Mensch-Natur-Wechselwirkungen in der Vormoderne

Touching Parchment: How Medieval Users Rubbed, Handled, and Kissed Their Manuscripts: Volume 2: Social Encounters with the Book

In the late middle ages (ca. 1200-1520), both religious and secular people used manuscripts, was regarded as a most precious item. The traces of their use through touching and handling during different rituals such as oath-taking, public reading, and memorializing the dead, is the subject of Kathryn Rudy’s research in Touching Parchment.

Starke Frauen des Mittelalters und das Bild des neuen Europa

Dante’s Performance

Through an historical and philological lens, this book explores passages from Dante’s Commedia which reveal elements inspired byprocessions, pageants, liturgical drama, psalm singing, or dance performance. The sacred poem finds influence in medieval theories of the performing arts as well as actual performances which Dante would have seen in churches or town squares. Dante’s Performance opens a new perspective from which to consider the Commedia : Dante expected his contemporary readers to recognize references to and echoes of psalms, sacred plays, and performative practices. Twenty-first-century readers are tasked with reconstructing a cultural framework which allows us to grasp those same textual references. From the dramatization of the harrowing of hell in Inferno IX, to Beatrice’s celebratory return on top of Mount Purgatory, to the songs of the blessed, this study connects Dante’s language to coeval theoretical and practical texts about performance. If hell is "the Middle Age’s theatrum diaboli ," purgatory stages a performed purification through songs and acting, while paradise offers the spectacle of blessed spirits within the heavenly spheres as an aid to human understanding ( Par . IV 28–39).

Albert the Great and His Arabic Sources: Medieval Science between Inheritance and Emergence | MPIWG

Explores the crucial role of Arabic sources in shaping Albert the Great’s work and their impact on his larger scientific programme and thus on the thirteenth-century Latin world.

Brepols - Principia on the Sentences of Peter Lombard

Brepols is an international academic publisher of works in the humanities, with a particular focus in history, archaeology, history of the arts, language and literature, and critical editions of historical sources

Standardization in the Middle Ages

We live in a world riven through with standards. To understand more of their deep, rich past is to understand ourselves better. The two volumes, Standardization in the Middle Ages. Volume 1: The North and Standardization in the Middle Ages. Volume 2: Europe , turn to the Middle Ages to give a deeper understanding of the medieval ideas and practices that produced—and were produced by—standards and standardization. At first glance, the Middle Ages might appear an unlikely place to look for standardization. The editors argue that, on the contrary, generating predictability is a precondition for meaningful cultural interaction in any historical period and that we may look to the Middle Ages to learn more about the historical, social, and cognitive processes of standardization. This multidisciplinary venture, which includes medievalists from the fields of history, intellectual history, art history, philology, numismatics, and more, as well as scholars of cognitive science, informatics, and anthropology, interrogates how medieval people and groups envisioned and enforced predictability, uniformity, and order, and how they attempted to obtain and maintain standards across vast distances and heterogeneous social and cultural structures.