front cover of Middle English Dictionary
Middle English Dictionary
T.8
Robert E. Lewis, Editor-in-Chief
University of Michigan Press, 1996
The goal of the Middle English Dictionary is to include all meanings, grammatical forms, and spellings of all the words identified by its extensive reading program. When completed, it will represent what has been called the greatest achievement in medieval scholarship in America and the most important single project in English historical lexicography being carried out anywhere today. After sixty-five years it will have produced about 15,000 pages.
The Middle English Dictionary is a monumental scholarly endeavor that began more than fifty years ago and is expected to be completed in the late-1990s. The task of the editors compiling the dictionary is to document the English language from just after the Norman Conquest up to the introduction of the printing press at the end of the 1400s. With that innovation the language became more or less standardized, but during the Middle Ages the language was evolving under the stress of events and social change, particularly as French culture was absorbed into the language. These were truly the formative years of the English language, and they present major challenges to lexicographers.
Published volumes include all fascicles from A.1 through T.10, plus the Plan and Bibliography.
[more]

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Middle English Dictionary
T.9
Robert E. Lewis, Editor-in-Chief
University of Michigan Press, 1997
The goal of the Middle English Dictionary is to include all meanings, grammatical forms, and spellings of all the words identified by its extensive reading program. When completed, it will represent what has been called the greatest achievement in medieval scholarship in America and the most important single project in English historical lexicography being carried out anywhere today. After sixty-five years it will have produced about 15,000 pages.
The Middle English Dictionary is a monumental scholarly endeavor that began more than fifty years ago and is expected to be completed in the late-1990s. The task of the editors compiling the dictionary is to document the English language from just after the Norman Conquest up to the introduction of the printing press at the end of the 1400s. With that innovation the language became more or less standardized, but during the Middle Ages the language was evolving under the stress of events and social change, particularly as French culture was absorbed into the language. These were truly the formative years of the English language, and they present major challenges to lexicographers.
Published volumes include all fascicles from A.1 through T.10, plus the Plan and Bibliography.
[more]

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Middle English Dictionary
U.1
Robert E. Lewis, Editor-in-Chief
University of Michigan Press, 1997
The goal of the Middle English Dictionary is to include all meanings, grammatical forms, and spellings of all the words identified by its extensive reading program. When completed, it will represent what has been called the greatest achievement in medieval scholarship in America and the most important single project in English historical lexicography being carried out anywhere today. After sixty-five years it will have produced about 15,000 pages.
The Middle English Dictionary is a monumental scholarly endeavor that began more than fifty years ago and is expected to be completed in 2001. The task of the editors compiling the dictionary is to document the English language from just after the Norman Conquest up to the introduction of the printing press at the end of the 1400s. With that innovation the language became more or less standardized, but during the Middle Ages the language was evolving under the stress of events and social change, particularly as French culture was absorbed into the language. These were truly the formative years of the English language, and they present major challenges to lexicographers.
Fascicles U.1, U.2, and U.3 are the most recent additions to this ongoing undertaking. Published volumes include all fascicles from A.1 through U.3, plus the Plan and Bibliography.
[more]

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Middle English Dictionary
U.2
Robert E. Lewis, Editor-in-Chief
University of Michigan Press, 1998
The goal of the Middle English Dictionary is to include all meanings, grammatical forms, and spellings of all the words identified by its extensive reading program. When completed, it will represent what has been called the greatest achievement in medieval scholarship in America and the most important single project in English historical lexicography being carried out anywhere today. After sixty-five years it will have produced about 15,000 pages.
The Middle English Dictionary is a monumental scholarly endeavor that began more than fifty years ago and is expected to be completed in 2001. The task of the editors compiling the dictionary is to document the English language from just after the Norman Conquest up to the introduction of the printing press at the end of the 1400s. With that innovation the language became more or less standardized, but during the Middle Ages the language was evolving under the stress of events and social change, particularly as French culture was absorbed into the language. These were truly the formative years of the English language, and they present major challenges to lexicographers.
Fascicles U.1, U.2, and U.3 are the most recent additions to this ongoing undertaking. Published volumes include all fascicles from A.1 through U.3, plus the Plan and Bibliography.
[more]

front cover of Middle English Dictionary
Middle English Dictionary
U.3
Robert E. Lewis, Editor-in-Chief
University of Michigan Press, 1998
The goal of the Middle English Dictionary is to include all meanings, grammatical forms, and spellings of all the words identified by its extensive reading program. When completed, it will represent what has been called the greatest achievement in medieval scholarship in America and the most important single project in English historical lexicography being carried out anywhere today. After sixty-five years it will have produced about 15,000 pages.
The Middle English Dictionary is a monumental scholarly endeavor that began more than fifty years ago and is expected to be completed in 2001. The task of the editors compiling the dictionary is to document the English language from just after the Norman Conquest up to the introduction of the printing press at the end of the 1400s. With that innovation the language became more or less standardized, but during the Middle Ages the language was evolving under the stress of events and social change, particularly as French culture was absorbed into the language. These were truly the formative years of the English language, and they present major challenges to lexicographers.
Fascicles U.1, U.2, and U.3 are the most recent additions to this ongoing undertaking. Published volumes include all fascicles from A.1 through U.3, plus the Plan and Bibliography.
[more]

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Middle English Dictionary
U.4
Robert E. Lewis, Editor-in-Chief
University of Michigan Press, 1998
The most important modern reference work for Middle English studies
[more]

