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Elias of Thriplow, a village near Cambridge, was a schoolmaster in the thirteenth century. Apart from his complete Serium Senectutis, he wrote several works that have survived only as extracts, many of which are extensive. Elias seemingly wrote what has been called Petronius Rediuiuus, a collection of tales and of essays about knights, merchants, women, and farmers. This collection frequently reflects the influence of spicy Petronius, rarely read in the Middle Ages. Elias is important for his criticisms of medieval society, for the history of narrative literature, and for the history of English humanism. This new book offers the first critical edition of all the extracts from Elias and publishes many of these for the first time, with commentary indicating sources for the ideas and language.
The notion of Christianity as a religion of peace was severely tested during the Middle Ages, when killing in the name of God became a sanctified act. In this book, Tim Rayborn traces the development of the early Crusades, Christian views of war and violence, and its attitudes toward Islam, primarily during the turbulent period of the 11th and 12th centuries (with some attention to earlier centuries). A marked shift in Christian perceptions of its own identity coincided with a considerably more martial and aggressive approach to nonbelievers both inside and outside of Europe. This wide-ranging study includes such topics as the background to the First Crusade, the Knights Templar, Bernard of Clairvaux, the Cistercian Order, the works of Peter the Venerable, apocalyptic hopes and fears, and martyrdom in the context of Christian conflicts with Islam. Focusing on French monastic writings, the book also examines papal documents, Spanish polemics, crusade chronicles, and other works. This is a survey of research on these important subjects, and serves as both a reference work and a point of departure for further study.
This volume presents a series of penetrating analyses of particular poems and problems of literary history illustrating the many sides of medieval poetry and the interactions of learned, popular and courtly traditions. The first and longest essay, 'Waltharius-Gaiferos', aims to characterize the diverse treatments of one of the major European heroic themes - in modes that include lay and epic, saga and ballad, and range from pre-Carolingian times to the Renaissance. There follow three interrelated essays on the medieval transformations of Ovid, and a larger group devoted to close reading of medieval lyrics. After discussing some brilliant Latin compositions, of the 9th-12th centuries, both sa...
The fifteen essays in this volume cover a range of topics from the Carolingian period through to the early fourteenth century. Some offer new insight upon long-contested issues, some open up new areas of debate connected to the history of crusading, while others use innovative methodologies to unlock the potential of various types of source material including: manuscript illuminations depicting warfare, Templar graffiti, German crusading songs, and crusading charters.
Founded to support Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land and most famous for their support for crusading, the Military Religious Orders' activities and interests stretched far beyond the frontiers of Christendom. Representing some of the most recent advances in research, in this volume eleven scholars from Europe and North America explore important and hitherto under-researched aspects of the Orders' history, scrutinising their relations with the papacy, their organisational structure, their devotional practices, their fortresses and their presence in the localities of Western Europe.