The biblical book of Job is a timeless text that relates a story of intense human suffering, abandonment, and eventual redemption. It is a tale of profound theological, philosophical, and existential significance that has captured the imaginations of auditors, exegetes, artists, religious leaders, poets, preachers, and teachers throughout the centuries. This original volume provides an introduction to the wide range of interpretations and representations of Job—both the scriptural book and its righteous protagonist—produced in the medieval Christian West. The essays gathered here treat not only exegetical and theological works such as Gregory’s Moralia and the literal commentaries of Thomas Aquinas and Nicholas of Lyra, but also poetry and works of art that have Job as their subject.

A fascinating guide to strange-but-true jobs.

Calling into question the common assumption that the Middle Ages produced no secondary epics, Ann W. Astell here revises a key chapter in literary history. She examines the connections between the Book of Job and Boethius' s Consolation of Philosophy—texts closely associated with each other in the minds of medieval readers and writers—and demonstrates that these two works served as a conduit for the tradition of heroic poetry from antiquity through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. As she traces the complex influences of classical and biblical texts on vernacular literature, Astell offers provocative readings of works by Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Malory, Milton, and many others. Astell looks at the relationship between the historical reception of the epic and successive imitative forms, showing how Boethius's Consolation and Johan biblical commentaries echo the allegorical treatment of" epic truth" in the poems of Homer and Virgil, and how in turn many works classified as "romance" take Job and Boethius as their models. She considers the influences of Job and Boethius on hagiographic romance, as exemplified by the stories of Eustace, Custance, and Griselda; on the amatory romances of Abelard and Heloise, Dante and Beatrice, and Troilus and Criseyde; and on the chivalric romances of Martin of Tours, Galahad, Lancelot, and Redcrosse. Finally, she explores an encyclopedic array of interpretations of Job and Boethius in Milton's Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes.

In this second of a three-volume work, Vicchio addresses the Job traditions as interpreted in the period of the Middle Ages--in Jewish, Christian and Islamic sources. From the Vulgate to the Qur'an, from Maimonides to Calvin, Vicchio addresses the complexities of the "reception history" of intriguing work. Two appendices address how Job has been treated throughout history in literature, in drama, and in medicine. Volume 1: Job in the Ancient World Volume 2: Job in the Medieval World Volume 3: Job in the Modern World

The Bible, Gender, and Reception History: The Case of Job's Wife investigates the fleeting appearance in the Bible of Job's wife and its impact on the imaginations of readers throughout history. It begins by presenting key interpretive gaps in the biblical text concerning Job and his wife, explaining the way gender studies offers guiding principles with which the author engages a reception history of their marriage. After analyzing Job and his wife within medieval Christian theology of Eden, the author identifies ways in which Job's wife visually aligns with medieval images of Satan. The volume explores portrayals of Job and his wife in publications on marriage and gender roles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, moving onto an investigation of William Blake's sharp artistic divergence from the common tradition in his representation of Job's wife as a shrew. In the exploration of societal portrayals of Job and his Wife throughout history, this book discovers how arguments about marriage intertwine with not only gender roles, but also, with political, social, and historical movements.

The main themes of this volume are the identification of 'visions', 'messages', and 'meanings' in various facets of Byzantine culture and the possible differences in the perception of these visions, messages and meanings as seen by their original audience and by modern scholars. The volume addresses the methodological question of how far interpretations should go - whether there is a tendency to read too much into too little or whether not enough attention is paid to apparent minutiae that may have been important in their historical context. As the essays span a wide chronological era, they also present a means of assessing the relative degrees of continuity and change in Byzantine visions, messages and meanings over time. Thus, as highlighted in the concluding section, the book discusses the validity of existing notions regarding the fluidity of Byzantine culture: when continuity was a matter of a rigid adherence to traditional values and when a manifestation of the ability to adapt old conventions to new circumstances, and it shows that in some respects, Byzantine cultural history may have been less fragmented than is usually assumed. Similarly, by reflecting not just on new interpretations, but also on the process of interpreting itself, the contributors demonstrate how research within Byzantine studies has evolved over the past thirty years from a set of narrowly defined individual disciplines into a broader exploration of interconnected cultural phenomena.