Disputatio

Marsilius of Padua (c. 1275–c. 1342) was one of the most influential and controversial political thinkers of the Middle Ages. He is best known for his seminal text Defensor Pacis (1324) in which he attacks the papal theory of plenitude of power and defends an idea of political community based on the strict separation of political and religious authority. Marsilius’ work lies at the crossroads of different disciplines ranging from political philosophy to civil and canon law to medicine. Indeed he presents an original synthesis of several contemporary themes and traditions such as Aristotelianism Augustinianism the debate on Franciscan property the communal tradition of the Italian city-states ecclesiology medicine and astrology.

This edited volume analyses the life and thought of Marsilius of Padua in his own context and beyond. Gathering many of the leading experts in Marsilian studies across different national and linguistic traditions working today this volume has two main goals. First it aims to bring together experts who come from distinct fields in order to investigate the many branches of knowledge present in Defensor Pacis without losing sight of Marsilius as a comprehensive theorist. Second the volume aims to shed new light on one of the most neglected aspects in Marsilian studies: the Marsilian influence i.e. his impact in the early modern period during the Renaissance the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation up to twentieth century.

This is the first book-length study in decades to offer in-depth readings of a variety of late medieval poems across Gower’s trilingual corpus. Identifying Gower’s rhetorical cornerstones in Aristotelian pathos the theology of the Word and the execution of a plain style it provides fresh interpretations of poems in Latin French and Middle English that arise from an enhanced understanding of Gower’s literary methods. It explores the classical and medieval rhetorical traditions that informed Gower’s craft the biblical personae through which the poet achieved his rhetorical aims and the Renaissance publishers and authors who valued and imitated his strategies for composition. Gower adapted his rhetorical theory from the principles of Aristotelian texts Augustinian theology exemplars of Ciceronian style and the dictates of various artes poetriae; from the latter John of Garland’s Parisiana Poetria is especially important for outlining practices of Marian rhetoric. Modelling virtuous female speakers on the Virgin and prophetic narrators on John the Baptist and John the Evangelist Gower gave extra-scriptural voice to members of the extended Holy Family and in so doing achieved unimpeachable expressions inside classically informed structures of discourse. The epistolary structure proceeding from Ciceronian rhetoric and the artes dictaminis is one among Gower’s favoured rhetorical forms for projecting singular voices. His straightforward reiterative style in Middle English and his virginal speakers compelled Renaissance publisher Thomas Berthelette and celebrated authors Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare to praise Gower’s rhetoric in prefaces and imitate it on the stage.

Over the last two decades the historiography of medieval art has been defined by two seemingly contradictory trends: a focus on questions of visuality and more recently an emphasis on materiality. The latter which has encouraged multi-sensorial approaches to medieval art has come to be perceived as a counterpoint to the study of visuality as defined in ocularcentric terms.

Bringing together specialists from different areas of art history this book grapples with this dialectic and poses new avenues for reconciling these two opposing tendencies. The essays in this volume demonstrate the necessity of returning to questions of visuality taking into account the insights gained from the ‘material turn’. They highlight conceptions of vision that attribute a haptic quality to the act of seeing and draw on bodily perception to shed new light on visuality in the Middle Ages.

Throughout the Middle Ages fictional frameworks could be used as imaginative spaces in which to test or play with ideas without asserting their truth. The aim of this volume is to consider how intellectual problems were approached - if not necessarily resolved - through the kinds of hypothetical enquiry found in poetry and in other texts that employ fictional or imaginative strategies. Scholars working across the spectrum of medieval languages and academic disciplines consider why a writer might choose a fictional or hypothetical frame to discuss theoretical questions how a work’s truth content is affected and shaped by its fictive nature or what kinds of affective or intellectual work its reading demands. By reading literary philosophical and spiritual texts from England France and Italy alongside each other this collection offers a new interdisciplinary approach to the history of medieval thought.

This book investigates the nature of intellectual activity in the Middle Ages from the perspective of medieval Scandinavia by discussing how a multimodal and multilingual Scandinavian culture emerged through the dynamic interchange of foreign and local impulses in the minds of creative intellectuals. By deploying cognitive theory this volume conceptualizes intellectual culture as the result of the individual’s cognition which incorporates physical perceptions of the world memory and creation rationality emotionality and spirituality and decision making. In doing so it elucidates the diversity of social roles that could be assumed by people engaged in the activity of thinking. Attention is paid in particular to the key intellectual activities of negotiating secular and religious authority and identity; to thinking and learning through verbal and visual means; and to ruminating on worldly existence and heavenly salvation. These processes are explored in a series of essays that focus on various visual and textual artefacts among them Church art and sculptures manuscript fragments and texts of both different languages (Latin and Old Norse) and genres (sagas poetry and grammatical treatises laws liturgical explanations and theological texts). The variety of intellectual and ideational processes connected to the textual and material culture of medieval Scandinavia forms the focal point of this study. As a result this book actively seeks to transcend the traditional cultural dichotomies of written versus oral material Latin versus vernacular lay versus secular or European versus Nordic by foregrounding the cognitive and creative agency of intellectuals in medieval Scandinavia.

