Brepols Online Books Medieval Miscellanea Original Archive v2016 - bobar16mimeo

This volume honours the academic career of Professor Dhira B. Mahoney, recently retired from the Department of English at Arizona State University, who is well known for her rhetorical readings of medieval literature. Professor Mahoney’s scholarship employs rhetorical theory in readings of late medieval literature, particularly prologues and epilogues, women’s writings, and Arthuriana. As a response to her work, Romance and Rhetoric offers rhetorical readings of a variety of literary pieces from the late Middle Ages, especially for those authors and genres on which Professor Mahoney has published. Its collected essays provide interdisciplinary studies of art, social and literary history, manuscript transmission, and women’s studies in relation to texts in Middle English, Latin, German, and French. In particular, the essays in this volume focus on the writings of courtly authors such as Chaucer, Lydgate, Malory, Guillaume de Machaut, Christine de Pizan, Chrétien de Troyes, and others. In keeping with the ancient tradition of analysing rhetorical principles in the structure of an art work, they also examine the rhetoric of the manuscript art connected to these authors and the genres in which they wrote. This volume thus fills a gap in medieval literary scholarship, as it evaluates with scrutiny how rhetorical teachings or medieval poetic strategies inform the writing of romances.

The Gothic style is now one of the supreme products of Medieval and Renaissance visual culture. Subject to multiple readings and (re)interpretations from ca. 1500 to the present, Gothic stands as one of two dominant languages of European historical architecture. This volume explores methods of reading and interpreting the Gothic from the twelfth through the sixteenth century. Following the editor’s introduction, it contains ten essays written by leading scholars from Canada, the United States, and Great Britain. In challenging the traditional parameters of Gothic, the papers explore ‘Medieval’ and ‘Renaissance’ manifestations of the Gothic, and they consider material ranging geographically from Ireland to Poland, and from Paris to Sicily. Each paper explores ways in which Gothic was or could be read by the contemporary viewers for which it was designed, and by post-modern commentators. In placing the act of reading at the centre of their investigations, the papers offer significant new insights into the forms and meanings of the Gothic.

This volume examines forms of interaction between monastic or mendicant communities and lay people in the high Middle Ages in Britain, France, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia. The nineteen papers explore these issues in geographically and chronologically diverse settings in a way that no English-language collection has yet attempted. It brings together the latest research from established as well as younger historians. The first section ‘Patrons and Benefactors: power, fashion, and mutual expectations’ examines lay involvement in foundations, the rights held by patrons, and how they used these powers, as well as networks of relationships within broader groups of benefactors. The authors demonstrate how changing fashions shaped the fortunes of particular orders and houses and explore how power relations between different types of patrons and benefactors - royal figures, kinship, and other social groupings - affected the mutual expectations of the various parties. The second section of the volume, entitled ‘Lay and Religious: negotiation, influence, and utility’, shows how lay people’s ideas of the role of religious houses could impact upon their patronage of, and support for, monastic or mendicant institutions. Conversely, religious communities offered multi-faceted benefits - practical, intellectual, or spiritual - for the secular world. The book concludes by focusing on the rapid growth of confraternities, their relation to their urban mendicant and monastic contexts, and how the role and forms of confraternities evolved in the late medieval period.

This book brings together a group of leading experts on the political history of Germany and the medieval Empire from the Carolingian period to the end of the Middle Ages. Its purpose is to introduce and analyze key concepts in the study of medieval political culture. The representation of power by means of texts, buildings and images is a theme which has long interested historians. However, recent debates and methodological insights have fundamentally altered the way this subject is perceived, opening it up to perspectives unnoticed by its pioneers in the middle of the twentieth century. By taking account of these debates and insights, this volume explores a series of fundamental questions. How was power defined in a medieval context? How was it claimed, legitimized and disputed? What were the moral parameters against which its exercise was judged? How did different spheres of political power interact? What roles were played by texts, images and rituals in the maintenance of, and challenges to, the political order? The contributors bring varied and original approaches to these and other questions, illuminating the complex power relationships which determined the changing political history of medieval Germany.

