Reading Skin In Medieval Literature And Culture

Author : K. Walter
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 1137084642
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.44/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Reading Skin in Medieval Literature and Culture written by K. Walter and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-03-20 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Skin is a multifarious image in medieval culture: the material basis for forming a sense of self and relation to the world, as well as a powerful literary and visual image. This book explores the presence of skin in medieval literature and culture from a range of literary, religious, aesthetic, historical, medical, and theoretical perspectives.

Author : Katie L. Walter
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108565204
Total Pages : 539 pages
Book Rating : 4.02/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Middle English Mouths written by Katie L. Walter and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-21 with total page 539 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The mouth, responsible for both physical and spiritual functions - eating, drinking, breathing, praying and confessing - was of immediate importance to medieval thinking about the nature of the human being. Where scholars have traditionally focused on the mouth's grotesque excesses, Katie L. Walter argues for the recuperation of its material 'everyday' aspect. Walter's original study draws on two rich archives: one comprising Middle English theology (Langland, Julian of Norwich, Lydgate, Chaucer) and pastoral writings; the other broadly medical and surgical, including learned encyclopaedias and vernacular translations and treatises. Challenging several critical orthodoxies about the centrality of sight, the hierarchy of the senses and the separation of religious from medical discourses, the book reveals the centrality of the mouth, taste and touch to human modes of knowing and to Christian identity.

Author : Nicole Nyffenegger
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110578131
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.33/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Writing on Skin in the Age of Chaucer written by Nicole Nyffenegger and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-09-10 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Owing to its relatedness to parchment as the primary writing matter of the Middle Ages, human skin was not only a topic to write about in medieval texts, it was also conceived of as an inscribable surface, both in the material and in the figurative sense. This volume explores the textuality of human skin as discussed by Geoffrey Chaucer and other writers (medical, religious, philosophical, and literary) of the fourteenth and fifteenth century. It presents four main aspects of the complex relations between text, parchment, and human skin as they have been discussed in recent scholarship. These four aspects are, first, the (mostly figurative) resonances between parchment-making and transformations of human skin, second, parchment as a space of contact between animal and human spheres, third, human skin and parchment as sites where (gender) identities are negotiated, and fourth, the place of medieval skin studies within cultural studies and its relationship to the major concerns of cultural studies: the difficult demarcation of skin from body, the instability of any inscription, and the skin’s precarious state as an entity of its own.

Author : Brian Gastle
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1611496772
Total Pages : 269 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Later Middle English Literature, Materiality, and Culture written by Brian Gastle and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-04-12 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Jessica Barr
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
ISBN 13 : 0472126350
Total Pages : 261 pages
Book Rating : 4.54/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Intimate Reading written by Jessica Barr and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2020-04-20 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intimate Reading: Textual Encounters in Medieval Women’s Visions and Vitae explores the ways that women mystics sought to make their books into vehicles for the reader’s spiritual transformation. Jessica Barr argues that the cognitive work of reading these texts was meant to stimulate intensely personal responses, and that the very materiality of the book can produce an intimate encounter with God. She thus explores the differences between mystics’ biographies and their self-presentation, analyzing as well the complex rhetorical moves that medieval women writers employ to render their accounts more effective. This new volume is structured around five case studies. Chapters consider the biographies of 13th-century holy women from Liège, the writings of Margery Kempe, Gertrude of Helfta, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Julian of Norwich. At the heart of Intimate Reading is the question of how reading works—what it means to enter imaginatively and intellectually into the words of another. The volume showcases the complexity of medieval understandings of the work of reading, deepening our perception of the written word’s capacity to signify something that lies even beyond rational comprehension.

Author : Steven Connor
Publisher : Reaktion Books
ISBN 13 : 1861896409
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Book of Skin written by Steven Connor and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2009-01-15 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is the largest and perhaps the most important organ of our body—it covers our fragile inner parts, defines our social identities, and channels our sensory experiences. And yet we rarely give a thought. With The Book of Skin, Steven Connor aims to change all that, offering an intriguing cultural history of skin. Connor first examines physical issues such as leprosy, skin pigmentation, cancer, blushing, and attenuations of erotic touch. He also explains why specific colors symbolize certain emotions, such as green for envy or yellow for cowardice, as well as why skin is the focus of destructive rage in many people’s violent fantasies. The Book of Skin then probes into how skin has been such a powerfully symbolic terrain in photography, religious iconography, cinema, and literature. From the Turin shroud to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man to plastic surgery, The Book of Skin expertly examines the role of skin in Western culture. A compelling read that penetrates well beyond skin-deep, The Book of Skin validates James Joyce’s declaration that “modern man has an epidermis rather than a soul.” “Richly conceived and elaborately thought out. No flicker of meaning has escaped Connor’s ferocious, all-seeing eye.”—Guardian

Author : Virginia Langum
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 113744990X
Total Pages : 236 pages
Book Rating : 4.00/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Medicine and the Seven Deadly Sins in Late Medieval Literature and Culture written by Virginia Langum and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-09-15 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book considers how scientists, theologians, priests, and poets approached the relationship of the human body and ethics in the later Middle Ages. Is medicine merely a metaphor for sin? Or can certain kinds of bodies physiologically dispose people to be angry, sad, or greedy? If so, then is it their fault? Virginia Langum offers an account of the medical imagery used to describe feelings and actions in religious and literary contexts, referencing a variety of behavioral discussions within medical contexts. The study draws upon medical and theological writing for its philosophical basis, and upon more popular works of religion, as well as poetry, to show how these themes were articulated, explored, and questioned more widely in medieval culture.

Author : Mary C. Flannery
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 1137428627
Total Pages : 232 pages
Book Rating : 4.22/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Spaces for Reading in Later Medieval England written by Mary C. Flannery and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We are living in an age in which the relationship between reading and space is evolving swiftly. Cutting-edge technologies and developments in the publication and consumption of literature continue to uncover new physical, electronic, and virtual contexts in which reading can take place. In comparison with the accessibility that has accompanied these developments, the medieval reading experience may initially seem limited and restrictive, available only to a literate few or to their listeners; yet attention to the spaces in which medieval reading habits can be traced reveals a far more vibrant picture in which different kinds of spaces provided opportunities for a wide range of interactions with and contributions to the texts being read. Drawing on a rich variety of material, this collection of essays demonstrates that the spaces in which reading took place (or in which reading could take place) in later medieval England directly influenced how and why reading happened.

Author : Larissa Tracy
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 1843844524
Total Pages : 426 pages
Book Rating : 4.25/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Flaying in the Pre-modern World written by Larissa Tracy and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2017 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The practice and the representation of flaying in the middle ages and after are considered in this provocative collection.

Author : Andrew M. Beresford
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004419381
Total Pages : 380 pages
Book Rating : 4.84/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Sacred Skin: The Legend of St. Bartholomew in Spanish Art and Literature written by Andrew M. Beresford and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-02 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sacred Skin offers the first systematic evaluation of the cult of St. Bartholomew in Spain. Focusing primarily on flaying, its five chapters explore the paradoxes of hagiographic representation and their complex and ambivalent effect on the observer.