Results by title

The first comprehensive analysis of English national identity in the late Middle Ages

During the late Middle Ages, the increasing expansion of administrative, legal, and military systems by a central government, together with the greater involvement of the commons in national life, brought England closer than ever to political nationhood. Examining a diverse array of texts—ranging from Latin and vernacular historiography to Lollard tracts, Ricardian poetry, and chivalric treatises—this volume reveals the variety of forms “England” assumed when it was imagined in the medieval West.

From medieval to modern, exploring instrumental attitudes toward physical gadgets, diagrams, concepts, methods, and disciplines

Opening up the instrumental condition of the human for critical reflection and renewal, Instrumentality illuminates key moments in the intellectual history of the European Middle Ages. J. Allan Mitchell reveals how, in the predigital past, we can recognize many of the operative technics, analytics, and metaphorics that continue to shape human sense and cognition today.

Exploring the diverse modalities of medieval instruments, Mitchell’s case studies encompass techniques as seemingly distinct as time-keeping mechanisms, mathematical diagrams, logical syllogisms, and the literary devices of Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower. A cultural and intellectual history, Mitchell’s work leads readers from three-dimensional objects (physical mechanisms) to two-dimensional inscriptions (maps and diagrams) and onward to overarching disciplinary norms in the early liberal and mechanical arts. Prying loose the subtle, adaptable, and generative concept of technical objects from limiting contemporary frameworks, he shows how these instruments are indispensable to the past—and the future—of the arts and culture at large.

A radical reassessment of the trial of Joan of Arc that gives a new sense of Joan in her time.

The transcripts of Joan of Arc’s trial for heresy at Rouen in 1431 and the minutes of her interrogation have long been recognized as our best source of information about the Maid of Orleans. Historians generally view these legal texts as a precise account of Joan’s words and, by extension, her beliefs. Focusing on the minutes recorded by clerics, however, Karen Sullivan challenges the accuracy of the transcript. In The Interrogation of Joan of Arc, she re-reads the record not as a perfect reflection of a historical personality’s words, but as a literary text resulting from the collaboration between Joan and her interrogators.

In the Middle Ages, Muslim travelers embarked on a rihla, or world tour, as surveyors, emissaries, and educators. On these journeys, voyagers not only interacted with foreign cultures—touring Greek civilization, exploring the Middle East and North Africa, and seeing parts of Europe—they also established both philosophical and geographic boundaries between the faithful and the heathen. These voyages thus gave the Islamic world, which at the time extended from the Maghreb to the Indus Valley, a coherent identity.

Islam and Travel in the Middle Ages assesses both the religious and philosophical aspects of travel, as well as the economic and cultural conditions that made the rihla possible. Houari Touati tracks the compilers of the hadith who culled oral traditions linked to the prophet, the linguists and lexicologists who journeyed to the desert to learn Bedouin Arabic, the geographers who mapped the Muslim world, and the students who ventured to study with holy men and scholars. Travel, with its costs, discomforts, and dangers, emerges in this study as both a means of spiritual growth and a metaphor for progress. Touati’s book will interest a broad range of scholars in history, literature, and anthropology.

The volume contains selected papers from an international workshop in 2005, at the Hungarian Academy in Rome. They aim at investigating the registers of fifteenth-century supplications to the Apostolic Penitentiary of the Holy See and to analyze the multiplicity of issues in which a context of the local needs of Western Christians and the central power of the Pope had been occurring.

The contributions make clear that local and individual factors and practice of Christian faith and religion must not be seen as separated from the global power of the Roman curia. The latter’s influence could become directly important for any individual in any local space, also … et usque ad ultimum terrae (Acts 1:8), in the utmost peripheries of the Christian world. The assistance by the Apostolic Penitentiary was indispensable in a large variety of cases. The occupation with such cases happened in the local and regional space as well as in the globalized centre of the Holy See.