BOB2024MOME

The Old English Life of Saint Pantaleon survives in one eleventh century manuscript: it appears here for the first time in an easily available edition. This edition is based both on independent research and on the work of previous scholars. It is a challenging text, from a much-damaged manuscript, but well  worth reading: it is  interesting both from a linguistic point of view, as a testimony of late Anglo-Saxon language, and also as a sign of continental influence on Anglo-Saxon culture and of a change in literary taste in England on the eve of the Norman Conquest.  It is preceded by a full introduction dealing with the history of the text, from Greece to Western Europe and the context of its translation into Old English. The text is accompanied by copious notes dealing with difficult passages and it is made more accessible by a Modern English translation. The edition is completed by a 12th century Latin version which seems to be the closer to its Old English counterpart. The edition is completed by an Anglo-Saxon glossary.

1066 is one of the most well-known dates in English history: but how far do we understand the mental and emotional lives of those who experienced it? In just over a month, England was rocked by two separate invasions, multiple pitched battles, and the deaths of thousands. The repercussions of these traumatic events would echo through the history and literature of northern Europe for centuries to come.

Drawing on studies of trauma and cultural memory, this book examines the cultural repercussions of the year 1066 in medieval England, Normandy, and Scandinavia. It explores how writers in all three regions celebrated their common heritage and mourned the wars that brought them into conflict. Bringing together texts from an array of languages, genres, and cultural traditions, this study examines the strategies medieval authors employed to work through the traumas of 1066, narrating its events and experiences in different forms. It explores the ways in which history and memory interacted through multiple generations of writers and readers, and reveals how the field of trauma studies can help us better understand the mental and emotional lives of medieval people.

This book explores the intersection between the early development of medieval universities and the arrival of Aristotle's works in the Christian West, especially De anima: one of his most famous and obscure writings, straddling the fields of biology and psychology, and devoted to the functions of living beings – including the human being.

The leading figures in this very special meeting of cultures, also involving scientific writings from the Islamic world, are the Masters of Faculties of Arts. From the first half of the 13th century, they embarked on a theoretically very demanding enterprise, namely to restore a complete understanding of De anima; and they accomplished this difficult task by establishing a close – and often polemical – relationship with their more famous colleagues: theologians such as Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas.

By resorting to the research and teaching methods of their time, the Masters of Arts addressed crucial topics such as the soul/body relationship, sense perception, intellectual knowledge and the special status of the human intellect, mediating, as far as possible, between scientific requirements and those of the Christian faith.

Authors such as Adam of Buckfield, Peter of Spain, Siger of Brabant, John of Jandun and John Buridan, together with other, less famous ones and a small crowd of completely anonymous – yet theoretically no less interesting – scholars, gave rise to a choral narrative that disclosed new philosophical perspectives on man. It is in this intellectual context that the roots of Modern philosophical thought lie.

The ‘Leiden Glossary’ provides a record of the understanding and interpretation of the patristic and grammatical texts studied at the Canterbury School of Theodore and Hadrian, regarded by Bede as the high point of Christian culture in early Anglo-Saxon England. Each entry in the ‘Leiden Glossary’ is provided with detailed commentary on the sources consulted by the two Canterbury masters (earlier glossaries; Isidore; Eucherius) and the later uses of the glossary by compilers of the Epinal-Erfurt and Corpus glossaries. The ‘Leiden Glossary’ is thus a key witness to one of the greatest schools of learning in the early Middle Ages.

Based on the evidence of epigraphic material in combination with monumental painting, this book explores important dedicatory inscriptions (9th-beginning of the 13th c.) from Macedonia and Thrace, which have so far been investigated mainly from a philological-historical standpoint, thus neglecting the major issue of Middle Byzantine patronage. Through patron inscriptions and textual sources, the role and the motives of military officials in the patronage of defensive and fortification works, and the manner of publicizing them, are examined systematically. Patronage is looked at through the ideological messages that the donors endeavor to promote in a local society or monastic community, and which echo their relationship with the state and their views on education and faith. Interesting methodologically is the co-examination of the various categories of inscriptions in combination with historical texts and donor portraits, which opens up new avenues of research for the study of the interdisciplinary material in question.

Cet ouvrage se penche sur une région peu étudiée jusqu’à présent : le Bas-Poitou, situé en périphérie des principautés bretonnes, angevines et charentaises. Grâce à la diversité de ses terroirs et aux circonstances politiques particulières qu’elle a connues, cette région est privilégiée pour étudier l’organisation des sociétés médiévales durant la période charnière des xi e-xiii e siècles.

