Peter J. A. Jones
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- December 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780198843542
- eISBN:
- 9780191879364
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198843542.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Medieval History, Social History
Towards the end of the twelfth century, powerful images of laughing kings and saints began to appear in texts circulating at the English royal court. At the same time, contemporaries began ...
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Towards the end of the twelfth century, powerful images of laughing kings and saints began to appear in texts circulating at the English royal court. At the same time, contemporaries began celebrating the wit, humour, and laughter of King Henry II (r.1154-89) and his martyred Archbishop of Canterbury, Saint Thomas Becket (d.1170). Taking a broad genealogical approach, Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century traces the emergence of this powerful laughter through an immersive study of medieval intellectual, literary, social, religious, and political debates. Focusing on a cultural renaissance in England, the book situates laughter at the heart of the defining transformations of the second half of the 1100s. With an expansive survey of theological and literary texts, bringing a range of unedited manuscript material to light in the process, the book exposes how twelfth-century writers came to connect laughter with spiritual transcendence and justice, and how this connection gave humour a unique political and spiritual power in both text and action. Ultimately, the book argues that England’s popular images of laughing kings and saints effectively reinstated a sublime charismatic authority, something truly rebellious at a moment in history when bureaucracy and codification were first coming to dominate European political life.Less
Towards the end of the twelfth century, powerful images of laughing kings and saints began to appear in texts circulating at the English royal court. At the same time, contemporaries began celebrating the wit, humour, and laughter of King Henry II (r.1154-89) and his martyred Archbishop of Canterbury, Saint Thomas Becket (d.1170). Taking a broad genealogical approach, Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century traces the emergence of this powerful laughter through an immersive study of medieval intellectual, literary, social, religious, and political debates. Focusing on a cultural renaissance in England, the book situates laughter at the heart of the defining transformations of the second half of the 1100s. With an expansive survey of theological and literary texts, bringing a range of unedited manuscript material to light in the process, the book exposes how twelfth-century writers came to connect laughter with spiritual transcendence and justice, and how this connection gave humour a unique political and spiritual power in both text and action. Ultimately, the book argues that England’s popular images of laughing kings and saints effectively reinstated a sublime charismatic authority, something truly rebellious at a moment in history when bureaucracy and codification were first coming to dominate European political life.
Elizabeth A. Castelli
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780520292086
- eISBN:
- 9780520965638
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520292086.003.0016
- Subject:
- Religion, Early Christian Studies
One way of thinking about the last decades of scholarship on late ancient Christianity is to notice the effort to disentangle the historiographical project from the theological one. This effort has ...
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One way of thinking about the last decades of scholarship on late ancient Christianity is to notice the effort to disentangle the historiographical project from the theological one. This effort has travelled alongside a series of overlapping intellectual (and political) turns within the humanities and qualitative social sciences: the feminist turn, the literary turn, the cultural turn, and most recently (ironically enough) the turn to religion. How do these interpretive transformations change the practice of reading ancient sources? By taking up The Life of Melania the Younger, this chapter explores the critical differences implied and imposed by this series of interpretive turns. The reading of the Life interweaves questions of gender, power, and the body; genre, rhetoric, and audience; materiality and social relations; the production of subjectivity through the repetitions of ritual and piety; and reflections on the future of feminist critique in the history of religion.Less
One way of thinking about the last decades of scholarship on late ancient Christianity is to notice the effort to disentangle the historiographical project from the theological one. This effort has travelled alongside a series of overlapping intellectual (and political) turns within the humanities and qualitative social sciences: the feminist turn, the literary turn, the cultural turn, and most recently (ironically enough) the turn to religion. How do these interpretive transformations change the practice of reading ancient sources? By taking up The Life of Melania the Younger, this chapter explores the critical differences implied and imposed by this series of interpretive turns. The reading of the Life interweaves questions of gender, power, and the body; genre, rhetoric, and audience; materiality and social relations; the production of subjectivity through the repetitions of ritual and piety; and reflections on the future of feminist critique in the history of religion.
