Beasts, Humans, and Transhumans in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

Beasts, Humans, and Transhumans in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
Author: J. Eugene Clay
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
Total Pages: 168
Release: 2020
Genre: Electronic books
ISBN: 9782503590639

From shape-shifting Merlin to the homunculi of Paracelsus, the nine fascinating essays of this collection explore the contested boundaries between human and non-human animals, between the body and the spirit, and between the demonic and the divine. Drawing on recent work in animal studies, posthumanism, and transhumanism, these innovative articles show how contemporary debates about the nature and future of humanity have deep roots in the myths, literature, philosophy, and art of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The authors of these essays demonstrate how classical stories of monsters and metamorphoses offered philosophers, artists, and poets a rich source for reflection on marriage, resurrection, and the passions of love. The ambiguous and shifting distinctions between human, animal, demon, and angel have long been contentious. Beasts can elevate humanity: for Renaissance courtiers, horsemanship defined nobility. But animals are also associated with the demonic, and medieval illuminators portrayed Satan with bestial features. Divided into three sections that examine metamorphoses, human-animal relations, and the demonic and monstrous, this volume raises intriguing questions about the ways humans have understood their kinship with animals, nature, and the supernatural.

Multilingualism in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age

Multilingualism in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age
Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2016-09-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 311047090X

Bi- and multilingualism are of great interest for contemporary linguists since this phenomenon deeply reflects on language acquisition, language use, and sociolinguistic conditions in many different circumstances all over the world. Multilingualism was, however, certainly rather common already, if not especially, in the premodern world. For some time now, research has started to explore this issue through a number of specialized studies. The present volume continues with the investigation of multilingualism through a collection of case studies focusing on important examples in medieval and early modern societies, that is, in linguistic and cultural contact zones, such as England, Spain, the Holy Land, but also the New World. As all contributors confirm, the numerous cases of multilingualism discussed here indicate strongly that the premodern period knew considerably less barriers between people of different social classes, cultural background, and religious orientation. But we also have to acknowledge that already then human communication could fail because of linguistic hurdles which prevented mutual understanding in religious and cultural terms.

Reading the Natural World in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

Reading the Natural World in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
Author: Thomas Willard
Publisher:
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2020-09-15
Genre:
ISBN: 9782503590448

The environment--together with ecology and other aspects of the way people see their world--has become a major focus of pre-modern studies. The thirteen contributions in this volume discuss topics across the millennium in Europe from the late 600s to the early 1600s. They introduce applications to older texts, art works, and ideas made possible by relatively new fields of discourse such as animal studies, ecotheology, and Material Engagement Theory. From studies of medieval land charters and epics to the canticles sung in churches, the encyclopedic natural histories compiled for the learned, the hunting parks described and illustrated for the aristocracy, chronicles from the New World, classical paintings from the Old World, and the plays of Shakespeare, the authors engage with the human responses to nature in times when it touched their lives more intimately than it does for people today, even though this contact raised concerns that are still very much alive today.

Reinventing the Middle Ages & the Renaissance

Reinventing the Middle Ages & the Renaissance
Author: William F. Gentrup
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
Total Pages: 272
Release: 1998
Genre: History
ISBN:

The fourteen essays presented in this volume contribute substantially to the study of the reinvention of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. They take an historicized approach to constructions of the past, and most address the relatively new field of Medievalism. All of them focus on how and why the present of any period uses the past to promote its own opinions, beliefs, doctrines or views. In particular, the volume demonstrates that reinventions of past eras or figures can be motivated by a nationalistic desire to create cultural 'roots', to discover origins that justify a regime or group's self-identity, to appropriate a cultural icon or neglected author for a particular political agenda, or to reflect on contemporary social issues via a remote time and place. Reworkings or adaptations of earlier culture often tell us more about the age in which they were produced than the one revived or revisited. This volume features five essays that treat medieval subjects; four focus on Tudor and Stuart figures, religion or politics; and five concentrate on nineteenth-century uses of medieval or early modern events, literary conventions, settings and themes.

Material Culture and Cultural Materialisms in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

Material Culture and Cultural Materialisms in the Middle Ages and Renaissance
Author: Curtis Perry
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2001
Genre: History
ISBN:

The phrase 'cultural materialism' names an approach to cultural analysis that interrogates the socio-economic conditions within which artefacts are produced as well as their participation in other ideological and material fields of culture. Disciplines that have traditionally studied cultural artefacts like literature and painting have increasingly focused on the material production and ideological operation of objects once thought of in idealized or purely aesthetic terms. By the same token, historians - whose work, of necessity, has always tended to deal with the material traces of culture - have increasingly been willing to consider the social and ideological importance of art. The increasing popularity of this cultural studies approach to the past has in turn spurred investigation into other kinds of materiality. Recent historical and literary scholarship, for example, has become increasingly aware of the ways in which the lived materiality of the human body informs a range of cultural discourses.

