In this book, Rachel Teubner offers an exploration of humility in Dante's Divine Comedy, arguing that the poem is an ascetical exercise concerned with training its author gradually in the practice of humility, rather than being a reflection of authorial hubris. A contribution to recent scholarship that considers the poem to be a work of self-examination, her volume investigates its scriptural, literary, and liturgical sources, also offering fresh feminist perspectives on its theological challenges. Teubner demonstrates how the poetry of the Comedy is theologically significant, focusing especially on the poem's definition of humility as ethically and artistically meaningful. Interrogating the text canto by canto, she also reveals how contemporary tools of literary analysis can offer new insights into its meaning. Undergraduate and novice readers will benefit from this companion, just as theologians and scholars of medieval religion will be introduced to a growing body of scholarship exploring Dante's religious thought.
The essay for which The Sacred Wood is primarily remembered is one of the most famous pieces of criticism in English: “Tradition and the Individual Talent” helped to re-orientate arguments about the study of literature and its production by redefining the nature of tradition and the artist's relation to it.At a time when the word “traditional” had become a way of damning with faint praise by reference to the past, Eliot reinterpreted the term to mean something entirely different. It is not, he argues, something just “handed down,” but, instead, a prize to be obtained “by great labour,” not least in the making of a huge effort of understanding how the past fits together. Seen thus, Eliot suggests, a literary and artistic tradition “has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order” – and it is not just past, but present as well. For Eliot, “art never improves,” but only changes, and each part of the tradition is constantly being reinterpreted in light of what is added to the whole. The role of the poet, in Eliot's view, is to subjugate their own personality, and become “a receptacle,” in which “numberless feelings, phrases, images... can unite to form a new compound.” Redefining the issue of poets' relations to the past in this new way is a fine example of creative thinking, and Eliot’s ability to connect existing concepts in new ways was what gave weight to the argument that he advanced: that poets cannot succeed without understanding that they are taking their place on a continuum that stretches back to all their predecessors, and incorporate the ideas, strengths and failings of the entire body of work that those poets represented.
Central to the creative process of the Romantic poets that followed him, Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads has been both a gift and a thorn in the side of critics for over a century. Readers find themselves drawn back to the essay repeatedly as they seek to untangle the ideas and contradictions within it. The Preface is a statement of Wordsworth’s poetic vision and offers an explanation of the poetic process behind the poems, which fused the rusticity of the ballad form with the psychological introspection of modernity. But to the generation of Romantic writers that emerged in its wake, the Preface announced a new understanding of the creative process and of the high purposes of poetry: to reveal the human condition, and to awaken in its readers the profoundest emotions and the most enduring truths of existence.
In this book, Rachel Teubner offers an exploration of humility in Dante's Divine Comedy, arguing that the poem is an ascetical exercise concerned with training its author gradually in the practice of humility, rather than being a reflection of authorial hubris. A contribution to recent scholarship that considers the poem to be a work of self-examination, her volume investigates its scriptural, literary, and liturgical sources, also offering fresh feminist perspectives on its theological challenges. Teubner demonstrates how the poetry of the Comedy is theologically significant, focusing especially on the poem's definition of humility as ethically and artistically meaningful. Interrogating the text canto by canto, she also reveals how contemporary tools of literary analysis can offer new insights into its meaning. Undergraduate and novice readers will benefit from this companion, just as theologians and scholars of medieval religion will be introduced to a growing body of scholarship exploring Dante's religious thought.
- The first book to examine medical expert evidence in infanticide cases focusing in particular on the shifting notion of ‘certainty’ in medical testimony. - Explores the changing relationship between medical experts and the courts. - Explores the changing perception of infanticidal women by the courts.
The sixth annual Current Research in Egyptology symposium took place from 6th-8th January 2005 at the University of Cambridge. Although the topics covered by the papers were many and varied, if there is a general theme it would be that of exploring the borders and parameters of the discipline of Egyptology.
Humane ideals were central to the image Athenians had of themselves and their city during the classical period. Tragic plays, which formed a part of civic education, often promoted pity and compassion. But it is less clear to what extent Athenians embraced such ideals in daily life. How were they expected to respond, emotionally and pragmatically, to the suffering of other people? Under what circumstances? At what risk to themselves? In this book, Rachel Hall Sternberg draws on evidence from Greek oratory and historiography of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE to study the moral universe of the ancient Athenians: how citizens may have treated one another in times of adversity, when and how they were expected to help. She develops case studies in five spheres of everyday life: home nursing, the ransom of captives, intervention in street crimes, the long-distance transport of sick and wounded soldiers, and slave torture. Her close reading of selected narratives suggests that Athenians embraced high standards for helping behavior—at least toward relatives, friends, and some fellow citizens. Meanwhile, a subtle discourse of moral obligation strengthened the bonds that held Athenian society together, encouraging individuals to bring their personal behavior into line with the ideals of the city-state.
