265 books match the query 'To 1500' and 11 start with f

cover of Fashioning Change: The Trope of Clothing in High- and Late-Medieval England

Fashioning Change

The Trope of Clothing in High- and Late-Medieval England

Andrea Denny-Brown

The Ohio State University Press, 2012

Medieval European culture was obsessed with clothing. In Fashioning Change: The Trope of Clothing in High-and Late-Medieval England, Andrea Denny-Brown explores the central impact of clothing in medieval ideas about impermanence and the ethical stakes of human transience. Studies of dress frequently contend with a prevailing cultural belief that bodily adornment speaks to interests that are frivolous, superficial, and cursory. Taking up the vexed topic of clothing’s inherent changeability, Denny-Brown uncovers an important new genealogy of clothing as a representational device, one imbued with a surprising philosophical pedigree and a long history of analytical weightiness.
Considering writers as diverse as Boethius, Alain de Lille, William Durand, Chaucer, and Lydgate, among others, Denny-Brown tracks the development of a literary and cultural trope that begins in the sixth century and finds its highest expression in the vernacular poetry of fifteenth-century England. Among the topics covered are Boethian discourses on the care of the self, the changing garments of Lady Fortune, novelty in ecclesiastical fashions, the sartorial legacy of Chaucer’s Griselda, and the emergence of the English gallant. These literary treatments of vestimentary variation—which develop an aesthetics of change itself—enhance our understanding of clothing as a phenomenological and philosophical category in medieval Europe and illustrate the centrality of the Middle Ages to theories of aesthetics, of materiality, and of cultural change.
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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 Food Storage in Michigan's Late Woodland: The Work of Indigenous Women

Food Storage in Michigan's Late Woodland

The Work of Indigenous Women

Kathryn M. Frederick

University of Alabama Press, 2026

Incorporates experimental archaeology to understand the food-caching strategies led by Indigenous women in Late Woodland Michigan.

This experimental archaeology book centers on the decision of Indigenous women in Michigan’s Late Woodland to store food in cache pits for later use, to ensure a stable food supply. These food storage techniques were efforts to increase communal chances of survival in direct responses to sociopolitical changes. Kathryn M. Frederick highlights the importance of food storage in these communities and the decision-making and behaviors behind it.

To discover why food storage became a popular practice at that period, Frederick considered the efficacy of subterranean food storage and constructed experiments to understand the timing and use of cache pits and to test their reliability and efficiency. She also compiled ethnographic data on location, environmental conditions, movement strategies, and types of foodstuffs stored for dozens of hunter-gatherer groups. Two distinct patterns of food storage emerged: “reliant” and “redundant.” Frederick argues that the Indigenous women utilized a system of reliant storage during times of abundance but could switch to a redundant system as the socioeconomic climate shifted. This book will interest a wide swath of archaeologists and others interested in Indigenous foodways and women’s key roles.

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cover of Foodways and Daily Life in Medieval Anatolia: A New Social History

Foodways and Daily Life in Medieval Anatolia

A New Social History

By Nicolas Trépanier

University of Texas Press, 2014

Byzantine rule over Anatolia ended in the eleventh century, leaving the population and its Turkish rulers to build social and economic institutions throughout the region. The emerging Anatolian society comprised a highly heterogeneous population of Christians and Muslims whose literati produced legal documents in Arabic, literary texts in Persian, and some of the earliest written works in the Turkish language. Yet the cultural landscape that emerged as a result has received very little attention—until now.

Investigating daily life in Anatolia during the fourteenth century, Foodways and Daily Life in Medieval Anatolia draws on a creative array of sources, including hagiographies, archaeological evidence, Sufi poetry, and endowment deeds, to present an accessible portrait of a severely under-documented period. Grounded in the many ways food enters the human experience, Nicolas Trépanier’s comprehensive study delves into the Anatolian preparation of meals and the social interactions that mealtime entails—from a villager’s family supper to an elaborately arranged banquet—as well as the production activities of peasants and gardeners; the marketplace exchanges of food between commoners, merchants, and political rulers; and the religious landscape that unfolded around food-related beliefs and practices. Brimming with enlightening details on such diverse topics as agriculture, nomadism, pastoralism, medicine, hospitality, and festival rituals, Foodways and Daily Life in Medieval Anatolia presents a new understanding of communities that lived at a key juncture of world history.