Post- and Transhumanism

Post- and Transhumanism
Author: Robert Ranisch
Publisher: Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre: Humanism
ISBN: 9783631606629

Post- and Transhumanism are being introduced with respect to foundational questions, utopian issues, normative and evaluative elements, ontological perspectives and arts. The topics are divided up into five sections with the following titles: Confessions, Lands of Cockaygne, Neo-Socratic Reflections, Ontologies of Becoming and Paragone of the Arts.

Eroticism in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

Eroticism in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
Author: Ian Frederick Moulton
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016
Genre: Erotica
ISBN: 9782503567884

Magic rings; seductive she-devils; satyrs bound and whipped on stage; a woman sexually coerced in the confessional; a boy caught masturbating over a midwifery manual; a marriage of true minds between two men; a prince led to repentance at the sight of a naked girl prepared to give her life for his. These varied manifestations of medieval and early modern sexuality--each at the center of one of the essays in this volume--suggest the ubiquity and diversity of eroticism in the period. The erotic is the stuff of legend, but also of daily life. It is inextricable from relations of power and subordination and it plays a fundamental role in the heirarchical social structures of the period. The erotic is also very much a part of the spiritual realm, often in morally ambiguous ways. The seven essays collected in this volume explore the role the erotic played in early modern notions of happiness or fulfillment, in clerical life, in Jewish legend, heretical magic and Christian marriage, in poetry, on the public stage, and in medical manuals.

Myth in Early Northwest Europe

Myth in Early Northwest Europe
Author: Stephen O. Glosecki
Publisher: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS)
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2007
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

Peace and Negotiation

Peace and Negotiation
Author: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Conference
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2000
Genre: History
ISBN:

Peace was far from a pale, static concept - a simple lack of violence - in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Rather, it was at times constructed as a rich and complex, positive and dynamic ideal. The thirteen articles in this volume cover a broad range of disciplines, times, and geographical areas and explore strategies that were used in the past to resolve conflict and attain peace. They examine events, texts, and images that date from the fifth through the sixteenth centuries, and their authors focus not only on Western Europe, but also on Scandinavia, the Caucusus, and Egypt. This volume rests on the assumption that peace covers a spectrum of situations that connects the personal and the political. Therefore, the papers presented here examine not only how nations negotiated peace, but also how individuals did. Similarly, although several essays spotlight those in the seat of power, others explore those who are politically marginalized. our views about peace and conflict, as this collection makes clear, are shaped in part by the mentalites of the past. Although some peacemaking strategies may be unacceptable to us today - forced marriages and conversions, for example - we can learn from other strategies how to transcend or modify various modes of antagonistic thinking.

Posthuman Studies Reader

Posthuman Studies Reader
Author: Evi D. Sampanikou
Publisher: Schwabe Verlag (Basel)
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2021-04-20
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3796543189

The new reader presents an up-to-date collection of seminal texts dedicated to all branches of debates on Posthuman Studies: Transhumanism, Critical Posthumanism and Metahumanism. It includes classical as well as cutting-edge contributions to these debates. The Posthuman Studies Reader is an indispensable resource for studying as well as teaching key concepts, central claims and main arguments of contemporary debates in the field of Posthuman Studies. The reader includes texts by: Neil Badmington, Karen Barad, Nick Bostrom, Rosi Braidotti, Claire Colebrook, Jaime del Val, FM-2030, Francis Fukuyama, Elaine Graham, Donna Haraway, Ihab Habib Hassan, N. Katherine Hayles, James Hughes, Julian Huxley, Brian Massumi, Max More, David Pearce, Anders Sandberg, Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, Stelarc, Natasha Vita-More and Cary Wolfe. "This Reader is a perfect guide to get into bleeding-edge philosophy."Nicolás Rojas Cortés, Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities, University of Chile "The Reader can be used not only as a textbook in higher education, but also by all researchers and students in these fields as reference. [...] I highly recommend it to everyone who is interested in these movements and those works from which excerpts are included in it."Yunus Tuncel, The New School, New York "Since Sorgner, Sampanikou, Stasienko and their colleagues, almost singlehandedly, are crafting and advancing this discipline through its forming stages, when they publish a book with handpicked canonic texts, it should be treated as a landmark."Carmel Vaisman, The Cohn Institute and The Multidisciplinary Program in the Humanities, Tel Aviv University "What makes the Posthuman Studies Reader interesting and exciting is the facility to have in one volume the basic ideas and essentials of transhumanism, critical posthumanism and metahumanism. The reader provides in a condensed version an introduction to posthuman studies for both academic and nonacademic audiences."Leo Igwe, Department of Religious Studies, University of Cape Town "The Posthuman Studies Reader serves as a comprehensive guide and/or manual of an evolving and expanding Post/Trans/Meta Humanism discourse. [...] because of the clarity of organization by the editors and the highest scholarship of the writers, the collection was able to drive the interest of readers a notch or two higher."Joseph Reylan B. Viray, Polytechnic University of the Philippines