Download or read book Nigel of Longchamp Speculum Stultorum written by Jill Mann and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-06-15 with total page 646 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An edition and English translation of the Speculum Stultorum (The Mirror for Fools), a long Latin beast epic written near the end of the twelfth century by a monk of Christ Church, Canterbury. This was one of the most popular works of the Middle Ages, a favourite of Chaucer, Gower, and Henryson, and was copied for over three centuries, with a circulation extending as far as eastern Europe. It is not only a milestone in the history of medieval beast epic, but a rich source of information about contemporary life and events at Canterbury. The work is dedicated to William Longchamp, who was Richard I's chancellor, and the significance of this fact is shown. This is a highly entertaining narrative about a donkey who longs to have a longer tail and journeys to Salerno to buy some (imaginary) medicines which will provide it. When his medicines are destroyed in an accident, he decides to become learned instead, and goes off to study at the university of Paris for seven years, but can still say only 'heehaw'. Interwoven into this simple narrative are other stories and long rhetorical set-pieces which satirise the distorted values of contemporary religious life or the corruption of the papal curia, and describe the qualities of an ideal bishop (which the donkey hopes to become).
Download or read book A Benedictine Reader written by Hugh B. Feiss and published by Liturgical Press. This book was released on 2019-02-12 with total page 736 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Benedictine Reader, 530–1530, has been more than twenty years in the making. A collaboration of a dozen scholars, this project gives as broad and deep a sense of the reality of the first one thousand years of Benedictine monasticism as can be done in one volume, using primary sources in English translation. The texts included are drawn from many different genres and from several languages and areas of Europe. The introduction to each of the thirty-two chapters aims to situate each author and text and to make connections with other texts and studies within and outside the Reader. The general introduction summarizes the main ideas and practices that are present in the Rule of Saint Benedict and in the first thousand years of Benedictine monasticism while suggesting questions that a reader might bring to the texts.
Download or read book VIRTUOSOS OF FAITH written by Gert Melville and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For over a thousand years, monks, nuns, canons, friars, and others under religious vows stood at the pinnacle of Western European society. For their ascetic sacrifices, their learning, piety, and expertise, they were accorded positions of power and influence, and a wide range of legal, financial and social privileges. As such they present an important opportunity to consider the nature and dynamics of an "elite" in medieval culture. Using medieval religious life as their interpretive lens, the essays of this volume seek to uncover the essential markers of elite status. They explore how those under vows claimed and manifested elite status in complex spiritual, temporal, and social combinations. They explore the workings of elite status from day to day, across region and locale - who earned recognition and how, whether through specific achievements or the deployment of specific capacities; who recognized, conferred, or helped maintain elite status, how and why; how elite status could be redefined, contested or rejected. The essays also seek to understand how medieval European religious elites compared to those found in other cultures and settings, from Syria and South Asia to the early modern transatlantic world.
Download or read book The Making of Manners and Morals in Twelfth Century England written by Fiona Whelan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-01-12 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How different are we from those in the past? Or, how different do we think we are from those in the past? Medieval people were more dirty and unhygienic than us – as novels, TV, and film would have us believe – but how much truth is there in this notion? This book seeks to challenge some of these preconceptions by examining medieval society through rules of conduct, and specifically through the lens of a medieval Latin text entitled The Book of the Civilised Man – or Urbanus magnus – which is attributed to Daniel of Beccles. Urbanus magnus is a twelfth-century poem of almost 3,000 lines which comprehensively surveys the day-to-day life of medieval society, including issues such as moral behaviour, friendship, marriage, hospitality, table manners, and diet. Currently, it is a neglected source for the social and cultural history of daily life in medieval England, but by incorporating modern ideas of disgust and taboo, and merging anthropology, sociology, and archaeology with history, this book aims to bring it to the fore, and to show that medieval people did have standards of behaviour. Although they may seem remote to modern ‘civilised’ people, there is both continuity and change in human behaviour throughout the centuries.
Download or read book Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century written by Peter J. A. Jones and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Towards the end of the twelfth century, powerful images of laughing kings and saints began to appear in texts circulating at the English royal court. At the same time, contemporaries began celebrating the wit, humour, and laughter of King Henry II (r.1154-89) and his martyred Archbishop of Canterbury, Saint Thomas Becket (d.1170). Taking a broad genealogical approach, Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century traces the emergence of this powerful laughter through an immersive study of medieval intellectual, literary, social, religious, and political debates. Focusing on a cultural renaissance in England, the study situates laughter at the heart of the defining transformations of the second half of the 1100s. With an expansive survey of theological and literary texts, bringing a range of unedited manuscript material to light in the process, Peter J. A. Jones exposes how twelfth-century writers came to connect laughter with spiritual transcendence and justice, and how this connection gave humour a unique political and spiritual power in both text and action. Ultimately, Jones argues that England's popular images of laughing kings and saints effectively reinstated a sublime charismatic authority, something truly rebellious at a moment in history when bureaucracy and codification were first coming to dominate European political life.
