The Medieval Python

Explores the links between tales preserved in Latin from the Middle Ages and "classic" fairy tales from the collections of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen

James Grier documents the musical activities of Adémar de Chabannes, eleventh-century monk, historian, homilist and tireless polemicist for the apostolic status of Saint Martial, patron saint of the abbey that bore his name in Limoges. Adémar left behind some 451 folios of music with notation in his autograph hand, a musical resource without equal before the seventeenth century. He introduced, at strategic moments, pieces familiar from the standard liturgy for an apostle and items of his own composition. These reveal Adémar to be a supremely able designer of liturgies and a highly original composer. This study analyses his accomplishments as a musical scribe, compiler of liturgies, editor of existing musical works and composer; it also offers a speculative consideration of his abilities as a singer; and finally, it places Adémar's musical activities in the context of liturgical, musical and political developments at the abbey of Saint Martial in Limoges.

On a spring day in 1277, the prominent Jewish businesswoman Licoricia of Winchester was found by her daughter, murdered, stabbed to death in her own house. Alongside Licoricia's body was that of her

How exactly did political power operate in early medieval Europe? Taking Alsace as his focus, Hans Hummer offers an intriguing new case study on localised and centralised power and the relationship between the two from c. 600–1000. Providing a panoramic survey of the sources from the region, which include charters, notarial formulas, royal instruments, and Old High German literature, he untangles the networks of monasteries and kin groups which made up the political landscape of Alsace, and shows the significance of monastic control in shaping that landscape. He also investigates this local structure in light of comparative evidence from other regions. He tracks the emergence of the distinctive local order during the seventh century to its eventual decline in the late tenth century in the face of radical monastic reform. Highly original and well balanced, this 2006 work is of interest to all students of medieval political structures.

Until the Reformation, almost all sermons were written down in Latin. This is the first scholarly study systematically to describe and analyse the collections of Latin sermons from the golden age of medieval preaching in England, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Basing his studies on the extant manuscripts, Siegfried Wenzel analyses these sermons and the occasions when they were given. Larger issues of preaching in the later Middle Ages such as the pastoral concern about preaching, originality in sermon making, and the attitudes of orthodox preachers to Lollardy, receive detailed attention. The surviving sermons and their collections are listed for the first time in full inventories, which supplement the critical and contextual material Wenzel presents. This book is an important contribution to the study of medieval preaching, and will be essential for scholars of late medieval literature, history and religious thought.

During the later Middle Ages people became increasingly obsessed with vision, visual analogies and the possibility of visual error. In this book Dallas Denery addresses the question of what medieval men and women thought it meant to see themselves and others in relation to the world and to God. Exploring the writings of Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus, Peter Aureol and Nicholas of Autrecourt in light of an assortment of popular religious guides for preachers, confessors and penitents, including Peter of Limoges' Treatise on the Moral Eye, he illustrates how the question preoccupied medieval men and women on both an intellectual and practical level. This book offers a unique interdisciplinary examination of the interplay between religious life, perspectivist optics and theology. Denery presents significant new insights into the medieval psyche and conception of the self, ensuring that this book will appeal to historians of medieval science and those of medieval religious life and theology.

Christianity in the later Middle Ages was flourishing, popular and vibrant and the institutional church was generally popular--in stark contrast to the picture of corruption and decline painted by the

No Place of Rest pursues the literary traces of the traumatic expulsion of Jews from France in 1306. Through careful readings of liturgical, philosophical, memorial, and medical texts, Susan Einbinder

Lust for Liberty challenges long-standing views of popular medieval revolts. Comparing rebellions in northern and southern Europe over two centuries, Samuel Cohn analyzes their causes and forms, their

Replete with shady merchants, scoundrels, hungry mercenaries, scheming nobles, and maneuvering cardinals, The Man Who Believed He Was King of France proves the adage that truth is often stranger than

A variety of new perspectives and fresh insights into people and society in fifteenth-century England and France are gathered together here. We learn from contemporary accounts of the battle of Anthon

Presents the intellectual world of early medieval Sichuan through a critical biography of historian and classicist Qiao Zhou.

