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This monograph is a comprehensive study of the thought of al-Kindī, the first self-described philosopher in Islam, and the first to write original treatises in Arabic. Al-Kindī’s writings are closely engaged with Greek philosophical and scientific texts, whose translation into Arabic he oversaw. Some of the philosophical views for which al-Kindī is known are reactions to Greek thinkers. For instance, he used ideas from Philoponus in arguing against the eternity of the world, and his discussion of divine attributes is based on Neoplatonic texts. However, the book also places al-Kindī’s thought within the context of 9th century Islamic culture, especially contemporary theological developments. The book covers every aspect of al-Kindī’s extant philosophical corpus, including not only his philosophical theology but also his theory of soul, his epistemology, and his ethics. Two chapters are devoted to al-Kindī’s works on the natural sciences (in particular pharmacology, optics, music, and cosmology). The book concludes by discussing how al-Kindī used Greek cosmological ideas in his account of divine providence.

Theologians have always struggled to understand how humanity and divinity coexisted in the person of Christ. Proponents of the Arian heresy, which held that Jesus could not have been fully divine, found significant scriptural evidence of their position. The defenders of orthodoxy, such as Hilary of Poitiers, Ambrose of Milan, Jerome, and Augustine, believed that these biblical passages could be reconciled with Christ's divinity. Medieval theologians such as Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas, and Bonaventure, also grappled with these texts when confronting the rising threat of Arian heresy. They too faced the need to preserve Jesus' authentic humanity and to describe a mode of experiencing the passions that cast no doubt upon the perfect divinity of the Incarnate Word. However, they also confronted an additional obstacle. The medieval theologians had inherited from the Greek and Latin fathers a body of opinion on the passages in question, which by this time had achieved normative cultural status in the Christian tradition. However, the Greek and Latin fathers wrote in a polemical situation, responding to the threat to orthodoxy posed by the Arians. As a consequence, they sometimes found themselves driven to extreme and sometimes contradictory statements. These statements seemed to their medieval successors either to compromise the true divinity of Christ, his true humanity, or the possibility that the divine and human were in communication with or metaphysically linked to one another. As a result, medieval theologians also needed to demonstrate how two equally authoritative but apparently contradictory statements could be reconciled. This book examines the arguments that resulted from these dual pressures and finds that, under the guise of unchanging assimilation and transmission of a unanimous tradition, there were in fact many fissures and discontinuities between the two bodies of thought, ancient and medieval. Rather than organic change or development, the book finds radical change, trial, novelty, and even heterodoxy.

The Kharijites were a splinter group that broke away from the main forces of Islam during the formative medieval period, purportedly refusing arbitration and committing bloody outrages against their fellow Muslims. Their influence in the political and theological life of the nascent faith has ensured their place in both critical and religious accounts of early Islamic history. Over the centuries, the Kharijites have repeatedly been invoked whenever militant opposition arose and today the label is frequently applied to extremist Islamic movements. After a brief look at Kharijite origins, this book focuses on contemporary Egypt. The book shows how religious images of the Kharijites have dominated public discussion about political opposition movements, effectively undermining attempts to discuss the real issues generating such movements.

Hildegard of Bingen was one of the most notable women of the 12th century, as even a cursory glance at the recipients of her correspondence will suggest. The present volume concentrates on her personal life as viewed through the defining lens of her personal letters: her early bid for recognition of her spiritual gifts with her hesitant letter to the powerful and renowned Bernard of Clairvaux; her courageous, and ultimately futile, fight to keep her beloved confidante and friend, Richardis von Stade, by her side and the poignant outcome of that struggle; her vehement defiance of the male hierarchy of the Benedictine Order in her bid to establish communities under her own governance; her impudent challenge to contemporary conservative views by the dress and customs she established in her community; her paean of praise for the power of music; her adamant refusal, even at the advanced age of eighty, to give in to the demands of the male authorities even in the face of excommunication. Accompanied by informative and detailed introductions, these letters give an extraordinary insight into the life and reputation of this medieval saint.

