Brepols Online Books Medieval Miscellanea Collection 2023 - bob2023mime

This volume brings together a collection of essays that delve into the shifts in ideas, roles, and practices of masculinities and male attitudes during the transition from late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages. This period was marked by significant changes, including the collapse of Roman political authority in the West, the fragmentation of imperial universalism in polities, and the rise of Christianity, which all challenged the gender roles inherited from Antiquity.

Within this historical context, the book explores the evolution of men’s privileges, responsibilities, and burdens through eleven case studies focusing on different categories of men and manly behaviour. The volume brings to life husbands and fathers, kings and workers, clerics and warriors from both the East and the West, as revealed through contemporary textual and material sources and preserved in the physical remains of male bodies and actions. In doing so, this volume will bring to the fore new perspectives on masculinities and gender history.

The papers gathered in this volume focus on ‘Medieval Translations and their Readership’, the special strand of the 11th Cardiff Conference on the Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages. The volume discusses the role of the reader in the process of translation, communities of readers and their active participation in translators’ choices, and the translation as a result of a dialogue between author, text and its reader.

Translations of works of theology and religious education, the focus of most of the contributions to this volume, constitute excellent material for research into medieval lay audiences. Vernacular religious educational texts from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century show a great deal of conformity. Individual authors resorted to similar strategies and techniques to meet any translation challenges, to fulfil educational aims, or to relate to their readers and to accommodate their expectations. Simultaneously, the readers played a crucial role as they shaped the production of texts in many ways.

Research into Middle English pastoral and devotional literature and the conditions of its production still dominates scholarly work in the field. Religious texts in vernaculars other than Middle English have so far received little attention. This volume tries to tackle this lacuna by offering a careful comparative analysis of relevant vernacular texts across Europe, including Slavonic works, using historiographical, philological, and linguistic methods as well as literary scholarly approaches.

The sixteen chapters are organized in three sections. The first one, ‘Authors and Readers’, brings together articles examining the idea of a model reader as expressed in translations of biblical texts and texts of religious instruction. The contributions in the second section, on the ‘Dissimination of Knowledge’, focus on how translators addressed readers, how people read, and how they used the manuscripts and printed books made for them. The target audience or model reader of the first section is here put into perspective with the help of discussions of reading practices. The last section, ‘Religious Education in Transition’, comprises contributions which focus on textual material from the period when printed books gradually changed, the relationship between languages, texts, authors, and readers.

L’orientation vers les convergences, échanges et confrontations dans l’histoire monastique du grand Ouest européen au Moyen Âge permet de porter un regard nouveau sur la dynamique de divers établissements en observant les relations qui s’y sont développées tant au sein des communautés, qu’avec la société environnante. Les influences externes subies par les monastères et les conflits internes qui s’y jouent, les échanges dus aux pèlerinages, aux rouleaux des morts et aux confraternités sont au nombre des thèmes explorés.

This multidisciplinary volume celebrates the scholarship and career of Lawrence Earp, whose work has profoundly shaped the fields of Machaut studies, musicology, codicology, and fourteenth-century studies in general. For over four decades, Earp’s meticulous scholarship and generosity in collaboration have been a constant inspiration for medieval scholars, students, and colleagues alike. The twenty-six innovative essays herein gratefully acknowledge his influence and showcase a variety of fresh approaches. Recognizing both the breadth and depth of Earp’s work, the sections of this book are devoted to bibliography, historiography, literature, art history, and several musicological topics. Many of the chapters focus on the oeuvre of Guillaume de Machaut, but readers will also find explorations on Hildegard of Bingen, Philippe de Vitry, child performers in medieval theater, notation, genre, motets from the late thirteenth to the early fifteenth centuries, and polyphony in Italy and England. Made possible by Earp’s foundational and guiding work, this amply illustrated volume invites future interdisciplinary research.