Otherworlds: fantasy and history in medieval literature

This book offers a new perspective on the otherworlds of medieval literature. These fantastical realms are among the most memorable places in medieval writing, by turns beautiful and monstrous, alluring and terrifying. Passing over a river or sea, or entering into a hollow hill, heroes come upon strange and magical realms. These places are often very beautiful, filled with sweet music and adorned with precious stones and rich materials. There is often no darkness, time may pass at a different pace, and the people who dwell there are usually supernatural. Sometimes such a place is exactly what it appears to be-the land of heart's desire-but, the otherworld can also have a sinister side, trapping humans and keeping them there against their will. Otherworlds: Fantasy and History in Medieval Literature takes a fresh look at how medieval writers understood these places and why they found them so compelling. It focuses on texts from England, but places this material in the broader context of literary production in medieval Britain and Ireland. The narratives examined in this book tell a rather surprising story about medieval notions of these fantastical places. Otherworlds are actually a lot less 'other' than they might initially seem. Authors often use the idea of the otherworld to comment on very serious topics. It is not unusual for otherworld depictions to address political issues in the historical world. Most intriguing of all are those texts where locations in the real world are re-imagined as otherworlds. The regions on which this book focuses, Britain, Ireland and the surrounding islands, prove particularly susceptible to this characterization.

A misosoginia medieval e seus ecos nos Lais de Maria de França

The Lais of Marie de France are a specific type of historical record about the medieval aristocratic society and enables us to decipher the hierarchies that govern the relationship between men and women in the period. As well explains Georges Duby, medieval society tends to present coated with a male character because, among other factors, its latent misogyny. Women were placed under male authority, convinced of their natural superiority , the men despised , mocked her sex , meanwhile feared them, after all, women were Eve’s daughters. So, Lais offer female images that cannot be ignored , since it express the author women’s idea. However , as we seek to demonstrate in this article, Maria of France reflects the representations of the Christian society aristocratic. One note here that this article does not aspire to reach the actual circumstances, but the historical significance of female images present in the Lais.

A Sancta Sapientia Medieval: enigma e mistério no teatro cristão de Rosvita de Ganderseheim

Within the scope of Literary Studies, theory, criticism, and historiography about the literature produced in the Middle Ages developed considerably from 1940 on, with the works of Ernst Curtius, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Erich Auerbach. In spite of the progress made, some specific aspects remain in the shadow, with incursions which were punctual though meaningful: that is the case of the critic fortunes about women‟s literary production in that period. Rosvita was a canoness and lived in the Benedictine convent of Gandersheim (Germany), in the 10th century A.D. Coming under Terence‟s influence, she wrote theater plays in Latin in which she figuratively presented theological issues in order to spread the Christian doctrine. The martyrdom issue deserved to be put in relief and was the focal point of the play Wisdom, which took place at the time of the Roman emperor Adrian. This paper analyzes that dramatic text discussing, at the end, how the categories of symbol, enigma, allegory, and mystery are organized by the author as expressive resources and structural elements.

The calendar of the Anglican Church illustrated : with brief accounts of the saints who have churches dedicated in their names, or whose images are most frequently met with in England : the early christian and medieval symbols : and an index of emblems.

Calf, rebacked.

A dictionary of christian biography, literature, sects and doctrines : being a continuation of 'The dictionary of the Bible' /

Imprint varies: v.3-4, London, Murray.

A dictionary of Christian biography and literature to the end of the sixth century A.D., with an account of the principal sects and heresies;

Mode of access: Internet.

Address on the power and value of the Sunday school system in evangelizing heathen and re-constructing Christian communitys, by an improvement of the religion and morals, the education and literature, and the social, civil and political institutions of every people : and on the Southern enterprise of the American Sunday school union ; delivered in the Lutheran Church, City of Charleston, on Monday evening, March 17, 1834 /

Author's presentation copy.

The Christian library : comprising a series of standard works in religious literature.

Mode of access: Internet.

Computer Processing of Medieval Slavic Sources in the Institute of Literature at BAS Repertorium Project (1994–2004)

Mixed-content miscellanies (very frequent in the Byzantine and mediaeval Slavic written heritage) are usually defined as collections of works with non-occupational, non-liturgical application, and texts in them are selected and arranged according to no identifiable principle. It is a “readable” type of miscellanies which were compiled mainly on the basis of the cognitive interests of compilers and readers. Just like the occupational ones, they also appeared to satisfy public needs but were intended for individual usage. My textological comparison had shown that mixed- content miscellanies often showed evidence of a stable content – some of them include the same constituent works in the same order, regardless that the manuscripts had no obvious genetic relationship. These correspondences were sufficiently numerous and distinctive that they could not be merely fortuitous, and the only sensible interpretation was that even when the operative organizational principle was not based on independently identifiable criteria, such as the church calendar, liturgical function, or thematic considerations, mixed-content miscellanies (or, at least, portions of their contents) nonetheless fell into types. In this respect, the apparent free selection and arrangement of texts in mixed-content miscellanies turns out to be illusory. The problem was – as the corpus of manuscripts that I and my colleagues needed to examine grew – our ability to keep track of the structure of each one, and to identify structural correspondences among manuscripts within the corpus, diminished. So, at the end of 1993 I addressed a letter to Prof. David Birnbaum (University of Pittsburgh, PA) with a request to help me to solve the problem. He and my colleague Andrey Boyadzhiev (Sofia University) pointed out to me that computers are well suited to recording, processing, and analyzing large amounts of data, and to identifying patterns within the data, and their proposal was that we try to develop a computer system for description of manuscripts, for their analysis and of course, for searching the data. Our collaboration in this project is now ten years old, and our talk today presents an overview of that collaboration.

Hispanic orientalism: The literary development of a cultural paradigm, from medieval Spain to modern Latin America

This dissertation offers a novel approach to Hispanic Orientalism, developing a dynamic paradigm from its origins in medieval and Renaissance Iberia during the process of the Christian Reconquest, to its transatlantic migration and establishment in the early years of the Colony, from where it changed in late colonial and post-Independence Latin America, and onto modernity. ^ The study argues that Hispanic Orientalism does not necessarily imply a negative depiction of the Other, a quality associated with the traditional critique of Saidian Orientalism. Neither, does it entirely comply with the positivist approach suggested in the theoretical research of Said’s opponents, like Julia Kushigian. This dissertation also argues that sociopolitical changes and the shift in the discourse of powers, from imperial to non-imperial, had a significant impact of the development of Hispanic Orientalism, shaping the relationship with the Other. The methodology involves close reading of representative texts depicting the interactions of the dominant and dominated societies from each of the four historic periods that coincided with significant sociopolitical transformations in Hispanic society. Through an intercultural approach to literary studies, social history, and religious studies, this project develops an original paradigm of Hispanic Orientalism, derived from the image of the reinvented Semitic Other portrayed in the literary works depicting the relationship between the hegemonic and the subaltern cultures during the Reconquest period in Spain. Then, it traces the turn of the original paradigm towards reinterpretation during its transatlantic migration to Latin America through the analysis of the chronicles and travelogs of the first colonizers and explorers. During the transitional late colonial and early Independence periods Latin America sees a significant change in the discourse of powers, and Hispanic Orientalism reflects this oscillation between the past and the present therough the works of the Latin American authors from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Finally, once the non-imperial discourse of power established itself in the former Colony, a new modern stage in the development of Hispanic Orientalist paradigm takes place. It is marked by the desire to differentiate itself from the O(o)thers, as manifested in the works of the representatives of Modernism and the Boom.^