Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts


Book Description

Part of a detailed compendium of late-Roman learning in each of the seven liberal arts, set within an amusing mythological-allegorical tale of courtship and marriage among the pagan gods. The text provides an understanding of medieval allegory and the components of a medieval education.




The Intellectual Life of Western Europe in the Middle Ages


Book Description

A connected account of European thought from the Patristic age through the mid-fourteenth century, and emphasizing educational systems, the interaction between the popular and elite cultures, and medieval humanism; with excellent interpretive chapters on science and philosophy.




Classical Rhetoric in the Middle Ages


Book Description

Classical Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: The Medieval Rhetors and Their Art 400-1300, with Manuscript Survey to 1500 CE is a completely updated version of John Ward’s much-used doctoral thesis of 1972, and is the definitive treatment of this fundamental aspect of medieval and rhetorical culture. It is commonly believed that medieval writers were interested only in Christian truth, not in Graeco-Roman methods of ‘persuasion’ to whatever viewpoint the speaker / writer wanted. Dr Ward, however, investigates the content of well over one thousand medieval manuscripts and shows that medieval writers were fully conscious of and much dependent upon Graeco-Roman rhetorical methods of persuasion. The volume then demonstrates why and to what purpose this use of classical rhetoric took place.




A Companion to Boethius in the Middle Ages


Book Description

The articles in this volume focus upon Boethius's extant works: his De arithmetica and a fragmentary De musica, his translations and commentaries on logic, his five theological texts, and, of course, his Consolation of Philosophy. They examine the effects that Boethian thought has exercised upon the learning of later generations of scholars.




Women and Gender in Medieval Europe


Book Description

Publisher description




Touching the Passion — Seeing Late Medieval Altarpieces through the Eyes of Faith


Book Description

In Touching the Passion — Seeing Late Medieval Altarpieces through the Eyes of Faith, Donna Sadler explores the manner in which worshipers responded to the carved and polychromed retables adorning the altars of their parish churches. Framed by the symbolic death of Christ re-enacted during the Mass, the historical account of the Passion on the retable situated Christ’s suffering and triumph over death in the present. The dramatic gestures, contemporary garb, and wealth of anecdotal detail on the altarpiece, invited the viewer’s absorption in the narrative. As in the Imitatio Christi, the worshiper imaginatively projected himself into the story like a child before a dollhouse. The five senses, the sculptural medium, the small scale, and the rhetoric of memory foster this immersion.




Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages


Book Description

What were the boundaries between 'official' and 'subversive', 'orthodox' and 'dissenting' critical practices in the Middle Ages? Placing medieval critical and intellectual discourses within their cultural and ideological frameworks, Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages examines conflicts of gender, violence, academic freedom, hermeneutical authority, sacramentalism and heresy among so-called official as well as dissenting critical orders. Pedagogies, theories of grammar and rhetoric, poetics and hermeneutics, academic 'sciences', clerical professionalism, literacy, visual images, theology, and textual cultures of heresy are all considered. This 1996 collection of essays by major scholars examines medieval critical discourse, theories of textuality and interpretation, and representations of learning and knowledge - as contesting and contested institutional practices within and between Latin and vernacular cultures.




Music as Concept and Practice in the Late Middle Ages


Book Description

This entirely new volume of NOHM takes account of developments in late-medieval music scholarship, along with significant changes in the performance practice of the late-medieval repertory, witnessed during the latter half of the 20th century.




A Companion to Twelfth-Century Schools


Book Description

This Companion to Twelfth-Century Schools provides a comprehensive update and new synthesis of the last three decades of research. The fruit of a contemporary renewal of cultural history among international scholars of medieval studies, this collection draws on the discovery of new texts, the progress made in critical attribution, the growing attention given to the conditions surrounding the oral and written dissemination of works, the use of the notion of a “community of learning”, the reinterpretation of the relations between the cloister and the urban school, and links between institutional history and social history. Contributors are: Alexander Andrée, Irene Caiazzo, Cédric Giraud, Frédéric Goubier, Danielle Jacquart, Thierry Kouamé, Constant J. Mews, Ken Pennington, Dominique Poirel, Irène Rosier-Catach, Sita Steckel, Jacques Verger, and Olga Weijers. See inside the book.




Boethius in the Middle Ages


Book Description

Boethius' Consolatio Philosophiae is one of those exceptional works that circulated widely throughout such diverse medieval cultures as the schools and universities, the court, and religious houses. It spawned a rich tradition of Latin commentaries and was a major force in shaping vernacular literary traditions, including the works of Jean de Meun, Dante, and Chaucer. The changing perceptions of the Consolatio are the subject of this collection of new essays. The first section is devoted to the Latin commentary tradition (William of Conches, Nicholas Trevet, and Pierre d'Ailly). The other sections explore the vernacular traditions (Italian, French, German, English, and Dutch). The book underlines the interactions between the Latin and the vernacular and between literary and scholastic contexts, and the focus throughout is on the intellectual and institutional background of the works discussed.