Brepols

En 1624, quelques mois après l’accession d’Urbain VIII au trône de Saint Pierre, plusieurs espéraient un infléchissement de la condamnation venue interdire en 1616 l’enseignement du mouvement de la Terre autour du Soleil alors défendue publiquement par Galilée. Etait de ceux-là l’inspirateur des thèses, le jésuite Grégoire de Saint-Vincent, né à Bruges une quarantaine d’années auparavant : il avait activement participé à la séance du Collège Romain lorsque Galilée en 1611 commentait ses observations au télescope de planètes comme Saturne ou Vénus, ce qui faisait « murmurer les philosophes ». Ainsi le raconte Grégoire lui-même. Les thèses de 1624 montrent une extraordinaire représentation de Saturne. Voilà un exemple parmi bien d’autres des surprises de ces thèses.

Onze chapitres, suivis d’une bibliographie, organisent l’enquête sur les thèses, cellesci étant traduites au chapitre IX. Le document est d’abord présenté avec les problèmes qu’il pose à l’historien. Puis le moment même des thèses, l’imaginaire des hommes de cette période, et les positions épistémologiques d’alors sont discutés, tant avec le texte qu’avec les images. Cette conjonction d’analyses est essentielle à l’enquête qui se poursuit sur les acteurs des thèses, avec trois récits possibles, le récit historique de la journée des thèses, le récit scientifique du contenu mais aussi le récit iconologique. A ce point, on peut entrer d’une part dans la tradition des thèses universitaires, d’autre part dans la tradition du livre illustré. Ce qui, à partir des travaux des historiens de la mécanique, permet d’aboutir à une discussion sur la place de ces thèses dans une histoire qui a tant servi à constituer les diverses philosophies des sciences, dont le positivisme, le constructivisme, etc. Après la traduction proposée, il convient de revenir à titre de justification sur le détail de chaque théorème et de chaque vignette, et de terminer par le vocabulaire latin des thèses. Cette démarche est tout le contraire de la démarche dogmatique si naturelle à l’histoire des sciences, discipline dont il faut se rappeler qu’elle doit beaucoup au positivisme.

Si l’enquête sur les textes et les images s’avère beaucoup plus longue que les courtes thèses, le plaisir n’est-il pas au final de retrouver la cohérence d’un des mondes du baroque à l’aube de la science moderne ? L’intérêt est en particulier de surprendre la façon dont un intellectuel issu d’un ordre religieux connu pour son obéissance disciplinaire, parvient malgré la rigoureuse orthodoxie récemment mise en place, à raisonnablement donner sa place à une nouvelle imagination, sans entrer en dissidence mais sans céder, cherchant sans aucun doute à libérer la pensée religieuse de la pensée scientifique, et s’aidant alors de la pensée toute profane d’un peintre d’emblèmes.

Précédant de peu Jeanne d’Arc et le duc René II, figures emblématiques d’un Moyen Âge lorrain flamboyant, Charles II apparaît comme un prince de second rang. Son règne (1390-1431) est associé, non sans raison, aux temps les plus sombres de l’histoire de la Lorraine, devenue l’épicentre douloureux d’une Europe qu’embrasait par le jeu des alliances le conflit franco-anglais de la Guerre de Cent Ans. Pourtant, s’en tenir là serait oublier que Charles II fut l’instigateur de la réunion des duchés de Lorraine et de Bar et qu’il posa les bases de l’État princier en Lorraine.

Rassemblant patiemment une documentation dispersée au gré des aléas de l’histoire, délaissant les impasses d’une historiographie longtemps préoccupée par la question de l’État-nation et prisonnière de l’antagonisme exacerbé entre la France et l’Allemagne, Christophe Rivière réévalue ici un règne trop longtemps méconnu et trop facilement renvoyé à ses archaïsmes. Son enquête prosopographique livre les contours d’une société politique originale ; il analyse le dialogue qu’elle entretient avec le prince dans un espace politiquement morcelé, au sein duquel se rencontrent et s’affrontent les influences venues du royaume de France et de l’Empire ; empruntant aux ethnologues les concepts d’ « acculturation » et de « métissage », il éclaire les valeurs qui cimentent cette société nobiliaire, valeurs par lesquelles elle se rapproche ou se distingue tour à tour des principautés voisines pour faire progressivement place à l’affirmation de la souveraineté ducale.

L’Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, première histoire universelle écrite en prose française au début du XIIIe siècle, a joui d’une grande fortune en Italie, comme le montrent les manuscrits copiés dans les ateliers transalpins, les traductions, les citations et les réemplois jusqu’à la première moitié du XIVe siècle. Les traductions italiennes, ou volgarizzamenti, se divisent en deux groupes : les versions toscanes et les vénitiennes. Parmi les traductions toscanes, nous trouvons celle contenue dans trois manuscrits du Trecento, rédigée probablement entre la fin du XIIIe siècle et le début du XIVe. Le plus récent de ces codices, le manuscrit II I 146 de la Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale de Florence, est le seul témoin de l’Histoire ancienne en italien qui présente la section alexandrine ; il est utilisé comme base pour l’édition proposée ici, qui offre le récit sur Rome (depuis la fondation jusqu’aux guerres contre les Samnites), la Perse, Philippe II de Macédoine, Alexandre le Grand et les guerres des diadoques. Cette traduction toscane représente probablement l’une des plus anciennes versions italiennes de l’histoire d’Alexandre.

Stretching from Basel to Cologne, the Rhine formed the geographical axis of a broad cultural realm in the late Middle Ages, lending vitality not only to its cities and universities but also to the two great Councils to which it played host. Already in the fourteenth century, the lives of such famous German mystics as Meister Eckhart, Heinrich Seuse and Johannes Tauler testify to the presence of an advanced intellectual culture in the cities of the upper and lower Rhine. In the fifteenth century, the most famous Councils of the late Middle Ages took place along the Rhine, namely the Councils of Constance and Basel, which formed loci of intellectual exchange and which became seedbeds of philosophical ideas that engaged and influenced such participants as Heymericus de Campo and Nicholas of Cusa. With the establishment of the Universities of Cologne (1388), Freiburg (1457), Basel (1459) and Mainz (1476), the intellectual culture of this region took an institutional form that continues to exist to this day, and symbolizes the stability of the intellectual culture of the Rhineland. The main purpose of this volume is to explore the intellectual richness and vitality of the Rhineland in its various facets and on its different levels.

