Brepols Online Books Medieval Miscellanea Original Archive v2016 - bobar16mimeo

This volume asks whether there was a common structure, ideology, and image of the household in the medieval Christian West. In the period under examination, noble households often exercised great power in their own right, while even quite humble households were defined as agents of government in the administration of local communities. Many of the papers therefore address the public functions and perceptions of the household, and argue that the formulation of domestic (or family) values was of essential importance in the growth and development of the medieval Christian state.

Contributors to this volume of collected essays write from a number of disciplinary perspectives (archaeological, art-historical, historical and literary). They examine socially diverse households (from peasants to kings) and use case studies from different regions across Europe in different periods within the medieval epoch from c. 850 to c. 1550. The volume both includes studies from archives and collections not often covered in English-language publications, and offers new approaches to more familiar material. It is divided into thematic sections exploring the role of households in the exercise of power, in controlling the body, in the distribution of wealth and within a wider economy of possessions.

El interés que los autores de estos trabajos demuestran por las complejidades y consecuencias de la traducción en la Edad Media, o de la traducción de textos medievales en el período moderno, ha dado como resultado un volumen diverso y estimulante intelectualmente. Los trabajos del presente volumen, escritos en inglés, francés y español, se centran en el tema de la traducción desde muchas perspectivas, ofreciendo una amplia gama de interpretaciones del concepto de traducción. El volumen contiene trabajos que abarcan en el tiempo desde el período Anglo-Sajón hasta el presente, y en temática desde libros de recetas medievales hasta argumentos a favor de que las mujeres administren la Eucaristía. Las lenguas que se estudian incluyen no sólo lenguas no europeas sino también el Latín y numerosas vernáculas europeas, ya sean como lengua origen o lengua meta. Como cualquier traductor o estudioso de la traducción puede rápidamente constatar, es imposible separar lengua de cultura. Todos los autores de este volumen han analizado en profundidad las complejidades de la traducción como hecho cultural, aún cuando el foco de atención pareciera ser específicamente lingüístico. Son estas complejidades las que dotan al estudio de la teoría y práctica de la traducción en la Edad Media de su perdurable fascinación.

The interest of the writers of these essays in the intricacies and implications of translation in the Middle Ages, or of the translation of medieval texts in the modern period, has resulted in a diverse and intellectually stimulating volume. The papers in this volume, written in either English, French, or Spanish, approach translation from a wide variety of perspectives and offer a range of interpretations of the concept of translation. The volume contains essays ranging in time from the Anglo Saxon period to the present, and in topic from medieval recipe books to arguments in favour of women administering the sacrament. Languages studied include non-European languages as well as Latin and numerous European vernaculars as both source and target languages. As any translator or student of translation quickly becomes aware, it is impossible to divorce language from culture. All the contributors to this volume struggle with the complexities of translation as a cultural act, even when the focus would seem to be specifically linguistic. It is these complexities which lend the study of the theory and practice of translation in the Middle Ages its enduring fascination.

Complexité et fascination: deux mots qui reviennent souvent à l’esprit au contact des textes médiévaux, au point qu’ils pourraient servir à caractériser la nature des rapports qui unissent ces textes à leurs traducteurs. Dans leur diversité, les communications entendues à Saint-Jacques-de-Compostelle illustrent, chacune à sa manière, de nombreux aspects de cette complexité, qu’il s’agisse des sujets traités ou des problèmes techniques soulevés. Le rapport au temps qu’impose le texte médiéval se double d’un rapport à la distance, car la différence culturelle se présente au traducteur comme un éloignement, ce qui, dans le travail de rapprochement que constitue alors la traduction, introduit la notion d’interprétation. A son tour cette interprétation, avec ses degrés, est étroitement dépendante des objectifs pédagogiques, culturels, politiques ou religieux que s’est fixés le traducteur, comme cela apparaîtra clairement à la lecture d’un certain nombre de ces communications. Plusieurs études de ce recueil confirment également que la traduction, loin d’être un travail de solitaire, est avant tout un acte social, une activité de mise en relations. C’est cette patiente recherche d’adaptation à des publics différents, en fonction d’époques et de goûts différents, accompagnée de choix tour à tour réjouissants et frustrants, qui constitue le travail de tout traducteur, qu’il appartienne au Moyen Âge ou au monde moderne. C’est aussi cette richesse, venue du passé mais toujours actuelle, et cette recherche sans cesse reprise d’un équilibre toujours instable, qui font que la traduction, dans sa pratique comme dans sa théorie, exerce sur tant d’esprits une réelle fascination.

