Fear and its Representations: in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

Description

Fear is a topic that appeals to a wide audience and is particularly of interest today. In the modern world, we fear war and terrorism, economic recession, and environmental degradation: these fears make up a great portion of the fabric of our daily lives. This is a volume of essays on fear and its representations in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In it, the authors raise and try to answer questions about the ways in which individuals, families, and nations five-hundred, one-thousand, or even fifteen-hundred years ago approached the idea of fear. The interdisciplinary nature of this volume and its editors (an historian of late antiquity and professor of literature of the Middle Ages) motivates an analysis of fear from a multitude of perspectives and within a host of secular and religious literature, historical treatises, scholastic works, art, and political accounts. The volume covers several main topics: Defining the Nature of Fear; Fear and Religion; Fear in Politics and Cultural Identity; Fear as a Literary and Dramatic Device; The Fears of Courtly Lovers, Knights, and Poets; Fear and the Mystic. Through its breadth, depth, and interdisciplinary focus, the present volume makes a full contribution to the study of fear in medieval and Renaissance culture for historians, art historians, students of language and philosophy and anyone interested in how people in the past have experienced fear. Introduction, p. xi Anne Scott, Cynthia Kosso The Complexity and Importance of timor in Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, p. 1 Stephen Loughlin Fear and Instinct in Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale, p. 17 L. A. J. R. Houwen Fear of Falling: Depicting the Death of Judas in Late Medieval Italy, p. 33 Janet Robson The Fear of Divine Vengeance: Mnemonic Images as a Guide to Conscience in the Late Middle Ages, p. 66 Kimberly Rivers Orthodox Fears: Anti-Inquisitorial Violence and Defining Heresy, p. 92 Susan Taylor Snyder Evangelico mucrone: With an Evangelical Sword: Fear as a Weapon in the Early Evangelization of Gaul, p. 107 Elizabeth McLuhan Fear, Loathing, and Deadly Rivalry in the Frankish Polygamous Royal Family, p. 125 Elaine M. Ragland Fear and Power in Renaissance Mediterranean Kabbalah, p. 137 Yoni Garb Kabbalistic Tocinofobia: Américo Castro, Limpieza de Sangre and The Inner Meaning of Jewish Dietary Laws, p. 152 Barry R. Mark Fear of the Supernatural as a “Pleasante and Merry Humour” in Two of Newcastle’s Comedies, p. 189 James Fitzmaurice From Fearsome to Fearful: Panurge’s Satirical Waning, p. 206 Bernd Renner Christine de Pizan’s Frightened Lovers, p. 241 Tracy Adams Gender and Fear: Malory’s Lancelot and Knightly Identity, p. 255 Dorsey Armstrong To Fear or not to Fear, that is the Question: Oswald von Wolkenstein Facing Death and Enjoying Life: Fifteenth-Century Mentalitätsgeschichte Reflected in Lyric Poetry, p. 274 Albrecht Classen Mitigations of the Fear of Hell and Purgatory in the Later Middle Ages: Julian of Norwich and Catherine of Genoa, p. 295 Steven Fanning “a hevynly joy in a dredfulle soule”: Julian of Norwich’s Articulations of Dread, p. 311 C. E. Banchich