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Middle English Dictionary
V
Robert E. Lewis, Editor-in-Chief
University of Michigan Press, 1999
The goal of the Middle English Dictionary is to include all meanings, grammatical forms, and spellings of all the words identified by its extensive reading program. When completed, it will represent what has been called the greatest achievement in medieval scholarship in America and the most important single project in English historical lexicography being carried out anywhere today. After sixty-five years, it will have produced about 15,000 pages.
The Middle English Dictionary, a monumental scholarly endeavor that began more than fifty years ago, is scheduled to be completed in 2001. The task of the editors compiling the dictionary is to document the English language from just after the Norman Conquest to the introduction of the printing press at the end of the 1400s. With that innovation the language became more or less standardized, but during the Middle Ages the language was evolving under the stress of events and social change, particularly as French culture was absorbed into the language. These were truly the formative years of the English language, and they present major challenges to lexicographers.
Fascicles V.1, W.1, and W.2 are the most recent additions to this ongoing undertaking. Published volumes include all fascicles from A.1 through U.3, plus the Plan and Bibliography.
[more]

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Middle English Dictionary
W.1
Robert E. Lewis, Editor-in-Chief
University of Michigan Press, 1999
The goal of the Middle English Dictionary is to include all meanings, grammatical forms, and spellings of all the words identified by its extensive reading program. When completed, it will represent what has been called the greatest achievement in medieval scholarship in America and the most important single project in English historical lexicography being carried out anywhere today. After sixty-five years, it will have produced about 15,000 pages.
The Middle English Dictionary, a monumental scholarly endeavor that began more than fifty years ago, is scheduled to be completed in 2001. The task of the editors compiling the dictionary is to document the English language from just after the Norman Conquest to the introduction of the printing press at the end of the 1400s. With that innovation the language became more or less standardized, but during the Middle Ages the language was evolving under the stress of events and social change, particularly as French culture was absorbed into the language. These were truly the formative years of the English language, and they present major challenges to lexicographers.
Fascicles V.1, W.1, and W.2 are the most recent additions to this ongoing undertaking. Published volumes include all fascicles from A.1 through U.3, plus the Plan and Bibliography.
[more]

front cover of Middle English Dictionary
Middle English Dictionary
W.2
Robert E. Lewis, Editor-in-Chief
University of Michigan Press, 1999
The goal of the Middle English Dictionary is to include all meanings, grammatical forms, and spellings of all the words identified by its extensive reading program. When completed, it will represent what has been called the greatest achievement in medieval scholarship in America and the most important single project in English historical lexicography being carried out anywhere today. After sixty-five years, it will have produced about 15,000 pages.
The Middle English Dictionary, a monumental scholarly endeavor that began more than fifty years ago, is scheduled to be completed in 2001. The task of the editors compiling the dictionary is to document the English language from just after the Norman Conquest to the introduction of the printing press at the end of the 1400s. With that innovation the language became more or less standardized, but during the Middle Ages the language was evolving under the stress of events and social change, particularly as French culture was absorbed into the language. These were truly the formative years of the English language, and they present major challenges to lexicographers.
Fascicles V.1, W.1, and W.2 are the most recent additions to this ongoing undertaking. Published volumes include all fascicles from A.1 through U.3, plus the Plan and Bibliography.
[more]

front cover of Middle English Dictionary
Middle English Dictionary
W.3
Robert E. Lewis, Editor-in-Chief
University of Michigan Press, 2000
The goal of the Middle English Dictionary is to include all meanings, grammatical forms, and spellings of all the words identified by its extensive reading program. When completed, it will represent what has been called the greatest achievement in medieval scholarship in America and the most important single project in English historical lexicography being carried out anywhere today. After sixty-five years it will have produced about 15,000 pages.
TheMiddle English Dictionary, a monumental scholarly endeavor that began more than fifty years ago, is completed with the publication of these remaining fascicles. The task of the editors compiling the dictionary is to document theE nglish language from just after the Norman Conquest up to the introduction of the printing press at the end of the 1400s. With that innovation the language became more or less standardized, but during the Middle Ages the language was evolving under the stress of events and social change, particularly as French culture was absorbed into the language. These were truly the formative years of the English language, and they present major challenges to lexicographers.
 
[more]

front cover of Middle English Dictionary
Middle English Dictionary
W.4
Robert E. Lewis, Editor-in-Chief
University of Michigan Press, 2000
The goal of the Middle English Dictionary is to include all meanings, grammatical forms, and spellings of all the words identified by its extensive reading program. When completed, it will represent what has been called the greatest achievement in medieval scholarship in America and the most important single project in English historical lexicography being carried out anywhere today. After sixty-five years it will have produced about 15,000 pages.
TheMiddle English Dictionary, a monumental scholarly endeavor that began more than fifty years ago, is completed with the publication of these remaining fascicles. The task of the editors compiling the dictionary is to document the English language from just after the Norman Conquest up to the introduction of the printing press at the end of the 1400s. With that innovation the language became more or less standardized, but during the Middle Ages the language was evolving under the stress of events and social change, particularly as French culture was absorbed into the language. These were truly the formative years of the English language, and they present major challenges to lexicographers.
[more]

front cover of Middle English Dictionary
Middle English Dictionary
W.5
Robert E. Lewis, Editor-in-Chief
University of Michigan Press, 2000
The goal of the Middle English Dictionary is to include all meanings, grammatical forms, and spellings of all the words identified by its extensive reading program. When completed, it will represent what has been called the greatest achievement in medieval scholarship in America and the most important single project in English historical lexicography being carried out anywhere today. After sixty-five years it will have produced about 15,000 pages.
TheMiddle English Dictionary, a monumental scholarly endeavor that began more than fifty years ago, is completed with the publication of these remaining fascicles. The task of the editors compiling the dictionary is to document theE nglish language from just after the Norman Conquest up to the introduction of the printing press at the end of the 1400s. With that innovation the language became more or less standardized, but during the Middle Ages the language was evolving under the stress of events and social change, particularly as French culture was absorbed into the language. These were truly the formative years of the English language, and they present major challenges to lexicographers.
[more]

