Wonder And Skepticism In The Middle Ages

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Wonder and Skepticism in the Middle Ages

Keagan Brewer
Wonder and Skepticism in the Middle Ages Book PDF

Author : Keagan Brewer
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 236 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2016-01-29
Category : History
ISBN : 9781317430353

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Wonder and Skepticism in the Middle Ages by Keagan Brewer Pdf

Wonder and Skepticism in the Middle Ages explores the response by medieval society to tales of marvels and the supernatural, which ranged from firm belief to outright rejection, and asks why the believers believed, and why the skeptical disbelieved. Despite living in a world whose structures more often than not supported belief, there were still a great many who disbelieved, most notably scholastic philosophers who began a polemical programme against belief in marvels. Keagan Brewer reevaluates the Middle Ages’ reputation as an era of credulity by considering the evidence for incidences of marvels, miracles and the supernatural and demonstrating the reasons people did and did not believe in such things. Using an array of contemporary sources, he shows that medieval responders sought evidence in the commonality of a report, similarity of one event to another, theological explanations and from people with status to show that those who believed in marvels and miracles did so only because the wonders had passed evidentiary testing. In particular, he examines both emotional and rational reactions to wondrous phenomena, and why some were readily accepted and others rejected. This book is an important contribution to the history of emotions and belief in the Middle Ages.

Pleasure and Leisure in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age

Albrecht Classen
Pleasure and Leisure in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age Book PDF

Author : Albrecht Classen
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 764 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2019-08-05
Category : History
ISBN : 9783110623079

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Pleasure and Leisure in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age by Albrecht Classen Pdf

Jan Huizinga and Roger Caillois have already taught us to realize how important games and play have been for pre-modern civilization. Recent research has begun to acknowledge the fundamental importance of these aspects in cultural, religious, philosophical, and literary terms. This volume expands on the traditional approach still very much focused on the materiality of game (toys, cards, dice, falcons, dolls, etc.) and acknowledges that game constituted also a form of coming to terms with human existence in an unstable and volatile world determined by universal randomness and fortune. Whether considering blessings or horse fighting, falconry or card games, playing with dice or dolls, we can gain a much deeper understanding of medieval and early modern society when we consider how people pursued pleasure and how they structured their leisure time. The contributions examine a wide gamut of approaches to pleasure, considering health issues, eroticism, tournaments, playing music, reading and listening, drinking alcohol, gambling and throwing dice. This large issue was also relevant, of course, in non-Christian societies, and constitutes a critical concern both for the past and the present because we are all homines ludentes.

Imagination and Fantasy in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time

Albrecht Classen
Imagination and Fantasy in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time Book PDF

Author : Albrecht Classen
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 820 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 2020-08-24
Category : History
ISBN : 9783110693669

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Imagination and Fantasy in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time by Albrecht Classen Pdf

The notions of other peoples, cultures, and natural conditions have always been determined by the epistemology of imagination and fantasy, providing much freedom and creativity, and yet have also created much fear, anxiety, and horror. In this regard, the pre-modern world demonstrates striking parallels with our own insofar as the projections of alterity might be different by degrees, but they are fundamentally the same by content. Dreams, illusions, projections, concepts, hopes, utopias/dystopias, desires, and emotional attachments are as specific and impactful as the physical environment. This volume thus sheds important light on the various lenses used by people in the Middle Ages and the early modern age as to how they came to terms with their perceptions, images, and notions. Previous scholarship focused heavily on the history of mentality and history of emotions, whereas here the history of pre-modern imagination, and fantasy assumes center position. Imaginary things are taken seriously because medieval and early modern writers and artists clearly reveal their great significance in their works and their daily lives. This approach facilitates a new deep-structure analysis of pre-modern culture.

Lives, Identities and Histories in the Central Middle Ages

Julie Barrau,David Bates
Lives Identities and Histories in the Central Middle Ages Book PDF

Author : Julie Barrau,David Bates
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 339 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2021-10-07
Category : History
ISBN : 9781107160804

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Lives, Identities and Histories in the Central Middle Ages by Julie Barrau,David Bates Pdf

Offers a new take on the identities and life histories of medieval people, in their multi-layered and sometimes contradictory dimensions.