The main aim of this book is to argue that the use of private force by states has been restricted by a norm against mercenary use. It traces the evolution of this norm, from mercenaries in medieval Europe through to private security companies in modern day Iraq, telling a story about how the mercenaries of yesterday have evolved into those of today in the process. The norm against mercenaries has two components. First, mercenaries are considered to be immoral because they use force outside legitimate, authoritative control. Second, mercenaries are considered to be morally problematic because they fight wars for selfish, financial reasons as opposed to fighting for some kind of larger conception of the common good. The book examines four puzzles about mercenary use, and argues that they can only be explained by understanding the norm against mercenaries. First, the book argues that moral disapproval of mercenaries led to the disappearance of independent mercenaries from medieval Europe. Second, the transition from armies composed of mercenaries to citizen armies in the 19th century can only be understood with attention to the norm against mercenaries. Third, it is impossible to understand why international law regarding mercenaries, created in the 1970s and 1980s, is so ineffective without understanding the norm. Finally, the disappearance of companies like Executive Outcomes and Sandline and the development of today's private security industry cannot be understood without the norm.

Judah Halevi, the great medieval Hebrew poet, abandoned home and family in Spain (al-Andalus) at the end of his life and traveled east to die in the Holy Land. This book narrates his journey, quoting from Arabic letters by Halevi and his friends, and explores its meaning through analysis of his Hebrew poems. The poems are presented both in Hebrew and in new English verse translations and are provided with full commentary. The discussion introduces Halevi’s circle of Jewish businessmen and intellectuals in al-Andalus and Egypt, examines their way of life, and describes their position vis-à-vis Arabic and Islamic culture. It also explores the interweaving of religious ideas of Jewish, Islamic, and Hellenistic origin in Halevi’s work. Although Halevi was partially motivated by a desire to repudiate the Judeo-Arabic hybrid culture and embrace purely Jewish values, the book demonstrates that his poetry and his pilgrimage continue to reflect the Judeo-Arabic milieu. His poetry and pilgrimage also show that while the Jews’ precarious situation as a tolerated minority weighed on Halevi, he was impelled to the pilgrimage not by a grand plan for ending the Jewish exile, as is widely thought, but by a personal religious quest. Chapters 1 through 3 each deal with one of the major themes of Halevi’s poetry that point in the direction of the pilgrimage. Chapters 4 through 6 are a narrative of the pilgrimage. Chapters 7 through 10 are a study of Halevi’s poems that are explicitly about the Land of Israel and about the pilgrimage. The epilogue explores the later legend of his martyrdom.

The usual division of philosophy into ‘medieval’ and ‘modern’ obscures the continuities in philosophy up until 1700. This book examines three areas where these continuities are particularly clear: knowledge, the mind, and language. It does so through three chapters, by different authors, each followed by a detailed response. The first chapter shows how Descartes attacked faculty psychology and thus separated himself from one strand of the medieval tradition, represented by Suárez. At the same time, Descartes was closely following another strand, found in Ockham. Thus, the discontinuity between medieval and modern may not be as sharp as first appears. The second chapter considers discussions of whether knowledge should be kept for the elite. In the Christian world medieval and seventeenth-century thinkers alike rarely advocated esotericism, but Jewish and Muslim scholars such as al-Ghazâlî, Averroes, and Maimonides strongly defended it. The main chapter of Part III argues that a version of such esotericism may be a defensible philosophical position today. The main chapter of Part II shows how Locke's philosophy of language fits into a long medieval tradition of thought based on Aristotle's On Interpretation. Locke introduced the requirement that a word be linked to an idea in the speaker's mind, but the chapter argues that this does not mean that Locke was proposing that we each have a private language.