This is a significant new study of the festival culture of northern Europe in the later Middle Ages: more specifically of the German-speaking communities of the great cities of the eastern Baltic littoral in what was then called Livonia. While subject to a degree of Scandinavian influence, the festival culture of Livonian cities such as Riga, Reval (Tallinn), and Dorpat (Tartu), all members of the Hanseatic League, substantially overlapped with that of other German-speaking areas, not least the Hanseatic cities of northern Germany.

The major part of the book is devoted to the main annual festivals of the merchants' guilds: Christmas, Carnival, the popinjay shoot, and the May Count celebrations. There follows an analysis of specific aspects of the festivals: spatial contexts, finances, food and drink, entertainments (dances, jousts, games), customs and rituals. There is also a concluding glance at changes in festival culture after the Reformation. The study combines close scrutiny of local customs (made possible by the almost miraculous survival of uniquely detailed documentation), contextualization within the wider comparative context of festival culture in late-medieval Europe, and an alterness to significant recent scholarship in both English and German.

Urban hierarchy means a new study approach that focuses on the reciprocal concurrence of relationships between urban centers, their complementarity, opposition, support and ongoing collaboration. The goal is to go beyond the single analysis of a city and focus on the interaction between towns and cities and to distinguish their dynamics and the degree of specialization within a political framework. The final objective is to provide a comprehensive historical analysis as urban history requires, open to the advantages of interdisciplinarity and the contributions of the international researchers that will take part in the session. The processes of urban hierarchization are not only vital for observing the dynamics of cities, but also for studying in depth the response capabilities of the urban systems in the face of new challenges and stimuli. These aspects of the historical analysis of cities are still quite unexplored and, therefore, they will receive a great deal of attention in the book. The initial regional frameworks will not exclude small towns and rural centers since, even though they may look less potentially relevant, they might display greater specific development. Thanks to a renewed methodology and special attention to the empirical basis, it is possible to improve our knowledge of the urban systems of European regions at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Early Modern Era, shedding light on some aspects of the medieval past that will also influence other scientific areas of humanities.

From the end of the thirteenth century onwards, European towns exhibited a significant increase in the use of writing as a tool for administrative and economic purposes, as well as for social communication. The medieval towns of Poland are no exception to this pattern.

This book surveys the development of the literacy of Polish burghers in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, revealing socio-economic and cultural processes that changed the life of Polish urban society. Polish urban literacy is examined according to the reception of Western European urban culture more generally. Town networks in medieval Poland are explained, and the literacy skills of the producers and users of the written word are discussed. Literacy skills differed greatly from one social group to another, it is shown, due to the variety of town dwellers (clerics and lay people, professionals of the written word, occasional users of writing, and illiterates). Other issues that are discussed include the cooperation between agents of lay and church literacy, the relationship between literacy and orality, and the difference between developing literacies in Latin and in the vernacular languages.

This collection of essays by international scholars focuses on the vernacular urban culture of the Chambers of Rhetoric in the Low Countries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Reflecting social, religious, and economic realities at a time of fundamental change, the Rhetoricians’ plays also reveal a range of poetic and theatrical conventions that make them an important source of information both on practical stagecraft and on the role of theatre in the urban community, as seen in their involvement in civic processions or the organization of drama competitions. The volume sets the Rhetoricians’ drama in the cultural life of the provinces of the Low Countries during a period dominated by ruling foreign dynasties: the Burgundian dukes and then the Habsburg dynasty, most prominently the Emperor Charles V and his son King Philip II of Spain. It was a time of intense religious controversy which gave rise to debates both on and off stage. These debates, far from damaging Rhetorician culture, actually stimulated its activities and development to such an extent that Rhetoricians became representative voices for their time. The admixture of entertainment and education offered by the Chambers to their own members - and to a wider public - was one which, though originating in a medieval context, soon became linked with humanist and Renaissance thinking. This volume illustrates how, as a consequence, the Chambers of Rhetoric contributed to the development in the Low Countries of an increasingly articulate society.

The essays in this volume offer a state-of-the-art analysis of a heretofore somewhat neglected part of financial history: the way in which urban governments in Western Europe during the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Times handled the public debts their cities were confronted with. The technical aspects of the sale of annuities (renten, rentes) may have already been abundantly studied, but the links with social and political history still needed to be tackled. Who bought these annuities and thus participated in sharing the burden and profits which were likely to arise from them? What were their motives? How did the obvious links with urban elites work? And, perhaps most significantly, how did these occasional sales evolve into a structural way of linking financially important private persons with public finances, in the context both of cities and of growing states, since often the cities needed the money on a short-term basis in order to accomplish their own financial obligations toward ‘the state’. Participants in the colloquium where a large number of the essays were first presented represent in the first place the urban strongholds of Europe in the period under scrutiny: the Low Countries and Northern and Central Italy, but the Swiss cities, the cities of Aragon, London and papal Rome are also considered.

Entre le dernier quart du XIIIe siècle et le premier tiers du XIVe siècle, les banquiers piémontais installés dans le duché de Brabant constituèrent la communauté la plus importante des Lombards actifs dans les anciens Pays-Bas. Banquiers du Prince, ils prêtaient également aux élites urbaines et à la noblesse. Cette étude s’attache à reconstituer les stratégies commerciales et les réseaux sociaux des financiers piémontais grâce auxquels ceux-ci jouèrent un rôle de premier plan dans l’économie et la politique du duché de Brabant. En s’interrogeant sur les modalités d’intégration des Piémontais dans les villes brabançonnes, l’étude a finalement pour ambition de dépasser l’image caricaturale du Lombard, souvent identifié à un usurier public.

