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Nickolaus provides the readers with a concise critical discussion of the "courtly love" debate, broad historical and comparative analysis, and a model that explains, at the level of plot, rhetoric, and ideology, the proper place of amorous motifs in the context of prevailing Christian doctrines and attitudes.
The Sayings and Stories of the Desert Fathers and Mothers offers a new translation of the Greek alphabetical Apophthegmata Patrum, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers. For the first time in an English translation, this volume provides: extensive background and contextual notes significant variant readings in the alphabetical manuscripts and textual differences vis-à-vis the systematic and anonymous Apophthegmata reference notes to both quotations from Scriptures and the many allusions to Scripture in the sayings and stories. In addition, there is an extensive glossary that offers information and further resources on people, places, and significant monastic vocabulary. Perfect for students and enthusiasts of the desert tradition.
First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
This book examines the method of meditative reading encouraged by John Cassian (c. 360-435) in his ascetic writings, the bulk of which are fictive dialogues that purportedly record the instruction he had received from Egyptial Christian monks. This instruction was at its core an interactive experience, depending upon both the discernment of the master and diligent application of instruction by the student. Driver examines Cassian's understanding of the act of reading and suggests the implications of this for Cassian's monastic teaching and it interprets Cassian's method of reading in light of contemporary discussions of reading and the self.
This book explains how the authority Thomas Aquinas's theological teachings grew out of the doctrinal controversies surrounding it within the Dominican Order. The adoption and eventual promotion of the teachings of Aquinas by the Order of Preachers ran counter to every other current running through the late thirteenth-century Church; most scholastics, the Dominican Order included, were wary of the his unconventional teachings. Despite this, the Dominican Order was propelled along their solitary via Thomas by conflicts between two groups of magistri: Aquinas's early Dominican followers and their more conservative neo-Augustinian brethren. This debate reached its climax in a series of bitter polemical battles between Hervaeus Natalis, the most prominent of early defenders, and Durandus of St. Pourçain, the last major Dominican thinker to attack Aquinas's teachings openly. Elizabeth Lowe offers a vivid illustration of this major shift in the Dominican intellectual tradition.
Using one man as a lens, a man known variously as Folquet, Folques, Folco, and Folc, it will examine some of the important changes and developments of the period from a new, more human, perspective.
First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
This book argues that far from preaching traditional, otherworldly ideals, the authors or these religious works were deeply engaged in the social, political, and spiritual issues that characterized the Holy Roman Empire at a time of radical transformation.
The tenth and eleventh centuries in medieval Europe are commonly seen as a time of uncertainty and loss: an age of lawless aristocrats, of weak political authority, of cultural decline and dissolute monks, and of rampant superstition. It is a period often judged from its margins, compared (mostly negatively) to what came before and what would follow. We impose upon it both a sense of nostalgia and a teleology, as they somehow knowingly foreshadow what is to come. Seeking to complicate this mischaracterisation, which is primarily the invention of nineteenth and early twentieth century historiography, this book maps the movement between two intellectual stances: a shift from prophetic to apoca...