The aim of the present work is threefold. One, it intends to place the thought of Avicenna within its proper historical context, whether the philosophical-scientific tradition inherited from the Greeks or the indigenous influences coming from the medieval Islamic world. Thus, in addition to a substantive introductory chapter on the Greek and Arabic sources and influences to which Avicenna was heir, the historical and philosophical context central to Avicenna’s own thought is provided in order to assess and appreciate his achievement in the specific fields treated in that chapter. Two, the present volume aims to offer a philosophical survey of Avicenna’s entire system of thought ranging from his understanding of the interrelation of logic, physics, psychology, metaphysics, ethics, politics, and medicine. The emphasis here is on how, using a relatively small handful of novel insights, Avicenna was not only able to address a whole series of issues that had troubled earlier philosophers working in both the ancient Hellenistic and medieval Islamic world, but also how those insights fundamentally changed the direction philosophy took, certainly in the Islamic East, but even in the Jewish and Christian milieus. Three, the present volume will provide philosophers, historians of science, and students of medieval thought with a starting point from which to assess the place, significance, and influence of Avicenna and his philosophy within the history of ideas.

This volume collects together lectures by distinguished scholars. One lecture examines medieval religious relics, focusing on what they actually comprised and asking how these paltry items came to be so highly valued. Another lecture takes the authentic medieval Welsh literary corpus associated with Owain Glyndwr, consisting in the main of bardic eulogies rather than prophecies, and examines them in their historical context. A lecture on Alexander Pope asks what part Shaftesbury's polite wit, Mandeville's cynicism, and Augustan sentimentalism played in the poetry of England's greatest satirist. Another lecture focuses on the Romantic poets' fascination with the lens-made and projected images that the modern world has come to think of as the virtual image. A further lecture examines the choices made by young musicians in Renaissance Italy. The next lecture examines how the paradoxical doctrine of ‘the one and the multiple’ was translated into visual language in Chinese Buddhist art. In some cases, groups related to certain numbers bearing metaphorical significances; while in others, objects were simply replicated in large numbers to create a sense of awe. The final lecture explores the way the natural history of the Americas was exported to 16th-century northern European scientists and how they reacted intellectually and politically.

The mendicant orders—Augustinians, Carmelites, Dominicans, Franciscans, and several other groups—spread across Europe apace from the early thirteenth century, profoundly influencing numerous aspects of medieval life. But, alongside their tremendous success, their members (or friars) also encountered derision, scorn, and even violence. Such opposition, generally known as antifraternalism, is often seen as an ecclesiastical inhouse affair or an ideological response to the brethren’s laxity: both cases registering a moral decline symptomatic of a decadent church. Challenging the accuracy of these views, The Making of Medieval Antifraternalism contends that the phenomenon exhibits a breadth of scope that, on the one hand, pushes it far beyond its accustomed boundaries and, on the other, supports only tenuous links with Reformation or modern forms of anticlericalism. Based on numerous sources, from theological treatises, to poetry, to criminal court records, this study shows that people from all walks of life lambasted and occasionally assaulted the brethren, orchestrating in the process detailed scenes of urban violence. Their myriad motivations and diverse goals preclude us from associating antifraternalism with any one ideology or agenda, let alone allow us to brand many of its proponents as religious reformers. At the same time, it demonstrates the friars’ active role in forging a medieval antifraternal tradition, not only by deviating from their founders’ paths to varying degrees, but also by chronicling their suffering inter fideles and thus incorporating it into the orders’ identity as the vanguard of Christianity. In doing so, The Making of Medieval Antifraternalism illuminates a major chapter in Europe’s social, urban, and religious history.

In the course of the fifth century, the Roman farms and villas of lowland Britain were replaced by the new, distinctive settlements of Anglo-Saxon communities. This volume presents a major synthesis of the evidence, now rapidly growing, for such settlements from across England and throughout the Anglo-Saxon period. Its aim is to explore what this evidence reveals about the communities who lived in them and whose daily lives went almost wholly unrecorded. The book examines the appearance, ‘life-cycles’ and function of their buildings; the relationship of Anglo-Saxon settlements to the Romano-British landscape and to later medieval villages; the role of ritual in daily life; what distinguished ‘rural’ from ‘urban’; and the relationship between farming regimes and settlement forms. A central theme throughout the book is the impact on rural producers of the rise of lordship and markets, and how this impact is reflected in the remains of their settlements.

