Writing the New Middle Ages

PMLA ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 120 (2) ◽  
pp. 422-441 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen G. Nichols
Keyword(s):  
Modal Logic ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Visual Literacy ◽  
Philosophical Anthropology ◽  
Medieval Studies ◽  
Vernacular Literature ◽  
Medieval Latin

Medieval studies are big—in fact, have rarely been livelier … or more controversial. This energy has succeeded in breaching the ramparts that traditionally divided the field into a series of vigorously defended fiefs. In a word, the discipline has gone interdisciplinary. Visual literacy, patristics, modal logic, grammar, rhetoric, onomastics, philosophical anthropology, sociology, historiography, linguistics, codicology, vernacular literature, classical and medieval Latin thought and letters, philology, and myriad other subsets conjugate in dizzying and unexpected configurations to produce exciting views of the period.

Picatrix: A Medieval Treatise on Astral Magic. Trans. with an intro. by Dan Attrell and David Porreca. Based on the Latin edition by David Pingree. The Magic in History Series. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019, xii, 372 pp.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 530-532
Author(s):  
Albrecht Classen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Modern Time ◽  
State University ◽  
Pennsylvania State University ◽  
Medieval Studies ◽  
Medieval Latin ◽  
Early Modern Time ◽  
The Middle Ages

Ordinary readers would welcome this new translation as one of many publications rendering a medieval Latin into modern English. All those efforts are certainly most welcome and necessary to maintain the scholarly and pragmatic-didactic approach to Medieval Studies. However, the Picatrix represents a unique magical treatise which every European pre-modern magician consulted and which enjoyed greatest respect for its universal relevance. Many contributors to the edited volume Magic and Magicians in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Time, ed. by Albrecht Classen (2018) refer to the Picatrix, acknowledging it as a most important source for magic throughout the entire pre-modern world.

Theophrastus (c.372–c.287 BC)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela M. Huby
Keyword(s):  
Modal Logic ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Considerable Influence ◽  
The West ◽  
Medieval Latin ◽  
Politics And Religion ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Human Intellect ◽  
The Middle Ages

Theophrastus, the pupil and successor of Aristotle, shared all the latter’s interests, and produced a large number of works on the same topics. Some, like the extant botanical works, went far beyond Aristotle, and Theophrastus is known as the Father of Botany; others amplified and criticized what Aristotle had done. The short Metaphysics, also extant, raises many questions about the nature and the possibility of metaphysics, but most of his work on logic, science, psychology, ethics, politics and religion survives only in fragments, some material coming from the Arabs, and some only from medieval Latin sources. His developments of modal logic and various forms of the syllogism were regarded as important, and his amplification of Aristotle’s account of the human intellect was studied in the Middle Ages in the West. His little Characters, an entertaining set of sketches of human peculiarities, has had considerable influence on later literature, and his surveys of earlier opinions, of which his On the Senses survives, influenced later doxographers. He was an older contemporary of Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, but his influence on Stoicism remains uncertain, and we also know little of his relationship with Epicurus.

Fiona J. Griffiths, Nuns’ Priests’ Tales: Men and Salvation in Medieval Women’s Monastic Life. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018, pp. 360, 29 illus.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 286-288
Author(s):  
Therese Martin
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Family Members ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
University Of Pennsylvania ◽  
Medieval Studies ◽  
Monastic Life ◽  
Multiple Levels

The year 2018 saw the publication of two important monographs, each with groundbreaking scholarship on complementary aspects of monasticism; together they offer a clear path forward for Medieval Studies as a whole. While Fiona Griffiths’s Nuns’ Priests’ Tales and Steven Vanderputten’s Dark Age Nunneries approach the essentially interrelated natures of men’s and women’s medieval monasticism from different perspectives, it is by reading them in concert that one becomes aware of the paradigm shift they signal. In a welcome change from a traditional consideration of so-called “double” monasteries as neither fish nor fowl, Griffiths and Vanderputten offer a feast of evidence for the multiple levels of interactions between the genders—including priests and nuns, students and teachers, patrons, family members, and rulers, as well as the conventionally understood mixed religious communities of monks and nuns—at majority female monasteries in Western Christendom from the early through central Middle Ages. Vanderputten starts at the beginning of the ninth century and carries his investigation forward to the mid-eleventh, at which point Griffiths launches her study, moving the matter on from the late eleventh century into the early thirteenth.

