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50 books match the query 'Literature, Medieval' and 5 start with f

cover of Fiction And Incarnation: Rhetoric, Theology, and Literature in the Middle Ages

Fiction And Incarnation

Rhetoric, Theology, and Literature in the Middle Ages

Alexandre Leupin

University of Minnesota Press, 2002

A fresh look at the relationship between theology and rhetoric.

Focusing on the Incarnation-the only dogma original to Christianity, in which God becomes man and history-this book offers a wide-ranging and theoretically sophisticated investigation of the relationship between Christian discourse and literature from Roman antiquity to the fourteenth century through a look at texts by Cicero, Quintilian, Martianus Capella, Tertullian, Saint Augustine, Alain of Lille, Guillaume de Machaut, and others.

Alexandre Leupin asks if it is possible to go beyond the dialectics of the Incarnated God and the Devil without harking back to the beautiful but partially obsolete truths of paganism and sophistry. Employing a method inspired by psychoanalysis, Leupin repudiates the sophistry and relativism of postmodern theory while calling into question old commonplaces that have been invalidated by modernity. He does so by attending to the larger and deeper structures hidden within the discourses of theology, rhetoric, literature, and psychoanalysis. The result is an innovative perspective on the Middle Ages, an original and promising view of the problems of Western literature in relation to theology and rhetoric. Alexandre Leupin is Gregorie Professor in French studies at Louisiana State University. He is the author of many books, including, in English translation, Barbarolexis: Medieval Literature and Sexuality (1989).David Laatsch is a Ph.D. candidate in the French department of Louisiana State University.
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cover of Fixers: Agency, Translation, and the Early Global History of Literature

Fixers

Agency, Translation, and the Early Global History of Literature

Zrinka Stahuljak

University of Chicago Press, 2024

A new history of early global literature that treats translators as active agents mediating cultures.
 
In this book, Zrinka Stahuljak challenges scholars in both medieval and translation studies to rethink how ideas and texts circulated in the medieval world. Whereas many view translators as mere conduits of authorial intention, Stahuljak proposes a new perspective rooted in a term from journalism: the fixer. With this language, Stahuljak captures the diverse, active roles medieval translators and interpreters played as mediators of entire cultures—insider informants, local guides, knowledge brokers, art distributors, and political players. Fixers offers nothing less than a new history of literature, art, translation, and social exchange from the perspective not of the author or state but of the fixer.
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cover of Forging Communities: Food and Representation in Medieval and Early Modern Southwestern Europe

Forging Communities

Food and Representation in Medieval and Early Modern Southwestern Europe

Montserrat Piera

University of Arkansas Press, 2018

Forging Communities explores the importance of the cultivation, provision, trade, and exchange of foods and beverages to mankind’s technological advancement, violent conquest, and maritime exploration. The thirteen essays here show how the sharing of food and drink forged social, religious, and community bonds, and how ceremonial feasts as well as domestic daily meals strengthened ties and solidified ethnoreligious identity through the sharing of food customs. The very act of eating and the pleasure derived from it are metaphorically linked to two other sublime activities of the human experience: sexuality and the search for the divine.

This interdisciplinary study of food in medieval and early modern communities connects threads of history conventionally examined separately or in isolation. The intersection of foodstuffs with politics, religion, economics, and culture enhances our understanding of historical developments and cultural continuities through the centuries, giving insight that today, as much as in the past, we are what we eat and what we eat is never devoid of meaning.
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cover of Foundations of Feeling: Theorizing Emotions in Late Medieval Literature

Foundations of Feeling

Theorizing Emotions in Late Medieval Literature

Jessica Rosenfeld

University of Chicago Press, 2026

A fresh reading of medieval literature as deeply concerned with thinking about feelings. 

Are emotions primarily bodily or cognitive? Do “natural” emotions exist? What is the relationship between emotion and gender? In Foundations of Feeling, Jessica Rosenfeld shows how medieval literature informs contemporary ideas about how emotions operate. Ranging widely from love poetry to pastoral and theological writings, to political satire and more, Rosenfeld reveals a wealth of attention to emotions in both scientific and philosophical discourses of the time. By mining Latin, medieval French, and Middle English traditions, she relates medieval concerns to the most central, current debates (and impasses) in the fields of history of emotion and affect theory today, reframing how we think about and define feelings.

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cover of Fragments for a History of a Vanishing Humanism

Fragments for a History of a Vanishing Humanism

Edited by Myra Seaman and Eileen A. Joy

The Ohio State University Press, 2016

Fragments for a History of a Vanishing Humanism brings together scholars working in prehistoric, classical, medieval, and early modern studies who are developing, from longer and slower historical perspectives, critical post/humanisms that explore: 1) the significance (historical, sociocultural, psychic, etc.) of human expression and affectivity; 2) the impact of technology and new sciences on what it means to be a human self; 3) the importance of art and literature in defining and enacting human selves; 4) the importance of history in defining the human; 5) the artistic plasticity of the human; 6) the question of a human collectivity—what is the value, and peril, of “being human” or “being post/human” together?; and finally, 7) the constructive, and destructive, relations (aesthetic, historical, and philosophical) of the human to the nonhuman.
 
This volume, edited by Myra Seaman and Eileen A. Joy, insists on the always provisional and contingent formations of the human, and of various humanisms, over time, while also aiming to demonstrate the different ways these formations emerge (and also disappear) in different times and places, from the most ancient past to the most contemporary present. The essays are offered as “fragments” because the authors do not believe there can ever be a “total history” of either the human or the post/human as they play themselves out in differing historical contexts. At the same time, the volume as a whole argues that defining what “the human” (or “post/human”) is has always been an ongoing, never finished cultural project.
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