Fragments

Fragments

Author: Anne And Chris Wortham

Publisher: Strategic Book Publishing

Published: 2009-03

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 1606933302

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Award-winning authors share an astonishing collection of memories of travels, joys, sorrows, events, people, places, and things, beautifully rendered in this deeply moving and inspiring narration.


The Sacred Tree

The Sacred Tree

Author: Carole M. Cusack

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2011-05-25

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 1443830313

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The fundamental nature of the tree as a symbol for many communities reflects the historical reality that human beings have always interacted with and depended upon trees for their survival. Trees provided one of the earliest forms of shelter, along with caves, and the bounty of trees, nuts, fruits, and berries, gave sustenance to gatherer-hunter populations. This study has concentrated on the tree as sacred and significant for a particular group of societies, living in the ancient and medieval eras in the geographical confines of Europe, and sharing a common Indo-European inheritance, but sacred trees are found throughout the world, in vastly different cultures and historical periods. Sacred trees feature in the religious frameworks of the Ghanaian Akan, Arctic Altaic shamanic communities, and in China and Japan. The power of the sacred tree as a symbol is derived from the fact that trees function as homologues of both human beings and of the cosmos. This study concentrates the tree as axis mundi (hub or centre of the world) and the tree as imago mundi (picture of the world). The Greeks and Romans in the ancient world, and the Irish, Anglo-Saxons, continental Germans and Scandinavians in the medieval world, all understood the power of the tree, and its derivative the pillar, as markers of the centre. Sacred trees and pillars dotted their landscapes, and the territory around them derived its meaning from their presence. Unfamiliar or even hostile lands could be tamed and made meaningful by the erection of a monument that replicated the sacred centre. Such monuments also linked with boundaries, and by extension with law and order, custom and tradition. The sacred tree and pillar as centre symbolized the stability of the cosmos and of society. When the Pagan peoples of Europe adopted Christianity, the sacred trees and pillars, visible signs of the presence of the gods in the landscape, were popular targets for axe-wielding saints and missionaries who desired to force the conversion of the landscape as well as the people. Yet Christianity had its own tree monument, the cross on which Jesus Christ was crucified, and which came to signify resurrected life and the conquest of eternal death for the devout. As European Pagans were converted to Christianity, their tree and pillar monuments were changed into Christian forms; the great standing crosses of Anglo-Saxon northern England played many of the same roles as Pagan sacred trees and pillars. Irish and Anglo-Saxons Christians often combined the image of the Tree of Life from the Garden of Eden with Christ on the cross, to produce a Christian version of the tree as imago mundi.


ANZAMRS Bulletin

ANZAMRS Bulletin

Author: Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Renaissance Studies

Publisher:

Published: 1968

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK


Empress Adelheid and Countess Matilda

Empress Adelheid and Countess Matilda

Author: Penelope Nash

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-02-15

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 1137585145

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book compares two successful, elite women, Empress Adelheid (931-999) and Countess Matilda (1046-1115), for their relative ability to retain their wealth and power in the midst of the profound social changes of the eleventh century. The careers of the Ottonian queen and empress Adelheid and Countess Matilda of Tuscany reveal a growth of opportunities for women to access wealth and power. These two women are analyzed under three categories: their relationships with family and friends, how they managed their property (particularly land), and how they ruled. This analysis encourages a better understanding of gender relations in both the past and the present.


Renaissance Poetry and Drama in Context

Renaissance Poetry and Drama in Context

Author: Andrew Lynch

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2009-03-26

Total Pages: 365

ISBN-13: 1443808407

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Renaissance Poetry and Drama in Context is a stimulating refereed collection of new work dedicated to Emeritus Professor Christopher Wortham of The University of Western Australia. The essays provide a rich context for the interdisciplinary study of the English Renaissance, from its medieval antecedents to its modern afterlife on stage and screen. Their up-to-date engagement with many scholarly fields - art and iconography, cartography, cultural and social history, literature, politics, theatre, and film - will ensure that this book makes a valuable contribution to contemporary Renaissance studies, with a special interest for those researching and teaching English literature and drama. The nineteen contributors include distinguished Renaissance scholars such as Ann Blake, Graham Bradshaw, Alan Brissenden, Conal Condren, Joost Daalder, Heather Dubrow, Philippa Kelly, Anthony Miller, Kay Gililand Stevenson, Robert White, and Lawrence Wright. Work on Shakespeare forms the core of this coherent collection. There are also significant essays on Magnificence, Donne, Marlowe, A Yorkshire Tragedy, Jonson, Marvell, the Ferrars of Little Gidding, and female conduct literature. hardbound with dust jacket; xii+353 pp; 18 b/w illustrations.


