This collection includes essays on the visual experience and material culture at medieval pilgrimage shrines of northern Europe and the British Isles, particularly the art and architecture created to intensify spiritual experience for visitors. These studies focus on regional pilgrimage centers which flourished from the 12th-16th centuries, addressing various aspects of visual imagery and architectural space which inspired devotees to value cults of enshrined saints and to venerate them in memory from afar. Subjects include pilgrim dress, jeweled and painted reliquaries, labyrinths, elaborate...

This work examines Pierre d'Ailly's (1351-1420) views on bishops, theologians, and canon lawyers, not primarily in their conciliar context but within the broader dimensions of their individual status, office, and authority within the Church. These views also unfold, in varying degrees, within the apocalyptic context of his thought and result in a call for both pastoral and personal reform, especially for the episcopacy. This call, moreover, reveals strong apostolic and evangelical influences, especially those of the Franciscans and the Brethren of the Common Life, and adds a distinctive...

This study in comparative conceptual history reveals how the concepts of nation and fatherland were redefined within public religion in eighteenth-century England, the Netherlands and Sweden, leading to more positive and inclusive conceptions of nationhood and the gradual reconfiguration of national identities in more secular terms.

This anthology explores often overlooked periods in medicine from medieval to early modern times, taking as a principal theme the need to return to familiar texts and sources for new interpretations. In twelve essays written by a diverse group of scholars, the collection covers topics such as medical politics, herbal remedies and nationalism, the role of experience in casebook writing, the use of medical allusions in literature and popular culture, and the changing impact of various book editions on surgery, embryology, and lay medical knowledge.

The volume provides new evidence of how the legal ideas of the Lutheran Reformation were put into practice, especially in the Nordic countries, and how they worked in the history of law. Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden forming the largest Lutheran area in the world, this lacuna is considerable. The first part of the book deals with the legal, theological and philosophical thought of the reformers. The second part examines the impact of the Reformation on particular aspects of legal reform, especially marriage and criminal law and the law on poor relief in the Northern Europe. The study is...

No volume about the spectacles and public performances of early modern England could pretend to treat comprehensively a body of materials so conspicuously vast. Rather than efforts to survey the territory, these essays are best understood in the original sense of the term as "essays"--as trials, attempts, experiments to open alternative ways of understanding that vast corpus of mystery plays, civic pageants, court masques and professional dramas that constitute its subject. The book crosses traditional period lines, including studies of Medieval as well as Renaissance entertainments. Once...