front cover of Middle English Dictionary
Middle English Dictionary
W.6
Robert E. Lewis, Editor-in-Chief
University of Michigan Press, 2000
The goal of the Middle English Dictionary is to include all meanings, grammatical forms, and spellings of all the words identified by its extensive reading program. When completed, it will represent what has been called the greatest achievement in medieval scholarship in America and the most important single project in English historical lexicography being carried out anywhere today. After sixty-five years it will have produced about 15,000 pages.
TheMiddle English Dictionary, a monumental scholarly endeavor that began more than fifty years ago, is completed with the publication of these remaining fascicles. The task of the editors compiling the dictionary is to document theE nglish language from just after the Norman Conquest up to the introduction of the printing press at the end of the 1400s. With that innovation the language became more or less standardized, but during the Middle Ages the language was evolving under the stress of events and social change, particularly as French culture was absorbed into the language. These were truly the formative years of the English language, and they present major challenges to lexicographers.
Fascicle X/Y/Z is the final addition to this incredible undertaking. Published volumes include all fascicles from A.1 through X/Y/Z, plus the Plan and Bibliography.
[more]

front cover of Middle English Dictionary
Middle English Dictionary
W.7
Robert E. Lewis, Editor-in-Chief
University of Michigan Press, 2001
The goal of the Middle English Dictionary is to include all meanings, grammatical forms, and spellings of all the words identified by its extensive reading program. When completed, it will represent what has been called the greatest achievement in medieval scholarship in America and the most important single project in English historical lexicography being carried out anywhere today. After sixty-five years it will have produced about 15,000 pages.
TheMiddle English Dictionary, a monumental scholarly endeavor that began more than fifty years ago, is completed with the publication of these remaining fascicles. The task of the editors compiling the dictionary is to document theE nglish language from just after the Norman Conquest up to the introduction of the printing press at the end of the 1400s. With that innovation the language became more or less standardized, but during the Middle Ages the language was evolving under the stress of events and social change, particularly as French culture was absorbed into the language. These were truly the formative years of the English language, and they present major challenges to lexicographers.
Fascicle X/Y/Z is the final addition to this incredible undertaking. Published volumes include all fascicles from A.1 through X/Y/Z, plus the Plan and Bibliography.
[more]

front cover of Middle English Dictionary
Middle English Dictionary
W.8
Robert E. Lewis, Editor-in-Chief
University of Michigan Press, 2001
The goal of the Middle English Dictionary is to include all meanings, grammatical forms, and spellings of all the words identified by its extensive reading program. When completed, it will represent what has been called the greatest achievement in medieval scholarship in America and the most important single project in English historical lexicography being carried out anywhere today. After sixty-five years it will have produced about 15,000 pages.
TheMiddle English Dictionary, a monumental scholarly endeavor that began more than fifty years ago, is completed with the publication of these remaining fascicles. The task of the editors compiling the dictionary is to document theE nglish language from just after the Norman Conquest up to the introduction of the printing press at the end of the 1400s. With that innovation the language became more or less standardized, but during the Middle Ages the language was evolving under the stress of events and social change, particularly as French culture was absorbed into the language. These were truly the formative years of the English language, and they present major challenges to lexicographers.
Fascicle X/Y/Z is the final addition to this incredible undertaking. Published volumes include all fascicles from A.1 through X/Y/Z, plus the Plan and Bibliography.
[more]

front cover of Middle English Dictionary
Middle English Dictionary
X/Y/Z
Robert E. Lewis, Editor-in-Chief
University of Michigan Press, 2001
The goal of the Middle English Dictionary is to include all meanings, grammatical forms, and spellings of all the words identified by its extensive reading program. When completed, it will represent what has been called the greatest achievement in medieval scholarship in America and the most important single project in English historical lexicography being carried out anywhere today. After sixty-five years it will have produced about 15,000 pages.
TheMiddle English Dictionary, a monumental scholarly endeavor that began more than fifty years ago, is completed with the publication of these remaining fascicles. The task of the editors compiling the dictionary is to document theE nglish language from just after the Norman Conquest up to the introduction of the printing press at the end of the 1400s. With that innovation the language became more or less standardized, but during the Middle Ages the language was evolving under the stress of events and social change, particularly as French culture was absorbed into the language. These were truly the formative years of the English language, and they present major challenges to lexicographers.
Fascicles W.9 and X/Y/Z will be the final additions to this incredible undertaking. Published volumes include all fascicles from A.1 through W.8, plus the Plan and Bibliography.
[more]

front cover of Middle High German Legends in English Translation
Middle High German Legends in English Translation
Edited by Jef Jacobs, Kenny Louwen, Bart Veldhoen, and Barend Verkerk
Leiden University Press, 2022
Five medieval German legends, freshly translated with accessible reading guides.

This volume collects five medieval German legends—the story of Veronica, Vespasian, Theophilus, Mary Magdalene, and the True Cross—in both the Middle High German original and modern English translation alongside unique guides to the relevant Germanic research and the principal themes of each text.
 
