Elias of Thriplow, a village near Cambridge, was a schoolmaster in the thirteenth century. Apart from his complete Serium Senectutis, he wrote several works that have survived only as extracts, many of which are extensive. Elias seemingly wrote what has been called Petronius Rediuiuus, a collection of tales and of essays about knights, merchants, women, and farmers. This collection frequently reflects the influence of spicy Petronius, rarely read in the Middle Ages. Elias is important for his criticisms of medieval society, for the history of narrative literature, and for the...

In this monograph the dialogue production between 1200 and 1400 is presented in a detailed repertory. Building on this material, the author describes four genres of dialogue (didactic, polemical, introspective and philosophical dialogues), locating them in the literary tradition.

This edition offers a critical text of the Latin prose translation of the Odyssey of Homer, made in about 1462 by Francesco Griffolini at the behest of Pope Pius II. The comprehensive introduction provides information about the life and work of the author, examines his method of translation and clarifies the manuscript transmission of the text.

A key tenet in the criticism of medieval and early modern courts is: Let him who desires to be righteous retire from the court (Exeat Aula, qui vult esse pius). How Enea Silvio Piccolimini and Ulrich von Hutten perceived, criticized and justified courtly life, is the subject of this book.

Ritual Memory brings together two areas of study which have hitherto rarely been studied in comparison: liturgy and the apocryphal Acts of the Apostles. The book gives an analysis of the liturgical celebration of the apostles in the medieval West and examines the incorporation of the apocrypha in practices of ritual commemoration. It reveals the role that liturgy played in the transmission of the apocryphal Acts and visualises the way these narrative traditions developed and changed through their incorporation into a ritual context. The result is a dynamic picture of the ritual...

In his monograph Verlorenes Mittelalter, Thomas Haye discusses the question of why the greater part of the Latin texts which were produced over the course of the Middle Ages has not been preserved. Contemporary sources attest to the existence of thousands of texts which have not come down to the modern era. As Haye demonstrates, these losses are not primarily due to random happenstance, but are often rather the results of certain aspects of contemporary mentality, sociohistorical circumstances, preferences regarding literary genres and other specific cultural factors. Modern literary...

Was it a whale or a shark that devoured Jonah? And how were the walls of Jericho brought down? In his wide-ranging study, Physica Sacra, Bernd Roling shows that the natural sciences and biblical exegesis have not always stood in stark opposition to one another. From the high Middle Ages, Bible commentators such as Albertus Magnus and Alonso Tostado made extensive use of the knowledge available in their times about zoology, medicine and astronomy to explain the wonders of revelation and to defend their historical basis. Even with the advent of modern Biblical criticism and in the age of...

The twelfth-century vita of Saint Olav, the Norwegian King Olav Haraldsson, is an outstanding example of how the intersection of power and sanctity was politically functionalised in the Middle Ages. Olav's hagiographic dossier is transmitted in several and in part newly discovered manuscripts. Its contents depend on both the Latin and the vernacular tradition, while the milieus in which it was used range from the clerics of the High Middle Ages to the Hanseatic merchants at the end of the epoch. Fourteen studies on language and style, on codicological as well as cultic and cultural context of...

The Cosmographia is one of the most inventive and enigmatic works of medieval literature. Mark Kauntze argues that this allegory of creation is best understood as a product of the vibrant intellectual culture of twelfth-century France. Bernard Silvestris established the authority of his treatise by imitating those ancient philosophers and poets who were assiduously studied in the contemporary schools. But he also revised and updated them, to develop a compelling intervention into twelfth-century debates about man's place in nature and the relationship between theology and natural...

This book throws new light on the question of authorship in the Latin literature of the later medieval and in the early modern periods. It shows that authorship was not something to be automatically assumed in an empathic sense, but was chiefly to be found in the paratextual features of works and was imparted by them. This study examines the strategies and tools used by authors ca. 1350-1650, to assert their authorial aspirations. Enenkel demonstrates how they incorporated themselves into secular, ecclesiastical, spiritual and intellectual power structures. He shows that in doing so rituals...