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This book honours the scholarship of English historian Dr. Alan Thacker by exploring the insular, the European and, more broadly, the Mediterranean connections and contexts of the history and culture of Anglo-Saxon England in the age of Bede, and beyond. It brings together original contributions by leading European and North American scholars of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages working across a range of disciplines: history, theology, epigraphy, and art history. Moving from the Irish Sea to the Bosporus, this collection presents a linked world in which saints, scholars, and the city of Rome all played powerful connective roles, creating communities, generating relationships, linking east to west, north to south, and present to past.

As in Thacker’s own work, Bede’s life and thought is a central presence. Bede’s attitudes to historical and contemporaneous conceptions of heresy, to the Irish church, and the evidence for his often complex relationships with his Northumbrian contemporaries all come under scrutiny, together with groundbreaking studies of his exegesis, christology, and historical method. Many of the contributions offer original insights into figures and phenomena that have been the focus of Dr. Thacker’s highly influential scholarship.

In medieval Europe, cultural, political, and linguistic identities rarely coincided with modern national borders. As early as the end of the twelfth century, French rose to prominence as a lingua franca that could facilitate communication between people, regardless of their origin, background, or community. Between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, literary works were written or translated into French not only in France but also across Europe, from England and the Low Countries to as far afield as Italy, Cyprus, and the Holy Land. Many of these texts had a broad European circulation and for well over three hundred years they were transmitted, read, studied, imitated, and translated.

Drawing on the results of the AHRC-funded research project Medieval Francophone Literary Culture Outside France, this volume aims to reassess medieval literary culture and explore it in a European and Mediterranean setting. The book, incorporating nineteen papers by international scholars, explores the circulation and production of francophone texts outside of France along two major axes of transmission: one stretching from England and Normandy across to Flanders and Burgundy, and the other running across the Pyrenees and Alps from the Iberian Peninsula to the Levant. In doing so, it offers new insights into how francophone literature forged a place for itself, both in medieval textual culture and, more generally, in Western cultural spheres.

These fifteen essays, all published here for the first time, explore issues related to the editing and interpretation of Middle English literature. These include the treatment of various types of evidence (variant readings; punctuation; capitalization; rubrication; physical layout), in relation to both manuscript transmission and the transition from manuscript to print. The editorial representation of these and other aspects constitutes an act of textual interpretation at the most fundamental level, which subsequently influences scholarly understanding.

Two major fields of writing - religious texts and chronicles - provide the focus of this volume. Major works that receive attention include Trevisa’s translation of the Polychronicon, the Middle English Brut, Piers Plowman, Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, and John Mirk’s Festial; a wide range of shorter devotional and historical texts, in both verse and prose, is also considered, as are aspects related to the translation of texts from Latin and French into Middle English. Almost all of the contributors are experienced editors of medieval texts. Several contribute further insights into texts they have edited, whilst others discuss or offer new editions of previously unpublished works. Collectively, these essays foreground the many and varied matters of interpretation that confront the editor of Middle English texts.

The present volume is the third in a series of three integrated publications, the first produced in 2013 as Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe: The Hull Dialogue and the second in 2015 as Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe: The Kansas City Dialogue. Whereas the first volume focused primarily on Northern Europe, the second expanded the range to include material in minority languages such as Old Norse and Old Irish and focused particularly on education and other textual forms, such as the epistolary and the legal.

The third volume expands the geographical range by including a larger selection of female religious, for instance, tertiaries, and further languages (for example, Danish and Hungarian), as well as engaging more explicitly on issues of adaptation of manuscript and early printed texts for a female readership. Like the previous volumes, this collection of essays, focused on various aspects of nuns’ literacies from the late seventh to the mid-sixteenth century, brings together the work of specialists to create a dialogue about the Latin and vernacular texts that were read, written, and exchanged by medieval nuns. Contributors to this volume investigate the topic of literacy primarily from palaeographical and textual evidence and by discussing information about book ownership and production in convents.

This interdisciplinary volume explores the ways in which time is staged at the threshold between the Middle Ages and the early modern period. Proceeding from the reality that all cultural forms are inherently and inescapably temporal, it seeks to discover the significance of time in mediations and communications of all kinds.

By showing how time is displayed in diverse cultural strategies and situations, the essays of this volume show how time is intrinsic to the very concept of tradition. In exploring a variety of medial forms and communicative practices, they also reveal that while the beginning of the age of printing (around 1500) may mark a fundamental change in terms of reproduction and circulation, artefacts and other historical traditions continue to employ earlier systems and practices relating time and space.

The volume features articles by leading researchers in their respective fields, including studies on mosaics as a medium reflecting space and time; the triptych’s potential as a time machine; winged altarpieces mediating eternity; texts and images of the passion of Christ permeating past, present, and future; dimensions of time embedded in maps; a compendium of world knowledge organized by forms of time and temporality; the figuration of prophecy in times of crisis; the portrayal of time in architecture.

The volume thus provides a new approach to media and mediality from the perspective of cultural history.

Central to many medieval ritual traditions both sacred and secular, the Gothic cathedral holds a privileged place within the European cultural imagination and experience. Due to the burgeoning historical interest in the medieval past, in connection with the medieval revival in literature, visual arts, and architecture that began in the late seventeenth century and culminated in the nineteenth, the Gothic cathedral took centre stage in numerous ideological discourses. These discourses imposed contemporary political and aesthetic connotations upon the cathedral that were often far removed from its original meaning and ritual use.