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front cover of Migration in the Medieval Mediterranean
Migration in the Medieval Mediterranean
Sarah Davis-Secord
Arc Humanities Press, 2021
Migration in the Medieval Mediterranean argues that the cross-Mediterranean movement of peoples was a central aspect of the medieval world. Medieval people migrated in search of safety after regime change, secure life amongst coreligionists, and prosperous careers. This kind of travel between Muslim and Christian regions demonstrates the mutual influences, interconnections, and communications linking them, surpassing the differences between the two civilizations.
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Miniature Painting in the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia from the Twelfth to the Fourteenth Century
Sirarpie Der Nersessian
Harvard University Press, 1993
Sirarpie Der Nersessian’s scholarship has influenced the understanding of Armenian art and its Byzantine context. These two volumes are the culmination of six decades devoted to the exploration of Armenian art, and reflect a deep knowledge of the manuscripts and their creators.
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front cover of Ministry to the Sick and Dying in the Late Medieval Church
Ministry to the Sick and Dying in the Late Medieval Church
Thomas M. Izbicki
Catholic University of America Press, 2023
The focus of this volume is on ministry to the sick and dying in the later Middle Ages, especially providing them with the sacraments. Medieval writers linked illness to sin and its forgiveness. The priest, as physician of souls, was expected to heal the soul, preparing it for the hereafter. His ministry might also effect healing of bodies, when that healing did not endanger the soul. This book treats how a priest prepared to visit sick persons and went to them in procession with the Eucharist and oil of the sick. The priest was to comfort the patient and, if death was imminent, prepare the soul for the hereafter. Canon law, theology, and ritual sources are employed. Three sacraments, penance, viaticum, (final communion) and extreme unction (anointing of the sick) are treated in detail. Sickbed confession was designed to forgive the ailing person's mortal sins. A priest could absolve a dying person of all sins, even those reserved to a bishop or the pope. Viaticum was to strengthen a suffering Christian for life's last conflict, that between angels and demons for the soul of the dying person. The deathbed thus was a spiritual battlefield. Extreme unction was reserved for those in danger of death, relieving the soul of venial sins or "the remains of sin," even after confession and absolution. The commendatio animae (commendation of the soul) used with the dying was to usher the soul into the afterlife. Many works have been written about attitudes toward death, dying, and the afterlife in the Middle Ages. Likewise, there is a good deal of literature about individual sacraments. This study aims at bridging between these literatures, with a focus on the priest and parishioner in both theory and practice at the sickbed.
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front cover of Minting, State, and Economy in the Visigothic Kingdom
Minting, State, and Economy in the Visigothic Kingdom
From Settlement in Aquitaine through the First Decade of the Muslim Conquest of Spain
Andrew Kurt
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
This study of the Visigothic kingdom monetary system in southern Gaul and Hispania from the fifth century through the Muslim invasion of Spain fills a major gap in the scholarship of late antiquity. Examining all aspects of the making of currency, it sets minting in relation to questions of state - monarchical power, administration and apparatus, motives for money production - and economy. In the context of the later Roman Empire and its successor states in the west, the minting and currency of the Visigoths reveal shared patterns as well as originality. The analysis brings both economic life and the needs of the state into sharper focus, with significant implications for the study of an essential element in daily life and government. This study combines an appreciation for the surprising level of sophistication in the Visigothic minting system with an accessible approach to a subject which can seem complex and abstruse.
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Mirabile Dictu
Representations of the Marvelous in Medieval and Renaissance Epic
Douglas Biow
University of Michigan Press, 1996
Mirabile Dictu covers in six separate chapters the works of Virgil, Dante, Boccaccio, Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser. Its broad aim is to provide a select cross-section of works in the Middle Ages and Renaissance in order systematically to examine and compare for the first time the marvelous in the light of epic genre, of literary and critical theory (both past and present), and of historically and culturally determined representational practices.
Douglas Biow organizes this volume around the literary topos of the bleeding branch through which a metamorphosed person speaks. In each chapter the author takes this "marvellous event" as his starting point for a broad-ranging comparison of the several poets who employed the image; he also investigates the ways in which a period's notion of "history" underpins its representations of the marvelous. This method offers a controlled yet flexible framework within which to develop readings that engage a multiplicity of theories and approaches.
Mirabile Dictu offers not only an insightful survey of the literary connections among this group of important poets, but also a useful point of departure for scholars and students intrigued by the reuse of epic conventions, by the peculiar role of "marvellous" events in dramatic poetry, and by the later history of classical literature.
 
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front cover of Miracle Tales from Byzantium
Miracle Tales from Byzantium
Alice-Mary Talbot
Harvard University Press, 2012

Miracles occupied a unique place in medieval and Byzantine life and thought. This volume makes available three collections of miracle tales never before translated into English. Together, the collections offer an exceptional variety of miracles from the Byzantine era.

First are the fifth-century Miracles of Saint Thekla. Legendary female companion of the Apostle Paul, Thekla counted among the most revered martyrs of the early church. Her Miracles depict activities, at once extraordinary and ordinary, in a rural healing shrine at a time when Christianity was still supplanting traditional religion. A half millennium later comes another anonymous text, the tenth-century Miracles of the Spring of the Virgin Mary. This collection describes how the marvelous waters at this shrine outside Constantinople healed emperors, courtiers, and churchmen. Complementing the first two collections are the Miracles of Saint Gregory Palamas, fourteenth-century archbishop of Thessalonike. Written by the most gifted hagiographer of his era (Philotheos Kokkinos), this account tells of miraculous healings that Palamas performed, both while alive and once dead. It allows readers to witness the development of a saint’s cult in late Byzantium. Saints and their miracles were essential components of faith in medieval and Byzantine culture. These collections deepen our understanding of attitudes toward miracles. Simultaneously, they display a remarkable range of registers in which Greek could be written during the still little-known Byzantine period.

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Miracles of the Virgin. Tract on Abuses
Nigel of Canterbury
Harvard University Press, 2022

The first English translation of the earliest Latin poems about miracles performed by the Virgin Mary, composed in twelfth-century Canterbury by a Benedictine monk who inspired Chaucer.

Nigel (ca. 1135–1198), a Benedictine monk at Christ Church in Canterbury, is best known for The Mirror of Fools—a popular satire whose hero Burnellus the Ass is referenced in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Nigel’s oeuvre also includes other important poems and hagiography.

The Miracles of the Virgin is the oldest Latin poem about miracles performed by Mary. This collection features seventeen lively tales in which the Virgin rescues a disappointed administrator from a pact with the devil, has a Roman emperor killed by a long-dead martyr, saves a Jewish boy from being burned alive, and shields an abbess from the shame of pregnancy. Each story illustrates the boundlessness of Mary’s mercy. In the Tract on Abuses, a letter that resembles a religious pamphlet, Nigel rails against ecclesiastical corruption and worldly entanglements.

Alongside authoritative editions of the Latin texts, this volume offers the first translations of both works into English.

