In this book Thomas H. Bestul constructs the literary history of the Latin Passion narratives, placing them within their social, cultural, and historical contexts. He examines the ways in which the ...Passion is narrated and renarrated in devotional treatises, paying particular attention to the modifications and enlargements of the narrative of the Passion as it is presented in the canonical gospels.
Of particular interest to Bestul are the representations of Jews, women, and the body of the crucified Christ. Bestul argues that the greatly enlarged role of the Jews in the Passion narratives of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is connected to the rising anti-Judaism of the period. He explores how the representations of women, particularly the Virgin Mary, express cultural values about the place of women in late medieval society and reveal an increased interest in female subjectivity.
Scholastic disputation, the formalized procedure of debate in the medieval university, is one of the hallmarks of intellectual life in premodern Europe. Modeled on Socratic and Aristotelian methods ...of argumentation, this rhetorical style was refined in the monasteries of the early Middle Ages and rose to prominence during the twelfth-century Renaissance. Strict rules governed disputation, and it became the preferred method of teaching within the university curriculum and beyond. InThe Medieval Culture of Disputation, Alex J. Novikoff has written the first sustained and comprehensive study of the practice of scholastic disputation and of its formative influence in multiple spheres of cultural life.
Using hundreds of published and unpublished sources as his guide, Novikoff traces the evolution of disputation from its ancient origins to its broader impact on the scholastic culture and public sphere of the High Middle Ages. Many examples of medieval disputation are rooted in religious discourse and monastic pedagogy: Augustine's inner spiritual dialogues and Anselm of Bec's use of rational investigation in speculative theology laid the foundations for the medieval contemplative world. The polemical value of disputation was especially exploited in the context of competing Jewish and Christian interpretations of the Bible. Disputation became the hallmark of Christian intellectual attacks against Jews and Judaism, first as a literary genre and then in public debates such as the Talmud Trial of 1240 and the Barcelona Disputation of 1263. As disputation filtered into the public sphere, it also became a key element in iconography, liturgical drama, epistolary writing, debate poetry, musical counterpoint, and polemic.The Medieval Culture of Disputationplaces the practice and performance of disputation at the nexus of this broader literary and cultural context.
Affective meditation on the Passionwas 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 Compassionadvances 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 creation of the earliest and most influential texts in the genre, from John of Fécamp'sLibellusto theMeditationes vitae Christi, thus challenging current paradigms that cast the compassionate affective mode as Anselmian or Franciscan in origin. The early development of the genre in women's practices had a powerful and lasting legacy. With special attention to Middle English texts, including Nicholas Love'sMirrorand a wide range of Passion lyrics and laments,Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassionilluminates how these scripts for the performance of prayer served to construct compassion itself as an intimate and feminine emotion. To feel compassion for Christ, in the private drama of the heart that these texts stage, was to feel like a woman. This was an assumption about emotion that proved historically consequential, McNamer demonstrates, as she traces some of its legal, ethical, and social functions in late medieval England.
InPrinting the Middle AgesSiân Echard looks to the postmedieval, postmanuscript lives of medieval texts, seeking to understand the lasting impact on both the popular and the scholarly imaginations of ...the physical objects that transmitted the Middle Ages to the English-speaking world. Beneath and behind the foundational works of recovery that established the canon of medieval literature, she argues, was a vast terrain of books, scholarly or popular, grubby or beautiful, widely disseminated or privately printed. By turning to these, we are able to chart the differing reception histories of the literary texts of the British Middle Ages. For Echard, any reading of a medieval text, whether past or present, amateur or academic, floats on the surface of a complex sea of expectations and desires made up of the books that mediate those readings.
Each chapter ofPrinting the Middle Agesfocuses on a central textual object and tells its story in order to reveal the history of its reception and transmission. Moving from the first age of print into the early twenty-first century, Echard examines the special fonts created in the Elizabethan period to reproduce Old English, the hand-drawn facsimiles of the nineteenth century, and today's experiments with the digital reproduction of medieval objects; she explores the illustrations in eighteenth-century versions ofGuy of WarwickandBevis of Hampton; she discusses nineteenth-century children's versions of theCanterbury Talesand the aristocratic transmission history of John Gower'sConfessio Amantis; and she touches on fine press printings of Dante, Froissart, and Langland.
This volume analyses the importance of history, the textual resources of the past and the integration of Christian and imperial Rome into the cultural memory of early medieval Europe within the wider ...question of identity formation. The case studies in this book shed new light on the process of codification and modification of cultural heritage in the light of the transmission of texts and the extant manuscript evidence from the early middle ages. The authors demonstrate how particular texts and their early medieval manuscript representatives in Italy, Francia, Saxony and Bavaria not only reflect ethnic, social and cultural identities but themselves contributed to the creation of identities, gave meaning to social practice, and were often intended to inspire, guide, change, or prevent action, directly or indirectly. These texts are shown to be part of a cultural effort to shape the present by restructuring the past.