This volume is composed of selected papers from the main strand ‘Time and Eternity’ at the seventh International Medieval Congress held in July 2000. It attests to the fact that the medieval experience of time and eternity was rich and complex, and that its investigation is open to various approaches and methods. Time and (the possibility or impossibility of) its beginning and its end were frontiers to be explored and to be understood.

To make the reader more familiar with the field of study, the volume begins with Wesley Stevens’s plenary address ‘A Present Sense of Things Past: Quid est enim tempus?’, a stimulating introduction not only with regard to some of the basic problems in conceptualizing the nature of time but also to the dating of historical events and the use of calendars for that purpose.

Following Stevens’s essay, the volume is organised into seven broader themes covering a variety of questions and trying to offer new insights into the medieval perception and constructions of time. They deal with the computation of time and the use of calendars; Jewish concepts of time and redemption; Christian philosophies of eternity and time; monastic and clerical conceptions; literary representations; time and art; and apocalyptic expectations. The volume’s selection of authors is international in scope and represents some of the leading current scholarship in the field. It proves that we still ‘thirst to know the power and the nature of time’ (St Augustine).

In the modern world, interest in religious devotion is as great as ever. This volume brings together the research of ten scholars into the diverse ways that Europeans expressed their quest for God over more than a millennium, from the formative centuries of Christianity up to the seventeenth century. Topics include women transvestite saints, Monophysite wall-paintings, Anglo-Saxon sainthood and painful martyrdom, Carmelite self-redefinition, the confident authorship of Gautier de Coinci and Matfre Ermengaud, competition between the bishop and a wandering preacher for popular favor in Le Mans, the contemplative philanthropies of the Poor Clares, Chester Nativity-cycle actors’ masculinity, Jean Gerson’s warm relations with his siblings, and George Herbert’s Eucharistic feeling. The authors’ profound familiarity with primary sources as well as the influence of current theory makes these essays vibrant and timely.

Historien de la philosophie et de la théologie du Moyen Âge tardif, spécialiste des xiv e et xv e siècles, Zénon Kaluza a profondément marqué les études médiévales des dernières décennies. Ses travaux portent sur plusieurs grands thèmes de l’histoire doctrinale du Moyen Âge, notamment le «platonisme» parisien et pragois, les méthodes et les langages de la philosophie et de la théologie, les contextes institutionnels du savoir et, enfin, la question du rapport entre l’Église et l’État. Pour rendre hommage à l’homme et à son œuvre, ses collègues et amis lui offrent ce recueil d’articles. Réunies sous le titre de Chemins de la pensée médiévale, ces études explorent différents aspects de l’histoire de la philosophie et de la théologie ainsi que, dans une perspective plus large, de l’histoire intellectuelle et sociale du Moyen Âge. Par l’ampleur de son orientation thématique, le présent volume offre une excellente présentation de l’état actuel de la recherche sur la pensée médiévale.

Fear is a topic that appeals to a wide audience and is particularly of interest today. In the modern world, we fear war and terrorism, economic recession, and environmental degradation: these fears make up a great portion of the fabric of our daily lives. This is a volume of essays on fear and its representations in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In it, the authors raise and try to answer questions about the ways in which individuals, families, and nations five-hundred, one-thousand, or even fifteen-hundred years ago approached the idea of fear.

