Sometime toward the middle of the twelfth century, it is supposed, an otherwise obscure figure, born a Jew in Cologne and later ordained as a priest in Cappenberg in Westphalia, wrote a Latin account of his conversion to Christianity. Known as the "Opusculum," this book purportedly by "Herman, the former Jew" may well be the first autobiography to be written in the West after the "Confessions" of Saint Augustine. It may also be something else entirely.
In "The Conversion of Herman the Jew" the eminent French historian Jean-Claude Schmitt examines this singular text and the ways in which...
Sometime toward the middle of the twelfth century, it is supposed, an otherwise obscure figure, born a Jew in Cologne and later ordained as a pries...
Scholastic disputation, the formalized procedure of debate in the medieval university, is one of the hallmarks of intellectual life in premodern Europe. Modeled on Socratic and Aristotelian methods of argumentation, this rhetorical style was refined in the monasteries of the early Middle Ages and rose to prominence during the twelfth-century Renaissance. Strict rules governed disputation, and it became the preferred method of teaching within the university curriculum and beyond. In The Medieval Culture of Disputation, Alex J. Novikoff has written the first sustained and...
Scholastic disputation, the formalized procedure of debate in the medieval university, is one of the hallmarks of intellectual life in premodern Eu...