The Emergence of Subjectivity in the Ancient and Medieval World

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Stewart
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Philosophical Anthropology ◽  
Cultural Development ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
Individual Freedom ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Different Cultures

This work represents a combination of different genres: cultural history, philosophical anthropology, and textbook. It follows a handful of different but interrelated themes through more than a dozen texts that were written over a period of several millennia. By means of an analysis of these texts, this work presents a theory about the development of Western Civilization from antiquity to the Middle Ages. The main line of argument traces the various self-conceptions of the different cultures as they developed historically. These self-conceptions reflect different views of what it is to be human. The thesis is that in these we can discern the gradual emergence of what we today call inwardness, subjectivity and individual freedom. As human civilization took its first tenuous steps, it had a very limited conception of the individual. Instead, the dominant principle was that of the wider group: the family, clan or people. Only in the course of history did the idea of what we know as individuality begin to emerge. It took millennia for this idea to be fully recognized and developed. The conception of human beings as having a sphere of inwardness and subjectivity subsequently had a sweeping impact on all aspects of culture, such as philosophy, religion, law, and art. Indeed, this conception largely constitutes what is today referred to as modernity. It is easy to lose sight of the fact that this modern conception of human subjectivity was not simply something given but rather the result of a long process of historical and cultural development.

The Meaning of ‘carruca’ in the ‘Leges Barbarorum’

Traditio ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 297-300
Author(s):  
Theodore John Rivers
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Transitional Period ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Medieval Latin ◽  
Original Meaning ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
The Middle Ages

The term carruca (or carruga), like many other terms in medieval Latin, acquired a new and different meaning in the Middle Ages in place of its original classical meaning. There is no confusion over the meaning of carruca in Roman historical and literary sources: it clearly means a four-wheeled wagon or carriage. However, its original meaning was modified during the medieval period so that by the early ninth century carruca denoted a wheeled plow. Although the medieval plow is often called a carruca (whereas the Roman plow is called an aratrum), one should not infer that all references to carruca in medieval sources signify a plow, particularly if these sources are datable to that transitional period during which the classical meaning of the word was beginning to be transformed into its medieval one. Characteristic of the sources which fall within this period are the Germanic tribal laws (leges barbarorum), and of these, three individual laws in particular are of interest: the Pactus legis Salicae 38.1, Lex Ribuaria 47.2, and Lex Alamannorum 93.2.

Prospects for the Development of Source Studies in Modern Medieval Studies

Istoriya ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (6 (104)) ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Ekaterina Kirillova
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Research Work ◽  
Scientific Conference ◽  
Medieval Studies ◽  
Russian Scientific ◽  
Source Studies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Source Study ◽  
Academy Of Sciences ◽  
The Middle Ages

Source study is the foundation of the research work of professional historians. It became the subject of the All-Russian Scientific Conference “Source Studies in Contemporary Medieval Studies”, which was held from 28 to 29 June 2021 at the Institute of World History at the Russian Academy of Sciences. The conference, conceived as a platform for regular communication of specialists in the history of the Middle Ages, allowed the participants and numerous listeners to get acquainted with the latest research on the source study of the history of Russia, Europe, the East and America. It included reports summarizing the experience of research and outlining the prospects for further work on key problems of source study of the history of the Middle Ages.

Urban Change in Early Medieval Italy: The Example of Pavia

1966 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 82-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. A. Bullough
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Social History ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Medieval Studies ◽  
Medieval Italy ◽  
Warm Hospitality ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

Prefatory Note.—My interest in Pavia goes back at least to 1951 when I was elected Rome Scholar in Medieval Studies. I began seriously to collect material for the history of the city in the early Middle Ages in the winter and spring of 1953 when I enjoyed the warm hospitality of the Collegio Ghislieri, thanks to the efforts made on my behalf by the late Hugh Last, to whose memory this article is dedicated. The published proceedings of the Reichenau and Spoleto congresses on ‘The early medieval town’ in the 1950s clearly underlined the need for detailed studies of particular towns; but the lack of adequate archaeological evidence discouraged me from attempting such a study of early medieval Pavia. In 1964, however, Dr. A. Peroni, Director of the Museo Civico invited me to read a supplementary paper on this topic to the Convegno di Studio sul Centro Storico di Pavia held in the Università degli Studi at Pavia on July 4th and 5th of that year. The present article is an amplified and corrected version of that paper: I have made no substantial alterations to my account of the ‘urbanistica’ of early medieval Pavia—written for an audience of architects and art-historians as well as of historians—but have dealt more fully with the social history of the city in this period. Professor Richard Krautheimer read a draft of the revised version and made some pointed and helpful comments. I am greatly indebted to Dr. Peroni, not merely for the invitation to present the original paper but also for supplying illustrations and answering queries at a time when he and his staff were engaged in helping to repair the ravages of the Florence floods.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document