The Shaping of German Identity

The Shaping of German Identity
Author: Len Scales
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 637
Release: 2012-04-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0521573335

German identity, a key force in history, took shape during the late Middle Ages. This book explains how and why.

German Literature of the High Middle Ages

German Literature of the High Middle Ages
Author: Will Hasty
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2006
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1571131736

New essays on the first flowering of German literature, in the High Middle Ages and especially during the period 1180-1230.

Abject Eroticism in Northern Renaissance Art

Abject Eroticism in Northern Renaissance Art
Author: Yvonne Owens
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2020-10-29
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1350190500

Hans Baldung Grien, the most famous apprentice and close friend of German artist Albrecht Dürer, was known for his unique and highly eroticised images of witches. In paintings and woodcut prints, he gave powerful visual expression to late medieval tropes and stereotypes, such as the poison maiden, venomous virgin, the Fall of Man, 'death and the maiden' and other motifs and eschatological themes, which mingled abject and erotic qualities in the female body. Yvonne Owens reads these images against the humanist intellectual milieu of Renaissance Germany, showing how classical and medieval medicine and natural philosophy interpreted female anatomy as toxic, defective and dangerously beguiling. She reveals how Hans Baldung exploited this radical polarity to create moralising and titillating portrayals of how monstrous female sexuality victimised men and brought them low. Furthermore, these images issued from-and contributed to-the contemporary understanding of witchcraft as a heresy that stemmed from natural 'feminine defect,' a concept derived from Aristotle. Offering new and provocative interpretations of Hans Baldung's iconic witchcraft imagery, this book is essential reading for historians of art, culture and gender relations in the late medieval and early modern periods.