Burning Bodies

Burning Bodies

Author: Michael D. Barbezat

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-12-15

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 1501716816

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Burning Bodies interrogates the ideas that the authors of historical and theological texts in the medieval West associated with the burning alive of Christian heretics. Michael Barbezat traces these instances from the eleventh century until the advent of the internal crusades of the thirteenth century, depicting the exclusionary fires of hell and judicial execution, the purifying fire of post-mortem purgation, and the unifying fire of God's love that medieval authors used to describe processes of social inclusion and exclusion. Burning Bodies analyses how the accounts of burning heretics alive referenced, affirmed, and elaborated upon wider discourses of community and eschatology. Descriptions of burning supposed heretics alive were profoundly related to ideas of a redemptive Christian community based upon a divine, unifying love, and medieval understandings of what these burnings could have meant to contemporaries cannot be fully appreciated outside of this discourse of communal love. For them, human communities were bodies on fire. Medieval theologians and academics often described the corporate identity of the Christian world as a body joined together by the love of God. This love was like a fire, melting individuals together into one whole. Those who did not spiritually burn with God's love were destined to burn literally in the fires of Hell or Purgatory, and the fires of execution were often described as an earthly extension of these fires. Through this analysis, Barbezat demonstrates how presentations of heresy, and to some extent actual responses to perceived heretics, were shaped by long-standing images of biblical commentary and exegesis. He finds that this imagery is more than a literary curiosity; it is, in fact, a formative historical agent.


Forgotten Queens in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Forgotten Queens in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Author: Valerie Schutte

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-10-16

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 1351618733

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Forgotten Queens in Medieval and Early Modern Europe examines queens dowager and queens consort who have disappeared from history or have been deeply misunderstood in modern historical treatment. Divided into eleven chapters, this book covers queenship from 1016 to 1800, demonstrating the influence of queens in different aspects of monarchy over eight centuries and furthering our knowledge of the roles and challenges that they faced. It also promotes a deeper understanding of the methods of power and patronage for women who were not queens, many of which have since become mythologized into what historians have wanted them to be. The chronological organisation of the book, meanwhile, allows the reader to see more clearly how these forgotten queens are related by the power, agency, and patronage they displayed, despite the mythologization to which they have all been subjected. Offering a broad geographical coverage and providing a comparison of queenship across a range of disciplines, such as religious history, art history, and literature, Forgotten Queens in Medieval and Early Modern Europe is ideal for students and scholars of pre-modern queenship and of medieval and early modern history courses more generally.


Memory and Foresight in the Celtic World

Memory and Foresight in the Celtic World

Author: Lorna G. Barrow

Publisher: Sydney University Press

Published: 2020-12-01

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 1743327145

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Memory and Foresight in the Celtic World delves deep into the experience of Celtic communities and individuals in the late medieval period through to the modern age. Its thirteen essays range widely, from Scottish soldiers in France in the fifteenth century to Gaelic-speaking communities in rural New South Wales in the twentieth, and expatriate Irish dancers in the twenty-first. Connecting them are the recurring themes of memory and foresight: how have Celtic communities maintained connections to the past while keeping an eye on the future? Chapters explore language loss and preservation in Celtic countries and among Celtic migrant communities, and the influence of Celtic culture on writers such as Dylan Thomas and James Joyce. In Australia, how have Irish, Welsh and Scottish migrants engaged with the politics and culture of their home countries, and how has the idea of a Celtic identity changed over time? Drawing on anthropology, architecture, history, linguistics, literature and philosophy, Memory and Foresight in the Celtic World offers diverse, thought-provoking insights into Celtic culture and identity.