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“So infectious is R. Howard Bloch’s passion for his subject
that even those unable to do the traveling required will find in
Paris and Her Cathedrals an inspiring guide to these time-hallowed
masterpieces of medieval culture.” —Colin Jones, author of
Paris and The Great Nation Over the years, R. Howard Bloch has
become renowned for the insider tours of Paris that he gives to
students abroad. Long sought after by travelers and history buffs
for his near-encyclopedic knowledge of French cathedrals, the
eminent French literature scholar finally shares his expertise with
a wider audience. In Paris and Her Cathedrals, six of the most
sublime cathedrals in the penumbra of Paris—Saint-Denis,
Notre-Dame, Chartres, Sainte-Chapelle, Amiens, Reims—are
illumined in magnificent detail as Bloch, taking us from the High
Middle Ages to the devastating fire that set Notre-Dame ablaze in
2019, traces the evolution of each in turn. Written from the
premise that “seeing is enhanced by knowing,” each chapter is
organized along the lines of a walk around and then through the
space of the cathedral, such that the actual or virtual visitor
feels the rich sweep of the church, “the essence of these
architectural wonders” (Antonia Felix). Animating the past with
lush evocations of architectural splendor—from flying buttresses
and jewel-encrusted shrines to hidden burial grounds and secret
chambers—Bloch then contextualizes the cathedrals within the
annals of French history. Here thrilling tales of kingly
intrigue—as in Saint-Chapelle, where the pious King Louis IX
amassed relics, including Christ’s crown of thorns—and
audacious abbots are interspersed with anecdotes about the meeting
of aristocratic and everyday life, culminating in “a rich,
colorful narrative that clearly but expertly explains the history
and symbolism of some of the world’s most magnificent
buildings” (Ross King). To be read in preparation for an
enlightened visit or merely to open a window upon the High Middle
Ages in France, Paris and Her Cathedrals is a “revelation,” an
“indispensable guide” (Garry Wills) to these awe-inspiring
structures. Complete with the author’s own photographs, this
beautifully illustrated volume vitally enhances our understanding
of the history of Paris and its environs.
Eminent French literature professor R. Howard Bloch has become
renowned for his insider tours of Paris, given to college students
abroad. Long sought after for his encyclopaedic knowledge of French
cathedrals, Bloch has at last decided to share his intimate
knowledge with a wider audience. Here, six cathedrals-Saint-Denis,
Chartres, Sainte-Chapelle, Reims, Amiens and Notre-Dame-are
illumined in magnificent detail as Bloch, taking us from the High
Middle Ages to the devastating fire that set Notre-Dame ablaze in
2019, traces the evolution of each in turn. Contextualising the
cathedrals within the annals of French history, Bloch animates the
past with lush evocations of architectural splendour-high-flying
buttresses and jewel-encrusted shrines, hidden burial grounds and
secret chambers-and thrilling tales of kingly intrigue, audacious
architects and the meeting of aristocratic and everyday life.
Complete with the author's own photographs, Paris and Her
Cathedrals vitally enhances our understanding of the history of
Paris and its environs.
The forerunner of our digital age, a French poem about a shipwreck
published in 1897, with its mind-bending possibilities of being
read up and down, backwards and forwards, even sideways, launched
modernism. Stephane Mallarme's "One Toss of the Dice" has for over
a century tantalised everyone from physicists to composers to
graphic artists. R. Howard Bloch decodes the poem still considered
among the most enigmatic ever written. Creating a shimmering
portrait of Belle-epoque Paris with a cast of exotic
characters-Napoleon III, the Lumiere brothers, Auguste Rodin,
Berthe Morisot, even an expatriate American dentist, Bloch
positions Mallarme as the spiritual giant of
late-nineteenth-century France. Featuring a new translation of the
poem by J.D. McClatchy, One Toss of the Dice reveals how a
masterpiece shaped our perceptual world.
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The Fabliaux (Hardcover)
Nathaniel E. Dubin; Introduction by R.Howard Bloch
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R752
Discovery Miles 7 520
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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Composed between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, these
virtually unknown erotic and satiric poems lie at the root of the
Western comic tradition. Passed down by the anticlerical middle
classes of medieval France, The Fabliaux depicts priapic priests,
randy wives, and their cuckolded husbands in tales that are
shocking even by today s standards. Chaucer and Boccaccio borrowed
heavily from these riotous tales, which were the wit of the common
man rebelling against the aristocracy and Church in matters of
food, money, and sex. Containing 69 poems with a parallel Old
French text, The Fabliaux comes to life in a way that has never
been done in nearly eight hundred years."
