Brepols

Al-Qurṭubī (m. 671/1273) est l'auteur d'un commentaire coranique qui constitue, depuis le XIIIe siècle jusqu’à nos jours, une référence incontournable dans la transmission du savoir islamique. Ce monumental commentaire offre un matériel pluridisciplinaire permettant d’accéder de manière inédite à une représentation à la fois globale et contextualisée du thème de la non-islamité dans les différentes branches de la pensée islamique. Dans ce texte, l’exégèse coranique renseigne le matériel juridique : elle a pour fonction de l’expliquer. Ainsi les notions coraniques sont réinterprétées, détachées de leur contexte d’origine, en vue de fonder le patrimoine juridique ainsi que les règles de droit dans le Coran considéré comme source de loi. 

Cette recherche démontre que la notion de mécréance avait initialement un sens purement politique renvoyant à des actes d’insoumission, de déloyauté et d’iniquité. La notion s’élabore dans le contexte historico-mythique de paix brisées, guerres et conciliations évoquées dans le Coran. L’idée de filiation entre les religions monothéistes, tout particulièrement celle que l’islam provient des religions des « Gens du Livre » –Juifs et Chrétiens -, est dominante. La “mécréance” devient alors l’argument qui permet de réhabiliter la coexistence entre musulmans et non-musulmans. Puis on découvre que c’est d’avantage la non-islamité accompagnée de l’allégeance politique – plutôt que le critère de mécréance en tant que tel -, qui détermine l’octroi de la protection légale (dhimma) aux non-musulmans résidant en Terre d’Islam.

Ce volume rassemble les articles que le Père Boyle a publiés sur Thomas d'Aquin tout au long de sa carrière. Par le simple fait de replacer la moindre question dans son contexte le plus large, ce médiéviste averti avait l'art de la renouveler profondément. En relisant cet ensemble de travaux à quelques années de distance, on ne peut qu'être frappé de leur pertinence. Souvent livré, et à juste titre, aux philosophes et aux théologiens, Thomas d'Aquin n'a pas toujours été situé par eux dans le contexte historique nécessaire à sa bonne compréhension. C'est précisément ce qu'a fait Leonard Boyle.

Personne, certes, n'eut été mieux qualifié que lui pour dire l'intention qui le guidait; mais à défaut de pouvoir l'entendre lui-même, il n'est peut-être pas impossible de dégager l'originalité des études ici rassemblées. On ne semble pas jusqu'ici s'être particulièrement intéressé à ses travaux du point de vue de la théologie. De ce fait, ils n'ont peut-être pas encore trouvé tout le retentissement qu'il était en droit d'en attendre.

La maestria avec laquelle l'auteur met en oeuvre les différents aspects d'une méthode bien rôdée pour l'étude des textes médiévaux aurait suffi à elle seule à justifier leur reprise en un volume. Non seulement leur qualité les fait émerger très au-dessus de nombreux autres travaux, mais certaines d'entre elles touchent aux questions les plus graves quant au sens de l'oeuvre thomasienne, de la mission et de la spiritualité de l'ordre dominicain, et même quant à la vision d'ensemble du XIIIe siècle religieux tout entier.

Par la générosité de son travail le Père Boyle a sensiblement renouvelé les questions qu'il a touchées. Quiconque voudra bien porter à sa recherche l'attention qu'elle mérite devra reconnaître qu'il nous fait découvrir un saint Thomas "différent".

This book investigates the interface between faith and knowledge in Scandinavia in the centuries before and after the Reformation, a period in which the line between belief and knowledge was often blurred, and local traditions remained influential. While Scandinavia was undoubtedly an integral part of Latin Christendom before the arrival of Lutheranism, the essays gathered together in this volume demonstrate that religious discourse still took a unique form in this region. Faith was influenced by magical practices centred on remnants of Nordic paganism, local wisdom literature, and metaphoric language about the divine that diverged considerably from that of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Texts, motifs, and practices that were common throughout Europe were also transformed and altered within this northern setting.

Covering the late medieval up to the early modern period, this volume offers new insights into intellectual culture in Scandinavia, and the remarkable longevity of local beliefs even into the early post-Reformation period.

