The essays in this collection focus not on texts but on people, specifically on teachers and their students, beginning with the late Carolingian era and continuing through the creation of monastic and secular schools in the centuries before the first universities. Central to the articles in this volume are the schools and communities of Northern France and England, including Reims, Bec, Soissons, and Canterbury, whose patterns of thought and learning gave shape to intellectual endeavours throughout medieval Europe. In addition to some of the most prominent personalities of the day (among them Gerbert of Reims, Lanfranc and Anselm of Bec, Ivo of Chatres, and John of Salisbury), the contributors examine those teachers and students who worked in the shadows: figures like the biblical exegete Richard of Preaux and the musical innovator Theinred of Dover. The focus throughout the volume is on personalities and personal relationships, thus recreating the human connections that lay behind medieval humanism and the Twelfth-Century Renaissance. Taken together, the essays here create a coherent and compelling picture of the tumultuous time before the universities came to organize and take control of teaching and learning-a seminal period when teaching methods and curricula grew out of the particular experience of specific teachers and their interactions with their students.

Cultures of learning and practices of education in the Middle Ages are drawing renewed attention, and recent approaches are questioning the traditional boundaries of institutional and intellectual history. This book assembles contributions on both Byzantine and Latin learned culture, and locates medieval scholars in their religious and political contexts, instead of studying them in a framework of 'schools.' The contributions offer complementary perspectives on scholars and their work, discussing the symbolic and discursive construction of religious and intellectual authority, practices of networking, and adaptations of knowledge formations. (Series: Byzantinistische Studies and Texts / Byzantinistische Studien und Texte - Vol. 6) [Subject: Medieval Studies, History, Education]

Offers a comparative cultural history of north-western Europe in the crucial period of the eleventh century.

This Companion to the Abbey of Le Bec in the Central Middle Ages (11th–13th Centuries) offers the first major collection of studies dedicated to the medieval abbey of Le Bec, one of the most important, and perhaps the single most influential, monastery in the Anglo-Norman world. Following its foundation in 1034 by a knight-turned-hermit called Herluin, Le Bec soon developed into a religious, cultural and intellectual hub whose influence extended throughout Normandy and beyond. The fourteen chapters gathered in this Companion are written by internationally renowned experts of Anglo-Norman studies, and together they address the history of this important medieval institution in its many exciting facets. The broad range of scholarly perspectives combined in this volume includes historical and religious studies, prosopography and biography, palaeography and codicology, studies of space and identity, as well as theology and medicine. Contributors are Richard Allen, Elma Brenner, Laura Cleaver, Jean-Hervé Foulon, Giles E.M. Gasper, Laura L. Gathagan, Véronique Gazeau, Leonie V. Hicks, Elizabeth Kuhl, Benjamin Pohl, Julie Potter, Elisabeth van Houts, Steven Vanderputten, Sally N. Vaughn, and Jenny Weston.

This introductory guide, written by a leading expert in medieval theology and church history, offers a thorough overview of medieval biblical interpretation. After an opening chapter sketching the necessary background in patristic exegesis (especially the hermeneutical teaching of Augustine), the book progresses through the Middle Ages from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries, examining all the major movements, developments, and historical figures of the period. Rich in primary text engagement and comprehensive in scope, it is the only current, compact introduction to the whole range of medieval exegesis.

The Permeable Self offers medievalists new insight into the appeal and dangers of the erotics of pedagogy; the remarkable influence of courtly romance conventions on hagiography and mysticism; and the unexpected ways that pregnancy—often devalued in mothers—could be positively ascribed to men, virgins, and God.

A follow-up publication to the Handbook of Medieval Studies, this new reference work turns to a different focus: medieval culture. Medieval research has grown tremendously in depth and breadth over the last decades. Particularly our understanding of medieval culture, of the basic living conditions, and the specific value system prevalent at that time has considerably expanded, to a point where we are in danger of no longer seeing the proverbial forest for the trees. The present, innovative handbook offers compact articles on essential topics, ideals, specific knowledge, and concepts defining the medieval world as comprehensively as possible. The topics covered in this new handbook pertain to issues such as love and marriage, belief in God, hell, and the devil, education, lordship and servitude, Christianity versus Judaism and Islam, health, medicine, the rural world, the rise of the urban class, travel, roads and bridges, entertainment, games, and sport activities, numbers, measuring, the education system, the papacy, saints, the senses, death, and money.