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Mirror in Parchment
The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England
Michael Camille
University of Chicago Press, 1998
What is the status of visual evidence in history? Can we actually see the past through images? Where are the traces of previous lives deposited? Michael Camille addresses these important questions in Mirror in Parchment, a lively, searching study of one medieval manuscript, its patron, producers, and historical progeny.

The richly illuminated Luttrell Psalter was created for the English nobleman Sir Geoffrey Luttrell (1276-1345). Inexpensive mechanical illustration has since disseminated the book's images to a much wider audience; hence the Psalter's representations of manorial life have come to profoundly shape our modern idea of what medieval English people, high and low, looked like at work and at play. Alongside such supposedly truthful representations, the Psalter presents myriad images of fantastic monsters and beasts. These patently false images have largely been disparaged or ignored by modern historians and art historians alike, for they challenge the credibility of those pictures in the Luttrell Psalter that we wish to see as real.

In the conviction that medieval images were not generally intended to reflect daily life but rather to shape a new reality, Michael Camille analyzes the Psalter's famous pictures as representations of the world, imagined and real, of its original patron. Addressed are late medieval chivalric ideals, physical sites of power, and the boundaries of Sir Geoffrey's imagined community, wherein agricultural laborers and fabulous monsters play a similar ideological role. The Luttrell Psalter thus emerges as a complex social document of the world as its patron hoped and feared it might be.
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front cover of Mirror In Parchment
Mirror In Parchment
The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England
Michael Camille
Reaktion Books, 1998
What is the status of visual evidence in history? Can we actually see the past through images? Where are the traces of previous lives deposited? Michael Camille addresses these important questions in Mirror in Parchment, a lively, searching study of one medieval manuscript, its patron, producers, and historical progeny.

The richly illuminated Luttrell Psalter was created for the English nobleman Sir Geoffrey Luttrell (1276-1345). Inexpensive mechanical illustration has since disseminated the book's images to a much wider audience; hence the Psalter's representations of manorial life have come to profoundly shape our modern idea of what medieval English people, high and low, looked like at work and at play. Alongside such supposedly truthful representations, the Psalter presents myriad images of fantastic monsters and beasts. These patently false images have largely been disparaged or ignored by modern historians and art historians alike, for they challenge the credibility of those pictures in the Luttrell Psalter that we wish to see as real.

In the conviction that medieval images were not generally intended to reflect daily life but rather to shape a new reality, Michael Camille analyzes the Psalter's famous pictures as representations of the world, imagined and real, of its original patron. Addressed are late medieval chivalric ideals, physical sites of power, and the boundaries of Sir Geoffrey's imagined community, wherein agricultural laborers and fabulous monsters play a similar ideological role. The Luttrell Psalter thus emerges as a complex social document of the world as its patron hoped and feared it might be.
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front cover of The Mirror of Spain, 1500-1700
The Mirror of Spain, 1500-1700
The Formation of a Myth
J. N. Hillgarth
University of Michigan Press, 2000
In this major new work, J. N. Hillgarth investigates how Spain was seen by non-Spaniards in the period when it was the leading power in Europe. The author brings together a wide range of sources that elucidate Spanish history and Spanish character. He demonstrates the ways that propaganda has distorted both these things in the past and even continues to do so in the present.
In the first of the volume's four parts, the author discusses the reasons--geographic, political, and religious--why Spain has proved a hard country to understand. Hillgarth looks at travelers to Spain, from pilgrims to diplomats, spies, exiles, and foreign residents. In its second part, special attention is devoted to the interaction between Christians, Jews, and Muslims, including Jewish and Muslim exiles and secret Jews within Spain.
In its third section, The Mirror of Spain explores reactions to Spain by those who saw it from the outside, the Italians, Dutch, French, and English. One chapter deals with the English, Scottish, and Irish Catholics, who, like the Jewish and Muslim exiles, played a double role in that they were at once "insiders" and outsiders. Finally, Hillgarth attempts to show how two crucial centuries have affected the way Spain has been seen down to the present.
The Mirror of Spain draws on a wide range of sources in different languages. It relies on documents in the Public Record Office and the British Library, the Archivo General de Simancas and the collections of the colleges founded by exiles in Spain, and on major libraries in Venice and Jerusalem. The volume will be of interest to a broad spectrum of scholars--to medievalists, historians of Spain, scholars of political and literary thought, and all those interested in notions of national identity.
J. N. Hillgarth has taught for many years at the University of Toronto and the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and has received awards and honors from a wide variety of distinguished institutions in Europe and North America.
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front cover of The Modulated Scream
The Modulated Scream
Pain in Late Medieval Culture
Esther Cohen
University of Chicago Press, 2010

In the late medieval era, pain could be a symbol of holiness, disease, sin, or truth. It could be encouragement to lead a moral life, a punishment for wrong doing, or a method of healing. Exploring the varied depictions and descriptions of pain—from martyrdom narratives to practices of torture and surgery—The Modulated Scream attempts to decode this culture of suffering in the Middle Ages.

Esther Cohen brings to life the cacophony of howls emerging from the written record of physicians, torturers, theologians, and mystics. In considering how people understood suffering, explained it, and meted it out, Cohen discovers that pain was imbued with multiple meanings. While interpreting pain was the province only of the rarified elite, harnessing pain for religious, moral, legal, and social purposes was a practice that pervaded all classes of Medieval life. In the overlap of these contradicting attitudes about what pain was for—how it was to be understood and who should use it—Cohen reveals the distinct and often conflicting cultural traditions and practices of late medieval Europeans. Ambitious and wide-ranging, The Modulated Scream is intellectual history at its most acute.