Middle English Marvels

Tara Williams
Middle English Marvels Book PDF

Author : Tara Williams
Publisher : Penn State Press
Page : 182 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2018-01-03
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780271081762

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Middle English Marvels by Tara Williams Pdf

This multidisciplinary volume illustrates how representations of magic in fourteenth-century romances link the supernatural, spectacle, and morality in distinctive ways. Supernatural marvels represented in vivid visual detail are foundational to the characteristic Middle English genres of romance and hagiography. In Middle English Marvels, Tara Williams explores the didactic and affective potential of secular representations of magic and shows how fourteenth-century English writers tested the limits of that potential. Drawing on works by Augustine, Gervase of Tilbury, Chaucer, and the anonymous poets of Sir Orfeo and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, among others, Williams examines how such marvels might convey moral messages within and beyond the narrative. She analyzes examples from both highly canonical and more esoteric texts and examines marvels that involve magic and transformation, invoke visual spectacle, and invite moral reflection on how one should relate to others. Within this shared framework, Williams finds distinct concerns—chivalry, identity, agency, and language—that intersect with the marvelous in significant ways. Integrating literary and historical approaches to the study of magic, this volume convincingly shows how certain fourteenth-century texts eschewed the predominant trends and developed a new theory of the marvelous. Williams’s engaging, erudite study will be of special interest to scholars of the occult, the medieval and early modern eras, and literature.

Does God Doubt? R. Gershon Henoch Leiner’s Thought in Its Contexts

Jonathan Garb
Does God Doubt R Gershon Henoch Leiner s Thought in Its Contexts Book PDF

Author : Jonathan Garb
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 260 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2024-03-04
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9789004694231

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Does God Doubt? R. Gershon Henoch Leiner’s Thought in Its Contexts by Jonathan Garb Pdf

Does God Doubt? shows that Rabbi Gershon Henoch Leiner of Radzin considered God to be revealed as doubt. Thus, according to this profound and important nineteenth-century Hasidic leader, doubt is an essential aspect of the human condition, and especially of religious life. His position is shown to be remarkably bold and unique compared to kabbalistic writing, and especially to the Hasidic worlds to which he belonged. At the same time, the roots of his thought are located in earlier discussions of doubt as one of the highest parts of the divine world. Doubt about, in, and of God is part of the Hasidic contribution to modernity.

Vera Lex Historiae?

Catalin Taranu
Vera Lex Historiae Book PDF

Author : Catalin Taranu
Publisher : punctum books
Page : 371 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2022-08-18
Category : History
ISBN : 9781685710309

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Vera Lex Historiae? by Catalin Taranu Pdf

Writing circa 731 CE, Bede professes in the introduction to his Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum that he will write his account of the past of the English following only vera lex historiae. Whether explicitly or (most often) implicitly, historians narrate the past according to a conception of what constitutes historical truth that emerges in the use of narrative strategies, of certain formulae or textual forms, in establishing one's own ideological authority or that of one's informants, in faithfulness to a cultural, narrative, or poetic tradition. If we extend the scope of what we understand by history (especially in a pre-modern setting) to include not just the writings of historians legitimated by their belonging to the Latinate matrix of christianized classical history writing, but also collective narratives, practices, rituals, oral poetry, liturgy, artistic representations, and acts of identity - all re-enacting the past as, or as representation of, the present, we find a plethora of modes of constructions of historical truth, narrative authority, and reliability. Vera Lex Historiae? will be constituted by contributions that reveal the variety of evental strategies by which historical truth was constructed in late antiquity and the earlier Middle Ages, and the range of procedures by which such narratives were established first as being historical and then as "true" histories. This is not only a matter of narrative strategies, but also habitus, ways of living and acting in the world that feed on and back into the commemoration and re-enactment of the past by communities and by individuals. In doing this, we hope to recover something of the plurality of modes of preserving and reenacting the past available in late antiquity and the earlier middle ages which we pass by because of preconceived notions of what constitutes history writing.

