This unique collection of letters portrays the life and times of John of Salisbury, the devoted secretary of Archbishop Theobald, the faithful friend and...

"One of the many merits of this book is that it places Western scholasticism in its setting--and this both in space and in time. Plotinus lives on, Aristotle comes back to life again, Averroes breaks in--but this is not the right word, for this Muslim philosopher and his Western Christian disciples are inmates of the same house. Professor Knowles brings out the unity of Islamic and Western Christian culture. Medieval Islam and Western Christendom had a common mental heritage of Jewish (...) religion and Greek philosophy; both were stimulated intellectually by a tension between the Judaic and the Hellenic pole of their thought; and the same stimulus led thinkers in both provinces of this Judaistic-Hellenistic Christian-Muslim world to interest themselves in the same problems."--In The Observer (London). (shrink)

_Five Faces of Modernity_ is a series of semantic and cultural biographies of words that have taken on special significance in the last century and a half or so: _modernity_, _avant-garde_, _decadence_, _kitsch_, and _postmodernism_. The concept of modernity—the notion that we, the living, are different and somehow superior to our predecessors and that our civilization is likely to be succeeded by one even superior to ours—is a relatively recent Western invention and one whose time may already have passed, if (...) we believe its postmodern challengers. Calinescu documents the rise of cultural modernity and, in tracing the shifting senses of the five terms under scrutiny, illustrates the intricate value judgments, conflicting orientations, and intellectual paradoxes to which it has given rise. _Five Faces of Modernity_ attempts to do for the foundations of the modernist critical lexicon what earlier terminological studies have done for such complex categories as _classicism_, _baroque_, _romanticism_, _realism_, or _symbolism_ and thereby fill a gap in literary scholarship. On another, more ambitious level, Calinescu deals at length with the larger issues, dilemmas, ideological tensions, and perplexities brought about by the assertion of modernity. (shrink)

***Angaben zur beteiligten Person Goetz: Prof. Dr. Hans-Werner Goetz lehrte mittelalterliche Geschichte an der Universität Hamburg. Er beschäftigt sich vor allem mit den Vorstellungswelten des frühen und hohen Mittelalters.

The aim of this book is to examine Erasmus' attitude toward the medieval past and to relate it to his historical consciousness.

Historian Arthur Herman traces the roots of declinism and shows how major thinkers, past and present, have contributed to its development as a coherent ideology of cultural pessimism. From Nazism to the Sixties counterculture, from Britain's Fabian socialists to America's multiculturalists, and from Dracula and Freud to Robert Bly and Madonna, this work examines the idea of decline in Western history and sets out to explain how the conviction of civilization's inevitable end has become a fixed part of the modern (...) Western imagination. Through a series of biographical portraits spanning the 19th and 20th centuries, the author traces the roots of declinism and aims to show how major thinkers of the past and present, including Nietzsche, DuBois, Sartre, and Foucault, have contributed to its development as a coherent ideology of cultural pessimism. (shrink)

Published just after the Second World War, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages is a sweeping exploration of the remarkable continuity of European literature across time and place, from the classical era up to the early nineteenth century, and from the Italian peninsula to the British Isles. In what T. S. Eliot called a "magnificent" book, Ernst Robert Curtius establishes medieval Latin literature as the vital transition between the literature of antiquity and the vernacular literatures of later centuries. The (...) result is nothing less than a masterful synthesis of European literature from Homer to Goethe. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages is a monumental work of literary scholarship. In a new introduction, Colin Burrow provides critical insights into Curtius's life and ideas and highlights the distinctive importance of this wonderful book. (shrink)

Vorwort. I. Individualitat und Gemeinschaft: A. Haverkamp: Leben in Gemeinschaften: alte und neue Formen im 12. Jahrhundert - O. Langer: Teleia philia und amicitia spiritalis. Zwei Formen rationaler Personenbeziehungen im Abendland - W. Haug: Die Entdeckung der personalen Liebe und der Beginn der fiktionalen Literatur. II. Schule und Wissenschaft: W. Kluxen: Wissenschaftliche Rationalitat im 12. Jahrhundert: Aufgang einer Epoche - J. Ehlers: Das Augustinerchorherrenstift St. Viktor in der Pariser Schul- und Studienlandschaft des 12. Jahrhunderts - R. Heinzmann: Die Entwicklung der (...) Theologie zur Wissenschaft - K. W. Norr: Ordnung und Individuum: ein kritisches Element in der streitigen Gerichtsbarkeit der mittelalterlichen Kirche. III. Natur und Kunst: A. Speer: Zwischen Naturbeobachtung und Metaphysik. Zur Entwicklung und Gestalt der Naturphilosophie im 12. Jahrhundert - G. Schrimpf: Bernhard von Chartres, die Rezeption des Timaios und die neue Sicht der Natur - G. Binding: Die neue Kathedrale. Rationalitat und Illusion. IV. Zwei Reprasentanten des 12. Jahrhunderts: U. Kopf: Bernhard von Clairvaux: Mystiker und Politiker - G. Wieland: Abailard: Vernunft und Leidenschaft.'Eine grundliche Studie, [.] deren differenzierte Forschungsthesen aber noch lange Zeit unsere Aufmerksamkeit verdie. (shrink)

The Dragmaticon, William of Conches’ major systematic treatise on natural philosophy, was probably written in Normandy between 1144 and 1148. It was copied and widely circulated in no less than 80 manuscripts for more than 400 years. It was even translated into Catalan in the fifteenth century. The editio princeps, published in 1567 in Strasburg by Josiah Rihel and reprinted in 1967, was prepared by the Italian physician and humanist Guglielmo Gratarolo, who used just one manuscript he bought in Padua, (...) then collated against another owned by Rihel, and often “emended” . The present edition, by another Italian, a philologist and classicist turned medievalist, provides for the first time a critical text, based on 40 selected manuscripts. A detailed introduction informs on William of Conches’ works and career, as well as title, dating, aims, and the manuscript transmission of the Dragmaticon. Two registers of apparatus give a full documentation of both the sources and/or parallels and the meaningful variant readings of the 40 manuscripts used. The improvements on Gratarolo's edition are quite substantial. The critical edition of the early Catalan translation, edited by a known Catalan philologist, accompanies the Latin edition, making this volume all the more valuable. (shrink)