This is the first full-length study of the place and meaning of pilgrimage in European Renaissance culture. It makes new material available and also provides fresh perspectives on canonical writers such as Montaigne, Erasmus, Petrarch, Augustine, and Gregory of Nyssa. This wide-ranging and timely new work aims to question the ways in which recent theoretical and historical research in the area has determined the differences between fictional worlds and the real.

To call something 'monstrueux' in the mid-sixteenth century is, more often than not, to wonder at its enormous size: it is to call to mind something like a whale. By the late seventeenth 'monstrueux' is more likely to denote hidden intentions, unspoken desires. Several shifts are at work in this word history, and in what Othello calls the 'mighty magic' of monsters; these shifts can be described in a number of ways. The clearest, and most compelling, is the translation or migration of the monstrous from natural history to moral philosophy, from descriptions of creatures found in the external...

Rights were once thought to derive from the God-given nature of man. But today human rights and religion are sometimes in conflict. The universal claims made for rights can put them at odds with the revealed truths from which religions derive their authority. Many people's sense of human worth and dignity nevertheless depends on recognising the divine in each of us. Where rights and revelation diverge, how can the differences be negotiated? How should we measure individual claims to freedom against the demands of religious traditions?
In this volume, eminent theologians and...