Who owns the spaces of religion? Does the question matter, or even make sense? Modern distinctions between sacred and secular spheres tend to assume that clergy dominate the former, and lay people the latter. A man or woman living in the early modern period might not have been so sure. They would have thought more immediately of things of heaven and things of earth, and would have seen each as the concern of clergy and laity alike. Faith’s boundaries, while real, were very porous. This collection offers the first sustained comparative examination of lay-clerical relations in confraternities through the late medieval and early modern periods. It shows how laity and clergy debated, accommodated, resolved, or deflected the key issues of gender, race, politics, class, and power. The sixteen essays are organized into six sections that consider different aspects of the function of confraternities as social spaces where laity and clergy met, mediated, and sometimes competed and fought. They cover a period historically when kinship was a dominant metaphor in religious life and when kinship groups like confraternities were dominant models in religious institutions. They deal with Catholic, Jewish, and Islamic confraternities, and range geographically from Europe to the Middle East, Central and South Asia, and Latin America.

Confronted with the shifting idea of the authority of a text and its transmission and reception in a variety of genres, settings and contexts, this collective volume envisages to enlarge and deepen our understanding of these notions by tangling literary forgery and emulation. Authority and authoritative literary productions provoke all kinds of interest and emulation. Hermeneutical techniques, detailed exegesis and historical critique are invoked to put authority, and indeed also possible falsifications, to the test. Scholars from various disciplines working on texts, either authoritative or forged, and stemming from different periods of time, reflect on these topics on a methodological basis and from a hermeneutical entrance. In doing so, a threefold axis for questioning the phenomenon is proposed, namely the motif of falsification, the mechanism or technique applied, and the direct or indirect effect of this fraud.

This is the second of two volumes on the history and archaeology of the port city of Famagusta in Cyprus from the beginning of the island’s Frankish rule in 1191 to the Ottoman conquest in 1571. The first volume, entitled Art and Architecture and edited by Annemarie Weyl Carr, was published in this series in 2014.

The volume provides a comprehensive survey of the four-century history of Famagusta under Frankish, Genoese, and Venetian rule down to the Ottoman siege and conquest, supplemented by an account of the image of the medieval and Renaissance city in retrospect. Based on original research and often using unpublished sources, fourteen acknowledged specialists study Famagusta’s political, social, economic, and ecclesiastical history from a multi- and interdisciplinary approach that involves aspects such as institutional continuities and discontinuities, military and spatial organisation, religious and cultural exchanges, gender roles, and the city’s image in travelogues, literature and art. Such an approach allows a better understanding of the evolution of the ethnically and religiously diverse Famagustian society from a rich commercial centre under the Lusignans to an enclave under the Genoese and a military outpost under the Venetians.

A continuing ‘cry for the new’, it is said, drives present-day consumerism. People are producing and buying new goods in ever-larger quantities. However, in the past, consumer choices for new products were paralleled and even overlapped by structurally embedded practices such as re-use, recycling and resale. Unfortunately far too little is known about these important practices. The ‘birth of a consumer society’ was grounded not only in the appearance of new products and new industries; a similar drive manifested itself in the handling, buying and selling of ‘second-hand’.

In this book then the editors confront and integrate historical research on the world of the new and the old. Papers focus on the relationship between material culture and novelty, fashion and innovation on the one hand; and/or patina, second-hand and re-cycling on the other. Differences existed in the use of old and new products according to time, place, social and gender groups. By paying close attention to this historical diversity, this book explores the changing meanings and motivations of consumption. The geographical coverage will be an urban one. The studied time frame will be ‘the long eighteenth-century’ (from circa 1650 until 1900). It was only then that rapid fashion changes, new imports and spreading industrialization changed the existing material culture dramatically. However, comparisons crossing time and place do place sweeping ‘modern’ assumptions in perspective. After all: who can decipher how the concepts old and new are changing today, with the current popularity of more responsible (social and ecological) forms of consumption and recycling, and with vintage-clothing and antique furniture back en vogue?

