BiblioVault - Books about Christian literature, Latin (Medieval and modern)

The Idea of the Theater in Latin Christian Thought

Augustine to the Fourteenth Century

Donnalee Dox

University of Michigan Press, 2004

"Through well-informed and nuanced readings of key documents from the fourth through fourteenth centuries, this book challenges historians' long-held beliefs about how concepts of Greco-Roman theater survived the fall of Rome and the Middle Ages, and contributed to the dramatic triumphs of the Renaissance. Dox's work is a significant contribution to the history of ideas that will change forever the standard narrative of the birth and development of theatrical activity in medieval Europe."
---Margaret Knapp, Arizona State University

"...an elegantly concise survey of the way classical notions of theater have been interpreted in the Latin Middle Ages. Dox convincingly demonstrates that far from there being a single 'medieval' attitude towards theater, there was in fact much debate about how theater could be understood to function within Christian tradition, even in the so-called 'dark ages' of Western culture. This book makes an innovative contribution to studies of the history of the theater, seen in terms of the history of ideas, rather than of practice."
---Constant Mews, Director, Centre for the Study of Religion & Theology, University of Monash, Australia

"In the centuries between St. Augustine and Bartholomew of Bruges, Christian thought gradually moved from a brusque rejection of classical theater to a progressively nuanced and positive assessment of its value. In this lucidly written study, Donnalee Dox adds an important facet to our understanding of the Christian reaction to, and adaptation of, classical culture in the centuries between the Church Fathers and the rediscovery of Aristotle."
---Philipp W. Rosemann, University of Dallas

This book considers medieval texts that deal with ancient theater as documents of Latin Christianity's intellectual history. As an exercise in medieval historiography, this study also examines biases in modern scholarship that seek links between these texts and performance practices. The effort to bring these texts together and place them in their intellectual contexts reveals a much more nuanced and contested discourse on Greco-Roman theater and medieval theatrical practice than has been acknowledged. The book is arranged chronologically and shows the medieval foundations for the Early Modern integration of dramatic theory and theatrical performance.

The Idea of the Theater in Latin Christian Thought will be of interest to theater historians, intellectual historians, and those who work on points of contact between the European Middle Ages and Renaissance. The broad range of documents discussed (liturgical treatises, scholastic commentaries, philosophical tracts, and letters spanning many centuries) renders individual chapters useful to philosophers, aestheticians, and liturgists as well as to historians and historiographers. For theater historians, this study offers an alternative reading of familiar texts which may alter our understanding of the emergence of dramatic and theatrical traditions in the West. Because theater is rarely considered as a component of intellectual projects in the Middle Ages, this study opens a new topic in the writing of medieval intellectual history.

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Macaronic Sermons

Bilingualism and Preaching in Late-Medieval England

Siegfried Wenzel

University of Michigan Press, 2010

Siegfried Wenzel's groundbreaking study seeks to describe and analyze the linguistically mixed, or macaronic, sermons in late fourteenth-century England. Not only are these works of considerable religious interest, they provide extensive information on their literary, linguistic, and cultural milieux.

Macaronic Sermons begins by offering a typology of such works: those in which English words offer glosses, or offer structural functions, or offer neither of the two but yet are syntactically integrated. This last group is then examined in detail: reasons are given for this usage and for its origins, based on the realities of fourteenth-century England.

Siefriend Wenzel draws valuable conclusions about the linguistic status quo of the era, together with the extent of education, the audiences' expectations, and the ways in which the authors' minds worked.

Obviously of interest to scholars and students of early English literature, Macaronic Sermons also contains much valuable information for specialists in language development or oral theory, and for those interested in multicultural societies.

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The One Thomas More

Travis Curtright

Catholic University of America Press, 2012

The One Thomas More carefully studies the central humanist and polemical texts written by More to illustrate a coherent development of thought.

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Saints of the Christianization Age of Central Europe

Tenth to Eleventh Centuries

Cristian Gaspar

Central European University Press, 2012

This volume is the first of two containing hagiographical narratives from medieval Central Europe. The lives of the saints in this volume, from the tenth to eleventh centuries, written not much later, are telling witnesses for the process of Christianization of Bohemia, Poland, Hungary and Dalmatia. Most of them became patrons of their region and highly venerated throughout the Middle Ages. The volume presents the first English translation of a legend of each of these saints with the most recent critical edition of the Latin original and prefaces discussing the textual tradition. In an appendix the extensive hagiographical literature of the saints is being critically surveyed.

