This book, based on a wide range of eighteenth-century works, concerns European attitude towards North Africa in the century preceding the French conquest of Algiers in 1830. It studies the radical transformation of perceptions of Barbary during the period, essentially by placing them in the context of the different eighteenth-century systems of classification of the world. We see that uncertainty as to how to classify this region, its inhabitants, its form of government and social evolution - which led to its absence from most contemporary anthropological discussions - was resolved in the...

The editors of this volume have collected a large number of texts, most of them previously available only in manuscript, of a wide range of scholastic views on the problem of the eternity of the world. These selections range from William of Durham in the 1220s to John of Jandun in 1315. They illustrate the continuity of medieval discussions of this crucial topic and present the major arguments on all sides of the question. Several of the authors are anonymous, and many of those whose names are known have been little studied. The notes not only identify the fontes but also, through...

Using Darwin's "The Origin of Species" as a casepoint, this book shows that the language of scientists does remain "language" and that a skilful use of its rhetorical and poetic aspects often determines the 'facts' and the transmission of information.

Wessel Gansfort (1419-1489) is the author of a number of astute but difficult texts which indicate the high level of late-medieval spirituality and scholarship in northern Europe. Together with his younger friend Agricola (1444-1485) he ushered in the beginning of modern intellectual life in the northern part of the Netherlands (the province of Groningen) and adjoining Germany. This volume contains eight contributions on Gansfort, enlarging the range of perceptions of his work and personality for the first time since the major studies of 1917 and 1933 by Maarten van Rhijn. There are three...

The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 led to a large diaspora of French Huguenots, known as the Refuge. Spreading throughout Europe, many of these Huguenots used their literary and polemical talents in the development of political ideas that would help them in their efforts to return to France, or in their adjustment to living outside of France. Arguably, their predicament turned some of them into cosmopolitans and instigated their contributions to the theory and practice of freedom of the press and economic freedom. As in the case of other diaspora cultures, expulsion from...

This book makes available to scholars the unpublished proto-scholastic Commentary on the Psalms, composed by one of the outstanding figures of the early twelfth century, Gilbert of Poiters (Gilbert Porreta). The commentary had its origins in the atmosphere of experimentation which characterized the schools of Laon, Chartres and Paris in the first decades of the century. Its unique mise en page, its methodology and its connection to other texts - especially glossed classical texts, the Glossa ordinaria and the writings of Peter Lombard - are explored. Gilbert's...

Early medieval religious communities were filled with monks and nuns who spent almost their entire lives within the monastic confines. Many had arrived in childhood, through an irrevocable act of parental sacrifice (oblatio). According to Benedict's Rule, parents were to donate their sons 'to God in the monastery', following the biblical example of Hannah offering her son Samuel at the Temple.
From the twelfth century onwards, this once widespread practice became increasingly controversial. Why did parents give away their children? Were they driven by economic necessity?
This book...

These studies respond to the challenge posed twenty years ago by John E. Murdoch, in whose honor they have been assembled: to interpret ancient and medieval mathematical and scientific texts not just as isolated intellectual productions but as responses to particular settings or contexts. Two broad settings are explored here: that of the wider intellectual culture, where relations among mathematics, astronomy, natural philosophy - and also theology, logic and astrology - are shown to have shaped individual texts; and the context of lay society, where institutional structures, patronage, even...

An assessment of how four humanists in the court of Pope Clement VII - Pietro Alcionio, Pietro Corsi, Jacopo Sadoleto, and Pierio Valeriano - interpreted the cataclysmic Sack of Rome (1527), which called into question their earlier images of the Renaissance papacy. Building upon recent discussions in literary criticism and cognitive psychology, the author elucidates how these humanists' narratives gave meaningful shape to their memories and, in so doing, helped to redefine the image of Renaissance Rome as it would be "remembered" by subsequent generations.