An institute for advanced studies in the intellectual and material cultures of the Middle Ages
An institute for advanced studies in the intellectual and material cultures of the Middle Ages
An institute for advanced studies in the intellectual and material cultures of the Middle Ages
An institute for advanced studies in the intellectual and material cultures of the Middle Ages
An institute for advanced studies in the intellectual and material cultures of the Middle Ages
An institute for advanced studies in the intellectual and material cultures of the Middle Ages
An institute for advanced studies in the intellectual and material cultures of the Middle Ages
An institute for advanced studies in the intellectual and material cultures of the Middle Ages
Forthcoming.
Studies and Texts 231; Judaism in the Medieval and Early Modern World 3 • xvi, 332 pp. • ISBN 978-0-88844-231-4 • Cloth • $95
Robert Wakefield (ca. 1493/5–1537) and his brother Thomas (1500–1575) were pioneers in the study and teaching of Hebrew in early modern England, but the range of their learning and their accomplishments has received scant scholarly attention.
Forthcoming.
Studies and Texts 232; Catholic and Recusant Texts of the Late Medieval & Early Modern Periods 5 • xxii, 454 pp. plus 8 colour plates • ISBN 978-0-88844-232-1 • Cloth • $115
Elizabethan poet Henry Constable (1562–1613), a Protestant-born Catholic convert, is a fascinating case study in how religious and political preoccupations could drive the learned across the unstable confessional divide. This book provides a new comprehensive critical edition of Constable’s sonnets that returns to the primary sources – some of them newly discovered.
Learning Hebrew in Medieval England: Christian Scholars and the Longleat House Grammar
Studies and Texts 230; Judaism in the Medieval and Early Modern World 2 • x, 194 pp. plus 24 colour plates • ISBN 978-0-88844-230-7 • Cloth • $95
The fountainhead of theology, a “doorway to wisdom,” or a philological riddle: there were many reasons to learn Hebrew for inquisitive Christian minds in the Middle Ages. Although preoccupation with the meanings of the names of the Hebrew letters and their presumed inherent virtues can be traced back to the early Church Fathers, the rediscovery of classical sources and Aristotelian philosophy and the engagement with Graeco-Arabic sciences that marked the renaissance of the twelfth century also brought about an acute awareness of the need for a philological understanding of the Hebrew language.
Boccaccio and the Consolation of Literature
Studies and Texts 229 • x, 216 pp. • ISBN 978-0-88844-229-1 • Cloth • $90
The reader of Boccaccio’s voluminous writings, from the early Filocolo through the Decameron and to the later Epistles, cannot help but marvel at the pervasive engagement with the power and reach of consolation. Time and again, his protagonists suffer heartache and tribulation and seek comfort in the words of others or, significantly, in the reading of literature. These scenes are accompanied, tellingly, by the author’s own declarations for the care and solace of his readers. Although scholars have long recognized its importance, this wide-ranging and multifaceted exploration of the consolatory value of literature has not received the attention it deserves. Boccaccio and the Consolation of Literature is the first sustained study of Boccaccio’s consoling fictions as well as his reflections on the way literature can, and should, offer solace.
Studies and Texts 227; Toronto Studies in Romance Philology 4 • xii, 422 pp. • Essays in French, English, Italian, and Spanish • ISBN 978-0-88844-227-7 • Cloth • $100
Oltre la mer salee collects revised versions of twenty-eight papers in English, French, Italian, and Spanish originally presented at the 21st International Congress of the Société Rencesvals pour l’étude des épopées romanes, held in August 2018 in Toronto. Specialists in the field of medieval Romance epic reconsider traditional approaches and present novel research perspectives. Their studies are divided among four major themes: family relations, manuscripts, French epic in England, and travel and exchanges.
Gold in the Sanctuary: Reassessing Notker of St Gall’s Liber Ymnorum
Studies and Texts 228 • xvi, 290 pp. plus 12 colour plates • ISBN 978-0-88844-228-4 • Cloth • $95
A meticulous reading of Notker of St Gall’s texts and their backgrounds, as well as the exploration of their multifaceted reverberation in literature and art, allow for retracing the story of a significant if forgotten aspect of the poetic tradition in the Latin Middle Ages.
Gower and Anglo-Latin Verse
Studies and Texts 226 • xii, 346 pp. • ISBN 978-0-88844-226-0 • Cloth • $95
This study offers a novel paradigm for explaining the late-medieval Anglo-Latin verse, by analyzing the development of the writings of the English poet John Gower (ca. 1330–1408), who made major contributions to English- and French-language poetry, in addition to being the pre-eminent Latin poet of the “Age of Chaucer.”
Asceticism of the Mind: Forms of Attention and Self-Transformation in Late Antique Monasticism
Studies and Texts 213 • 2018 • x + 238 pp.
