You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The thirteenth century saw such a proliferation of new encyclopedic texts that more than one scholar has called it the “century of the encyclopedias.” Variously referred to as a speculum, thesaurus, or imago mundi—the term encyclopedia was not commonly applied to such books until the eighteenth century—these texts were organized in such a way that a reader could easily locate a collection of authoritative statements on any given topic. Because they reproduced, rather than simply summarized, parts of prior texts, these compilations became libraries in miniature. In this groundbreaking study, Mary Franklin-Brown examines writings in Latin, Catalan, and French that are connected to the ...
In medieval society and culture, memory occupied a unique position. It was central to intellectual life and the medieval understanding of the human mind. Commemoration of the dead was also a fundamental Christian activity. Above all, the past - and the memory of it - occupied a central position in medieval thinking, from ideas concerning the family unit to those shaping political institutions. Focusing on France but incorporating studies from further afield, this collection of essays marks an important new contribution to the study of medieval memory and commemoration. Arranged thematically, each part highlights how memory cannot be studied in isolation, but instead intersects with many other areas of medieval scholarship, including art history, historiography, intellectual history, and the study of religious culture. Key themes in the study of memory are explored, such as collective memory, the links between memory and identity, the fallibility of memory, and the linking of memory to the future, as an anticipation of what is to come.
The rich cultural insights afforded by the study of medieval Latin are only beginning to be appreciated. In this difficult study of the text-books through which Latin was learned, together with the Latin, Anglo-Norman and English glosses to be found in their manuscript versions, Tony Hunt makes a pioneering attempt to understand its relationship to the vernaculars spoken in England.' TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT. Here at last is the first systematic study of the teaching and learning of Latin in thirteenth century England based on evidence from nearly 200 manuscripts where the text has been glossed in the vernacular. These glosses provide the key to discovering the linguistic competence and int...
Organised in 2008 by four medievalists from the University of Sheffield, Locating the Voice: Expressions of Identity in the Middle Ages provided a theatre for dialogue between postgraduates and early career researchers from around the world. This collection of articles, born out of the conference, forms an intriguing and interesting way of looking at identity and reflects the editors’ desire to reconcile ideas within adjacent interdisciplinary fields of study. Reaching far beyond the domain of medieval literature, already familiar to so many, this book examines the authorial and pictorial voice, the voice of national identity and even the physical attributes a medieval voice may have had. Each contributor shows how, in locating the voice in their own field of research, it is possible to build a multi-disciplinary approach to individuality and identity in the medieval world.
In medieval Europe, where theologians saw sin, some natural philosophers saw a phenomenon in need of explanation. They believed some men were born with homosexual inclinations and others acquired them as habits based on early pleasurable experiences.
The Familiar Enemy examines the linguistic, literary, and cultural identities of England and France during the Hundred Years War. It explores works by Deschamps, Charles d'Orléans, and Gower, as well as Chaucer who, the book argues, must be resituated within the context of the multilingual cultural geography of medieval Europe.
Delogu examines how biographical writings on kings contributed to nascent ideas of nationhood, exerted pressure upon traditional ideals of kingship, and ultimately redefined the theoretical and practical bases of medieval kingship.
New Medieval Literatures is an annual of work on medieval textual cultures, aiming to engage with intellectual and cultural pluralism in the Middle Ages and now. Its scope is inclusive of work across the theoretical, archival, philological, and historicist methodologies associated with medieval literary studies, and embraces the range of European cultures, capaciously defined. Essays in this volume engage with a wide range of subject matter, from as far back as Livy (d.c.AD 12/18) to Erwin Panofsky (d. 1968). They demonstrate that medieval textual cultures is a radically negotiable category and that medieval understandings of the past were equally diverse and unstable.They reflect on relatio...
Language and ideology in the scholarship of the late Middle Ages
Custom was fundamental to medieval legal practice. Whether in a property dispute or a trial for murder, the aggrieved and accused would go to lay court where cases were resolved according to custom. What custom meant, however, went through a radical shift in the medieval period. Between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, custom went from being a largely oral and performed practice to one that was also conceptualized in writing. Based on French lawbooks known as coutumiers, Ada Maria Kuskowski traces the repercussions this transformation – in the form of custom from unwritten to written and in the language of law from elite Latin to common vernacular – had on the cultural world of law. Vernacular Law offers a new understanding of the formation of a new field of knowledge: authors combined ideas, experience and critical thought to write lawbooks that made disparate customs into the field known as customary law.