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front cover of The Monk and the Book
The Monk and the Book
Jerome and the Making of Christian Scholarship
Megan Hale Williams
University of Chicago Press, 2006

In the West, monastic ideals and scholastic pursuits are complementary; monks are popularly imagined copying classics, preserving learning through the Middle Ages, and establishing the first universities. But this dual identity is not without its contradictions. While monasticism emphasizes the virtues of poverty, chastity, and humility, the scholar, by contrast, requires expensive infrastructure—a library, a workplace, and the means of disseminating his work. In The Monk and the Book, Megan Hale Williams argues that Saint Jerome was the first to represent biblical study as a mode of asceticism appropriate for an inhabitant of a Christian monastery, thus pioneering the enduring linkage of monastic identities and institutions with scholarship.

Revisiting Jerome with the analytical tools of recent cultural history—including the work of Bourdieu, Foucault, and Roger Chartier—Williams proposes new interpretations that remove obstacles to understanding the life and legacy of the saint. Examining issues such as the construction of Jerome’s literary persona, the form and contents of his library, and the intellectual framework of his commentaries, Williams shows that Jerome’s textual and exegetical work on the Hebrew scriptures helped to construct a new culture of learning. This fusion of the identities of scholar and monk, Williams shows, continues to reverberate in the culture of the modern university.

"[Williams] has written a fascinating study, which provides a series of striking insights into the career of one of the most colorful and influential figures in Christian antiquity. Jerome's Latin Bible would become the foundational text for the intellectual development of the West, providing words for the deepest aspirations and most intensely held convictions of an entire civilization. Williams's book does much to illumine the circumstances in which that fundamental text was produced, and reminds us that great ideas, like great people, have particular origins, and their own complex settings."—Eamon Duffy, New York Review of Books


 

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Monster Theory
Reading Culture
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
University of Minnesota Press, 1996

Explores concepts of monstrosity in Western civilization from Beowulf to Jurassic Park.

We live in a time of monsters. Monsters provide a key to understanding the culture that spawned them. So argue the essays in this wide-ranging and fascinating collection that asks the question, What happens when critical theorists take the study of monsters seriously as a means of examining our culture?

In viewing the monstrous body as a metaphor for the cultural body, the contributors to Monster Theory consider beasts, demons, freaks, and fiends as symbolic expressions of cultural unease that pervade a society and shape its collective behavior. Through a historical sampling of monsters, these essays argue that our fascination for the monstrous testifies to our continued desire to explore difference and prohibition.Contributors: Mary Baine Campbell, Brandeis U; David L. Clark, McMaster U; Frank Grady, U of Missouri, St. Louis; David A. Hedrich Hirsch, U of Illinois; Lawrence D. Kritzman, Dartmouth College; Kathleen Perry Long, Cornell U; Stephen Pender; Allison Pingree, Harvard U; Anne Lake Prescott, Barnard College; John O'Neill, York U; William Sayers, George Washington U; Michael Uebel, U of Virginia; Ruth Waterhouse.
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The Moralized Ovid
Pierre Bersuire
Harvard University Press, 2023

An influential medieval allegorical interpretation of the Metamorphoses that uncovers the hidden moral truths of Ovid’s stories, translated into English for the first time.

Written in about 1340 in Avignon by the Benedictine preacher Pierre Bersuire, The Moralized Ovid—commonly referred to by its Latin title, Ovidius moralizatus, to distinguish it from the anonymous French vernacular Ovide moralisé—was arguably the most influential interpretation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the High Middle Ages. It circulated widely in manuscript form and was frequently printed during the Renaissance. Originally intended as a sourcebook of exempla for preachers’ sermons, The Moralized Ovid provides not only a window into the reception of classical literature in the fourteenth century but also amazingly vivid details of daily life in the Middle Ages across all strata of society.

The work begins with a detailed description of the Greco-Roman gods, inspired in part by Bersuire’s friend and fellow proponent of classical poetry, Francesco Petrarch. It then retells selected major myths from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, each followed by numerous allegorical interpretations that draw from biblical stories, contemporary events, and the natural world.

This edition presents the first full English translation alongside an authoritative Latin text.

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Mosaics of Hagia Sophia, Istanbul
The Fossati Restoration and the Work of the Byzantine Institute
Natalia B. Teteriatnikov
Harvard University Press, 1998

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The Mosaics of St. Mary’s of the Admiral in Palermo
With a Chapter on the Architecture of the Church by Slobodan Ćurčić
Ernst Kitzinger
Harvard University Press, 1991
The text explores the iconographic and stylistic sources of the Greek mosaicists, as well as the departures from Byzantine norms, and the relationship of the decoration to contemporary work in the royal foundations. Also included is a chapter on the architecture of the church by Slobodan Ćurčić.
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Moses Maimonides and His Time
Eric L. Ormsby
Catholic University of America Press, 2018
A collection of essasys on the philosophy of Moses Maimonides.
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The Most Noble of People
Religious, Ethnic, and Gender Identity in Muslim Spain
Jessica A. Coope
University of Michigan Press, 2017
The Most Noble of People presents a nuanced look at questions of identity in Muslim Spain under the Umayyads, an Arab dynasty that ruled from 756 to 1031. With a social historical emphasis on relations among different religious and ethnic groups, and between men and women, Jessica A. Coope considers the ways in which personal and cultural identity in al-Andalus could be alternately fluid and contentious.

The opening chapters define Arab and Muslim identity as those categories were understood in Muslim Spain, highlighting the unique aspects of this society as well as its similarities with other parts of the medieval Islamic world. The book goes on to discuss what it meant to be a Jew or Christian in Spain under Islamic rule, and the degree to which non-Muslims were full participants in society. Following this is a consideration of gender identity as defined by Islamic law and by less normative sources like literature and mystical texts. It concludes by focusing on internal rebellions against the government of Muslim Spain, particularly the conflicts between Muslims who were ethnically Arab and those who were Berber or native Iberian, pointing to the limits of Muslim solidarity.

Drawn from an unusually broad array of sources—including legal texts, religious polemic, chronicles, mystical texts, prose literature, and poetry, in both Arabic and Latin—many of Coope’s illustrations of life in al-Andalus also reflect something of the larger medieval world. Further, some key questions about gender, ethnicity, and religious identity that concerned people in Muslim Spain—for example, women’s status under Islamic law, or what it means to be a Muslim in different contexts and societies around the world—remain relevant today.