David Kusman , docteur en histoire médiévale de l’Université Libre de Bruxelles, est chercheur associé à l’Unité de Recherche en histoire rurale et urbaine (U.L.B.) et au PAI VII/26 "City and Society in the Low Countries (1200-1850)

This first volume of the Silk Roads Studies is a reference manual of the published Uygur Buddhist literature. Uygur Buddhist Literature creates a complete inventory of the published Uygur Buddhist texts along with a bibliography of the pertinent scholarlyliterature. The work includes an introduction that outlines the history of the discovery of the Uygur Buddhist Literature and a short history of the Buddhist Uygurs and their translation activities. The survey of the literature itself is divided into six sections: (1) Non-Mahayana Texts, including Sutra, Vinaya, Abhidarma, Biographies of the Buddha (including Jatakas) and Avadana; (2) Mahayana Sutras; (3) Commentaries; (4) Chinese Apocrypha; (5) Tantric Texts (6) Other Buddhist Works. Included under each title of a text is a brief synopsis of the text and an explanation of the Uygur manuscript, including where known: origin of translation, the translator and the place of translation, the place it was found, and any other interesting points. After this brief survey of the manuscript, the signature of the manuscript with references to the editions of the text is provided as well as additional references to the secondary literature. The survey concludes with an index to titles, translators, scribes and sponsors. This manual is an essential tool not only for specialists in the field of Altaic, especially Turcological or Monogolian, Iranological, Sinological or Buddhological Studies, but is also written for a larger public of students interested in Asian religions and cultural history in general. This book provides in a systematic and exhaustive way the most recent information on the places where the documents are kept, a synopsis of the text, editions and secondary literature.

In the modern world, interest in religious devotion is as great as ever. This volume brings together the research of ten scholars into the diverse ways that Europeans expressed their quest for God over more than a millennium, from the formative centuries of Christianity up to the seventeenth century. Topics include women transvestite saints, Monophysite wall-paintings, Anglo-Saxon sainthood and painful martyrdom, Carmelite self-redefinition, the confident authorship of Gautier de Coinci and Matfre Ermengaud, competition between the bishop and a wandering preacher for popular favor in Le Mans, the contemplative philanthropies of the Poor Clares, Chester Nativity-cycle actors’ masculinity, Jean Gerson’s warm relations with his siblings, and George Herbert’s Eucharistic feeling. The authors’ profound familiarity with primary sources as well as the influence of current theory makes these essays vibrant and timely.

This volume is the result of a workshop organized in Leuven within the context of the Australian Catholic University-KU Leuven-Tilburg University project on Vatican II (1962-1965). This volume focuses on the preparatory period of the Council and its broader context, for many renewal movements were underway decades before the Council's opening. The preparation of the Council was also a period of intense consultation of bishops and male superiors of religious orders and congregations. Indeed, John XXIII aimed at introducing an aggiornamento in the Roman Catholic Church, taking into account the wishes and the needs of bishops and superiors. The volume presented here offers new insights about this period on the basis of archives and other materials insufficiently consulted to date. The papers presented are the result of research by both senior scholars and junior researchers. They focus on the following issues: revelation, ecclesiology, ecumenism, and education.

In this volume the McGill University Research Group on Transmission, Translation, and Transformation in Medieval Cultures and their collaborators initiate a new reflection on the dynamics involved in receiving texts and ideas from the antiquity or from other contemporary cultures. For all their historic specificity, the western European, Arab/Islamic and Jewish civilizations of the Middle Ages were nonetheless co-participants in a complex web of cultural transmission that operated via translation and inevitably involved the transformation of what had been received. This threefold process is what defines medieval intellectual history. Every act of transmission presumes the existence of some ‘efficient cause’ – a translation, a commentary, a book, a library etc. Such vehicles of transmission, however, are not passive containers in which cultural products are transported. On the contrary: the vehicles themselves select, shape, and transform the material transmitted, making ancient or alien cultural products usable and attractive in another milieu. The case studies contained in this volume attempt to bring these larger processes into the foreground. They lay the groundwork for a new intellectual history of medieval civilizations in all their variety, based on the core premise that these shared not only a cultural heritage from antiquity but, more importantly, a broadly comparable ‘operating system’ for engaging with that heritage. Each was a culture of transmission, claiming ownership over the prestigious knowledge inherited from the past. Each depended on translation. Finally, each transformed what it appropriated.

This volume includes a collection of reworked articles which the author, during the last twenty years, dedicated to the origins and conditions constitutive of Christian philosophical-theological thought. From the earliest centuries of the Christian era, human reason was submitted to a particular formal conditioning, in so far as it was necessarily obliged to confront the contents of a divine revelation recognized as necessarily ‘true’. The medieval Latin scholar was induced by the social and cultural peculiarities of his time to confront a model of thought which imposes a decisive subordination of natural knowledge - demonstrated to be imperfect and inconclusive - to the certainties assured by the faith. The production of this model of philosophia, significantly different from the dominant paradigms in the classical period, rooted itself in the critical redimensioning of reason which Cicerointroduced into the West. Departing from the observation of the failure of the philosophical aspirations of antiquity, the Christian intellectuals effected an operative ‘overturning’ of the conditions of veridical knowledge.

The new wisdom was not entirely the result of religion interfering in the field of rational science, but it was shaped by a conscious ‘conversion’ of the philosophers and reached fulfillment under two principles: faith, which requires earthly knowledge in order to defend itself from misunderstandings and heresies; and reason, which allows itself to draw upon supernatural revelation for the possession of regulatory principles which guide it in the study of natural things.

This book investigates the development of this approach during the course of the centuries which in the West precede the rediscovery of Aristotelian epistemology: from Augustine to Boethius, from John Scottus Eriugena to Anselm of Aosta. It concludes by describing the return of this methodological approach, at the end of the Medieval Scholastic period, in the results of the anti-Aristotelian critique carried out by the men of the Renaissance through the recovery of a model of thought which had dominated in the Patristic and Early Medieval periods.

En devenant le principal support pédagogique des grammatici, l’œuvre de Virgile a joué un rôle central dans la formation intellectuelle de la jeunesse lors de l’Antiquité romaine tardive, y compris dans la formation rhétorique : les discours - principalement ceux de l’Énéide - ont fourni aux commentateurs du grand poète l’occasion d’expliquer des notions rhétoriques et d’analyser des exemples précis de situations oratoires. Les contributions du présent volume explorent les différentes facettes de cet art virgilien de la parole, tel qu’il a été compris par les professionnels de la littérature et de l’éducation de l’Antiquité tardive.

This book provides a richly documented study of vernacular translators as agents within the literary culture of Italy during the fifteenth century. Through a fresh and careful examination of these early modern translators, Rizzi shows how humanist translators went about convincing readers of the value of their work in disseminating knowledge that would otherwise be inaccessible to many. The translators studied in this book include not only the well-known ‘superstars’ such as Leonardo Bruni, but also little-known and indeed obscure writers from throughout the Italian peninsula.

Rizzi demonstrates that vernacular translation did not cease with the rise of ‘humanism’. Translations from Greek into Latin spurred the concurrent production of ‘new’ vernacular versions. Humanists challenged themselves to produce creative and authoritative translations both from Greek and occasionally from the vernacular into Latin, and from Latin into the vernacular. Translators grew increasingly self-assertive when taking on these tasks.

