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Eastward Bound looks at travel and travelers in the medieval period. An international range of distinguished contributors offer discussions on a wide range of themes, from the experiences of Crusaders on campaign, to the lives of pilgrims, missionaries and traders in the Middle East. It examines their modes of travel, equipment and methods of navigation, and considers their expectations and experiences en route. The contributions also look at the variety of motives--public and private--behind the decision to travel eastwards. Other essays discuss the attitudes of Middle-Eastern rulers to their visitors. In so doing they provide a valuable perspective and insight into the behavior of the Europeans and non-Europeans alike.
These essays challenge what many scholars perceived to be an opposition of "East" and "West" in Polo's writings.
Vernacular writers of late medieval England were engaged in global conversations about orthodoxy and heresy. Entering these conversations with a developing vernacular required lexical innovation. The Language of Heresy in Late Medieval English Literature examines the way in which these writers complemented seemingly straightforward terms, like heretic, with a range of synonyms that complicated the definitions of both those words and orthodoxy itself. This text proposes four specific terms that become collated with heretic in the parlance of medieval English writers of the 14th and 15th centuries: jangler, Jew, Saracen, and witch. These four labels are especially important insofar as they represent the way in which medieval Christianity appropriated and subverted marginalized or vulnerable identities to promote a false image of unassailable authority.
This book offers a comparative study of emotion in Arabic Islamic and English Christian contemplative texts, c. 1110-1250, contributing to the emerging interest in ‘globalization’ in medieval studies. A.S.Lazikani argues for the necessity of placing medieval English devotional texts in a more global context and seeks to modify influential narratives on the ‘history of emotions’ to enable this more wide-ranging critical outlook. Across eight chapters, the book examines the dialogic encounters generated by comparative readings of Muhyddin Ibn ‘Arabi (1165-1240), ‘Umar Ibn al-Fārid (1181-1235), Abu al-Hasan al-Shushtarī (d. 1269), Ancrene Wisse (c. 1225), and the Wooing Group (c. 1225). Investigating the two-fold ‘paradigms of love’ in the figure of Jesus and in the image of the heart, the (dis)embodied language of affect, and the affective semiotics of absence and secrecy, Lazikani demonstrates an interconnection between the religious traditions of early Christianity and Islam.
This authoritative edition of the complete works of Geoffrey Chaucer presents Chaucer's works for a new generation of students, and for a wide range of general readers. It provides all that undergraduates and graduate students will need to understand and appreciate Chaucer in his original Middle English, as well as an extensive scholarly apparatus. A detailed introduction situates Chaucer's works in his life and culture and offers a guide on how to read and enjoy his language and verse forms. The edition contains all of Chaucer's surviving poetry and prose, edited using a coherent editorial practice that is explained to the reader; detailed glosses on each line to aid reading; literary introductions to each text; extensive explanatory notes designed both to help the beginner with the text and to guide the scholar; and textual introductions and notes to every text, providing a detailed rationale and all of the empirical evidence for the editing practice by which the texts have been presented.
The Routledge History of the Senses presents readers with an overview of the field. As well as pointing to directions for the future of the discipline, it illustrates the extent to which the subject offers a considerable space for the exploration of diverse historical topics through the lens of sensory experience. The handbook brings together essays and case studies from some of the leading academics on the history of the senses. Together, they not only chart topics and arguments in existing scholarship but introduce fresh methodologies for future analyses. Specifically, the chapters collectively show that the senses of the historical body often portray the intensity of the invasion of capit...
Drawing on medieval accounts of the earliest European journeys to China, India, Mongolia, and southeast Asia, Before Orientalism explores European attitudes toward Asian eating habits, sexual practices, femininities, and civility, reconstructing a precolonial vision of the East that was often neutral or admiring.
The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Early Modern Authorship draws together leading and emerging scholars of Shakespeare and early modern literature to consider anew how authorship worked in the time in which Shakespeare wrote, and to interrogate the construction of the Shakespeare-as-author figure. Composed of four main sections, it offers fresh analysis of the literary and cultural influences and forces that 'formed' authors in the period; the 'mechanics' of early modern authorship; the 'mediation' of Shakespeare and others' works in performance, manuscript, and print; and the critical and popular reimagining across times of Shakespeare as an author figure. Diving into modern debates about early modern authorship, authority, and identity politics, contributors supply rich new accounts of the wider scene of professional authorship in early modern England, of how Shakespeare's writings contributed to it, and of what made him distinctive within it. Looking beyond Shakespeare, the Handbook seeks to provide a vital testing ground for new research into early modern literature and culture more broadly.
Medieval European literature was once thought to have been isolationist in its nature, but recent scholarship has revealed the ways in which Spanish and Italian authors – including Cervantes and Marco Polo – were influenced by Arabic poetry, music, and philosophy. A Sea of Languages brings together some of the most influential scholars working in Muslim-Christian-Jewish cultural communications today to discuss the convergence of the literary, social, and economic histories of the medieval Mediterranean. This volume takes as a starting point María Rosa Menocal's groundbreaking work The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History, a major catalyst in the reconsideration of prevailing assumptions regarding the insularity of medieval European literature. Reframing ongoing debates within literary studies in dynamic new ways, A Sea of Languages will become a critical resource and reference point for a new generation of scholars and students on the intersection of Arabic and European literature.
Drawing on Arabic, English, French, Irish, Latin and Spanish sources, the essays share a focus on the body's productive capacity - whether expressed through the flesh's materiality, or through its role in performing meaning. The collection is divided into four clusters. 'Foundations' traces the use of physical remnants of the body in the form of relics or memorial monuments that replicate the form of the body as foundational in communal structures; 'Performing the Body' focuses on the ways in which the individual body functions as the medium through which the social body is maintained; 'Bodily Rhetoric' explores the poetic linkage of body and meaning; and 'Material Bodies' engages with the processes of corporeal being, ranging from the energetic flow of humoural liquids to the decay of the flesh. Together, the essays provide new perspectives on the centrality of the medieval body and underscore the vitality of this rich field of study.