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In Yeats and Afterwords, contributors articulate W. B. Yeats's powerful, multilayered sense of belatedness as part of his complex literary method. They explore how Yeats deliberately positioned himself at various historical endpoints--of Romanticism, of the Irish colonial experience, of the Ascendancy, of civilization itself--and, in doing so, created a distinctively modernist poetics of iteration capable of registering the experience of finality and loss. While the crafting of such a poetics remained a constant throughout Yeats's career, the particular shape it took varied over time, depending on which lost object Yeats was contemplating. By tracking these vicissitudes, the volume offers new ways of thinking about the overarching trajectory of Yeats's poetic engagements.Yeats and Afterwords proceeds in three stages, involving past-pastness, present-pastness, and future-pastness. The first, "The Last Romantics," examines how Yeats repeats classic motifs and verbal formulations from his literary forebears in order to express the circumscribed cultural options with which he struggles. The essays in this section often uncover Yeats's relation to sources and precursors that are surprising or have been relatively neglected by scholars. The second section, "Yeats and Afterwords," looks at how Yeats subjects his own past sentiments, insights, and styles to critical negation, crafting his own afterwords in various ways. The last section, "Yeats's Aftertimes," explores how, thanks to the stature Yeats achieved through its invention, his style of belatedness itself comes to be reiterated by other writers. Yeats is a towering figure in literary history, hard to follow and harder to avoid, and later writers often found themselves producing words that were, in some sense, his afterwords.

At the heart of the University of Notre Dame's campus sits the Main Building with its trademark golden dome. Flanking it on the west is the equally distinctive Sacred Heart Basilica, and on the east is the building known today as Washington Hall. Washington Hall at Notre Dame is the first history of this building--the university's first performing arts center--and illuminates the ways in which Washington Hall has served as the prime venue of secular communal assembly for the university and surrounding communities since 1864. In addition to detailing the history of Washington Hall, Mark Pilkinton, a theatre historian, emphasizes the art form of theatre and its development at Notre Dame, but also discusses the contributions of music, debate, and lectures, as well as the introduction of the "new media" of film, radio, and television. Among many other fascinating stories, the author recounts the early commencements and "exhibitions" that included students' orations in Latin and Greek, chronicles the history of the ghost of Washington Hall, and describes the contributions Knute Rockne made to the performing arts at the university, both as a student actor and as a faculty member. Lavishly illustrated with 50 halftones and 5 line drawings, Washington Hall at Notre Dame offers a fascinating history of Notre Dame through the prism of its first performing arts center and adds to our understanding of American Catholic higher education and American history in general.

Pastoral poetry has long been considered a signature Renaissance mode: originating in late sixteenth-century England via a rediscovery of classical texts, it is concerned with self-fashioning and celebrating the court. But, as Katherine C. Little demonstrates in Transforming Work: Early Modern Pastoral and Medieval Poetry, the pastoral mode is in fact indebted to medieval representations of rural labor.Little offers a new literary history for the pastoral, arguing that the authors of the first English pastorals used rural laborers familiar from medieval texts--plowmen and shepherds--to reflect on the social, economic, and religious disruptions of the sixteenth century. In medieval writing, these figures were particularly associated with the reform of the individual and the social world: their work also stood for the penance and good works required of Christians, the care of the flock required of priests, and the obligations of all people to work within their social class. By the sixteenth century, this reformism had taken on a dangerous set of associations--with radical Protestantism, peasants' revolts, and complaints about agrarian capitalism. Pastoral poetry rewrites and empties out this radical potential, making the countryside safe to write about again.Moving from William Langland's Piers Plowman and the medieval shepherd plays, through the Piers Plowman-tradition, to Edmund Spenser's pastorals, Little's reconstructed literary genealogy discovers the "other" past of pastoral in the medieval and Reformation traditions of "writing rural labor."

Since the 1973 publication of Gustavo Gutiérrez's groundbreaking work A Theology of Liberation, liberation theology's central premise of the preferential option for the poor has become one of the most important yet controversial theological themes of the twentieth century. As the situation for many of the world's poor worsens, it becomes ever more important to ensure that the option for the poor remains not only a vibrant theological concept but also a practical framework for living out the gift and challenge of Christian faith. The Preferential Option for the Poor beyond Theology draws on a diverse group of contributors to explore how disciplines as varied as law, economics, politics, the environment, science, liberal arts, film, and education can help us understand putting a commitment to the option for the poor into practice. The central focus of the book revolves around the question: How can one live a Christian life in a world of destitution? The contributors address the theological concept of the option for the poor as well as the ways it can shape our social, economic, political, educational, and environmental approaches to poverty. Their creative examples serve as an inspiration to all those who are seeking to put their talents at the service of human need and the building of a more just and humane world.

