Courtly Desire and Medieval Homophobia

Courtly Desire and Medieval Homophobia
Author: Elizabeth B. Keiser
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 1997-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780300069235
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One of the key issues facing us in the next millennium is the ability to manipulate the genetics of living organisms. The possibility of manipulating human genetics raises many theological, ethical land socio-political issues. These include specific decisions about whether the technology will be developed, how it will be applied and more general questions about the technical manipulation of natural processes.

Allegory and Sexual Ethics in the High Middle Ages

Allegory and Sexual Ethics in the High Middle Ages
Author: N. Guynn
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2007-03-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230603661
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Guynn offers an innovative new approach to the ethical, cultural, and ideological analysis of medieval allegory. Working between poststructuralism and historical materialism, he considers both the playfulness of allegory and its disciplinary force.

A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Medieval Age

A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Medieval Age
Author: Linda Kalof
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2012-03-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1350995185
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The Christian, Jewish and Muslim communities of medieval Western Europe conceived of the human body in manifold ways. The body was not a fixed or unmalleable mass of flesh but an entity that changed its character depending on its age, its interactions with its environment and its diet. For example, a slave would have been marked by her language, her name, her religion or even by a sign burned onto her skin, not by her color alone. Covering the period from 500 to 1500 and using sources that range across the full spectrum of medieval literary, scientific, medical and artistic production, this volume explores the rich variety of medieval views of both the real and the metaphorical body. A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Medieval Age presents an overview of the period with essays on the centrality of the human body in birth and death, health and disease, sexuality, beauty and concepts of the ideal, bodies marked by gender, race, class and age, cultural representations and popular beliefs and the self and society.

From Boys to Men

From Boys to Men
Author: Ruth Mazo Karras
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2003
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780812218343
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While the social identity of women in medieval society hinged largely on the ritual of marriage, identity for men was derived from belonging to a particular group. Knights, monks, apprentices, guildsmen all underwent a process of initiation into their unique subcultures. As From Boys to Men shows, the process of this socialization reveals a great deal about medieval ideas of what it meant to be a man—as distinguished from a boy, from a woman, and even from a beast. In an exploration of the creation of adult masculine identities in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, From Boys to Men takes a close look at the roles of men through the lens of three distinct institutions: the university, the aristocratic household and court, and the craft workshop. Ruth Mazo Karras demonstrates that, while men in the later Middle Ages were defined as the opposite of women, this was never the only factor in determining their role in society. A knight proved himself against other men by the successful use of violence as well as by successful control of women. University scholars proved themselves against each other through a violence that was metaphorical and against other men by their Latinity and their use of the tools of logic and rationality. Craft workers proved their manhood by achieving independent householder status. Drawing on sources throughout Northern Europe, including court records and other administrative documents, prescriptive texts such as instructions for dubbing to knighthood, biographies, and imaginative literature, From Boys to Men sheds new light on how young men were trained to take their place in medieval society and the implications of that training for the construction of gender in the Middle Ages. Rescuing maleness from its classification as an ungendered category, From Boys to Men unravels what it meant to be men in a womanless context, revealing the common threads that emerge from the study of young manhood in various disparate institutional settings.

Chaucer's Queer Poetics

Chaucer's Queer Poetics
Author: Susan Schibanoff
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2006-01-01
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0802090354
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Geoffrey Chaucer was arguably fourteenth-century England's greatest poet. In the nineteenth century, readers of Chaucer's early dream poems - the Book of the Duchess, House of Fame, and Parliament of Fowles - began to detect a tripartite model of his artistic development from a French to an Italian, and finally to an English phase. They fleshed out this model with the liberation narrative, the inspiring story of how Chaucer escaped the emasculating French house of bondage to become the generative father of English poetry. Although this division has now largely been dismissed, both the tripartite model and the accompanying liberation narrative persist in Chaucer criticism. In Chaucer's Queer Poetics, Susan Schibanoff interrogates why the tripartite model remains so tenacious even when literary history does not support it. Revealing deeply rooted Francophobic, homophobic, and nationalistic biases, Schibanoff examines the development paradigm and demonstrates that 'liberated Chaucer' depends on antiquated readings of key source texts for the dream trilogy. This study challenges the long held view the Chaucer fled the prison of effete French court verse to become the 'natural' English father poet and charts a new model of Chaucerian poetic development that discovers the emergence of a queer aesthetic in his work.

Queering the Middle Ages

Queering the Middle Ages
Author: Glenn Burger
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2001
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780816634040
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The essays in this volume present new work that, in one way or another, "queers" stabilized conceptions of the Middle Ages, allowing us to see the period and its systems of sexuality in radically different, off-center, and revealing ways. While not denying the force of gender and sexual norms, the authors consider how historical work has written out or over what might have been non-normative in medieval sex and culture, and they work to restore a sense of such instabilities. At the same time, they ask how this pursuit might allow us not only to re-envision medieval studies but also to rethink how we study culture from our current set of vantage points within postmodernity. The authors focus on particular medieval moments: Christine de Pizan's representation of female sexuality; chastity in the Grail romances; the illustration of "the sodomite" in manuscript commentaries on Dante's Commedia; the complex ways that sexuality inflected English national politics at the time of Edward II's deposition; the construction of the sodomitic Moor by Reconquista Spain. Throughout, their work seeks to disturb a logic that sees the past as significant only insofar as it may make sense for and of a stabilized present.

