Carol Symes - Böcker

Cities, Texts and Social Networks examines the experiences of urban life from late antiquity through the close of the fifteenth century, in regions ranging from late Imperial Rome to Muslim Syria, Iraq and al-Andalus, England, the territories of medieval Francia, Flanders, the Low Countries, Italy and Germany. Together, the volume's contributors move beyond attempts to define 'the city' in purely legal, economic or religious terms. Instead, they focus on modes of organisation, representation and identity formation that shaped the ways urban spaces were called into being, used and perceived. Their interdisciplinary analyses place narrative and archival sources in communication with topography, the built environment and evidence of sensory stimuli in order to capture sights, sounds, physical proximities and power structures. Paying close attention to the delineation of public and private spaces, and secular and sacred precincts, each chapter explores the workings of power and urban discourse and their effects on the making of meaning. The volume as a whole engages theoretical discussions of urban space - its production, consumption, memory and meaning - which too frequently misrepresent the evidence of the Middle Ages. It argues that the construction and use of medieval urban spaces could foster the emergence of medieval 'public spheres' that were fundamental components and by-products of pre-modern urban life. The resulting collection contributes to longstanding debates among historians while tackling fundamental questions regarding medieval society and the ways it is understood today. Many of these questions will resonate with scholars of postcolonial or 'non-Western' cultures whose sources and cities have been similarly marginalized in discussions of urban space and experience. And because these essays reflect a considerable geographical, temporal and methodological scope, they model approaches to the study of urban history that will interest a wide range of readers.

Medieval Arras was a thriving town on the frontier between the kingdom of France and the county of Flanders, and home to Europe's earliest surviving vernacular plays: The Play of St. Nicholas, The Courtly Lad of Arras, The Boy and the Blind Man, The Play of the Bower, and The Play about Robin and about Marion.In A Common Stage, Carol Symes undertakes a cultural archeology of these artifacts, analyzing the processes by which a handful of entertainments were conceived, transmitted, received, and recorded during the thirteenth century. She then places the resulting scripts alongside other documented performances with which plays shared a common space and vocabulary: the crying of news, publication of law, preaching of sermons, telling of stories, celebration of liturgies, and arrangement of civic spectacles. She thereby shows how groups and individuals gained access to various means of publicity, participated in public life, and shaped public opinion. And she reveals that the theater of the Middle Ages was not merely a mirror of society but a social and political sphere, a vital site for the exchange of information and ideas, and a vibrant medium for debate, deliberation, and dispute.The result is a book that closes the gap between the scattered textual remnants of medieval drama and the culture of performance from which that drama emerged. A Common Stage thus challenges the prevalent understanding of theater history while offering the first comprehensive history of a community often credited with the invention of French as a powerful literary language.

In this timely revision of their beloved #1 Western Civ text, authors Joshua Cole and Carol Symes help students see the relevance of history to their own lives and concerns. New material helps students think critically about the emergence of Western ideals, such as democracy and equality, and their intersection with the invention of race and other forms of difference. Coupled with the text are dynamic pedagogical resources, including the new Norton Illumine Ebook that promotes student accountability and improves preparation through engaging and motivational features that illuminate core concepts for students in a supportive, low-stakes environment.

In this timely revision of their beloved #1 Western Civ text, authors Joshua Cole and Carol Symes help students see the relevance of history to their own lives and concerns. New material helps students think critically about the emergence of Western ideals, such as democracy and equality, and their intersection with the invention of race and other forms of difference. Coupled with the text are dynamic pedagogical resources, including the new Norton Illumine Ebook that promotes student accountability and improves preparation through engaging and motivational features that illuminate core concepts for students in a supportive, low-stakes environment.

In this timely revision of their beloved #1 Western Civ text, authors Joshua Cole and Carol Symes help students see the relevance of history to their own lives and concerns. New material helps students think critically about the emergence of Western ideals, such as democracy and equality, and their intersection with the invention of race and other forms of difference. Coupled with the text are dynamic pedagogical resources, including the new Norton Illumine Ebook that promotes student accountability and improves preparation through engaging and motivational features that illuminate core concepts for students in a supportive, low-stakes environment.

In this timely revision of their beloved #1 Western Civ text, authors Joshua Cole and Carol Symes help students see the relevance of history to their own lives and concerns. New material helps students think critically about the emergence of Western ideals, such as democracy and equality, and their intersection with the invention of race and other forms of difference. Coupled with the text are dynamic pedagogical resources, including the new Norton Illumine Ebook that promotes student accountability and improves preparation through engaging and motivational features that illuminate core concepts for students in a supportive, low-stakes environment.

For the first time, a group of distinguished authors come together to provide an authoritative exploration of the cultural history of tragedy in the Middle Ages. Reports of the so-called death of medieval tragedy, they argue, have been greatly exaggerated; and, for the Middle Ages, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Eight essays offer a blueprint for future study as they take up the extensive but much-neglected medieval engagement with tragic genres, modes, and performances from the vantage points of gender, politics, theology, history, social theory, anthropology, philosophy, economics, and media studies. The result? A recuperated medieval tragedy that is as much a branch of literature as it is of theology, politics, law, or ethics and which, at long last, rejoins the millennium-long conversation about one of the world’s most enduring art forms.Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: forms and media; sites of performance and circulation; communities of production and consumption; philosophy and social theory; religion, ritual and myth; politics of city and nation; society and family, and gender and sexuality.

This volume explores a millennium of multilingual literary exchanges among the peoples of Sicily, the Iberian Peninsula, and North Africa: the Maghrib, or westernmost strongholds of medieval Islam. Beginning in the seventh century, Muslim expansion into the western Mediterranean initiated a new phase in the layering of heterogeneous peoples and languages in this perennial contact zone: Arabs and Berbers, Christians and Jews, Sunnī and Shīʿa Muslims, Greeks and Latins all shaped, shared, and contested identities, hybrid genealogies of knowledge, and fragile but vital political alliances. Waves of migration and the movement of scholars and poets transmitted and expanded canonical and convergent literary forms while facilitating the rise of new vernaculars and the adoption of "foreign" cultural practices and themes. These essays excavate the complexities of the literary artefacts produced in these times of turmoil, offering new perspectives on the intellectual networks and traditions that proved instrumental in overcoming the often traumatic transitions among political and/or religious regimes.

When Janet Abu-Lughod sketched the contours of a medieval “world system” in 1989, she located most communication networks in the southern hemisphere. In recent decades, however, new trends in research and new forms of evidence have complicated, enriched, and expanded this picture, geographically and chronologically. We now know that vast portions of the world were interconnected throughout the Middle Ages and, moreover, that the entire circumpolar North was a contact zone in its own right. In this volume, scholars from a range of disciplines explore the boreal globe from the late Iron Age to the seventeenth century, offering fresh perspectives that cross the frontiers of national historiographies and presenting new research on migration, trade, mapping, cultural exchange, and the interactions of humans with their environment.