Brepols Online Books Medieval Miscellanea Collection 2025 - bob2025mime

Many excellent studies have been published on the phenomenon of holy (wo)men and saints. As a rule, however, they focus on successful candidates for holiness who played the roles of charismatic leaders and patrons of social and religious life.

This volume offers a new perspective on ancient and medieval holiness — its main focus is holiness as defined by its peripheries, and not by its conceptual centre. The contributors explore stories of men and women whose way to sainthood did not follow typical ‘models’, but who engaged with it from its outskirts. Several essays examine the strategies employed by hagiographical authors to tailor the images of candidates for holiness whose lives provided less obvious examples of moral and/or religious ideals. These include attempts to make saints out of emperors, heretics, and other unlikely or obscure figures. Other case studies focus on concerns with false holiness, or unusual cases of holiness being ascribed prior to a saint’s death. Another concept explored in the volume is space. The spatial boundaries of holiness are discussed in relation to the transmission of relics, to the opposition between urban and rural spaces, holy sites, and even imagined space.

Holiness and sainthood have been crucial concepts for Christianity from its inception. By exploring their ‘marginal’ and ‘peripheral’ aspects, the essays in this book offer vital new perspectives on the religious world of Late Antiquity.

This volume investigates the vivid and emotionally intense commemoration of the Passion of Christ as a key element in late medieval religious culture. Its goal is to shed light on how the Passion was communicated and on its socio-religious function in late medieval Europe. By adopting a multidisciplinary approach, the volume analyses the different media involved in this cultural process (sermons, devotional texts, lively performances, statues, images), the multiple forms and languages in which the Passion was presented to the faithful, and how they were expected to respond to it. Key questions concern the strategies used to present the Passion; the interaction between texts, images, and sounds in different media; the dissemination of theological ideas in the public space; the fashioning of an affective response in the audience; and the presence or absence of anti-Jewish commonplaces.

By exploring the interplay among a wide range of sources, this volume highlights the pervasive role of the Passion in late medieval society and in the life of the people of the time.

While the medieval regions that form modern-day Britain, Ireland, Iceland, and the Scandinavian states were, very much like today, home to diverse ethnic and linguistic groups, it is evident that the peoples who inhabited the north-western Atlantic seaboard at this time were nonetheless connected by key cultural, environmental, historical, and ideological experiences that set them apart from other regions of Europe. This volume is the first to focus specifically on these cultural and linguistic connections from the perspective of the history of emotions. The contributions collected here examine cultural encounters among medieval North Atlantic peoples with regard to the gradual development of shared emotional models and the emergence of early cross-cultural emotional communities in this region. The chapters also explore how the folk psychologies illustrated in the oldest European vernacular writing traditions (Irish, English, and Scandinavian) bear witness to cultural models for emotions that first took shape in pre-Christian times.

Il volume raccoglie alcune delle relazioni presentate durante il 4° Colloquio Internazionale della Societas Artistarum. Svoltosi presso l’Università degli studi di Milano il 7-9 novembre 2019, esso si proponeva di approfondire da prospettive diverse come si sia configurato nell’Italia medievale e rinascimentale il rapporto fra medicina e filosofia. Alcuni contributi si soffermano sul contesto storico-istituzionale dell’insegnamento e della pratica della medicina, sull’uso di dottrine etiche e di strumenti logici e retorici da parte dei medici. Altri contributi, avvalendosi anche di documenti e testi inediti, analizzano invece temi interdisciplinari come le teorie della generazione e la natura delle acque fluviali oppure mettono a fuoco il pensiero e l’opera di medici-filosofi come Bartolomeo da Salerno, Taddeo Alderotti, Antonio da Parma, e Ludovico Boccadiferro.

Graphic devices such as tables and diagrams and other visual strategies of organising text and information are an essential part of communication. The use of these devices and strategies in books and documents developed throughout the medieval and early modern periods, as knowledge was translated and circulated in European vernaculars. Yet the use of graphic practices and multimodal literacies associated with them have mostly been examined in the context of Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew, and early vernacular writing remains an under-researched area. This volume brings together contributors from English historical linguistics and book studies to highlight multimodal graphic practices and literacies in texts across a range of genres and text types from the late medieval period until the eighteenth century. Contributions in the volume investigate both handwritten and printed materials, from books in the domains of medicine, religion, history, and grammar, to administrative records and letter writing.

Gerasa/Jerash and the Decapolis are located along the seismically active area of the Dead Sea Rift, a point where four tectonic plates meet to create the 110 km-long fault known as the Dead Sea Transform. It was activity along this fault that led, in ad 749, to a famously devastating earthquake in the region. Measuring at least 7.0 on the Richter scale, this quake not only had a profound physical impact on the Decapolis, Galilee, Caesarea, and Jerusalem, causing widespread destruction and reshaping urban landscapes, but also led to a clear shift in socio-economic dynamics through a combination of economic decline and population displacement. It thus stands as a clear watershed moment in Late Antiquity. In its aftermath, some cities struggled to regain prominence, while others declined and were abandoned. Taking the ad 749 earthquake as its starting point, this volume aims to provide a nuanced understanding of the quake’s effects, questioning its role as a sole watershed moment and exploring the various other factors at play that influenced urban change. The contributions gathered here, which clearly recognize earthquakes as non-human actors in this process, clearly highlight the diverse impacts that this seismic event had on the city life in the southern Levant, and the fallout in the decades that followed.

