Blurred Boundaries and Deceptive Dichotomies in Pre-Modern Texts and Images : : Culture, Society and Reception / / ed. by Dafna Nissim, Vered Tohar.

• HerausgeberIn: Nissim, Dafna,; Tohar, Vered,
• Place / Publishing House: Berlin ;, Boston : : De Gruyter, , [2023]; 2024
• Year of Publication: 2023
• Language: English
• Series: Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture , 28
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (VII, 258 p.)

This collection of essays focuses on the way blurred boundaries are represented in pre-modern texts and visual art and how they were received and perceived by their audiences: readers, listeners, and viewers. According to the current understanding that opposing cognitive categories that are so common in modern thinking do not apply to pre-modern mentalities, we argue that individuals in medieval and pre-modern societies did not necessarily consider sacred and secular, male and female, real and fictional, and opposing emotions as absolute dichotomies.The contributors to the present collection examine a wide range of cultural artifacts - literary texts, wall paintings, sculptures, jewelry, manuscript illustrations, and various objects as to what they reflect regarding the dominant perceptual system - the network of beliefs, worldviews, presumptions, values, and norms of viewing/reading/hearing different from modern epistemology strongly predicated on the binary nature of things and people. The essays suggest that analyzing pre-modern cultural works of art or literature in light of reception theory can lead to a better understanding of how those cultural products influenced individuals and impacted their thoughts and actions.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Acknowledgements -- Table of Contents -- Blurred Boundaries in Pre-Modern Texts and Images: Aspects of Audiences and Readers-Viewers Responses -- The Sacred and the Profane in German Courtly Romances and Late Medieval Verse Narratives: With an Emphasis on Ulrich Bonerius and Heinrich Kaufringer -- The Poetic and Ideological Blurring of Boundaries in the Jewish Book of Ethics Orḥot Ṣaddiqim -- Laughing at Death: Blurred Boundaries in Giotto's Last Judgment -- The Popular in Service of the Sacred: The Sculpted Musicians of Santiago de Compostela -- Image and Legend of Saint Margaret as an Aid in Childbirth Rituals -- Violent Women and the Blurring of Gender in some Medieval Narratives -- On the Heavenly and the Earthly, the Secular as Sacred - A New Reading of Medieval Hebrew Fables -- The Secular and the Sacred in a Bifolio from Louis of Laval's Book of Hours and Its Spiritual Use -- Between Psalter and "Mirrors for Princes": On the Moral and Didactic Messages in BL Cotton MS Domitian A XVII -- Visual and Textual Authority: Reading Chevalier in Manuscripts of La Vie des pères -- Aspects of Italian and Flemish Identity in Relation to Book Illumination: Reception of Devotional and Antiquarian Ideas through Depictions of Jewelry -- List of Illustrations -- Notes on Contributors -- Index