Fr. Robert Griffin, C.S.C. (1925-1999), was a beloved member of the Notre Dame community. With his cocker spaniel, Darby O'Gill, he was instantly recognizable on campus. He was well known for his priestly work counseling students as university chaplain for thirty years, his summer ministry to the homeless and parishioners in New York City, and his weekly columns in the student newspaper, The Observer, in which he invited the campus community to reflect with him on the challenges and joys of being Catholic in a time of enormous social and religious change. This collection draws together essays that Griffin wrote for Notre Dame Magazine between 1972 and 1994. In them, he considers many of the challenges that beset church and campus, such as the laicization of priests, premarital sex, the erosion of institutional authority, intolerance toward gay people, and failure of fidelity to the teachings of the church. Griffin also ruminates on the distress that human beings experience in the ordinariness of their lives--the difficulty of communication in families, grief over the loss of family and friends, the agonies of isolation, and the need for forgiveness. Griffin's shrewd insights still ring true for people today. His efforts to temper the winds of institutional rules, cultural change, and personal suffering reveal a mind keenly attuned to the need for understanding human limitations and to the presence of grace in times of change. Griffin quotes from the works of literary modernists, such as Fitzgerald and Hemingway, whose novels and short stories he loved; in these allusions and in his own reflections and experiences, Griffin bridges the spiritual and the secular and offers hope for reconciliation and comfort.

Since the publication of Gustavo Gutiérrez's 1973 groundbreaking work, A Theology of Liberation, much has been written on liberation theology and its central premise of the preferential option for the poor. Arguably, this has been one of the most important yet controversial theological themes of the twentieth century. As globalization creates greater gaps between the rich and the poor, and as the situation for many of the world's poor worsens, there is an ever greater need to understand the gift and challenge of Christian faith from the context of the poor and marginalized of our society. This volume draws on the thought of leading international scholars and explores how the Christian tradition can help us understand the theological foundations for the option for the poor. The central focus of the book revolves around the question, How can one live a Christian life in a world of destitution? The contributors are concerned not only with a social, economic, or political understanding of poverty but above all with the option for the poor as a theological concept.While these essays are rooted in a solid grounding of our present "reality," they look to the past to understand some of the central truths of Christian faith and to the future as a source of Christian hope. Following Gustavo Gutiérrez's essay on the multidimensionality of poverty, Elsa Tamez, Hugh Page, Jr., Brian Daley, and Jon Sobrino identify a central theological premise: poverty is contrary to the will of God. Drawing on scripture, the writings of the early fathers, the witness of Christian martyrs, and contemporary theological reflection, they argue that poverty represents the greatest challenge to Christian faith and discipleship. David Tracy and J. Matthew Ashley carry their reflection forward by examining the option for the poor in light of apocalyptic thought. Virgilio Elizondo, Patrick Kalilombe, María Pilar Aquino, M. Shawn Copeland, and Mary Catherine Hilkert examine the challenges of poverty with respect to culture, Africa, race, and gender. Casiano Floristán and Luis Maldonado explore the relationship between poverty, sacramentality, and popular religiosity. The final two essays by Aloysius Pieris and Michael Signer consider the option for the poor in relationship to other major world religions, particularly an Asian theology of religions and the meaning of care for the poor within Judaism.

A genuine renaissance is presently underway in the study of biblical interpretation and biblical culture in the early Christian age. The profundity and complexity of the early Christians' engagement with Holy Scripture, in theology, in ecclesial and liturgical life, in ethics, and in ascetic and devotional life, are providing a rich resource for contemporary discussions of the Bible's ongoing "afterlife" within ecumenical Christian communities and contexts. The Bible in Greek Christian Antiquity is a collection of wide-ranging essays on the influence of the Bible in numerous and varied aspects of the life of the Greek-speaking churches during the first four centuries. Essays appear under the general themes of (I) The Bible as a Foundation of Christianity; (II) The Bible in Use among the Greek Church Fathers; (III) The Bible in Early Christian Doctrinal Controversy; (IV) The Bible and Religious Devotion in the Early Greek Church. Individual essays probe topics as diverse as the use of the Bible in early Christian preaching and catechesis, appeals to Scripture in the conflicts between Jews and Christians, pagan use of Scripture against the Church, and the Bible's influence in early Christian art, martyrology, liturgical reading, pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and ascetical life. Much of the volume constitutes a translation, revision, and adaptation of essays originally presented in the French volume Le monde grec ancien et la Bible (1984), Volume 1 of the series Bible de Tous les Temps. Four new studies appear, however, including an introductory essay on "Origin of Alexandria" as a guide to the biblical reader, and two essays on the biblical culture of early Eastern Christian monasticism. The Bible in Greek Christian Antiquity comes as an international project, the work of French, Swiss, Australian, and now Canadian and American scholars. It will be useful to students of early Christianity and the history of biblical interpretation, and will also serve as a useful introduction to the many dimensions of the reception of the Bible in the early Church.