Bruno Blondé is Research Professor at the Center for Urban History (University of Antwerp). His research interest includes urban networks, transport history and the history of consumption.

Natacha Coquery is appointed Professor at the University of Nantes. She has written extensively on the shopping and consumer habits of the French elites.

Jon Stobart is appointed professor at the University of Northampton. He has worked on urban networks and consumption in spatial perspective.

Ilja Van Damme is Postdoctoral Fellow of the Fund for Scientific Research. He has written a PhD on the interrelationships between consumer changes and retail evolutions.

Fear is a topic that appeals to a wide audience and is particularly of interest today. In the modern world, we fear war and terrorism, economic recession, and environmental degradation: these fears make up a great portion of the fabric of our daily lives. This is a volume of essays on fear and its representations in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In it, the authors raise and try to answer questions about the ways in which individuals, families, and nations five-hundred, one-thousand, or even fifteen-hundred years ago approached the idea of fear.

The interdisciplinary nature of this volume and its editors (an historian of late antiquity and professor of literature of the Middle Ages) motivates an analysis of fear from a multitude of perspectives and within a host of secular and religious literature, historical treatises, scholastic works, art, and political accounts. The volume covers several main topics: Defining the Nature of Fear; Fear and Religion; Fear in Politics and Cultural Identity; Fear as a Literary and Dramatic Device; The Fears of Courtly Lovers, Knights, and Poets; Fear and the Mystic.

Through its breadth, depth, and interdisciplinary focus, the present volume makes a full contribution to the study of fear in medieval and Renaissance culture for historians, art historians, students of language and philosophy and anyone interested in how people in the past have experienced fear.

The papers collected in this Festschrift in honour of Rita Beyers, Professor Emerita of Latin at the University of Antwerp and Director of the Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina and Continuatio Mediaevalis, focus on ancient (especially Christian) Latin literature and its influence in the Middle Ages and beyond.

In the first section, new light is shed on some important apocryphal texts from the second to the tenth century. The second part is devoted to literary and doctrinal aspects of works produced in the patristic era. The third part brings together a number of micro-historical studies on medieval (Latin, Byzantine, and vernacular) literature. The papers of the fourth section present some little-known Neo-Latin texts and offer a fresh analysis of the reception of ancient Christian texts in modern French and English literature. The volume, which contains several critical editions of previously unedited texts, concludes with two essays musing on the art of textual editing and the quintessence of philology.

The term ‘feminized counsel’ denotes the advice associated with and spoken by women characters. This book demonstrates that rather than classify women’s voices as an opposite against which to define masculine authority, late medieval vernacular poets embraced the feminine as a representation of their subordination to kings, patrons, and authorities. The works studied include Gower’s Confessio Amantis, Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women and Melibee, and English translations of Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othea. To advise readers, these texts draw on the politicized genre of mirrors for princes. Whereas Latin mirrors such as the Secretum secretorum and Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum represented women as inferior, weak, and detrimental to masculine authority, these vernacular texts break traditional expectations and portray women as essential and authoritative political counsellors.

By considering Latin and French sources, historical models of queens’ intercessions, and literary models of authoritative female personifications, this study explores the woman counsellor as a literary topos that enabled poets to criticize, advise, and influence powerful readers. Feminized Counsel elucidates the manner in which vernacular poets concerned with issues of counsel, mercy, and power identified with fictional women’s struggles to develop authority in the political sphere. These women counsellors become enabling models that paradoxically generate authority for poets who also lack access to traditionally recognized forms of intellectual or literary authority.

European Renaissance Festivals are noted for their extravagance, for their inherited classical culture, and as evidence of how court and civic spectacles could express political, religious, social, and economic aspirations. In this new monograph, the accent is firmly on the violent context of Magnificence: it examines how war affected the minds and practice of both artists and princes, and shows how victims and their suffering were as prominent in festival as were conquerors and their projections of victory. What emerges here is the dark side represented in princely entries where imperial ambitions are built upon civic devastation and where myths elaborate and expose their ambiguous nature and message. Artists and poets collaborated in bringing victory and violence together: Mantegna and Dürer in triumphal processions; Frans Floris and Rubens on the canvases they created for triumphal arches, where mythology was put to work to arouse excitement for deeds of heroism and death, while engravers depicted scenes of war and destruction to accommodate contemporary taste.