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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 Form and Reform: Reading across the Fifteenth Century

Form and Reform

Reading across the Fifteenth Century

Shannon Gayk and Kathleen Tonry

The Ohio State University Press, 2011

Form and Reform: Reading across the Fifteenth Century challenges the idea of any definitive late medieval moment and explores instead the provocatively diverse, notably untidy, and very rich literary culture of the age. These essays from leading medievalists, edited by Shannon Gayk and Kathleen Tonry, both celebrate and complicate the reemergence of the fifteenth century in literary studies. Moreover, this is the first collection to concentrate on the period between 1450 and 1500—the crucial five decades, this volume argues, that must be understood to comprehend the entire century’s engagement with literary form in shifting historical contexts.

The three parts of the collection read the categories of form and reform in light of both aesthetic and historical contexts, taking up themes of prose and prosody, generic experimentation, and shifts in literary production. The first section considers how attention to material texts might revise our understanding of form; the second revisits devotional writing within and beyond the context of reform; and the final section plays out different perspectives on the work of John Skelton that each challenge and test notions of the fifteenth century in literary history.
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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 From Monastery to Hospital: Christian Monasticism and the Transformation of Health Care in Late Antiquity

From Monastery to Hospital

Christian Monasticism and the Transformation of Health Care in Late Antiquity

Andrew T. Crislip

University of Michigan Press, 2005

From Monastery to Hospital traces the origin of the late Roman hospital to the earliest groups of Christian monastics. Often characterized as holy men and miracle-workers who transformed late antique spirituality, monks held an equally significant impact on the development of medicine in Late Antiquity. Andrew Crislip illuminates the innovative approaches to health care within the earliest monasteries that provided the model for the greatest medical achievement of Late Antiquity: the hospital.

From Monastery to Hospital draws on some of the most vibrant areas of scholarship of the ancient world, including asceticism, the study of the body, history of the family, and the history of medicine. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of early Christianity, Roman History, the history of medicine, and Catholic, Coptic, and Eastern Orthodox history and theology. It will also be of interest to the broader field of history of Christianity, especially with its connections to charitable traditions in the church through the modern period.

Andrew Crislip is Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Hawaii.

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cover of From Page to Performance: Essays in Early English Drama

From Page to Performance

Essays in Early English Drama

John A. Alford

Michigan State University Press, 1995

This book is a collection of 22 essays by scholars in the field of Medieval Drama, mostly relating to performance both past and present. Alford wrote one essay in the book.
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cover of From Topic to Tale: Logic and Narrativity in the Middle Ages

From Topic to Tale

Logic and Narrativity in the Middle Ages

Eugene VanceForeword by Wlad Godzich

University of Minnesota Press, 1987

From Topic to Tale was first published in 1987. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

The transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance has been discussed since the 1940s as a shift from a Latinate culture to one based on a vernacular language, and, since the 1960s, as a shift from orality to literacy. From Topic to Tale focuses on this multifaceted transition, but it poses the problem in different terms: it shows how a rhetorical tradition was transformed into a textual one, and ends ultimately in a discussion of the relationship between discourse and society.

The rise of French vernacular literacy in the twelfth century coincided with the emergence of logic as a powerful instrument of the human mind. With logic come a new concern for narrative coherence and form, a concern exemplified by the work of Chretien de Troyes. Many brilliant poetic achievements crystallized in the narrative art of Chretien, establishing an enduring tradition of literary technique for all of Europe. Eugene Vance explores the intellectual context of Chretien's vernacular literacy, and in particular, the interaction between the three "arts of language" (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) compromising the trivium. Until Vance, few critics have studied the contribution of logic to Chretiens poetics, nor have they assessed the ethical bond between rationalism and the new heroic code of romance.

Vance takes Chretien de Troyes' great romance, Yvain ou le chevalier au lion,as the centerpiece of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance. It is also central to his own thesis, which shows how Chretien forged a bold new vision of humans as social beings situated between beasts and angels and promulgated the symbolic powers of language, money, and heraldic art to regulate the effects of human desire. Vance's reading of the Yvain contributes not only to the intellectual history of the Middle Ages, but also to the continuing dialogue between contemporary critical theory and medieval culture.

Eugene Vance is professor of French and comparative literature at Emory University and principal editor of a University of Nebraska series, Regents Studies in Medieval Culture. Wlad Godzich is director of the Center for Humanistic Studies at the University of Minnesota and co-editor of the series Theory and History of Literature.

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