The findings of this study have wide implications: they trace a novel history of the use of the Italian language alongside Latin in a period when high culture was bilingual. They also shed further light on the topic of Renaissance self-fashioning, and on the workings of the patronage system, which has been studied far less in literary history than in art history. Finally, the book gives welcome emphasis to the concept that the creation and the circulation of translations (along with other literary activities) were collaborative activities, involving dedicatees, friends, and scribes, among others.

The studies collected in this volume highlight the rising of an ecumenical consciousness within the Catholic Church in the early twentieth century. The Catholic paths, suggested in view of the hoped-for Christian unity before the Second Vatican Council, were different but complementary: the path of prayer and liturgy, that of theological refl ection, that of fraternal witness and that of martyrdom. The text offers valuable contributions on all these paths, written by specialists in the history of ecumenism.

The Victorines were scholars and teachers of philosophy, liberal arts, sacred scripture, music, and contemplation at the Abbey of Saint-Victor in Paris. This collection focuses on the three greatest Victorines: Hugh (d. 1141), who established the direction of the school; Richard (d. 1173), who developed Victorine contemplation; and Thomas Gallus (d. 1246), who culminated Victorine contemplative thought and transmitted it to other schools, especially the Franciscans. They offer an innovative revival of the Christian spiritual and intellectual tradition for their reforming pastoral mission in their urban setting and for the Church.

Their contemporaries saw the Victorines as beacons of spiritual love and intellectual richness. Later reformers and thinkers held their writings as touchstones of contemplative love, including, for example, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, Jean Gerson, Thomas à Kempis, the Devotio Moderna, and many others. The writings of the Victorines found broad appeal among later medieval readers, as well as praise among early modern reformers, Protestant and Catholic alike. In recent decades, the Victorines have returned to scholarly attention and renewed appreciation. Scholarly studies, critical editions, and translation projects reveal the treasures of Victorine thought and spirituality.

This volume showcases the findings of recent research and scholarly advances in Victorine studies, offering new readers a status quaestionis of the field. It also features new research by eminent experts in Victorine thought that points out promising directions for future research, thus offering important new findings for established specialists.

Hildebert de Lavardin, évêque du Mans (1096-1125), puis archevêque de Tours (1125-1133), l’auteur de la Vita beate Marie Egyptiace, dont nous donnons ici la première traduction française, fut l’une des figures littéraires les plus importantes du Moyen Age: pendant plusieurs générations ses vers furent lus avec plaisir dans toute l’Europe occidentale; ses lettres servirent de modèles dans les écoles cathédrales et monastiques, pour leur élégance et leur noble distinction, et ses traités de philosophie morale et de droit canonique devinrent des manuels universellement appréciés.

La légende de Marie l’Égyptienne, compte parmi les figures du Moyen Age les plus connues et les plus vénérées de celles qui illustrent l’influence salutaire de Notre-Dame sur les plus grands pécheurs; elle a contribué pour une part nullement négligeable au développement du culte marial qui prend son essor définitif en Occident partir de l’époque carolingienne. Marie l’Égyptienne n’est pas seulement l’héroïne d’une parabole « évangélique », mais le personnage-clé d’un drame de la plus brûlante actualité : non seulement elle incarne en sa personne l’aspiration du monde féminin à rejoindre le mouvement des nouveaux ermites de l’époque d’Hildebert, mais elle intervient, en sa qualité d’ermite, pour donner des conseils au monde monastique. Le texte prend place dans la grande discussion de l'époque d'Hildebert sur la hiérarchie des vocations monastiques et leurs mérites respectifs, et sur les origines érémitiques du monachisme chrétien.

Christians have observed vigils in both East and West from earliest times. In the broad liturgical tradition of Christianity, the idea of keeping vigil appears to manifest the Church’s eschatological nature. Documentary evidence from the earliest centuries reveals that some Christians kept a night watch at the graves of martyrs and other heroes of the faith as to anticipate that dawn when the rising Sun of Justice would return in fulfilment of his promise. Eventually, vigils appear not just for Easter, Pentecost and saints’ days, but also for Christmas, the dedication of a church building, and on Saturday evening of the uniquely Roman quarterly Ember Weeks.

Liturgical sources of the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries reveal that such practices became relatively standardized with the assignment of specific Mass texts and scriptural readings, yet we know very little about the precise elements which comprised a vigil liturgy and of their theological significance. At the same time these vigils were so important that they attracted to themselves the celebration of major sacramental liturgies during them. Hence, the Paschal Vigil, which existed for centuries as a vigil liturgy of scriptural readings and prayers gradually became the setting for the annual baptismal celebration. This book examines the nature of Roman vigil liturgies in the early centuries of Christianity to unravel the most primitive structure of keeping vigil and to provide a better understanding of the Paschal Vigil, which Augustine of Hippo affirms as the ‘mother of all vigils.’

The economy of the late medieval Low Countries is often portrayed in terms of dynamism and economic growth. However, several regions within this larger entity followed an alternate path of development. One example of this is the Campine (Kempen), a communal peasant region situated to the northeast of the sixteenth-century ‘metropolis’ of Antwerp. By contrast with other regions in the Low Countries, this area was characterised by a remarkable stability.

By focusing on ‘independent’ peasant elites, this study explores the social structures and the characteristics of inequality of this region, showing how these factors led to a different, more stable mode of economic development. Looking past standard societal measurements such as property distribution, this work combines a wide variety of sources to grasp the nuances of inequality in a communal society. It therefore takes into account other economic factors such as control over the commons, and market integration. It also focuses on political and social inequality, shedding light on aspects of inequality in village politics, social life, and poor relief.

Thus, in contrast to dominant depictions of pre-modern societies on the road to capitalism, this book provides a comprehensive portrayal of inequality and elite groups in a communal peasant society.

