Jan R. Veenstra

Karin E. Olsen

Airy Nothings contains eleven contributions on the scholarly and literary representations of the Otherworld of Faerie from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment.

Imagining the Otherworld of Faerie from the Middle Ages to the Age of Reason : Essays in Honour of Alasdair A. MacDonald

Airy Nothings

Jn Bremmer

Jr. Veenstra

Jan N. Bremmer

Deities, demons, and angels became important protagonists in the magic of the Late Antique world, and were also the main reasons for the condemnation of magic in the Christian era. Supplicatory incantations, rituals of coercion, enticing suffumigations, magical prayers and mystical songs drew spiritual powers to the humain domain. Next to the magician's desire to regulate fate and fortune, it was the communion with the spirit world that gave magic the potential to purify and even deify its practitioners. The sense of elation and the awareness of a metaphysical order caused magic to merge with philosophy (notably Neoplatonism). The heritage of Late Antique theurgy would be passed on to the Arab world, and together with classical science and learning would take root again in the Latin West in the High Middle Ages. The metamorphosis of magic laid out in this book is the transformation of ritual into occult philosophy against the background of cultural changes in Judaism, Graeco-Roman religion and Christianity. This volume, the first in the new series Groningen Studies in Cultural Change, offers the papers presented at the workshop The Metamorphosis of Magic from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period held from 22 to 24 June 2000, and organised by Jan N. Bremmer and Jan R. Veenstra. The papers have been written by scholars from such varying disciplines as classics, theology, philosophy, cultural history, and law. Their contributions shed new light upon several old obscurities; they show magic to be a significant area of culture, and they advance the case for viewing transformations in the lore and practice of magic as a barometer with which to measure cultural change.

The Metamorphosis of Magic from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period

Rudolf Suntrup

The present volume tries to do justice to the variety of self-representational strategies in the art and literature of the late medieval and early modern period by focusing on both the traditional contexts of self-definition (such as courts, schools and religious institutions) and the more innovative contexts of humanist art and literature. The essays collected in this volume represent some of the scholarly approaches to historical testimonies of self-representation and self-fashioning, and hence deal with the literary, artistic, philosophical and theological conceptions of the self. They are preceded by a more general essay indexing the ways in which self-representational texts, ego-documents and self-testimonies should be defined. 'Self-Fashioning' bzw. 'Personenselbstdarstellung' als kultureller Typus charakterisieren das 15. und 16. Jahrhundert in einer besonderen Weise, die für das Verständnis des kulturellen Wandels im Übergang zur Frühen Neuzeit als überaus wichtig erkannt worden ist. Die in diesem Sammelband vereinten Tagungsbeiträge von Germanisten, Romanisten, Kunsthistorikern, Latinisten, Niederlandisten und Humanismusforschern behandeln das Thema in theoretischer Exposition sowie unter den Aspekten der literarischen Personencharakteristik und Selbstinszenierung, des künstlerischen Selbstverständnisses und philosophischer bzw. frömmigkeitstheologischer Personenkonzepte.

Personen(selbst)darstellung

Arie Johan Vanderjagt

Martin Grosman

Selected Proceedings of the International Conference, Groningen 6-9 November 1997

The Growth of Authority in the Medieval West

This volume presents a critical edition of Laurens Pignon's treatise "Contre les devineurs" (1411) and examines its literary and historical context of courtly magic and astrology in Burgundy and France during the reign of Charles VI.

Text and Context of Laurens Pignon's Contre Les Devineurs (1411)

Magic and Divination at the Courts of Burgundy and France

Für den mittelalterlichen Menschen waren das Bewusstsein und der Lebensalltag vom Glauben an das konkret vorgestellte Jenseits in einer Selbstverständlichkeit und Intensität geprägt, die für den modernen Menschen kaum noch nachvollziehbar ist. Wenngleich die Bildsprache vom 'Himmel' und die Rede vom 'Himmel auf Erden' heute gerade im außerreligiösen Kontext - als Buchtitel, im Schlager, in Redensarten und im Werbetext - verbreitet ist, wird in diesem thematisch geschlossenen Tagungsband in Einzelstudien der Frage nachgegangen, wie im Spätmittelalter und im Übergang zur Frühen Neuzeit die Idealvorstellung vom 'Himmel' auf bestimmte Formen individueller Lebensführung, gesellschaftlicher Organisation und künstlerischer Gestaltung einwirkt. Konkret fassbar wird dies etwa in Bereichen von Politik und Gesellschaft (Herrscher, Staat, Schulwesen, Theokratie), in religiöser Praxis (zweckbestimmte Armenfürsorge, Wallfahrt) und in bestimmten Kunstformen (Meistergesang, geistliches Lied, allegorische Dichtung). Der Band enthält sechs deutschsprachige und drei englische Beiträge. For medieval man heaven was a concrete reality. Belief in the afterlife was self-evident and intense in a way that is difficult to imagine for modern man who knows heaven sooner from booktitles, songs, figures of speech or advertisements than from every-day experience. The contributions to this volume of proceedings, however, deal with the question how in the late-medieval and early-modern period the idealized image of heaven influenced life, society and art. The various essays deal with the impact of this idealism on politics and society (ruler, state, education, theocracy), on religious practice (poor relief, pilgrimage), and on different art forms (Meistergesang, religious song, and allegorical poetry). The volume contains six German and three English contributions.

Heaven on earth

Papers presented at two conferences with the theme Konstruktion von Gegenwart und Zukunft in der Freuhen Neuzeit in 2004.

Jan R. Veenstra

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