The twelve articles in this volume promote the growing contacts between historical linguistics and medieval cultural studies. They fall into two groups. One examines the interrelation in Anglo-Saxon England between Latin and vernacular language and culture, investigating language-contact between Old English and Latin, the extent of Latinity in early medieval Britain, Anglo-Saxons’ attitudes to Classical culture, and relationships between Anglo-Saxon and Continental Christian thought. Another group uses historical linguistics as a method in the wider cultural study of medieval England, examining syntactic change, dialect, translation and semantics to give us access to politeness, demography, and cultural constructions of colour, thought and time. The volume will be of particular interest to scholars of Anglo-Saxon culture and Middle English language. Contributors are Olga Timofeeva, Alaric Hall, Seppo Heikkinen, Jesse Keskiaho, John Blair, Kathryn A. Lowe, Antonette DiPaolo Healey, Lilla Kopár, C. P. Biggam, Ágnes Kiricsi, Alexandra Fodor and Mari Pakkala-Weckström.

The aim of this book is to help teachers and students in Ancient philosophy to find their way into the vast amount of modern publications about Plotinus. It collects over 50 years of research in a single and easy-to-use book, containing over 1500 entries in all languages. The first part deals with modern translations of Plotinus’ treatises, while the second part lists studies concerning particular aspects of Plotinus’ thought. The work ends with a series of 4 indexes allowing the reader to find any references quickly. This bibliography contains all the entries that have been listed in the different existing bibliographical indexes. These entries have been corrected and completed with small summaries when necessary. This bibliography is the most exhaustive one now available for those interested in plotinian studies.

Augustine of Hippo (AD 354-430) is arguably the most controversial Christian thinker in history. His positions on philosophical and theological concerns have been the subjects of intense scrutiny and criticism from his lifetime to the present. Augustine and his Critics gathers twelve specialists' responses to modern criticisms of his thought, covering: personal and religious freedom; the self and God; sexuality, gender and the body; spirituality; asceticism; cultural studies; and politics. Stimulating and insightful, the collection offers forceful arguments for neglected historical, philosophical and theological perspectives which are behind some of Augustine's most unpopular convictions.

Isaac of Nineveh's Ascetical Eschatology demonstrates that Isaac's eschatology is an original synthesis based on ideas garnered from a distinctively Syriac cultural milieu. Jason Scully investigates six sources relevant to the study of Isaac's Syriac source material and cultural heritage. These include ideas adapted from Syriac authors like Ephrem, John the Solitary, and Narsai, but also adapted from the Syriac versions of texts originally written in Greek, like Evagrius's Gnostic Chapters, Pseudo-Dionysius's Mystical Theology, and the Pseudo-Macarian homilies. Isaac's eschatological synthesis of this material is a sophisticated discourse on the psychological transformation that occurs when the mind has an experience of God. It begins with the premise that asceticism was part of God's original plan for creation. Isaac says that God created human beings with infantile knowledge and that God intended from the beginning for Adam and Eve to leave the Garden of Eden. Once outside the garden, human beings would have to pursue mature knowledge through bodily asceticism. Although perfect knowledge is promised in the future world, Isaac also believes that human beings can experience a proleptic taste of this future perfection. Isaac employs the concepts of wonder and astonishment in order to explain how an ecstatic experience of the future world is possible within the material structures of this world. According to Isaac, astonishment describes the moment when a person arrives at the threshold of eschatological perfection but is still unable to comprehend the heavenly mysteries, while wonder describes spiritual comprehension of heavenly knowledge through the intervention of divine grace.

This book employs Cognitive Literary Theory in an analysis of Conceptual and Intertextual Blending in the Gospel of Philip and the Exegesis on the Soul, read as Christian texts contemporary with the production and use of the Nag Hammadi Codices.

A comprehensive overview of ideas about dreams and visions in the Christian cultures of the early Middle Ages.