Book 3 of the Sentences deals with the mystery of the Word made flesh: Christ's incarnation, passion, and death, the consequent restoration of humankind, and the virtues to be practised in imitation of Christ.

The Poetria nova, written by the Englishman Geoffrey of Vinsauf shortly after 1200, was the most influential medieval treatise on rhetorical poetics. Modeled on Horace's Ars poetica, it is an art of poetry (and prose) in 2121 hexameter verses. With its updated scholarship and improved format, this revised edition is a valuable resource for anyone interested in medieval literature or the history of rhetoric and writing instruction.

The Medieval Clergy gives voice to the so-called secular clergy in the Central Middle Ages -- a group that included priests, bishops, deacons, and canons, whose primary responsibilities included ministering to laypeople. For most medieval people, these clergy stood at the center of religious life: they served as the face of the church and the link between the faithful and God, between this life and the next. These clerics administered the sacraments, and their churches sheltered the poor, housed the relics of the saints, and offered places of protection and community. The documents collected here allow readers to explore the richness of the lives of these clergy: the ideals they strove to emulate, the complexity of their lived experiences, and the multifaceted roles they played -- pastoral, sacramental, familial, social, educational, liturgical, memorial, military, economic, legal, and civic. Most of the documents here appear for the first time in English; the collection also includes dossiers of interconnected documents that allow students and non-specialists to explore individuals, ideas, and historical contexts in depth.

This volume makes available for the first time in English full translations of Book 1 of Peter Lombard's Sentences, the work that would win the greatest teacher of the twelfth century a place in Dante's Paradise and would continue to excite generations of students well beyond the Middle Ages.

The problem of being is central to Western metaphysics. Etched sharply in the verses of Parmenides, it took on distinctive colouring in Aristotle as the subject matter of a science expressly labelled 'theological.' For Aristotle, being could not be shared in generic fashion by other natures. As a nature it had to be found not in various species but in a primary instance only. The science specified by the primary nature was accordingly the one science that under the aspect of being treated universally of whatever is: it dealt with being qua being.

This book is the second volume of a projected 3-volume edition which aims to contribute to our understanding of Robert Persons's significance as a controversial figure in early modern European history. It includes documents and letters by Persons, as well as letters to Persons, notably from the superior general of the Society of Jesus, Claudio Acquaviva. Letters in Latin, Italian and Spanish are presented both in the original language and spelling and with English translation, and letters in English in original spelling. The correspondence in this volume covers Persons's eight-year sojourn in Spain following the failure of the Spanish armada of 1588, the repercussions of the death of William Cardinal Allen, and Persons's return to Rome in 1597 to deal with disaffected students at the English College.

Found in Translation: Itinerant French Epics in Medieval Scandinavia contains English translations of three Old Norse-Icelandic renderings of French chansons de geste: Elis saga ok Rosamundu, Bevers saga, and Flovents saga, as well as Baerings saga, an Icelandic chivalric romance. Unlike the courtly romances, such as the Arthurian narratives of Chretien de Troyes, the French epics were anonymous; the earliest is the eleventh-century Chanson de Roland (Song of Roland), dated to around 1100. The epic poems were recited by jongleurs, itinerant storytellers, who performed, for example, at markets on feast days in exchange for payment. The French epics translated into Old Norse-Icelandic were composed a couple of centuries later, under the influence of courtly romance, and are commonly designated romance epics. They introduced the motif of the love of a beautiful Saracen maiden, la bele Sarrasine, for a Christian knight in Scandinavia. The romance epics are anonymous, unattributed narratives, which were subject to revision and to recreation. Each epic, Elie de Saint-Gilles, Boeve de Haumtone, and Floovant, has been transmitted in only one manuscript. Comparison of the Old Norse-Icelandic translations with the French epics reveals that the translations are renderings of variant versions of these narratives. At times the translations provide more information or less than the French epics; leave out entire passages or figures; or add new matter and conflicting facts. These translations resulted in the creation of a new Icelandic genre, the riddarasaga (pl. riddarasogur), or chivalric saga. Found in the oldest manuscript containing translations of French epics, Baerings saga stands at the head of this tradition, the first riddarasaga and a thoroughly original Icelandic narrative, despite a plot heavily indebted to Bevers saga.

The topics of Questions i-iv of St. Thomas Aquinas' Commentary on the De Trinitate of Boethius are of vital interest to the Christian philosopher and theologian. Written while Aquinas was a youthful Master of Theology, the Questions show his solidarity with Christian tradition, his wide acquaintance with Scripture and the Fathers of the Church, and his creative use of philosophy in addressing theological issues.

Question i treats of the possibility of our knowing God, and the human limitations of this knowledge. Question ii concerns theology as a science which reaches out to God by faith in his revealed word and uses philosophical reasoning to throw light on the contents of revelation. In Question iii Aquinas takes up the nature of faith, showing its relation to religion and its necessity for the welfare of the human race. He argues for the catholicity or universality of the Christian faith and defends the orthodox teaching of the trinity of Persons in the one God. Question iv turns to a set of philosophical problems occasioned by Boethius' treatise on the Trinity: the factors that cause a plurality in genera, species and individuals. In this connection Aquinas makes one of his most controversial statements of the principle of individuation.

