Brepols Online Books Medieval Miscellanea Collection 2024 - bob2024mime

Historiography on the Vikings of the East — the Rus' and the Varangians — has been both multiform and varied, but it has been invariably focused on actual historical events, and the extent to which these are accurately reflected in written sources. In contrast, very little attention has been paid up to now to the narrators behind these medieval accounts, to their motives in writing, or to the context in which they were working.

This volume aims to redress the balance by offering a re-examination of medieval sources on the Eastern Vikings and by highlighting ongoing ‘debates’ concerning the identities of the Rus' and the Varangians in the medieval period. The chapters gathered here compare and contrast sources emanating from different cultures — Byzantium, the Abbasid Caliphate and its successor states, the early kingdoms of the Rus', and the high medieval Scandinavian kingdoms — and examine what significance these sources have attached to the Rus' and the Varangians in different contexts. The result is a new understanding of how different cultures chose to define themselves in relation to one another, and a new perspective on the history of the Scandinavian peoples in the East.

Traditionally attributed to King Solomon and defined by Rabbi Aqiva as the Holy of Holies among the sacred Scriptures, the Song of Songs is one of the most fascinating and controversial biblical books. Celebrated as a key to the supreme mystery of the union between God and the faithful, this ambivalent book, which combined a sensual celebration of love with a well-established tradition of allegorical interpretation, was a text crucial to both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and held a particular appeal for poets. Indeed, the Song of Songs played a significant role in the development of European poetry from its very beginning, creating an exceptional convergence of sacred and secular languages and horizons of meaning.

Written by a group of distinguished international scholars, this volume explores the complex and multifaceted processes through which the Song of Songs entered, influenced, and interacted with medieval and Renaissance European poetry (twelfth to seventeenth centuries). Focusing on both individual authors – including Peter Riga, Dante Alighieri, Richard Rolle, and George Herbert – and particularly relevant poetic traditions – including Hebrew liturgical poetry and the Tristan and Ysolt tradition, Middle English and Petrarchan lyric, Renaissance verse versions and seventeenth-century musical compositions, dissident and prophetic texts – the volume unveils the relevant role played by the biblical book in the development of European poetry, thought and spirituality, highlighting its ability to contribute to different poetic genres and give voice to a variety of religious, political, philosophical, and artistic intentions.

The Belgian Dominican friar Antoninus Hendrik Thomas published a critical reconstruction of the earliest Constitutions of the Dominican Order. He identified meticulously where Saint Dominic and his first brothers had borrowed material from other religious and secular juridical systems, as well as where they had been original, thus uncovering the foundational charism of the Order. Even today, researchers in the field regard Fr Thomas’s work as indispensable. Unfortunately, many of his insights are difficult to access for a wider audience, since Fr Thomas wrote his work in his native language, Dutch. To mark the eighth centenary of the death of Saint Dominic in 2021, the Belgian Dominican province therefore decided to publish Fr Thomas’s work in an English translation, as well as to complement this with a selection of essays written by contemporary experts, who – from their particular perspectives – engage with Fr Thomas’s main insights. The essays deal with the historiographical tradition to which Fr Thomas belonged, the Premonstratensian, Cistercian and secular sources of the Constitutions, the manuscript tradition and editing process of the earliest Constitutions, and their reception in the first century of the Order and by the late medieval observant movement.

Ecocriticism and Old Norse Studies is the first anthology to combine environmental humanities approaches and the study of premodern Nordic literature and culture. The chapters gathered here present innovative research based on the most recent developments within ecologically informed literary and cultural studies. Covering a wide variety of sources, the volume provides new insights into the Old Norse environmental imagination, showing how premodern texts relate to nature and the environment - both the real-world environments of the Viking Age and Middle Ages, and the fantastic environments of some parts of saga literature. Collectively, the contributions shed new light on the role of cultural contacts, textual traditions, and intertextuality in the shaping of Old Norse perceptions and representations of nature and the environment, as well as on the modern reception and (mis-)use of these ideas. The volume moreover has a contemporary relevance, inviting readers to consider the lessons that can be learned from how people perceived their environments and interacted with them in the past as we face environmental crises in our own times.

