William M. Reddy
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226706269
- eISBN:
- 9780226706283
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226706283.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, World Medieval History
In the twelfth century, the Catholic Church attempted a thoroughgoing reform of marriage and sexual behavior aimed at eradicating sexual desire from Christian lives. Seeking a refuge from the very ...
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In the twelfth century, the Catholic Church attempted a thoroughgoing reform of marriage and sexual behavior aimed at eradicating sexual desire from Christian lives. Seeking a refuge from the very serious condemnations of the Church and relying on a courtly culture that was already preoccupied with honor and secrecy, European poets, romance writers, and lovers devised a vision of love as something quite different from desire. Romantic love was thus born as a movement of covert resistance. This illuminates the birth of a cultural movement that managed to regulate selfish desire and render it innocent—or innocent enough. It strikes out from this historical moment on an international exploration of love, contrasting the medieval development of romantic love in Europe with contemporaneous eastern traditions in Bengal and Orissa, and in Heian Japan between the 9th and 12th centuries, where one finds no trace of an opposition between love and desire. In this comparative framework, this text tells a tale about the rise and fall of various practices of longing, underscoring the uniqueness of the European concept of sexual desire.Less
In the twelfth century, the Catholic Church attempted a thoroughgoing reform of marriage and sexual behavior aimed at eradicating sexual desire from Christian lives. Seeking a refuge from the very serious condemnations of the Church and relying on a courtly culture that was already preoccupied with honor and secrecy, European poets, romance writers, and lovers devised a vision of love as something quite different from desire. Romantic love was thus born as a movement of covert resistance. This illuminates the birth of a cultural movement that managed to regulate selfish desire and render it innocent—or innocent enough. It strikes out from this historical moment on an international exploration of love, contrasting the medieval development of romantic love in Europe with contemporaneous eastern traditions in Bengal and Orissa, and in Heian Japan between the 9th and 12th centuries, where one finds no trace of an opposition between love and desire. In this comparative framework, this text tells a tale about the rise and fall of various practices of longing, underscoring the uniqueness of the European concept of sexual desire.
Kathryn M. Ringrose
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- March 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226720159
- eISBN:
- 9780226720166
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226720166.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, World Medieval History
This book reevaluates the place of eunuchs in Byzantium, using the modern concept of gender as a social construct to identify eunuchs as a distinct gender and to illustrate how gender was defined in ...
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This book reevaluates the place of eunuchs in Byzantium, using the modern concept of gender as a social construct to identify eunuchs as a distinct gender and to illustrate how gender was defined in the Byzantine world. At the same time, the author explores the changing role of the eunuch in Byzantium from 600 to 1100. Accepted for generations as a legitimate and functional part of Byzantine civilization, eunuchs were prominent in both the imperial court and the church. They were distinctive in physical appearance, dress, and manner, and were considered uniquely suited for important roles in Byzantine life. Transcending conventional notions of male and female, eunuchs lived outside of normal patterns of procreation and inheritance and were assigned a unique capacity for mediating across social and spiritual boundaries, which allowed them to perform tasks from which prominent men and women were constrained, making them, in essence, perfect servants.Less
This book reevaluates the place of eunuchs in Byzantium, using the modern concept of gender as a social construct to identify eunuchs as a distinct gender and to illustrate how gender was defined in the Byzantine world. At the same time, the author explores the changing role of the eunuch in Byzantium from 600 to 1100. Accepted for generations as a legitimate and functional part of Byzantine civilization, eunuchs were prominent in both the imperial court and the church. They were distinctive in physical appearance, dress, and manner, and were considered uniquely suited for important roles in Byzantine life. Transcending conventional notions of male and female, eunuchs lived outside of normal patterns of procreation and inheritance and were assigned a unique capacity for mediating across social and spiritual boundaries, which allowed them to perform tasks from which prominent men and women were constrained, making them, in essence, perfect servants.
