Bøker av Lesley Smith

A celebration of the art of handwriting, including samples from famous writers, scientists, and historical figures. The less it is part of everyday life, the more the appeal of handwriting grows. This wonderful selection of treasures from the Bodleian Library introduces remarkable individuals through documents written in their own hands. From the second century BCE to the present, individual lives and relationships are illuminated through the writing that has been left behind. We see Elizabeth I attempting to win over her new stepmother, Alan Bennett working out the character of Mr. Toad, Henry Moore advising on cleaning methods for his sculptures, and Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin balancing childcare with discovering the structure of penicillin. Handwritten includes letters, first drafts, autograph books, hastily scribbled notes, fair copies, marked-up proofs, and doodles. Divided into themed categories, the entries feature novelists Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Raymond Chandler; scientists Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Albert Einstein; reformers Emmeline Pankhurst, Florence Nightingale, and Mohandas Gandhi; and explorers Walter Raleigh, T.E. Lawrence, and Patrick Leigh Fermor, among many others. Each of these extraordinary figures has passed on a manuscript or document with a fascinating story to tell.

Starting with the premise that the history of a medieval subject cannot be properly written "e;without recourse to the materials it produced,"e; Lesley Smith's Masters of the Sacred Page provides an illuminating study of theology in the Middle Ages. She focuses on the dramatic transformations of the discipline in the twelfth century and uses a collection of contemporary manuscripts as a guide to its changes and developments.Smith points out that the medieval masters of theology had a much wider view of their subject than the modern academic tendency for neatness and division can easily admit, and she places their discipline squarely within the rapidly evolving intellectual and educational context of the twelfth-century university.Her approach avoids two of the most common weaknesses of modern historical studies of medieval theology. In the first place, those histories have a tendency to be distorted by a reliance on easily available printed editions of medieval texts, the bulk of which are summae and other logical, systematic treatments. This preponderance, however, often reflects the concerns and interests of nineteenth- and twentieth-century editors more than it does the medieval masters. Biblical commentaries, sermons, and manuals for pastoral use have only recently begun to be edited and printed in numbers reflecting their importance and widespread use in the Middle Ages; Smith includes such material in her study.In the second place, traditional histories have a tendency to remove the study of theology from the actual environment of the medieval university and therefore fail to account for the complex relations between theology, the arts, and the burgeoning disciplines of medicine and law. By refusing to follow this trend, Smith has greatly improved our awareness of the situation of medieval theology.Using the manuscript books themselves as witnesses, Smith shows how theology competed with other disciplines for students (as well as teachers), how it attempted to define itself, and how it cooperated with other disciplines to foster new development in book technology-and new traditions in the social and intellectual culture of the medieval university.

"It has been 140 years since a full biography of William of Auvergne (1180?-1249), which may come as a surprise, given that William was an important gateway of Greek and Arabic thought and philosophy to western Europe in the thirteenth century, and one of the earliest writers in the medieval Latin west on demonology. Lesley Smith's aims in this book are two-fold: first, to take a closer look at William, the human being, how he saw the world and his place in it; and to uncover William's interactions with his Parisian congregation through the nearly 600 sermons he left after his death. Smith has mined these writings, unremarked in previous scholarship, to give us a different perspective on the schoolmaster, bishop of Paris, and strict theologian we have come to know: a preacher who spoke and ministered not just to the powerful and elite, but also to commoners, to the poor, and to the less fortunate. Through a study of the sermons, Smith creates a broader landscape of William's thought and life, highlighting his attention to the importance--and limits--of language, and his attempts to find a way to address the concerns of the larger populace. In his preaching, we get a sense of the balance William achieved, in the way he communicated religious teachings, in his understanding of the concerns of ordinary Parisians, and in his awareness of the ebb and flow of daily life in a medieval city. The book will interest scholars of intellectual history and philosophy, religion, and literary studies more broadly for Smith's innovative method of excavating the sermons in pursuit of William the person, and his humanity. An altogether "new" William for the twenty-first century"--

This book brings together and translates from the medieval Latin a series of commentaries on the biblical book of Ruth, with the intention of introducing readers to medieval exegesis or biblical interpretation. . . . Ruth is the shortest book of the Old Testament, being only four chapters long. It is partly for this reason that it lends itself so well to a short book introducing medieval exegesis; but it is also of interest in itself. Ruth poses a number of exegetical problems, including the basic one of why such an odd book, in which God never appears as an actor, and with a central character who was not an Israelite but a Moabite outsider, and a woman at that, should find a place in the canon of Scripture.

A collection of over 100 traditional nursery rhymes, from Incy Wincey Spider and Hey Diddle Diddle, to The Muffin Man and Old King Cole. Packed with delightful illustrations by Lesley Smith.

Papers on women and religion in the middle ages, drawn from archive, manuscipt and early printed sources.

Studies of women's roles in the secular literary world, as patrons, authors, readers, and characters in secular literature.

Focuses on the paradox of motherhood in the European Middle Ages. This book analyses the powers and the dangers of motherhood within the warp and weft of social history, beginning with the premise that religious discourse or practice served as a medium in which mothers (and others) could assess their situation, defend claims, and make accusations.

* The second volume of a compelling, original work which will redefine our perceptions of medieval civilization, the renaissance and the evolution of modern Europe. * Written by a man who was widely regarded as the greatest medieval historian. .