Le Grand Miroir du monde, Speculum maius, est la «Grande Encyclopedie» du Moyen Age. Ce livre présente les étapes de son élaboration comme outil du studium, par Frère Vincent de Beauvais, lecteur dominicain au service de son Ordre, et par ailleurs familier du roi Louis IX. Il caractérise la documentation mise en œuvre et son évolution. Conçu d'abord en deux parties, clans un esprit proche de la pensée victorine, ( vers 1244), l'ouvrage fut ensuite remis en avancées de la nouvelle science, tributaire d'Aristote et d'al-Farabi (vers 1260). L'influence naturaliste d'Albert le Grand faisant suite á celle, exégétique, de Hugues de Saint-Cher, le Speculum maius devient ainsi une œuvre en trois parties, Speculum naturale, consacre á l'histoire naturelle selon l'ordre des six jours de la création; Speculum doctrinale, inachevé, exposant toutes les branches du savoir (trivium propédeutique, sciences pratiques, sciences mécaniques, sciences théoriques); Speculum historiale, deroulant les facta et gesta de l'humanité (histoire proprement dite, histoire littéraire et hagiographie) jusqu'au Jugement dernier, selon la vision augustinienne de l'histoire.

Des documents traduits, dont !'important prologue, Libellus apologeticus, illustrent la méthode de composition et le contenu de l'œuvre, la mettent en relation avec d'autres ecrits paralleles du XIIIe siècle et témoignent de son succès au cours des siécles.

This collection of prose vitae of four virgins and scholars - Saints John the Baptist, John the Evangelist, Jerome, and Katherine of Alexandria - was almost certainly copied, and the texts very likely composed, at Syon Abbey or Sheen Charterhouse in the mid-fifteenth century. The lives cover a wide range of hagiographic modes, from hagiographic romance to affective, devotional appreciation to doctrinal treatise in narrative form. From the life of Jerome, composed by a monk for his aristocratic spiritual daughter, to the life of Katherine, reputedly translated for Henry V, to those of John the Baptist and John the Evangelist, which set their subjects in a recognizably Birgittine context, they show the interaction of men and women, lay and monastic, in the production of devotional literature. The diversity of their approaches and sources, moreover, shows the links between English dynastic politics and continental religious literature and spiritual traditions. As examples of translation practices, of monastic politics, and of religious instruction, these lives provide a window onto the devotional culture and literary worlds of fifteenth-century Europe.

Visible English recovers for the first time the experience of reading and writing the English language in the medieval period through the perspectives of littera pedagogy, the basis of medieval learning and teaching of literate skills in Latin. Littera is at the heart of the set of theories and practices that constitute the ‘graphic culture’ of the book’s title. The book shows for the first time that littera pedagogy was an ‘us and them’ discourse that functioned as a vehicle for identity formation. Using littera pedagogy as a framework for understanding the medieval English-language corpus from the point of view of the readers and writers who produced it, Visible English offers new insights on experiences of writing and reading English in communities ranging from those first in contact with Latin literacy to those where print was an alternative to manuscript. Discussing a broad range of materials from so-called ‘pen-trials’ and graffiti to key literary manuscripts, Visible English provides new perspectives on the ways that the alphabet was understood, on genres such as alphabet poems, riddles, and scribal signatures, and on the different ways in which scribes copied Old and Middle English texts. It argues that the graphic culture underpinned and transmitted by littera pedagogy provided frameworks for the development and understanding of English-language literacy practices and new ways of experiencing social belonging and difference. To be literate in English, it proposes, was to inhabit identities marked by Anglophone literate practices.

The North has long attracted attention, not simply as a circumpolar geographical location, but also as an ideological space, a place that is ‘made’ through the understanding, imagination, and interactions of both insiders and outsiders. The envisioning of the North brings it into being, and it is from this starting point that this volume explores how the North was perceived from ancient times up to the early modern period, questioning who, where, and what was defined as North over the course of two millennia.

Covering historical periods as diverse as Ancient Greece to eighteenth-century France, and drawing on a variety of disciplines including cultural history, literary studies, art history, environmental history, and the history of science, the contributions gathered here combine to shed light on one key question: how was the North constructed as a place and a people? Material such as sagas, the ethnographic work of Olaus Magnus, religious writing, maps, medical texts, and illustrations are drawn on throughout the volume, offering important insights into how these key sources continued to be used over time. Selected texts have been compiled into a useful appendix that will be of considerable value to scholars.

The special position of Jerusalem among the cities of the world stems from a long history shared by the three Abrahamic religions, and the belief that the city reflected a heavenly counterpart. Because of this unique combination, Jerusalem is generally seen as extending along a vertical axis stretching between past, present, and future. However, through its many ‘earthly’ representations, Jerusalem has an equally important horizontal dimension: it is represented elsewhere in all media, from two-dimensional maps to monumental renderings of the architecture and topography of the city’s loca sancta.

In documenting the increasing emphasis on studying the earthly proliferations of the city, the current book witnesses a shift in theoretical and methodological insights since the publication of The Real and Ideal Jerusalem in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Art in 1998. Its main focus is on European translations of Jerusalem in images, objects, places, and spaces that evoke the city through some physical similarity or by denomination and cult - all visual and material aids to commemoration and worship from afar. The book discusses both well-known and long-neglected examples, the forms of cult they generate and the virtual pilgrimages they serve, and calls attention to their written and visual equivalents and companions. In so doing, it opens a whole new vista onto the summa of representations of Jerusalem.

This is the first monograph devoted to manuscripts illuminated by the mid-fifteenth-century artist known as the Wavrin Master, so-called after his chief patron, Jean de Wavrin, chronicler and councillor at the court of Philip the Good of Burgundy. Specializing in the production of pseudo-historical prose romances featuring the putative ancestors of actual Burgundian families, the artist was an attentive interpreter of these texts which were designed to commemorate the chivalric feats of past heroes and to foster their emulation by noble readers of the day. Integral to these heroes’ deeds is the notion of justice, their worth being measured by their ability to remedy criminal acts such as adultery, murder, rape, and usurpation. In a corpus of 10 paper manuscripts containing the texts of 15 romances and over 650 watercolour miniatures, the stylized, expressive images of the Wavrin Master bring out with particular clarity the lessons in justice which these works offered their contemporary audience, many of whom, from the Burgundian dukes downwards, would have been responsible for upholding the law in their territories. Chapters are devoted to issues such as the nature of just war and how it is linked to good rulership; what forms of legal redress the heroines of these tales are able to obtain with or without the help of a male champion; and what responses are available in law to a spouse betrayed by an adulterous partner. The book will be of interest to scholars of medieval art, literature, legal and cultural history, and gender studies.

Fruit des travaux du colloque intitulé «Groupes sociaux et territoires urbains (Moyen Age-16e siècle)» organisé en décembre 2004 à l’Université Libre de Bruxelles, cet ouvrage rassemble douze contributions originales consacrées aux dynamiques sociales de l’espace urbain en Europe de l’ouest durant le bas Moyen Âge.

