificial climate in which masculine identity is set in opposition to the stigmatised other, for example the foreign, the feminine, and the heretical. What emerges from these readings, however, is that even the most homophobic, masculinist and normative texts of the period demonstrate an inability or unwillingness to separate the sodomitical from the orthodox. These blurred boundaries allow readers to glimpse alternative, even homoerotic, readings.

The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain, 4 Volume Set

The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain, 4 Volume Set PDF

Author: Sian Echard

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2017-08-07

Total Pages: 2102

ISBN-13: 1118396987

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Bringing together scholarship on multilingual and intercultural medieval Britain like never before, The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain comprises over 600 authoritative entries spanning key figures, contexts and influences in the literatures of Britain from the fifth to the sixteenth centuries. A uniquely multilingual and intercultural approach reflecting the latest scholarship, covering the entire medieval period and the full tapestry of literary languages comprises over 600 authoritative yet accessible entries on key figures, texts, critical debates, methodologies, cultural and isitroical contexts, and related terminology Represents all the literatures of the British Isles including Old and Middle English, Early Scots, Anglo-Norman, the Norse, Latin and French of Britain, and the Celtic Literatures of Wales, Ireland, Scotland and Cornwall Boasts an impressive chronological scope, covering the period from the Saxon invasions to the fifth century to the transition to the Early Modern Period in the sixteenth Covers the material remains of Medieval British literature, including manuscripts and early prints, literary sites and contexts of production, performance and reception as well as highlighting narrative transformations and intertextual links during the period

Medieval Virginities

Medieval Virginities PDF

Author: Ruth Evans

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2003-01-01

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 9780802086372

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The variety of subjects and disciplines represented here testify both to the elusiveness of virginity and to its lasting appeal and importance. Medieval Virginities shows how virginity's inherent ambiguity highlights the problems, contradictions and discontinuities lurking within medieval ideologies.

Sleep and its spaces in Middle English literature

Sleep and its spaces in Middle English literature PDF

Author: Megan G. Leitch

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2021-07-06

Total Pages: 343

ISBN-13: 152615109X

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Middle English literature is intimately concerned with sleep and the spaces in which it takes place. In the medieval English imagination, sleep is an embodied and culturally determined act. It is both performed and interpreted by characters and contemporaries, subject to a particular habitus and understood through particular hermeneutic lenses. While illuminating the intersecting medical and moral discourses by which it is shaped, sleep also sheds light on subjects in favour of which it has hitherto been overlooked: what sleep can enable (dreams and dream poetry) or what it can stand in for or supersede (desire and sex). This book argues that sleep mediates thematic concerns and questions in ways that have ethical, affective and oneiric implications. At the same time, it offers important contributions to understanding different Middle English genres: romance, dream vision, drama and fabliau.

The Fires of Lust

The Fires of Lust PDF

Author: Katherine Harvey

Publisher: Reaktion Books

Published: 2022-11-28

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1789144884

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An illuminating exploration of the surprisingly familiar sex lives of ordinary medieval people. The medieval humoral system of medicine suggested that it was possible to die from having too much—or too little—sex, while the Roman Catholic Church taught that virginity was the ideal state. Holy men and women committed themselves to lifelong abstinence in the name of religion. Everyone was forced to conform to restrictive rules about who they could have sex with, in what way, how often, and even when, and could be harshly punished for getting it wrong. Other experiences are more familiar. Like us, medieval people faced challenges in finding a suitable partner or trying to get pregnant (or trying not to). They also struggled with many of the same social issues, such as whether prostitution should be legalized. Above all, they shared our fondness for dirty jokes and erotic images. By exploring their sex lives, the book brings ordinary medieval people to life and reveals details of their most personal thoughts and experiences. Ultimately, it provides us with an important and intimate connection to the past.

Later Middle English Literature, Materiality, and Culture

Later Middle English Literature, Materiality, and Culture PDF

Author: Brian Gastle

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2018-04-12

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 1611496772

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The essays in this volume consider the ways in which material and intellectual culture both shaped and were shaped by the literature of late medieval England. The first section, “Textual Material,” reflects on cultural and social issues generally referred to as the History of Ideas, and how those ideas manifest in later medieval English texts. Essays address, for example, affect in The Book of Margery Kempe, rhetoric in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, anarchy in late medieval political texts, and temporality in Gower’s Confessio Amantis. The essays in the second section, “Material Texts,” examine physical objects – from pilgrim badges, to manuscripts, to money, to early printed editions – and the cultural behaviors associated with them, interpreting these objects and exploring their connections to the important literary and political texts of the age such as Piers Plowman, Lydgate’s Troy Book, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. All of the essays in this collection emerge from the relationships and connections between the issues that characterize Jim Dean’s work: the cultural, material, and aesthetic aspects of later medieval English literature. So too do they reflect a movement in medieval literary studies presaged by Dean’s career of scholarship and teaching, that critical approaches to literary texts are best undertaken with an understanding of the complex cultural and historical milieu that defines both the production of those texts and the production of our own work on those texts.

Fairies in Medieval Romance

Fairies in Medieval Romance PDF

Author: J. Wade

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2011-05-23

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 0230119158

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This is the first book to construct a theoretical framework that not only introduces a new way of reading romance writing at large, but more specifically that generates useful critical readings of the specific functions of fairies in individual romance texts.