Christine de Pizan : Texts/intertexts/contexts
Christine de Pizan : Texts/intertexts/contexts

Author: Marilynn Desmond

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 9780816630806

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Christine de Pizan, an Italian-born writer in French in the early 15th century, composed lyric poetry, debate poetry, political biography, and allegory. Her texts constantly negotiate the hierarchical and repressive discourses of late medieval court culture. How they do so is the focus of this volume, which places Christine's work in the context of larger discussions about medieval authorship, identity, and categories of difference.

Queering the Middle Ages
Queering the Middle Ages

Author: Glenn Burger

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 9780816634040

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The essays in this volume present new work that, in one way or another, "queers" stabilized conceptions of the Middle Ages, allowing us to see the period and its systems of sexuality in radically different, off-center, and revealing ways. While not denying the force of gender and sexual norms, the authors consider how historical work has written out or over what might have been non-normative in medieval sex and culture, and they work to restore a sense of such instabilities. At the same time, they ask how this pursuit might allow us not only to re-envision medieval studies but also to rethink how we study culture from our current set of vantage points within postmodernity. The authors focus on particular medieval moments: Christine de Pizan's representation of female sexuality; chastity in the Grail romances; the illustration of "the sodomite" in manuscript commentaries on Dante's Commedia; the complex ways that sexuality inflected English national politics at the time of Edward II's deposition; the construction of the sodomitic Moor by Reconquista Spain. Throughout, their work seeks to disturb a logic that sees the past as significant only insofar as it may make sense for and of a stabilized present.

Margaret's Monsters
Margaret's Monsters

Author: Michael E. Heyes

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-12-06

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 0429588607

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St. Margaret of Antioch was one of the most popular saints in medieval England and, throughout the Middle Ages, the various Lives of St. Margaret functioned as a blueprint for a virginal life and supernatural assistance to pregnant women during the dangerous process of labor. In her narrative, Margaret is accosted by various demons and, having defeated each monster in turn, she is taken to the place of her martyrdom where she prays for supernatural boons for her adherents. This book argues that Margaret’s monsters are a key element in understanding Margaret’s importance to her adherents, specifically how the sexual identities of her adherents were constructed and maintained. More broadly, this study offers three major contributions to the field of medieval studies: first, it argues for the utility of a diachronic analysis of Saints’ Lives literature in a field dominated by synchronic analyses; second, this diachronic analysis is important to interpreting the intertext of Saints’ Lives, not only between different Lives but also different versions of the same Life; and third, the approach further suggests that the most valuable socio-cultural information in hagiographic literature is found in the auxiliary characters and not in the figure of the saint him/herself.

Rethinking Democratic Accountability
Rethinking Democratic Accountability

Author: Robert D. Behn

Publisher:

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 634

ISBN-13: 9780815708612

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" Traditionally, American government has created detailed, formal procedures to ensure that its agencies and employees are accountable for finances and fairness. Now in the interest of improved performance, we are asking our front-line workers to be more responsive, we are urging our middle managers to be innovative, and we are exhorting our public executives to be entrepreneurial. Yet what is the theory of democratic accountability that empowers public employees to exercise such discretion while still ensuring that we remain a government of laws? How can government be responsive to the needs of individual citizens and still remain accountable to the entire polity? In Rethinking Democratic Accountability, Robert D. Behn examines the ambiguities, contradictions, and inadequacies in our current systems of accountability for finances, fairness, and performance. Weaving wry observations with political theory, Behn suggests a new model of accountability--with ""compacts of collective, mutual responsibility""--to address new paradigms for public management. "

Reconsidering Boccaccio
Reconsidering Boccaccio

Author: Olivia Holmes

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2018-01-01

Total Pages: 452

ISBN-13: 1487501781

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Reconsidering Boccaccio explores the exceptional social, geographic, and intellectual range of the Florentine writer Giovanni Boccaccio, his dialogue with voices and traditions that surrounded him, and the way that his legacy illuminates the interconnectivity of numerous cultural networks.

Making the Bible French
Making the Bible French

Author: Jeanette Patterson

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2022-01-27

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 1487539207

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From the end of the thirteenth century to the first decades of the sixteenth century, Guyart des Moulins’s Bible historiale was the predominant French translation of the Bible. Enhancing his translation with techniques borrowed from scholastic study, vernacular preaching, and secular fiction, Guyart produced one of the most popular, most widely copied French-language texts of the later Middle Ages. Making the Bible French investigates how Guyart’s first-person authorial voice narrates translation choices in terms of anticipated reader reactions and frames the biblical text as an object of dialogue with his readers. It examines the translator’s narrative strategies to aid readers’ visualization of biblical stories, to encourage their identification with its characters, and to practice patient, self-reflexive reading. Finally, it traces how the Bible historiale manuscript tradition adapts and individualizes the Bible for each new intended reader, defying modern print-based and text-centred ideas about the Bible, canonicity, and translation.