Faith, Ethics, and Church

Faith, Ethics, and Church
Author: David Aers
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 174
Release: 2000
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780859915618
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Examination of key texts - Chaucer to Wyclif - sheds new light on medieval spirituality. The relationship between versions of the late medieval Church, faith, ethics and the lay powers, as explored in a range of late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century texts written in England, is the subject of this book. It argues that they disclose strikingly diverse models of Christian discipleship, and examines the sources and consequences of such differences. Issues investigated include whether the Church could shape modern communities and individualidentities, and how it could combine its status as a major landlord and trader without being assimilated by the various networks of earthly power and profit. The book begins with Chaucer's treatment of received versions of faith,ethics and the Church, and moves via St Thomas, Ockham, Nicholas Love, Gower, the Gawain-poet and Langland (who pursues the issues with particular intensity and focus) to Wyclif's construal of Christian discipleship in relation to his projected reform of the Church. Interdisciplinary in approach, the book will be of interest to all those studying late medieval Christianity and literature. DAVID AERS is James B. Duke Professor of English and Professor of Historical Theology at Duke University.

Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion

Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion
Author: Sarah McNamer
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2011-07-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812202783
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Affective meditation on the Passion was one of the most popular literary genres of the high and later Middle Ages. Proliferating in a rich variety of forms, these lyrical, impassioned, script-like texts in Latin and the vernacular had a deceptively simple goal: to teach their readers how to feel. They were thus instrumental in shaping and sustaining the wide-scale shift in medieval Christian sensibility from fear of God to compassion for the suffering Christ. Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion advances a new narrative for this broad cultural change and the meditative writings that both generated and reflected it. Sarah McNamer locates women as agents in the creation of the earliest and most influential texts in the genre, from John of Fécamp's Libellus to the Meditationes Vitae Christi, thus challenging current paradigms that cast the compassionate affective mode as Anselmian or Franciscan in origin. The early development of the genre in women's practices had a powerful and lasting legacy. With special attention to Middle English texts, including Nicholas Love's Mirror and a wide range of Passion lyrics and laments, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion illuminates how these scripts for the performance of prayer served to construct compassion itself as an intimate and feminine emotion. To feel compassion for Christ, in the private drama of the heart that these texts stage, was to feel like a woman. This was an assumption about emotion that proved historically consequential, McNamer demonstrates, as she traces some of its legal, ethical, and social functions in late medieval England.

i missed me after the terror, during the years of unbearable sorrow:

i missed me after the terror, during the years of unbearable sorrow:
Author: Alan Allen
Publisher: Trafford Publishing
Total Pages: 740
Release: 2010-04-30
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 1466981814
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(Spring 2010) Local parents warned about priests and nuns who gang rape and prostitute kids, tweens & teens in directory of clergy perps & pervs in your neighborhood. i missed me after the terror, during the years of unbearable sorrow: trafficking the holy Spirit includes oral journalism of adults raped as kids and a parental directory of priests and nuns who gang rape and prostitute kids, tweens and teens. Book asks Angela Merkel, Michele Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Alessandra Mussolini and Oprah Winfrey to help remove state, federal, civil and criminal statutes of limitation for sexual assault of kids, tweens and teens. Author says, “To protect families we must remove civil, criminal, state & federal statutes of limitation for sexual assault of children by showing parents and legislators cliches of ‘child abuse’ mask violent serial sexual assault and child, tween and teen suicide. The book documents only a few U.S. priests and nuns rape children under 12, serially rape children under 11, gang rape children under 10, sodomize kids under 9, give kids AIDS, get 11 year olds pregnant, abort children and teenagers, ritually abuse kids, sexually assault kids, torture kids, prostitute and murder kids, and abandon their illegitimate children borne of kids they raped ... all at the same 1.5% percentile as perps & pervs in society: of one million Catholic priests worldwide, only 15,000 sexually assault kids and teens; of ten million nuns, only 150,000 are perps & pervs. An appendix, Where are the Children of Table 34?, exposes a study of the ‘scientifically established’ orgasm rates of infants, toddlers, preschool children, kids, tweens and teens cited in proponing today's standards of sex education in the classroom for kids too young to be exposed to sex education and helped set statutes of limitation for rape of women (there had been none) and the shift from rapists being guilty to women having to prove they didn't want to be raped. It likely influenced setting statutes of limitation for clergy crimes of sexual assault of kids, tweens and teens. It has come to light ‘scientists using stopwatches’ to document ‘scientific studies’ – now used to justify premature sexual education of elementary school-aged kids, were conducted by child rapists and child murderers. That is one reason statutes should be removed, or extended to the life of the child, or ‘windowed’, since the ‘objective studies’ were done by perps and pervs. Another reason is, the psychiatric record establishes kids, tweens and teens sexually abused often commit suicide or repress the events for 20-30 years in order to not go crazy. They consequently make bad choices and live sad lives that never would have been, if they had not been sexually molested, assaulted, raped, serially raped, gang raped, prostituted and/or ritually abused. ABOUT THE AUTHOR & THE PHOTOGRAPHER Allen first published at 9 yrs old. Old Rails’ Tales reviewed by NYT as one of best books of year. Books include: Storytellin’ Muni Drivers; and A Noah’s Ark of Recurring Celebration: San Francisco Annual Event History. Tanna Baumgardner, Digital Faerie Photography www.digifaephotography.com dredged vintage baby doll (on book’s cover) from river in North Carolina.

The Surgeon in Medieval English Literature

The Surgeon in Medieval English Literature
Author: J. Citrome
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2016-04-30
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1137096810
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Jeremy Citrome employs the language of contemporary psychoanalysis to explain how surgical metaphors became an important tool of ecclesiastical power in the wake of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. Pastoral, theological, recreational, and medical writings are among the texts discussed in this wide-ranging study.