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The term ‘Augustinianism’ has been used by scholars for over a century to refer to trends in medieval philosophy, theology, and politics, which had a major effect on the transformations of European culture and society from the Middle Ages to the onset of modernity. Yet in each of these three disciplines ‘Augustinianism’ means something different, and the lack of clarity only increases when the debates over the relationship between a late medieval Augustinianism and Martin Luther are also considered. Based on historical, philological, and iconographic analysis, this study adopts a hermeneutical approach drawn from philosophical hermeneutics, religious studies, and literary and sociological theory to argue for a historical, as distinct from a philosophical or theological referent for the term ‘Augustinianism’. The central argument of the book is that the interpretation of a late medieval Augustinianism can only be based historically on the newly created image of Augustine discerned in the writings of the Augustinian Hermits in the early fourteenth century, rather than on our own interpretations of Augustine himself. Recognizing the diverse dimensions of this created image is requisite to a historical understanding of Augustine’s late medieval reception and impact. As such, the book sets its sights beyond the later Middle Ages to encompass approaches to interpreting Augustine’s influence in general, for Augustine remains, today as in the later Middle Ages, a created saint.

At once a royal secretary, a poet, and a composer, Guillaume de Machaut was one of the most protean and creative figures of the late Middle Ages. Rather than focus on a single strand of his remarkable career, the book encompasses all aspects of his work, illuminating it in a distinctively interdisciplinary light. It provides a comprehensive picture of Machaut's artistry; reviews the documentary evidence about his life; charts the different agendas pursued by modern scholarly disciplines in their rediscovery and use of specific parts of his output; and delineates Machaut's own poetic and material presentation of his authorial persona. The book details Machaut's central poetic themes of hope, fortune, and death, integrating the aspect of Machaut's multimedia art that differentiates him from his contemporaries' treatment of similar thematic issues: music. In restoring the centrality of music in Machaut's poetics, arguing that his words cannot be truly understood or appreciated without the additional layers of meaning created in their musicalization, the book makes a compelling argument that musico-literary performance occupied a special place in the courts of fourteenth-century France.

This book uses manorial account rolls innovatively to reconstruct the economic mentalities of medieval farmers and, by so doing, argues that they have been unfairly stereotyped. It overturns the traditional view of medieval countrymen as economically backward and instead reveals that agricultural decision-making was as rational in the 14th and 15th centuries as in modern times. It investigates agricultural mentalities first in a detailed case study of the exceptionally well-documented demesne farm of Wisbech Barton, analysing the sale and consumption of produce, cereal-cropping strategies, crop rotations, the use of agrarian techniques, and livestock husbandry in four periods between 1313 and 1429. The last third of the book then tests the findings of this case study across medieval England as a whole. The book argues that human action shaped the course of the rural economy to a much greater extent than has hitherto been appreciated, and challenges the commonly held view that the medieval period was dominated by ecological and economic crises. In particular, it argues that rational decision-making rather than soil exhaustion or climatic change lay behind declining arable and pastoral yields at this time, and that the change in demesne management from direct cultivation to leasing during the later Middle Ages was partly the result of a managerial crisis. Although focused chiefly on well-documented farms of great landlords, the book also has crucial implications for our understanding of medieval peasant farming, not least the yield of their land, which may well have been significantly higher than is generally assumed.

The humanist perception of fourteenth-century Rome as a slumbering ruin awaiting the Renaissance and the return of papal power has cast a long shadow on the historiography of the city. Challenging the view, this book argues that Roman political culture underwent dramatic changes in the late Middle Ages, with profound and lasting implications for the city's subsequent development. The book examines the transformation of Rome's governing elites as a result of changes in the city's economic, political, and spiritual landscape. It explores this shift through the history of Roman political society, its identity as an urban commune, and its once-and-future role as the spiritual capital of Latin Christendom. Tracing the contours of everyday Roman politics, the book reframes the reestablishment of papal sovereignty in Rome as the product of synergy between papal ambitions and local political culture. More broadly, it emphasizes Rome's distinct role in evolution of medieval Italy's city-communes.

