Limits of Thought and Power in Medieval Europe

Limits of Thought and Power in Medieval Europe PDF Author: Edward Peters
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
The essays in this volume constitute a series of investigations into the limitations on thought and power as conceived by thinkers in the medieval West and they draw on material ranging from law to literature. The author deals with limits on the human desire for knowledge, the passion with which knowledge could legitimately be pursued, and the propriety of the knowledge sought, as well as the limits that might be tolerable and tolerated in the case of royal incapacity or misbehaviour. One particular focus is the work of Dante Alighieri, and these ideas are traced across a wide range of his thought. Chronologically the essays run from Augustine and the Gnostics through to Shakespeare.

Limits of Thought and Power in Medieval Europe

Limits of Thought and Power in Medieval Europe PDF Author: Edward Peters
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 376

Get Book Here

Book Description
The essays in this volume constitute a series of investigations into the limitations on thought and power as conceived by thinkers in the medieval West and they draw on material ranging from law to literature. The author deals with limits on the human desire for knowledge, the passion with which knowledge could legitimately be pursued, and the propriety of the knowledge sought, as well as the limits that might be tolerable and tolerated in the case of royal incapacity or misbehaviour. One particular focus is the work of Dante Alighieri, and these ideas are traced across a wide range of his thought. Chronologically the essays run from Augustine and the Gnostics through to Shakespeare.

The Limits of History

The Limits of History PDF Author: Constantin Fasolt
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226239101
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
History casts a spell on our minds more powerful than science or religion. It does not root us in the past at all. It rather flatters us with the belief in our ability to recreate the world in our image. It is a form of self-assertion that brooks no opposition or dissent and shelters us from the experience of time. So argues Constantin Fasolt in The Limits of History, an ambitious and pathbreaking study that conquers history's power by carrying the fight into the center of its domain. Fasolt considers the work of Hermann Conring (1606-81) and Bartolus of Sassoferrato (1313/14-57), two antipodes in early modern battles over the principles of European thought and action that ended with the triumph of historical consciousness. Proceeding according to the rules of normal historical analysis—gathering evidence, putting it in context, and analyzing its meaning—Fasolt uncovers limits that no kind of history can cross. He concludes that history is a ritual designed to maintain the modern faith in the autonomy of states and individuals. God wants it, the old crusaders would have said. The truth, Fasolt insists, only begins where that illusion ends. With its probing look at the ideological underpinnings of historical practice, The Limits of History demonstrates that history presupposes highly political assumptions about free will, responsibility, and the relationship between the past and the present. A work of both intellectual history and historiography, it will prove invaluable to students of historical method, philosophy, political theory, and early modern European culture.

Heresy and Authority in Medieval Europe

Heresy and Authority in Medieval Europe PDF Author: Edward Peters
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812206800
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Throughout the Middle Ages and early modern Europe theological uniformity was synonymous with social cohesion in societies that regarded themselves as bound together at their most fundamental levels by a religion. To maintain a belief in opposition to the orthodoxy was to set oneself in opposition not merely to church and state but to a whole culture in all of its manifestations. From the eleventh century to the fifteenth, however, dissenting movements appeared with greater frequency, attracted more followers, acquired philosophical as well as theological dimensions, and occupied more and more the time and the minds of religious and civil authorities. In the perception of dissent and in the steps taken to deal with it lies the history of medieval heresy and the force it exerted on religious, social, and political communities long after the Middle Ages. In this volume, Edward Peters makes available the most compact and wide-ranging collection of source materials in translation on medieval orthodoxy and heterodoxy in social context.

Heresy and authority in medieval Europe

Heresy and authority in medieval Europe PDF Author: Edward Peters
Publisher:
ISBN: 9787900526205
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description


Power and Profit

Power and Profit PDF Author: Peter Spufford
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780500285947
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
Newly available in paperback, this is a wonderfully readable account of the role of merchants and money in the medieval world. Professor Spufford, who has made a lifelong study of the subject, brings together a vast amount of material from archives all over the world to build up this important economic history of the origins of capitalism essential reading for the scholar, but also engaging and entertaining to the layman.