Relations between images and texts have benefited from an increase in scholarly attention. In medieval studies, art historians, historians, codicologists, philologists and others have applied their methods to the study of illuminated manuscripts and other works of art. These studies have shifted from a concern about the contents of the messages contained in the artefacts (e.g. in iconography) to an interest in the ways in which they were communicated to their intended audiences. The perception of texts and images, their reception by contemporaries and by later generations have become topics in their own right. According to some, medieval images may be ‘read’. According to others, the perception of images is fundamentally different from that of texts. The analysis of individual manuscripts and works of art remains the basis for any consideration of their transmission and uses. The interactions between non-verbal and verbal forms of communication, more in particular the relations between visual symbols other than writing and the recording of speech in writing, are important for the evaluation of both images and texts.

L’imaginaire ne se réduit pas au chimérique, au non-être. Depuis l’Antiquité, artistes, poètes et philosophes pressentent qu’il procède du désir et appartient en premier lieu au registre de l’individuel: forces pulsionnelles, messages de soi à soi, le rêve et bientôt la création n’ont pas attendu le discours de la psychanalyse ou des diverses sciences de la culture pour forger leurs mondes autour de la réalité partagée. Les sociétés à leur tour se sont lancées par cette voie dans la quête de leur identité et ont assigné à leurs mythes le soin d’exprimer leur structure. Pour autant, le lecteur s’apercevra au fil des douze communications assemblées ci-après que les royautés évoquées ressortissent rarement du pur imaginaire et conservent jalousement un lien organique avec leur référent concret. Il conviendrait davantage de parler de la royauté comme objet d’imagination, en ce qu’elle représente le point de fixation suprême du désir.

Fontevraud: 1101-2001. Fontevraud: à la fois monastère et congrégation, communauté mixte où, par la singulière volonté du fondateur, les hommes en ce temps féodal étaient soumis au pouvoir des femmes. Célébrer le neuvième centenaire de la fondation de Robert d’Arbrissel s’imposait; ce qui fut fait du 13 au 16 décembre 2001, dans l’enceinte même de la somptueuse abbaye ligérienne.

Le présent volume témoigne de ces denses journées d’étude; il intègre aussi des contributions supplémentaires, pour gagner encore en richesse et en cohérence. Volontairement déroutant, il nous entraîne d’abord bien loin du Val de Loire, dans les solitudes boisées des Apennins, où le ressourcement monastique surgi du haut Moyen Âge inaugure ce Moyen Âge que nous disons central. Les organisateurs scientifiques de la rencontre n’ont en effet pas souhaité la focaliser d’emblée sur l’originalité de Fontevraud et les étranges comportements de son fondateur. Ils ont au contraire voulu donner à lire l’accident de 1101 dans le vaste élan qui ouvre une ère nouvelle pour la Chrétienté et pour notre monde en ce qu’il en procède: cette réforme de l’Église qu’on dit «grégorienne», qui repense en fait toute l’architecture ecclésiale et sociale, des plus hauts aux plus infimes pouvoirs, des institutions aux individus et du sacré au profane.

The essays in this volume, presented in honour of John O. Ward, explore the role of rhetoric in promoting reform and renewal in the Latin West from Peter Abelard (1079-1142) to Juan Luis Vives (1492-1540). Ward, who has taught for many years at the University of Sydney, has been an influential and creative force in medieval and renaissance studies both in Australia and internationally. This volume opens with a personal memoir and bibliography of Ward’s publications, as well as an overview of the study of medieval rhetoric. The first of the three sections, ‘Abelard and Rhetoric’, relates Abelard’s rhetoric to his logic, his theology, and his relationship to Heloise. A second section, ‘Voices of Reform’, considers various writers (William of Malmesbury, John of Salisbury, Richard FitzNigel, and William of Ockham) who bring rhetorical techniques to bear upon analysis of social conditions. A third section, ‘Rhetoric in Transition’, deals with the evolution of rhetorical theory between the late fourteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The volume will be of interest not just to specialists in rhetoric, but to all concerned with issues of reform and renewal in European culture during the period 1100-1540.