Medieval marvels and fictions in the Latin West and Islamic world / Michelle Karnes.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Karnes, Michelle, author.

Contributor:

Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library (University of Pennsylvania)

Horace Howard Furness Memorial Fund.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Literature, Medieval--History and criticism.

Literature, Medieval.

Comparative literature--Western and Arabic--History and criticism.

Comparative literature.

Curiosities and wonders in literature.

Comparative literature--Western and Arabic.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

ix, 248 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2022.

Summary:

"It is a commonplace that marvels like enchanted rings and sorcerers' stones were topics of fascination in the Middle Ages, not only in romance and travel literature, but also in the period's philosophic writing: magical objects with hard-to-explain powers abound. This is the first book to analyze these different bodies of writing alongside one another, comparing texts from both the Latin West (including writings in English, French, Italian, and Spanish) and in Arabic on the topic, attempting a unifying theory of marvels across different disciplines and cultures. Michelle Karnes tells an untold story of the parallels between Arabic and Latin thought, reminding us that the strange and the unfamiliar travel unusually well across a range of genres, spanning geographical and conceptual space, and offers an ideal vantage point from which to understand Arabic and Latin intercultural exchange. Employing the notion of the near-impossibility, Karnes traverses this diverse archive, marking the outer boundaries of both nature's capabilities and human creativity. Imagination, she shows, invests marvels with their character and, ultimately, their power. Skirting the distinction between the real and unreal, the true and the false, imagination, for Karnes, endows marvels with indeterminacy and import, imbuing them with inherently interdisciplinary, boundary-resistant, perplexing properties. These near-impossibilities cannot be conclusively discounted; rather, they challenge readers to discover the highest capabilities of both nature and the human intellect. Karnes offers here a rare, comparative perspective and a new methodology to study a topic long recognized to be central to medieval culture"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: ch. 1 Marvels and the Philosophy of Imagination: True Dreams, Prophecy, and Possession

ch. 2 Marvels and the Philosophy of Imagination: Bewitchment, Telekinesis, and the Moving of Mountains

ch. 3 Philosophers' Fables

ch. 4 Imaginative Geography

ch. 5 Marvelous Trials

ch. 6 Mutatis Mirabilibus.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Horace Howard Furness Memorial Fund.

ISBN:

9780226819754

0226819752

9780226819747

0226819744

OCLC:

1274200118

Publisher Number:

99993061874