EMISCA

In recent years medieval drama has seen a marked revival of interest, much of it informed by an increasing appreciation of its multi-disciplinary nature. The drama of medieval Europe is not just literature; it is a social and indeed commercial event, essentially a communal enterprise, inextricably bound up with the structures of society. This collection of essays by international scholars working in collaboration examines various aspects of the inter-relationship between different European communities and the plays they performed. Its coverage of a wide range of theatres and play-types provides a critical and practical perspective on performance cultures of the Northern Middle Ages. The comparative nature of this volume has the effect of underlining drama as a true medieval mass medium.

Traditional historiography generally stresses the opposition and contradiction between secular and ecclesiastical power. By contrast, this volume focuses upon the interdependence of secular and ecclesiastical power and on the ways both secular rulers, kings, counts and other lords, and ecclesiastical authorities and institutions continuously interacted, trying to affirm the relationships between them. This selection of a historiographical introduction plus nine case-studies from England, northern France and the Low Countries enables a subtle comparison of secular and ecclesiastical links and social interactions in a series of regional and local contexts during the Central Middle Ages. The volume demonstrates that this process of negotiation led to an affirmation of shared values and contributed to the creation of common social values in medieval Europe.

Ludo Milis (Universiteit Gent), “This book, composed around three major themes (‘Texts as Tools of Power’, ‘Land and Kinship’, and ‘Conflict and Affirmation’), exemplifies how medievalists can reshape their discipline into a more responsive one. Its scope is not to offer a wide range of definitive explanations, but it shows how medievalists should try (and indeed do try) to return to a close reading of their documents. For far too long, institutional history, legal history, and histoire événémentielle have tried to monopolize power relationships and to encapsulate them in rather narrow explanatory schemes. This volume offers a broader and more encompassing approach.”

Was there a women’s movement in the thirteenth century and is such a question meaningful in its medieval context? Far from being resolved, the issue of whether women had a thirteenth-century renaissance has still decisively to unsettle the periodization of Western European history in twelfth and sixteenth-century humanist renaissances. Herbert Grundmann long ago demonstrated the participation of women in the eremitically-inspired reforming movements of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and in the production of vernacular literature. Yet it is upon his work that this volume builds, for the diocese of Liège is the key area in this development. It was from Liège that Jacques de Vitry approached the papacy to secure permission for the women of the bishopric of Liège, France and Germany to live together and to promote holiness in each other by mutual example. The seventeen contributors to this volume examine not only the beguine religious life in the southern Low Countries, but also the impact of this movement on later medieval Sweden, England and France, the new modes of influence exerted by women in their religious lives, and the revivals of feminine spirituality in the late medieval West through to contemporary North America. Research does not yet allow for a whole new synthesis, but this volume directs scholars to detailed work on specific localities and persons, with an awareness of the problems and possibilities of wider European comparisons.

In this book, a dozen distinguished scholars in the field of the history of philosophy and science investigate aspects of the commentary tradition on Aristotle’s De generatione et corruptione, one of the least studied among Aristotle’s treatises in natural philosophy. Many famous thinkers such as Johannes Philoponus, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, John Buridan, Nicole Oresme, Francesco Piccolomini, Jacopo Zabarella, and Galileo Galilei wrote commentaries on it. The distinctive feature of the present book is that it approaches this commentary tradition as a coherent whole, thereby ignoring the usual historiographical distinctions between the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the seventeenth century.