front cover of The Secret of Secrets
The Secret of Secrets
The Scholarly Career of a Pseudo-Aristotelian Text in the Latin Middle Ages
Steven J. Williams
University of Michigan Press, 2003
The Secret of Secrets. The title alone promises the revelation of the most treasured arcana and piques our interest. Add the names of Aristotle and Alexander the Great, and our curiosity is securely engaged. Readers reacted similarly during the Latin Middle Ages. The work alleges to be an extended letter of advice sent by Aristotle to his former pupil Alexander the Great while the latter was on a campaign in Persia. It stood at the top of the "best-seller" list for hundreds of years and was read by two different audiences: scholars and laypersons. Steven J. Williams focuses his study on its reception by European scholars, starting with its translation into Latin during the High Middle Ages and carrying the story through to the time when scholarly attention waned around 1550.
 
An important medieval text that also provides a window onto medieval intellectual life, Secret of Secrets played a modest though significant role in medieval scholarly life: "significant" in that it was used in a variety of scholarly contexts, had some part to play in the scholarly controversies of the day, and was so often read that an impressive number of manuscripts are still extant today; "modest" in that it was cited much less frequently than the major works of its day.
 
Steven J. Williams is Associate Professor in the Department of History, New Mexico Highlands University.
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front cover of The Symbolism of Marriage in Early Christianity and the Latin Middle Ages
The Symbolism of Marriage in Early Christianity and the Latin Middle Ages
Images, Impact, Cognition
Line Cecilie Engh
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
In the Middle Ages everyone, it seems, entered into some form of marriage. Nuns -- and even some monks -- married the bridegroom Christ. Bishops married their sees. The popes, as vicars of Christ, married the universal Church. And lay people, high and low, married each other. What united these marriages was their common reference to the union of Christ and Church. Christ™'s marriage to the Church was the paradigmatic symbol in which all the other forms of union participated, in superior or inferior ways. This book grapples with questions of the impact of marriage symbolism on both ideas and practice in the early Christian and medieval period. In what ways did marriage symbolism -- with its embedded concepts of gender, reproduction, household, and hierarchy -- shape people™'s thought about other things, such as celibacy, ecclesial and political relations, and devotional relations? How did symbolic cognition shape marriage itself? And how, if at all, were these two directions of thinking symbolically about marriage related?
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