This book seeks to fill an important gap in our knowledge of painting in fifteenth-century France. Focusing on the work of ?the Master of Morgan 453, ? an accomplished, if unnamed, manuscript illuminator, Clark identifies, compares, and analyzes all extant books that can be attributed to the painter and reconstructs his career on the basis of a wide range of liturgical as well as art-historical criteria. In examining collaborations and workshop practices involving many different illuminators who hailed not only from Northern France but also from the Netherlands, Clark's work also sheds light on complex artistic interchanges between France, Flanders, and England at a time of profound political change. The survey of the career of the Morgan 453 Master and his intense artistic milieu is complemented by a comprehensive catalogue of manuscripts and a checklist of Parisian illuminators and manuscripts, ca. 1420-1450, as well as liturgical appendices and an associated website

That the exercise of our intellectual powers in the service of the Gospel can prove life-transforming is a principle that both informs the writings of Thomas Aquinas and, at the same time, marks the horizon of his thought. Yet the contemporary interpretation of Aquinas? thought, with a few notable exceptions, continues to suffer from the modern divorce between systematic theology and spirituality. Even among those studies that link Aquinas? systematic and spiritual purposes, few have asked how Aquinas sets about composing his text in such a way that it orders spiritual operations of memory, affect, imagination, understanding, judgment, and decision to each other and to the purpose of Christian spiritual development.

Embracing Wisdom proposes a theological interpretation of the Summa theologiae as a spiritual pedagogy ordered to the growth in wisdom, and thus in holiness, of preachers and confessors in the late thirteenth century. It proceeds along two unequal trajectories. The first proceeds by examining the social and cultural transformations of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, and the spiritual crisis they occasioned for the Church, a crisis which called for the creation of a new kind of pastoral agent to take responsibility for the preaching of the Gospel. The analysis that follows develops a picture of the socio-cultural role of the theologian and preacher and brings to light the rhetorical means Aquinas deploys to promote the formation of wise preachers who can mediate the Gospel by means of new cultural forms.

Successive chapters then present the pedagogical structure and spiritual dynamic of the Summa theologiae in light of these rhetorical principles, showing how it climaxes in the Christology of the tertia pars. This Christology is shown to promote communion with and conforming of the whole person to Wisdom Incarnate, transforming the student into an agent of Divine Wisdom in the world.

A common refrain in twelfth-century thought is that God alone knows the secrets of the heart. Originating in Scripture, the principle was elaborated exegetically to imply two distinct domains: one of external actions open to human perception and judgment and the other including thoughts, intentions, and sentiments - the products of internal acts - visible only to God. But changes in medieval penance, especially in the Fourth Lateran Council's demand in 1215 that all Christians fully confess their sins to a priest, reveals a shift in attitude towards the secrecy of the heart. A close reading of twelfth and thirteenth-century texts from the cathedral and monastic schools shows that oral confession was to include not only visible, external acts, but also the merely internal actions formerly limited to God's knowledge.

What lay behind this shift? Should we attribute it to changes in priestly status? To the development of new techniques for breaching the heart's secrecy? Was new value placed on the secrets subject to confession? These questions are provocative because much recent scholarship implicates medieval penance in evolving western notions of selfhood and the part played by interiority in defining the self. Lateran IV's mandate to confess is characterized as a critical juncture in the history of subjectivity and the rise of a modern sense of self with its noted attributes of inwardness and autonomy.

The aim of Sin, Interiority, and Selfhood in the Twelfth-Century West is to uncover the conception of self that underlay the demand that all Christians confess their innermost thoughts. Drawing on sources from the world of the medieval schools, it juxtaposes discussions that treat topics ranging from the difficulties of discerning the source of tears to the mechanics of original sin. All these discussions are linked by their underlying interest in the internal aspects of committing or remitting sin. Contextualizing these aspects of interiority allows us to see what role was assigned to internal actions in medieval definitions of the self; it also provides insight into the intellectual currents that contributed to that understanding.

This volume provides the first edition and systematic study of the Liber florum celestis doctrine by the Benedictine John of Morigny. Until recently this work was known only through a chronicle report of its burning at Paris in 1323, on the grounds that it revived a condemned ritual called the Ars notoria. However, it survives in three versions in more than twenty copies from across Europe, few of which indicate doubt as to its orthodoxy.

The Liber florum has at its core a Book of Prayers, written at the University of Orléans between 1301 and 1308, which models an angelic ascent to the court of heaven. The Book of Prayers promises infused knowledge of the liberal arts and other disciplines to operators who obtain the Virgin's license to use it. It also enables them to petition the Virgin for visionary dreams in which she may respond to specific questions.

After assuming a high-ranking position as provost of Morigny in 1308, John continued to elaborate his work. By 1315 he had added two versions of a Book of Figures, sending out new materials in instalments to a growing circle of followers, including secular priests as well as professional religious. He had also added a Book of Visions, which narrates his journey from sin to redemption as well as that of his sister, Bridget. Here he describes his first vision of the virgin Mary at Chartres, his later magical practices, his encounters with demons, and his ultimate rejection of magic arts under the Virgin's protection.

An intimate visionary collaboration between human and divine, the Liber florum will be of interest to all students of the middle ages, especially those interested in university learning, monasticism, liturgy, mysticism, visions, magic, and book history.