Writing and the Formation of Tradition in the Later Middle Ages
In the mid-nineteenth century, Jacob Grimm published a collection of late medieval records of local law-called WeistUEmer-that was scarcely less comprehensive than his famous collection of fairy tales. As with the fairy tales, Grimm assumed that before their transcription, people had handed these down orally from time immemorial. His interest in ......
Interaction and Intellectual Exchange in the Medieval Islamic World
The medieval Islamic world comprised a wide variety of religions. While individuals and communities in this world identified themselves with particular faiths, boundaries between these groups were vague and in some cases nonexistent. Rather than simply borrowing or lending customs, goods, and notions to one another, the peoples of the ......
Pope John Paul II famously canonised more saints than all his predecessors combined. Several of these candidates were controversial. To this day there remain holy men and women "on the books" of the Vatican's Congregation for the Causes of Saints whose canonisation would provoke considerable debate. This was no less true during the period covered ......
Galbert of Bruges' ""The Murder, Betrayal and Assassination of the Glorious Charles, Count of Flanders"" is one of the most widely read books of the Middle Ages. It recounts the assassination of Charles, Count of Flanders, and the events leading up to and following the murder. Galbert was a resident of Bruges and had served in the count's ......
The eucharistic crisis of the eleventh century posed the greatest challenge to the Church's understanding of the Real Presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament until the Reformation. The eucharistic symbolism of ""Berengarius of Tours"", which was at the heart of the controversy, was challenged first by Lanfranc of Canterbury and then by his ......
Around 1147 the bishop of Chartres directed Geoffrey Grossus, a monk of Tiron Abbey, to write the life of its founder Bernard of Abbeville (ca. 1050-1116) in an effort to further his canonization. Although Geoffrey Grossus blithely borrowed from other writings on saints' lives to further his hagiographical purpose, he presented an erudite, ......
Benevolence toward the poor in medieval Europe rested upon ideological foundations established by Christianity and was practiced by a diverse body of clerics and lay people. ""Charity and Religion in Medieval Europe"" is the first comprehensive study of the ideas that underlie medieval generosity and of the institutions created to serve the poor. ......
In each of these six essays, treating the greatest literary accomplishments of medieval and renaissance England, the author is concerned with the literary work as a whole and with a survey of recent critical approaches to it. Beowulf, by R. E. Kaske; The Canterbury Tales, by Richard L. Hoffman; Le Morte Darthur, by Larry D. Benson; The Faerie ......
The Lives of Liutbirga of Wendhausen and Hathumoda of Gandersheim
Around the year 840, Liutbirga, the adopted daughter of a noble Saxon widow, asked to be walled into a cell in a church at one of the family's cloisters for religious women. She spent the last thirty years of her life in her cell, doing penance for her sins, fending off attacks by the devil, and instructing women in religion and handiwork through ......
