Article
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Public festivities in Portuguese medieval towns
Arnaldo Sousa MELO; Maria do Carmo RIBEIRO
Published in Pleasure in the Middle Ages
Keywords: Medieval towns, Pleasure, Portugal, Public festivities, Urban space.
The aim of this paper is to analyze the major Portuguese public festivities in late XIV and XV centuries, mainly in three Portuguese towns – Lisbon, Porto (Oporto) and Braga – in order to study their relationship with the urban space. We start by studying civic and religious festivities, namely royal baptisms, weddings and enthronements, as well as royal and lordly entries in towns, but also regular festivities such as the Corpus Christi. We proceed to study the urban areas where they occurred, their itinerary, the type of festivities (street theater, processions, bullfights, music and dance...) and the ornamentation of those urban areas. Finally we will analyze pleasure connected to these different types of festivities, as well as to various social groups. Our methodology is based upon different types of sources, namely written and iconographic documents, as well as remaining medieval historic buildings and urban plans.
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The Concept of Beauty in Medieval Nativities from England and Spain
Vicente CHACÓN-CARMONA
Published in Pleasure in the Middle Ages
Keywords: Beauty, Landscape, Music, Nativity, Religious drama, Shepherds.
Medieval nativity plays, in particular those dealing with the adoration of the shepherds, tend to depict two well distinct worlds, namely before and after the characters learn about the birth of the Messiah. English and Castilian playwrights depict the postlapsarian world prior to Jesus’s birth as a gloomy, barren place inhabited by rough ignorant creatures awaiting their redemption. Even if beauty is not staged as such in these plays, it is clear that the characters, due to their moral state, are unable to appreciate the aesthetics of their surroundings. It is the aim of this article to analyse and compare the strategies utilised by the authors in order to stimulate the characters and make beauty somehow apparent to the spectators both in the English and the Castilian traditions. Special attention is paid to the roles played by landscape, language, and music.
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Sinfulness, Sanctity and Bodily Transgressions: Representations of Ageing, Disability and Impairment in Late-Medieval Drama
Helen Frances SMITH
Published in Pleasure in the Middle Ages
Keywords: Disability, Drama, Late-Medieval, Physiognomy, Sinfulness.
The relationship between the textual and physical representations of the disabled or impaired body and morality is an intriguing and complex area to explore in medieval literary and dramatic culture. In medieval thought, since the body and soul were seen as inextricably linked, different sins were thought to take their own physiological effects upon the body. While sexual sin, for instance, was thought to cause leprosy, the sin of avarice was thought to cause premature ageing. Yet, physical disability or impairment, and other bodily transgressions, as cultural constructs, were not always negatively received in society. Affliction could be a means of grace rather than punishment, and there is evidence that monks even prayed for physical and mental affliction to regain a state of purity. In order to explore how disability, impairment and bodily transgression is represented in the context of sinfulness and the ageing body, this paper will use a moral spectrum of characters as well as historical evidence.
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Pleasures of Gluttony
Burçin EROL
Published in Pleasure in the Middle Ages
Keywords: Gluttony, Middle English Literature, Pleasure, Seven deadly sins.
In the late Middle Ages, especially in England, displaying an abundance of food and feasting became not only an act of pleasure but also a means of establishing status and wealth, despite gluttony being one of the seven deadly sins. In the fourteenth century – due to various reasons such as increased population, crop failure, the Black Death, and the disruption of food production by warfare – feasting, the displaying of food, and indulgence in gluttony was an indicator of wealth, riches, and high status for the upper class or the social climber as it is well indicated in the works of Chaucer and some of his contemporaries.
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“The Pleasure of the Text”: The Parliament of Fowls as the Site of Bliss for Chaucer and his Readers
Oya BAYILTMIŞ ÖĞÜTCÜ
Published in Pleasure in the Middle Ages
Keywords: Bliss, Parliament of Fowls, Roland Barthes, Textual pleasure, Writerly neurosis.
