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Power of a Woman. Memoirs of a turbulent life: Eleanor of Aquitaine
The feminine spirit soars as Eleanor of Aquitaine dictates her memoirs "Power of a Woman. Memoirs of a turbulent life: Eleanor of Aquitaine" reveals the mind of medieval Europe's most exceptional woman recalling her own astonishing odyssey. Why did Eleanor wait until her eighty-first year to dictate her life story? Because "Life was for living. Bloodless recall is better suited to old age!" Betrayals and loyalties; triumphs and trials; stormy marriages to two warring kings, France's Louis VII and England's Henry II: "They left me worn, these men, but they didn't level me." Eleanor recalls wars, intrigues, her travels, troubadours and ruthless diplomacy while confessing her loves, hopes for her children and their fates: "God Almighty, let me die before You gather in another child, or the child of a child, of mine!" To secure her children's wellbeing she even tries threatening God: "I would prefer to relinquish this old body quietly, but be warned! If I must be borne hence cursing Christ, as Henry was, I shall." Eleanor looks back dispassionately, analyzing the Grace she enjoyed as the femme fatale of her day--"This old carcass once embodied the feminine ideal"--and she explains the role her Court of Ladies played in freeing women's minds from an "iron, bearded world." Chicago's Margaret Schmidt calls author Robert Fripp "a rare magician, a 'writer's writer'.".
Price: $20.99
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A Dictionary of Early Music: From The Troubadours to Monteverdi
Here is an invaluable ready reference to the world of early music. No other single book currently available gives the reader the essential facts about the composers, their music, and the bewildering variety of instruments for which is was written. There are entries for some 700 composers from the troubadours to Monteverdi, featuring especially those composers whose music is available in modern editions and on recordings. Every medieval or Renaissance instrument likely to be heard in modern performance is described, often with the help of line drawings. The dictionary also provides a succinct and lucid guide to technical terms, musical forms, manuscript and printed sources, Renaissance music publishers, and the more important contemporary theorists. A Dictionary of Early Music has been compiled for everyone who goes to concerts and buys recordings of early music. Students, performers, and listeners alike will find it indispensable..
Price: $44.95
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History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
Recorded history is a finely-woven magic fabric of intricate lies about events predating the sixteenth century. There is not a single piece of evidence that can be reliably and independently traced back earlier than the eleventh century. This book details events that are substantiated by hard facts and logic, and validated by new astronomical research and statistical analysis of ancient sources. .
Price: $9.95
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The Last Troubadour: Song of Montsegur
In this historical thriller set against the rich background of the 13th-century Inquisition, the last living troubadour, condemned by the church as a heretic, must rescue a holy Christian relic from a crusading king. Seamlessly weaving the history of the Cathar Crusade with the historical origins of the Tarot deck, this fascinating, genre-bending epic brings symbols of the Tarot to life through medieval characters—Arnot the Knight Templar as the Chariot, Dame Esclarmonde de Foix as the High Priestess, Nevara as the Magician, Pope Innocent IV as the Hierophant, and Ramon Troubadour as the Fool—to create a richly textured historical fantasy that is suspenseful, humourous, tragic, and satirical by turns. .
Price: $15.41
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The Passionate Troubadour: A Medieval Novel About Francis of Assisi
Most lives of the saints are written backward, beginning with the saint’s achieved holiness. This lively story begins at the beginning, with Francis as a very human and, therefore, flawed man, a hopeless romantic who is slowly and painfully drawn by grace toward a destiny he does not desire. More than simply picturing the patron saint of poverty, peace, ecology and animals, this book depicts Francis as a holy model for becoming fully oneself as a unique individual. From the age of fourteen until his death, this passionate man is forced to wrestle with his opposing personalities. On the one hand he is an ascetic influenced by the negative theology of his day. On the other hand he is a poet, troubadour, and joyful lover of life..
Price: $8.00
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The Mountain of the Women: Memoirs of an Irish Troubadour
In an irresistible tale of a life lived fully, if not always wisely, Liam Clancy, of the legendary Irish group the Clancy Brothers, describes his eventful journey from a small town in Ireland in the 1930s into the heart of the New York music scene in the 1950s and ’60s. Following in the grand tradition of such Irish memoirs as Angela’s Ashes and Are You Somebody?, Liam Clancy relates his life’s story in a raucously funny and star-studded account of moving from provincial Ireland to the bars and clubs of New York City, to the cusp of fame as a member of Tommy Makem and the Clancy Brothers. Born in 1935, the eleventh out of as many children, young Liam was a naive and innocent lad of the Old Country. His memories of childhood include bounding over hills, streams, and the occasional mountain, getting lost, and eventually found, and making mischief in the way of a typical Irish boy. As an aimless nineteen-year-old, Clancy met a strange and wonderfully energetic lover of music, Ms. Diane Guggenheim, an American heiress. She and a colleague from America had set out to record regional Irish folk music, and their undertaking led them to Carrick-on-Suir in the shadow of Slievenamon, "The Mountain of the Women," where Mammie Clancy had been known to carry a tune or two in her kitchen. Guggenheim fell for young Liam and swept him along on her travels through the British Isles, the American Appalachians, and finally Greenwich Village, the undisputed Mecca for aspiring artists of every ilk in the late 1950s. Clancy was in New York to become an actor. But on the side, he played and sang with his brothers, Paddy and Tom, and fellow countryman Tommy Makem, in pubs like the legendary White Horse Tavern. In the heady atmosphere of the Village, Clancy’s life was a party filled with music, sex, and McSorley’s. His friendships with then-unknown artists such as Bob Dylan, Maya Angelou, Robert Redford, Lenny Bruce, Pete Seeger and Barbra Streisand form the backdrop of the charming adventures of a small-town boy making it big in the biggest of cities. In music circles, the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem are known as the Beatles of Irish music. The band’s music continues to play on jukeboxes in pubs and bars, in living rooms of folk music fans, and in Irish American homes throughout the country. Liam Clancy’s lively memoir captures their wild adventures on the road to fame and fortune, and brings to life a man who never lets himself off the hook for his sins, and happily views his success as a blessing..