This is a study of the intellectual history and religious culture of German‐speaking Europe in the late Middle Ages. Its focus is the bilingual oeuvre of the Franciscan Marquard von Lindau (d. 1392), arguably the most widely read author in the German language before the Reformation. His most successful works were those which were aimed at a broad implicit audience and dealt with pragmatic issues of the Christian life. This book deals with three of those pragmatic issues most central to late medieval religious life: Christ's Passion, the sacrament of the Eucharist, and devotion to the Virgin Mary. Marquard's approach is understood and contextualized in each case in comparison with the works of his predecessors, his contemporaries, and his successors, in Germany and in the wider European world, in order to locate his contribution ‐ and theirs ‐ in this way within a wide temporal framework. It is argued that the dominant approaches hitherto taken towards these aspects of fourteenth‐century religious life, and the patterns of behaviour and thought which those approaches had fostered, represented problematic challenges to Marquard. These were challenges which he met in a distinctive and influential manner, often in direct and remarkable opposition to the affectively charged devotional practices encouraged by many within and without his order, and which have been considered normative for the religious culture of the late Middle Ages in modern historiography. The ethos projected by his works determined a new trajectory for intellectual life in Germany into the fifteenth century and beyond.

The History of the University of Oxford will be an authoritative and comprehensive history of one of Britain's most important and influential institutions. This book, Volume II, examines the University during the late Middle Ages, when scholasticism was at its height. The expert contributors explore the academic pursuits of the scholars of Oxford: theology, pre-eminently, but also philosophy, mathematics, law and medicine. They examine the nature of everyday life during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries — the finances and administration of the colleges, their architecture, and the individuals who lived and worked in them. This is the definitive study of the medieval University of Oxford and a major contribution to scholarship.

This volume aims to rethink critical assumptions about a particular type of medieval manuscript: the miscellany. A miscellany is a multi-text manuscript, made up of mixed contents, often in a mixture of languages; such a volume might be the work of one compiler or several, and might have been put together over a short period of time or over many years (even over several generations). Such variety proves problematic when attempting to form critical judgements, particularly in terms of terminology and definitions. These issues are explored in the introduction, and the fifteen essays that follow discuss a great number of manuscript miscellanies produced in Britain in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. Some of the chapters offer new insights into very well-known miscellanies, whilst others draw attention to little-known volumes. Whilst previous studies of the miscellany have restricted themselves to disciplinary or linguistic boundaries, this collection uniquely draws on the expertise of specialists in the rich range of vernacular languages used in Britain in the later Middle Ages (Anglo-French, Middle English, Older Scots, Middle Welsh). As a result, illuminating comparisons are drawn between miscellany manuscripts that were the products of different geographical areas and cultures. Collectively the chapters in Insular Books explore the wide range of heterogeneous manuscripts that may be defined as miscellanies, and model approaches to their study that will permit a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the production of these assemblages, as well as their circulation and reception in their own age and beyond.

Contributors to Shaping Identity in Medieval French Literature consider the multiplicity and instability of identity in medieval French literature, examining the ways in which literary identity can be created and re-created, adopted, refused, imposed, and self-imposed. Moreover, it is possible to take one’s place in a group while remaining foreign to it. Chrétien de Troyes’s Conte du Graal provides the perfect example of the latter. The tale opens with Perceval hunting alone in the forest, absorbed in his own pursuits, world, and thoughts. His “alone-ness” and self-absorption are evident as he moves toward an integration into a society from which he emerges both accepted and yet even more “different.” The ability to exist simultaneously inside and outside of a community serves as the focal point for the volume, which illustrates the breadth of perspectives from which one may view the “Other Within.” The chapters study identity through a wide range of lenses, from marginal characters to gender to questions of religious difference and of voice and naming. The works analyzed span genres—chanson de geste, romance, lyric poetry, hagiography—and historical periods, ranging from the twelfth century to the late Middle Ages. In so doing, they highlight the fluidity and complexity of identity in medieval French texts, underscoring both the richness of the literature and its engagement with questions that are at once more and less modern than they may initially appear.

This history of the Celts from origins to the present draws on archaeological, historical, literary and linguistic evidence. It is divided into three parts. Part One covers the continental Celts in prehistory and antiquity, complete with accounts of the Celts in Germany, Italy, Iberia, and Asia Minor. The second part follows the Celts from the departure of the Romans to the late Middle Ages, including the migrations to and settlements in Ireland, Wales, Scotland and Brittany. Discussions of the Celtic kingdoms and the rise and fall of Celtic Christianity are also given. The final part brings the history of the Celts up to the present, covering the assimilation of the Celts within the national cultures of Great Britain, France, and Ireland. Included in this consideration are the suppression of Gaelic; the declines, revivals and survivals of languages and literatures; and the histories of Celtic culture. The book concludes with a discussion on the recent history of the meaning of Celtic in contrast to, for example, Germanic, and the effect this has had on modern perceptions of the Celtic past and attempts at Celtic cultural renewal.