Medieval Conduct

Medieval Conduct
Author: Kathleen M. Ashley
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2001
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780816635757

Focusing on a broad range of texts from England, France, Germany, and Italy -- conduct and courtesy books, advice poems, devotional literature, trial records -- the contributors to Medieval Conduct draw attention to the diverse ways in which readers of this literature could interpret such behavioral guides, appropriating them to their own ends. Medieval Conduct expands the concept of conduct to include historicized practices, and theorizes the connection between texts and their concrete social uses; what emerges is a nuanced interpretation of the role of gender and class inscribed in such texts. By bringing to light these subtleties and complexities, the authors also reveal the ways in which the assumptions of literary history have shaped our reception of such texts in the past two centuries.

Medieval Conduct Literature

Medieval Conduct Literature
Author: Kathleen M. Ashley
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2009-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0802098320

"Conduct literature is a term used to identify writings that address how one should 'conduct' oneself in social situations. In the medieval period conduct literature was essential reading for nearly all literate children and adolescents to educate them in the expected social behaviours for their culture, gender, and status. Using a comparative approach, this anthology pairs together pieces of male-directed and female-directed medieval conduct literature, many being translated into English for the first time, to present an illuminating picture of medieval gender norms, parenting, literary style, and pedagogy." "Containing texts written in six vernacular languages, each section is also accompanied by textual notes, an introduction, and an English translation. A fascinating examination of a diverse range of regions and cultures, Medieval Conduct Literature is a remarkable window into medieval life, customs, behaviour, and social expectations." --Book Jacket.

Conduct Books and the History of the Ideal Woman

Conduct Books and the History of the Ideal Woman
Author: Tabitha Kenlon
Publisher: Anthem Press
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2020-03-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1785273159

The longest-running war is the battle over how women should behave. “Conduct Books and the History of the Ideal Woman” examines six centuries of advice literature, analyzing the print origins of gendered expectations that continue to inform our thinking about women’s roles and abilities. Close readings of numerous conduct manuals from Britain and America, written by men and women, explain and contextualize the legacy of sexism as represented in prescriptive writing for women from 1372 to the present. While existing period-specific studies of conduct manuals consider advice literature within the society that wrote and read them, “Conduct Books and the History of the Ideal Woman” provides the only analysis of both the volumes themselves and the larger debates taking place within their pages across the centuries. Combining textual literary analysis with a social history sensibility while remaining accessible to expert and novice, this book will help readers understand the on-going debate about the often-contradictory guidelines for female behavior.

Dante's Comedy and the Ethics of Invective in Medieval Italy

Dante's Comedy and the Ethics of Invective in Medieval Italy
Author: Nicolino Applauso
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2019-11-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1498567797

Dante's Comedy and the Ethics of Invective in Medieval Italy proposes a new approach to invective and comic poetry in Italy during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and opens the way for an innovative understanding of Dante’s masterpiece. The Middle Ages in Italy offer a wealth of vernacular poetic invectives—polemical verses aimed at blaming specific wrongdoings of an individual, group, city or institution— that are both understudied and rarely juxtaposed. No study has yet provided a scholarly examination of the connection between this medieval invective tradition, and its elements of humor, derision, and reprehension in Dante’s Comedy. This book argues that these comic texts are rooted in and actively engaged with the social, political, and religious conflicts of their time. Political invective has a dynamic ethical orientation that is mediated by a humor that disarms excessive hostility against its individual targets, providing an opening for dialogue. While exploring medieval comic poems by Rustico Filippi (from Florence), Cecco Angiolieri (from Siena), and Folgore da San Gimignano, this study unveils new biographical data about these poets retrieved from Italian state archives (most of these data are published here in English for the very first time), and ultimately shows what the medieval invective tradition can add to our understanding of Dante’s Comedy.

Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe

Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe
Author: James A. Brundage
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 714
Release: 2009-02-15
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0226077896

This monumental study of medieval law and sexual conduct explores the origin and develpment of the Christian church's sex law and the systems of belief upon which that law rested. Focusing on the Church's own legal system of canon law, James A. Brundage offers a comprehensive history of legal doctrines–covering the millennium from A.D. 500 to 1500–concerning a wide variety of sexual behavior, including marital sex, adultery, homosexuality, concubinage, prostitution, masturbation, and incest. His survey makes strikingly clear how the system of sexual control in a world we have half-forgotten has shaped the world in which we live today. The regulation of marriage and divorce as we know it today, together with the outlawing of bigamy and polygamy and the imposition of criminal sanctions on such activities as sodomy, fellatio, cunnilingus, and bestiality, are all based in large measure upon ideas and beliefs about sexual morality that became law in Christian Europe in the Middle Ages. "Brundage's book is consistently learned, enormously useful, and frequently entertaining. It is the best we have on the relationships between theological norms, legal principles, and sexual practice."—Peter Iver Kaufman, Church History

Handbook of Medieval Studies

Handbook of Medieval Studies
Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 2822
Release: 2010-11-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110215586

This interdisciplinary handbook provides extensive information about research in medieval studies and its most important results over the last decades. The handbook is a reference work which enables the readers to quickly and purposely gain insight into the important research discussions and to inform themselves about the current status of research in the field. The handbook consists of four parts. The first, large section offers articles on all of the main disciplines and discussions of the field. The second section presents articles on the key concepts of modern medieval studies and the debates therein. The third section is a lexicon of the most important text genres of the Middle Ages. The fourth section provides an international bio-bibliographical lexicon of the most prominent medievalists in all disciplines. A comprehensive bibliography rounds off the compendium. The result is a reference work which exhaustively documents the current status of research in medieval studies and brings the disciplines and experts of the field together.

The Ideology of Conduct (Routledge Revivals)

The Ideology of Conduct (Routledge Revivals)
Author: Nancy Armstrong
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2014-06-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317744322

In The Ideology of Conduct, first published in 1987, scholars from various fields, from the medieval period to the present day, discuss literature in which the sole purpose is to instruct women in how to make themselves desirable. This collection investigates how middle-class writers who had long emulated the behaviour of the aristocracy began to criticise that behaviour by formulating an alternative object of desire. They did so without appearing to breed political controversy because it seemed to concern only the female. But writing for and about women in fact became a powerful instrument of hegemony as it introduced a whole new vocabulary for social relations, induced certain forms of economic behaviour as desirable in men and women respectively, and insured the reproduction of the nuclear family. It is argued, therefore, that the literature of conduct not only recorded but also assisted the production of our contemporary gender-based culture.

Conduct Becoming

Conduct Becoming
Author: Glenn Burger
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2018
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0812249607

Glenn D. Burger argues that, over the course of the long fourteenth century, the "invention" of the good wife in discourses of sacramental marriage, private devotion, and personal conduct reconfigures how female embodiment is understood.

The Good Wife's Guide (Le Ménagier de Paris)

The Good Wife's Guide (Le Ménagier de Paris)
Author:
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2012-09-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0801462118

In the closing years of the fourteenth century, an anonymous French writer compiled a book addressed to a fifteen-year-old bride, narrated in the voice of her husband, a wealthy, aging Parisian. The book was designed to teach this young wife the moral attributes, duties, and conduct befitting a woman of her station in society, in the almost certain event of her widowhood and subsequent remarriage. The work also provides a rich assembly of practical materials for the wife's use and for her household, including treatises on gardening and shopping, tips on choosing servants, directions on the medical care of horses and the training of hawks, plus menus for elaborate feasts, and more than 380 recipes. The Good Wife's Guide is the first complete modern English translation of this important medieval text also known as Le Ménagier de Paris (the Parisian household book), a work long recognized for its unique insights into the domestic life of the bourgeoisie during the later Middle Ages. The Good Wife's Guide, expertly rendered into modern English by Gina L. Greco and Christine M. Rose, is accompanied by an informative critical introduction setting the work in its proper medieval context as a conduct manual. This edition presents the book in its entirety, as it must have existed for its earliest readers. The Guide is now a treasure for the classroom, appealing to anyone studying medieval literature or history or considering the complex lives of medieval women. It illuminates the milieu and composition process of medieval authors and will in turn fascinate cooking or horticulture enthusiasts. The work illustrates how a (perhaps fictional) Parisian householder of the late fourteenth century might well have trained his wife so that her behavior could reflect honorably on him and enhance his reputation.