The Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Culture
- ISBN-10
- 0754601153
- ISBN-13
- 9780754601159
- Category
- Literary Criticism / Ancient & Classical
- Pages
- 253
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2000
- Publisher
- Ashgate
- Authors
- Darryll Grantley, Nina Taunton
Description
Taking as its chronological starting-point the female body of late medieval devotional literature, the volume moves on to a consideration of the representation of gendered bodies in later literature. It then proceeds to examine sixteenth-century occupational orderings of the (male) body in education, the civil service and the army, and involves explorations into a variety of rituals for the purification, ordering and disciplining of the flesh. It includes enquiries into the miraculous royal body, demon bodies, the 'virtual' body of satire, and ends the late seventeenth century with dramatic representations of the diseased body, and the grotesque bodies of travellers' tales as signifiers of racial difference. It pushes forward post-modern notions of the body as a site for competing discourses. It provides new dimensions to fantasies, rituals and regulations in narratives ('fictions') of the body as identifications of forms of knowledge unique to the early modern period. Each of the essays sheds new light on how these late medieval and early modern narratives function to produce specialized and discrete languages of the body that cannot be understood simply in terms, say, of religion, philosophy or physiology, but produce their own discrete forms of knowledge. Thus the essays materially contribute to an understanding of the relationship between the body and spatial knowledge by giving new bearings on epistemologies built upon pre-modern perceptions about bodily spaces and boundaries. They address these issues by analysing forms of knowledge constructed through regulations of the body, fantasies about extensions to the body and creations of bodily, psychic, intellectual and spiritual space. The essays pose important questions about how these epistemologies offer different investments of knowledge into structures of power. What constitutes these knowledges? What are the politics of corporeal spaces? In what forms of knowledge about spatial and bodily perceptions and practices are these early modern narratives embedded? What ideologies shape and contain them? The collection deliberately incorporates a period range which encompasses considerable cultural and ideological shifts that impact upon perceptions of the body. The choice of essays in the volume recognizes both continuities and discontinuities between perceptions of the body in the medieval and early modern periods.
Get the book
Other editions
Similar books
-
Handbook of Classical Mythology
By William F. HansenPresents classic stories of the Greeks and Romans, along with geographical and historical background information.
-
Sophocles: Antigone
By Sophocles, Sir Richard C. JebbThis is one of the seven plays of Sophocles in the full editions by R.C. Jebb, all of which will be reissued under the BCP imprint.
-
Ancient and Medieval Theatre: A Historiographical Handbook
By Ronald W. VinceI owe a debt of gratitude as well to my colleagues Laurel Braswell , Douglas Duncan , Antony Hammond , and Richard Morton , who read the work in its earlier stages and offered valuable comment ; to James Brasch , Linda Hutcheon ...
-
图解红楼梦
By （清）曹雪芹著, （清）孙温绘, 图解经典编辑部编国内第一本让你完全读懂红楼梦的书籍，从“死都读不下去”到掩卷深思 本书将用大量人物形象图、人物关系图、活动路线图、经典情节再现以及谜底追踪等图解形式，全方位展示 ...
-
Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800
By James E. PersonCLC 20 See also CA 81-84 Sterne , Laurence 1713-1768 LC 2 ; DA ; WLC See also CDBLB 1660-1789 ; DLB 39 Sternheim , ( William Adolf ) Carl 1878-1942 . TCLC 8 See also CA 105 ; DLB 56 , 118 Stevens , Mark 1951 .
-
Festivals and Plays in Late Medieval Britain
By Clifford Davidson128 See John Walton Tyrer , Historical Survey of Holy Week : Its Services and Ceremonial , Alcuin Club Collections 29 ( London : Oxford University Press , 1932 ) , esp . 58 ; and see also this occasion was important for other reasons ...
-
The Unity of the Odyssey
By George DimockAccording to George E. Dimock, what gives the "Odyssey" its unity is Homer's overarching theme of the meaning of pain and suffering in human life.
-
Αἶνοι, Λόγοι, Μῦθοι: Fables in Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic Greek Literature. With a Study of the Theory and Terminology of...
By Gert-Jan van DijkThe first intertextual study of all (allusions to) fables occuring in Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic Greek literature, examining both modern and ancient fable theory as well as Greaco-Roman terminology of the genre.
-
杨雨讲诗词故事.情谊卷
By 杨雨“杨雨讲诗词故事”系列图书由《百家讲坛》主讲人，《中国成语大会》《快乐汉语》《见字如面》《中华好诗词》等节目点评专家，中南大学古代文学专业杨雨教授历时三年倾心创 ...
-
杨雨讲诗词故事.自然卷
By 杨雨“杨雨讲诗词故事”系列图书由《百家讲坛》主讲人，《中国成语大会》《快乐汉语》《见字如面》《中华好诗词》等节目点评专家，中南大学古代文学专业杨雨教授历时三年倾心创 ...