Download or read book The Horned Moses in Medieval Art and Thought written by Ruth Mellinkoff and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1970-01-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Good,No Highlights,No Markup,all pages are intact, Slight Shelfwear,may have the corners slightly dented, may have slight color changes/slightly damaged spine.
Download or read book The Stereotype of the Priest in the Old French Fabliaux written by Daron Burrows and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2005 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Old French fabliaux may be notorious for their bawdy content, but few aspects of these medieval comic narratives are as astonishing as their depiction of the parish priest, whose fiscal and sexual transgressions are on occasion so enormous that lay protagonists are driven to inflict graphic punishments ranging from public exposure and communal beating to castration and murder. In this study, Burrows draws on social psychological research into the cognitive and socio-motivational components of stereotyping to explore the forces underlying the creation and development of the fabliau priest. Through an assessment of the constituent elements of the figure against a background of a range of literary and historical sources, Burrows demonstrates that the literary figure is the product of the specific socio-historical context of contemporaneous changes in relationships between Church and laity in which anticlerical stereotyping, in a manner comparable to other instances of outgroup derogation, can be attributed to a quest for positive social identity and ingroup solidarity on the part of an inscribed lay audience.
Download or read book Religious Conflict at Canterbury Cathedral in the Late Twelfth Century written by James Barnaby and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2024-05-21 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first comprehensive study of a bitter dispute which occupied the archbishops and monks of Canterbury throughout the 1180s and 1190s. For fifteen years the monks of Christ Church Canterbury waged a war against their archbishop, over a plan to build a church to provide funds for their administration, dedicated to Thomas Becket. Fearing the loss of their most beloved (and lucrative) saint to this new institution, the monks embarked on a course of action which saw rioting in the streets of Canterbury, their excommunication, and the cathedral placed under siege by the archbishop. Although at first glance an internal dispute between the archbishop and his cathedral chapter, it had a wide-ranging impact. The monks travelled thousands of miles in support of their cause, enlisting the backing of popes, cardinals, and the elites of Europe. In England, the kings during the period took a personal interest in the dispute, sometimes attempting to resolve it and sometimes hindering any chance of peace. This book, the first full account of the conflict, draws on the huge collection of letters it provoked (one of the largest compiled in the twelfth century), alongside other sources such as monastic culture, to offer a detailed narrative of this complicated feud between Archbishops Baldwin of Forde, Hubert Walter and their cathedral monks; it also considers the continuations of the dispute in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In addition, it analyses the key themes of the conflict: the role of royalty, travel, and the deployment of Thomas Becket.
Download or read book England under the Norman and Angevin Kings written by Robert Bartlett and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2000-01-27 with total page 810 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This vivid and and comprehensive account of the politics, religion, and culture of England in the century and a half after the Norman Conquest lays bare the patterns of everyday life, and increases our understanding of medieval society at a time when England was more closely tied to Europe than ever before. This was a period in which the ruling dynasty and military aristocracy were deeply enmeshed with the politics and culture of France. The book describes their conflicts and their preoccupations: the sense of honour, the role of violence, and the glitter of tournament, heraldry, and Arthurian romance. The author explores the mechanics of their government, and analyses the part played by the Church at a time of radical developments in religious life and organization. He investigates the role of ordinary men and women: the fundamental importance of the peasant economy, the growing urban and commercial arenas; and also their outlook on the world, including their views on the past; on sexuality; on animals; on death, the undead and the occult. The result is a fascinating and complex account of a period which begins with conquest and ends in assimilation.
Download or read book The Clergy in the Medieval World written by Julia Barrow and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-15 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unlike monks and nuns, clergy have hitherto been sidelined in accounts of the Middle Ages, but they played an important role in medieval society. This first broad-ranging study in English of the secular clergy examines how ordination provided a framework for clerical life cycles and outlines the influence exerted on secular clergy by monastic ideals before tracing typical career paths for clerics. Concentrating on northern France, England and Germany in the period c.800–c.1200, Julia Barrow explores how entry into the clergy usually occurred in childhood, with parents making decisions for their sons, although other relatives, chiefly clerical uncles, were also influential. By comparing two main types of family structure, Barrow supplies an explanation of why Gregorian reformers faced little serious opposition in demanding an end to clerical marriage in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Changes in educational provision c.1100 also help to explain growing social and geographical mobility among clerics.
