Bøker i Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture-serien

The churches and manuscripts of medieval Europe incessantly juxtapose imagery depicting sacred themes with likenesses of the crudest and basest nature. Drawing on the contrast between Bakhtin's concepts of the carnivalesque and the domain of the law, this book examines such opposites in six major works of pre-1350 Spanish literature.

An analysis of the importance of "textual criticism" as an act of historical interpretation and recovery in medieval literature. It points out the need for attention to the physical bearers of our knowledge of the English Middle Ages, the books and the features of manuscript culture.

In The Artificiality of Christianity, the author's primary goal is to distill from monastic literature a poetical tool that can be used to decipher the literary structure of religious texts; a secondary goal is to show the centrality of monasticism to the specific experiences of Christian reading.

Written by one of the world's leading paleographers, this book reconstructs the ways Western cultures have used writing-on tombstones, monuments, scrolls, books, posters-to commemorate the dead from the tombs of ancient Egypt to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C.

These fourteen essays draw on new biographical information and recent developments in literary theory and cultural studies to reinterpret Auerbach's work, both in the social and historical contexts of its author's life.

What is medieval religious drama, and what function does it serve in negotiating between the domains of theology and popular life? This book aims to answer these questions by studying three sets of these dramas from Germany, France, England, and Spain: 10th-century Easter plays, 12th-century Adam plays, and 15th- and 16th-century Passion plays.

This book interprets fourth-century theological discourse as an incident in the history of masculine gender, arguing that Nicene trinitarian doctrine is a crucial site not only for theological innovation but also for reimagining and reproducing manhood in the late Roman empire.

This book explores the wide range of Dante's reading and the extent to which he transformed what he read, whether in the biblical canon, in the ancient Latin poets, in such Christian authorities as Augustine or Benedict, or in the "book of the world"-the globe traversed by pilgrims and navigators.

Where does courtly literature come from? What is the meaning of courtly love? What is the relation between religious and secular culture in the Middle Ages, and why does it matter? This book addresses these questions by way of contradiction, which is central both to medieval logic and to most modern protocols of reading.

This work of intellectual and cultural history seeks to understand the recurring connection of teaching with contradiction in some major texts of the European Middle Ages.

This analysis aims to show how the greatest romance stories of medieval Europe contain the seeds of later versions of tragedy, and the stress this put upon the literary form and ideological function of the romance.

The author analyzes the transformations of the love deities in later Middle English Chaucerian poetry, academic Latin discourses on classical myth, and French conventions that associate Venus and Cupid with Ovidian arts of love.

This book explains how a change in writing-the introduction of word separation-led to the development of silent reading during the period from late antiquity to the 15th century. It also explains why word separation was so long in coming.

This work presents a thorough historicist account of the development of subjectivity in the medieval period, as traced in medieval literature and historical documentation.

Scholars have come to realize that we can and need to speak of a twin birth of Christianity and Judaism, not a genealogy in which one is parent to the other. In this book, the author develops a revised understanding of the interactions between nascent Christianity and nascent Judaism in late antiquity.

This book examines the conflicting images of peasants from the post-Carolingian period to the German Peasants' War-how they were represented as subhuman yet as close to God; as contemptible yet as exemplary Christians-and how such views formed the basis for social movements.

This work explores the appropriation and transformation of classical mythology by French culture from the mid-12th century to about 1430. Each of the five chapters focuses on a specific moment in this process and asks questions including what were the purposes of transforming classical myth?

Ranging chronologically from the 12th to the 15th centuries and thematically from Latin to vernacular literary modes, this book challenges standard assumptions about the musical cultures and philosophies of the European Middle Ages.

This book focuses on the literary artistry of the texts of Old French and bilingual motets, notably the special feature of motets that distinguished them from other medieval lyric forms: the phenomenon of polytextuality.