Lament for the Dead in Fifteenth-Century Scotland

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Marsland
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Romance Narratives

This chapter explores the importance of lament for the dead within historical and romance narratives composed in Scotland between c.1438 and c.1500 in both Older Scots and Latin. The chapter looks in detail at intercalated laments for the dead included in Walter Bower’s Scotichronicon (c.1440–7) and the anonymous Liber Pluscardensis (completed c.1461) as well as in the octosyllabic Buik of Alexander (c.1437), The Wallace (c.1476–8), and Sir Gilbert Hay’s Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour (c.1460–99). The chapter traces a persistent association within these texts between lament for the dead and physical rites of commemoration such as burial and the production of monuments, arguing that lament for the dead provides a means by which reputations can be authoritatively fixed.

Written in the Heart

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Lambert
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Individual

This chapter first explores how elements of fifteenth-century devotion were transformed in sixteenth-century Nuremberg. Using a genre of print culture, the illustrated song pamphlet, it argues that devotional culture provides methodological tools with which to engage with belief. One such pamphlet, containing a hymn originally written to accompany the preaching of the Joachimsthal minister Johannes Mathesius, then provides an avenue into the re-conception of belief in resurrection in Lutheran devotional culture. Mathesius’s writings about resurrection and the power of sight and sound reveal how faith in the raising of the dead was understood to be “written in the heart” of the individual. As Mathesius’s encounter with song in the midst of tragedy confirms, the formation of belief was thus understood to be contingent on personal experience. Yet as the spread of that song across Germany confirms, communal singing also forged an understanding of belief as a tie that bound.

Aurispa, Petrarch, and Lucian: An Aspect of Renaissance Translation

1974 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Cast
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
Latin Translation ◽  
The Dead

‘A great age of literature’ remarked Ezra Pound in Make it New 'is perhaps always a great age of translation.’ In this article we will be examining a Latin translation of the twelfth Dialogue of the Dead of Lucian by the Italian humanist Giovanni Aurispa, and the influence that this translation, known generally as the Comparatio, had in Italy and in other countries of Europe, in France, in Germany, in England, in Spain, and in Bohemia. Such a translation was naturally important. Few educated people in Europe at the time we are concerned with, the fifteenth century, could, or would, read Greek. If they knew anything of a recently discovered writer like Lucian, it was precisely through Latin versions of his work produced by scholars like Aurispa.

scholarly journals THE VAMPIRLIJA HILL IN THE VILLAGE OF MIJAJLOVAC (TRSTENIK): A POSSIBLE LOCATION FOR THE BIRTHPLACE OF EUROPEAN ‘VAMPIROLOGY’

2021 ◽  
pp. 116-132
Author(s):  
ALEKSANDAR RISTIĆ
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Bram Stoker ◽  
Habsburg Empire ◽  
The West ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
Historical Figure ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Morava River ◽  
The Village

Vampires gained worldwide popularity due to the classic novel about the most famous one, Dracula, written by Bram Stoker in 1897. Bram Stoker’s Dracula has very little in common with his inspiration, the fifteenth-century Wallachian ruler Vlad III (1431‒1476), who was a real historical figure. However, some strange events involving the dead seem to have occurred in Southwest of Transylvania a few centuries after the Wallachian prince’s death. In some parts of the Habsburg Kingdom of Serbia (1718‒1739), the local Austrian authorities recorded some cases of ‘vampirism’, which Europe would be introduced to shortly afterward, along with this newly accepted word. This paper will present historical facts about one particular case recorded at the southernmost border of the Habsburg Empire, which at the time was the West Morava River. It was the case of a ‘vampire’ named Arnold Paole, who died in 1726/7 in the border village of Medveđa and whose case ‘infected’ the whole Europe with the ‘virus’ of ‘vampiromania’. The main goal of the paper is to locate the spot where one of the first ‘vampire slayings’ ever recorded could have taken place, and to direct further investigations within early modern age archaeology.

scholarly journals The art of death and childbirth in Renaissance Italy

2011 ◽  
pp. 93-98
Author(s):  
Elaine Hoysted
Keyword(s):  
Pregnant Women ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Post Partum ◽  
Vast Array ◽  
Mother And Child ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Renaissance Italy

Pregnancy was a dangerous event in the life of a fifteenth-century Florentine patrician woman. One-fifth of all deaths among females that occurred in Florence during this period were in fact related to complications in childbirth or ensuing post-partum infections. In the years 1424-25 and 1430, the Books of the Dead recorded the deaths of fifty-two women as a result of labour. As conditions for pregnant women did not improve in the ensuing half a century, childbirth remained a dangerous event for women to endure. Husbands took many precautions to ensure a successful birth as can be seen in the vast array of objects associated with this event created at this time. People turned to religion and magic in order to ensure that both the mother and child would survive this perilous process. Death in childbirth affected women from all classes and wealth did not act as a deterrent. The loss ...

Catullus' Passer as Passer

1998 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 188-194 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Ward Jones
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Physical Exertion ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
The Dead

Poem 2 of the Liber Catullianus – the first of the passer poems – was probably the poet's most famous piece. The poem presents a charming and fascinating picture of a Roman matron who is said by the poet to divert her mind from her passion by playing with her pet bird. Of this seemingly innocent picture a peculiar esoteric interpretation was offered in the time of the Italian Renaissance. Toward the end of the fifteenth century, the Florentine scholar Angelo Poliziano suggested that Catullus had woven an obscene allegory into his poem, and he supported his argument by reference to the sixth epigram of Martial's eleventh book. This epigram is a vulgar poem that ends with the words ‘passerem Catulli’. It will figure prominently in our discussion below. Poliziano only hinted at an indecent meaning. The Dutch scholar, Isaac Voss, in his Observations on Catullus published in 1684, makes the matter explicit. The Greeks, he alleges, often used the names of birds to refer to a man's penis, and similarly passer in poem is ambiguous and at one level represents the poet's penis. By this obscene interpretation, the basic allegory of the poem would be something like this. Lesbia has great familiarity with the poet's male member. She delights in playing with it and in this way seems to satisfy her erotic impulses. The poet by means of similar play would like to take similar satisfaction for himself. He cannot because masturbation gives him no pleasure. According to Voss, this allegory continues in poem 3, the famous dirge for the dead passer. Here, he declares, we should suppose that the poet wishes to represent himself as ‘confectum et exhaustum lucta Venerea et funerata… ea parte quae virum facit’ (‘worn out and exhausted by a physical exertion erotic and deadly in regard to that part which makes a person a man’).

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