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Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not
used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad
quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are
images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to
keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the
original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain
imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made
available for future generations to enjoy.
Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not
used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad
quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are
images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to
keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the
original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain
imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made
available for future generations to enjoy.
Literature serves many purposes, and one of them certainly proves
to be to convey messages, wisdom, and instruction, and this across
languages, religions, and cultures. Beyond that, as the
contributors to this volume underscore, people have always
endeavored to reach out to their community members, that is, to
build community, to learn from each other, and to teach. Hence,
this volume explores the meaning of communication, translation, and
community building based on the medium of language. While all these
aspects have already been discussed in many different venues, the
contributors endeavor to explore a host of heretofore less
considered historical, religious, literary, political, and
linguistic sources. While the dominant focus tends to rest on
conflicts, hostility, and animosity in the pre-modern age, here the
emphasis rests on communication with its myriad of challenges and
potentials for establishing a community. As the various studies
illustrate, a close reading of communicative issues opens profound
perspectives regarding human relationships and hence the social
context. This understanding invites intensive collaboration between
medical historians, literary scholars, translation experts, and
specialists on religious conflicts and discourses. We also learn
how much language carries tremendous cultural and social meaning
and determines in a most sensitive manner the interactions among
people in a communicative and community-based fashion.
The notions of other peoples, cultures, and natural conditions have
always been determined by the epistemology of imagination and
fantasy, providing much freedom and creativity, and yet have also
created much fear, anxiety, and horror. In this regard, the
pre-modern world demonstrates striking parallels with our own
insofar as the projections of alterity might be different by
degrees, but they are fundamentally the same by content. Dreams,
illusions, projections, concepts, hopes, utopias/dystopias,
desires, and emotional attachments are as specific and impactful as
the physical environment. This volume thus sheds important light on
the various lenses used by people in the Middle Ages and the early
modern age as to how they came to terms with their perceptions,
images, and notions. Previous scholarship focused heavily on the
history of mentality and history of emotions, whereas here the
history of pre-modern imagination, and fantasy assumes center
position. Imaginary things are taken seriously because medieval and
early modern writers and artists clearly reveal their great
significance in their works and their daily lives. This approach
facilitates a new deep-structure analysis of pre-modern culture.
Traditionally sight has been the only sense with a ticket to enter
the museum. The same is true of histories of art, in which artworks
are often presented as purely visual objects. In The Museum of the
Senses Constance Classen offers a new way of approaching the
history of art through the senses, revealing how people used to
handle, smell and even taste collection pieces. Topics range from
the tactile power of relics to the sensuous allure of cabinets of
curiosities, and from the feel of a Rembrandt to the scent of
Monet's garden. The book concludes with a discussion of how
contemporary museums are stimulating the senses through interactive
and multimedia displays. Classen, a leading authority on the
cultural history of the senses, has produced a fascinating study of
sensual and emotional responses to artefacts from the middle ages
to the present. The Museum of the Senses is an important read for
anyone interested in the history of art as well as for students and
researchers in cultural studies and museum studies.
Jan Huizinga and Roger Caillois have already taught us to realize
how important games and play have been for pre-modern civilization.
Recent research has begun to acknowledge the fundamental importance
of these aspects in cultural, religious, philosophical, and
literary terms. This volume expands on the traditional approach
still very much focused on the materiality of game (toys, cards,
dice, falcons, dolls, etc.) and acknowledges that game constituted
also a form of coming to terms with human existence in an unstable
and volatile world determined by universal randomness and fortune.
Whether considering blessings or horse fighting, falconry or card
games, playing with dice or dolls, we can gain a much deeper
understanding of medieval and early modern society when we consider
how people pursued pleasure and how they structured their leisure
time. The contributions examine a wide gamut of approaches to
pleasure, considering health issues, eroticism, tournaments,
playing music, reading and listening, drinking alcohol, gambling
and throwing dice. This large issue was also relevant, of course,
in non-Christian societies, and constitutes a critical concern both
for the past and the present because we are all homines ludentes.
This volume continues the critical exploration of fundamental
issues in the medieval and early modern world, here concerning
mental health, spirituality, melancholy, mystical visions,
medicine, and well-being. The contributors, who originally had
presented their research at a symposium at The University of
Arizona in May 2013, explore a wide range of approaches and
materials pertinent to these issues, taking us from the early
Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, capping the volume with some
reflections on the relevance of religion today. Lapidary sciences
matter here as much as medical-psychological research, combined
with literary and art-historical approaches. The premodern
understanding of mental health is not taken as a miraculous panacea
for modern problems, but the contributors suggest that medieval and
early modern writers, scientists, and artists commanded a
considerable amount of arcane, sometimes curious and speculative,
knowledge that promises to be of value and relevance even for us
today, once again. Modern palliative medicine finds, for instance,
intriguing parallels in medieval word magic, and the mystical
perspectives encapsulated highly productive alternative perceptions
of the macrocosm and microcosm that promise to be insightful and
important also for the post-modern world.
