This study follows the transmission and reception of Caesarius of Heisterbach's Dialogus miraculorum (1219–1223), one of the most compelling and successful Cistercian collections of miracles and memorable events, from the Middle Ages to the present day. It ranges across different media and within different interpretive communities and includes brief summaries of a number of the exempla.

This study follows the transmission and reception of Caesarius of Heisterbach's Dialogus miraculorum (1219–1223), one of the most compelling and successful Cistercian collections of miracles and memorable events, from the Middle Ages to the present day. It ranges across different media and within different interpretive communities and includes brief summaries of a number of the exempla.

Caesarius was a monk at the Cistercian monastery of Heisterbach in Germany, where he served as Master of novices. For their instruction and edification, he composed his lengthy Dialogue on Miracles in twelve sections between 1219 and 1223. The many surviving manuscripts of this and other works by Caesarius attest to his stature in the history of Cistercian letters. This volume contains sections one through six of Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogue on Miracles, the first complete translation into English of an influential representation of exempla literature from the Middle Ages. Caesarius’s stories provide a splendid index to monastic life, religious practices, and daily life in a tumultuous time.

In 17th-century intellectual life, the ideas of the Renaissance humanist Justus Lipsius (1547–1606) were omnipresent. The publication of his Politica in 1589 had made Lipsius' name as an original and controversial political thinker. The sequel, the Monita et exempla politica (Political admonitions and examples), published in 1605, was meant as an illustration of Lipsius political thought as expounded in the Politica. Its aim was to offer concrete models of behavior for rulers against the background of Habsburg politics. Lipsius' later political treatise also forms an indispensable key to interpret the place and function of the Politica in Lipsius’ political discourse and in early modern political thought. The Political admonitions and examples – widely read, edited, and translated in the 17th and 18th centuries – show Lipsius’ pivotal role in the genesis of modern political philosophy.

This book is about reading practice and experience in late medieval and early modern England. It focuses on the kinds of literatures that were more readily available to the widest spectrum of the population. Four case studies from many possibilities have been selected, each examining a particular type of popular literature under the headings ‘religious’, ‘moral’, ‘practical’ and ‘fictional’. A key concern of the book is how we might use particular types of evidence in order to understand more about reading practice and experience, so issues of method and approach are discussed fully in the opening chapter. One distinctive element of this book is that it attempts to uncover evidence for the reading practices and experiences of real, rather than ideal, readers, using evidence that is found within the material of a book or manuscript itself, or within the structure of a specific genre of literature. Salter attempts to negotiate a path through a set of methodological and interpretive issues in order to arrive at a better understanding of how people may have read and what they may have read. This, in turn, leads on to how we may interpret the evidence that manuscripts and early printed books provide for the ways that medieval and early modern people engaged with reading. This book will be of interest to academics and research students who study the history of reading, popular culture, literacy, manuscript and print culture, as well as to those interested more generally in medieval and early modern society and culture.

Reading Medieval Latin is an introduction to medieval Latin in its cultural and historical context and is designed to serve the needs of students who have completed the learning of basic classical Latin morphology and syntax. (Users of Reading Latin will find that it follows on after the end of section 5 of that course.) It is an anthology, organised chronologically and thematically in four parts. Each part is divided into chapters with introductory material, texts, and commentaries which give help with syntax, sentence-structure, and background. There are brief sections on medieval orthography and grammar, together with a vocabulary which includes words (or meanings) not found in standard classical dictionaries. The texts chosen cover areas of interest to students of medieval history, philosophy, theology, and literature.

In this detailed study of English narrative verse the author describes and analyses the undisputed masterpieces of narrative (such as the works of the Gawain poet, Langland, Gower and Chaucer), as well as anonymous romances and specimens of religious and comic narrative which form the background to more well-known poems.