Mr. Bloch has attempted to establish what he calls a 'literary
anthropology.' The project is important and ambitious. It seems to
me that Mr. Bloch has completely achieved this ambition. -Michel
Foucault Bloch's Study is a genuinely interdisciplinary one,
bringing together elements of history, ethnology, philology,
philosophy, economics and literature, with the undoubted ambition
of generating a new synthesis which will enable us to read the
Middle Ages in a different light. Stated simply, and in terms which
do justice neither to the density nor the subtlety of his argument,
Bloch's thesis is this: that medieval society perceived itself in
terms of a vertical mode of descent from origins. This model is
articulated etymologically in medieval theories of grammar and
language, and is consequently reflected in historical and
theological writings; it is also latent in the genealogical
structure of the aristocratic family as it began to be organized in
France in the twelfth century, and is made manifest in such systems
of signs as heraldry and the adoption of patronymns. . . . It is an
ingenious and compelling synthesis which no medievalist, even on
this side of the Atlantic, can afford to ignore. -Nicholas Mann,
Times Literary Supplement
In the early 1990s, Stephen Nichols introduced the term "new
medievalism" to describe an alternative to the traditional
philological approach to the study of the romantic texts in the
medieval period. While the old approach focused on formal aspects
of language, this new approach was historicist and moved beyond a
narrow focus on language to examine the broader social and cultural
contexts in which literary works were composed and disseminated.
Within the field, this transformation of medieval studies was as
important as the genetic revolution to the study of biology and has
had an enormous influence on the study of medieval literature.
Rethinking the New Medievalism offers both a historical account of
the movement and its achievements while indicating - in Nichols'
innovative spirit - still newer directions for medieval studies.
The essays deal with questions of authorship, theology, and
material philology and are written by members of a wide
philological and critical circle that Nichols nourished for forty
years. Daniel Heller-Roazen's essay, for example, demonstrates the
conjunction of the old philology and the new. In a close
examination of the history of the words used for maritime raiders
from Ancient Greece to the present (pirate, plunderer, bandit),
Roazen draws a fine line between lawlessness and lawfulness,
between judicial action and war, between war and public policy.
Other contributors include Jack Abecassis, Marina Brownlee,
Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, Andreas Kablitz, and Ursula Peters.
"God's Plagiarist" is an entertaining account of the abbe
Jacques-Paul Migne, one of the great entrepreneurs of the
nineteenth century. A priest in Orleans from 1824 to 1833, Migne
then moved to Paris, where, in the space of a decade, he built one
of the most extensive publishing ventures of all time.
How did he do it?
Migne harnessed a deep well of personal energy and a will of iron
to the latest innovations in print technology, advertising, and
merchandising. His assembly-line production and innovative
marketing of the massive editions of the Church Fathers placed him
at the forefront of France's new commerce. Characterized by the
police as one of the great "schemers" of the century, this
priest-entrepreneur put the most questionable of business practices
in the service of his devotion to Catholicism.
Part detective novel, part morality tale, Bloch's narrative not
only will interest scholars of nineteenth-century French
intellectual history but will appeal also to general readers
interested in the history of publishing or just a good historical
yarn.
"An unforgettable, Daumier-like portrait, sharp and satirical, of
this enterprising, austere and somewhat crazed merchandiser of
sacred learning. . . . Bloch deserves great credit for the wit and
style of his effort to explore the Pedantic Park of
nineteenth-century learning, that island of monsters which scholars
have found, as yet, no escape."--Anthony Grafton, "New Republic"
"Bloch is an exhilarating guide to the methods which made Migne the
Napoleon of the Prospectus, a publicist of genius, Buffalo Bill and
P.T. Barnum rolled into one."--David Coward, "Times Literary
Supplement"
"Mercifully, Bloch's sense of humour has none of that condescending
mock-bewilderment commonly applied to the foreign or ancient. . . .
It enables Bloch to promote Migne as a forerunner of the department
store and to place him on a continuum running from St. Paul to the
Tupperware party: the quality of the merchandise is increasingly
irrelevant, still more the nature of its contents."--Graham Robb,
"London Review of Books"
In the early 1990s, Stephen Nichols introduced the term "new
medievalism" to describe an alternative to the traditional
philological approach to the study of the romantic texts in the
medieval period. While the old approach focused on formal aspects
of language, this new approach was historicist and moved beyond a
narrow focus on language to examine the broader social and cultural
contexts in which literary works were composed and disseminated.
Within the field, this transformation of medieval studies was as
important as the genetic revolution to the study of biology and has
had an enormous influence on the study of medieval literature.
Rethinking the New Medievalism offers both a historical account of
the movement and its achievements while indicating - in Nichols'
innovative spirit - still newer directions for medieval studies.
The essays deal with questions of authorship, theology, and
material philology and are written by members of a wide
philological and critical circle that Nichols nourished for forty
years. Daniel Heller-Roazen's essay, for example, demonstrates the
conjunction of the old philology and the new. In a close
examination of the history of the words used for maritime raiders
from Ancient Greece to the present (pirate, plunderer, bandit),
Roazen draws a fine line between lawlessness and lawfulness,
between judicial action and war, between war and public policy.
Other contributors include Jack Abecassis, Marina Brownlee,
Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, Andreas Kablitz, and Ursula Peters.