Interiorization and a trend towards a consideration of the nature of personal experience have long been recognized as important elements in the changing landscape of the religious culture of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The homo interior is at the centre of the religious writings of that time, and the 'inner man' is a pivotal concept for making sense of the literature of religious formation. Monastic writers try to provide their readers with a 'script' to enact in themselves, in order to form their inner self, as the way to ascend to the knowledge of God. Interiority, however, is not a straightforward aspect of human existence with an unchanging meaning. The notion as it is used by medieval monastic authors gives expression to a specific understanding of what a human being was thought to be, quite different from later self-perceptions. Because of this difference, when they write 'histories of the self' historians and philosophers often pass over the Middle Ages. On the other hand, in histories of mysticism the twelfth century is often read through the lens of later mysticism. This book explores the notion of interiority via four influential authors of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and the way in which notions about interiority function in their pedagogy. The concepts governing how the homo interior is fashioned are developed within age-old monastic and theological traditions. Medieval ideas about man as imago Dei, monastic reading culture and biblical exegesis are only a few of the elements of these traditions. The choice of authors has been guided by the wish to encompass and highlight various aspects of the eleventh- and twelfth-century notions of 'inner life': monastic and eremitical tradition in Peter Damian, theological-anthropological concepts in Hugh of Saint-Victor, the importance of exegetical procedures in Richard of Saint-Victor, and the role of experience in William of Saint-Thierry. These authors illustrate what was then conceptually possible when it came to thinking about the inner life. Their notions of the inner self are an intriguing part of a continuing history of conceptions of the self and of how it may be fashioned.

Aux xiv e et xv e siècles, la Grèce suscite en Italie et en France un engouement nouveau, dans une tension entre admiration et méfiance face à l’altérité mal connue et mal perçue tant de son univers ancien que de son devenir byzantin. Se multiplient les œuvres en latin, en français et en italien qui évoquent le passé de la Grèce ancienne. Les héros et les héroïnes de la Grèce ancienne entrent dans des univers scripturaires nombreux qui manifestent des exploitations littéraires et esthétiques, mais aussi politiques, religieuses et éthiques très diverses. Ces appropriations ne cessent de s’élargir à des formes d’écriture nouvelles jusqu’à la fin du xv e siècle, entre réinterprétation, instrumentalisation, recréation poétique ou fidélité aux textes peu à peu redécouverts. Le présent ouvrage étudie la présence et l’exploitation des figures de la Grèce ancienne en France et en Italie aux xiv e et xv e siècles, et les nouvelles formes d’ « actualité » qu’elles prennent dans les textes, avec l’évolution du regard et de l’interprétation des auteurs, avec aussi les décalages qui existent entre l’Italie et la France.

Voici une histoire du sang royal au féminin. De 1270 à la fin du XIV e siècle, le statut des princesses royales en France est en cours de normalisation. Les filles du roi sont progressivement exclues du trône, des apanages et de la pairie. Mais la canonisation de Louis IX et la valorisation du lignage royal renforcent leur prestige. Elles obtiennent, sinon un patrimoine, du moins un rang spécifique et la reconnaissance d’une qualité. Elles ont aussi un rôle important dans la construction de la mémoire de saint Louis et dans la diffusion de son culte. Au cours de cette période, la conscience dynastique passe par une célébration des rois défunts, mais aussi de leurs parents, hommes et femmes. C’est un domaine dans lequel la présence féminine est acceptée aux côtés de celle des princes, du fait des liens étroits entre les parentes du roi et le sacré.

