Beautiful death [[electronic resource] ] : Jewish poetry and martyrdom in medieval France / / Susan L. Einbinder

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910455260003321
• Autore: Einbinder Susan L. <1954->
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Princeton, N.J., : Princeton University Press, c2002
• ISBN: 1-282-15778-7; 9786612157783; 1-4008-2525-3
• Edizione: [Course Book]
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (232 p.)
• Collana: Jews, Christians, and Muslims from the ancient to the modern world
• Disciplina: 892.4/0938296
• Soggetti: Hebrew literature, Medieval - France, Northern - History and criticism; Martyrdom in literature; Martyrdom - Judaism; Judaism - France, Northern - History - To 1500; Jews - France, Northern - History - To 1500; Jews - Persecutions - France, Northern; Electronic books.
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Description based upon print version of record.
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references (p. [189]-209) and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Acknowledgments -- INTRODUCTION: The Medieval Poetry of Jewish Martyrdom -- ONE. Faith and Fury: Medieval Jewish Martyrological Poetry and Resistance to Conversion -- TWO. "The Fire Does Not Burn": The Emergence of a Martyrological Motif -- THREE. Burning Jewish Books -- FOUR. Wheels within Wheels: Literature, History, and Methodology -- FIVE. Une Bele Qedushah: Troyes 1288 -- SIX. Jonathan and His Magic Book: Paris 1290 -- Epilogue -- Bibliography -- Index
• Sommario/riassunto: When Crusader armies on their way to the Holy Land attacked Jewish communities in the Rhine Valley, many Jews chose suicide over death at the hands of Christian mobs. With their defiant deaths, the medieval Jewish martyr was born. With the literary commemoration of the victims, Jewish martyrology followed. Beautiful Death examines the evolution of a long-neglected corpus of Hebrew poetry, the laments ; reflecting the specific conditions of Jewish life in northern France. The poems offer insight into everyday life and into the ways medieval French Jews responded to persecution. They also suggest that poetry was used to encourage resistance to intensifying pressures to convert. The educated Jewish elite in northern France was highly acculturated. Their poetry--particularly that emerging from the innovative Tosafist schools--reflects their engagement with the vernacular renaissance unfolding around them, as well as conscious and unconscious absorption of Christian popular beliefs and hagiographical conventions. At the same time, their extraordinary poems signal an increasingly harsh repudiation of Christianity's sacred symbols and beliefs. They reveal a complex relationship to Christian culture as Jews internalized elements of medieval culture even while expressing a powerful revulsion against the forms and beliefs of Christian life. This gracefully written study crosses traditional boundaries of history and literature and of Jewish and general medieval scholarship. Focusing on specific incidents of persecution and the literary commemorations they produced, it offers unique insights into the historical conditions in which these poems were written and performed.

Contraband guides : race, transatlantic culture, and the arts in the Civil War era / / Paul H. D. Kaplan

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910809744003321
• Autore: Kaplan Paul H. D (Paul Henry Daniel), <1952->
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: University Park, Pennsylvania : , : The Pennsylvania State University Press, , [2020]; ©2020
• ISBN: 0-271-08820-6; 0-271-08822-2
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (313 pages)
• Disciplina: 704.0396073
• Soggetti: African American art - European influences; African American art - 19th century; Art, American - 19th century; African Americans in art - History - 19th century; Art and race - History - 19th century; Black people in art - History - 19th century
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Front matter -- Contents -- List of illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1 Representations of People of Color in Nineteenth-Century American Accounts of Italian Travel -- 2 “A Mulatto Sculptor from New Orleans” -- 3 “The Black Man To-day Means Liberty” -- 4 “Something American” -- 5 Old Masters -- 6 Contraband Guide -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index
• Sommario/riassunto: In his best-selling travel memoir, The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain punningly refers to the black man who introduces him to Venetian Renaissance painting as a “contraband guide,” a term coined to describe fugitive slaves who assisted Union armies during the Civil War. By means of this and similar case studies, Paul H. D. Kaplan documents the ways in which American cultural encounters with Europe and its venerable artistic traditions influenced nineteenth-century concepts of race in the United States.Americans of the Civil War era were struck by the presence of people of color in European art and society, and ; American artists and authors, both black and white, adapted and transformed European visual material to respond to the particular struggles over the identity of African Americans. Taking up the work of both well- and lesser-known artists and writers—such as the travel writings of Mark Twain and William Dean Howells, the paintings of German American Emanuel Leutze, the epistolary exchange between John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton, newspaper essays written by Frederick Douglass and William J. Wilson, and the sculpture of freed slave Eugène Warburg—Kaplan lays bare how racial attitudes expressed in mid-nineteenth-century American art were deeply inflected by European traditions. By highlighting the contributions people of black African descent made to the fine arts in the United States during this period, along with the ways in which they were represented, Contraband Guides provides a fresh perspective on the theme of race in Civil War–era American art. It will appeal to art historians, to specialists in African American studies and American studies, and to general readers interested in American art and African American history.