Price: $10.99
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Lark in the Morning: The Verses of the Troubadours, a Bilingual Edition
Although the troubadours flourished at the height of the Middle Ages in southern France, their songs of romantic love, with pleasing melodies and intricate stanzaic patterns, have inspired poets and song writers ever since, from Dante to Chaucer, from Renaissance sonneteers to the Romantics, and from Verlaine and Rimbaud to modern rock lyricists. Yet despite the incontrovertible influence of the troubadours on the development of both poetry and music in the West, there existed no comprehensive anthology of troubadour lyrics that respected the verse form of the originals until now.
Lark in the Morning honors the meter, word play, punning, and sound effects in the troubadours' works while celebrating the often playful, bawdy, and biting nature of the material. Here, Robert Kehew augments his own verse translations with those of two seminal twentieth-century poets—Ezra Pound and W. D. Snodgrass—to provide a collection that captures both the poetic pyrotechnics of the original verse and the astonishing variety of troubadour voices. This bilingual edition contains an introduction to the three major periods of the troubadours—their beginning, rise, and decline—as well as headnotes that briefly put each poet in context. Lark in the Morning will become an essential collection for those interested in learning about and teaching the origins of Western vernacular poetry.
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Price: $21.36
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Ernest Tubb: The Texas Troubadour
In this definitive biography of Ernest Tubb, Ronnie Pugh brings one of country music’s greatest performers back to center stage. Tracing a career that began in the 1930s and continued until just a few years before Tubb’s death in 1984, Pugh presents not only the long and legendary life of the Texas Troubadour but also an unparalleled view of the world of country music in which Ernest Tubb played an essential part. Tubb began his career as an imitator of Jimmie Rodgers, but stormed the country music scene in the 1940s with a new honky tonk sound and a string of hits that included “Walking the Floor Over You.” His innovations marked an important transition in country music to a style and lyric in tune with modern American working people, or at least that offered the real-life themes of hard drinking, divorce, tough times, and ruined lives—changes that helped define the music we recognize today as “country.” A member of the Grand Ole Opry until 1982, Tubb hosted a live radio broadcast from the Ernest Tubb Record Shop in Nashville for years and became one of the first country music stars to host his own television show in the mid-1960s. Always popular and on the road much of the time even after his prime hit-making years had ended, he was well-known for promoting the careers of many new performers on the rise. Delving into fan club journals, songbooks, newspaper broadcast logs, record company files, and hundreds of interviews, Ronnie Pugh draws a picture of Tubb—exploring both his personal and professional life—that is unprecedented in its intimacy, detail, and vitality. We get a close-up view of Tubb riding the crest of his popularity, setting the pace for Nashville, facing the onslaught of Elvis Presley and rock ’n roll, and surviving as a country music legend. Richly illustrated with almost a hundred photographs, many of which are rare unpublished shots from private collections, Ernest Tubb also contains a detailed and complete sessionography, a resource that will be of continuing importance for serious record collectors. A biography that has been long awaited from Ronnie Pugh, unquestionably the leading authority on Ernest Tubb, this book will delight readers from among the fans of country music, those interested in the history of country music or American popular music and culture generally, and, of course, Ernest Tubb fans. .
Price: $18.33
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Eleanor of Aquitaine: Queen of the Troubadours
A comprehensive view of the mythical and historic significance of the great medieval queen • Explains that courtly love was not a platonic and intellectual affectation but an initiatic process of male transcendence akin to Tantra • Shows that Eleanor’s embodiment of divine power undermined the pattern of patriarchy • Reveals how Eleanor inspired the powerful influence of the Arthurian cycle’s figures Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122-1204) has been long noted for her political and cultural achievements that profoundly shaped twelfth-century Europe. Culturally, beyond her role as wife of kings Louis VII of France and Henry II of England and mother of kings Richard and John, she inspired the huge diffusion of the Arthurian cycle and the Celtic myths underpinning it. Without Eleanor, figures such as Merlin, Arthur, and Guinevere (for whom Eleanor served as model) would never have assumed the enormous symbolic value they now possess. Politically, she embodied divine power that ended the dark age of patriarchy, playing a crucial role not only in the development of the Plantagenet Empire, but also in the granting of charters to merchants and craftsmen that led to the birth of the modern middle class. But her greatest influence, still shaping modern sensibilities, was her role as the symbol of courtly love, which was not a mere diversion of the aristocracy but a process of male initiation and transcendence that bore a close resemblance to Indian Tantra. While the Virgin Mary was restoring a feminine face to medieval religious life, Eleanor embodied the adulterous queen who incarnates sovereignty--the woman who shares authority with the men who act in her name, but only after that power has been transmitted to them through an initiatory process leading to sexual union..
Price: $10.35
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