Ce volume rassemble les communications faites lors d'un cycle de Séminaires internationaux tenus au "Centro Studi Biagio Pelicani" de Parme. Depuis, ce Centre a été transféré a l'Université de Florence. Ces Séminaires visaient à poser des questions fondamentales qui n 'ont toujours pas trouvé de réponses définitives : malgré le syncrétisme inhérent à la philosophie et à la science du moyen âge, peut-on affirmer que ces dernières représentent une transmission pure et simple de la philosophie et de la science grecques? La dette contractée a l'égard d' Aristote, d'Euclide ou de Ptolémée a-t-elle inhibé la pensée des maîtres médievaux, ou bien, a-t-elle, au contraire, permis une originalité non seulement grâce à l 'influence des trois religions monothéistes, mais également par l 'intermédiaire des réflexions scientifiques de savants juifs et arabes qui vécurent pendant l'âge d'or, c'est à dire du 9e au 12e siècle?

Les recherches menées dans ce volume abordent des arguments très differents à première vue : philosophie de la nature, astronomie, optique, mathématique, physiognomie, iconologie, réthorique, dialectique. En fait, les thèmes ont un lien entre eux si on prend en considération le caractère global des connaissances pendant l' époque médievale. Comment se présente le savoir philosophique et scientifique à la fin du moyen âge et à l'aube de la Renaissance? Tel était le point central de ces rencontres. Les auteurs des divers articles ont tenté d'apporter une réponse à ces questions et de solutionner bien d'autres problèmes historiographiques. On trouve done dans ce livre une perspective nouvelle à propos d'une série de questions spécifiques qui font encore I' objet de discussions jusqu'à aujourd'hui.

Les articles sont dus à des spécialistes des divers domaines concernés : F. Barocelli (Parma), J. Biard (Paris), S. Caroti (Parma), P. Castelli (Ferrara), G. Federici Vescovini (Firenze), S. Feraboli (Genova), R. Fubini (Firenze), M. Mamiani (Udine), R. Morelon (Paris), P. Morpurgo (Parma), J. North (Groningen), R. Rashed, (Paris), V. Sorge (Napoli).

On a essayé dès le Haut Moyen Age de traduire d’importants textes philosophiques dans les langues vulgaires de l’Europe germanique et romane. Aux XIIè-XIIIè siècles, les vulgarisations deviennent plus complexes et souvent, sous l’apparence de simples “traductions” de textes philosophiques, on trouve des réécritures contenant des ajouts et des commentaires qui peuvent être considérés à juste titre comme des travaux philosophiques autonomes. Dans le contexte de cette littérature prend finalement forme une série d’essais de “faire de la philosophie” en langue vulgaire, qui sont en général l’oeuvre de personnages dotés d’une vaste culture et qui exercent également leur activité en langue latine.

Ce genre de littérature pose de nombreuses questions intéressantes tant pour l’histoire de la philosophie que celle de la culture : existe-t-il une différence entre rédiger de la philosophie en latin ou en langue vulgaire ? Est-ce que le fait d’écrire en vernaculaire implique nécessairement une banalisation du contenu ? L’attitude des auteurs change-t-elle en fonction des différents destinataires ? Peut-on vraiment parler de divers types de public philosophique (clercs, laïcs) bien distincts ? Peut-on établir une typologie des textes philosophiques en vulgaire différente de celle qui existe en latin ?

Ces problèmes sont abordés à l’aide d’un grand choix d’auteurs, parmi lesquels Maître Eckhart, Conrad de Megenberg, le roi Alphonse le Sage, Marguerite Porète, Nicole Oresme, Christine de Pisan, Dante Alighieri, Michele Savonarola et de nombreux auteurs anonymes ou des traducteurs peu connus de questions naturelles ou d’écrits mystiques.

Les chercheurs qui ont collaboré à ce volume sont des spécialistes d’histoire de la philosophie médiévale, de philologie germanique et de philologie romane: A. Beccarisi (Lecce), P. Bertini Malgarini (Cagliari), L. Bianchi (Vercelli), N. Bray (Lecce), S. Caroti (Parma), L. Cifuentes (Barcelona), A. Coco (Lecce), C. Crisciani (Pavia), P. Falzone (Roma), G. Federici Vescovini (Firenze), B. Garì (Barcelona), F. Geymonat (Torino), A. Ghisalberti (Milano), D. Gottschall (Lecce), K. Grubmüller (Göttingen), R. Gualdo (Lecce), A. Musco (Palermo), M. L. Picascia (Pavia), T. Ricklin (Neuchâtel), A. Saccon (Torino), L. Sturlese (Lecce), U. Vignuzzi (Roma), S. J. Williams (Las Vegas).

