Brepols Online Books Medieval Miscellanea Collection 2018 - bob2018mime

This volume explores the intersection of landscape and myth in the context of northwestern Atlantic Europe. From the landscapes of literature to the landscape as a lived environment, and from myths about supernatural beings to tales about the mythical roots of kingship, the contributions gathered here each develop their own take on the meanings behind ‘landscape’ and ‘myth’, and thus provide a broad cross-section of how these widely discussed concepts might be understood.

Arising from papers delivered at the conference Landscape and Myth in North-Western Europe, held in Munich in April 2016, the volume draws together a wide selection of material ranging from texts and toponyms to maps and archaeological data, and it uses this diversity in method and material to explore the meaning of these terms in medieval Ireland, Wales, and Iceland. In doing so, it provides a broadly inclusive and yet carefully focused discussion of the inescapable and productive intertwining of landscape and myth.

What makes political power legitimate? Without legitimation, subjects will not accept power, and, since religion permeated medieval society, religion became foundational to philosophical legitimations of political power.

In 2013, the xix Annual Colloquium of the International Society for the Study of Medieval Philosophy took place in Alcalá de Henares, one of the medieval centers of political debate within and between Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities. The members of these communities all shared the common belief that God constitutes the remote or proximate cause of legitimation. Yet, beyond this common belief, they differed significantly in their points of departure and how their arguments evolved. For instance, the debate among Western Christians in the conflict between secular power and Papal authority sowed the seeds for a secular basis of legitimacy.

The volume reflects the results of the colloquium. Many contributions focus on key Christian thinkers such as Marsilius of Padua, Thomas Aquinas, John Quidort of Paris, Giles of Rome, Dante, and William of Ockham; other studies focus on major authors from the Jewish and Muslim traditions, such as Maimonides and Alfarabi. Finally, several papers focus on lesser-known but no less important figures for the history of political thought: Manegold of Lautenbach, Ptolemy of Lucca, Guido Terrena, John of Viterbo, Pierre de Ceffons, John Wyclif and Pierre de Plaoul. The contributions rely on original texts, giving the readers a fresh insight into these issues.

Les cisterciens sont moins connus pour avoir recherché et retravaillé les textes que pour leurs efforts de centralisation et d’unification dans l’architecture et les arts, la liturgie et la vie quotidienne, et pour leur utilisation active de l’écrit pragmatique – pour ne citer que ces quelques domaines. Et pourtant, leurs bibliothèques, parfois immenses, font mentir par leur richesse et les textes rarissimes ou inattendus qu’elles nous ont conservés l’idée d’un ordre peu consacré aux études. Où les cisterciens ont-ils trouvé ces textes ? Quels étaient leurs réseaux ? Avaient-ils des critères pour choisir les textes à copier et les modèles ? La recherche des textes était-elle dans ces abbayes réfléchie, concertée ? En somme, les cisterciens ont-ils été des transmetteurs par hasard, ou parce que leur intérêt pour les textes allait bien au-delà de ce que nous croyons habituellement ? Ce livre montre que la seconde réponse est certainement la plus juste.

Late antique and early medieval science is commonly defined by the quadrivium, the four subjects of the seven liberal arts relating to natural science: astronomy, geometry, arithmetic, and music. The seven-fold division of learning was designed in Late Antiquity by authors such as Martianus Capella, and these authors were studied intensively from the Carolingian age onwards. Because these subjects still have currency today, this leads to the anachronistic view that the artes dominated intellectual thought in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages.

Quite the contrary, the artes were an idealized curriculum with limited application in practice. Certainly, the artes do not help in our understanding of the intellectual endeavour between the early fifth and the late eighth centuries. This period was dominated by computus, a calendrical science with the calculation of Easter at its core. Only computus provides a traceable continuation of scientific thought from Late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages. The key questions were the mathematical modeling of the course of the sun through the zodiac (the Julian calendar) and of the moon phases (in various lunar calendars).

This volume highlights key episodes in the transmission of calendrical ideas in this crucial period, and therewith helps explaining the transformation of intellectual culture into its new medieval Christian setting.