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....

Starting from theories on dreams, the innovative philosophical atmosphere of the Western 12th century are examined here. It is shown that the integration of Arabic medical know-how eventually opened perspectives which brought about the new interest in the Byzantine and Arabic Aristotle. Anhand der Traumtheorien untersucht der Autor das innovative philosophische Klima des lateinischen 12. Jahrhunderts. Es zeigt sich, dass die Aneignung arztlicher Fachbucher zu jenen neuen Perspectiven gefuhrt hat, die sich schliesslich im Interesse am byzantinischen und arabischen Aristoteles niedergeschlagen...

During his long tenure at the university of Paris, John of Garland, one of the most prolific writers of the 13th century wrote, in addition to more ambitious literary works, several didactic texts on grammar, rhetoric, and theology. With didactic brevity his Misteria Ecclesie focus on the symbolism of the church-buildings, the ecclesiastical order of the clergy, the vestments, (the prayers said at) the canonical hours, the liturgical year, mass, and the eucharist. As the source, a prose-treatise by Ps.- Hugo of St. Victor could be identified. For the edition, 30 manuscripts (13-15th...

The Christian monumental historic-heroic epic Davidiad is the masterpiece of the prolific Croat Humanist Marko Marulic (Marcus Marulus, 1450-1524). The poem, comprising 6765 Latin hexameters, and divided into 14 books, was never published, and eventually even thought to be lost. Marulic's autograph resurfaced in the Biblioteca Nazionale of Turin, although it had been heavily damaged during the huge fire in January 1904. For the present edition the author has collated the original manuscript in Turin, made additional corrections, adopting the suggestions of Veljko Gortan, and reduced...

The book offers a complete edition of 115 Latin, Old Czech and German texts, for the most part transcribed for the first time. This forms the basis for an investigation of the dissemination of the Visio Pauli in medieval Europe; on its incorporation into new, changing contexts of transmission and combinations of text as well as on its vernacular translation. In so doing the author shows that the Apocrypha (the apocalypse of Paul) which arose in the East in late antiquity and their European transformation (Visio Pauli) - one as a closed text, the other as an open text - represent...

The Historia Romana was the most popular work on Roman history in the Middle Ages. A highly interesting aspect of its transmission and reception are its many redactions which bear witness to the continuous development of the text in line with changing historical contexts. This study presents the very first classification of such rewritings, and produces new insights into historiographical discourse in the Middle Ages. Drawing on an analysis of the paraphrase contained in the manuscript Bamberg Hist. 3, which is edited here for the first time, the author offers numerous examples of...

Survey of neo-latin epic in France during the 16th and 17th centuries, more extensive than anything presented to date. Repertorium of more than 80 poems with detailed information on their contents and their authors. Development of the literary genre.

Heinzer's book, a series of case studies, deals with the fundamental relation between monastic reform and book production in the middle ages in the southwestern part of the German-speaking area during the period from the 9th to the early 16th century. This book, thus, might be considered as a complementary contribution to a long-term project, initiated by scholars of mediaeval german studies (Nigel Palmer and Hans-Jochen Schiewer), of reconstructing a "Literary Topography of south-west Germany", dealing however almost exclusively with Latin texts and focussing not as much on more specifically...

This is a new critical edition (in two volumes) of Vossius' Latin Poeticae institutiones, with a translation in English, an introduction, annotations and a commentary. In 1647 the Amsterdam professor Gerardus Vossius published his main work on poetics, Poeticarum institutionum libri III, which can be considered as an important result of the Dutch Golden Age. In the same year two shorter works appeared, De artis poeticae natura ac constitutione, which is an introduction to the main work, and De imitatione, which elaborates on two aspects of poetics: imitation and...

What kind of being did a sailor see, when he was confronted with a mermaid? A demon, a fairy, a monster, or only an extraordinary marine mammal? Transmitted by the tradition of ancient natural history the European universities faced many creatures belonging to natural science as well as to mythology, which still could be observed throughout the world. While medieval sholarship treated those beings as subjects for demonology, early modern scholars started to rationalize the sirens and satyrs and developed new models of explanation. Throughout hundreds of academical disputations the debate on...