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Books > History > World history > 500 to 1500
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The Medieval Warrior Aristocracy - Gifts, Violence, Performance, and the Sacred (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R2,230
Discovery Miles 22 300
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The Medieval Warrior Aristocracy - Gifts, Violence, Performance, and the Sacred (Hardcover)
Series: Gallica
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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A major reconsideration of the relationship between warrior
aristocrats, epics, and heroes in medieval culture. The process of
identity formation during the central Middle Ages (10th-12th
centuries) among the warrior aristocracy was fundamentally centered
on the paired practices of gift giving and violent taking,
inextricably linked elements of the same basic symbolic economy.
These performative practices cannot be understood without reference
to a concept of the sacred, which anchored and governed the
performances, providing the goal and rationale of social and
military action. After focussing on anthropological theory, social
history, and chronicles, the author turns to the "literary" persona
of the hero as seen in the epic. He argues that the hero was
specifically a narrative touchstone used for reflection on the
nature and limits of aggressive identity formation among the
medieval warrior elite; the hero can be seen, from a theoretical
perspective, as a "supplement" to his own society, who both
perfectly incarnated its values but also, in attaining full
integrity, short-circuited the very mechanisms of identity
formation and reciprocity which undergirded the society. The book
shows that the relationship between warriors, heroes, and their
opponents (especially Saracens) must be understood as a complex,
tri-partite structure - not a simple binary opposition - in which
the identity of each constituent depends on the other two. ANDREW
COWELL isAssociate Professor of the Department of French and
Italian, and the Department of Linguistics, at the University of
Colorado.
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