Maimonides Review of Philosophy and Religion Volume 1, 2022

Anonim
Maimonides Review of Philosophy and Religion Volume 1 2022 Book PDF

Author : Anonim
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 287 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2022-06-20
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9789004506626

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Maimonides Review of Philosophy and Religion Volume 1, 2022 by Anonim Pdf

The Maimonides Review of Philosophy and Religion is an annual collection of double-blind peer-reviewed articles that seeks to provide a broad international arena for an intellectual exchange of ideas between the disciplines of philosophy, theology, religion, cultural history, and literature and to showcase their multifarious junctures within the framework of Jewish studies. Contributions to the Review place special thematic emphasis on scepticism within Jewish thought and its links to other religious traditions and secular worldviews. The Review is interested in the tension at the heart of matters of reason and faith, rationalism and mysticism, theory and practice, narrativity and normativity, doubt and dogma. This volume features contributions by Reimund Leicht, Gitit Holzman, Jonathan Garb, Anna Lissa, Gianni Paganini, Adi Louria Hayon, Mark Marion Gondelman, and Jürgen Sarnowsky. This volume features contributions by Jeremy Phillip Brown, Libera Pisano, Jeffrey G. Amshalem, Maria Vittoria Comacchi, Jonatan Meir, Rebecca Kneller-Rowe, Isaac Slater, Michela Torbidoni, Guido Bartolucci, and Tamir Karkason.

Medieval Disability Sourcebook

Cameron Hunt McNabb
Medieval Disability Sourcebook Book PDF

Author : Cameron Hunt McNabb
Publisher : punctum books
Page : 501 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2020
Category : History
ISBN : 9781950192731

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Medieval Disability Sourcebook by Cameron Hunt McNabb Pdf

The field of disability studies significantly contributes to contemporary discussions of the marginalization of and social justice for individuals with disabilities. However, what of disability in the past? The Medieval Disability Sourcebook: Western Europe explores what medieval texts have to say about disability, both in their own time and for the present. This interdisciplinary volume on medieval Europe combines historical records, medical texts, and religious accounts of saints' lives and miracles, as well as poetry, prose, drama, and manuscript images to demonstrate the varied and complicated attitudes medieval societies had about disability. Far from recording any monolithic understanding of disability in the Middle Ages, these contributions present a striking range of voices-to, from, and about those with disabilities-and such diversity only confirms how disability permeated (and permeates) every aspect of life. The Medieval Disability Sourcebook is designed for use inside the undergraduate or graduate classroom or by scholars interested in learning more about medieval Europe as it intersects with the field of disability studies. Most texts are presented in modern English, though some are preserved in Middle English and many are given in side-by-side translations for greater study. Each entry is prefaced with an academic introduction to disability within the text as well as a bibliography for further study. This sourcebook is the first in a proposed series focusing on disability in a wide range of premodern cultures, histories, and geographies.

The Prester John Legend between East and West During the Crusades

Ahmed M. A. Sheir
The Prester John Legend between East and West During the Crusades Book PDF

Author : Ahmed M. A. Sheir
Publisher : Trivent Publishing
Page : 369 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2022-06-22
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9786156405296

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The Prester John Legend between East and West During the Crusades by Ahmed M. A. Sheir Pdf