Martin Camargo Professor of English Medieval Studies and Classics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a beloved teacher mentor colleague and the scholar whose work this collection celebrates. With interests in defining ‘medieval rhetoric’ understanding the history of both literary and bureaucratic epistles explaining the revival of rhetorical studies in fourteenth-century England editing texts for teaching the trivium and excavating performance pedagogies in medieval language classrooms Carmago has paved the way for scholars in many fields including educational and institutional history; literature language and manuscript studies; and rhetoric in the Middle Ages.

This book pays tribute to his own ground-breaking research by presenting original and inventive new work in many of these fields. Authored by established scholars and innovative new researchers alike the essays contained in this volume give significant scope to didactic medieval commentaries theories of medieval rhetoric and language literary epistles and the ars dictaminis and poetry of various genres including romances and riddles as well as to the classroom practices that all of these investigations infer. In keeping with Camargo’s generosity in sharing resources the authors hope that their essays in turn will provide encouragement and suggestions for further work.

The term ‘feminized counsel’ denotes the advice associated with and spoken by women characters. This book demonstrates that rather than classify women’s voices as an opposite against which to define masculine authority late medieval vernacular poets embraced the feminine as a representation of their subordination to kings patrons and authorities. The works studied include Gower’s Confessio Amantis Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women and Melibee and English translations of Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othea. To advise readers these texts draw on the politicized genre of mirrors for princes. Whereas Latin mirrors such as the Secretum secretorum and Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum represented women as inferior weak and detrimental to masculine authority these vernacular texts break traditional expectations and portray women as essential and authoritative political counsellors.

By considering Latin and French sources historical models of queens’ intercessions and literary models of authoritative female personifications this study explores the woman counsellor as a literary topos that enabled poets to criticize advise and influence powerful readers. Feminized Counsel elucidates the manner in which vernacular poets concerned with issues of counsel mercy and power identified with fictional women’s struggles to develop authority in the political sphere. These women counsellors become enabling models that paradoxically generate authority for poets who also lack access to traditionally recognized forms of intellectual or literary authority.

Medievalists and Renaissance specialists contribute to this compelling volume examining how and why the classics of Greek and Latin culture were taught in various Western European curricula (including in England Scotland FranceGermany and Italy) from the tenth to the sixteenth centuries. By analysing some of the commentaries glosses and paraphrases of these classics that were deployed in medieval and Renaissance classrooms and by offering greater insight into premodern pedagogic practice the chapters here emphasize the ‘pragmatic’ aspects of humanist study. The volume proposes that the classics continued to be studied in the medieval and Renaissance periods not simply for their cultural or ‘ornamental’ value but also for utilitarian reasons for ‘life lessons’. Because the volume goes beyond analysing the educational manuals surviving from the premodern period and attempts to elucidate the teaching methodology of the premodern period it provides a nuanced insight into the formation of the premodern individual. The volume will therefore be of great interest to scholars and students interested in medieval and Renaissance history in general as well as those interested in the history of educational theory and practice or in the premodern reception of classical literature.

This is the first substantial treatment of John of Salisbury’s views on Aristotelian science. In his great work on logic and education John of Salisbury proposes an Aristotelian foundation for education research and science. Theories and methods of science and scholarship were central topics in twelfth-century discourse and John is apparently the first to propose use of the entire Organon the texts of which were to become very influential and important in the thirteenth century. However his precise knowledge and understanding of Aristotle has never been thoroughly examined. The present book challenges the view that John read understood and used the entire Organon. It pays particular attention to the Metalogicon but it draws upon a variety of other sources as well in arguing that John did not in fact study the Ars nova with any care and that he probably never read the most important text the Posterior Analytics in its entirety. The conclusions of the book have important consequences not only for our conception of John of Salisbury but also for our views and understanding of twelfth-century Aristotelianism and science in general.

This volume provides an advanced survey of Dante studies and offers a new detailed and accessible reading of his Purgatorio making this very rich text freshly available to an English-speaking readership. Through analysis of a variety of emotional states across Dante’s three major works - the Purgatorio Inferno and Paradiso and in his minor works such as the Rime and the Convivio - Dante in Purgatory: States of Affect contends that emotions are historically constructed at different moments. The book also demonstrates that while Dante presents some emotions as defined and distinct he depicts others as blends of several states of feeling as emotions which are in process or metamorphosis. In particular the author examines the seven cardinal vices (‘seven deadly sins’) amid a wider discussion of states of affect. He argues that the emotional states associated with these vices are different from contemporary conceptions of affective states. He compels us to acknowledge that there is a history of both the emotional states themselves and the methods with which we describe them. Above all his study shows that there is a history of emotions which is part of the history of a European acquisition of a subjective sense of the self. To historicize emotion thus requires that the ‘human’ becomes increasingly defined as the subject is ascribed further interior qualities which must be named. Dante in Purgatory is thus relevant not only to readers of Dante but also to any reader interested in thinking about emotion and affectual states and how these can be described and how they can be conceptualized.