Pleasure in the Middle Ages / edited by Naama Cohen-Hanegbi and Piroska Nagy.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Cohen-Hanegbi, Naama, editor.

Nagy, Piroska, 1962- editor.

Series:

International medieval research (Series) ; 24.

International medieval research ; volume 24

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Pleasure--Philosophy.

Pleasure.

Pleasure--Religious aspects.

Pleasure--Social aspects.

Manners and customs.

History.

Europe--Social life and customs--History--To 1500.

Europe.

Middle Ages.

Civilization, Medieval.

Pleasure--Social aspects--Europe--To 1500.

Pleasure--Religious aspects--To 1500.

Physical Description:

xxiii, 383 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm.

Place of Publication:

Turnhout, Belgium : Brepols, [2018]

Summary:

Applying a variety of methodological perspectives, the essays collected here analyse the role of pleasure in relation to a variety of subjects such as the human body, love, relationships, education, food, friendship, morality, devotion, and mysticism. They also integrate a wide range of sources including literature (monastic to courtly), medical texts, illuminated prayer books, iconography, and theatrical plays. Each document, each discipline, and thus each essay combine to provide a complex and diversified picture of medieval joys and delights - a picture that shows the extent to which pleasure is engrained in the period's culture. This collection shows how pleasure in the Middle Ages is at once a coveted feeling and a constant moral concern, both the object and the outcome of a constant negotiation between earthly and divine imperatives.

Contents:

Pleasured bodies. Reflections on high medieval monastic pleasures / Esther Cohen

'It is full merry in heaven': the pleasurable connotations of 'merriment' in late medieval England / Philippa C. Maddern

The pleasures and joys of the humoral body in medieval medicine / Fernando Salmón

Bodily pleasures: late medieval medical counsel in context / Naama Cohen-Hanegbi

Visual pleasure and the illuminated prayer book / Maeve Doyle

Abbasid concubines and slave courtesans in Adab discourse: cultural mediators for an ethical appreciation of pleasure / Karen Moukheiber

Courts and pleasures: the neuroscience of pleasure and the pursuit of favour in twelfth-century courts / William M. Reddy

Didactic pleasures. Taking pleasure in virtues and vices: Alcuin's manual for Count Wido / Barbara H. Rosenwein

Sin, the business of pleasure, and the pleasure of reading: exemplary narratives and other forms of sinful pleasure in William Peraldus's Summa de vitiis / Richard Newhauser

The role of pleasure in the acquisition of good virtues: Giles of Rome's idea of education in his De regimine principum (c. 1279) / Noëlle-Laetitia Perret

Pleasure as an affective tool in pastoral care: the cases of Simone Fidati and Richard Rolle in fourteenth-century Italy and England / Xavier Biron-Ouellet

Hell: the pleasure of the suffering of others from visions of the afterlife to religious theatre / Élyse Dupras

Pleasures in God. Holy gluttons: Bede and the Carolingians on the pleasures of reading / Zachary Giuliano

On leeks and onions: Pope Gregory VII and the rejection of pleasure / Ken A. Grant

Intoxication and the Song of Songs: Bernard of Clairvaux and the rediscovery of Origen in the twelfth century / Constant J. Mews

Pleasure in medieval Christian mystical literature: the analysis of John of Ruusbroec (1281-1381) and Hadewijch (thirteenth century) / Rob Faesen.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

250357520X

9782503575209

OCLC:

993754664