Negotiating Space

Negotiating Space PDF Author: Barbara H. Rosenwein
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801485213
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Why did early medieval kings declare certain properties to be immune from the judicial and fiscal encroachments of their own agents? Did weakness compel them to prohibit their agents from entering these properties, as historians have traditionally believed? In a richly detailed book that will be greeted as a landmark addition to the literature on the Middle Ages, Barbara H. Rosenwein argues that immunities were markers of power. By placing restraints on themselves and their agents, kings demonstrated their authority, affirmed their status, and manipulated the boundaries of sacred space.Rosenwein transforms our understanding of an institution central to the political and social dynamics of medieval Europe. She reveals how immunities were used by kings and other leaders to forge alliances with the noble families and monastic centers that were central to their power. Generally viewed as unchanging juridical instruments, immunities as they appear here are as fluid and diverse as the disparate social and political conflicts that they at once embody and seek to defuse. Their legacy reverberates in the modern world, where liberal institutions, with their emphasis on state restraint, clash with others that encourage governmental intrusion. The protections against unreasonable searches and seizures provided by English common law and the U.S. Constitution developed in part out of the medieval experience of immunities and the institutions that were elaborated to breach them.

Re-Thinking Kinship and Feudalism in Early Medieval Europe

Re-Thinking Kinship and Feudalism in Early Medieval Europe PDF Author: Stephen D. White
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000939383
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
This is the second collection of studies by Stephen D. White to be published by Variorum (the first being Feuding and Peace-Making in Eleventh-Century France). The essays in this volume look principally at France and England from Merovingian and Anglo-Saxon times up to the 12th century. They analyze Latin and Old French discourses that medieval nobles used to construct their relationships with kin, lords, men, and friends, and investigate the political dimensions of such relationships with particular reference to patronage/clientage, the use of land as an item of exchange, and feuding. In so doing, the essays call into question the conventional practice of studying kinship and feudalism as independent systems of legal institutions and propose new strategies for studying them.

Studies in Scholasticism

Studies in Scholasticism PDF Author: Marcia L. Colish
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040233627
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Spanning thirty years, the papers brought together in this volume reflect three of Professor Colish's interests as a historian of medieval scholastic thought. The first group of studies represent investigations that flowed into, and out of, the research on Peter Lombard (d. 1161) and his contemporaries that culminated in her book Peter Lombard (1994). Following the publication of that work, she next sought to discover how Peter's theology became mainstream Paris theology in the period between Lombard's death and the early 13th century, resulting in the second group of papers in this collection. Finally, the last two papers offer reflections on broader interpretive issues, considering ways in which medievalists ought to reconsider their general understanding of the story lines of high medieval intellectual history.

Sin: Essays on the Moral Tradition in the Western Middle Ages

Sin: Essays on the Moral Tradition in the Western Middle Ages PDF Author: Richard Newhauser
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000939790
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Richard Newhauser examines here aspects of the moral tradition of medieval thought, specifically the construction of the seven deadly sins, their offspring, and related schematizations of immorality in the Latin West. The emphasis in these studies is on the malleability of moral categories, their relationship to changes in medieval culture, and the creativity and sensitivity of the thinkers who made use of the concepts of sinfulness in the Middle Ages. The first section examines the contexts in which the seven deadly sins (or nine accessory sins) are found in medieval Latin, English, and German texts, and in particular the genre of the treatise on vices and virtues as the major vehicle in which concepts of immorality were examined and presented to a variety of audiences for meditative or pastoral purposes. The second section deals with one of the more interesting of the seven deadly sins, avarice, in its penitential, literary, apocalyptic, and institutional contexts, as its definition changed slowly with developing commercial experiences in medieval Europe. In the last section the breadth of the concept of a sinful curiosity is examined, and its historical development is delineated in the thought of Augustine of Hippo and the early Cistercians.

The Experience of Power in Medieval Europe

The Experience of Power in Medieval Europe PDF Author: Robert F. Berkhofer
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754651062
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
This volume explores the experience of power in medieval Europe. The seventeen essays range geographically from England in the north to Castile in the south, and chronologically from the 10th century to the 14th, and address a series of specific topics in institutional, social, religious, cultural, and intellectual history. Taken together, they present three distinct ways of discussing power in a medieval historical context: uses of power, relations of power, and discourses of power.