Before the advent of printing, the preaching of the friars was the mass medium of the middle ages. This edition of marriage sermons reveals what a number of famous preachers actually taught about marriage, teasing out the close connection between marriage symbolism and social, cultural, and legal realities in the 13th century. The relation between genre, content, and gender is analysed, with particular attention to the likely impact of preaching, viewed as a means of intellectual power in competition with vernacular genres and other social forces. Its mass diffusion anticipated printing, but the means of production were those of the monastic scriptorium. The textual criticism and palaeographical analysis of these sermons undermine central assumptions of both medieval and early modern historians of the book, establishing a technique of textual criticism appropriate for texts of this kind. A pragmatic compromise between simple transcriptions which ignore stemmatic relation and full-scale editions attempting to fit all manuscripts into a genealogical table, this book addresses both the sermon literature of the period and the understanding of marriage and its religious and cultural significance in the middle ages.

Medieval literature is fascinated with the idea that love may be a fatal affliction. Indeed, it is frequently suggested that true love requires sacrifice, that you must be ready to die for, from, and in love. Love, in other words, is represented, sometimes explicitly, as a form of martyrdom, a notion that is repeatedly reinforced by courtly literature's borrowing of religious vocabulary and imagery. The paradigm of the martyr to love has of course remained compelling in the early modern and modern period. This book seeks to explore what is at stake in medieval literature's preoccupation with love's martyrdom. Informed by modern theoretical approaches, particularly Lacanian psychoanalysis and Jacques Derrida's work on ethics, it offers new readings of a wide range of French and Occitan courtly texts from the 12th and 13th centuries, and argues that a new secular ethics of desire emerges from courtly literature because of its fascination with death. This book also examines the interplay between lyric and romance in courtly literary culture, and shows how courtly literature's predilection for sacrificial desire imposes a repressive sex-gender system that may then be subverted by fictional women and queers who either fail to die on cue, or who die in troublesome and disruptive ways.

In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Crown of Aragon in Spain was a rapidly expanding and powerful political unit with an original form of representative government. Throughout this period, a series of energetic and talented rulers sought to maintain royal authority and govern their realms effectively. Their persuasive rhetoric, and that of their advisers, is preserved in the archives of the Crown of Aragon in Barcelona, which provide a rich and under-exploited vein of source material for historians. There are long letters to their subjects, historical works, and the proceedings of the courts, where the kings and queens persuaded their reluctant subjects to grant taxes and to support their decisions. This book examines the tradition of royal eloquence, thereby illuminating the nature of political discourse and persuasion in Aragon during the medieval period and exploring the key ideas shared by the king and the political classes of the kingdom.

This book argues for the importance of synoptically examining the whole range of same‐sex relations in the Anglo‐Saxon period, revisiting well‐known texts and issues (as well as material often considered marginal) from a radically different perspective. The introductory chapters first lay out the premises underlying the book and its critical context, then emphasise the need to avoid modern cultural assumptions about both male‐female and male‐male relationships, and underline the paramount place of homosocial bonds in Old English literature. Part II then investigates the construction of and attitudes to same‐sex acts and identities in ethnographic, penitential, and theological texts, ranging widely throughout the Old English corpus and drawing on Classical, Medieval Latin, and Old Norse material. Part III expands the focus to homosocial bonds in Old English literature in order to explore the range of associations for same‐sex intimacy and their representation in literary texts such as Genesis A, Beowulf, The Battle of Maldon, The Dream of the Rood, The Phoenix, and Ælfric's Lives of Saints. During the course of the book's argument, it uncovers several under‐researched issues and suggests fruitful approaches for their investigation. It concludes that, in omitting to ask certain questions of Anglo‐Saxon material, in being too willing to accept the status quo indicated by the extant corpus, in uncritically importing invisible (because normative) heterosexist assumptions in our reading, we risk misrepresenting the diversity and complexity that a more nuanced approach to issues of gender and sexuality suggests may be more genuinely characteristic of the period.