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In Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages, Michelle Karnes revises the history of medieval imagination with a detailed analysis of its role in the period’s meditations and theories of cognition. Karnes here understands imagination in its technical, philosophical sense, taking her cue from Bonaventure, the thirteenth-century scholastic theologian and philosopher who provided the first sustained account of how the philosophical imagination could be transformed into a devotional one. Karnes examines Bonaventure’s meditational works, the Meditationes vitae Christi, the Stimulis amoris, Piers Plowman, and Nicholas Love’s Myrrour, among others, and argues that the cognitive importance that imagination enjoyed in scholastic philosophy informed its importance in medieval meditations on the life of Christ. Emphasizing the cognitive significance of both imagination and the meditations that relied on it, she revises a long-standing association of imagination with the Middle Ages. In her account, imagination was not simply an object of suspicion but also a crucial intellectual, spiritual, and literary resource that exercised considerable authority.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer is the annual yearbook of the New Chaucer Society, publishing articles on the writing of Chaucer and his contemporaries, their antecedents and successors, and their intellectual and social contexts. More generally, articles explore the culture and writing of later medieval Britain (1200-1500). Each SAC volume also includes an annotated bibliography and reviews of Chaucer-related publications.
"It is a commonplace that marvels like enchanted rings and sorcerers' stones were topics of fascination in the Middle Ages, not only in romance and travel literature, but also in the period's philosophic writing: magical objects with hard-to-explain powers abound. This is the first book to analyze these different bodies of writing alongside one another, comparing texts from both the Latin West (including writings in English, French, Italian, and Spanish) and in Arabic on the topic, attempting a unifying theory of marvels across different disciplines and cultures. Michelle Karnes tells an untold story of the parallels between Arabic and Latin thought, reminding us that the strange and the unf...
Studies in the Age of Chaucer is the annual yearbook of the New Chaucer Society, publishing articles on the writing of Chaucer and his contemporaries, their antecedents and successors, and their intellectual and social contexts. More generally, articles explore the culture and writing of later medieval Britain (1200-1500). Each SAC volume also includes an annotated bibliography and reviews of Chaucer-related publications.
Intimate Reading: Textual Encounters in Medieval Women’s Visions and Vitae explores the ways that women mystics sought to make their books into vehicles for the reader’s spiritual transformation. Jessica Barr argues that the cognitive work of reading these texts was meant to stimulate intensely personal responses, and that the very materiality of the book can produce an intimate encounter with God. She thus explores the differences between mystics’ biographies and their self-presentation, analyzing as well the complex rhetorical moves that medieval women writers employ to render their accounts more effective. This new volume is structured around five case studies. Chapters consider the...
Studies in the Age of Chaucer is the annual yearbook of the New Chaucer Society, publishing articles on the writing of Chaucer and his contemporaries, their antecedents and successors, and their intellectual and social contexts. More generally, articles explore the culture and writing of later medieval Britain (1200-1500). Each SAC volume also includes an annotated bibliography and reviews of Chaucer-related publications.
Affective meditation on the Passion was one of the most popular literary genres of the high and later Middle Ages. Proliferating in a rich variety of forms, these lyrical, impassioned, script-like texts in Latin and the vernacular had a deceptively simple goal: to teach their readers how to feel. They were thus instrumental in shaping and sustaining the wide-scale shift in medieval Christian sensibility from fear of God to compassion for the suffering Christ. Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion advances a new narrative for this broad cultural change and the meditative writings that both generated and reflected it. Sarah McNamer locates women as agents in the creatio...
An overlooked aspect of the iconography of the Annunciation investigated - Mary's book.
In Imago Mortis: Mediating Images of Death in Late Medieval Culture, Ashby Kinch argues for the affirmative quality of late medieval death art and literature, providing a new, interdisciplinary approach to a well-known body of material. He demonstrates the surprising and effective ways that late medieval artists appropriated images of death and dying as a means to affirm their artistic, social, and political identities. The book dedicates each of its three sections to a pairing of a visual convention (deathbed scenes, the Three Living and Three Dead, and the Dance of Death) and a Middle English literary text (Hoccleve’s Lerne for to die, Audelay’s Three Dead Kings, and Lydgate’s Dance of Death).
The Companion to Ignatius of Loyola aims at placing Loyola’s life, his writings, and spirituality in a broader context of important late medieval and early modern movements and processes that have been appreciated too little by historians who explored Ignatius more as the colossal icon of the so-called Counterreformation than as a man influenced by the dramatic and revolutionary period in which he lived. One book will be never able to cover all aspects of such rich and controversial a figure as Ignatius of Loyola but the fifteen chapters of this volume indicate important directions of current scholarship that reassesses the previous scholarship and suggests new angles of studies on this pivotal figure of early modern period. An interview with editor Robert A. Maryks about this Companion is available on YouTube.