This volume explores the diverse manifestations and uses of pleasure in medieval culture. Pleasure is a sensation, an affirmation, a practice, and is at the core of the medieval worldview, no less than pain. Applying a variety of methodological perspectives, the essays collected here analyse the role of pleasure in relation to a variety of subjects such as the human body, love, relationships, education, food, friendship, morality, devotion, and mysticism. They also integrate a wide range of sources including literature (monastic to courtly), medical texts, illuminated prayer books, iconography, and theatrical plays. Each document, each discipline, and thus each essay combine to provide a complex and diversified picture of medieval joys and delights - a picture that shows the extent to which pleasure is engrained in the period's culture. This collection shows how pleasure in the Middle Ages is at once a coveted feeling and a constant moral concern, both the object and the outcome of a constant negotiation between earthly and divine imperatives.
Author(s): Naama Cohen Hanegbi, Piroska Nagy (eds.)
Series: International Medieval Research, 24
Publisher: Brepols
Year: 2018
Language: English
Pages: 410
List of Illustrations viii
Acknowledgements ix
Abbreviations x
Pleasure in the Middle Ages: An Introduction / Naama Cohen-Hanegbi and Piroska Nagy xi
Pleasured Bodies
Reflections on High Medieval Monastic Pleasures / Esther Cohen 3
'It Is Full Merry in Heaven': The Pleasurable Connotations of 'Merriment' in Late Medieval England / Philippa C. Maddern 21
The Pleasures and Joys of the Humoral Body in Medieval Medicine / Fernando Salmón 39
Bodily Pleasures: Late Medieval Medical Counsel in Context / Naama Cohen-Hanegbi 59
Visual Pleasure and the Illuminated Prayer Book / Maeve Doyle 77
Abbasid Concubines and Slave Courtesans in 'Adab' Discourse: Cultural Mediators for an Ethical Appreciation of Pleasure / Karen Moukheiber 113
Courts and Pleasures: The Neuroscience of Pleasure and the Pursuit of Favour in Twelfth-Century Courts / William M. Reddy 131
Didactic Pleasures
Taking Pleasure in Virtues and Vices: Alcuin's Manual for Count Wido / Barbara H. Rosenwein 167
Sin, the Business of Pleasure, and the Pleasure of Reading: Exemplary Narratives and Other Forms of Sinful Pleasure in William Peraldus's 'Summa de vitiis' / Richard Newhauser 181
The Role of Pleasure in the Acquisition of Good Virtues: Giles of Rome's Idea of Education in his 'De regimine principum' (c. 1279) / Noëlle-Laetitia Perret 203
Pleasure as an Affective Tool in Pastoral Care: The Cases of Simone Fidati and Richard Rolle in Fourteenth-Century Italy and England / Xavier Biron-Ouellet 225
Hell: The Pleasure of the Suffering of Others from Visions of the Afterlife to Religious Theatre / Élyse Dupras 249
Pleasures in God
Holy Gluttons: Bede and the Carolingians on the Pleasures of Reading / Zachary Giuliano 281
On Leeks and Onions: Pope Gregory VII and the Rejection of Pleasure / Ken A. Grant 309
Intoxication and the Song of Songs: Bernard of Clairvaux and the Rediscovery of Origen in the Twelfth Century / Constant J. Mews 329
Pleasure in Medieval Christian Mystical Literature: The Analysis of John of Ruusbroec (1281–1381) and Hadewijch (Thirteenth Century) / Rob Faesen 353
Index 379
