The eighteen papers collected in this volume - fifteen of which are published in English for the first time - explore the transformations of religious practices between the third and the fifth centuries in the Western part of the Roman Empire. They share an approach that privileges the study of processes and interactions and does not take for granted the categories and roles traditionally ascribed to social actors. A first group of papers focuses on the sermons and letters of Augustine of Hippo. These texts are precious evidence for balancing the clerical perspective that characterizes most...

The volume consists of sixteen papers on the history of Francia between the seventh and eleventh centuries. Originally published between 1979 and 2009, the papers are arranged around three interlinking themes: the relationship between History and Hagiography, the history of Francia under the respective regimes of the Merovingan and Carolingian kings, and the problem of how states with weak governing institutions were able to exercise power over large areas. The history of Francia has been one of the most productive areas of early medieval history over the past two generations. Models of...

Thomas Anthony Birrell (1924-2011) was a man of many parts. For most of his working life he was Professor of English Literature in the University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands, where he was famous for his lively, humoristic and thought-provoking lectures. He was the author of some very popular literary surveys in Dutch, one of which - a history of English literature - has had seven editions so far. However, first and foremost he was a bibliographer and a book historian. The present collection contains fifteen of his book-historical articles, two reviews and one published version of a lecture...

H.C. Erik Midelfort has carved out a reputation for innovative work on early modern German history, with a particular focus on the social history of ideas and religion. This collection pulls together some of his best work on the related subjects of witchcraft, the history of madness and psychology, demonology, exorcism, and the social history of religious change in early modern Europe. Several of the pieces reprinted here constitute reviews of recent scholarly literature on their topics, while others offer sharp departures from conventional wisdom. A critique of Michel Foucault's view of the...

The essays gathered together in this volume follow the career of the sixteenth-century courtier-poet Pietro Aretino. Part One introduces the author during the 1520s in Rome with his remarkable first comedy, La Cortigiana. With Aretino's move to Venice (1527), he found a congenial life-long home in which he could flourish. Yet the transition from courtier poet to poligrafo, vernacular writer for the popular press, was slow and difficult before he adopted a new career model derived from Erasmus; even then, he contemplated abandoning Italy for the Ottoman Empire. Part Two examines his work as a...

Dr Heywood's second volume of collected papers in the Variorum series brings together fourteen studies published between 2000 and 2010. They represent two of the main strands of his interests during the past decade: the era of Ottoman history dominated by the ministerial family of KAprA1/4lA1/4; and the maritime history of the 'post-Braudelian' Mediterranean, in the later 17th and early 18th centuries. Aspects of the KAprA1/4lA1/4 era under examination in Part One include the shifting chronology of the A+ehrin campaign of 1678; a study of the role of renegades in Ottoman service, linked in...

This book brings together a selection of Kevin Corrigan's works published over the course of some 27 years. Its predominant theme is the encounter with otherness in ancient, medieval and modern thought and it ranges in scope from the Presocratics-through Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and the late ancient period, on the one hand, and early Christian thought, especially Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine and, much later, Aquinas, on the other. Among the key questions examined are the relation between faith and reason; the nature of creation and insight, being and existence; literature, philosophy and the...

One of the significant developments in scholarship in the latter half of the twentieth century was the awareness among historians of ideas, historians of theology, and medievalists of the importance of the Christian scriptures in the Latin Middle Ages. In contrast to an earlier generation of scholars who considered the medieval period as a 'Bible-free zone', recent investigations have shown the central role of scripture in literature, art, law, liturgy, and formal religious education. Indeed, to understand the Latin Middle Ages one must understand the value they placed upon the Bible, how...

Although he is often identified as a Monteverdi scholar (Approaches to Monteverdi: Aesthetic, Psychological, Analytical and Historical Studies, published in the Variorum series in 2013), the majority of Jeffrey Kurtzman's work has focused on other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian sacred music. Organized into three sections, part one begins with a chapter on the Monteverdi Mass and Vespers of 1610 which spotlights the other major work in Monteverdi's first prominent sacred print, the Missa in illo tempore, followed by examples of Kurtzman's work on the sacred music of other composers...

Although articles in this volume fall into three thematic clusters, each of those groups exemplifies three general themes: micro-social processes; innovations and the question of continuity versus discontinuity; and the relationship between ideas and practice. Most of these essays touch upon, and some of them are exclusively concerned with, small scale social processes: e.g. the routines of the all-female early-modern childbirth ritual, the different ways that male practitioners were summoned to such occasions, the functioning of voluntary hospitals, the protocols underlying patient records....