The Playful Middle Ages
Meanings of Play and Plays of Meaning: Essays in Memory of Elaine C. Block
Edited by Paul Hardwick
Love play or playing dead, wordplay or playing games – the notion of play inhabits all spheres of human activity. This collection of essays brings together international scholars from a range of disciplines to explore aspects of playfulness in the later European Middle Ages. From manuscript to performance and from the domestic to the doctrinal, the exuberance and ambiguity of verbal and visual play is interrogated in order to decode layers of meaning in texts and artefacts. These twelve papers celebrate the work of Elaine C. Block, whose dedicated study of misericords has, through countless articles and books, made the riches of this dizzying iconographic resource easily available to scholars for the first time. Her monumental Corpus on Medieval Misericords volumes will no doubt inform medieval scholars for generations to come, and those included in the present collection are both proud and grateful to be of the first generation to benefit from her work on this body of carvings which challengingly – and playfully – straddles thesometimes invisible line between the sacred and profane.
- Edited by Paul Hardwick
Other Titles in this Series
Essays in Manuscript Geography
Vernacular Manuscripts of the English West Midlands from the Conquest to the Sixteenth Century
Volume 10
Celts, Gaels, and Britons
Studies in Language and Literature from Antiquity to the Middle Ages in Honour of Patrick Sims-Williams
Volume 35
Multi-Disciplinary Approaches to Medieval Brittany, 450-1200
Connections and Disconnections
Volume 36
The Social Life of Illumination
Manuscripts, Images, and Communities in the Late Middle Ages
Volume 21
Writing and Reading in Medieval Manuscript Culture
The Translation and Transmission of the Story of Elye in Old French and Old Norse Literary Contexts
Volume 25
Grant risee?
The Medieval Comic Presence / La Presence comique medievale: Essays in Memory of Brian J. Levy
Volume 11
The Ideological Foundations of Early Irish Law and Their Reception in Anglo-Saxon England, c. 600-c. 900
Volume 37
Historical Narratives and Christian Identity on a European Periphery
Early History Writing in Northern, East-Central, and Eastern Europe (c.1070-1200)
Volume 26
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