Books of Knowledge in Late Medieval Europe

Books of Knowledge in Late Medieval Europe PDF Author: Pavlina Cermanova
Publisher:
ISBN: 9782503594637
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
This book provides a series of studies concerning unique medieval texts that can be defined as 'books of knowledge', such as medieval chronicles, bestiaries, or catechetic handbooks. Thus far, scholarship of intellectual history has focused on concepts of knowledge to describe a specific community, or to delimit intellectuals in society. However, the specific textual tool for the transmission of knowledge has been missing. Besides oral tradition, books and other written texts were the only sources of knowledge, and they were thus invaluable in efforts to receive or transfer knowledge. That is one reason why texts that proclaim to introduce a specific field of expertise or promise to present a summary of wisdom were so popular. These texts discussed cosmology, theology, philosophy, the natural sciences, history, and other fields. They often did so in an accessible way to maintain the potential to also attract a non-specialised public. The basic form was usually a narrative, chronologically or thematically structured, and clearly ordered to appeal to readers. Books of this kind could be disseminated in dozens or even hundreds of copies, and were often available (by translation or adaptation) in various languages, including the vernacular. In exploring these widely-disseminated and highly popular texts that offered a precise segment of knowledge that could be accessed by readers outside the intellectual and social elite, this volume intends to introduce books of knowledge as a new category within the study of medieval literacy.

Books of Knowledge in Late Medieval Europe

Books of Knowledge in Late Medieval Europe PDF Author: Pavlina Cermanova
Publisher:
ISBN: 9782503594637
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 325

Get Book

Book Description
This book provides a series of studies concerning unique medieval texts that can be defined as 'books of knowledge', such as medieval chronicles, bestiaries, or catechetic handbooks. Thus far, scholarship of intellectual history has focused on concepts of knowledge to describe a specific community, or to delimit intellectuals in society. However, the specific textual tool for the transmission of knowledge has been missing. Besides oral tradition, books and other written texts were the only sources of knowledge, and they were thus invaluable in efforts to receive or transfer knowledge. That is one reason why texts that proclaim to introduce a specific field of expertise or promise to present a summary of wisdom were so popular. These texts discussed cosmology, theology, philosophy, the natural sciences, history, and other fields. They often did so in an accessible way to maintain the potential to also attract a non-specialised public. The basic form was usually a narrative, chronologically or thematically structured, and clearly ordered to appeal to readers. Books of this kind could be disseminated in dozens or even hundreds of copies, and were often available (by translation or adaptation) in various languages, including the vernacular. In exploring these widely-disseminated and highly popular texts that offered a precise segment of knowledge that could be accessed by readers outside the intellectual and social elite, this volume intends to introduce books of knowledge as a new category within the study of medieval literacy.

Collecting, Organizing and Transmitting Knowledge

Collecting, Organizing and Transmitting Knowledge PDF Author: Sabrina Corbellini
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
ISBN: 9782503569703
Category : Anthologies
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Miscellanies may easily make up the single largest group of medieval manuscripts. It was especially in the Late Middle Ages that the number of such multi-textual manuscripts, often compiled by lay and religious individuals for personal or communal use, grew substantially. In spite of their seminal relevance for the reconstruction of medieval culture, such manuscripts have not until recently garnered much scholarly interest. The present volume pinpoints the societal and cultural relevance of 14th- and 15th-century miscellanies as well as their role in the understanding of textual creation, transformation and complexity, in both late medieval and early modern societies. The contributions scrutinise, on the one side, text corpora and textual traditions that had a seminal impact on late medieval European culture: the texts of Geoffrey Chaucer and Reginald Pecock, the manuscripts of Dante's Commedia, late medieval Italian and Latin poetic anthologies, but also miscellanies from the Council of Basel and multi-textual manuscripts containing anti-Hussite texts. On the other side, the volume takes into account individual scribes/compilers and collections: from remarkable cases such as Pico della Mirandola and Leonardo da Vinci, to personal collections made up by lesser-known but not less significant compilers and users. Under a strong pan-European umbrella, the volume embarks on specific problems, among which authorship, non-autonomy, composition, reception and use, along with more general issues such as multilingualism or the relationship between image and text. Though ubiquitous and complex, miscellanies blend the diverse cultural, economic and social tendencies of their prosumers, thus proving to be tokens of the appropriation of medieval knowledge and providing snapshots of a dynamic textual culture.

The Visualization of Knowledge in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

The Visualization of Knowledge in Medieval and Early Modern Europe PDF Author: J. H. Chajes
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
ISBN: 9782503583037
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 475

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Book Description
All of us are exposed to graphic means of communication on a daily basis. Our life seems flooded with lists, tables, charts, diagrams, models, maps, and forms of notation. Although we now take such devices for granted, their role in the codification and transmission of knowledge evolved within historical contexts where they performed particular tasks. The medieval and early modern periods stand as a formative era during which visual structures, both mental and material, increasingly shaped and systematized knowledge. Yet these periods have been sidelined as theorists interested in the epistemic potential of visual strategies have privileged the modern natural sciences. This volume expands the field of research by focusing on the relationship between the arts of memory and modes of graphic mediation through the sixteenth century. Chapters encompass Christian (Greek as well as Latin) production, Jewish (Hebrew) traditions, and the transfer of Arabic learning. The linked essays anthologized here consider the generative power of schemata, cartographic representation, and even the layout of text: more than merely compiling information, visual arrangements formalize abstract concepts, provide grids through which to process data, set in motion analytic operations that give rise to new ideas, and create interpretive frameworks for understanding the world.