This book by one of our most admired and influential medievalists
offers a fundamental reconception of the person generally assumed
to be the first woman writer in French, the author known as Marie
de France. "The Anonymous Marie de France" is the first work to
consider all of the writing ascribed to Marie, including her famous
"Lais," her 103 animal fables, and the earliest vernacular Saint
Patrick's Purgatory.
Evidence about Marie de France's life is so meager that we know
next to nothing about her-not where she was born and to what rank,
who her parents were, whether she was married or single, where she
lived and might have traveled, whether she dwelled in cloister or
at court, nor whether in England or France. In the face of this
great writer's near anonymity, scholars have assumed her to be a
simple, naive, and modest Christian figure. Bloch's claim, in
contrast, is that Marie is among the most self-conscious,
sophisticated, complicated, and disturbing figures of her time-the
Joyce of the twelfth century. At a moment of great historical
turning, the so-called Renaissance of the twelfth century, Marie
was both a disrupter of prevailing cultural values and a founder of
new ones. Her works, Bloch argues, reveal an author obsessed by
writing, by memory, and by translation, and acutely aware not only
of her role in the preservation of cultural memory, but of the
transforming psychological, social, and political effects of
writing within an oral tradition.
Marie's intervention lies in her obsession with the performative
capacities of literature and in her acute awareness of the role of
the subject in interpreting his or her own world. According to
Bloch, Marie develops a theologyof language in the "Lais," which
emphasize the impossibility of living in the flesh along with a
social vision of feudalism in decline. She elaborates an ethics of
language in the "Fables," which, within the context of the court of
Henry II, frame and form the urban values and legal institutions of
the Anglo-Norman world. And in her "Espurgatoire," she produces a
startling examination of the afterlife which Bloch links to the
English conquest and occupation of medieval Ireland.
With a penetrating glimpse into works such as these, "The Anonymous
Marie de France" recovers the central achievements of one of the
most pivotal figures in French literature. It is a study that will
be of enormous value to medievalists, literary scholars, historians
of France, and anyone interested in the advent of female
authorship.
Until now the advent of Western romantic love has been seen as a
liberation from--or antidote to--ten centuries of misogyny. In this
major contribution to gender studies, R. Howard Bloch demonstrates
how similar the ubiquitous antifeminism of medieval times and the
romantic idealization of woman actually are. Through analyses of a
broad range of patristic and medieval texts, Bloch explores the
Christian construction of gender in which the flesh is feminized,
the feminine is aestheticized, and aesthetics are condemned in
theological terms. Tracing the underlying theme of virginity from
the Church Fathers to the courtly poets, Bloch establishes the
continuity between early Christian antifeminism and the
idealization of woman that emerged in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries. In conclusion he explains the likely social, economic,
and legal causes for the seeming inversion of the terms of misogyny
into those of an idealizing tradition of love that exists alongside
its earlier avatar until the current era. This startling study will
be of great value to students of medieval literature as well as to
historians of culture and gender.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which
commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out
and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and
impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes
high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using
print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in
1977.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which
commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out
and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and
impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes
high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using
print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in
1977.
God's Plagiarist is an entertaining account of the abbe
Jacques-Paul Migne, one of the great entrepreneurs of the
nineteenth century. Tracing Migne's life between 1840 and 1870, a
period of robust economic growth in France, Howard Bloch reveals
how the abbe Migne founded one of the most extensive publishing
ventures of all time. Migne harnessed a will of iron and boundless
personal energy to the latest innovations in print technology and
marketing. Most famous for his massive 469-volume edition of the
Church Fathers, Migne was the founder of the Ateliers catholiques
of Paris and owned a total of ten newspapers during the course of
his life. Bloch shows how closely Migne's activities in the
newspaper world coincided with his editing and marketing of the
Church Fathers. He sold the Fathers by means of advertising and
merchandising ploys so creative and modern that Bloch is able to
link Migne and his methods to the rise of wholesale exchange and
large department stores in Paris. Migne's assembly-line production
and innovative pyramid sales schemes placed him a the forefront of
France's new commerce. And yet, Migne had a lengthy police record
and was characterized by the police as one of the great "schemers"
of the century. This priest-entrepreneur put the most questionable
of business practices in the service of his devotion to
Catholicism. He was run in for bribery, hounded because of
irregularities in the licensing of his papers, and continually
being sued for plagiarism. He employed priests who could not find
work elsewhere and paid them such low wages that they were
considered a constant source of political unrest. Migne trafficked
illegally in masses and frequently reprinted editionsthat were not
in the public domain. Despite his years under police scrutiny, he
does, however, appear to have been a saintly schemer, whose
activities on the margin of the law were motivated by a greater
good. Part detective novel, part mortality tale, Bloch's narrative
not only will interest scholars of nineteenth-century French
intellectual history but will appeal also to general readers
interested in the history of publishing or just a good historical
yarn.
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