Dans sa première partie, l’ouvrage montre la structuration à long terme de l’espace urbain par les stratégies d’occupation de groupes dominants: chapitres canoniaux, élites scabinales, métiers (Tours, Namur, Trévise). Il confronte ce processus d’appropriation à la capacité de réagencement matériel ou symbolique déployée par certains acteurs urbains. Accident aléatoire (Tortosa), circonstances politiques (Bruges), modulation des rapports à la ville (Ratisbonne) redessinent les territoires respectifs, rallument sans cesse la lutte pour la maîtrise de l’espace et de ses éléments signifiants.

Dans sa seconde partie, l’ouvrage donne à penser la société urbaine dans ses relations avec des horizons plus lointains. Dans un premier temps sont abordées les relations des villes avec leur arrière-pays, sur lequel les groupes citadins dominants réinventent sans cesse les modalités économiques et juridiques de leur contrôle (Bruxelles, Chieri, Dijon). Dans un second temps, sont considérées les armatures urbaines de certains territoires (Brabant, Hainaut, Saint-Empire) dont la vivacité économique dépend de l’intensité des relations marchandes.

Les articles réunis ici éclairent, souvent d’un jour nouveau, non seulement l’histoire singulière des villes concernées mais plus fondamentalement les processus et les logiques à l’œuvre dans l’agencement et le réagencement permanent des espaces urbains.

Bien qu’il soit encore bien trop tôt pour dresser un bilan critique de l’activité scientifique de Carlos Lévy, qui demeure en pleine évolution et qui promet toujours de nouvelles contributions à nos études, il est déjà évident qu’il a laissé une empreinte très importante dans les disciplines classiques au moins à deux égards : du point de vue de la méthode, Carlos Lévy a enseigné combien il est important, à une époque où la recherche se spécialise toujours plus, de ne pas perdre au contraire la capacité de « penser sans frontières », en joignant la sensibilité de l’intuition géniale à la rigueur des principes philologiques et à une compétence dans la discipline aussi solide qu’étendue et complète. C’est dans cette perspective que s’épanouit sa surprenante capacité de travailler à la fois comme historien de la philosophie, spécialiste de la pensée politique classique, expert en rhétorique et en éloquence, autant qu’en linguistique et en sémantique historique ; dans cette perspective encore que se comprend sa volonté d’étudier textes grecs comme textes latins, appartenant à toutes les écoles philosophique de l’Antiquité, et aussi ceux d’auteurs éloignés du domaine de la philosophie ; dans cette perspective enfin que se dessine son ouverture vers la modernité, la permanence de l’époque classique, le dialogue avec la philosophie contemporaine. Du point de vue des contenus, d’autre part, il est évident que l’activité scientifique de Carlos Lévy s’est concentrée surtout - mais certainement pas seulement - sur le sujet fascinant et toujours actuel du rapport entre vérité et apparence, entre dogme et incertitude, entre ontologie et gnoséologie. C’est donc autour du binôme vérité et apparence, envisagé autant d’un point de vue philosophique que d’un point de vue plus proprement rhétorique ou poétique, à travers l’étude d’auteurs de l’Antiquité à la Renaissance, que s’est construit ce volume d’amitié.

Perrine Galand, normalienne, ancien membre junior de l’Institut Universitaire de France, directeur d’études à l’École pratique des Hautes Études, est spécialiste de la poétique de la Renaissance européenne.

Ermanno Malaspina, professeur d’histoire de la langue latine à Turin, s’occupe de Cicéron, de Sénèque et du paysage littéraire en latin.

The abbey of San Sebastiano, which lies not far from the town of Alatri in Southern Lazio, preserves within its walls almost fifteen hundred years of history. This history is unusually bound to a number of important figures, from Saint Benedict to Pope Nicholas V and his circle of humanists. For the past four years a small team has been investigating the extant structures of the abbey, analyzing the stratigraphy of the standing walls and tracing the various building phases. The study has produced some startling discoveries: the plan and preserved walls of one of the oldest monasteries in Europe, and one of the earliest Renaissance villas. The book gives an account of the architecture and the history of the building, showing how each phase relates to the last both structurally and thematically.

The project was initiated at the American Academy in Rome, where Elizabeth Fentress was Andrew Mellon Professor, and Caroline Goodson, Margaret L. Laird and Stephanie C. Leone were Fellows. Margaret Laird and Stephanie Leone are now assistant professors at the University of Washington, Seattle and at Boston College. Other contributors include Caroline Bruzelius, Professor of the History of Art at Duke University, Antonio Manfredi, Vatican Library, Serena Romano, Professor of the History of Art at the University of Lausanne, Marco Rossi, director of the Museum of Alatri, and Ingrid Rowland, Andrew Mellon Professor at the American Academy in Rome.

The Decapolis city of Gerasa has seen occupation since the Bronze Age but reached its zenith in the Roman to early Islamic period as a population centre and trading hub. Located in a fertile valley in the limestone foothills of the Ajlun mountains, the city benefitted from a benign climate and an excellent local water supply from karstic springs and perennial streams. By the Roman-Early Byzantine period, these water sources were harnessed and managed by extensive aqueduct and distribution networks that satisfied the broad range of water needs of both urban and rural dwellers.

This volume offers an up-to-date, comprehensive, and multidisciplinary analysis of the water management system employed in both Gerasa and its hinterland from the time of Roman occupation to the devastating earthquakes that struck the city at the end of the Umayyad period. Drawing on archaeological evidence from the author’s field research, together with a critical and detailed analysis of the evidence of water installations and the results of a radiocarbon dating study, this insightful book offers the first diachronic interpretation of Gerasa’s water distribution, setting the city in its geoarchaeological, historical, and landscape contexts, and contributing to the broader understanding of its archaeological history.

This book sheds new light on old problems of wealth, poverty and material culture in rural societies. Much of the debate has concentrated on north-west Europe and the Atlantic world. This volume widens the geographic range to compare less well known areas, with case studies on the Mediterranean world (Catalonia and Greece), from central Europe (Bohemia and Hungary), and from the Nordic countries (Denmark). Methodologically, several papers link the possession of goods to the use of room space, while others highlight the importance of the channels for the circulation of goods, problems of stocks and flows of goods, and the complexities of urban/rural difference. Finally, this book seeks to stimulate new comparative studies in living standards and lifestyles by providing an overview of achievements up till now.