This book considers the history of the Prester John legend and its impact on the Crusades, investigating its entangled mythical history between East and West during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The present study thus responds to the still pressing need for a comprehensive historical investigation of the twelfth and thirteenth crusading history of the legend and its impact on the Muslim-Crusader encounters, examining various Latin, Arabic, Syriac, and Coptic accounts. It further reflects on new eastern aspects of the legend, presenting a new Arab scholarly view. This book first charts a pre-history of the legend in the late ancient Christian prophecy of the Last Emperor down to the emergence of the legend in the mid-twelfth century. Second, the work presents a historical discussion of the legend and its association with actual occurrences in the Far East and the Levant, analysing the legend history under the crusading crisis and the imperial papal schism in Europe. Meanwhile, the work considers the vague Prester John Letter addressed to Manuel I Komnenus, Byzantine Emperor, and its elaborate conception of a mythical eastern kingdom, revealing imaginative parallels on the wondrous East and legendary Eastern Christian kings in Arabic Muslim and Christian accounts of the Muslim geographer and cartographer al-Idrisi, the Coptic Abu al-Makarim and the Syriac Ibn al-'Ibri (Bar Hebraeus), among others. Moreover, the book examines how the legend impacted war and peace processes between the Ayyubids and the Crusaders during the Fifth Crusade against Egypt (1217-1221), revealing how it was mingled with Arabic and Eastern Christian prophecies at the time. The study concludes by investigating the perception of Prester John by the papal and European envoys to the Mongols in the thirteenth century, revealing how the legend was instrumentalised (and even weaponised) to establish a Latin-Mongol crusade through a parallel exploration of relevant Latin, Arabic and Syriac sources.

The Mineral and the Visual

Brigitte Buettner
The Mineral and the Visual Book PDF

Author : Brigitte Buettner
Publisher : Penn State Press
Page : 271 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2022-06-29
Category : Art
ISBN : 9780271093697

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The Mineral and the Visual by Brigitte Buettner Pdf

Opulent jeweled objects ranked among the most highly valued works of art in the European Middle Ages. At the same time, precious stones prompted sophisticated reflections on the power of nature and the experience of mineralized beings. Beyond a visual regime that put a premium on brilliant materiality, how can we account for the ubiquity of gems in medieval thought? In The Mineral and the Visual, art historian Brigitte Buettner examines the social roles, cultural meanings, and active agency of precious stones in secular medieval art. Exploring the layered roles played by gems in aesthetic, ideological, intellectual, and economic practices, Buettner focuses on three significant categories of art: the jeweled crown, the pictorialized lapidary, and the illustrated travel account. The global gem trade brought coveted jewels from the Indies to goldsmiths’ workshops in Paris, fashionable bodies in London, and the crowns of kings across Europe, and Buettner shows that Europe’s literal and metaphorical enrichment was predicated on the importation of gems and ideas from Byzantium, the Islamic world, Persia, and India. Original, transhistorical, and cross-disciplinary, The Mineral and the Visual engages important methodological questions about the work of culture in its material dimension. It will be especially useful to scholars and students interested in medieval art history, material culture, and medieval history.

Disenchantment, Skepticism, and the Early Modern Novel in Spain and France

Ann T. Delehanty
Disenchantment Skepticism and the Early Modern Novel in Spain and France Book PDF

Author : Ann T. Delehanty
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 193 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2022-12-16
Category : History
ISBN : 9781000825268

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Disenchantment, Skepticism, and the Early Modern Novel in Spain and France by Ann T. Delehanty Pdf

This volume examines five early modern novels from the seventeenth century in Spain and France as examples of literature as a form of skeptical inquiry: Cervantes’s Don Quijote, Zayas’s Desengaños amorosos, Scarron’s Roman comique, Cyrano de Bergerac’s L’Autre Monde, and Mme. de Lafayette’s Zayde. These early modern novels encourage readers to take a critical stance toward accepted beliefs, through content that stages multiple encounters with the shockingly unfamiliar as well as through experiments in literary form, especially the interpolated story. At its broadest reach, this study asserts the fundamental value of literature as a means of encouraging discernment, recognizing the illusory, and honing critical acuity. In terms of the particularity of the historical moment, the volume also identifies the early modern novel as uniquely able to represent the conflicting value spheres of early modernity because of its ability to present multiple voices and its fascination with conflicting vantage points. Due to its interdisciplinary nature, Disenchantment, Skepticism, and the Early Modern Novel in Spain and France appeals to literary scholars and intellectual historians of the early modern period in Europe, as well as to advanced undergraduates and postgraduates studying the early novel, intellectual history, and philosophy of literature.

