Defining Acts considers how the surviving English plays of the fifteenth century represent and transform competing late-medieval practices of interpretation. These works take up a series of contests over who could legitimately determine the meaning of texts - men or women, clerics or laity, rulers or subjects, Christians or Jews - and stage these texts for audiences far beyond their original academic contexts. Ruth Nisse focuses in particular on how theater translates the temporal ideas of textual exegesis into spatial models and politics. She situates medieval drama both in its vernacular...
Defining Acts considers how the surviving English plays of the fifteenth century represent and transform competing late-medieval practices of interpre...
Defining Acts considers how the surviving English plays of the fifteenth century represent and transform competing late-medieval practices of interpretation. These works take up a series of contests over who could legitimately determine the meaning of texts - men or women, clerics or laity, rulers or subjects, Christians or Jews - and stage these texts for audiences far beyond their original academic contexts. of textual exegesis into spatial models and politics. She situates medieval drama both in its vernacular literary setting, as a genre composed against the same cultural background as...
Defining Acts considers how the surviving English plays of the fifteenth century represent and transform competing late-medieval practices of interpre...
Jewish and Christian authors of the High Middle Ages not infrequently came into dialogue or conflict with each other over traditions drawn from ancient writings outside of the bible. Circulating in Hebrew and Latin translations, these included the two independent versions of the Testament of Naphtali in which the patriarch has a vision of the Diaspora, a shipwreck that scatters the twelve tribes. The Christian narrative is linear and ends in salvation; the Jewish narrative is circular and pessimistic. For Ruth Nisse, this is an emblematic text that illuminates relationships between...
Jewish and Christian authors of the High Middle Ages not infrequently came into dialogue or conflict with each other over traditions drawn from anc...