The Future Of The Middle Ages And The Renaissance

This volume, containing a selection of essays from ACMRS's 1996 conference, reflects a broad range of interests in medieval and Renaissance studies. Although most of the eleven essays address western European topics, one essay deals with Byzantine political and theological histroy, and one touches on Arabic poetry in medieval Sicily. The chronological range is also broad, extending from the seventh to the twentieth century and including topics from an early Byzantine polemicist to the recent growing interest in medievalism, and from critical readings of early texts to implications of computer technology for future manuscript study. In some significant ways the volume continues earlier discussions of the state of the profession, such as those in William D. Paden (ed.), The Future of the Middle Ages, and John Van Engen (ed.), The Past and Future of Medieval Studies. More generally, this second volume in the ASMAR series extends the theme of the first, Reinventing the Past, and makes fresh contributions to the scholarship on a number of problems. If the current volume provides a reliable gauge for the future of medieval and Renaissance studies, we are on the verge of new beginnings, increasingly outward-looking, reexamining and redefining old boundaries to reach a new and sharpened understanding of the past.

Studies of varied ways in which medieval people imagined the future, reasons behind such representations, and the implications for an understanding of medieval society as a whole.

Art must be the faithful expression of a society, since it represents it by its works as it has created them -- undeniable witnesses of its spirit and manners for future generations. But it must be acknowledged that art is only the consequence of the ideas which it expresses; it is the fruit of civilization, not its origin. To understand the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, it is necessary to go back to the source of its art, and to know the life of our fathers; these are two inseparable things, which entwine one another, and become complete one by the other. - Preface.

From shape-shifting Merlin to the homunculi of Paracelsus, the nine fascinating essays of this collection explore the contested boundaries between human and non-human animals, between the body and the spirit, and between the demonic and the divine. Drawing on recent work in animal studies, posthumanism, and transhumanism, these innovative articles show how contemporary debates about the nature and future of humanity have deep roots in the myths, literature, philosophy, and art of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The authors of these essays demonstrate how classical stories of monsters and metamorphoses offered philosophers, artists, and poets a rich source for reflection on marriage, resurrection, and the passions of love. The ambiguous and shifting distinctions between human, animal, demon, and angel have long been contentious. Beasts can elevate humanity: for Renaissance courtiers, horsemanship defined nobility. But animals are also associated with the demonic, and medieval illuminators portrayed Satan with bestial features. Divided into three sections that examine metamorphoses, human-animal relations, and the demonic and monstrous, this volume raises intriguing questions about the ways humans have understood their kinship with animals, nature, and the supernatural.

The essays here collect the author's further researches since the publication of her pathbreaking Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages in 1969. In part stimulated by responses to the book, they also show the extent to which the field then opened up has now expanded. In the last forty years a cultural shift in the meaning of 'history' has brought to the forefront an interest in how people have charted their future by the signs given in their historical heritage. Both pessimistic and optimistic readings of history meet in medieval Western Europe and colour the thought, art, even the politics of the Renaissance. In particular, the powerful vision of Joachim of Fiore activated a reading of history which culminates in a flowering of a 'third age'. These essays attempt to portray some of the strange and moving shapes which thronged the imagination as men and women looked to their prophetic future.

A "lively and engaging" history of the Middle Ages (Dallas Morning News) from the acclaimed historian William Manchester, author of The Last Lion. From tales of chivalrous knights to the barbarity of trial by ordeal, no era has been a greater source of awe, horror, and wonder than the Middle Ages. In handsomely crafted prose, and with the grace and authority of his extraordinary gift for narrative history, William Manchester leads us from a civilization tottering on the brink of collapse to the grandeur of its rebirth: the dense explosion of energy that spawned some of history's greatest poets, philosophers, painters, adventurers, and reformers, as well as some of its most spectacular villains. "Manchester provides easy access to a fascinating age when our modern mentality was just being born." --Chicago Tribune