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In England in the late thirteenth century, a young chorister at the Cathedral of Saint Aelred, an outcast due to his crippled foot, sympathizes with the city's other outcasts, the Jews, and sets out to prove their leader innocent of murder.

These three anthologies are all relatively unknown, particularly in the English-speaking world, outside of professional medieval Latinist circles. Though excerpts from the Regensburg and Ripoll poems have been published in English translation, only the Ripoll poems have been translated completely, and only into Spanish and French. Making these anthologies available in a bilingual edition with commentary will make the insight they provide into several aspects of medieval life accessible to medieval historians as well as the more general public. The Regensburg poems take the form of epistolary exchanges in Leonine hexameters, mainly between a male teacher and his female students, who appear to have been nuns. Some of the sixty-eight short poems imply an erotic relationship between teacher and student. The poems afford us rare glimpses into the education of women at this time. The Ripoll poems are a collection of twenty love poems, probably written in Lorraine around 1150 and copied in Ripoll. All twenty poems were written by a single unknown poet, except for one, a misogynistic poem also found in other manuscripts. The Chartres poems comprise seven performed at the post-Christmas festivities in Chartres around 1180, when the world was turned upside down in a carnivalesque suspension of the normal social order. This collection offers unique insight into the kind of poems performed during these "feasts of fools." The last four poems are by two of the most famous medieval Latin poets, Walter of Chytillon and Peter of Blois, the canonist.

In this lively work, Beatrice K. Otto takes us on a journey around the world in search of one of the most colorful characters in history—the court jester. Though not always clad in cap and bells, these witty, quirky characters crop up everywhere, from the courts of ancient China and the Mogul emperors of India to those of medieval Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas. With a wealth of anecdotes, jokes, quotations, epigraphs, and illustrations (including flip art), Otto brings to light little-known jesters, highlighting their humanizing influence on people with power and position and placing otherwise remote historical figures in a more idiosyncratic, intimate light. Most of the work on the court jester has concentrated on Europe; Otto draws on previously untranslated classical Chinese writings and other sources to correct this bias and also looks at jesters in literature, mythology, and drama. Written with wit and humor, Fools Are Everywhere is the most comprehensive look at these roguish characters who risked their necks not only to mock and entertain but also to fulfill a deep and widespread human and social need.

A young man searches for three people more foolish than his fiancée and her parents.

From the author of The Architecture of Happiness, a deeply moving meditation on how we can still benefit, without believing, from the wisdom, the beauty, and the consolatory power that religion has to offer. Alain de Botton was brought up in a committedly atheistic household, and though he was powerfully swayed by his parents' views, he underwent, in his mid-twenties, a crisis of faithlessness. His feelings of doubt about atheism had their origins in listening to Bach's cantatas, were further developed in the presence of certain Bellini Madonnas, and became overwhelming with an introduction to Zen architecture. However, it was not until his father's death -- buried under a Hebrew headstone in a Jewish cemetery because he had intriguingly omitted to make more secular arrangements -- that Alain began to face the full degree of his ambivalence regarding the views of religion that he had dutifully accepted. Why are we presented with the curious choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle and effective rituals and practices for which there is no equivalent in secular society? Why do we bristle at the mention of the word "morality"? Flee from the idea that art should be uplifting, or have an ethical purpose? Why don't we build temples? What mechanisms do we have for expressing gratitude? The challenge that de Botton addresses in his book: how to separate ideas and practices from the religious institutions that have laid claim to them. In Religion for Atheists is an argument to free our soul-related needs from the particular influence of religions, even if it is, paradoxically, the study of religion that will allow us to rediscover and rearticulate those needs.