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The Sanctity of the Leaders

Holy Kings, Princes, Bishops and Abbots from Central Europe (11th to 13th Centuries)

Gábor Klaniczay

Central European University Press, 2023

The latest title in the Central European Medieval Texts series contains the lives of saints who were canonized in the eleventh through thirteenth centuries in the newly Christianized countries of Central and Eastern Europe (Bohemia, Poland, Hungary, and Dalmatia). A rejoinder to the earlier volume in the series, the Saints of the Christianization Age of Central Europe (CEMT, Vol. 6), containing hermits, missionaries, and martyrs, this second volume of hagiography is dominated by political or ecclesiastical leaders who became saintly patrons of their region and were highly venerated throughout the Middle Ages.

The legends in the volume present the two Hungarian holy kings Stephen and Ladislas, the holy duke Emeric, the Czech holy abbot Prokop of Sázava, three bishops, the Venetian-Hungarian Gellért of Csanád, the Polish Stanislas of Cracow (both martyrs), and the Dalmatian holy bishop Saint John of Trogir. Each “vita” is published in Latin original with an English translation and with prefaces discussing the textual tradition.

Saints’ lives have been recognized as an invaluable source of information on social and economic history, the history of mentalities and everyday life, cultural history, and, above all, as a special genre with crucial importance and prevalence in medieval literature.

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Via Crucis

Essays on Early Medieval Sources and Ideas

THOMAS N. HALL

West Virginia University Press, 2002

This book originated as a series of papers delivered at a Symposium on Irish and Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture in Honor of J. E. Cross, held in conjunction with the 30th International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo in May 1996. The purpose of that symposium was to bring together a number of friends and admirers of Professor Cross to celebrate his remarkably rich career as a scholar of Old English and Insular Latin literature; Anglo-Saxon manuscripts; and medieval sermons, saints’ lives, and apocrypha.

Just over a decade earlier, a group of colleagues had honored Professor Cross with a Festschrift published as a special volume of Leeds Studies in English, but in the years since that collection appeared, Professor Cross had managed to launch into the most productive period of his entire career, producing over thirty new articles and books since 1984, including his ground-breaking monograph on the Pembroke 25 homiliary, a facsimile edition of the Copenhagen Wulfstan manuscript for the series Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile, a book on the Gospel of Nicodemus and Vindicta Salvatoris apocrypha from the St Omer 202 homiliary, and an edition and translation of Archbishop Wulfstan’s canon laws.

Surely these achievements were worthy of fresh recognition, we reasoned, and a small cohort of Professor Cross’s friends accordingly began conspiring to host a symposium in his honor with an eye toward producing a second Festschrift. Kalamazoo was the logical site for this event. Professor Cross had frequented the Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo for as long as any of us could remember, had chaired and presented in numerous sessions, and was a plenary speaker in 1990. It was also at Kalamazoo that Professor Cross initiated discussions of a plan to revise and update J. D. A. Ogilvy’s Books Known to the English, 597-1066, an ambitious project that has since given rise to two large collaborative ventures to which many Anglo-Saxonists around the world now contribute: Fontes Anglo-Saxonici and Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture.

Kalamazoo was thus a perfect match for Professor Cross, and with the kind indulgence of the Medieval Congress program committee, we proceeded to organize five sessions for the 1996 meeting on Irish and Anglo-Saxon studies as a tribute to Professor Cross’s work in these areas. The timing, as it turned out, proved meaningful: Professor Cross died unexpectedly the following December, just seven months after the symposium, and the Kalamazoo conference was consequently the last opportunity most of us had to see him.

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The Works of Hrotsvit of Gandersheim

Facsimile of the First Edition (1581)

Hrotsvit of Gandersheim. Edited by David H. Price.

University of Illinois Press, 2017

Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, born circa 935, was a canoness at Gandersheim, a Benedictine monastery in Saxony. She may have come from the Saxon nobility, and she had the education to refer to ancient authors like Ovid and Virgil. Hrotsvit died around the year 975. David H. Price is professor of religious studies, history, and Jewish studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

These works by a tenth-century woman, who wrote plays when no one else in Europe was writing plays and who imitated the style of Terence when most people thought the classics had been forgotten, caused a literary sensation when they were first published in 1501.

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