Cette étude se concentre sur l’ensemble des familles aristocratiques de la région, soit plus de 128 lignées identifiées par des tableaux de filiation, une cartographie, et des recherches archéologiques et monumentales sur les lieux de pouvoir. L’ouvrage se structure autour de trois articulations majeures : l’écrit et la façon dont les moines scribes ont perçu et mis par écrit l’organisation des lignages, la nature des pouvoirs exercés et leurs liens particuliers avec la divinité manifestés par les nombreuses aumônes accordées et l’élévation d’églises et d’abbayes. Leur implantation au sein des territoires en a constitué la seconde, pour comprendre comment ils ont pu transformer un espace en châtellenies polarisées autour d’un château, délimitées précisément et soumis à leur autorité. L’exercice du pouvoir en est la troisième : comment ces familles ont-elles progressivement constitué un réseau capable de relayer leur influence et de surmonter les principaux défis que sont les disparitions et les crises de succession. Si des tendances communes se dégagent, chaque lignage développe ses propres stratégies, (resserrement lignager, viage) et surtout renforce ses liens avec les communautés monastiques, les seules capables de lutter, par leurs prières, contre le pire des fléaux, l’oubli.

À travers l’étude de ces familles, c’est toute l’histoire d’une région qui se construit, intégrant ses rythmes, ses particularités topographiques et historiques qui continuent à dessiner la Vendée d’aujourd’hui.

Saint Patrick is a central figure in the medieval Irish Church. As the converter saint he was a central anchor through which Irish people came to understand their complicated religious past as well as their new place in the wider Christian world. This study considers some of the earliest and most influential writings focused on Saint Patrick, and asks how successive generations forged, sustained and redirected aspects of the saint’s persona in order to suit their specific religious and political needs.

In this book Elizabeth Dawson, for the first time, treats the Hiberno-Latin vitae of Patrick as a body of connected texts. Seminal questions about the corpus are addressed, such as who wrote the Lives and why? What do the works tell us about the communities that venerated and celebrated the saint? And what impact did these Lives have on the success and endurance of the saint’s cult? Challenging the perception that Patrick’s legend was created and sustained almost exclusively by the monastic community at Armagh, she demonstrates that the Patrick who emerges from the Lives is a varied and malleable saint with whom multiple communities engaged.

How did medieval authors publish their works in the age before print? This study seeks to achieve new insights into the publishing strategies of medieval authors by focusing on Nicholas Trevet, an English Dominican friar and Oxford master. Shortly after 1317, Trevet was commissioned by his provincial prior to write a literal commentary on the Psalter. He chose as his reference version the less commonly used Latin translation by Jerome from the Hebrew, and delivered his work before 1321/22.

The first book-length examination of Trevet’s commentary, this detailed study traces the ways in which the work was circulated by the author and his proxies. Through a combined analysis of codicological, textual, and historical features of the nine extant fourteenth-century manuscripts, this study identifies contemporary efforts to make Trevet’s work available to readers within and without the Dominican Order, in England and on the Continent. Even during the author’s lifetime the commentary was copied in Paris and reached readers in Avignon and likely in Naples.

From the time of the Roman Republic, continental Europeans traveling to England brought knowledge of Greek and Roman intellectual culture in the form of books of every genre. But, until 1111 CE, the island contained not a single Platonic dialogue. And for the next two centuries, it had only a partial Latin translation of the Timaeus. A Latin Phaedo eventually appeared, in 1340, and the Meno in 1423. But this hardly limited the number of ideas people had about Plato. He was a proto-Christian, a sage, a scholar of the cosmos, and a healer. And he had an elaborate oeuvre that did exist in England, works of astrology, numerology, medicine, and science, including Cado, Calf, Circle, Herbal, Question, Alchemy, and Book of Prophecies of a Greek King. This book tells the story of Plato in Medieval England, from a name with too few works to a sage with too many. Based on a complete survey of all extant manuscripts, publications, and library records until the fifteenth century, it traces with extraordinary precision the movement of opinions and information about Plato from Europe to England and then into its various monasteries, schools, and universities. This erudite and illuminating sociology of knowledge provides novel insight into the dubious English career of our best-known philosopher. This is intellectual history and reception studies at its most surprising.

Cambridge University Library, MS Additional 2604 contains a unique prose legendary almost entirely of female saints, all of whom are virgins, martyrs, or nuns. The manuscript, which also has varied post-medieval items, is written in one hand probably dating from c. 1480 to c. 1510. This previously unstudied Middle English collection features twenty-two universal and native saints, both common (like John the Baptist and Æthelthryth) and rare (such as Wihtburh and Domitilla). These texts are dependent on a complex mixture of Latin sources and analogues. Specific linguistic and art-historical features, as well as attention to the predominant female saints of Ely and post-medieval provenance, suggest an East Anglian convent for the original readership. Through an exploration of the manuscript and its later ownership (both recusant and antiquarian), a discussion of its linguistic attributes, a consideration of local female monastic and book history, a comparison of hagiographical texts, and a wide-ranging source and analogue study, this Study fully contextualises these Middle English lives. The book concludes with a survey of the structural and stylistic aspects of the texts, followed by three appendices, and an extensive bibliography. The texts are edited for the first time in its companion volume, Saints’ Lives for Medieval English Nuns, II: An Edition of the ‘Lyves and Dethes’ in Cambridge University Library, MS Additional 2604.