| Popis: |
This introductory chapter underlines the physical liminality and the tremulous conceptual centrality of the crossroads to early modern society and its continued relevance to many as a stage upon which both the desires of human aspiration and the fears of mortality have been enacted. It delineates the crossroads’ literary and historical representations, myths, superstitions, traditions, and ritual praxis in early modern Europe and other places and times that the rest of the book will develop, and outlines its theoretical underpinning in the work of Lefebvre, de Certeau and others. The chapter also explores the crossroads’ central paradox, that a parting of ways is always also a confluence of ways, and suggests that this applies also to other related binaries. For instance, a crossroads may be a proverbial common-place, even a liminal non-space, but can simultaneously act as a significant site of exchange between the worlds of the living and the dead. It can also be a potent nexus for seemingly opposed rituals, of both transformative potential and of perpetual spiritual limitation. |
