This book brings together, in a modern English translation, a selection of relevant medieval texts that are determined by wisdom. Mostly hidden in a literary framework, the messages contained in these excerpts prove to be highly valuable for all people throughout time, addressing ethical, moral, and religious values and ideals. Critical discussions of the meaning of wisdom frame the text anthology.

Serendipitously, at around the same time as Boccaccio published his famous Decameron (1350), the Swiss-German Dominican Ulrich Bonerius published his highly popular collection of fables, The Gemstone. Both authors pursued very similar goals, instructing their audiences about vices and virtues, Boccaccio by telling entertaining, often erotic tales, Bonerius by relating didactic tales, mostly based on animals as the active characters. This book provides the first English translation of all one hundred fables authored by Bonerius. Bonerius drew mostly from the classical Aesopian tradition, and...

Long ignored, the fascinating Baltic-German author Werner Bergengruen (d. 1964), once even nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature, is reintroduced here through the English translation of a selection of his best short stories. The bulk of the book consists of his Death from Reval (1939), in which we are confronted with a variety of perspectives on death as intertwined with people's lives in that Estonian city. We are invited to follow curious habits and attitudes by various survivors and thus learn to smile about and with death. In other novellas chosen from his extensive oeuvre,...