Download or read book Ethnicity in Medieval Europe 950 1250 written by Claire Weeda and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2021 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An investigation into how racial stereotypes were created and used in the European Middle Ages. Students in twelfth-century Paris held slanging matches, branding the English drunkards, the Germans madmen and the French as arrogant. On crusade, army recruits from different ethnic backgrounds taunted each other's military skills. Men producing ethnography in monasteries and at court drafted derogatory descriptions of peoples dwelling in territories under colonisation, questioning their work ethic, social organisation, religious devotion and humanness. Monks listed and ruminated on the alleged traits of Jews, Saracens, Greeks, Saxons and Britons and their acceptance or rejection of Christianity. In this radical new approach to representations of nationhood in medieval western Europe, the author argues that ethnic stereotypes were constructed and wielded rhetorically to justify property claims, flaunt military strength and assert moral and cultural ascendance over others. The gendered images of ethnicity in circulation reflect a negotiation over self-representations of discipline, rationality and strength, juxtaposed with the alleged chaos and weakness of racialised others. Interpreting nationhood through a religious lens, monks and schoolmen explained it as scientifically informed by environmental medicine, an ancient theory that held that location and climate influenced the physical and mental traits of peoples. Drawing on lists of ethnic character traits, school textbooks, medical treatises, proverbs, poetry and chronicles, this book shows that ethnic stereotypes served as rhetorical tools of power, crafting relationships within communities and towards others.
Download or read book The Monastic Order in England written by David Knowles and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-01-29 with total page 808 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book was originally published in 1940 and was quickly recognised as a scholarly classic and masterpiece of historical literature. It covers the period from about 940, when St Dunstan inaugurated the monastic reform by becoming abbot of Glastonbury, to the early thirteenth century.
Download or read book The English and the Normans written by Hugh M. Thomas and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2003-04-10 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the Anglo-Norman period itself, the relations beween the English and the Normans have formed a subject of lively debate. For most of that time, however, complacency about the inevitability of assimilation and of the Anglicization of Normans after 1066 has ruled. This book first challenges that complacency, then goes on to provide the fullest explanation yet for why the two peoples merged and the Normans became English. Drawing on anthropological theory, the latest scholarship on Anglo-Norman England, and sources ranging from charters and legal documents to saints' lives and romances, it provides a complex exploration of ethnic relations on the levels of personal interaction, cultural assimilation, and the construction of identity. As a result, the work provides an important case study in pre-modern ethnic relations that combines both old and new approaches, and sheds new light on some of the most important developments in English history.
Download or read book Latin Satire written by Witke and published by BRILL. This book was released on 1970 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Passion of St Lawrence Epigrams and Marginal Poems written by Jan M. Ziolkowski and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-12-06 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nigel of Canterbury (often referred to as Nigel Wireker or Nigel de Longchamps) was a monk of Christ Church, Canterbury, during the troubled decades after the martyrdom of Thomas Becket. Nigel is widely known for his Speculum Stultorum, an amusing satiric poem nearly four thousand lines in length, and for a caustic treatise that has been given the title Tractatus contra Curiales et Officiales Clericos. Although his seventeen Miracula Sancte Dei genitricis uirginis Marie, uersifice have been edited recently, not all his other works have fared well. The Passion of St. Lawrence, Epigrams and Marginal Poems brings into print for the first time Nigel's remaining poems. From British Library Cotton Vespasian D xix are edited his account in rhymed hexameters of the passion of Saint Lawrence and thirteen epigrams; from Cambridge, Trinity College B. 15. 5 (342) are published newly discovered marginal poems that shed light upon his techniques of poetic composition. The volume opens with a general introduction on Nigel's writings, his life at Canterbury, and notable features of his verse. Each of the three texts or sets of texts is preceded by a brief introduction and followed by a detailed commentary, which glosses difficult words and constructions and which points the reader to literary sources and analogues. The volume concludes with indexes of names and of notable words. This new edition deepens our perspective upon Nigel of Canterbury and upon intellectual life in Canterbury after the death of Becket.
Download or read book Dictionary of the Middle Ages written by and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 764 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arranged alphabetically, this volume contains articles on various aspects of life in the Middle Ages, from A.D. 500 to 1500 and covering a geographic area including the Latin West, the Slavic world, Asia Minor, the lands of the caliphate in the East, and the Muslim-Christian areas of North Africa.
Download or read book Monastic Hospitality written by Julie Kerr and published by Boydell Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on a wide range of sources, this text explores the practice and perception of monastic hospitality in England c. 1070-c.1250, an important and illuminating time in a European and an Anglo-Norman context.
