Joanna Miles, The Devil’s Mortal Weapons: An Anthology of Late Medieval and Protestant Vernacular Theology and Popular Culture. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2018, xv, 400 pp.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 500-502
Author(s):  
Albrecht Classen
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The Public ◽  
Religious Issues ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Middle Ages

As recent scholarship has increasingly realized, all our traditional paradigms regarding historical or cultural epochs are the results of long academic debates and represent the outcome of extensive negotiations. What we have traditionally identified as the Middle Ages and as the Renaissance or the era of the Protestant Reformation, suddenly no longer seems to be so neatly separated. In fact, much of the public discourse in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, especially with respect to religious issues, morality, and ethics, continued well beyond 1500 and even extended into the seventeenth century, as mirrored, for instance, by Shakespeare, who certainly reveals many medieval elements in his writings.

Matei Cazacu, Dracula. Ed. Stephen W. Reinert, trans. Nicole Mordarski et al. East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 450–1450, 46. Leiden: Brill, 2017, pp. xxxiii, 457, 27 illus.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 438-439
Author(s):  
Thomas Farmer
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
The Public ◽  
Historical Figure ◽  
The Middle Ages

The name Vlad III Ţepeş may be unfamiliar to the public, but Dracula certainly is not; the latter conjures up a host of images from popular culture, most of which have only a tenuous connection to the former. Yet Dracula was an actual historical figure, and Matei Cazacu’s biography reveals that his life and reign are worthy of study in their own right. Having originally appeared in French in 2004, it has now been translated into English by Nicole Mordarski, a student of Stephen Reinert at Rutgers. As Reinert explains in his introduction, Mordarski translated Cazacu’s French narrative (with assistance), while he handled translations of the quotations from their original languages into English and updated the bibliography. The result is a godsend for Anglophone readers, who now have access to a thorough, scholarly account of the Impaler’s life and times.

Matthew Wranovix, Priests and Their Books in Late Medieval Eichstätt. Lanham, Boulder, New York, and London: Lexington Books, 2017, xx, 221 pp.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 487-488
Author(s):  
Albrecht Classen
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
New World ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Catholic Clergy ◽  
Dramatic Decline ◽  
Intellectual Abilities ◽  
Religious Devotion ◽  
The Middle Ages

One of the most effective propaganda tools used by the Humanists and early Protestants directed against the Catholic clergy was the severe criticism of their lack of education, their ignorance about the biblical texts, and their material abuse of their position within their communities. Scholarship has mostly accepted this viewpoint, subscribing to the notion of a dramatic decline of the late medieval clergy in terms of its morality, intellectual abilities, and religious devotion and piety. The alleged ‘autumn of the Middle Ages’ hence gave way to the rise of a new world, the Renaissance and the age of the Protestant Reformation.

“The Truth of Reliable Tradition”: Saadya Gaon, Arabic Rhetoric, and the Challenge to Rhetorical Historiography

2017 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-188
Author(s):  
Brandon Katzir
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Arabic Language ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Medieval Rhetoric ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Latin Language ◽  
Arabic Rhetoric ◽  
Rhetorical Traditions ◽  
The Middle Ages

This article explores the rhetoric of medieval rabbi and philosopher Saadya Gaon, arguing that Saadya typifies what LuMing Mao calls the “interconnectivity” of rhetorical cultures (Mao 46). Suggesting that Saadya makes use of argumentative techniques from Greek-inspired, rationalist Islamic theologians, I show how his rhetoric challenges dominant works of rhetorical historiography by participating in three interconnected cultures: Greek, Jewish, and Islamic. Taking into account recent scholarship on Jewish rhetoric, I argue that Saadya's amalgamation of Jewish rhetorical genres alongside Greco-Islamic genres demonstrates how Jewish and Islamic rhetoric were closely connected in the Middle Ages. Specifically, the article analyzes the rhetorical significance of Saadya's most famous treatise on Jewish philosophy, The Book of Doctrines and Beliefs, which I argue utilizes Greco-Islamic rhetorical strategies in a polemical defense of rabbinical authority. As a tenth-century writer who worked across multiple rhetorical traditions and genres, Saadya challenges the monocultural, Latin-language histories of medieval rhetoric, demonstrating the importance of investigating Arabic-language and Jewish rhetorics of the Middle Ages.

Attitudes of Seventeenth-Century France Toward the Middle Ages.

1946 ◽  
Vol 61 (7) ◽  
pp. 484
Author(s):  
H. Carrington Lancaster ◽  
Nathan Edelman
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
The Middle Ages

Protestant Rivalry — Metaphysics and Rhetoric in Germany c. 1590–1620

1990 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristian Jensen
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Early Modern Times ◽  
The Middle Ages

One of the most remarkable changes to take place at German Protestant universities during the last decade of the sixteenth century and the first twenty years of the seventeenth century was the return of metaphysics after more than halfa century of absence. University metaphysics has acquired a reputation for sterile aridity which was strengthened rather than diminished by its survival in early modern times, when such disciplines are supposed deservedly to have vanished with the end of the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, this survival has attracted some attention this century. For a long urne it was assumed that German Protestants needed a metaphysical defence against the intellectual vigour of the Jesuits. Lewalter has shown, however, that this was not the case.

scholarly journals The evolution of the hospital from antiquity to the end of the middle ages

Curationis ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Cilliers ◽  
F.P. Retief
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Health Care Facilities ◽  
Public Hospitals ◽  
Nursing Facilities ◽  
The Public ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Specialized Institutions ◽  
And Function ◽  
The Military ◽  
The Middle Ages

The evolution of the hospital is traced from its onset in ancient Mesopotamia towards the end of the 2nd millennium to the end of the Middle Ages. Reference is made to institutionalised health care facilities in India as early as the 5th century BC, and with the spread of Buddhism to the east, to nursing facilities, the nature and function of which are not known to us, in Sri Lanka, China and South East Asia. Special attention is paid to the situation in the Graeco-Roman era: one would expect to find the origin of the hospital in the modem sense of the word in Greece, the birthplace of rational medicine in the 4th century BC, but the Hippocratic doctors paid house-calls, and the temples of Asclepius were visited for incubation sleep and magico-religious treatment. In Roman times the military and slave hospitals which existed since the 1st century AD, were built for a specialized group and not for the public, and were therefore also not precursors of the modem hospital. It is to the Christians that one must turn for the origin of the modem hospital. Hospices, initially built to shelter pilgrims and messengers between various bishops, were under Christian control developed into hospitals in the modem sense of the word. In Rome itself, the first hospital was built in the 4th century AD by a wealthy penitent widow, Fabiola. In the early Middle Ages (6th to 10th century), under the influence of the Benedictine Order, an infirmary became an established part of every monastery. During the late Middle Ages (beyond the 10th century) monastic infirmaries continued to expand, but public hospitals were also opened, financed by city authorities, the church and private sources. Specialized institutions, like leper houses, also originated at this time. During the Golden Age of Islam the Muslim world was clearly more advanced than its Christian counterpart with magnificent hospitals in various countries.

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