This is the first book to focus on Latin epic verse saints' lives in their medieval historical contexts. Anna Taylor examines how these works promoted bonds of friendship and expressed rivalries among writers, monasteries, saints, earthly patrons, teachers, and students in Western Europe in the central middle ages. Using philological, codicological, and microhistorical approaches, Professor Taylor reveals new insights that will reshape our understanding of monasticism, patronage, and education. These texts give historians an unprecedented glimpse inside the early medieval classroom, provide a nuanced view of the complicated synthesis of the Christian and Classical heritages, and show the cultural importance and varied functions of poetic composition in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries.

This groundbreaking book, the first to examine Milton's thinking about matter and substance throughout his entire poetic career, seeks to alter the prevailing critical view that Milton was a monist-materialist--one who believes that all things are composed of material and all phenomena (including consciousness) are the result of material interactions. Based on her close study of the philosophical movements of Milton's mind, Sugimura discovers the "fluid intermediaries" in his poetry that are neither strictly material nor immaterial. In doing so, Sugimura uses Paradise Lost as a fascinating window into the intersection of literature and philosophy, and of literary studies and intellectual history. Sugimura finds that Milton displays a tense and ambiguous relationship with the idealistic dualism of Plato and the materialism of Aristotle and she argues for a more nuanced interpretation of Milton's metaphysics.

The body of theory on speech production and speech disorder developed prior to Descartes has been so neglected by historians that its very existence is practically unknown today. Yet it provides a framework for understanding the speech process which is not only comprehensive and coherent, but of great relevance to current debates on issues of language performance and applied linguistics. Current theoretical difficulties stem largely from initial errors of Descartes; whereas earlier theoretical formulations, while outlining a bio-mechanics of speech, retain the central role of the human agent. The discussions explicated in this book come mainly from the natural-philosophic and medical literature of Greco-Roman Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance and early 17th century. This uncharted territory is mapped by tracing its textual history and diffusion as well as explaining the theory on its own terms but in clear and comprehensible language. Interdisciplinary in perspective, the book encompasses topics of interest not only to the language sciences, but also to the biosciences, medicine, philosophy of human movement, psychology and behavioral sciences, neurosciences, speech pathology, experimental phonetics, speech and rhetoric, and the history of science in general.