In hisProblemata, Aristotle provided medieval thinkers with the occasion to inquire into the natural causes of the sexual desires of men to act upon or be acted upon by other men, thus bringing human ...sexuality into the purview of natural philosophers, whose aim it was to explain the causes of objects and events in nature. With this philosophical justification, some late medieval intellectuals asked whether such dispositions might arise from anatomy or from the psychological processes of habit formation. As the fourteenth-century philosopher Walter Burley observed, "Nothing natural is shameful." The authors, scribes, and readers willing to "contemplate base things" never argued that they were not vile, but most did share the conviction that they could be explained. From the evidence that has survived in manuscripts of and related to theProblemata, two narratives emerge: a chronicle of the earnest attempts of medieval medical theorists and natural philosophers to understand the cause of homosexual desires and pleasures in terms of natural processes, and an ongoing debate as to whether the sciences were equipped or permitted to deal with such subjects at all. Mining hundreds of texts and deciphering commentaries, indices, abbreviations, and marginalia, Joan Cadden shows how European scholars deployed a standard set of philosophical tools and a variety of rhetorical strategies to produce scientific approaches to sodomy.
This book investigates the 'owner portrait' in the context of late medieval devotional books primarily from France and England. These mirror-like pictures of praying book owners respond to and help ...develop a growing concern with visibility and self-scrutiny that characterized the religious life of the laity after the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. The image of the praying book owner translated pre-existing representational strategies concerned with the authority and spiritual efficacy of pictures and books, such as the Holy Face and the donor image, into a more intimate and reflexive mode of address in Psalters and Books of Hours created for lay users. Alexa Sand demonstrates how this transformation had profound implications for devotional practices and for the performance of gender and class identity in the striving, aristocratic world of late medieval France and England.
This book is a collection of essays offering a wide range of approaches to teaching with commonplace books. In the medieval period and beyond, commonplace books promoted a blend of excerpting, ...memorization, creative writing, and journaling, making them the analogue equivalent to modern-day digital journaling, bookmarking, and note-taking tools. Covering a variety of methods for introducing students to the medieval and Renaissance reading practice known as commonplacing, this volume provides instructors with concrete guidelines for using commonplace books as a teaching and learning tool. The enclosed essays provide a point of reference for best practices as well as concrete models for teaching and learning with commonplace books, helping instructors develop more student-centred, inclusive curricula.
The art of the object reached unparalleled heights in the medieval Islamic world, yet the deep intellectual dimensions of ceramics, metalwares, and other plastic arts in this milieu have not always ...been acknowledged. Arts of Allusion reveals the object as a crucial site where premodern craftsmen of the eastern Mediterranean and Persianate realms engaged their creations in fertile dialogue with poetry, literature, painting, and, perhaps most strikingly, architecture. Through close studies of objects from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, this book reveals that allusions to architecture abound across media in the portable arts of the medieval Islamic world. Arts of Allusion draws upon a broad range of material evidence as well as medieval texts, from works of philosophy and ethics to marketplace manuals, to locate its subjects in a nuanced cultural landscape where the material, visual, and verbal realms were intertwined. Moving far beyond the initial identification of architectural types with their miniature counterparts in the plastic arts, it develops a series of new frameworks for exploring the intelligent art of the allusive object. These address materiality, representation, and perception, and examine contemporary literary and poetic paradigms of metaphor, description, and indirect reference as tools for approaching the plastic arts. Arts of Allusion makes a powerful case for the role of the intellect in the applied arts and for the communicative potential of ornament. Simultaneously, it argues for the reinstatement of craftsmanship into Islamic intellectual history.
How ‘green’ were people in late antiquity and the Middle Ages? Unlike today, the nature around them was approached with faith, trust and care. The population size was many times smaller than today ...and human impact on nature not as extreme as it is now. People did not have to worry about issues like deforestation and sustainability. This book is about the knowledge of plants and where that knowledge came from. How did people use earth and plants in ancient times, and what did they know about their nutritional or medicinal properties? From which plants one could make dyes, such as indigo, woad and dyer’s madder? Is it possible to determine that through technical research today? Which plants could be found in a ninth-century monastery garden, and what is the symbolic significance of plants in secular and religious literature? The Green Middle Ages addresses these and other issues, including the earliest herbarium collections, with a leading role for the palaeography and beautiful illuminations from numerous medieval manuscripts kept in Dutch and other Western libraries and museums.