New in Paperback (2021): ISBN 978-0-88844-429-5 • $37.50
Casebound: ISBN 978-0-88844-213-0 • Cloth • $80
Asceticism is founded on the possibility that human beings can profoundly transform themselves through training and discipline. In particular, asceticism in the Eastern monastic tradition is based on the assumption that individuals are not slaves to the habitual and automatic but can be improved by ascetic practice and, with the cooperation of divine grace, transform their entire character and cultivate special powers and skills. Asceticism of the Mind explores the strategies that enabled Christian ascetics in the Egyptian, Gazan, and Sinaitic monastic traditions of late antiquity to cultivate a new form of existence.
The Early Glossed Ecclesiastes: A Critical Edition with Introduction
Studies and Texts 224; The Glossed Bible: Editions and Studies of the Medieval Sacra pagina 1 • x, 324 pp. • ISBN 978-0-88844-224-6 • Cloth • $95
The Glossa ordinaria was the main exegetical instrument by which the Bible was taught and studied during the Middle Ages, a resource whose influence began in the early twelfth century and remained perceptible in theological writing beyond the sixteenth century. For much of its modern history, the sheer scale, range, and ubiquity of the Glossa have deterred scholars from sustained study of its origins, development, and reception. However, the recent growth of studies devoted to the Laon-Paris teaching milieu in which the Glossa was central has altered the scholarly landscape. This volume, like the series of which it is part, should contribute to this development by providing the first textual and historical analysis of the earliest written version of the glossed Ecclesiastes.
The Birth of the Author: Pictorial Prefaces in Glossed Books of the Twelfth Century
Studies and Texts 225; Text Image Context: Studies in Medieval Manuscript Illumination 9 • xxvi, 302 pp. incl. 150 colour illus. • ISBN 978-0-88844-225-3 • Cloth • $100
This book argues that the images devised to accompany medieval commentaries, whether on the Bible or on classical texts, made claims to authority, even inspiration, that at times were even more forceful than those made by the texts themselves. Paradoxically, it was in the context of commentaries that modern conceptions of independent authorship first were forged.
Beyond Words: New Research on Manuscripts in Boston Collections
Studies and Texts 221; Text Image Context: Studies in Medieval Manuscript Illumination 8 • xxxii, 362 pp. incl. 291 colour illus. • ISBN 978-0-88844-221-5 • Cloth • $150
In the fall of 2016 an international scholarly con ference accompanied the exhibition Beyond Words: Illuminated Manuscripts in Boston Collections. The speakers were chosen because of their expertise and because they were known to have research under way pertaining to important manuscripts in the exhibition. The aim of both exhibition and conference was to provide a broad overview of the history of patronage and book production over the course of the High and late Middle Ages, to the extent that the eclectic holdings of Boston-area institutions permitted. Most of the papers delivered at the conference have been collected as essays in this abundantly illustrated volume which, while still linked to the exhibition, now has an independent purpose.
In This Land: Jewish Life and Legal Culture in Late Medieval Provence
Studies and Texts 223; Judaism in the Medieval and Early Modern World 1 • 2021 • x, 168 pp. • ISBN 978-0-88844-223-9 • Cloth • $90
Jewish communities existed across the county of Provence throughout the Middle Ages. In This Land reveals the changes that those communities underwent during the late-thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and the social and cultural tensions that shaped their identity.
Beyond the Sermo modernus: Sermon Form in Early Fifteenth-Century England
Studies and Texts 222 • 2021 • xii, 282 pp. • ISBN 978-0-88844-222-2 • Cloth • $95
In England, as well as on the continent, the early fifteenth century saw a slackening of rigorous academic work in theology and at the same time a stronger interest in biblical and devotional approaches and practices. This book addresses the question of whether, and if so in what way, such a change may also have occurred in preaching by investigating the form in which sermons were constructed, to determine whether a new development or innovation replaced the scholastic sermon, or sermo modernus, in use from the later thirteenth century on. The volume concludes with editions of sermons drawn from major works created in England between the final years of the fourteenth and the middle of the fifteenth century.
From the Vulgate to the Vernacular: Four Debates on an English Question c. 1400
Studies and Texts 220; British Writers 7 • cxxxvi, 216 pp. plus 8 b&w plates • ISBN 978-0-88844-220-8 • Cloth • $150
Co-published with The Bodleian Library (ISBN 978-1-85124-563-5)
Translation is at the centre of Christianity, scripturally, as reflected in the biblical stories of the Tower of Babel or of the apostles’ speaking in tongues after the Ascension, and historically, where arguments about it were dominant in councils, such as those of Trent or the Second Vatican Council of 1962–64, which privileged the use of the vernacular in liturgy.
Translation and the Rediscovery of Rhetoric
Studies and Texts 217; Toronto Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Rhetoric 1 • 2020 • xii, 444 pp. • ISBN 978-0-88844-217-8 • Cloth • $95
Translation and the Rediscovery of Rhetoric presents a diachronic case study of how translation is the means by which rhetoric, as the art of reasoning, becomes a part of a lineage of – and a resource for – an ethics of civic discourse. It shows how translation (as practice and as theory, via the medieval topos of translatio as the transfer of knowledge) serves as the vehicle for the transfer of rhetoric as an art of argumentation and persuasion from classical Greece and Rome to modern Paris and Brussels by way of medieval France and Italy.
