Search results for ""Author John V. Fleming""

In this study of Giovanni Bellini's great masterpiece, the so-called Frick St. Francis, John V. Fleming moves beyond earlier discussions of the work to offer a detailed and comprehensive iconographic analysis, with the further intention of exploring the nature of the medieval Franciscan imagination and showing how fundamental Franciscan ideas ideas often by nature more poetic and pictorial than discursive found powerful expression in word and image. Originally published in 1983. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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In The Dark Side of the Enlightenment, John V. Fleming shows how the impulses of the European Enlightenment—generally associated with great strides in the liberation of human thought from superstition and traditional religion—were challenged by tenacious religious ideas or channeled into the “darker” pursuits of the esoteric and the occult. His engaging topics include the stubborn survival of the miraculous, the Enlightenment roles of Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry, and the widespread pursuit of magic and alchemy. Though we tend not to associate what was once called alchemy with what we now call chemistry, Fleming shows that the difference is merely one of linguistic modernization. Alchemy was once the chemistry, of Arabic derivation, and its practitioners were among the principal scientists and physicians of their ages. No point is more important for understanding the strange and fascinating figures in this book than the prestige of alchemy among the learned men of the age. Fleming follows some of these complexities and contradictions of the “Age of Lights” into the biographies of two of its extraordinary offspring. The first is the controversial wizard known as Count Cagliostro, the “Egyptian” freemason, unconventional healer, and alchemist known most infamously for his ambiguous association with the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, which history has viewed as among the possible harbingers of the French Revolution and a major contributing factor in the growing unpopularity of Marie Antoinette. Fleming also reviews the career of Julie de Krüdener, the sentimental novelist, Pietist preacher, and political mystic who would later become notorious as a prophet. Impressively researched and wonderfully erudite, this rich narrative history sheds light on some lesser-known mental extravagances and beliefs of the Enlightenment era and brings to life some of the most extraordinary characters ever encountered either in history or fiction.

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This textual and intertextual analysis of the dialogue in Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose combines specific close readings of texts with a rich theoretical argument to establish Reason's moral primacy in the poem's economy. Originally published in 1984. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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Fleming masterfully demonstrates Camões's debt to, and participation in, the long and continuing traditions of "spiritual" or allegorical scriptural exegesis in the European Middle Ages and Renaissance. Second in its fame only to the Lusiads within Camões's large body of poetry, "Sôbolos rios" ("Babylon and Zion") in redondilhas is a philosophically ambitious masterwork of Christian humanism that draws from the psalm Super flumina Babylonis both a general theory of poetry and an intensely focused meditation upon the shape of an individual poet's career. Bringing to bear upon the poem the several learned traditions the poet demands, Fleming's study relates the poem to the traditions of allegorical scriptural exegesis characteristic of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Specific subjects include the centrality of the psalms and the image of David to European poets, therelation of pagan myth to biblical truth, the complexity and purposefulness of Camoes's intertextual strategies, the underappreciated influence on Camões of Juan Boscán, the exegetical control of the poem's elaborate numerological schemes, and the concept of palinode as literary genre and personal moral statement. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature emeritus at Princeton University.

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Since the Roman de la Rose had tremendous influence on the poetry of the fourteenth century, particularly on the works of Deschamps, Machaut, Froissart, and Chaucer, Professor Fleming maintains that it is important for the modern reader to understand what this influential moral satire meant to readers of the medieval period. Basing his interpretation in part on iconographic analysis of the illuminations found in more than one hundred manuscript copies of the poem, he advances a "medieval" reading of the poem. Other tools used by Mr. Fleming to get at the meaning of the poem include a study of the mythographic tradition, a logical and rhetorical analysis of the text, and an examination of formal exegetical documents of the late Middle Ages, especially the Old French commentary on the Echecs Amoureux. Originally published in 1969. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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