History in the Comic Mode Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person
In this groundbreaking collection, twenty-one prominentmedievalists discuss continuity and change in ideas of personhoodand community and argue for the viability of the comic mode in thestudy and recovery of history. These scholars approach theirsources not from a particular ideological viewpoint but with anunderstanding that all topics, questions, and explanations areviable. They draw on a variety of sources in Latin, Arabic, French,German, Middle English, and more, and employ a range of theoriesand methodologies, always keeping in mind that environments areinseparable from the making of the people who inhabit them and thatthese people are in part constituted by and understood in terms oftheir communities. Essays feature close readings of both familiar and lesser knownmaterials, offering provocative interpretations of John ofRupescissa's alchemy; the relationship between the living and thesaintly dead in Bernard of Clairvaux's sermons; the nomenclature ofheresy in the early eleventh century; the apocalyptic visions ofRobert of Uzès; Machiavelli's De principatibus; the roleof "demotic religiosity" in economic development; and the visionsof Elizabeth of Schönau. Contributors write as historians ofreligion, art, literature, culture, and society, approaching theirsubjects through the particular and the singular rather thanthrough the thematic and the theoretical. Playing with the wildpossibilities of the historical fragments at their disposal, thescholars in this collection advance a new and exciting approach towriting medieval history
eBook, 2007
Columbia University Press, NEW YORK, 2007