Search results for ""King's College London School of Humanities""

At a time when the discourse of a clash of civilisations has been re-grounded anew in scaremongering and dog-whistle politics over a Hispanic "challenge" to America and a Muslim "challenge" to European societies, and in the context of the War on Terror and migration panics, evocations of al-Andalus - medieval Iberia under Islamic rule - have gained new and hotly polemic topicality, championed and contested as either exemplary models or hoodwinking myths. The essays in this volume explore how al-Andalus has been transformed into a "travelling concept": that is, a place in time that has transcended its original geographic and historical location to become a figure of thought with global reach. They show how Iberia's medieval past, where Islam, Judaism and Christianity co-existed in complex, paradoxical and productive ways, has offered individuals and communities in multiple periods and places a means of engaging critically and imaginatively with questions of religious pluralism, orientalism and colonialism, exile and migration, intercultural contact and national identity. Travelling in their turn from the medieval to the contemporary world, across Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas, and covering literary, cultural and political studies, critical Muslim and Jewish studies, they illustrate the contemporary significance of the Middle Ages as a site for collaborative interdisciplinary thinking.

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The twin themes of punishment and penance considered through both historical and literary medieval German texts. The supposed brutality of medieval punishment looms large in the popular contemporary imagination, yet this perception can obscure the diverse and nuanced reactions of medieval society to violent or criminal acts. This collectionaddresses the ways in which different approaches to punishment are depicted and discussed in written texts, focusing in particular on the often complex intersection - semantic, theoretical and theological - between punishment andpenitential practices, both self-imposed and imposed by others. Often in dialogue with theoretical approaches (for example, those of René Girard or Michel Foucault), individual essays explore a range of themes: the intersection ofthe literary representation of acts of punishment and penance with historical experience; the ways in which acts of punishment and penance engage the wishes and desires of those inflecting or witnessing them; legal and theological implications; the symbolic and communicative capital of the body. They focus on a range of texts (romance, lyric, mystical writing, saints' lives) written in German, from the twelfth to the sixteenth century. Sarah Bowden is Lecturer in German at King's College London; Annette Volfing is Professor of Medieval German Studies at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Oriel College. Contributors: Sarah Bowden, Björn Buschbeck, Sebastian Coxon, Racha Kirakosian, Andreas Kraß, Henrike Manuwald, Katharina Mertens-Fleury, Jamie Page, Aimut Suerbaum, Annette Volfing.

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