Locations of Knowledge in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Locations of Knowledge in Medieval and Early Modern Europe PDF Author: Kocku von Stuckrad
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004184236
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Addressing discourses of perfect knowledge in Western culture between 1200 and 1800, this book integrates the study of Western esotericism in a larger analytical framework of European history of religion.

Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine

Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine PDF Author: Nancy G. Siraisi
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226761312
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
Western Europe supported a highly developed and diverse medical community in the late medieval and early Renaissance periods. In her absorbing history of this complex era in medicine, Siraisi explores the inner workings of the medical community and illustrates the connections of medicine to both natural philosophy and technical skills.

Cultures of Religious Reading in the Late Middle Ages

Cultures of Religious Reading in the Late Middle Ages PDF Author: Sabrina Corbellini
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Books and reading
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Read often, learn all that you can. Let sleep overcome you, the roll still in your hands; when your head falls, let it be on the sacred page. - St Jerome, 384 AD With these words, the Church Father Jerome exhorted the young Eustochium to find on the sacred page the spiritual nourishment that would give her the strength to live a life of chastity and to keep her monastic vows. His call to read does not stand alone. Books and reading have always played a pivotal role in early and medieval Christianity, often defined as 'a religion of the book'. A second important stage in the development of the 'religion of the book' can be attested in the late Middle Ages, when religious reading was no longer the exclusive right of men and women living in solitude and concentrating on prayer and meditation. Changes in the religious landscape and the birth of new religious movements transformed the medieval town into a privileged area of religious activity. Increasing literacy opened the door to a new and wider public of lay readers. This seminal transformation in the late medieval cultural horizon saw the growing importance of the vernacular, the cultural and religious emancipation of the laity, and the increasing participation of lay people in religious life and activities. This volume presents a new, interdisciplinary approach to religious reading and reading techniques in a lay environment within late medieval textual, social, and cultural transformations.

Faith and Knowledge in Late Medieval and Early Modern Scandinavia

Faith and Knowledge in Late Medieval and Early Modern Scandinavia PDF Author: Karoline Kjesrud
Publisher:
ISBN: 9782503579016
Category : Paganism
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description


Forms of Individuality and Literacy in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods

Forms of Individuality and Literacy in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods PDF Author: Franz-Josef Arlinghaus
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
ISBN: 9782503552200
Category : Individuality in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
'Individuality' is one of the central categories of modern society. Can the roots of modern individuality be found in pre-modern times? Or is our way of thinking about ourselves a very recent phenomenon? This book takes a theoretical approach to the problem, derived from Niklas Luhmann's system theory, in which different forms of individuality are linked to different structures of society in modern and pre-modern times. The papers in this volume approach this problem by discussing a broad variety of medieval and early modern sources, including charters and seals, letters, and naming-practices in a late medieval town. Self-representation is also considered, in 'housebooks' and drawings. Textual studies include autobiography in German Humanism, and concepts of individuality and gender in late medieval literary texts.

The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages

The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Edward Grant
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521567626
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
This 1997 book views the substantive achievements of the Middle Ages as they relate to early modern science.

The Map of Knowledge

The Map of Knowledge PDF Author: Violet Moller
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 150982961X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
'A lovely debut from a gifted young author. Violet Moller brings to life the ways in which knowledge reached us from antiquity to the present day in a book that is as delightful as it is readable.' Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads In The Map of Knowledge Violet Moller traces the journey taken by the ideas of three of the greatest scientists of antiquity – Euclid, Galen and Ptolemy – through seven cities and over a thousand years. In it, we follow them from sixth-century Alexandria to ninth-century Baghdad, from Muslim Cordoba to Catholic Toledo, from Salerno’s medieval medical school to Palermo, capital of Sicily’s vibrant mix of cultures, and – finally – to Venice, where that great merchant city’s printing presses would enable Euclid’s geometry, Ptolemy’s system of the stars and Galen’s vast body of writings on medicine to spread even more widely. In tracing these fragile strands of knowledge from century to century, from east to west and north to south, Moller also reveals the web of connections between the Islamic world and Christendom, connections that would both preserve and transform astronomy, mathematics and medicine from the early Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Vividly told and with a dazzling cast of characters, The Map of Knowledge is an evocative, nuanced and vibrant account of our common intellectual heritage. 'An endlessly fascinating book, rich in detail, capacious and humane in vision.' Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Swerve: How the World Became Modern