One of the most important thinkers of the Middle Ages, the Jewish philosopher Solomon Ibn Gabirol (known in the Latin Middle Ages as ‘Avicebron’) greatly contributed to the history of metaphysics. His most famous work, the Fons vitae, was the source of sophisticated, radical doctrines (like universal hylomorphism and the plurality of substantial forms) that were rigorously debated in the Latin world for centuries.

Breaking a long period of scholarly neglect of his thought, this volume scrutinises Ibn Gabirol’s philosophical contributions by disentangling his original theories from the misconceptions originated by his medieval readers and critics, like Thomas Aquinas and Albert the Great. The first part of the volume expands on the Latin translation of Ibn Gabirol’s philosophical work, the Fons vitae, from which many of these misconceptions seems to have originated. The second part focuses on the sources used by Ibn Gabirol and reconstructs the philosophical framework of his reflections. The final two parts of the volume are dedicated to the influence on Ibn Gabirol’s thought on the Latin and Hebrew traditions, respectively.

Authored by some of the most renowned worldwide experts on Hebrew and Latin philosophy, the cutting-edge contributions included in the volume give a lively picture of a complex yet fascinating medieval philosopher and his unique interpretation of the universe.

Assembling the contributions of twenty-two authors, this volume aims at revisiting the question of the choice of burial sites throughout the Middle Ages, in their political, emotional, and devotional dimensions, across a wide chronology and in a vast palette of different social statuses. The choice of a burial site inevitably reflets very important statements, made by the living persons, not only regarding what they wished the memory of their passage on Earth to be, but equally enlightening us on what their concern for the future of their souls was and how it should be cared for, in the afterlife.

The first part of this volume is devoted to royal pantheons, considering their development and relevance in the construction of royal legitimacy. Kings and Queens were not the only ones considering their lineage and personal memory: noblemen, ecclesiastics, rich tradesmen, and their wives and daughters, were also involved in a world of changing tendencies, which are dealt with in the second part of the book. The third and last part looks at the strategies and interconnection between building a burial site and constructing collective memories, whether in stone or in writing through the performing influence of rituals, images, or symbols.

This book proposes, therefore a whole new set of approaches on the subject, addressed either in interdisciplinary and all-around syntheses or via analysis of specific case-studies, looking at panteons and other burial sites as the important witnesses of the lives, emotions, and devotions of the medieval society they served.

Contributors to this volume are Xavier Barral i Altet, Catarina Fernandes Barreira, Thiago José Borges, Maria Helena Cruz Coelho, Frederica Cosenza, Antonio Pio de Cosmo, Lorenzo Curatella, Mário Farelo, José Romón González de la Cal, Linsy Grant, Laurent Hablot, Orlindo Jorge, Emma Lano Martínez, Christian de Mérindol, Sonia Morales Cano, Jorge Morín Pablos, Pedro Redol, Martina Saltamacchia, Isabel Sánchez Ramos, Lydwine Scordia, Rosa Smurra and Christian Steer.

Understanding and influencing nature were preeminent aims of medieval Arabic science, and attracted European fascination with its accomplishments. This volume draws together studies on central themes, presenting a world of enquiry into the earth and the heavens, and ways to harness this information for divination and the occult sciences. It gives examples of how Arabic science travelled to Latin Europe through texts and instruments, and how it underwent transformation there as diverse fields were put to use and reinterpreted. The studies introduce a range of learning and perspectives: astrology conducted with planetary lots; a geography where features of the earth's surface move over time; knowledge of the elements and climates which Adelard of Bath learned from Arab masters; Avicenna’s meteorology explaining the extremes of fire storms and catastrophic floods; debates about the eternity or creation of the world; evaluations of magic as a rational, intellectual discipline, or alternatively a danger needing censorship and linked to female witchcraft; and a precious astrolabe which in the Renaissance was reused and inspired new theoretical writings. Together these studies sketch a landscape of medieval Arabic science and Latin European engagement with this new frontier.