The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe

Valerie Irene Jane Flint
The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe Book PDF

Author : Valerie Irene Jane Flint
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 466 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2020-03-31
Category : History
ISBN : 9780691210025

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The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe by Valerie Irene Jane Flint Pdf

"There are forces better recognized as belonging to human society than repressed or left to waste away or growl about upon its fringes." So writes Valerie Flint in this powerful work on magic in early medieval Europe. Flint shows how many of the more discerning leaders of the early medieval Church decided to promote non-Christian practices originally condemned as magical--rather than repressing them or leaving them to waste away or "growl." These wise leaders actively and enthusiastically incorporated specific kinds of "magic" into the dominant culture not only to appease the contemporary non-Christian opposition but also to enhance Christianity itself.

Metamorphosis and Identity

Caroline Walker Bynum
Metamorphosis and Identity Book PDF

Author : Caroline Walker Bynum
Publisher : Mit Press
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2005
Category : History
ISBN : 1890951234

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Metamorphosis and Identity by Caroline Walker Bynum Pdf

An exploration of the roles of metamorphosis and hybridity in the establishment of personal identity, with particular emphasis on the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The four studies in this book center on the Western obsession with the nature of personal identity. Focusing on the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but with an eye toward antiquity and the present, Caroline Walker Bynum explores the themes of metamorphosis and hybridity in genres ranging from poetry, folktales, and miracle collections to scholastic theology, devotional treatises, and works of natural philosophy. She argues that the obsession with boundary-crossing and otherness was an effort to delineate nature's regularities and to establish a strong sense of personal identity, extending even beyond the grave. She examines historical figures such as Marie de France, Gerald of Wales, Bernard Clairvaux, Thomas Aquinas, and Dante, as well as modern fabulists such as Angela Carter, as examples of solutions to the perennial question of how the individual can both change and remain constant. Addressing the fundamental question for historians--that of change--Bynum also explores the nature of history writing itself.

Cistercian Stories for Nuns and Monks

Martha G. Newman
Cistercian Stories for Nuns and Monks Book PDF

Author : Martha G. Newman
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 313 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2020-10-30
Category : History
ISBN : 9780812297584

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Cistercian Stories for Nuns and Monks by Martha G. Newman Pdf

Around the year 1200, the Cistercian Engelhard of Langheim dedicated a collection of monastic stories to a community of religious women. Martha G. Newman explores how this largely unedited collection of tales about Cistercian monks illuminates the religiosity of Cistercian nuns. As did other Cistercian storytellers, Engelhard recorded the miracles and visions of the order's illustrious figures, but he wrote from Franconia, in modern Germany, rather than the Cistercian heartland. His extant texts reflect his interactions with non-Cistercian monasteries and with Langheim's patrons rather than celebrating Bernard of Clairvaux. Engelhard was conservative, interested in maintaining traditional Cistercian patterns of thought. Nonetheless, by offering to women a collection of narratives that explore the oral qualities of texts, the nature of sight, and the efficacy of sacraments, Engelhard articulated a distinctive response to the social and intellectual changes of his period. In analyzing Engelhard's stories, Newman uncovers an understudied monastic culture that resisted the growing emphasis on the priestly administration of the sacraments and the hardening of gender distinctions. Engelhard assumed that monks and nuns shared similar interests and concerns, and he addressed his audiences as if they occupied a space neither fully sacerdotal nor completely lay, neither scholastic nor unlearned, and neither solely male nor only female. His exemplary narratives depict the sacramental value of everyday objects and behaviors whose efficacy relied more on individual spiritual formation than on sacerdotal action. By encouraging nuns and monks to imagine connections between heaven and earth, Engelhard taught faith as a learned disposition. Newman's study demonstrates that scholastic questions about signs, sacraments, and sight emerged in a narrative form within late twelfth-century monastic communities.