The Sibyl Series Of The Fifteenth Century

Raybould's The Sibyl Series of the Fifteenth Century examines the change that occurred in representations of the sibyls during the early Renaissance, representations intended to provide new witness by these pagan prophetesses to the universality of the Christian message.

Raybould's The Sibyl Series of the Fifteenth Century examines the change that occurred in representations of the sibyls during the early Renaissance, representations intended to provide new witness by these pagan prophetesses to the universality of the Christian message.

What images come to mind with the words “women”, “aging”, “old”, even “elderly”? Are they stereotypes? Are there any positive associations? The thirteen contributions to this edited volume explore a broad range of images of old women, ranging from medieval “old wives” to contemporary re-imaginations of shamans and witches and empowering self-portraits. Works from medieval Europe to colonialtime Polynesia, present West Africa, Japan, and the Americas, in a multiplicity of media are explored in detail. These studies of varied representations of “old women” offer fresh perspectives and an engaging dialogue about society's values and preconceptions regarding the wisdom of our elders and the “golden years” in different times and cultures.

This encyclopedia is the perfect guide to the weird, magical, superstitious, and supernatural beliefs of people from all over the world. This book is devoted to those human beliefs that fall in the "gray zone" between science, religion, and everyday life-call them superstitious, supernatural, magical, or just wrong. In an often incomprehensible world where lightning or plague could end life quickly or drought could condemn a poor family to agonizing death, superstitious beliefs gave people a feeling of understanding or even control. They have continued to shape societies and cultures ever since. This book covers a range of superstitious, supernatural, and otherwise unusual beliefs from the ancient world to the early 19th century. More than 100 entries explain beliefs, discuss historical evidence, and explain how each belief differs across cultures. This book is a perfect gateway for anyone curious about superstitious and magical beliefs, with topics ranging from the everyday, such as dogs and iron, to legendary figures, such as Hermes Trismegistus and the Yellow Emperor.

The prescience of medieval English authors has long been a source of fascination to readers. Retrospective Prophecy and Medieval English Authorship draws attention to the ways that misinterpreted, proleptically added, or dubiously attributed prognostications influenced the reputations of famed Middle English authors. It illuminates the creative ways in which William Langland, John Gower, and Geoffrey Chaucer engaged with prophecy to cultivate their own identities and to speak to the problems of their age. Retrospective Prophecy and Medieval English Authorship examines the prophetic reputations of these well-known medieval authors whose fame made them especially subject to nationalist appropriation. Kimberly Fonzo explains that retrospectively co-opting the prophetic voices of canonical authors aids those looking to excuse or endorse key events of national history by implying that they were destined to happen. She challenges the reputations of Langland, Gower, and Chaucer as prophets of the Protestant Reformation, Richard II’s deposition, and secular Humanism, respectively. This intellectual and critical assessment of medieval authors and their works successfully makes the case that prophecy emerged and recurred as an important theme in medieval authorial self-representations.

This book restores the rich tradition of the Sibyls to the position of prominence they once held in the culture and society of the English Renaissance. The sibyls — figures from classical antiquity — played important roles in literature, scholarship and art of the period, exerting a powerful authority due to their centuries-old connection to prophetic declamations of the coming of Christ and the Apocalypse. The identity of the sibyls, however, was not limited to this particular aspect of their fame, but contained a fluid multi-layering of meanings given their prominence in ancient Greek and Roman cultures, as well as the widespread dissemination of prophecies attributed the sibyls that circulated through the oral tradition. Sibylline prophecy of the Middle Ages served as another conduit through which sibylline authority, fame, and familiarity was transmitted and enhanced. Writers as disparate as John Foxe, John Dee, Thomas Churchyard, John Fletcher, Thomas Heywood, Jane Seager, John Lyly, An Collins, William Shakespeare, and many draw upon this shared sibylline tradition to produce particular and specific meanings in their writing. This book explores the many identities, the many faces, of the prophetic sibyls as they appear in the works of English Renaissance writers.

In recent decades the concept of Mediterranean has been cited with increasing frequency in relation to the study of medieval literatures. And yet, in what sense would Dante’s Comedy be ‘Mediterranean’? Is it because of its Greek-Arabic and Islamic sources? Dante and the Mediterranean Comedy analyzes the ideological function of references to the sea in the study of the Comedy undertaken by Enrico Cerulli, a scholar of Somali-Ethiopian languages, and a colonial governor of ‘Italian East Africa.’ Then it presents novel lines of inquiry on the reception and appropriation of the poem, such as the presence of Islamic sources in early commentaries of the Comedy, and cross-cultural allusions to Dante’s Hell in some graffiti on the walls of the Spanish Inquisition prison in Palermo. The image of the Mediterranean that seeps through the poem and through the history of its circulation is vivid yet hardly idyllic.