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"A vivid insight into the country life and seasonal activities of the year in the later middle ages.""--Cover.
"A vivid insight into the country life and seasonal activities of the year in the later middle ages.""--Cover.
A fresh examination of how the seasons are depicted in medieval literature.
"In 1987, Ernst Aebi happened on a dismal little village in the Sahara, seven days by camel from Timbuktu. Its name was Araouane, and for centuries its abundant water supply had made it a bustling hub of the caravan routes. But now, with the region's trade all but dried up, it had been reduced to a squalid cluster of shacks with a population of 120 who found themselves virtually adrift in the desert." "It was a tableau of misery Aebi couldn't forget. He returned to Araouane with a truckload of date palms, seeds, and farm equipment, a vision of self-sufficiency he was determined to share, and an antic sense of humor that would prove to be a crucial tool. The local dialect eluded him. The villagers had never seen, let alone tasted, vegetables. It hadn't rained in more than four decades, and the water level had sunk to 170 feet below the sand. An ancient class structure supported a white merchant class that ruled the town from afar and kept in perpetual thrall the blacks who worked as their slaves mining salt." "Little by little, though, Aebi achieved success. The garden began to flourish, and those who wouldn't tend it learned they wouldn't eat. The villagers built a school, then a hotel. Former masters worked alongside former slaves, and for the first time, men alongside women. The villagers were introduced to money, and with it, to the complexities of competition and ownership, and the means as well as the hope for a better life. Most important, they tasted self-reliance, a gift that their ongoing struggles cannot erase." "Seasons of Sand is a great and often hilarious story, a real-life fable of altruism and adventure for anyone who has ever wondered whether one person can make a difference in the world."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Elegant representations of nature and the four seasons populate a wide range of Japanese genres and media—from poetry and screen painting to tea ceremonies, flower arrangements, and annual observances. In Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons, Haruo Shirane shows how, when, and why this practice developed and explicates the richly encoded social, religious, and political meanings of this imagery. Refuting the belief that this tradition reflects Japan's agrarian origins and supposedly mild climate, Shirane traces the establishment of seasonal topics to the poetry composed by the urban nobility in the eighth century. After becoming highly codified and influencing visual arts in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the seasonal topics and their cultural associations evolved and spread to other genres, eventually settling in the popular culture of the early modern period. Contrasted with the elegant images of nature derived from court poetry was the agrarian view of nature based on rural life. The two landscapes began to intersect in the medieval period, creating a complex, layered web of competing associations. Shirane discusses a wide array of representations of nature and the four seasons in many genres, originating in both the urban and rural perspective: textual (poetry, chronicles, tales), cultivated (gardens, flower arrangement), material (kimonos, screens), performative (noh, festivals), and gastronomic (tea ceremony, food rituals). He reveals how this kind of "secondary nature," which flourished in Japan's urban architecture and gardens, fostered and idealized a sense of harmony with the natural world just at the moment it was disappearing. Illuminating the deeper meaning behind Japanese aesthetics and artifacts, Shirane clarifies the use of natural images and seasonal topics and the changes in their cultural associations and function across history, genre, and community over more than a millennium. In this fascinating book, the four seasons are revealed to be as much a cultural construction as a reflection of the physical world.
Bethany Lindstrom is well on the way to achieving her career goals as an historian when her trip to Oxford goes badly awry. On an unplanned visit to Cornwall, while wandering around her enigmatic hostess's ancient home, she stumbles through an unseen portal into the fourteenth century. Stranded in 1353, Beth knows she must find a way back to her own time or face a life of falsehood and peril. But with the stern overlord Baron Michael Veryan, she is swept up into the intrigues of King Edward's court, which will test their mettle and their faith to the limits-and forever bind their lives together.