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"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit
quietly in a room alone," Blaise Pascal wrote in 1654. But then
there's Walt Whitman, in 1856: "Whoever you are, come forth! Or man
or woman come forth! / You must not stay sleeping and dallying
there in the house." It is truly an ancient debate: Is it better to
be active or contemplative? To do or to think? To make an impact,
or to understand the world more deeply? Aristotle argued for
contemplation as the highest state of human flourishing. But it was
through action that his student Alexander the Great conquered the
known world. Which should we aim at? Centuries later, this argument
underlies a surprising number of the questions we face in
contemporary life. Should students study the humanities, or train
for a job? Should adults work for money or for meaning? And in
tumultuous times, should any of us sit on the sidelines, pondering
great books, or throw ourselves into protests and petition drives?
With Action versus Contemplation, Jennifer Summit and Blakey
Vermeule address the question in a refreshingly unexpected way: by
refusing to take sides. Rather, they argue for a rethinking of the
very opposition. The active and the contemplative can-and should-be
vibrantly alive in each of us, fused rather than sundered. Writing
in a personable, accessible style, Summit and Vermeule guide
readers through the long history of this debate from Plato to
Pixar, drawing compelling connections to the questions and problems
of today. Rather than playing one against the other, they argue, we
can discover how the two can nourish, invigorate, and give meaning
to each other, as they have for the many writers, artists, and
thinkers, past and present, whose examples give the book its rich,
lively texture of interplay and reference. This is not a self-help
book. It won't give you instructions on how to live your life.
Instead, it will do something better: it will remind you of the
richness of a life that embraces action and contemplation, company
and solitude, living in the moment and planning for the future.
Which is better? Readers of this book will discover the answer:
both.
In Jennifer Summit's account, libraries are more than inert
storehouses of written tradition; they are volatile spaces that
actively shape the meanings and uses of books, reading, and the
past. Considering the two-hundred-year period between 1431, which
saw the foundation of Duke Humfrey's famous library, and 1631, when
the great antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton died, "Memory's Library
"revises the history of the modern library by focusing on its
origins in medieval and early modern England. Summit argues that
the medieval sources that survive in English collections are the
product of a Reformation and post-Reformation struggle to redefine
the past by redefining the cultural place, function, and identity
of libraries. By establishing the intellectual dynamism of English
libraries during this crucial period of their development,
"Memory's Library "demonstrates how much current discussions about
the future of libraries can gain by reexamining their past.
Studies of women's roles in the secular literary world, as patrons,
authors, readers, and characters in secular literature. This second
volume of proceedings from the `Women and the Book' conference,
held at St Hilda's College, Oxford in 1993, brings together fifteen
papers dealing with women's experience in the secular literary
world. It covers the whole variety of roles women might take, as
patrons, authors, readers, and characters in secular literature;
encompassed in its range are well-known characters, real and
fictional, such as Christine de Pisan and the Wife of Bath, and the
more obscure but no less fascinating topic of women in Chinese
medieval court poetry. Like its predecessor Women, the Book, and
the Godly(Brewer, 1995), this volume illuminates the world of
medieval women with carefulscholarship and attention to sources,
producing new readings and new materials which shed fresh light on
an increasingly important field of study. Contributors: PATRICIA
SKINNER, PHILIP E. BENNETT, JENNIFER GOODMAN, CHARITY
CANNON-WILLARD, BENJAMIN SEMPLE, ANNE BIRRELL, JEANETTE BEER, MARK
BALFOUR, CAROL HARVEY, HEATHER ARDEN, KAREN JAMBECK, JULIA BOFFEY,
JENNIFER SUMMIT, MARGARITA STOCKER
"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit
quietly in a room alone," Blaise Pascal wrote in 1654. But then
there's Walt Whitman, in 1856: "Whoever you are, come forth! Or man
or woman come forth! / You must not stay sleeping and dallying
there in the house." It is truly an ancient debate: Is it better to
be active or contemplative? To do or to think? To make an impact,
or to understand the world more deeply? Aristotle argued for
contemplation as the highest state of human flourishing. But it was
through action that his student Alexander the Great conquered the
known world. Which should we aim at? Centuries later, this argument
underlies a surprising number of the questions we face in
contemporary life. Should students study the humanities, or train
for a job? Should adults work for money or for meaning? And in
tumultuous times, should any of us sit on the sidelines, pondering
great books, or throw ourselves into protests and petition drives?
With Action vs. Contemplation, Jennifer Summit and Blakey Vermeule
address the question in a refreshingly unexpected way: by refusing
to take sides. Rather, they argue for a rethinking of the very
opposition. The active and the contemplative can--and should--be
vibrantly alive in each of us, fused rather than sundered. Writing
in a personable, accessible style, Summit and Vermeule guide
readers through the long history of this debate from Plato to
Pixar, drawing compelling connections to the questions and problems
of today. Rather than playing one against the other, they argue, we
can discover how the two can nourish, invigorate, and give meaning
to each other, as they have for the many writers, artists, and
thinkers, past and present, whose examples give the book its rich,
lively texture of interplay and reference. Â This is not a
self-help book. It won't give you instructions on how to live your
life. Instead, it will do something better: it will remind you of
the richness of a life that embraces action and contemplation,
company and solitude, living in the moment and planning for the
future. Which is better? Readers of this book will discover the
answer: both.
In Jennifer Summit's account, libraries are more than inert
storehouses of written tradition; they are volatile spaces that
actively shape the meanings and uses of books, reading, and the
past. Considering the two-hundred-year period between 1431, which
saw the foundation of Duke Humfrey's famous library, and 1631, when
the great antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton died, "Memory's Library
"revises the history of the modern library by focusing on its
origins in medieval and early modern England. Summit argues that
the medieval sources that survive in English collections are the
product of a Reformation and post-Reformation struggle to redefine
the past by redefining the cultural place, function, and identity
of libraries. By establishing the intellectual dynamism of English
libraries during this crucial period of their development,
"Memory's Library "demonstrates how much current discussions about
the future of libraries can gain by reexamining their past.
The English literary canon is haunted by the figure of the lost
woman writer. In our own age, she has been a powerful stimulus for
the rediscovery of works written by women. But as Jennifer Summit
argues, "the lost woman writer" also served as an evocative symbol
during the very formation of an English literary tradition from the
fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries.
"Lost Property" traces the representation of women writers from
Margery Kempe and Christine de Pizan to Elizabeth I and Mary Queen
of Scots, exploring how the woman writer became a focal point for
emerging theories of literature and authorship in English precisely
because of her perceived alienation from tradition. Through
original archival research and readings of key literary texts,
Summit writes a new history of the woman writer that reflects the
impact of such developments as the introduction of printing, the
Reformation, and the rise of the English court as a literary
center.
A major rethinking of the place of women writers in the histories
of books, authorship, and canon-formation, "Lost Property"
demonstrates that, rather than being an unimaginable anomaly, the
idea of the woman writer played a key role in the invention of
English literature.
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