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Palgrave Macmillan

Ecstatic Transformation

On the Uses of Alterity in the Middle Ages

  • Book
  • © 2005

Overview

Authors:
  1. Michael Uebel
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Part of the book series: The New Middle Ages (TNMA)

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Table of contents (8 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-x
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  2. Introduction: The Uses of Medieval Alterity

    1. Introduction: The Uses of Medieval Alterity

      • Michael Uebel
      Pages 1-7

  3. The Material of Alterity

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 9-9
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    2. Eastern Marvels

      • Michael Uebel
      Pages 11-24

    3. Muslim Monstrosity

      • Michael Uebel
      Pages 25-53

  4. The Space of Alterity

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 55-55
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    2. Medieval Desert Utopias

      • Michael Uebel
      Pages 57-83

    3. Desert Ecstasies

      • Michael Uebel
      Pages 85-99

  5. The Structure of Alterity

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 101-101
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    2. The Marvel and the List

      • Michael Uebel
      Pages 103-126

    3. Monstrous Topoi

      • Michael Uebel
      Pages 127-150

  6. Post

    1. Postscript: Utopic Endings

      • Michael Uebel
      Pages 151-160

  7. Back Matter

    Pages 161-227
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Keywords

About this book

This book studies the way in which medieval ways of knowing the Oriental 'other' were constructed around the idea of a utopic East as located in the legend and Letter of Prester John (c. 1160). The birth of utopic thinking, it argues, is tied to an understanding of alterity having as much to do with the ways the medieval West understood itself as the manner in which the foreign was mapped. Drawing upon the insights of cultural studies, film studies, and psychoanalysis, this book rethinks the contours of the known and the unknown in the medieval period. It demonstrates how the idea of otherness intersected in intricate ways with other categories of difference (spatial, gender, and religious). Scholars in the fields of history as well as literary and religious studies will be interested in the manner in which the book considers the formal dimensions of how histories of the Oriental other were written and lived.

About the author

MICHAEL UEBEL is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Kentucky, USA.

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