Text and textuality in early medieval Iberia: the written and the world, 711‑1031
This book is a study of the functions and conceptions of writing and reading, documentation and archives, and the role of literate authorities in the Christian kingdoms of the northern Iberian Peninsula between the Muslim conquest of 711 and the fall of the Islamic caliphate at Córdoba in 1031. Based on the first complete survey of the over 4,000 surviving Latin charters from the period, it is an essay in the archaeology and biography of text: part one concerns materiality, tracing the lifecycle of charters from initiation and composition to preservation and reuse, while part two addresses connectivity, delineating a network of texts through painstaking identification of more than 2,000 citations of other charters, secular and canon law, the Bible, liturgy, and monastic rules. Few may have been able to read or write, yet the extent of textuality was broad and deep, in the authority conferred upon text and the arrangements made to use it. Via charter and scribe, society and social arrangements came increasingly to be influenced by norms originating from a network of texts. By profiling the intersection and interaction of text with society and culture, this book reconstructs textuality, how the authority of the written and the structures to access it framed and constrained actions and cultural norms, and proposes a new model of early medieval reading. As they cited other texts, charters circulated fragments of those texts; we must rethink the relationship of sources and audiences to reflect fragmentary transmission, in a textuality of imperfect knowledge.
zum Buch im ULB-KatalogPlus
zum Buch auf der Verlags-Website
Fe/Male Friends: Staging Gender and Friendship in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Spanish Literature
Although the traditions of philia and amicitia proclaim friendship as a universal concept, it has been an androcentric model until the emergence of the female friend in the Age of Enlightenment. This book analyzes the discursive turn from premodern to modern gendered constructions of friends in Spanish literature and sheds light on specific models of male, female, and mixed relationships in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Our approach reveals the gendering of male friendship through the exclusion of women and shows the crucial moment when women appear capable of true friendship. The study traces the process of transition from a homosocial bond based on a feudal notion of honor in the Siglo de Oro to new forms of affective relations in a proto-bourgeois society that promotes equality, reason and citizenship. This book spans two centuries of friendship and scrutinizes the creation of specifically gendered social bonds in literary and theoretical frameworks ranging from political writing to poetry, and from the working classes to the intellectual elites. Through novellas, novels, plays, poems, moral weeklies, and letters by female and male authors, every chapter examines a specific concept of fe/male friends related to society, politics, ethics, subjectivity, courtly culture, family and marriage structures. Thus, the book demonstrates the very act of gendering as it relates to friendship as one of the most important forms of social interaction.
zum Buch im ULB-KatalogPlus
zum Buch auf der Verlags-Website