This volume gathers the papers presented during an interdisciplinary research seminar entitled “The individual and his body in the Ancient Mediterranean Basin.” This seminar was at the crossroads of history of religions and social anthropology, creating a dialogue between philologists, archaeologists, historians of religions and anthropologists. Its main aim consisted in studying self-perceptions of the body in the Ancient Near East, with incursions in other parts of the Mediterranean Basin in a comparatist perspective. In this volume, various themes are examined, such as: 1) the relationship between the body and language; 2) the body, perceptions and society, including a study of the senses as they are described in the texts; 3) the body as a symbol of social belonging; 4) the body as a medium for religious experience.

En décembre 2007, Jacqueline Hamesse a fêté son 65ème anniversaire, puis a accédé à l’éméritat en 2008. Nombreux sont les collègues et amis qui ont souhaité marquer ces dates en rendant hommage à son dévouement aux études médiévales, que ce soit dans l’enseignement et la recherche ou pour la création et le développement d’institutions internationales dans ce domaine, sans oublier les efforts déployés pour l’édition de nombreux ouvrages collectifs et l’organisation de diverses rencontres scientifiques. Nous avons donc décidé de lui dédier ce volume d’études intitulé «Florilegium mediaevale. Études offertes à Jacqueline Hamesse à l 'occasion de son éméritat ».

L’ouvrage comprend vingt-neuf études concernant l’un des quatre thèmes suivants: les textes philosophiques dans leur contexte et leur support matériel, les instruments travail ainsi que le vocabulaire des textes philosophiques. En effet, ce sont des domaines qui ont surtout retenu son attention depuis de nombreuses années et dans lesquels elle a apporté des contributions significatives à la recherche.

Le volume comprend des contributions de: L-J. Bataillon (†) et O. Weijers (Paris / Den Haag), F. Bertelloni (Buenos Aires), Ch. Burnett (London), J. Casteigt (Toulouse), J. Celeyrette et J-L. Solère (Lille / Boston), W. Courtenay (Wisconsin-Madison), G. Dahan (Paris), G. Dinkova-Bruun (Toronto), K. Emery Jr. (Notre Dame), Ch. Erismann (Cambridge), B. Faes de Mottoni (Milano), G. Federici Vescovini (Firenze), B. Fernández de la Cuesta (Madrid), R. Friedman et Ch. Schabel (Leuven / Nicosia), D. Gottschall (Lecce), S. Harvey (Jerusalem), I. Heullant-Donat (Reims), R. Hissette (Köln), M. Hoenen (Freiburg i.B.), J. Meirinhos (Porto), O. Merisalo (Jyväskylä), M. Mulchahey (Toronto), M. J. Muñoz Jiménez (Madrid), M. C. Pacheco (Porto), G. Piaia (Padova), R. H. Pich (Porto Alegre), J. Puig Montada (Madrid), R. Ramón Guerrero (Madrid), C. Sirat et M. Geoffroy (Paris), G. Spinosa (Roma), I. Ventura (Louvain-la-Neuve).

This book is a collection of articles studying various aspects of the relationship between town and countryside during the period from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. The focus is on how towns were supplied with basic foodstuffs, and especial attention is paid to England and the Low Countries.

Among the articles, several deal with the food-provisioning strategies of some of the major cities within that area - Antwerp, Ghent and London - and show among other things that large cities were unable to meet their requirements from local supplies and had consequently to access markets further afield. Important matters given substantial elucidation are transport costs and market integration.

In historiography, a great deal of attention has been paid to the influence of towns on the countryside and agriculture, and particularly to the relationship between the rise of urban markets and the emergence of commercial agriculture, but there is still no clarity about how town-countryside relationships influenced economic growth. One of the merits of this book is that it opens up new avenues to an understanding of the complex relationship between urban markets and commercial agriculture. The approach differs from article to article, some scholars homing in on the individual strategies of farms, others working more in the macroeconomic tradition. In sum, the book is a valuable contribution to both rural and urban historiography, and can provide a fresh stimulus to the study of economic relationships between town and countryside.

