The essays in this volume, presented in honour of John O. Ward, explore the role of rhetoric in promoting reform and renewal in the Latin West from Peter Abelard (1079-1142) to Juan Luis Vives (1492-1540). Ward, who has taught for many years at the University of Sydney, has been an influential and creative force in medieval and Renaissance studies both in Australia and internationally. This volume opens with a personal memoir and bibliography of Ward's publications, as well as an overview of the study of medieval rhetoric. The first of the three sections, 'Abelard and Rhetoric', relates Abelard's rhetoric to his logic, his theology, and his relationship to Heloise. A second section, 'Voices of Reform', considers various writers (William of Malmesbury, John of Salisbury, Richard FitzNigel, and William of Ockham) who bring rhetorical techniques to bear upon analysis of social conditions. A third section, 'Rhetoric in Transition', deals with the evolution of rhetorical theory between the late fourteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The volume will be of interest not just to specialists in rhetoric, but to all concerned with issues of reform and renewal in European culture during the period 1100-1540.

A formidable challenge to the study of Roma (Gypsy) music is the muddle of fact and fiction in determining identity. This book investigates "Gypsy music" as a marked and marketable exotic substance, and as a site of active cultural negotiation and appropriation between the real Roma and the idealized Gypsies of the Western imagination. David Malvinni studies specific composers-including Liszt, Brahms, Rachmaninov, Janacek, and Bartók-whose work takes up contested and varied configurations of Gypsy music. The music of these composers is considered alongside contemporary debates over popular music and film, as Malvinni argues that Gypsiness remains impervious to empirical revelations about the "real" Roma.

This book provides an analytical overview of the vast range of historiography which was produced in western Europe over a thousand-year period between c.400 and c.1500. Concentrating on the general principles of classical rhetoric central to the language of this writing, alongside the more familiar traditions of ancient history, biblical exegesis and patristic theology, this survey introduces the conceptual sophistication and semantic rigour with which medieval authors could approach their narratives of past and present events, and the diversity of ends to which this history could then be put. By providing a close reading of some of the historians who put these linguistic principles and strategies into practice (from Augustine and Orosius through Otto of Freising and William of Malmesbury to Machiavelli and Guicciardini), it traces and questions some of the key methodological changes that characterise the function and purpose of the western historiographical tradition in this formative period of its development.

Through combinations of instructive prose and incantatory verse, liturgical rituals and herbal recipes, Latinate learning and oral tradition, the Old English remedies offer hope not only for bodily ailments but also for such dangers as solitary travel, swarming bees and stolen cattle. Hybrid healing works from the premise that the tremendous diversity of Old English medical texts requires an equally diverse range of interpretative methodologies. Through a case study approach, this exploration of early medicine offers a series of close readings tailored specifically to individual remedies, drawing from a range of fields including plant biology, classical rhetoric, archaeology, folkloristics and disability studies. Embracing the endless complexity of these Old English texts, Hybrid healing argues that the healing power of individual remedies ultimately derives from a dynamic and unpredictable process that is at once both deeply traditional and also ever-changing.

At a time when the Battle of Hastings and Magna Carta have become common currency in political debate, this study of the role played by the Norman Conquest in English history between the eleventh and the seventeenth centuries is both timely and relevant.

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]

A study of the representation of education in material culture, at a period of considerable change and growth.