Dislocations: Maps, Classical Tradition, and Spatial Play in the European Middle Ages
Studies and Texts 218 • 2020 • xii, 348 pp. plus 32 pages of colour plates • ISBN 978-0-88844-218-5 • Cloth • $95
In Europe, during the Middle Ages, classical Greek and Roman geography continued to provide the fundamental structure for knowing the world’s places and peoples. From encyclopedic compendia such as the Natural History of Pliny the Elder and its redaction in Julius Solinus’s Polyhistor to the works of canonical Roman poets such as Virgil, Ovid, and Lucan, the geographical content of antique texts invited study and explication. Yet medieval authors well knew that classical spatial order, itself full of lacunae, only infrequently corresponded to their own reality. Dislocations: Maps, Classical Tradition, and Spatial Play in the European Middle Ages considers the ways in which medieval and, later, humanist geography absorbed and reinvented classical spatial models in order to address key questions of historical change, migration, and emerging national, regional, and linguistic identities.
From Sithiu to Saint-Bertin: Hagiographic Exegesis and Collective Memory in the Early Medieval Cults of Omer and Bertin
Studies and Texts 219 • 2019 • xiv, 340 pp. • ISBN 978-0-88844-219-2 • Cloth • $95
Medieval historians who have explored the abbey of Sithiu (modern Saint-Omer) have often done so to explain the competition between the canons of Saint-Omer and the monks of Saint-Bertin, a rivalry deriving from their shared origins in the abbey of Sithiu. However, David Defries’s book centers on the cooperative relationship that developed between the saints Omer and Bertin in the monks’ collective memory. Throughout the early Middle Ages, the cults of the abbey’s two patron saints shaped the life of the community at Sithiu, and the first four centuries of its development reveal how a group of monks negotiated their place in the larger Christian West, adapting Columbanian and Benedictine identities to fit the relationship they discerned between Omer and Bertin.
A Soul’s Journey: Franciscan Art, Theology, and Devotion in the Supplicationes variae
Studies and Texts 210; Text Image Context: Studies in Medieval Manuscript Illumination 6 • 2019 • xviii, 354 pp. incl. 245 colour illus. • ISBN 978-0-88844-210-9 • Cloth • $150
The Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence houses an extraordinary manuscript: an anthology of devotional texts and images called the Supplicationes variae, dated 1293 and made for use in Genoa, that ends with a remarkable series of full-page illustrations. Although the Supplicationes does not include or illustrate Bonaventure’s seminal text, The Soul’s Journey into God, the manuscript is effectively the site for performance of a spiritual pilgrimage, for it is through the Franciscan theologian’s mystical and poetic concepts that the deeper meanings of its images can be discerned.
Heretics, Schismatics, or Catholics? Latin Attitudes to the Greeks in the Long Twelfth Century
Studies and Texts 216 • 2019 • xvi + 292 pp. • ISBN 978-0-88844-216-1 • Cloth • $95
The political division of the Roman world into Western and Eastern Roman Empires at the end of the fourth century spurred the divergence of the Latinised Western and the Hellenised Eastern halves. According to a pervasive and deeply ingrained belief in modern academic, educational and popular literature, the ensuing antagonism on religious and cultural grounds between the two parts of medieval Christendom eventually led to the “schism of 1054.” Less than fifty years after the schism, Greeks and Latins came into closer contact as a result of the crusades and the encounter was catastrophic, leading to the capture and sack of Constantinople in 1204 by the armies of the Fourth Crusade. This study, the first to deal exclusively with Latin perceptions of and attitudes toward the Greeks in terms of religion, aims to revisit and challenge the view that the so-called schism between the Latin and Greek Churches led to the isolation of the Byzantine Empire by the Latin states and eventually to the events of 1204.
Imagining the Miraculous: Miraculous Images of the Virgin Mary in French Illuminated Manuscripts, ca. 1250–ca. 1450
Studies and Texts 215; Text Image Context: Studies in Medieval Manuscript Illumination 7 • 2019 • xviii, 194 pp. incl. 94 colour illus. • ISBN 978-0-88844-215-4 • Cloth • $95
This is not a book about miraculous images of the Virgin Mary (be they icons, sculptures, altarpieces, or reliquaries) but about their representations in French illuminated manuscripts from ca. 1250 to ca. 1450. Most of these depictions of the Virgin Mary cannot be identified even tangentially with particular surviving images (such as the Virgins of Rocamadour, Soissons, Chartres, and Laon). Rather, these illustrations point to the ubiquity of local miraculous Marian images in devotional practices from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century in French-speaking regions. This book analyzes depictions of material images and the animated miracles they perform, and traces their evolution from the earliest narratives of Marian miracles written in Old French to texts and images produced at the Burgundian court of the late Middle Ages.