The Medieval World At Our Fingertips

No manuscript is an island. We may consider medieval illumination as a single characteristic of the whole Middle Ages, but every manuscript is part of the evolving history of European art and culture, and every one belongs to a place and period. The Sandra Hindman Collection is a remarkable journey through time and location. Every illuminated cutting described here is a microcosm of a larger history. A sublime initial from a twelfth-century Bible from France is part of a setting which includes Chartres Cathedral, the Crusades and Abelard; two late thirteenth-century narrative miniatures of saints from northern Italy have stepped from in a world inhabited by Giotto and Dante and the basilica of Santa Croce in Florence; a miniature by the Berlin Master of Mary of Burgundy belongs in age of Rogier van der Weyden and Hans Memling; a painting from a choir book by the 'Master B.F.' can hold its place with Leonardo da Vinci and Palestrina. Manuscripts were always at the heart of intellectual and visual culture. For thirty years Sandra Hindman has been selecting and refining a collection of perfect medieval miniatures which are the quintessence of their time. Each is a window which illuminates a world. The history of stained glass, architecture, fresco painting, tapestries and wood carving, as well as medieval literature, religion, music and romance, are all made slightly clearer and more focused by looking at the illuminated miniatures chosen for exhibition here.

Essays about the creation, circulation, and collection of medieval manuscripts. The essays collected here celebrate the work of Barbara Shailor, the distinguished scholar of medieval manuscripts. They explore various aspects of their provenance. The subjects addressed range from studies of the history of individual manuscripts, to the evidence afforded by the understanding of their textual traditions, to the significance of the identification of fragments, to the roles of individual scholars and collectors. As a whole the volume contributes to a wider understanding of how the history and ownership of medieval manuscripts can be fruitfully examined, a flourishing area of interest in the field.

Is Trump responsible for the January 6 insurrection? Are “white people” responsible for slavery? In Moral Responsibility beyond Our Fingertips: Collective Responsibility, Leaders, and Attributionism, Eugene Schlossberger expands, updates, and argues for the attributionist account of moral responsibility and agency and applies it to several pressing contemporary concerns: leaders’ responsibility for their followers' acts (and ordinary persons’ responsibility for their influence on others), collective responsibility, addiction, and responsibility for what we would have done. Moral agents are continuing worldviews in operation who are ultimately responsible for their worldviews and occasion-responsible for acts, events, and circumstances that occasion a judgment of responsibility. Agents can be responsible for many things beyond their fingertips—such as others' behavior that they enabled—that reveal something about their worldviews. The wide-ranging discussion addresses the responsibility of psychopaths; the nature of beliefs and desires; social convergence theory; twelve forms of subjectability (such as blame and owing an apology); queerness and moral internalism; the beneficiary pays principle; and much more. The result is a comprehensive picture of agency and responsibility.

The acclaimed author of Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts introduces us to the extraordinary keepers and companions of medieval manuscripts over a thousand years of history The illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages are among the greatest works of European art and literature. We are dazzled by them and recognize their crucial role in the transmission of knowledge. However, we generally think much less about the countless men and women who made, collected and preserved them through the centuries, and to whom they owe their existence. This entrancing book describes some of the extraordinary people who have spent their lives among illuminated manuscripts over the last thousand years: a monk in Normandy, a prince of France, a Florentine bookseller, an English antiquary, a rabbi from central Europe, a French priest, a Keeper at the British Museum, a Greek forger, a German polymath, a British connoisseur and the woman who created the most spectacular library in America—all of them members of what Christopher de Hamel calls the Manuscripts Club. This exhilarating fraternity, and the fellow enthusiasts who come with it, throw new light on how manuscripts have survived and been used by very different kinds of people in many different circumstances. Christopher de Hamel’s unexpected connections and discoveries reveal a passion that crosses the boundaries of time. We understand the manuscripts themselves better by knowing who their keepers and companions have been. In 1850 (or thereabouts) John Ruskin bought his first manuscript “at a bookseller’s in a back alley.” This was his reaction: “The new worlds which every leaf of this book opened to me, and the joy I had in counting their letters and unravelling their arabesques as if they had all been of beaten gold—as many of them were—cannot be told.” The members of de Hamel’s club share many such wonders, which he brings to us with scholarship, style and a lifetime’s experience.

The twenty-eight essays in this Handbook represent the best of current thinking in the study of Latin language and literature in the Middle Ages. The insights offered by the collective of authors not only illuminate the field of medieval Latin literature but shed new light on broader questions of literary history, cultural interaction, world literature, and language in history and society. The contributors to this volume--a collection of both senior scholars and gifted young thinkers--vividly illustrate the field's complexities on a wide range of topics through carefully chosen examples and challenges to settled answers of the past. At the same time, they suggest future possibilities for the necessarily provisional and open-ended work essential to the pursuit of medieval Latin studies. While advanced specialists will find much here to engage and at times to provoke them, this handbook successfully orients non-specialists and students to this thriving field of study. The overall approach of The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Latin Literature makes this volume an essential resource for students of the ancient world interested in the prolonged after-life of the classical period's cultural complexes, for medieval historians, for scholars of other medieval literary traditions, and for all those interested in delving more deeply into the fascinating more-than-millennium that forms the bridge between the ancient Mediterranean world and what we consider modernity.

In this book Michael Heim provides the first consistent philosophical basis for critically evaluating the impact of word processing on our use of and ideas about language. This edition includes a new foreword by David Gelernter, a new preface by the author, and an updated bibliography. "Not only important but seminal, on the cutting-edge, furrowing new conceptual territory."-Walter J. Ong, S.J. "A philosopher ponders how the word processor has affected language use and our ideas about it. Heim shrewdly updates a school of thought, associated with such thinkers as Walter Ong, that maintains all changes in writing technology tend to change the way we perceive the world. His argument that word processing leads to fragmented thinking should be addressed and debated."-Carlin Romano, Philadelphia Inquirer "The arguments range over all of Western philosophy (and some Eastern as well), from the ancient Greeks to contemporary phenomenology. . . . Everyone who has used a word processor will find much to think about in Heim's ideas."-David Weinberger, Byte "Fascinating, clear, and well-done . . . stimulating and challenging."-Don Ihde, Philosophy and Rhetoric

Drawing on the expertise of 26 distinguished scholars, this important volume covers the major issues in the study of medieval Europe, highlighting the significant impact the time period had on cultural forms and institutions central to European identity. Examines changing approaches to the study of medieval Europe, its periodization, and central themes Includes coverage of important questions such as identity and the self, sexuality and gender, emotionality and ethnicity, as well as more traditional topics such as economic and demographic expansion; kingship; and the rise of the West Explores Europe’s understanding of the wider world to place the study of the medieval society in a global context

Larry Kritcher has always had an insatiable desire for travel, coupled with a love of the world’s cuisines. With a huge itch to explore strange and unusual destinations, he wouldn’t call himself a thrill seeker, but many of his experiences have taken him past the normal boundaries of work and play. In Blind Dog Further down the Travel Trail, Kritcher tells of his lifetime of travel and how he and his wife, Rita, have fulfilled most of his travel dreams. A sequel to Blind Dog on the Travel Trail, this new chapter in the Kritcher travel saga grew from Rita’s daily journals, Larry’s flight-log pages, scribblings on cocktail napkins and the margins of guidebooks, photo album memories, and old road maps creased beyond recognition. The stories and photographs explore the couple’s visits to more than 130 countries. Blind Dog Further down the Travel Trail is an ambitious narrative of travel booty, absurdities, happiness, tribulations, sorrows, and survival covering seven continents and all five oceans, traveling by land, air, and sea.