This study follows the transmission and reception of Caesarius of Heisterbach's Dialogus miraculorum (1219–1223), one of the most compelling and successful Cistercian collections of miracles and memorable events, from the Middle Ages to the present day. It ranges across different media and within different interpretive communities and includes brief summaries of a number of the exempla.

Caesarius was a monk at the Cistercian monastery of Heisterbach in Germany, where he served as Master of novices. For their instruction and edification, he composed his lengthy Dialogue on Miracles in twelve sections between 1219 and 1223. The many surviving manuscripts of this and other works by Caesarius attest to his stature in the history of Cistercian letters. This volume contains sections one through six of Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogue on Miracles, the first complete translation into English of an influential representation of exempla literature from the Middle Ages. Caesarius’s stories provide a splendid index to monastic life, religious practices, and daily life in a tumultuous time.

In 17th-century intellectual life, the ideas of the Renaissance humanist Justus Lipsius (1547–1606) were omnipresent. The publication of his Politica in 1589 had made Lipsius' name as an original and controversial political thinker. The sequel, the Monita et exempla politica (Political admonitions and examples), published in 1605, was meant as an illustration of Lipsius political thought as expounded in the Politica. Its aim was to offer concrete models of behavior for rulers against the background of Habsburg politics. Lipsius' later political treatise also forms an indispensable key to interpret the place and function of the Politica in Lipsius’ political discourse and in early modern political thought. The Political admonitions and examples – widely read, edited, and translated in the 17th and 18th centuries – show Lipsius’ pivotal role in the genesis of modern political philosophy.

Reading Medieval Latin is an introduction to medieval Latin in its cultural and historical context and is designed to serve the needs of students who have completed the learning of basic classical Latin morphology and syntax. (Users of Reading Latin will find that it follows on after the end of section 5 of that course.) It is an anthology, organised chronologically and thematically in four parts. Each part is divided into chapters with introductory material, texts, and commentaries which give help with syntax, sentence-structure, and background. There are brief sections on medieval orthography and grammar, together with a vocabulary which includes words (or meanings) not found in standard classical dictionaries. The texts chosen cover areas of interest to students of medieval history, philosophy, theology, and literature.

This book is about reading practice and experience in late medieval and early modern England. It focuses on the kinds of literatures that were more readily available to the widest spectrum of the population. Four case studies from many possibilities have been selected, each examining a particular type of popular literature under the headings ‘religious’, ‘moral’, ‘practical’ and ‘fictional’. A key concern of the book is how we might use particular types of evidence in order to understand more about reading practice and experience, so issues of method and approach are discussed fully in the opening chapter. One distinctive element of this book is that it attempts to uncover evidence for the reading practices and experiences of real, rather than ideal, readers, using evidence that is found within the material of a book or manuscript itself, or within the structure of a specific genre of literature. Salter attempts to negotiate a path through a set of methodological and interpretive issues in order to arrive at a better understanding of how people may have read and what they may have read. This, in turn, leads on to how we may interpret the evidence that manuscripts and early printed books provide for the ways that medieval and early modern people engaged with reading. This book will be of interest to academics and research students who study the history of reading, popular culture, literacy, manuscript and print culture, as well as to those interested more generally in medieval and early modern society and culture.

In this detailed study of English narrative verse the author describes and analyses the undisputed masterpieces of narrative (such as the works of the Gawain poet, Langland, Gower and Chaucer), as well as anonymous romances and specimens of religious and comic narrative which form the background to more well-known poems.

'At a historic moment, when religion shows all its social and political strength in various post-modern societies around our globe, this fascinating collection of studies from the Middle Ages to twentieth-century Europe demonstrates all the richness and innovative force of investigating individual and shared experiences when questioning the cultural, political and social place of religion in society. It also makes known in English the work of a series of Finnish historians elaborating together a pioneering vision of the notion of experience in the discipline of history.' - Piroska Nagy, Universite du Quebec a Montreal, Canada This open access book offers a theoretical introduction to the history of experience on three conceptual levels: everyday experience, experience as process, and experience as structure. Chapters apply 'experience' to empirical case studies, exploring how people have made and shared their religion through experience in history. This book understands experience as a simultaneously socially constructed and intimately personal process that connects individuals to communities and past to future, thereby forming structures that create and direct societies. It represents the crossroads of a new field of the history of experience, and an established tradition of the history of lived religion. Chapters offer a longue duree view from the fourteenth-century heretics, via experiences of miracle, madness, sickness, suffering, prayer, conversion and death, to the religious artisanship of soldiers in the Second World War frontlines. It concentrates on Northern Europe, but includes materials from Italy, France and United Kingdom.

Composed in the 1630s, Giambattista Basile’s The Tale of Tales, later known as the Pentameron, is a sophisticated, affectionate, often wicked parody of Boccaccio’s 14th century masterpiece, the Decameron, containing fifty tales within an intricate framing story. Importantly, among its stories are the earliest literary versions of famous fairy tales such as Cinderella, Rapunzel, The Sleeping Beauty and Hansel and Gretel. This is only the fourth translation of the complete text into English. With its scholarly introduction, notes, and up-to-date bibliography, it will appeal to anyone studying European literature or the fairy tale in general, its history and subsequent development, as well as anyone wishing to trace specific themes within the genre and their different treatments.

This study traces how medieval audiences judge bodies from Doomsday visions to beauty contests. Employing cultural and formalist approaches, this study breaks new ground on the historical obsession about ends and changes, reflected in different genres spanning several hundred years.

Bi- and multilingualism are of great interest for contemporary linguists since this phenomenon deeply reflects on language acquisition, language use, and sociolinguistic conditions in many different circumstances all over the world. Multilingualism was, however, certainly rather common already, if not especially, in the premodern world. For some time now, research has started to explore this issue through a number of specialized studies. The present volume continues with the investigation of multilingualism through a collection of case studies focusing on important examples in medieval and early modern societies, that is, in linguistic and cultural contact zones, such as England, Spain, the Holy Land, but also the New World. As all contributors confirm, the numerous cases of multilingualism discussed here indicate strongly that the premodern period knew considerably less barriers between people of different social classes, cultural background, and religious orientation. But we also have to acknowledge that already then human communication could fail because of linguistic hurdles which prevented mutual understanding in religious and cultural terms.