Piet van Cruyningen is senior researcher at the Wageningen University.

Erik Thoen is professor at the University of Ghent.

The Greeks had a rich and varied relationship with foreign lands and people, which made possible a real circulation of knowledge throughout the Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic times. The essays collected in this volume aim at exploring the hypothesis that the most adventurous intellectuals saw foreign lands and foreigners as repositories of knowledge that the Greeks σοφοί had to engage with, in the hope of bringing back home valuables in the form of new ideas. Each of the articles included in this collective work explores one aspect of the “stranger” as a potential source, with contributions mostly focused on Plato, Xenophon, Democritus, Aristotle, Diogenes, Cicero, and Galen.

The essays collected in this volume focus on a prominent aspect of Anglo-Saxon culture: educational texts and the Insular manuscripts which have preserved them.

The English imported manuscripts and texts from the Continent, whilst a series of foreign masters, from Theodore of Tarsus to Abbo of Fleury, brought with them knowledge of works which were being studied in Continental schools. Although monastic education played a leading role for the entire Anglo-Saxon period, it was in the second half of the tenth and early eleventh centuries that it reached its zenith, with its renewed importance and the presence of energetic masters such as Æthelwold and Ælfric. The indebtedness to Continental programs of study is evident at each step, beginning with the Disticha Catonis. Nevertheless, a number of texts initially designed for a Latin-speaking milieu appear to have been abandoned (for instance in the field of grammar) in favour of new teaching tools.

Beside texts which were part of the standard curriculum, Anglo-Saxon manuscripts provide abundant evidence of other learning and teaching instruments, in particular those for a specialized class of laymen, the Old English læce, the healer or physician. Medicine occupies a relevant place in the book production of late Anglo-Saxon England and, in this field too, knowledge from very far afield was preserved and reshaped.

All these essays, many by leading scholars in the various fields, explore these issues by analysing the actual manuscripts, their layout and contents. They show how miscellaneous collections of treatises in medieval codices had an internal logic, and highlight how crucial manuscripts are to the study of medieval culture.

El presente volumen tiene su origen en el Coloquio Internacional Formas de acceso al saber de la Antigüedad Tardía a la Alta Edad Media (V), celebrado en la Universidad de Salamanca en octubre de 2014, bajo la dirección de D. Paniagua, en el marco de actuación del Proyecto de Investigación «La evolución de los saberes y su transmisión en la Antigüedad Tardía y la Alta Edad Media latinas II» (Investigadora Principal: M.a A. Andrés Sanz). El coloquio, al igual que el proyecto en el que se enmarcó, tuvo como objetivo profundizar en el conocimiento de las formas de evolución y de utilización de los textos latinos tardoantiguos y altomedievales ligados a la transmisión de conocimientos. Este conjunto de estudios, variados en sus diferentes aproximaciones filológicas, tiene como común denominador el interés por explorar las múltiples y ricas implicaciones culturales de estos textos, atendiendo no solamente al corpus escrito conservado -incluido el estudio de sus fuentes y de su posteridad literaria- sino también a su transmisión material concreta, generalmente en forma de códices, y a los entornos (escolares o no) en los que ésta tiene lugar.

‘Individuality’ is one of the central categories of modern society. Can the roots of modern individuality be found in pre-modern times? Or is our way of thinking about ourselves a very recent phenomenon? This book takes a theoretical approach to the problem, derived from Niklas Luhmann’s system theory, in which different forms of individuality are linked to different structures of society in modern and pre-modern times.

The papers in this volume approach this problem by discussing a broad variety of medieval and early modern sources, including charters and seals, letters, and naming practices in a late medieval town. Self-representation is also considered, in ‘housebooks’ and drawings. Textual studies include autobiography in German Humanism, and concepts of individuality and gender in late medieval literary texts.