You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Caesarius was a monk at the Cistercian monastery of Heisterbach in Germany, where he served as Master of novices. For their instruction and edification, he composed his lengthy Dialogue on Miracles in twelve sections between 1219 and 1223. The many surviving manuscripts of this and other works by Caesarius attest to his stature in the history of Cistercian letters. This volume contains sections one through six of Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogue on Miracles, the first complete translation into English of an influential representation of exempla literature from the Middle Ages. Caesarius’s stories provide a splendid index to monastic life, religious practices, and daily life in a tumultuous time.
Caesarius was a monk at the Cistercian monastery of Heisterbach in Germany, where he served as Master of novices. For their instruction and edification, he composed his lengthy Dialogue on Miracles in twelve sections between 1219 and 1223. The many surviving manuscripts of this and other works by Caesarius attest to his stature in the history of Cistercian letters. This second volume contains sections seven through twelve of Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogue on Miracles, the first complete translation into English of an influential representation of exempla literature from the Middle Ages. Caesarius’s stories provide a splendid index to monastic life, religious practices, and daily life in a tumultuous time.
In this brief essay, esteemed medieval historian Edouard Jeauneau examines a much-debated question in medieval intellectual history: did the famous School of Chartres actually exist? Gracefully acknowledging the suggestion by Sir Richard Southern in 1965 that the School was actually a myth, Jeauneau argues that the School did in fact exist but perhaps was not as important as previously thought. Jeauneau provides a fascinating portrait of the School of Chartres during its heyday in the first half of the twelfth century, bringing to light the accomplishments of Fulbert of Chartres, Bernard of Chartres, Thierry of Chartres, Gilbert of Poitiers and William of Conches. Deftly translated by Claude...
While the late Anglo-Saxons rarely recorded saints' posthumous miracles, a shift occurred as monastic writers of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries started to preserve hundreds of the stories they had heard of healings, acts of vengeance, resurrections, recoveries, and other miraculous deeds effected by their local saints. Indeed, Rachel Koopmans contends, the miracle collection quickly became a defining genre of high medieval English monastic culture. Koopmans surveys more than seventy-five collections and offers a new model for understanding how miracle stories were generated, circulated, and replicated. She argues that orally exchanged narratives carried far more propagandistic power...
The version of the Rule of St. Augustine used at the Abbey of St.Victor began with the command to love God above all things and ones neighbor as oneself. Not surprisingly, then, love was a pervasive theme in the writings produced there, many of which are introduced and translated here: (1)five lyrical essays by Hugh of St.Victor (d.1141): The Praise of Charity; The Betrothal Gift of the Soul; In Praise of the Spouse; On the Substance of Love; What Truly Should Be Loved?; (2)On the Four Degrees of Violent Love, by Richard of St.Victor (d.1173), which traces the likenesses and differences between romantic love and the love of God; (3)Achard of St.Victor (d.1170), Sermon5 and two of Adam of St.Victors sequences are examples of how these authors wove love into their writings; (4)excerpts from the Microcosmus by Godfrey of St.Victor (d.ca.1195), summarize the central place of love in his humanistic theological anthropology.
Metaphrasis: A Byzantine Concept of Rewriting and Its Hagiographical Products represents a first and authoritative discussion of rewriting in Byzantium. It brings together a rich variety of articles that treat the topic of hagiographical rewriting from various angles.The contributors discuss and comment on different kinds of texts in Greek and other languages, including Apophthegmata Patrum, Passions, Saints’ Lives, Enkomia, Miracle Collections, Synaxaria, and Menologia which date from late antiquity to late Byzantium. The volume offers a series of case studies examining how the same legends evolved through time by the process of rewriting. It is shown that the main driving force behind such rewriting was adaptation to different audiences and contexts. This work argues that rewriting is central to Christian cultures in the Middle Ages. Contributors are Andria Andreou, Anne Alwis, Stavroula Constantinou, Koen de Temmerman, Kristoffel Demoen, Marina Detoraki, Bernard Flusin, Laura Franco, Martin Hinterberger, Christian Høgel, Daria D. Resh, Klazina Staat, Julie van Pelt, Robert Wiśniewski, and † John Wortley.
This book argues that in order to understand nationalisms, we need a clearer understanding of the types of cultural myths, symbols, and traditions that legitimate them. Myths of origin and election, memories of a greater and purer past, and narratives of persecution and mission are required for the production and maintenance of powerful national sentiments. Through an investigation of how early modern Catholics and Protestants reimagined, reinterpreted, and rewrote the lives of the founder-saints who spread Christianity in England, this book offers a theoretical framework for the study of origin narratives. Analyzing the discursive construction of time and place, the invocation of forces beyond the human to naturalize and authorize, and the role of visual and ritual culture in fabrications of the past, this book provides a case study for how to approach claims about founding figures. Serving as a timely example of the dependence of national identity on key religious resources, Griffin shows how origin narratives – particularly the founding figures that anchor them – function as uniquely powerful rhetorical tools for the cultural production of regional and national identity.
Les Eschéz d’Amours may be the last great medieval allegory to find its way into a modern edition. In the tradition of the Roman de la Rose, the Eschéz surveys matters of love, politics, economics, music, medicine, and chess through the lens of classical and Scholastic learning. In addition to the first 16,293 (of over 30,000) verses newly edited out of the manuscripts, the editors present a complete apparatus of literary, historical and linguistic essays that place the poem in the context of the scholarly and courtly life of late 14th century Paris. The important Latin glosses of the Venice manuscript of the Eschéz follow in an edition of their own, with critical notes and translation.