scholarly journals Three Takes on One Legend: Polyphony in Muscovite Court Culture

2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-52
Author(s):  
Sergei Bogatyrev
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Nadia Maria El Cheikh

This chapter discusses how research into court culture is an essential part of the growth in historical anthropology. The main historiographical developments have focused first, on the ritual and symbolic aspects of rulership; and second, on the personal and domestic world. Any historical investigation of the court faces the problem of definition because courts were so diverse and also because any ruler's court could be different depending on the occasion. This may explain why it is that court studies are almost nonexistent for various periods of Islamic history. This is the same for the Byzantine court as well as the Abbasid society: the Byzantines, like the Abbasids, did not isolate the court as a social and cultural phenomenon worthy of literary attention; rather, court culture was a fact of life which those who lived in it did not feel the need to articulate.


Author(s):  
Erika Fischer-Lichte

The introduction ‘Philhellenism and Theatromania’ retraces the emergence of these two phenomena in the German middle class. The year 1755 marks a watershed in this regard: it saw the publication of J. J. Winckelmann’s treatise Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks and the premiere of G. E. Lessing’s first domestic tragedy Miß Sara Sampson. Both share the common root and motivation once and for all to banish Frenchified German court culture. While Winckelmann’s treatise praised the ‘noble simplicity’ and ‘quiet greatness’ of the Greek masterpieces, Lessing’s play advocated new family values and the ideal of ‘naturalness’ as the true virtues of the middle class. The merging of Philhellenism as the cult of beauty with theatromania as the quest for identifying in a social group and as an individual provided the basic condition for staging Greek tragedies.


Author(s):  
Andrew Kahn ◽  
Mark Lipovetsky ◽  
Irina Reyfman ◽  
Stephanie Sandler

The chapter contextualizes the literary developments of the second half of the seventeenth century, including the changes in education and print culture. A new vision of court culture, expanding administration, and ecclesiastical reforms provided new contexts for writing, as well as innovations in the theater and in poetry. The spaces represented in Russian literature were, as previously, the monastery and the church. The court moved into the limelight as a center of cultural production. The social reality of the period did not entirely foster the creation of civic spaces or an autonomous literary field, and writing had to adapt to the control of the authorities. Opportunities for the ritual performance of the liturgy and at court expanded considerably during the last decades of the seventeenth under the aegis of Tsar Aleksei. Orthodox proponents of neo-humanist culture who worked in Moscow succeeded in transforming the uses of rhetoric during ceremonial occasions.


2003 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 620
Author(s):  
Joseph F. Patrouch ◽  
Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly
Keyword(s):  

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Vanessa Lyon

Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens argues that the Baroque painter, propagandist, and diplomat, Peter Paul Rubens, was not only aware of rapidly shifting religious and cultural attitudes toward women, but actively engaged in shaping them. Today, Rubens’s paintings continue to be used -- and abused -- to prescribe and proscribe certain forms of femininity. Repositioning some of the artist’s best-known works within seventeenth-century Catholic theology and female court culture, this book provides a feminist corrective to a body of art historical scholarship in which studies of gender and religion are often mutually exclusive. Moving chronologically through Rubens’s lengthy career, the author shows that, in relation to the powerful women in his life, Rubens figured the female form as a transhistorical carrier of meaning whose devotional and rhetorical efficacy was heightened rather than diminished by notions of female difference and particularity.


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