Outlook on this insane, sickly, degrading, insecure, ugly world - where the worst and meanest (criminals, predators and parasites) win and rule, not merely the fittest... Is this "the glory of Creation" .. It seems, we live in the world of animals, in a society of inadequate morons not responsible for their actions and deeds, from top to the bottom, worldwide, without any Cosmic guidance and grace... The real issue is not East vs. West, or South vs. North, nor conflict of civilizations, but incompatible antagonism between the upper strata and masses, power/authorities and the people, exploiters and the destitute, Labor and Capital, the Good and the Evil... Conflict between Homo Sapiens and Homo Defectus... Real people's enemies are banks, financial speculators, bureaucracy, mass-media, entertainment and insane politicians... Criminality of the most authorities is in disrespect, contempt for their own people. In majority of the countries the state does not fulfill its due functions, turning into the Monster degrading and terrorizing the people in all spheres. That's the common social decease which can be solved only through transformation of inadequate state into Volksstaat based on equality, collective, just economy...

Translation of the anonymous 2 volume Latin manuscript, compiled from around 1577 to sometime after 1583, and held at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C, number V.b.26.

The commentary of John Colet (1467-1519) on Dionysius the Areopagite’s Ecclesiastical Hierarchy adapts a work widely neglected by medieval theologians to the early sixteenth century. Dionysius’s “apostolic” model allowed Colet to set ecclesiastical corruption against the ideas for re-forming the mind as well as the church. The commentary reveals Colet’s fascination with the Kabbalah and re-emergent Galenism, but it subordinates all to harmonizing Dionysius and his supposed teacher, Paul. This first new edition in almost 150 years and first edition of the complete manuscript is edited critically, translated expertly, and provided with an apparatus that advances historical, theological, and rhetorical contexts. It resituates study of Colet by identifying a coherent center for his theology and agenda for reform in Tudor England.

Remembering the past in the Middle Ages is a subject that is usually perceived as a study of chronicles and annals written by monks in monasteries. Following in the footsteps of early Christian historians such as Eusebius and St Augustine, the medieval chroniclers are thought of as men isolated in their monastic institutions, writing about the world around them. As the sole members of their society versed in literacy, they had a monopoly on the knowledge of the past as preserved in learned histories, which they themselves updated and continued. A self-perpetuating cycle of monks writing chronicles, which were read, updated and continued by the next generation, so the argument goes, remained the vehicle for a narrative tradition of historical writing for the rest of the Middle Ages. Elisabeth van Houts forcefully challenges this view and emphasises the collaboration between men and women in the memorial tradition of the Middle Ages through both narrative sources (chronicles, saints' lives and miracles) and material culture (objects such as jewellery, memorial stones and sacred vessels). Men may have dominated the pages of literature from the period, but they would not have had half the stories to write about if women had not told them: thus the remembrance of the past was a human experience shared equally between men and women.

This study opens up an important perspective to the intellectual history of the 12th and early 13th century. It also proposes a new approach for cultural historical research by using secular Latin poetry as materials for the analysis of the ideological articulation of clerical orders of the time.

Dante's classic is presented in the original Italian as well as in a new prose translation, and is accompanied by commentary on the poem's background and allegory.