Linguistic fragmentation contains the risk of cultural separation, while the concept of inclusion implies the recognition of the difference of the Other, which must be recognised in its specificity to develop a process of inclusion. One of the main means of overcoming the dangers hidden in linguistic fragmentation is unquestionably plurilingualism and, relatedly, translation. Translation enables the transmission of content from one linguistic-cultural system to another. Multilingualism is not just a peculiarity of the contemporary age, it is a fundamental phenomenon of the Middle Ages. The conceptual relationship between linguistic fragmentation and cultural inclusion, and the inter-relationships of these two apparently opposing poles with the communicative tool of translation, requires some reflection within the broader framework of translation studies in the Middle Ages. This collection of essays examines the seemingly paradoxical concept of linguistic fragmentation as an instrument of cultural inclusion thanks to the practice of translation.

The essays explain the relationship through translations between many medieval languages and texts, from Icelandic to Italian, from English to French, and more. They examine vernacular circulation of religious texts (translation of the Bible, of hagiographic or homiletic texts, etc.); circulation, thanks to translation, of literary texts (e.g., the translation of epic-chivalric cycles); translation from a koine language to another language and vice versa; and the relationship between the choice of the target language and the socio-cultural context.

Studies of medical learning in medieval England, Wales, Ireland, and Scandinavia have traditionally focused on each geographical region individually, with the North Atlantic perceived as a region largely peripheral to European culture. Such an approach, however, means that knowledge within this part of the world is never considered in the context of more global interactions, where scholars were in fact deeply engaged in wider intellectual currents concerning medicine and healing that stemmed from both continental Europe and the Middle East.

The chapters in this interdisciplinary collection draw together new research from historians, literary scholars, and linguists working on Norse, English, and Celtic material in order to bring fresh insights into the multilingual and cross-cultural nature of medical learning in northern Europe during the Middle Ages, c. 700–1600. They interrogate medical texts and ideas in both Latin and vernacular languages, addressing questions of translation, cultural and scientific inheritance, and exchange, and historical conceptions of health and the human being within nature. In doing so, this volume offers an in-depth study of the reception and transmission of medical knowledge that furthers our understanding both of scholarship in the medieval North Atlantic and across medieval Europe as a whole.

Alors que depuis plusieurs décennies, les recherches sur la mémoire – memory studies – prennent un essor exceptionnel, ce volume a pour objet les modalités de l’élaboration de mémoires particulières, celles de passés antiques, et prend en compte une longue durée allant du xive siècle jusque dans les années 1830. Les deux termes de « mémoire » et d’« élaboration » évoquent un acte de réception et de construction. Les mémoires de l’Antiquité ne sont pas un ensemble de connaissances reçues passivement et non transformées, elles sont des représentations consciemment élaborées par des auteurs et des artistes. Étudier le phénomène sur une longue temporalité permet de mieux analyser les constantes, qui relèvent sans nul doute d’une anthropologie de la mémoire, et aussi les évolutions. Ce volume porte sur des œuvres qui, illustrées ou non, sont écrites et/ou contiennent un texte. La réflexion qu’il propose s’inscrit en parallèle aux recherches dédiées à la réception de la Grèce ancienne dans la littérature française prémoderne (1320-1550) et le projet ERC Advanced Grant AGRELITA, « The Reception of Ancient Greece in Premodern French Literature and Illustrations of Manuscripts and Printed Books (1320-1550) ». Elle ouvre le champ d’analyse à une plus large diachronie et à un plus large corpus.

L’essor des traductions directes du grec au français commence dans les années 1550. Du début du XIVe siècle jusqu’au milieu du XVIe siècle, les auteurs-traducteurs en langue française qui représentent la Grèce ancienne n’ont, sauf exception, aucune connaissance directe des œuvres grecques. Les savoirs sur la Grèce qu’ils transmettent et réinventent sont médiatisés par des filtres divers. Leur réception est indirecte, elle prend appui sur des œuvres antérieures, textuelles et iconographiques, dont les représentations de la Grèce ancienne sont déjà le fruit d’une ou de plusieurs réceptions.Les œuvres latines qu’ils traduisent et adaptentsont pour une part des œuvres antiques et médiévales qui ne sont pas des traductions, et pour une part des traductions ou adaptations d’œuvres grecques, avec parfois plusieurs transferts linguistiques à partir du grec. Elles sont très diverses : des textes antiques jusqu’aux traductions humanistes latines d’œuvres grecques réalisées en Italie et aux Pays-Bas, en passant par des œuvres latines médiévales originales, des traductions latines du français et des traductions arabo-latines et arabo-hispano-latines.

Les auteurs-traducteurs en langue française héritent ainsi de réceptions antérieures diverses, qu’ils s’approprient et transforment, poursuivant le processus d’invention de représentations de la Grèce ancienne. Comme les manuscrits et les imprimés de leurs nouvelles traductions sont souvent très illustrés, les artistes offrent dans le même temps des traductions visuelles qui elles aussi s’appuient sur des sources diverses et des réceptions antérieures et donnent à voir de nouvelles images de la Grèce ancienne. La question de la réception de l’Antiquité grecque sera donc explorée par une entrée différente de celle qui a été adoptée jusqu’à présent et qui a consisté en l’étude de la transmission et de la traduction directes des œuvres grecques. Le présent volume se focalise sur les traductions au second degré de textes grecs.