Trees As Symbol and Metaphor in the Middle Ages

Trees As Symbol and Metaphor in the Middle Ages
Author: Michael Bintley
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2024-03-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 1843846640

Forests, with their interlacing networks of trees and secret patterns of communication, are powerful entities for thinking-with. A majestic terrestrial community of arboreal others, their presence echoes, entangles, and resonates deeply with the human world. The essays collected here aim to highlight human encounters with the forest and its trees at the time of the European Middle Ages, when, whether symbol and metaphor, or actual and real, their lofty boughs were weighted with meaning. The chapters interrogate the pre-Anthropocene environment, reflecting on trees as metaphors for kinship and knowledge as they appear in literary, historical, art-historical, and philosophical sources. They examine images of trees and trees in-themselves across a range of environmental, material, and intellectual contexts, and consider how humans used arboreal and rhizomatic forms to negotiate bodies of knowledge and processes of transition. Looking beyond medieval Europe, they include discussion of parallel developments in the Islamic world and that of the Māori, the indigenous people of New Zealand.

The Tree

The Tree
Author: Pippa Salonius
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre: Art, Medieval
ISBN: 9782503548395

With its vital character - growing, flowering, extending its roots into the ground, and its branches and leaves to the sky - the tree is a polyvalent metaphor, a suggestive symbol, and an allegorical subject. During the Middle Ages, a number of iconographic schemata were based on the image and structure of the tree, including the Tree of Jesse and the Tree of Virtues and Vices. From the late eleventh century onwards such formulae were increasingly used as devices for organizing knowledge and representing theoretical concepts. Despite the abstraction inherent in these schemata, however, the semantic qualities of trees persist in their usage. The analysis of different manifestations of trees in the Middle Ages is highly instructive for visual, intellectual, and cultural history. Essays in this volume concentrate on the formative period for arboreal imagery in the medieval West, that is, the eleventh to fifteenth centuries. Using a range of methodological strategies and examining material from different media, ranging from illuminated manuscripts to wall painting, stained glass windows, and monumental sculpture, the articles in this volume show how different arboreal structures were conceived, employed, and appropriated by their specific contexts, how they functioned in their original framework, and how they were perceived by their audience.

The Tree of Life and Arboreal Aesthetics in Early Modern Literature

The Tree of Life and Arboreal Aesthetics in Early Modern Literature
Author: Victoria Bladen
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2021-10-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000454819

The Tree of Life and Arboreal Aesthetics in Early Modern Literature explores the vital motif of the tree of life and what it meant to early modern writers who drew from its long histories in biblical, classical and folkloric contexts, giving rise to a language of trees, an arboreal aesthetics. An ancient symbol of immortality, the tree of life was appropriated by Christian ideology and iconography to express ideas about Christ; however, the concept also migrated beyond religious doctrine. Ideas circulating around the tree of life enabled writers to imagine and articulate ideas of death and rebirth, loss and regeneration, the condition of the political state and personal states of the soul through arboreal metaphors and imagery. The motif could be used to sacralise landscapes, such as the garden, orchard or country estate, blurring the lines between contemporary green spaces and the spiritual and poetic imaginary. Located within the field of environmental humanities, and intersecting with ecocriticism and critical plant studies, this volume outlines a comprehensive history of the tree of life and offers interdisciplinary readings of focus texts by Shakespeare, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Aemilia Lanyer, Andrew Marvell and Ralph Austen. It includes consideration of related ideas and motifs, such as the tree of Jesse and the Green Man, illuminating the rich histories and meanings that emerge when an understanding of the tree of life and arboreal aesthetics are brought to the analysis of early modern literary texts and their representations of green spaces, both physical and metaphysical.

Aromatree

Aromatree
Author: Salvatore Battaglia
Publisher: Black Pepper Creative
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2019-09-04
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 0648260631

Aromatherapy is one of the most popular forms of natural therapies available to us. What makes essential oils so exciting is that they are the only ‘plant-based remedies’ that work on all levels of our wellbeing — our physical, emotional, mental and spiritual wellbeing. As an aromatherapy educator, I often notice how frustrated people become when they have to learn the individual properties and actions of essential oils. The aromatree identifies the relationships that exist between the individual essential oils and the different parts of a plant such as leaves, roots, resin, wood, fruits, seed or flowers. In Aromatree, we examine the relationship and pattern between the botany of the plant, traditional folklore, symbolism, mythology of plants, aroma, chemistry, pharmacology, essential oil safety, our psyche, our personality, the chakras, the energetics according to traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurveda, and blending tips. Aromatree embraces all aspects of aromatherapy. Whether you are a beginner or a professional aromatherapist, you will gain an incredible insight into using essential oils.

An African Tree of Life

An African Tree of Life
Author: Thomas G. Christensen
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2015-12-30
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1498278663

An African Tree of Life demonstrates how mission involves not only a "bringing-to" a people, but a "discovering-of" those deep symbols in human culture and God's creation that, in the light of the gospel, draw humanity to Christ. This book, in a scholarly yet intriguing way, explores the stories and rituals of the Gbaya people of the Cameroon and the Central African Republic. These deep symbols are typically centered not in the esoteric or exotic but in the familiar and everyday. Christensen focuses on the especial importance of the peace-bringing tree of life--the sore tree--central to the lives and worship of the Gbaya. "Gbaya Christians," says Christensen, "offer to North American Christians fresh and hope-filled images, rich metaphors, new and yet familiar to us." Thus, An African Tree of Life is an important book not only for theologians, missiologists, and Africanists but for all those concerned with issues of contextualization and seeking life-giving symbols in the quest to communicate the gospel message.

Lines of Thought

Lines of Thought
Author: Ayelet Even-Ezra
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2021-04-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 022674311X

We think with objects—we conduct our lives surrounded by external devices that help us recall information, calculate, plan, design, make decisions, articulate ideas, and organize the chaos that fills our heads. Medieval scholars learned to think with their pages in a peculiar way: drawing hundreds of tree diagrams. Lines of Thought is the first book to investigate this prevalent but poorly studied notational habit, analyzing the practice from linguistic and cognitive perspectives and studying its application across theology, philosophy, law, and medicine. These diagrams not only allow a glimpse into the thinking practices of the past but also constitute a chapter in the history of how people learned to rely on external devices—from stone to parchment to slide rules to smartphones—for recording, storing, and processing information. Beautifully illustrated throughout with previously unstudied and unedited diagrams, Lines of Thought is a historical overview of an important cognitive habit, providing a new window into the world of medieval scholars and their patterns of thinking.

Enter the King

Enter the King
Author: Gordon Kipling
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 422
Release: 1998
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780198117612

This study describes for the first time the ritual purposes, symbolic vocabulary, and quasi-dramatic form of one late medieval courtly festival, the royal entry. Although the royal entry as a formal ceremony can be traced back as an unbroken tradition from late Classical times through to the Renaissance, Kipling begins where the royal entry adopts pageantry as its essential medium in the late fourteenth century.

Thinking Queerly

Thinking Queerly
Author: Jes Battis
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2021-06-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501515357

Why do we love wizards? Where do these magical figures come from? Thinking Queerly traces the wizard from medieval Arthurian literature to contemporary YA adaptations. By exploring the link between Merlin and Harry Potter, or Morgan le Fay and Sabrina, readers will see how the wizard offers spaces of hope and transformation for young readers. In particular, this book examines how wizards think differently, and how this difference can resonate with both LGBTQ and neurodivergent readers, who’ve been told they don’t fit in.