Women and Marriage in German Medieval Romance

Women and Marriage in German Medieval Romance
Author: D. H. Green
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2009-04-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0521513359

D. H. Green shows how German romances found ways to debate and challenge the conventional antifeminism of the medieval period.

Women and Marriage in German Medieval Romance

Women and Marriage in German Medieval Romance
Author: Dennis Howard Green
Publisher:
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2009
Genre: Arthurian romances
ISBN: 9780511517495

"D. H. Green shows how German romances found ways to debate and challenge the conventional antifeminism of the medieval period".--Résumé de l'éditeur.

Conflicting Femininities in Medieval German Literature

Conflicting Femininities in Medieval German Literature
Author: Karina Marie Ash
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2016-05-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317162129

Drastic changes in lay religiosity during the High Middle Ages spurred anxiety about women forsaking their secular roles as wives and mothers for religious ones as nuns and beguines. This anxiety and the subsequent need to model an ideal of feminine behavior for the laity is particularly expressed in the German versions of Latin and French narratives. Using thirteenth-century penitentials, monastic exempla, and sermons, Karina Marie Ash clarifies how secular wifehood was recast as a quasi-religious role and, in German epics and romances from the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, how female characters are adapted to promote the salvific nature of worldly love in ways that echo the pastoral reevaluation of women at that time. Then she argues that mid and late thirteenth-century German literature not only reflects this impulse to idealize women's roles in lay society but also to promote an alternative model of femininity that deploys ways of privileging secular roles for women over religious ones. These continuously evolving readaptations of female protagonists across cultures and across centuries reflect fictive solutions for real historical concerns about women that not only complement contemporary pastoral and legal reforms but are also unique to medieval German literature.

Death in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times

Death in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times
Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 505
Release: 2016-04-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3110434873

Death is not only the final moment of life, it also casts a huge shadow on human society at large. People throughout time have had to cope with death as an existential experience, and this also, of course, in the premodern world. The contributors to the present volume examine the material and spiritual conditions of the culture of death, studying specific buildings and spaces, literary works and art objects, theatrical performances, and medical tracts from the early Middle Ages to the late eighteenth century. Death has always evoked fear, terror, and awe, it has puzzled and troubled people, forcing theologians and philosophers to respond and provide answers for questions that seem to evade real explanations. The more we learn about the culture of death, the more we can comprehend the culture of life. As this volume demonstrates, the approaches to death varied widely, also in the Middle Ages and the early modern age. This volume hence adds a significant number of new facets to the critical examination of this ever-present phenomenon of death, exploring poetic responses to the Black Death, types of execution of a female murderess, death as the springboard for major political changes, and death reflected in morality plays and art.

Women's Genealogies in the Medieval Literary Imagination

Women's Genealogies in the Medieval Literary Imagination
Author: Emma O. Bérat
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2024-02-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1009434756

Emma O. Bérat shows the centrality of women's legacies to medieval political and literary thought in chronicles, hagiography, and genealogy.

Logical Fictions in Medieval Literature and Philosophy

Logical Fictions in Medieval Literature and Philosophy
Author: Virginie Greene
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2014-10-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1316195104

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, new ways of storytelling and inventing fictions appeared in the French-speaking areas of Europe. This new art still influences our global culture of fiction. Virginie Greene explores the relationship between fiction and the development of neo-Aristotelian logic during this period through a close examination of seminal literary and philosophical texts by major medieval authors, such as Anselm of Canterbury, Abélard, and Chrétien de Troyes. This study of Old French logical fictions encourages a broader theoretical reflection about fiction as a universal human trait and a defining element of the history of Western philosophy and literature. Additional close readings of classical Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle, and modern analytic philosophy including the work of Bertrand Russell and Rudolf Carnap, demonstrate peculiar traits of Western rationalism and expose its ambivalent relationship to fiction.

Ethics in the Arthurian Legend

Ethics in the Arthurian Legend
Author: Melissa Ridley Elmes
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 421
Release: 2023-07-11
Genre:
ISBN: 184384687X

An interdisciplinary and trans-historical investigation of the representation of ethics in Arthurian Literature. From its earliest days, the Arthurian legend has been preoccupied with questions of good kingship, the behaviours of a ruling class, and their effects on communities, societies, and nations, both locally and in imperial and colonizing contexts. Ethical considerations inform and are informed by local anxieties tied to questions of power and identity, especially where leadership, service, and governance are concerned; they provide a framework for understanding how the texts operate as didactic and critical tools of these subjects. This book brings together chapters drawing on English, Welsh, German, Dutch, French, and Norse iterations of the Arthurian legend, and bridging premodern and modern temporalities, to investigate the representation of ethics in Arthurian literature across interdisciplinary and transhistorical lines. They engage a variety of methodologies, including gender, critical race theory, philology, literature and the law, translation theory, game studies, comparative, critical, and close reading, and modern editorial and authorial practices. Texts interrogated range from Culhwch and Olwen to Parzival, Roman van Walewein, Tristrams Saga, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Malory's Morte Darthur. As a whole, the approaches and findings in this volume attest to the continued value and importance of the Arthurian legend and its scholarship as a vibrant field through which to locate and understand the many ways in which medieval literature continues to inform modern sensibilities and institutions, particularly where the matter of ethics is concerned.

Gods and Humans in Medieval Scandinavia

Gods and Humans in Medieval Scandinavia
Author: Jonas Wellendorf
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2018-04-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 110842497X

This study shows some of the ways in which medieval Scandinavians received and re-interpreted pre-Christian religion.

Shaping the Archive in Late Medieval England

Shaping the Archive in Late Medieval England
Author: Sarah Elliott Novacich
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2017-03-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107177057

Sarah Elliott Novacich explores the ways in which the plots of sacred history were preserved and repurposed in Medieval English literature.

Ethics and Enjoyment in Late Medieval Poetry

Ethics and Enjoyment in Late Medieval Poetry
Author: Jessica Rosenfeld
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2010-12-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1139495259

Jessica Rosenfeld provides a history of the ethics of medieval vernacular love poetry by tracing its engagement with the late medieval reception of Aristotle. Beginning with a history of the idea of enjoyment from Plato to Peter Abelard and the troubadours, the book then presents a literary and philosophical history of the medieval ethics of love, centered on the legacy of the Roman de la Rose. The chapters reveal that 'courtly love' was scarcely confined to what is often characterized as an ethic of sacrifice and deferral, but also engaged with Aristotelian ideas about pleasure and earthly happiness. Readings of Machaut, Froissart, Chaucer, Dante, Deguileville and Langland show that poets were often markedly aware of the overlapping ethical languages of philosophy and erotic poetry. The study's conclusion places medieval poetry and philosophy in the context of psychoanalytic ethics, and argues for a re-evaluation of Lacan's ideas about courtly love.