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Knowledge, Love, and Ecstasy in the Theology of Thomas Gallus provides the first full study of Thomas Gallus (d. 1246) in English and represents a significant advance in his distinctive theology. Boyd Taylor Coolman argues that Gallus distinguishes, but never separates and intimately relates two "international modalities" in human consciousness: the intellective and the affective, both of which are forms of cognition. Coolman shows that Gallus conceives these two cognitive modalities as co-existing in an interdependent manner, and that this reciprocity is given a particular character by Gallus' anthropological appropriation of the Dionysian concept of hierarchy. Because Gallus conceives of t...
Throughout the Middle Ages, John the Evangelist, identified as the author of both the Book of Revelation and the most profound and theologically informed of the four Gospels, provided monks and nuns with a figure of inspiration and an exemplar of vision and virginity. Rather than the historical apostle, this book's protagonist is a persona of the Evangelist established in theology, the liturgy, and devotional practice: the model mystic, who, by virtue of his penetrating insight, was seen as having become a mirror image of Christ. In St. John the Divine, Jeffrey Hamburger identifies a remarkable set of images from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries that identify the inspired Evangelist so c...
In this tribute to Anthony Grafton, a preeminent historian of early modern European intellectual and textual culture and of classical scholarship, fifty-eight contributors present new research across the many areas in which Grafton has been active. The articles span topics from late antiquity to the 20th century, from Europe to North American, and a full spectrum of fields of learning, including art history, the history of science, classics, Jewish and oriental studies, church history and theology, English and German literature, political, social, and book history. Major themes include the communities and dynamics of the Republic of Letters, the reception of classical texts, libraries and bo...
Does a plant shrink at night and swell in the day, like an animal breathing in and out? For a long time, the Galenic concept of spiritus provided a causal explanation for human and animal life and perception. Albert the Great (1200-1280), whose honorific acknowledges among other things his pioneering work on biology, extended the concept to plants. This is only one of the remarkable concepts studied in this book, the first comparative study of Albert's concept of spiritus. It unveils the Arabic roots of his early psychophysiology and the original developments found in his mature Aristotelian paraphrases.
The Secret in Medieval Literature: Alternative Worlds in the Middle Ages explores the many strange phenomena, both in the Middle Ages and today, that do not find any good rational explanations. Those do not pertain to magic or to religion in the traditional sense of the word; they are secrets of an epistemological kind and tend to defy human rationality, without being marginal or irrelevant. At first sight, we might believe that we face elements from fairy tales, but the medieval cases discussed here go far beyond such a simplistic approach to the mysterious dimension of secrets. In fact, as this book argues, medieval poets commonly engaged with alternative forces and described their working...
This volume provides a much needed, historically accurate narrative of the development of theories of space up to the beginning of the eighteenth century. It studies conceptions of space that were implicitly or explicitly entailed by ancient, medieval and early modern representations of the cosmos. The authors reassess Alexandre Koyré’s groundbreaking work From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (1957) and they trace the permanence of arguments to be found throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. By adopting a long timescale, this book sheds new light on the continuity between various cosmological representations and their impact on the ontology and epistemology of space. Readers may...
In June 2012, scholars from a number of disciplines and countries gathered in Stockholm to discuss the representation of ancient mythology in Renaissance Europe. This symposium was an opportunity for the participants to cross disciplinary borders and to problematize a well-researched field. The aim was to move beyond a view of mythology as mere propaganda in order to promote an understanding of ancient tales and fables as contemporary means to explain and comprehend the Early Modern world. W ...
Richard of St.Victor (d.1173) developed original ideas about the faculty of imagination in a twelfth-century Parisian context. Related to the historical study of philosophical psychology, Richard of St. Victor’s Theory of Imagination acknowledges that the faculty of imagination, being a necessary precondition for human reasoning and a link between soul and body, plays an important role in Richard’s understanding of the human soul. Richard also deals with the interpretation of biblical language, metaphors, rhetoric, and the possibility of creative imagination. Considering all these aspects of the imagination in Richard’s texts improves our understanding of his theological epistemology and sheds new light on the theory of the imagination in the history of medieval philosophy in general.
This collection surveys the tradition of medieval commentaries on Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics" from its thirteenth-century origins to the fifteenth century, concentrating on the conception of the moral and intellectual virtues in a continuous interplay of ancient and Christian moral thought.
What does it mean to speak for nature? Contemporary environmental critics warn that giving a voice to nonhuman nature reduces it to a mere echo of our own needs and desires; they caution that it is a perverse form of anthropocentrism. And yet nature's voice proved a powerful and durable ethical tool for premodern writers, many of whom used it to explore what it meant to be an embodied creature or to ask whether human experience is independent of the natural world in which it is forged. The history of the late medieval period can be retold as the story of how nature gained an authoritative voice only to lose it again at the onset of modernity. This distinctive voice, Kellie Robertson argues, ...