Giorgio Agamben is accused of political passivity, but this article argues that he sees the potential for resistance in modes of being inactive and unproductive, in study, play and profanity, which alone can escape the binary oppositions through which modern power operates, most notably the attempt to separate useful from useless life. He finds the resources for this model in very diverse locations, including the poetry of the troubadours, medieval thought about angels and medieval monastic movements. Agamben argues (...) that such texts retain philosophical potential which is revealed precisely by modern crises of subjectivity, economy and community. Agamben’s The End of the Poem is read here as containing early elements of a mode of resistance that informs the new paradigms for human life and practice developed in his The Kingdom and the Glory and The Highest Poverty, where the revolutionary potential of past cultures emerges fully. (shrink)

Includes 28 illustrations of manuscripts, artwork, and architecture. Paperback edition ($16.95) not seen. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

One of a series "designed to add to the growing body of historical material reevaluating the culture of Medieval Europe." This volume consists of short, lucid articles which explore some of the historical, philosophical and literary figures and developments of the Middle Ages. A lead article by Laurence K. Shook discusses the nature and value of medieval studies.—B. P. H.

The articles contained in this volume are indicative of a new effort, in the best of current research on the early medieval west, to examine the period from new angles that more fully illumine its vitality and creativity than has been done in the past.

Ranging chronologically from the twelfth to the fifteenth century and thematically from Latin to vernacular literary modes, this book challenges standard assumptions about the musical cultures and philosophies of the European Middle Ages. Engaging a wide range of premodern texts and contexts, from the musicality of sodomy in twelfth-century polyphony to Chaucer's representation of pedagogical violence in the Prioress's Tale, from early Christian writings on the music of the body to the plainchant and poetry of Hildegard of Bingen, the author (...) argues that medieval music was quintessentially a practice of the flesh. The book reveals a medieval world in which erotic desire, sexual practice, torture, flagellation, and even death itself resonated with musical significance and meaning. In its insistence on music as an integral part of the material cultures of the Middle Ages, the book presents a revisionist account of an important aspect of premodern European civilization. (shrink)

The Middle Ages takes over from antiquity the perception of memory as primarily a rhetoric skill needed for composing. Both the memory of the canon authors and the memory of mnemotechnics are a testament to the enormous significance that education and science were attached to remembering and reminding themselves. Unfortunately, so far we don't know enough about the great role played by monastic inspiration – deriving from liturgy and meditation – in shaping the culture of memory.

The author analyzes the formation of questioning in two cultures (Ancient and Middle Ages) by the example of questions and answers in the works of Plato and St. Augustine. The author points out two reasons that triggered this process: firstly, the formation of an ancient personality, which was characterized by independent behavior and creativity, and secondly, the need not only to present new knowledge and pictures of the world to listeners, but also to convince them of the correctness of the (...) proposed innovations. The questions and answers in Plato's dialogues are considered; in addition to the task of persuasion, they mark the stages of Plato's construction of concepts, while probably taking into account the objections of Plato's listeners, and the contradictions arising from the proposed definitions, and the understanding of various empirical cases, and the possibility of thinking them all as a whole. Questions, on the one hand, were a kind of reflection of cognition (dialectics) Plato of complex phenomena, on the other hand, helped Plato's listeners to develop a seemingly similar process of cognition. The analysis of questioning in Augustine's "Confession" allowed the author to distinguish three semantic contexts: the first one is the certification of new theoretical constructions, the second context is thinking, here the questions, on the one hand, mark the stages of creativity, representing a form of reflection, on the other hand, initiate listeners' own thinking, the third context is religious, it is both repentance and the conviction of those who waver in faith. If most questioners usually have questions that help thinking and work for persuasion, then the third context can be very different. (shrink)

JOHN E. MURDOCH AND EDITH DUDLEY SYLLA INTRODUCTION Conferences and colloquia are held and their results often published, but very rarely is any account ...

Reading Medieval Chinese Poetry: Text, Context, and Culture. Edited, with an introduction, by Paul W. Kroll. Sinica Leidensia, vol. 117. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Pp. vi + 310. €126, $164.

In the thirteenth century, the University of Paris emerged as a complex community with a distinctive role in society. This book explores the relationship between contexts of learning and the ways of knowing developed within them, focusing on twelfth-century schools and monasteries, as well as the university. By investigating their views on money, marriage and sex, Ian Wei reveals the complexity of what theologians had to say about the world around them. He analyses the theologians' sense of responsibility to the (...) rest of society and the means by which they tried to communicate and assert their authority. In the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, however, their claims to authority were challenged by learned and intellectually sophisticated women and men who were active outside as well as inside the university and who used the vernacular - an important phenomenon in the development of the intellectual culture of medieval Europe. (shrink)

The year 1400 is one of those loudly proclaimed milestones in English literary history in which the vagaries of human life and human chronological systems appear to come together with unusual appropriateness. The year not only of a new century's beginning but of the death of the old century's most important poet, 1400 has often been taken by Middle English scholars to mark one of those crucial transitions between an age of gold and one of brass: between the Age of (...) Chaucer and the glories of Ricardian literature, on the one hand, and that of what is persistently taken, on the other, as the dullness and all-too-proper humility of fifteenth-century writing—dedicated as so much of it seems to be to the sterile elevation and imitation of the beloved “father and master” Chaucer. So well naturalized has this model become, and so much has it consequently influenced the reading habits of Middle English scholars, that it is only now becoming possible to recognize the model as a construct inherited from the fifteenth century itself: a cultural formation, founded on half-truths, which deserves attention as an object, more than a tool, of critical analysis. Thus it has been only recently that serious reflection has begun both on the nature of the changes of which Chaucer's death has been taken as a symbol and on the ideological manipulations for which that year, as the sign of the end of an era, has been used as an only apparently natural substitute. (shrink)