John Broad is visiting academic at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, University of Cambridge. He has published on rural society and poverty in England, and his current research interests include a book on English rural housing, and large-scale surveys of population, religion, and landholding in England in the eighteenth century.

Anton Schuurman is associate professor of Rural History at Wageningen University. He has published on the history of material culture and rural transformations in the Netherlands. Currently he is writing a book on the processes of modernisation and democratisation in the Dutch countryside from 1840 till 1920.

At the heart of any story of metamorphosis lies the issue of identity, and the tales of the werwulf (lit. ‘man-wolf’) are just as much about the wolf as about the man. What are the constituents of the human in general? What symbolic significance do they hold? How do they differ for different types of human? How would it affect the individual if one or more of these elements were to be subtracted?

Focusing on a group of Old Norse-Icelandic werewolf narratives, many of which have hitherto been little studied, this insightful book sets out to answer these questions by exploring how these texts understood and conceptualized what it means to be human. At the heart of this investigation are five factors key to the werewolf existence - skin, clothing, food, landscape, and purpose - and these are innovatively examined through a cross-disciplinary approach that carefully teases apart the interaction between two polarizations: the external and social, and the interior and psychological. Through this approach, the volume presents a comprehensive new look at the werewolf not only as a supernatural creature and a literary motif, but also as a metaphor that bears on the relationship between human and non-human, between Self and Other, and that is able to situate the Old-Norse texts into a broader intellectual discourse that extends beyond medieval Iceland and Norway.

This interdisciplinary study takes as its subject the multi-faceted genre of didactic literature (the literature of instruction) which constituted the cornerstone of literary enterprise and social control in medieval and early-modern Europe. Following an introduction that raises questions of didactic meaning, intent, audience, and social effect, nineteen chapters deal with the construction of the individual didactic voice and persona in the premodern period, didactic literature for children, women as the creators, objects, and consumers of didactic literature, the influence of advice literature on adult literacy, piety, and heresy, and the revision of classical didactic forms and motifs in the early-modern period. Attention is paid throughout to the continuities of didactic literature across the medieval and early-modern periods — its intertextuality, reliance on tradition, and self-renewal — and to questions of gender, authority, control, and the socially constructed nature of advice. Contributors particularly explore the intersection of advice literature with real lives, considering the social impact of both individual texts and the didactic genre as a whole. The volume deals with a wide variety of texts from the early Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, written in languages from Latin through the European vernaculars to Byzantine Greek and Russian, offering a comprehensive overview of this pervasive and influential genre.

The British Isles, Scandinavia, Iceland, Greenland, and Eastern Canada, alongside many small islands, form a broken bridge across the northern extremities of the Atlantic Ocean. This ‘North Atlantic World’ is a heterogeneous but culturally intertwined area, ideally suited to the fostering of an interest in all things northern by its people. For the storytellers and writers of the past, each more northerly land was far enough away that it could seem fabulous and even otherworldly, while still being just close enough for myths and travellers’ tales to accrue. This book charts attitudes to the North in the North Atlantic World from the time of the earliest extant sources until the present day. The varied papers within consider a number of key questions which have arisen repeatedly over the centuries: ‘where is the North located?’, ‘what are its characteristics?’, and ‘who, or what lives there?’. They do so from many angles, considering numerous locations and an immense span of time. All are united by their engagement with the North Atlantic World’s relationship with the North.

The decade that gave rise to the term ‘the Hungry Forties’ in Europe is often regarded, and rightly so, as one of deprivation, unrest, and revolution. Two events, the Great Irish Famine and the various political events of ‘1848’, stand out. This book is the first to discuss the subsistence crisis of the 1840s in a truly comparative way. This subsistence crisis may be divided into two rather distinct elements. On the one hand, the failure of the potato caused by the new, unfamiliar fungus, phytophthera infestans, which first struck Europe in mid-1845, resulted in a catastrophe in Ireland that killed about one million people, and radically transformed its landscape and economy. Poor potato crops in 1845 and in the following years also resulted in significant excess mortality elsewhere in Europe. On the other hand, this period, and 1846 in particular, was also one of poor wheat and rye harvests throughout much of Europe. Failure of the grain harvest alone rarely resulted in a subsistence crisis, but the combination of poor potato and grain harvests in a single place was a lethal one. Connections between the local and the global, between the economic and the political, and between the rural and the industrial, make the crisis of the late 1840s a multi-layered one.

This book offers a comparative perspective on the causes and the effects of what is sometimes considered as the ‘last’ European subsistence crisis. It begins with an extensive introduction that treats the topic in comparative perspective. The subsistence crisis had its most catastrophic impact in Ireland, and three chapters in the current volume are concerned mainly with that country. A fourth chapter uses price data to shed comparative perspective on the crisis, while the remaining nine chapters are case studies covering countries ranging from Sweden to Spain and from Scotland to Prussia. Throughout, the contributors focus on a range of common themes, such as the extent of harvest deficits, the functioning of food markets, fertility and mortality, and public action at local and national levels.

Cormac Ó Gráda is professor of economics at University College, Dublin. He has worked extensively on the history of famines in Ireland and worldwide.

Richard Paping teaches economic and social history and economics at University of Groningen. He has done extensive research on developments in standard-of-living, economy and demography in the Netherlands.

Eric Vanhaute is professor social and economic history and world history at Ghent University. He has mainly published on the history of the rural society and of labour markets in Flanders and outside.

Table of contents:

Eric Vanhaute, Richard Paping and Cormac Ó Gráda, The European Subsistence Crisis of 1845-1850: a Comparative Perspective

PART I - The Irish Famine in an International Perspective

Cormac Ó Gráda, Ireland’s Great Famine. An overview - Mary E. Daly, Something Old and Something New. Recent Research on the Great Irish Famine - Peter M. Solar, The Crisis of the Late 1840s. What Can Be Learned From Prices? - Peter Gray, The European Food Crisis and the Relief of Irish Famine, 1845-1850

PART II - A Potato Famine Outside Ireland?

