The Literary and Historical Recuperation of Pagan Virtue in Fourteenth-century England
Author: Francis William Grady
Publisher:
Published: 1991
Total Pages: 484
ISBN-13:
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Author: Francis William Grady
Publisher:
Published: 1991
Total Pages: 484
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: Cindy L. Vitto
Publisher: American Philosophical Society
Published: 1989
Total Pages: 108
ISBN-13: 9780871697950
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFor pious Christians of every age, the question of ultimate concern has been salvation: What is necessary to ensure the soul's eternal bliss? During the Middle Ages, within the Church itself, the guidelines were clear: baptism, reception of the sacraments, an attempt to put into practice the teachings of Christ. But a theological debate arose on the possibility of salvation for those outside the Church, who fell into two basic categories: those who had been offered the Christian faith but had refused it, & those who, for reasons of chronology or geography, lacked the opportunity to join the Church but lived as virtuously as possible. Two categories of these "virtuous pagans" who received special attention were the classical poets & philosophers of Greece & Rome, & the Old Testament patriarchs. From the standpoint of human reason, it seemed especially unfortunate that these two groups should be damned eternally. This study discusses the theological background of this issue; the Virtuous Pagan in legend & in Dante; St. Erkenwald's Harrowing of Hell; & "Piers Plowman": Issues in Salvation & the Harrowing as Thematic Climax.
Author: Cindy Lynn Vitto
Publisher:
Published: 1985
Total Pages: 193
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: Holly A. Crocker
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2019-09-27
Total Pages: 360
ISBN-13: 0812251415
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIf material bodies have inherent, animating powers—or virtues, in the premodern sense—then those bodies typically and most insistently associated in the premodern period with matter—namely, women—cannot be inert and therefore incapable of ethical action, Holly Crocker contends. In The Matter of Virtue, Crocker argues that one idea of what it means to be human—a conception of humanity that includes vulnerability, endurance, and openness to others—emerges when we consider virtue in relation to modes of ethical action available to premodern women. While a misogynistic tradition of virtue ethics, from antiquity to the early modern period, largely cast a skeptical or dismissive eye on women, Crocker seeks to explore what happened when poets thought about the material body not as a tool of an empowered agent whose cultural supremacy was guaranteed by prevailing social structures but rather as something fragile and open, subject but also connected to others. After an introduction that analyzes Hamlet to establish a premodern tradition of material virtue, Part I investigates how retellings of the demise of the title female character in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Henryson's Testament of Cresseid, and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida among other texts structure a poetic debate over the potential for women's ethical action in a world dominated by masculine violence. Part II turns to narratives of female sanctity and feminine perfection, including ones by Chaucer, Bokenham, and Capgrave, to investigate grace, beauty, and intelligence as sources of women's ethical action. In Part III, Crocker examines a tension between women's virtues and household structures, paying particular attention to English Griselda- and shrew-literatures, including Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew. She concludes by looking at Chaucer's Legend of Good Women to consider alternative forms of virtuous behavior for women as well as men.
Author:
Publisher:
Published: 1992-11
Total Pages: 572
ISBN-13:
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Author: S. Lightsey
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2007-08-06
Total Pages: 225
ISBN-13: 0230605648
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book examines marvels as tangible objects in the literary, courtly, and artisanal cultures of medieval England, but these clever devices, neither wholly semiotic nor purely positivist objects, are imbued with diverse cultural significance that illuminates in new ways the familiar literature of the Ricardian period.
Author:
Publisher:
Published: 1991
Total Pages: 724
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: Modern Language Association of America
Publisher:
Published: 1992
Total Pages: 1372
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKVols. for 1969- include ACTFL annual bibliography of books and articles on pedagogy in foreign languages 1969-
Author: Daniel Stokes
Publisher:
Published: 2014
Total Pages: 270
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"This dissertation identifies what I call a post-cultural imagination running throughout a body of late medieval vernacular religious literature that has hitherto been assessed as either paradigmatically ethnocentric or anomalously culturally tolerant. I argue that, rather than debating cultural tolerance, these texts in fact deconstruct the category of culture altogether. I contend that, as they considered issues of multi-culturalism and cosmopolitanism, these Catholic English writers assumed a post-cultural standpoint, wherein they filed qualities such as dress, skin color, and language, id est those that are 'accidental' in nature, into a conceptual space that tolerated such cultural variance. But these qualities took a subordinate position to 'substantive' universal concerns of the human condition which exist - or should exist - beyond culture in every truly human community and nationality. Consequently, cultural diversity could be countenanced, but only so long as the conceptual space of substantive truth and falsehood, good and evil, beyond culture was securely regarded as fixed and universal. With the dawn of the Reformation, however, this local-universal separation proved increasingly difficult to sustain, as proto-Protestant Lollard attacks on Christian Orthopraxy depended on a fundamentalist reading of human virtue. Accordingly, the accidental space for cultural variety was eradicated and all aspects of human behavior and belief had to be substantiated in biblically grounded universal and divinely mandated terms. In the first chapter of Post-Cultural Imagination, I argue that the author of Mandeville's Travels makes Catholic Christianity catholic, that is by definition free from sectarian prejudice, by portraying Christianity as a universal cosmopolitan principle that transcends nation, race and culture, rather than a local or provincial religion. I demonstrate that the much written-about contradiction between 'modern' relativism and dogmatic exclusivity, in Mandeville, can be more fully appreciated through a lens of post-cultural understanding. In chapter two, I state that in order to solve the problem of the Law's shortcomings in Piers Plowman, Langland presents a model of do-well reminiscent of St. Paul's concept of being 'in the spirit.' In such a model, an individual will necessarily fail to completely realize justice, but will succeed to do-well through the endeavor itself. In chapter three, I look at a religious uncertainty principle present in the fourteenth-century alliterative poem St. Erkenwald and contend that the poem reveals to both St. Erkenwald and the reader that they only perceive the nature of universal truth and justice 'as through a glass darkly.' In doing so, the poem invites empathy for the unfortunate pagan Other. My final chapter looks into the ways in which the post-cultural sensibility began to decline with the arrival of Lollard polemics. I argue that Lollardy destabilized the post-cultural sensibilities of medieval English Christianity. Ultimately these pressures lead to a collapse of a postcultural consciousness, which contained crucial features differentiating between Catholic and Proto-Protestant Christianities at the birth of the Reformation"--Pages v-vi.
Author: Katherine Van Liere
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
Published: 2012-05-24
Total Pages: 364
ISBN-13: 0199594791
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe first geographically broad, comparative survey of early modern 'sacred history', or writing on the history of the Christian Church, its leaders and saints, and its internal developments, in the two centuries from c. 1450 to c. 1650.