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In the Skin of a Beast
In medieval literature, when humans and animals meet—whether as friends or foes—issues of mastery and submission are often at stake. In the Skin of a Beast shows how the concept of sovereignty comes to the fore in such narratives, reflecting larger concerns about relations of authority and dominion at play in both human-animal and human-human interactions. Peggy McCracken discusses a range of literary texts and images from medieval France, including romances in which animal skins appear in symbolic displays of power, fictional explorations of the wolf’s desire for human domestication, and tales of women and snakes converging in a representation of territorial claims and noble status. These works reveal that the qualities traditionally used to define sovereignty—lineage and gender among them—are in fact mobile and contingent. In medieval literary texts, as McCracken demonstrates, human dominion over animals is a disputed model for sovereign relations among people: it justifies exploitation even as it mandates protection and care, and it depends on reiterations of human-animal difference that paradoxically expose the tenuous nature of human exceptionalism.
Samson and Delilah in Medieval Insular French
Samson and Delilah in Medieval Insular French investigates several different adaptations of the story of Samson that enabled it to move from a strictly religious sphere into vernacular and secular artworks. Catherine Léglu explores the narrative’s translation into French in medieval England, examining the multiple versions of the Samson narrative via its many adaptations into verse, prose, visual art and musical. Utilizing a multidisciplinary approach, this text draws together examples from several genres and media, focusing on the importance of book learning to secular works. In analysing this Biblical narrative, Léglu reveals the importance of the Samson and Delilah story as a point of entry into a fuller understanding of medieval translations and adaptations of the Bible.
Reinventing Babel in Medieval French
How can untranslatability help us to think about the historical as well as the cultural and linguistic dimensions of translation? For the past two centuries, theoretical debates about translation have responded to the idea that translation overcomes linguistic and cultural incommensurability, while never inscribing full equivalence. More recently, untranslatability has been foregrounded in projects at the intersections between translation studies and other disciplines, notably philosophy and comparative literature. The critical turn to untranslatability re-emphasizes the importance of translation's negotiation with foreignness or difference and prompts further reflection on how that might be...
The Limburg Sermons: Preaching in the Medieval Low Countries at the Turn of the Fourteenth Century
For a long time it was thought that there were no Middle Dutch sermons dating from the thirteenth century. It was only after J.P. Gumbert had redated the manuscript from The Hague containing the Limburg Sermons that its contents could be assigned to that century. Most of the Limburg Sermons appear to be translations of the Middle High German St. Georgen sermons. But sixteen of these texts are known only in Middle Dutch, and among these is to be found material drawn from the works of Hadewijch and Beatrijs van Nazareth. Thus the Limburg Sermons emerge to take their place in the famous tradition of Brabantine mysticism.
Power and Prejudice
Because of its virtual absence in the long tradition of biblical study, the Gospel of Mark offers an extraordinary case history of how changing cultural circumstances influence biblical reception. Brenda Deen Schildgen examines what characteristics of Mark led to its being included in the canon of Scriptures and then explores the history of its reception. While focusing primarily on this single gospel, Schildgen examines numerous other works in the periods under consideration in order to provide a context for her discussion. Ultimately, observes Schildgen, we can see that when Mark receives attention, the form that its reception takes is an indicator of new historical forces at work. Multidisciplinary in approach, her work will be of interest not only to biblical scholars but to all those interested in hermeneutics, literary and critical theory, and the relationship between historical and literary studies.
Source of Wisdom
As one of the most prolific and influential scholars in the field, Thomas D. Hill has made an indelible mark on the study of Old English literature. In celebration of his distinguished career, the editors of Source of Wisdom have assembled a wide-ranging collection of nineteen original essays on Old English poetry and prose as well as early medieval Latin, touching upon many of Hill's specific research interests. Among the topics examined in this volume are the Christian-Latin sources of Old English texts, including religious and 'sapiential' poetry, and prose translations of Latin writings. Old English poems such as Beowulf, The Dream of the Rood, and The Wife's Lament are treated, throughout, to thematic, textual, stylistic, lexical, and source analysis. Prose writers of the period such as King Alfred and Wærferth, as well as medieval Latin writers such as Bede and Pseudo-Methodius are also discussed. As an added feature, the volume includes a bibliography of publications by Thomas D. Hill. Source of Wisdom is, ultimately, a contribution to the understanding of medieval English literature and the textual traditions that contributed to its development.
Temptation Transformed
A "brisk and entertaining" (Wall Street Journal) journey into the mystery behind why the forbidden fruit became an apple, upending an explanation that stood for centuries. How did the apple, unmentioned by the Bible, become the dominant symbol of temptation, sin, and the Fall? Temptation Transformed pursues this mystery across art and religious history, uncovering where, when, and why the forbidden fruit became an apple. Azzan Yadin-Israel reveals that Eden’s fruit, once thought to be a fig or a grape, first appears as an apple in twelfth-century French art. He then traces this image back to its source in medieval storytelling. Though scholars often blame theologians for the apple, accounts of the Fall written in commonly spoken languages—French, German, and English—influenced a broader audience than cloistered Latin commentators. Azzan Yadin-Israel shows that, over time, the words for “fruit” in these languages narrowed until an apple in the Garden became self-evident. A wide-ranging study of early Christian thought, Renaissance art, and medieval languages, Temptation Transformed offers an eye-opening revisionist history of a central religious icon.
The Literal Sense and the Gospel of John in Late Medieval Commentary and Literature
Focusing on the famous Medieval commentator Nicolas of Lyra and the anonymous Middle English biblical adaptation of the Gospel of John, the Cursor Mundi, this book examines the development of the analytical tools of biblical literary criticism showing how late Medieval commentators negotiated the paradoxical interdependence of the literal and spiritual senses, as transmitted by traditional and inherited vocabularies, through a focus on narrative structure. Mark Hazard combines an enlightening account of the actual practice of professional commentators, the history of Gospel interpretation and cultural history to reveal that remarkable shift in the treatment of the Bible that modern scholars would regard as having laid the groundwork for the historical-critical methods in biblical research. As such this book sheds light not only on the 14th century practice of biblical interpretation, but will also be of value to those currenlty engaged in reading and writing about the bible.
