Medieval

Mary Carruthers's classic study of the training and uses of memory for a variety of purposes in European cultures during the Middle Ages has fundamentally changed the way scholars understand medieval culture. This fully revised and updated second edition considers afresh all the material and conclusions of the first. While responding to new directions in research inspired by the original, this new edition devotes much more attention to the role of trained memory in composition, whether of literature, music, architecture, or manuscript books. The new edition will reignite the debate on memory in medieval studies and, like the first, will be essential reading for scholars of history, music, the arts and literature, as well as those interested in issues of orality and literacy (anthropology), in the working and design of memory (both neuropsychology and artificial memory), and in the disciplines of meditation (religion).

These pages capture a thousand years of medieval women's visionary writing, from late antiquity to the 15th century. Written by hermits, recluses, wives, mothers, wandering teachers, founders of religious communities, and reformers, the selections reveal how medieval women felt about their lives, the kind of education they received, how they perceived the religion of their time, and why ascetic life attracted them.

This 1982 book was the first major and comprehensive survey of mirror-imagery to be found in medieval book-titles and English literature from the thirteenth to the end of the seventeenth century. Working within the tradition of the historical study of metaphor as developed by E. R. Curtius, Professor Grabes not only traces the shifting historical usages of the mirror (as the metaphor's 'vehicle') but also studies the metaphor's structural function in individual works. At the same time, the author addresses himself to the aesthetic problem of originality in literature, and, by investigating the function of a metaphor central to literature over a long period of time, he reveals the interplay between cultural history, the changing attitude towards life and the world, and literary imagination. It represents a substantial contribution to the history of ideas and to the study of iconography, which, by providing a systematic and historical contextualisation of the many varied metaphorical senses of the mirror, will be of particular value to art and literary historians, and cultural philosophers.

Up to the twelfth century, writing in the western vernaculars dealt almost exclusively with religious, historical and factual themes, all of which were understood to convey the truth. The second half of the twelfth century saw the emergence of a new genre--the romance--which was consciously conceived as fictional and therefore allowed to break free from traditional presuppositions. Green examines this period of crucial importance for the romance genre and for the genesis of medieval fiction.