For thirteenth-century preacher, exorcist, and hagiographer Thomas of Cantimpré, the Southern Low Countries were a harbinger of the New Jerusalem. The Holy Spirit, he believed, was manifesting itself in the lives of lay and religious people alike. Thomas avidly sought out these new kinds of saints, writing accounts of their lives so that these models of sanctity might astound, teach, and trouble the convictions of his day. In Excessive Saints, Rachel J. D. Smith combines historical, literary, and theological approaches to offer a new interpretation of Thomas’s hagiographies, showing how they employ vivid narrative portrayals of typically female bodies to perform theological work in a rhetorically specific way. Written in an era of great religious experimentation, Thomas’s texts think with and through the bodies of particular figures: the narrative of the holy person’s life becomes a site of theological invention in a variety of registers, particularly the devotional, the mystical, and the dogmatic. Smith examines how these texts represent the lives and bodies of holy women to render them desirable objects of devotion for readers and how Thomas passionately narrates these lives even as he works through his uncertainties about the opportunities and dangers that these emerging forms of holiness present. Excessive Saints is the first book to consider Thomas’s narrative craft in relation to his theological projects, offering new visions for the study of theology, medieval Christianity, and medieval women’s history.
How and why did the images of the crucified Christ and his grieving mother achieve such prominence, inspiring unparalleled religious creativity as well such imitative extremes as celibacy and self-flagellation? To answer this question, Fulton ranges over developments in liturgical performance, private prayer, doctrine, and art.
In medieval Occitania (southern France), troubadours and monastic creators fostered a vibrant musical culture. In response to the early Crusade campaigns of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Christians of the region turned to producing monophonic, poetic song, encompassing both secular and sacred genres. These works assert shifting regional identities and worldviews, exploring devotional practices and religious beliefs, overlaid with notions of contemporaneous geopolitics and secular, intellectual interests. Mapping Medieval Identities in Occitanian Crusade Song demonstrates the profound impact the Crusades had on two seemingly discrete musical-poetic practices: the Latin, sacred Aquitanian versus, associated with Christian devotion, and the vernacular troubadour lyric, associated with courtly love. Rachel May Golden investigates how such Crusade songs distinctively arose out of their geographic environment, uncovering intersections between the beginning of Holy War and the emergence of new styles of poetic-musical composition. She brings together sacred and secular genres of the region to reveal the inventiveness of new composition and the imaginative scope of the Crusades within medieval culture. These songs reflect both the outer world and interior lives, and often their conjunction, giving shape and expression to concerns with the Occitanian homeland, spatial aspects of the Crusades, and newly emerging positions within socio-political history. Drawing on approaches from cultural geography, literary studies, and musicology, Mapping Medieval Identities in Occitanian Crusade Song provides a timely perspective on geopolitical and cultural interactions between nations.
This inter-disciplinary volume explores the poetics of medicine and science, and the scientific aspects of literary and devotional works in a wide-ranging selection of texts from the medieval and early modern periods. Areas of knowedge which we now regard as occupying separate and specialist spheres, were freely and fluidly hybridized in medieval and early modern times
National Human Rights Institutions (NHRIs), defined by the UN as bodies established to promote and protect human rights, have increased in number since the General Assembly adopted principles governing their effectiveness in 1993. The UN and others have encouraged states to set up such institutions as an indication of their commitment to human rights, and now over 20 such institutions exist in Africa and many more will follow. These institutions have taken various forms including ombudsmen, commissions, or a combination of the two. They differ in terms of how they are established; some by constitution, some by legislation and some by decree. These NHRIs have varying functions, usually both promotional and protective, such as giving advice to government, parliament, and others, making recommendations on compliance with human rights standards, awareness raising, and analysis of law and policy. Despite the considerable variations in the method of their creation, powers and composition, most of these institutions have chosen or indeed been mandated, to become involved in international and regional fora. This book examines these institutions in the African region, the way in which they use the international and regional fora, the effectiveness of their contributions and how they are able to participate.
From the early days of colonial rule in India, the British established a two-tier system of legal administration. Matters deemed secular were subject to British legal norms, while suits relating to the family were adjudicated according to Hindu or Muslim law, known as personal law. This important new study analyses the system of personal law in colonial India through a re-examination of women's rights. Focusing on Hindu law in western India, it challenges existing scholarship, showing how - far from being a system based on traditional values - Hindu law was developed around ideas of liberalism, and that this framework encouraged questions about equality, women's rights, the significance of bodily difference, and more broadly the relationship between state and society. Rich in archival sources, wide-ranging and theoretically informed, this book illuminates how personal law came to function as an organising principle of colonial governance and of nationalist political imaginations.