This book offers an inside into the modes of using ritual as an affective tool of political action in the Middle Ages - both in the practice of political entreprising, and on the level of narrative in

From the austere spirituality of a ninth-century Byzantine icon of the Virgin to the exalted frivolity of a fourteenth-century French table fountain, this book gives new coherence to the Cleveland Mu

Just as twenty-first-century technologies like blogs and wikis have transformed the once private act of reading into a public enterprise, devotional reading experiences in the Middle Ages were depende

Since the earliest days of the Church, theologians have struggled to understand how humanity and divinity coexisted in the person of Christ. Proponents of the Arian heresy, which held that Jesus could

In some of the 16 essays, 11 reprinted, Scattergood, (Medieval and Renaissance English, Trinity College, Dublin) discusses how manuscript books were made, who commissioned them, who made them, who own

Print Culture and the Medieval Author is a book about books. Examining hundreds of early printed books and their late medieval analogues, Alexandra Gillespie writes a bibliographical history of the p

Four customaries that describe the daily life and liturgy at the abbey of Cluny over nearly 100 years beginning at the end of the 10th century comprise both the sources and the object of these 14 stud

Mary O'Neill examines the legacy of the medieval poet composers of Northern France, the trouv�res. For many years problems and difficulties concerning the surviving melodies have prevented us from a

Essays in honour of Margaret Bent.The chapters of this book probe the varied functions of citation and allusion in medieval and renaissance musical culture. At its most fundamental level musical cultu

26 essays explore our current knowledge of this subject and look at what sculpture can tell us about early medieval society.

Drawing on manuscript sources, this book examines how the medieval clergy developed the authority and persuasive force to attempt to govern the day-to-day speech of Western Christians. It shows how attempts were made to portray some political, social and private speech as deviant and destructive, labelling it lying, slander, blasphemy and other Sins of the Tongue. It explores, for the first time, how Chaucer, Langland, Gower and the 'Patience' poet use the different strains of this pastoral discourse not only to expose the destructive power of speech in political and social life but also to judge clerical claims to authority and efficacy in formulating and applying codes of speech.

This is the second collection of articles by Kunitzsch on Arabic-Islamic astronomy and its reception in medieval Europe. In this multi- lingual edition (English, German and French) Kunitzsch examines

Rodney Hilton's account of the Peasant's Revolt of 1381 remains the classic authoritative text on the 'English Rising'. Hilton views the revolt in the context of a general European pattern of class co

Unites architectural history with the study of urban space and the spread of Islam, showing how dervish lodges became sites where a new ruling elite promoted the cult of Sufi saints.

The King's Body offers a unique and up-to-date overview of a central theme in European history: the nature and meaning of the sacred rituals of kingship. Informed by the work of recent cultural anthro

Medieval historian Berman (U. of Iowa) has gathered and translated a useful selection of charters that provide an insight into the creation and operation of female Cistercian monastic houses. The cha

Bringing together prominent scholars in the sociology of religion, this collection of essays offers a framework for understanding the transition from the essentially penitential purposes of the mediev

This volume of essays is dedicated to Wilbur Knorr, an outstanding historian of science whose career was cut short much too early. Inspired by Knorr's work, this volume concentrates on the history of

In this detailed study, Liddiard examines the processes and factors which determined the number, distribution and location of castles and considers how a castle's construction altered its environment.

As part of a unique series covering the grand sweep of Western civilization from ancient to present times, this biographical dictionary provides introductory information on 315 leading cultural figure

The customary path to achievement in China was through service to the state, but from the earliest times some men had been acclaimed for repudiating an official career. Placing the recluse into the so

This is the second of a three-volume set that presents biographical essays on the scholars whose work has defined medieval studies. Covers 35 scholars from the 16th to the 20th centuries whose subject

Descriptions of imaginary buildings abound in late medieval and early modern texts in France. This book examines the reasons for their popularity and analyzes the way in which metaphors of the buildin

The Ancrene Wisse, a guide for female recluses in the West Midlands in the early thirteenth century, and the closely related works of the "Katherine Group," offer vivid and fascinating insights into

As the Roman empire declined and 'fell', contemporary glorification of the emperor's triumphal rulership reached new heights, strewing traces of the empire's perennial victory across the physical and mental landscape of late antiquity. In this, the first comprehensive study of how a great imperial ceremony actually developed and how it influenced both the eastern and western heirs to the Roman legacy, the Roman triumph's resurgence and afterlife is documented from the Tetrarchy to the end of the Macedonian dynasty in Byzantium and to Charlemagne's successors in the early medieval West. This perspective shows that celebrations of the ruler's victory experienced unceasing change in ritual form and content and that these changes mirrored broader trends in the development of society and the monarchy. At the same time, it casts new light on the late Roman origins of the trappings of early medieval kingship. Far from the imperial capital, the cult of triumphal rulership permeated local elite