The conjunction of medieval religious studies and gender studies in the past several decades has produced not only nuanced attention to medieval mystics and religious thinkers, but a transformation in the study of medieval culture more broadly. This volume showcases new investigations of mysticism and religious writing in the Middle Ages and the early modern period. It also presents groundbreaking explorations of the feminized divine, from medieval to modern, and the many debts of medieval secular texts and cultures to the religious world that surrounded them. Medieval crossover also defines this volume: the contributors examine the crossovers between male and female, cloister and saeculum, divine and human, and vernacular and Latin that characterized so much of the complexity of medieval literary culture. These collected chapters examine mystics from Hildegard of Bingen and Juliana of Cornillon to Richard Rolle, Julian of Norwich, and Tomás de Jesús; the modern theologies of Philip K. Dick and Charles Williams; goddesses like Fame, Dame Courtesy, and Mother Church; and the role of religious belief in shaping conceptions of pacifism, obscenity, authorship, and bodily integrity. Together, they show the extraordinary impact of Barbara Newman’s scholarship across a range of fields and some of the new areas of investigation opened by her work.

Contributors: Jerome E. Singerman, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Jesse Njus, Andrew Kraebel, Nicholas Watson, Laura Saetveit Miles, Bernard McGinn, Carla Arnell, Maeve Callan, Katharine Breen, Lora Walsh, Susan E. Phillips and Claire M. Waters, Carissa M. Harris, Stephanie Pentz, Craig A. Berry, Dyan Elliott.

What did the world look like for Jews living in medieval Europe? How did they perceive and make use of the elements of their daily life, from items on the street to religious iconography within holy spaces — in particular synagogues and at the exterior of churches — and profane elements from the home? And how did they experience the visual and material cultures of their non-Jewish neighbours?

These questions form the core of this volume, which explores pre-modern Jewish approaches to images and material objects from a variety of perspectives. From clothing to manuscripts, and from lighting devices to the understanding of the invisible, the chapters gathered together in this multifaceted volume combine analyses of images and artefacts together with in-depth analyses of texts to offer fresh insights into the visual cultures that informed the world of European Jews in the Middle Ages.

Que représente la Grèce et les Grecs, pour les auteurs et les artistes des xiv e au xvi e siècle, en Europe occidentale ? Le présent volume explore cette question du point de vue de la perception et de l’imagination spatiales et géographiques. Il porte ainsi sur les représentations de l’espace grec, ancien et « moderne » du xiv e au xvi e siècle. En privilégiant des œuvres latines, françaises et italiennes, écrites principalement en Italie, en France, dans les Pays-Bas bourguignons et en Grèce, il étudie comment les auteurs et les artistes figurent textuellement et visuellement la géographie de la Grèce / de l’espace ou des espaces grec(s). Les difficultés pour définir, nommer et représenter la Grèce comme entité territoriale sont nombreuses durant ces siècles marqués par de très profonds bouleversements, avec du côté grec l’effondrement de l’empire byzantin et, du côté de l’Europe occidentale, des évolutions nombreuses dans les connaissances géographiques, historiques et aussi linguistiques, ainsi que dans les formes d’expression textuelles et iconographiques. La perception d’une identité spatiale, géographique, de la Grèce est d’autant plus délicate que plusieurs temporalités sont en jeu, celle de la Grèce ancienne, celle de la Grèce contemporaine aux auteurs, celle aussi de la Grèce médiévale antérieure au xiv e siècle. Les études réunies s’interrogent sur les différentes perceptions et représentations de l’espace grec, dans son unité et/ou sa diversité, qui s’expriment et se renouvellent durant ces trois siècles, ainsi que sur la nomination des lieux grecs et de la Grèce qui les accompagnent.