Wars cannot be fought and sustained without food and this unique collection explores the impact of war on food production, allocation and consumption in Europe in the twentieth century. A comparative perspective which incorporates belligerent, occupied and neutral countries provides new insights into the relationship between food and war. The analysis ranges from military provisioning and systems of food rationing to civilians' survival strategies and the role of war in stimulating innovation and modernization.
Playful, popular visions of Troy and Carthage, backdrops to the Iliad and Aeneid's epic narratives, shine the spotlight on antiquity's starring role in nineteenth-century culture. This is the story of how these ruined cities inspired bold reconstructions of the Trojan War and its aftermath, how archaeological discoveries in the Troad and North Africa sparked dramatic debates, and how their ruins were exploited to conceptualise problematic relationships between past, present and future. Rachel Bryant Davies breaks new ground in the afterlife of classical antiquity by revealing more complex and less constrained interaction with classical knowledge across a broader social spectrum than yet understood, drawing upon methodological developments from disciplines such as history of science and theatre history in order to do so. She also develops a thorough critical framework for understanding classical burlesque and engages in in-depth analysis of a toy-theatre production.
Orientalism and Musical Mission presents a new way of understanding music's connections with imperialism, drawing on new archive sources and interviews and using the lens of 'mission'. Rachel Beckles Willson demonstrates how institutions such as churches, schools, radio stations and governments, influenced by missions from Europe and North America since the mid-nineteenth century, have consistently claimed that music provides a way of understanding and reforming Arab civilians in Palestine. Beckles Willson discusses the phenomenon not only in religious and developmental aid circles where it has had strong currency, but also in broader political contexts. Plotting a historical trajectory from the late Ottoman and British Mandate eras to the present time, the book sheds new light on relations between Europe, the USA and the Palestinians, and creates space for a neglected Palestinian music history.
Would you like to learn to pray like a medieval Christian? In Mary and the Art of Prayer, Rachel Fulton Brown traces the history of the medieval practice of praising Mary through the complex of prayers known as the Hours of the Virgin. More than just a work of comprehensive historical scholarship, the book asks readers to immerse themselves in the experience of believing in and praying to Mary. Mary and the Art of Prayer crosses the boundaries that modern scholars typically place between observation and experience, between the world of provable facts and the world of imagination, suggesting what it would have been like for medieval Christians to encounter Mary in prayer. Mary and the Art of Prayer opens with a history of the devotion of the Hours or “Little Office” of the Virgin. It then guides readers in the practice of saying this Office, including its invitatory (Ave Maria), antiphons, psalms, lessons, and prayers. The book works on several levels at once. It provides a new methodology for thinking about devotion and prayer; a new appreciation of the scope of and audience for the Hours of the Virgin; a new understanding of how Mary functions theologically and devotionally; and a new reading of sources not previously taken into account. A courageous and moving work, it will transform our ideas of what scholarship is and what it can accomplish.
This book presents a reassessment of the governmental systems of the Late Babylonian period—specifically those of the Neo-Babylonian and early Persian empires—and provides evidence demonstrating that these are among the first to have developed an early form of administrative law. The present study revolves around a particular expression that, in its most common form, reads ḫīṭu ša šarri išaddad and can be translated as “he will be guilty (of an offense) against the king.” The authors analyze ninety-six documents, thirty-two of which have not been previously published, discussing each text in detail, including the syntax of this clause and its legal consequences, which involve the delegation of responsibility in an administrative context. Placing these documents in their historical and institutional contexts, and drawing from the theories of Max Weber and S. N. Eisenstadt, the authors aim to show that the administrative bureaucracy underlying these documents was a more complex, systematized, and rational system than has previously been recognized. Accompanied by extensive indexes, as well as transcriptions and translations of each text analyzed here, this book breaks new ground in the study of ancient legal systems.
This book investigates the feminine traditions of the Hebrew Bible in a readable manner, pertinent to contemporary times. It is unique in its focus on the experiences of biblical women and not how they were perceived within a patriarchal context.Women on the Biblical Road explores, through an eco-feminist lens, female heroes, their journey cycles, and the oral tradition from which these stories originate. At the core of this look at women on the biblical road is the book of Ruth, the Bible's most complete tale of the female adventure. Caspi and Havrelock point out that the journey of Ruth and Naomi corresponds with a cycle of return and redemption, inseparable from Ruth's and Naomi's experience on the road. The authors also propose that this story of two women from distinctly different places who are able to fuse their goals and help each other survive, points to plausible cultural reconciliation in the Middle East and beyond. This book is intended for any university class studying the Hebrew Bible, courses at synagogues or churches, and women interested in tracing female spiritual traditions. Women on the Biblical Road is an important book for the Women's Spirituality Movement and will surely appeal to the contemporary woman interested in reconstructing women's traditions.
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