Although it is fashionable among modernists to claim that globalism
emerged only since ca. 1800, the opposite can well be documented
through careful comparative and transdisciplinary studies, as this
volume demonstrates, offering a wide range of innovative
perspectives on often neglected literary, philosophical,
historical, or medical documents. Texts, images, ideas, knowledge,
and objects migrated throughout the world already in the pre-modern
world, even if the quantitative level compared to the modern world
might have been different. In fact, by means of translations and
trade, for instance, global connections were established and
maintained over the centuries. Archetypal motifs developed in many
literatures indicate how much pre-modern people actually shared.
But we also discover hard-core facts of global economic exchange,
import of exotic medicine, and, on another level, intensive
intellectual debates on religious issues. Literary evidence serves
best to expose the extent to which contacts with people in foreign
countries were imaginable, often desirable, and at times feared, of
course. The pre-modern world was much more on the move and reached
out to distant lands out of curiosity, economic interests, and
political and military concerns. Diplomats crisscrossed the
continents, and artists, poets, and craftsmen traveled widely. We
can identify, for instance, both the Vikings and the Arabs as
global players long before the rise of modern globalism, so this
volume promises to rewrite many of our traditional notions about
pre-modern worldviews, economic conditions, and the literary
sharing on a global level, as perhaps best expressed by the genre
of the fable.
Although it seems that erotic love generally was the prevailing
topic in the medieval world and the Early Modern Age, parallel to
this the Ciceronian ideal of friendship also dominated the public
discourse, as this collection of essays demonstrates. Following an
extensive introduction, the individual contributions explore the
functions and the character of friendship from Late Antiquity
(Augustine) to the 17th century. They show the spectrum of variety
in which this topic appeared? not only in literature, but also in
politics and even in painting.
This new volume explores the surprisingly intense and complex
relationships between East and West during the Middle Ages and the
early modern world, combining a large number of critical studies
representing such diverse fields as literary (German, French,
Italian, English, Spanish, and Arabic) and other subdisciplines of
history, religion, anthropology, and linguistics. The differences
between Islam and Christianity erected strong barriers separating
two global cultures, but, as this volume indicates, despite many
attempts to 'Other' the opposing side, the premodern world
experienced an astonishing degree of contacts, meetings, exchanges,
and influences. Scientists, travelers, authors, medical
researchers, chroniclers, diplomats, and merchants criss-crossed
the East and the West, or studied the sources produced by the other
culture for many different reasons. As much as the theoretical
concept of 'Orientalism' has been useful in sensitizing us to the
fundamental tensions and conflicts separating both worlds at least
since the eighteenth century, the premodern world did not quite yet
operate in such an ideological framework. Even though the Crusades
had violently pitted Christians against Muslims, there were
countless contacts and a palpitable curiosity on both sides both
before, during, and after those religious warfares.
A follow-up publication to the Handbook of Medieval Studies, this
new reference work turns to a different focus: medieval culture.
Medieval research has grown tremendously in depth and breadth over
the last decades. Particularly our understanding of medieval
culture, of the basic living conditions, and the specific value
system prevalent at that time has considerably expanded, to a point
where we are in danger of no longer seeing the proverbial forest
for the trees. The present, innovative handbook offers compact
articles on essential topics, ideals, specific knowledge, and
concepts defining the medieval world as comprehensively as
possible. The topics covered in this new handbook pertain to issues
such as love and marriage, belief in God, hell, and the devil,
education, lordship and servitude, Christianity versus Judaism and
Islam, health, medicine, the rural world, the rise of the urban
class, travel, roads and bridges, entertainment, games, and sport
activities, numbers, measuring, the education system, the papacy,
saints, the senses, death, and money.
Although the city as a central entity did not simply disappear with
the Fall of the Roman Empire, the development of urban space at
least since the twelfth century played a major role in the history
of medieval and early modern mentality within a social-economic and
religious framework. Whereas some poets projected urban space as a
new utopia, others simply reflected the new significance of the
urban environment as a stage where their characters operate very
successfully. As today, the premodern city was the locus where
different social groups and classes got together, sometimes
peacefully, sometimes in hostile terms. The historical development
of the relationship between Christians and Jews, for instance, was
deeply determined by the living conditions within a city. By the
late Middle Ages, nobility and bourgeoisie began to intermingle
within the urban space, which set the stage for dramatic and
far-reaching changes in the social and economic make-up of society.
Legal-historical aspects also find as much consideration as
practical questions concerning water supply and sewer systems.
Moreover, the early modern city within the Ottoman and Middle
Eastern world likewise finds consideration. Finally, as some
contributors observe, the urban space provided considerable
opportunities for women to carve out a niche for themselves in
economic terms.
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