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A Mother’s Manual for the Women of Ferrara
A Fifteenth-Century Guide to Pregnancy and Pediatrics
Michele Savonarola
Iter Press, 2022
The first treatise of its kind to be written in a European vernacular.

Around 1460, Michele Savonarola produced the extraordinary Mother’s Manual for the Women of Ferrara, a gynecological, obstetrical, and pediatric treatise composed in the vernacular so that it could be read not only by the learned but also by pregnant and nursing mothers and the midwives and wet nurses who presided over childbirth. Savonarola’s work is not merely a trivial set of instructions, but the work of a learned scholar who drew on, among others, the ancient Greek physicians Hippocrates and Galen, and Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine. The first of its kind, Savonarola’s Mother’s Manual helps readers understand both the development of late-medieval and early-modern obstetrics and gynecology, as well as the experiences of women who turn to advice books for help with reproductive issues. This book also provides a key to understanding why and how a new genre of book—the midwifery manual or advice book for pregnant women—arose in sixteenth-century Italy and eventually became a popular genre all over Europe from the early modern period to the present day. 
 
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Mountain and Plain
From the Lycian Coast to the Phrygian Plateau in the Late Roman and Early Byzantine Period
Martin Harrison
University of Michigan Press, 2001
Martin Harrison traveled widely in Asia Minor from his youth onward, and he was always fascinated by the questions of how and why the great and elegant cities of classical antiquity declined, and what happened to the descendants of the people who lived in them. Over nearly forty years he returned again and again to remote Lycia, where the ruins of monasteries and churches, villages, hamlets, and towns remained largely inaccessible and unexplored. His interest eventually led him to undertake the excavation of the Phrygian city of Amorium, whose importance became greater as the classical cities declined. At its peak it was considered second only to Byzantium, until it fell to the Arab invasions.
The present study is the fruit of years of excavation and research by the author. The manuscript was largely sketched out when Martin Harrison unexpectedly passed away, and the volume has been finished and prepared for press by his long-time assistant Wendy Young, with further guidance from friends and colleagues with whom he had discussed the project.
The resulting volume explores Martin Harrison's belief that the coastal cities of Lycia declined after the fifth century C.E., and that smaller settlements (monasteries, villages, and towns) appeared in the mountains and further inland. In addition he considered that there was a demographic shift of masons and sculptors from the cities to serve these new settlements. This beautifully illustrated study provides convincing evidence from architecture, sculpture, and inscriptional sources to support this theory. It also contains a description of Amorium in Phrygia, as revealed in survey and excavation seasons from 1987 until the author's untimely death half a dozen years later. The volume includes a preface by Stephen Hill and an appendix by Michael Ballance and Charlotte Roueché on three special inscriptions from Ovacik.
The volume will be of interest to historians of the Near East and classical antiquity, to archaeologists, and to students of architectural history.
Martin Harrison was Professor of Archaeology, University of Oxford. Wendy Young was Research Assistant to the author until his death.
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Muhammad and the Believers
At the Origins of Islam
Fred M. Donner
Harvard University Press, 2012

The origins of Islam have been the subject of increasing controversy in recent years. The traditional view, which presents Islam as a self-consciously distinct religion tied to the life and revelations of the prophet Muhammad in western Arabia, has since the 1970s been challenged by historians engaged in critical study of the Muslim sources.

In Muhammad and the Believers, the eminent historian Fred Donner offers a lucid and original vision of how Islam first evolved. He argues that the origins of Islam lie in what we may call the "Believers' movement" begun by the prophet Muhammad—a movement of religious reform emphasizing strict monotheism and righteous behavior in conformity with God's revealed law. The Believers' movement thus included righteous Christians and Jews in its early years, because like the Qur'anic Believers, Christians and Jews were monotheists and agreed to live righteously in obedience to their revealed law. The conviction that Muslims constituted a separate religious community, utterly distinct from Christians and Jews, emerged a century later, when the leaders of the Believers' movement decided that only those who saw the Qur'an as the final revelation of the One God and Muhammad as the final prophet, qualified as Believers. This separated them decisively from monotheists who adhered to the Gospels or Torah.

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Murder by Accident
Medieval Theater, Modern Media, Critical Intentions
Jody Enders
University of Chicago Press, 2009

Over fifty years ago, it became unfashionable—even forbidden—for students of literature to talk about an author’s intentions for a given work. In Murder by Accident, Jody Enders boldly resurrects the long-disgraced concept of intentionality, especially as it relates to the theater.

Drawing on four fascinating medieval events in which a theatrical performance precipitated deadly consequences, Enders contends that the marginalization of intention in critical discourse is a mirror for the marginalization—and misunderstanding—of theater. Murder by Accident revisits the legal, moral, ethical, and aesthetic limits of the living arts of the past, pairing them with examples from the present, whether they be reality television, snuff films, the “accidental” live broadcast of a suicide on a Los Angeles freeway, or an actor who jokingly fired a stage revolver at his temple, causing his eventual death. This book will force scholars and students to rethink their assumptions about theory, intention, and performance, both past and present.

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Music in the Castle
Troubadours, Books, and Orators in Italian Courts of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Centuries
F. Alberto Gallo
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Written by one of Italy's most eminent scholars of music, this book explores music's place in the cultural, artistic, and literary life of medieval Italian courts, paying particular attention to the influence of French culture on Italian artistic and musical traditions.

