This innovative study challenges the view that medieval thought was fundamentally abstract. He describes what medieval people 'thought' about population, studying the texts which contained their thought, and examining the medieval realities which shaped it, such as birth, birth-control, sex-ratio, marriage ages, length of life, and the population of the Holy Land.

Did growing literacy in the later medieval period foster popular heresy, or did heresy provide a crucial stimulus to the spread of literacy? This collective volume, by established scholars from Britain, continental Europe and the United States, considers the importance of the written word in pre-Lutheran heresies, and explores the extent to which heretics' familiarity with books paralleled or exceeded that of their orthodox contemporaries.

Penance, confession and their texts (penitential and confessors' manuals) are important topics for an understanding of the middle ages, in relation to a wide range of issues, from medieval social thought to Chaucer's background. These essays treat a variety of different aspects of the topic: subjects include the frequency and character of early medieval penance; the summae and manuals for confessors, and the ways in which these texts (written by males for males) constructed women as sexual in nature; William of Auvergne's remarkable writing on penance; and the relevance of confessors' manuals...

The sheer extent of crossover - medics as religious men, religious men as medics, medical language at the service of preaching and moral-theological language deployed in medical writings - is the driving force behind these studies. The book reflects the extraordinary advances which 'pure' history of medicine has made in the last twenty years: there is medicine at the levels of midwife and village practitioner, the sweep of the learned Greek and Latin tradition of over a millennium; there is control of midwifery by the priest, therapy through liturgy, medicine as an expression of religious...

'Did you see a heretic? When? Where? Who else was there?'. The inquisitor is questioning, and a suspect is replying; a notary is translating from the vernacular into Latin, and writing it down, abbreviating and omitting at will; later there is the reading out of a sentence in public and then, in a few cases, burning. At every stage there is a text: a list of questions, for example, or an inquisitor's how-to-do it manual. The substance and intention of these texts forms the subject of this book. The introduction brings them all together in an historiographical survey of the role of texts in...

The attitudes towards the human body held by different branches of medieval theology are currently a major focus of scholarly attention. This first volume from York Medieval Press includes studies of the metaphor of man as head and woman as body, Abelard, women and Catharism, the female body as an impediment to ordination, women mystics, and the University of York's 1995 Quodlibet Lecture given by Eamon Duffy on the early iconography and -lives- of St Francis of Assisi. PETER BILLER is Professor of Medieval History at the University of York; A.J. MINNIS is Douglas Tracy Smith Professor of...