Roland Barthes’s arguments in The Pleasure of the Text have brought a literary outlook to the concept of pleasure. For him, texts that do not have a closure (‘indecisive texts’) create pleasure both in the author and the reader due to polysemy resulting from writerly neurosis. Hence, the body of the text, like a physical body, becomes a site of pleasure. Chaucer’s the Parliament of Fowls presents such a site of bliss through the love debate among the birds where Chaucer depoliticises and satirises the medieval estate structure. Moreover, left open-ended, the text creates Barthesian bliss for both Chaucer and his readers. Thus, the aim of this paper is to elucidate and evaluate Chaucer’s the Parliament of Fowls as the source of textual pleasure.
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Human or Computer Assisted Interactive Transcription: Automated Text Recognition, Text Annotation, and Scholarly Edition in the Twenty-First Century
M. J. CASTRO-BLEDA, J. M. VILAR, S. ESPAÑA, D. LLORENS, A. MARZAL, F. PRAT, F. ZAMORA
Published in Pleasure in the Middle Ages
Keywords: Ancient documents, Assisted transcription, Interactive automatic text recognition, Multimodal human/computer interaction.
Computer assisted transcription tools can speed up the initial process of reading and transcribing texts. At the same time, new annotation tools open new ways of accessing the text in its graphical form. The balance and value of each method still needs to be explored. STATE, a complete assisted transcription system for ancient documents, was presented to the audience of the 2013 International Medieval Congress at Leeds. The system offers a multimodal interaction environment to assist humans in transcribing ancient documents: the user can type, write on the screen with a stylus, or utter a word. When one of these actions is used to correct an erroneous word, the system uses this new information to look for other mistakes in the rest of the line. The system is modular, composed of different parts: one part creates projects from a set of images of documents, another part controls an automatic transcription system, and the third part allows the user to interact with the transcriptions and easily correct them as needed. This division of labour allows great flexibility for organising the work in a team of transcribers.
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The sublime: from word to silence
Waldir BARRETO
Original title: Lo sublime, de la palabra al silencio
Published in Pleasure in the Middle Ages
Keywords: Beautiful, Imagination, Reason, Sublime, Understanding, Unrepresentable.
This essay presents a didactic and expositive approach the historical-philosophical deployment of the sublime’s concept since the retrieval of the term, according to its translation of the Greek into French, until the reinstatement of meaning, according to its shift from rhetoric to philosophy, through Anglo-Saxon valuation of the imagination, the birth of Aesthetics, philosophical premise, Burke’s key of terror and his distinction between pleasure and delight, the game of faculties in Kant, and the characterization of the radical informality of the sublime.
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Time, History, and Providence in the Philosophy of Nicholas of Cusa
Jason ALEKSANDER
Original title: Time, History, and Providence in the Philosophy of Nicholas of Cusa
Published in Nicholas of Cusa in Dialogue
Keywords: Divine Providence, Nicholas of Cusa, Philosophy of History, Temporality, Time.
Although Nicholas of Cusa occasionally discussed how the universe must be understood as the unfolding of the absolutely infinite in time, he left open questions about any distinction between natural time and historical time, how either notion of time might depend upon the nature of divine providence, and how his understanding of divine providence relates to other traditional philosophical views. From texts in which Cusanus discussed these questions, this paper will attempt to make explicit how Cusanus understood divine providence. The paper will also discuss how Nicholas of Cusa’s view of the question of providence might shed light on Renaissance philosophy’s contribution in the historical transition in Western philosophy from an overtly theological or eschatological understanding of historical time to a secularized or naturalized philosophy of history.
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Nicholas of Cusa in Dialogue in year 1453: theatral dimension and dialogical significance of De pace fidei and De visione Dei
João Maria ANDRÉ
Original title: Nicolau de Cusa em diálogo no ano de 1453: dimensão teatral e carácter dialógico do De pace fidei e do De visione Dei
Published in Nicholas of Cusa in Dialogue
Keywords: Dialogue, Nicholas of Cusa, Philosophy of Language.
In this article, we propose an approach of two works of Nicholas of Cusa written in the year 1453: De pace fidei and De visione Dei. First, is conceptualized its theatral dimension from the devices convocated in each of this two texts. Such devices show how the dialogical dimension, if it is the exposition form in some works of Nicolas of Cusa, it’s also present in texts that do not have the dialogue form. Second, we call the attention to the philosophy and theology of word and language implicitly or explicitly developed in these two works.
