In literature, culture, history, philosophy and arts of classical and Renaissance Europe, a certain thematic event can probably be traced through how people learned to cope with life, read, accumulate cultural capitals, fight ideologies, become smart, and turn into a happy man, a real human being. In this volume, the path our authors have taken is as versatile as life can have been. Exactly how people learned and what subjects appeared to them as having most powerful impact on material and spiritual life? We follow contemporary theory of cultural studies, find traces and grafts from texts, cover as many materials as possible, and earnestly deal with individual work and people. We hope to reach conclusions on how early European individuals tried to blend into and improve community life through private learnings. The joint effort is admirable in that petit histoire in educational study still has its superb edge: Compared with the self-sustaining vision in grand historical scholarship, our voice is perhaps more refined, allowing more space for intimacy. And it is perhaps more accommodating, more tolerant. We can fall in love with how it may sound, as if it comes from the whispering gallery of Derridean workshop of material reality, dialectical truth, and Foucault’s effective history.
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CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
NOTE ON AUTHORS
CONTENTS
PREFACE
Learning to Be Human: An Introduction to the Culture of Learning Till the European Renaissance
HOW TO LEARN
1 A Passion for Learning: Knowledge Acquisition and Management in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe
Denise Ming-yueh Wang
2 The Page and the Room: Medieval Architectures for Persuasion and Meditation
Sergi Sancho Fibla
3 From Revealing to Ravelling: Transformations in the Allegorical Representations of Knowledge During the Renaissance
Audrey Lecoeur
4 An Allegory of Learning: The Adventures of the Redcrosse Knight
Chih-chiao Joseph Yang
5 Between Workshop Practice and Art Theory: Artistic Formation in Renaissance
Venice Candida Syndikus
6 Burning Only with the Passion for Gathering Books: Richard de Bury’s Philobiblon and Its Modern Reception
Henk Vynckier
WHAT TO LEARN
7 “To Be or Not To Be” on the Alien Stage: Learning Englishness in Shakespeare’s Second Tetralogy
Hui-zung Perng
8 Too Vile for the Devil’s Ear? Anti-Gaelic Invective in Lowland Scottish Literature
Manfred Malzahn
9 Gnosis and the Unknown God: Esoteric Christianity from the New Testament to Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite
Wesley Hwang
10 The Eleusinian Mythic Paradigm of Life and Death in Shakespearean Drama Rupendra Guha-Majumdar
11 Marriage and Love: the Symbolic Significance Of Beowulf’s Celibacy
Yung-chih Cheng
12 Learning from the Poetics and Politics in Two Anti-Pastoral Plays by Shakespeare
Chin-ching Lee
INDEX
Chin-ching Lee and Daniel Hsu Lin