This volume presents interdisciplinary perspectives on the resignification of the Gothic cathedral in the post-medieval period. Its contributors, literary scholars and historians of art and architecture, investigate the dynamics of national and cultural movements that turned Gothic cathedrals into symbols of the modern nation-state, highlight the political uses of the edifice in literature and the arts, and underscore the importance of subjectivity in literary and visual representations of Gothic architecture. Contributing to scholarship in historiography, cultural history, intermedial and interdisciplinary studies, as well as traditional disciplines, the volume resonates with wider perspectives, especially relating to the reuse of artefacts to serve particular ideological ends.

For centuries, the Council of Trent has been studied as a fundamental episode in European history wherein doctrinal and institutional unity was lost. Although the Council decrees nowhere refer to the contexts of the peoples met by Christopher Columbus, nor to the Cathay regions rediscovered by missionaries, nor to their religions, their superstitions or their political systems, the Council was nonetheless a global event. The Roman Church, which lost doctrinal control of the considerable part of Europe captured by different forms of Protestantism, imposed itself upon its followers through the application of conciliar decrees. Freed of its exclusively European perspective it opened up to cultures of the rest of the world. The customs and traditions thus encountered, the relationships with political authorities, possibilities for the construction of a new Christianity offered by New Worlds, disclosing spaces and contexts to the Tridentine Church, with accommodations and cross-fertilizations, with a return to origins and tradition, obliged that it begin to think of itself, perhaps for the first time, as a universal Church.

The Council and Beyond suggests not only reconsideration of Europe through the prism of the Tridentine decrees and the long processes of their dissemination, but also through an intercontinental consideration, a spatial perspective that would become universal to the Church and to the normative texts that had been elaborated at Trent.

This volume recognises that religious writings care deeply about how devotional reading takes place, providing models for improving reading as a way of improving one’s ability to worship. The abundant evidence from medieval England suggests a deep interest among devotional writers in documenting, teaching, and circumscribing devotional reading, given the importance of careful reading practices for salvation. This volume therefore draws together a wide range of interests in and approaches to studying the reading and reception of devotional texts in medieval England, from representations of readers and reading in devotional texts, to literary production and reception of devotional texts and images, to manuscripts and early books as devotional objects, to individual readers and patrons of devotional texts.

Prefaced by a substantial introduction by the editors - setting the community in its wider religious and cultural environment and against the backdrop of broad historiographical trends - this volume brings together substantial essays based on original research by new and leading scholars in the field of medieval English studies. This collection (and indeed, many of the individual articles) brings into dialogue a number of traditional disciplinary approaches - early and late medieval English literary studies, gender studies, manuscript studies, and religious studies. It strives to reflect trends in current scholarship of breaking down disciplinary boundaries and exploring the relationships between and among not only analytical and critical perspectives, but also the kinds of evidence examined.

This monograph traces the history of one of the most prominent types of geographical myths of the North-West Atlantic Ocean: transmarine otherworlds of blessedness and immortality. Taking the mythologization of the Viking Age discovery of North America in the earliest extant account of Vínland (‘Wine-Land’) and the Norse transmarine otherworlds of Hvítramannaland (‘The Land of White Men’) and the Ódáinsakr/Glæsisvellir (‘Field of the Not-Dead’/‘Shining Fields’) as its starting point, the book explores the historical entanglements of these imaginative places in a wider European context. It follows how these Norse otherworld myths adopt, adapt, and transform concepts from early Irish vernacular tradition and Medieval Latin geographical literature, and pursues their connection to the geographical mythology of classical antiquity. In doing so, it shows how myths as far distant in time and space as Homer’s Elysian Plain and the transmarine otherworlds of the Norse are connected by a continuous history of creative processes of adaptation and reinterpretation. Furthermore, viewing this material as a whole, the question arises as to whether the Norse mythologization of the North Atlantic might not only have accompanied the Norse westward expansion that led to the discovery of North America, but might even have been among the factors that induced it.

En 1974, à l'époque de la publication du texte des Auctoritates Aristotelis les chercheurs n'avaient pas encore mesuré l'influence que ce florilège avait pu avoir dans bon nombre d'œuvres médiévales. Nombreux étaient ceux qui ne connaissaient même pas ce recueil et qui préféraient se référer directement à l'œuvre même du Stagirite pour identifier des citations. Mais la réalité médiévale était bien différente. En effet, les recherches menées après la parution de l'édition ont modifié considérablement notre conception de l'usage qu'en firent les intellectuels du 13e au 17e siècle. Beaucoup de progrès ont été faits depuis, surtout dans le domaine des éditions critiques de textes philosophiques encore inédits à l'époque. Il suffit de consulter les apparats critiques des sources utilisées par ces auteurs pour constater qu'ils furent nombreux à citer des « auctoritates » d'Aristote, extraites de ce florilège. D'autre part, les recherches réalisées progressivement, montrent que ce recueil a aussi une histoire.

Les études réunis dans ce volume se proposent de présenter un nouvel état de la question et de montrer à l'aide d'exemples pertinents l'usage qui fut fait des citations contenues dans le recueil par divers auteurs de l'époque. D'autre part, les informations glanées dans les divers exposés illustrent parfaitement des moments de son histoire. Ils ne rendent pas stériles les recherches ultérieures mais proposent diverses voies d'accès à la reconstitution de son élaboration, sans épuiser pour autant le sujet. Ces études permettent déjà de constater le succès énorme que connut le recueil, non seulement pendant l'époque scolastique, mais aussi jusqu'à la fin du 17e siècle, ce qui peut paraître étrange à première vue.