Brepols Online Books Medieval Monographs Collection 2017 - bob2017mome

A rare survival provides unmatched access to the the medieval classroom. In the academic year 1330-31, the Franciscan theologian, William of Brienne, lectured on Peter Lombard’s Sentences and disputed with the other theologians at the University of Paris. The original, official notes of these lectures and disputes survives in a manuscript codex at the National Library of the Czech Republic, and they constitute the oldest known original record of an entire university course. An analysis of this manuscript reconstructs the daily reality of the University of Paris in the fourteenth century, delineating the pace and organization of instruction within the school and the debates between the schools. The transcription made during William’s lectures and the later modifications and additions reveal how the major vehicle for Scholastic thought, the written Sentences commentary, relates to fourteenth-century teaching. As a teacher and a scholar, William of Brienne was a dedicated follower of the philosophy and theology of John Duns Scotus (+1308). He constructed Scotist doctrine for his students and defended it from his peers. This book shows concretely how scholastic thinkers made, communicated, and debated ideas at the medieval universities. Appendices document the entire process with critical editions of William’s academic debates (principia), his promotion speech, and a selection of his lectures and sources.

Founded in 1131 by the castellan of Cambrai, Vaucelles Abbey thrived in a borderland region, where German emperors, French kings, Flemish counts, bishops of Cambrai, and the Cistercian Order all had active interests. To understand how Vaucelles flourished, we must look at the relationships that the house created and fostered with various international, regional, and local individuals and institutions. Vaucelles used these connections to protect the vast patrimony that the monks created in the two centuries after its foundation.

This study asserts that three principal factors influenced the foundation and development of Vaucelles. First, the abbey was fortunate in its local support, beginning with the castellan family and expanding to include numerous regional families and the bishops of Cambrai. Second, the abbey was established in a political borderland, a geo-political situation that Vaucelles survived and actually turned into a positive feature of its development. And finally, Vaucelles was a Cistercian monastery, a direct daughter house of Clairvaux. Vaucelles’ Cistercian observance fostered relationships that were particularly significant to the abbey’s development from the late twelfth century onward. These factors offer exceptional tools for demonstrating many features of Vaucelles’ political, social, and economic life during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Despite the prominence of conflicts in all mythological and heroic literature, perceptions of these conflicts and their participants are shaped by different cultural influences. Socio-economic, political, and religious factors all influence how conflict is perceived and depicted in literary form. This volume provides the first comparative analysis to explore conceptions of conflict and otherness in the literary and cultural contexts of the early North Sea world by investigating the use of metaphor in Old English, Old Norse, and Early Irish poetry. Applying Conceptual Metaphor Theory together with literary and anthropological analysis, the study examines metaphors of conflict and alterity in a range of (pseudo-)mythological, heroic, and occasional poetry, including Beowulf, Old Norse skaldic and eddic verse, and poems from the celebrated ‘Ulster Cycle’. This unique approach not only sheds new light on a wide spectrum of metaphorical techniques, but also draws important conclusions concerning the common cultural heritage behind these three poetic corpora.