Tom M. Devine, Why the Highlands Did Not Starve. Ireland and Highland Scotland During the Potato Famine - Eric Vanhaute, “So Worthy an Example to Ireland”. The Subsistence and Industrial Crisis of 1845-1850 in Flanders - Richard Paping and Vincent Tassenaar, The Consequences of the Potato Disease in the Netherlands 1845-1860: a Regional Approach - Hans H. Bass, The Crisis in Prussia - Gunter Mahlerwein, The Consequences of the Potato Blight in South Germany - Nadine Vivier, The Crisis in France. A Memorable Crisis But Not a Potato Crisis - Jean Michel Chevet and Cormac Ó Gráda, Crisis: What Crisis? Prices and Mortality in Mid-Nineteenth Century France - Pedro Díaz Marín, Subsistence Crisis and Popular Protest in Spain. The Motines of 1847- Ingrid Henriksen, A Disaster Seen From the Periphery. The Case of Denmark - Carl-Johan Gadd, On the Edge of a Crisis: Sweden in the 1840s

This book offers a new and innovative approach to the study of magic and witchcraft in Italy between the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. Unusually, this subject is explored not through inquisitorial trial records or demonological literature, but through the sermons and confession manuals produced by Observant Franciscan friars, focusing on the so-called ‘pastoral’ approach to folklore, superstition, and witchcraft - an approach that appears to have been notably less harsh than that taken by inquisitors and dedicated demonologists.

Central to this research are the writings of a number of friars active at the friary of St Angelo’s in Milan. Among them were preachers and confessors such as Bernardino Busti, who treated superstition as part of a model that categorized the beliefs and behaviours of the faithful, as well as dedicated intellectuals such as Samuele Cassini, who took scepticism towards elements of belief in witchcraft still further, ultimately leading to a clash with groups such as the Dominicans.

By considering the writings of these men in their wider literary and pastoral context, and in the light of the broader reforming aims of the Franciscans, this unique study not only offers new insights into the late medieval understanding of superstition and witchcraft, but also makes an important contribution to the history of pastoral care.

This collection of essays compares and discusses women’s participation and experiences in credit markets in early modern Europe, and highlights the characteristics, common mechanisms, similarities, discrepancies, and differences across various regions in Europe in different time periods, and at all levels of society. The essays focus on the role of women as creditors and debtors (a topic largely ignored in traditional historiography), but also and above all on the development of their roles across time. Were women able to enter the credit market, and if so, how and in what proportion? What was then the meaning of their involvement in this market? What did their involvement mean for the community and for their household? Was credit a vector of female emancipation and empowerment? What were the changes that occurred for them in the transition to capitalism? These essays offer a variety of perspectives on women’s roles in the credit markets of early modern Europe in order to outline and answer these questions as well as analysing and exploring the nature of women, money, credit, and debt in a pre-industrial Europe.

During the English Civil Wars and Revolution (1640-60), the affairs of Church and State came under a crucial new form of comment and critique, in the form of public petitions. Petitioning was a readily available mode of communication for women, and this study explores the ways in which petitioning in seventeenth-century England was adapted out of and differed from pre-Revolutionary modes, whilst also highlighting gendered conventions and innovations of petitioning in that period.

Male petitioning in the seventeenth century did not have to negotiate the cultural assumptions about intellectual inferiority and legal incapacity that constrained women. Yet just because women did not claim separate (and modern) women’s rights does not mean that they were passive, quiescent, or had no political agency. On the contrary, as this study shows, women in the Revolution could use petitioning as a powerful way to address those in power, precisely because it was done from an assumed position of weakness. The petition is not simply a text, authored by a single pen, but a series of social transactions, performed in multiple social and political settings, frequently involving people previously excluded from participation in political discussion or action. To the extent that women participated in collective petitioning, or turned their individual addresses into printed artefacts for public scrutiny, they also participated in the public sphere of political opinion and debate.

In the last few decades, the study of women in the arts has largely increased in terms of scholars involved in research and investigation, with the reception of the outcomes especially acknowledged by museums which are dedicating part of their mission to organizing exhibitions and/or acquiring the works of women. The Annual International Women in Arts Conference seeks to advance contemporary discussions on how female creativity has helped shape European culture in its heterogeneity since the Middle Ages. This volume collects the proceedings of the first conference organised in Rome, in October 2021. It focuses on the role of women in literature, art,　and architecture. Throughout history, these domains were often seen as very masculine. Yet, there have been many women who have made their mark as writers, illuminators, artists and architects, or have played a decisive role as patrons and supporters in these arts. This collection of essays aims to bring these women to the fore and sheds a new light on the heritage and legacy of women in the creative arts and architecture from the Middle Ages until the 20th century.

There has long been a tendency among monastic historians to ignore or marginalize female participation in monastic life, but recent scholarship has begun to redress the balance, and the great contributions made by women to the religious life of the Middle Ages are now attracting increasing attention. This interdisciplinary volume draws together scholars from Spain, Italy, France, the Low Countries, Germany, Transylvania, Scandinavia, and the British Isles, and offers new insights into the history, art history, and material culture, and the religiosity and culture of medieval religious women.

The different chapters within this book take a comparative approach to the emergence and spread of female monastic communities across different geographical, political, and economic settings, comparing and contrasting houses that ranged from rich, powerful royal abbeys to small, subsistence priories on the margins of society, and exploring the artistic achievements, the interaction with neighbours and secular and ecclesiastical authorities, and the spiritual lives that were led by their inhabitants. The contributors to this volume address issues as diverse as patronage and relationships with the outside world, organizational structures, the nature of Cistercian observance and identity among female houses, and the role of male authority, and in doing so, they seek to shed light on the divergences and commonalities upon which the female religious life was based.

The roles played by women in history, and even the very idea of what it is to be female, have always been in flux, changing over centuries, between cultures, and in response to diverse social and economic parameters. Even today, women’s roles and women’s rights continue to face changes and pressures. In establishing the series Women of the Past: Testimonies from Archaeology and History, the ambition is to build on the profound theoretical and empirical developments that have taken place over the last fifty years of gender-focused research and to explore them in a contemporary context.

The aim of this series is to shed light on not just the outstanding and extraordinary women who were trendsetters of their time, but also the not quite so outstanding women, often overshadowed by outstanding men, and the ordinary women, those who simply went about their everyday life and kept their world turning in their own quiet way. This edited volume, Women of the Past, Issues for the Present, is the inaugural volume of the series and shows the wide span of the series chronologically, geographically, and socially in terms of the research presented. From Roman slaves to Viking women, and from medieval wet-nurses to the nineteenth-century wives who supported their archaeologist husbands on excavation, this groundbreaking volume opens a new vista in our understanding of the past.