Mediation And Love A Study Of The Medieval Go Between In Key Romance And Near Eastern Texts

This study offers a comprehensive typology of the Figure of the Medieval go-between across several Near-Eastern and European genres, and pays special attention to the role of intertextuality and history in the conception of the figure.

"Mediating Fictions examines the variety of strategies that these authors use to deprecate women healers, and in the process, to create early modern "others" to whom the ideal, male physician could be contrasted. Spill, La Celestina, and La Lozana andaluza all attempt to dissuade their readers from seeking the healing service of ordinary women."--BOOK JACKET.

This book explores the rich, complex, literary tradition of the medieval go-between. Idealized going between usually leads to marriage and it develops a new dimension of the much debated question of courtly love and woman's part in it. Chaucer's Pandarus's place in this go-between tradition is a tour de force.

This new Companion introduces the most important medieval vernacular literary genre in Britain and continental Europe.

Love at a Crux presents the emergence of versified love stories in the New Persian language as a crucial event in the history of romance. Using the tale of Vis & Rāmin (w. 1054) as its focal point, the book explores how Persian court poets in the eleventh century reconfigured "myths" and "fables" from the distant past in ways that transformed the love story from a form of evening entertainment to a method of ethical, political, and affective self-inquiry. This transformation both anticipates and helps to explain the efflorescence of romance in many medieval cultures across the western flank of Afro-Eurasia. Bringing together traditions that are often sundered by modern disciplinary boundaries, Love at a Crux unearths the interconnections between New Persian and comparable traditions in ancient and medieval Greek, Arabic, Georgian, Old French, and Middle High German, offering scholars in classics, medieval studies, Middle Eastern literatures, and premodern world literature a case study in literary history as connected history.

This is the first comprehensive resource on the subject of love in the teachings of the world's major religions, cultures, and philosophies. Encyclopedia of Love in World Religions is the first reference work to offer a comprehensive portrait of love in the context of the classic and contemporary literature of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism, as well as other cultures and philosophies. Like no volume published to date, it reveals the full richness of religious teachings on love in all its many forms, exploring an extensive range of topics that offer philosophical, psychological, and religious perspectives to guide the quest for the meaning of love. Encyclopedia of Love in World Religions features approximately 300 subject entries, as well as insightful biographic sketches of preeminent thinkers, all written by a multidisciplinary team of some of the foremost scholars on the subject. Entries examine both general and culture-specific interpretations of love: not just the dichotomy of spiritual and physical love, but the full emotional spectrum of love in relationships and practices. Collectively, they encompass love's integral—and sometimes conflicting—role in shaping beliefs and behavior in a vastly diverse world.

This book explores how Medieval and Early Modern writers reconstructed, and also how readers read, the contradictory meanings of "Lady" Wisdom.