The interdisciplinary nature of this volume and its editors (an historian of late antiquity and professor of literature of the Middle Ages) motivates an analysis of fear from a multitude of perspectives and within a host of secular and religious literature, historical treatises, scholastic works, art, and political accounts. The volume covers several main topics: Defining the Nature of Fear; Fear and Religion; Fear in Politics and Cultural Identity; Fear as a Literary and Dramatic Device; The Fears of Courtly Lovers, Knights, and Poets; Fear and the Mystic.

Through its breadth, depth, and interdisciplinary focus, the present volume makes a full contribution to the study of fear in medieval and Renaissance culture for historians, art historians, students of language and philosophy and anyone interested in how people in the past have experienced fear.

The practice of commentary upon authoritative texts is a prominent and fundamental feature of all teaching and learning during the Middle Ages. The roots of medieval commentaries made upon important philosophical texts lay in antiquity, but commentaries upon such texts — both ancient and more recent — flourished as never before during the late Middle Ages. Subsequently, beyond the end of the Middle Ages, the appeal and the habit of commentary declined, and to the point that today a considerable effort is required to understand medieval commentaries — their genres, their techniques, their evolution, their extraordinary persistence in use over many centuries — and perhaps too to understand the much diminished importance of the practice of commentary on select texts in current academic scholarship. The Philosophical Commentary in the Latin West (XIII-XV Centuries) proved to be a rich, varied and seemingly inexhaustible theme for the Colloquium of the International Society for the Study of Medieval Philosophy. The contributors who were invited discussed commentaries on texts of medicine, alchemy, biology, psychology, physics, ethics and politics as well as theology. The medieval commentators themselves were Arabs and Jews as well as Christians.

Ethnicity has been central to medieval studies since the Goths, Franks, Alamanni and other barbarian settlers of the former Roman empire were first seen as part of Germanic antiquity. Today, two paradigms dominate interpretation of barbarian Europe. In history, theories of how tribes formed (‘ethnogenesis’) assert the continuity of Germanic identities from prehistory through the Middle Ages, and see cultural rather than biological factors as the means of preserving these identities. In archaeology, the ‘culture history’ approach has long claimed to be able to trace movements of peoples not attested in the historical record, by identifying ethnically-specific material goods. The papers in this volume challenge the concepts and methodologies of these two models. The authors explore new ways to understand barbarians in the early Middle Ages, and to analyse the images of the period constructed by modern scholarship. Two responses to the papers, one by a leading exponent of the ‘ethnogenesis’ approach, the other by a leading critic, continue this important debate.

For some 40 years, A.G. Rigg has been defining the field of later Anglo-Latin literary scholarship, a task culminating in his History of Anglo-Latin Literature 1066-1422. Anglo-Latin and its Heritage is a collection of thirteen essays by his colleagues and students, past and present, which pays tribute to him both by exploring the field he has defined, and by making forays into its antecedents and descendants. The first section, “Roots and Debts,” includes essays on the migration of classical and late antique motifs and patterns of thought into early medieval Latin, and concludes with an essay which shows how a 12th-century writer reached back into that earlier period for stylistic models. The central section of the book, “Anglo-Latin Literature 1066-1422,” concentrates on Anglo-Latin writers of the period most studied by Rigg himself, and the seven essays in this section include analyses of poetic style and borrowing; discussions of patterns of reading; and essays which read Anglo-Latin works through their specific historical and cultural contexts. Two of the essays are elegant translations of significant Anglo-Latin poetic works. The final section of the book, “Influence and Survival,” offers three essays which consider Anglo-Latin literature in the late medieval and post-medieval world, from an edition of a Latin source for a late Middle English saint’s life; through an account of the migration of Latin texts into the royal libraries of Henry VIII; to the concluding essay, which explores a “mechanical” means of producing perfect Latin hexameter. A complete bibliography of Rigg’s works closes the volume. The chronological and methodological range of the essays in this collection is offered as a fitting tribute to one of Anglo-Latin’s most learned and indefatigable scholars.