In the first of three elegant essays, Gallo examines the troubadours who traveled to northern Italian courts from Provence during the thirteenth century. He discusses their performance practices, the verbal and musical sophistication of their songs, and their role in the daily life of courtiers at Genoa, Ferrara, and Monferrato. The second essay concerns the now dispersed collection of the Visconti library at Pavia. Here, Gallo examines how this collection expressed the tastes of the fourteenth-century court of Giangaleazzo Visconti, how French arts were imported and imitated at Pavia, and the effects this had on music heard at the court. In the final essay, Gallo looks at the fifteenth-century tradition of improvised music, and especially the virtuoso lute player Pietrobono. Mythologized in literary circles of his day, Pietrobono becomes a point of departure for a discussion of the entire vision of music of Italian humanists, from Guarino Veronese to Aurelio Brandolini.
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Music in the Flesh
An Early Modern Musical Physiology
Bettina Varwig
University of Chicago Press, 2023
A corporeal history of music-making in early modern Europe.

Music in the Flesh reimagines the lived experiences of music-making subjects—composers, performers, listeners—in the long seventeenth century. There are countless historical testimonies of the powerful effects of music upon the early modern body; it is described as moving, ravishing, painful, dangerous, curative, and miraculous while affecting “the circulation of the humors, the purification of the blood, the dilation of the vessels and pores.”

How were these early modern European bodies constituted that music generated such potent bodily-spiritual effects? Bettina Varwig argues that early modern music-making practices challenge our modern understanding of human nature as a mind-body dichotomy. Instead, they persistently affirm a more integrated anthropology, in which body, soul, and spirit remain inextricably entangled. Moving with ease across repertories and regions, sacred and vernacular musics, and domestic and public settings, Varwig sketches a “musical physiology” that is as historically illuminating as it is relevant for present-day performance. This book makes a significant contribution not just to the history of music, but also to the history of the body, the senses, and the emotions, revealing music as a unique access point for reimagining early modern modes of being-in-the-world.
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Mystery and Intelligibility
History of Philosophy as Pursuit of Wisdom
Jeffrey Dirk Wilson
Catholic University of America Press, 2021
Philosophy is born in its history as pursuit of the wisdom we are never able fully to know. Mystery and Intelligibility: History of Philosophy as Pursuit of Wisdom both argues for that method and presents the results it can achieve. Editor Jeffrey Dirk Wilson has gathered essays from six philosophical luminaries. In “History, Philosophy, and the History of Philosophy,” Timothy B. Noone provides the volume’s discourse on method in which he distinguishes three tiers of history. History of philosophy as method occupies the third and highest tier. John Rist reckons with contemporary corruption of the method in “A Guide for the Perplexed or How to Present or Pervert the History of Philosophy.” Wilson’s own essay, “Wonder and the Discovery of Being: From Homeric Myth to the Natural Genera of Early Greek Philosophy,” shows the loss of wonder, so evident in mythology, by early Greek thinkers and its recovery by Plato and Aristotle. In “Metaphysics and the Origin of Culture,” Donald Phillip Verene demonstrates the wide cultural implications of philosophical discoveries even when the discovery is the boundary of what humans can know. William Desmond offers an essay, “Flux-Gibberish: For and Against Heraclitus,” that owes as much to the humor of James Joyce as to the philosophical insights of philosophers, ancient, medieval, and modern. Eric D. Perl’s essay turns to the apophatic character of pursuing wisdom, perhaps especially when asking what may be the most fundamental metaphysical question: “Into the Dark: How (Not) to Ask, ‘Why is There Anything at All.’” Philipp W. Rosemann concludes the volume with the question best asked at the end of this literary seminar, “What is Philosophy?” Although there are philosophers within the analytic and continental schools who are committed to the history of philosophy, Mystery and Intelligibility demonstrates that history of philosophy as a third and distinct philosophical method is revelatory of the nature and structure of reality.
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The Mystic Fable, Volume One
The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
Michel de Certeau
University of Chicago Press, 1992
The culmination of de Certeau's lifelong engagement with the human sciences, this volume is both an analysis of Christian mysticism during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and an application of this influential scholar's transdisciplinary historiography.
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Mysticism and Space
Space and Spatiality in the Works of Richard Rolle, The Cloud of Unknowing Author, and Julian of Norwich
Carmel Bendon Davis
Catholic University of America Press, 2008
Mysticism and Space examines the influence and representation of space in the texts of three medieval mystics, Richard Rolle, Julian of Norwich, and The Cloud of Unknowing author
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Myth and History in Celtic and Scandinavian Traditions
Emily Lyle
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
Myth and History in Celtic and Scandinavian Traditions explores the traditions of two fascinating and contiguous cultures in north-western Europe. History regularly brought these two peoples into contact, most prominently with the Viking invasion of Ireland. In the famous Second Battle of Moytura, gods such as Lug, Balor, and the Dagda participated in the conflict that distinguished this invasion. Pseudohistory, which consists of both secular and ecclesiastical fictions, arose in this nexus of peoples and myth and spilled over into other contexts such as chronological annals. Scandinavian gods such as Odin, Balder, Thor, and Loki feature in the Edda of Snorri Sturluson and the history of the Danes by Saxo Grammaticus. This volume explores such written works alongside archaeological evidence from earlier periods through fresh approaches that challenge entrenched views.
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The Myth of Pope Joan
Alain Boureau
University of Chicago Press, 2001
In the ninth century, a brilliant young woman named Joan disguised herself as a man so that she could follow her lover into the then-exclusively male world of scholarship. She proved so successful that she ascended the Catholic hierarchy in Rome and was eventually elected pope. Her pontificate lasted two years, until she became pregnant and died after giving birth during a public procession from the Vatican.

Or so the legend goes—a legend that was fabricated sometime in the thirteenth century, according to Alain Boureau, and which has persisted in one form or another down to the present day. In this fascinating saga of belief and rhetoric, politics and religion, Boureau investigates the historical and ecclesiastical circumstances under which the myth of Pope Joan was constructed and the different uses to which it was put over the centuries. He shows, for instance, how Catholic clerics justified the exclusion of women from the papacy and the priesthood by employing the myth in misogynist moral tales, only to find the popess they had created turned against them in anti-Catholic propaganda during the Reformation.
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