One of the most exciting developments in recent literary studies bases interpretation on a new understanding of bodily aspects of text. Contributors Mary Carruthers, Michael Camille, Seth Lerer, and Carolyn Dinshaw bring various disciplinary perspectives to this intriguing subject.The method employed here views the body as a text to be read. Though the approaches of these essays are widely varied, three concerns figure and refigure themselves throughout the book: the gendered body and the copied book as locus of pain, pleasure, and desire. They will be of immense interest to medievalists and other scholars of language, philosophy, history, art history, and gender studies.Frese and O'Keeffe explore the liminal areas between the book and the body from contemporary perspectives. Though the approaches of these essays are widely varied, three concerns figure throughout the book: the gendered body and the copied book as locus of pain, pleasure, and desire.

On 31 May 1310, at the Place de Grève in Paris, the Dominican inquisitor William of Paris read out a sentence that declared Marguerite "called Porete," a beguine from Hainault, to be a relapsed heretic, released her to secular authority for punishment, and ordered that all copies of a book she had written be confiscated. William next consigned Guiard of Cressonessart, an apocalyptic activist in the tradition of Joachim of Fiore and a would-be defender of Marguerite, to perpetual imprisonment. Over several months, William of Paris conducted inquisitorial processes against them, complete with multiple consultations of experts in theology and canon law. Though Guiard recanted at the last moment and thus saved his life, Marguerite went to her execution the day after her sentencing. The Beguine, the Angel, and the Inquisitor is an analysis of the inquisitorial trials, their political as well as ecclesiastical context, and their historical significance. Marguerite Porete was the first female Christian mystic burned at the stake after authoring a book, and the survival of her work makes her case absolutely unique. The Mirror of Simple Souls, rediscovered in the twentieth century and reconnected to Marguerite's name only a half-century ago, is now recognized as one of the most daring, vibrant, and original examples of the vernacular theology and beguine mysticism that emerged in late thirteenth-century Christian Europe. Field provides a new and detailed reconstruction of hitherto neglected aspects of Marguerite's life, particularly of her trial, as well as the first extended consideration of her inquisitor's maneuvers and motivations. Additionally, he gives the first complete English translation of all of the trial documents and relevant contemporary chronicles, as well as the first English translation of Arnau of Vilanova's intriguing "Letter to Those Wearing the Leather Belt," directed to Guiard's supporters and urging them to submit to ecclesiastical authority.

St. Jerome (347-420) was undoubtedly one of the most learned of the Latin Church Fathers. He mastered nearly the entirety of the antecedent Christian exegetical and theological tradition, both Greek and Latin, and he knew Hebrew and Aramaic. We have the fruit of that knowledge in his most famous editorial achievement, the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible. Declared "the greatest doctor in explaining the Scriptures" by the Council of Trent, Jerome has been regarded by the Latin Church as its preeminent scriptural commentator. Much of Jerome's prodigious exegetical output, however, has never been translated into English. In this volume, Thomas P. Scheck presents the first English translation of St. Jerome's commentaries on Galatians, Titus, and Philemon. Jerome followed the Greek exegesis of Origen of Alexandria, proceeding step by step and producing the most valuable of all of the patristic commentaries on these three epistles of St. Paul. Jerome's exegesis is characterized by extensive learning, acute historical and theological criticism, lively and vigorous exposition, and homiletical exhortation. Scheck's translation is supplemented with thorough annotations and a detailed critical introduction that sets the context for reading Jerome's commentaries. It is an invaluable reference for patristics scholars, historical theologians, Church historians, and New Testament scholars.

In the archetypal confrontation between the Athenian lawmaker Solon and the Greek poet Thespis, Solon confronts Thespis after seeing him act in a tragedy. He asks Thespis if he is not ashamed to tell so many lies before so many people. In response to Thespis's reply--that it was no harm to say or do so in a play--Solon vehemently blames Thespis for a professional deceit that threatens to pervade society.Solon's criticism of Thespis points to a fundamental motivation for Solon and Thespis: an exploration of the long-standing antagonism between law and theater, between drama's inconsequential fiction and the real world's socially consequential fact, at a crucial moment--the sixteenth century--in England's cultural and legal formation.The literary critics and historians in this volume examine that antagonism and find it revelatory of English Renaissance law and Renaissance theater's institutional connections and interdependences at a time when both were emerging as powerful forces in English society. Renaissance legal processes were subject to dramatic and public representation, appropriation, and evaluation. Renaissance commercial theater, often populated by law students and practitioners, was both subject to the law and subversive of it. The contributors demonstrate that theater and law were not simply relevant to each other in the early modern period; they explore the physical spaces in which early modern law and drama were performed, the social and imaginative practices that energized such spaces, and the rhetorical patterns that make the two institutions far less discrete and far more collaborative than has previously been recognized.

The topic of Shakespeare and religion is a perennial one, and the recent "turn to religion" in historical and literary scholarship has pushed it to the fore. Besides speculating about Shakespeare's personal religious beliefs and allegiance, historians and literary critics writing about early modern England are reexamining the religious dynamics of the period and emphasizing the ways in which old, new, and emerging religious cultures coexisted in conflicting hybrid and unstable forms. The contributors to Shakespeare and Religion: Early Modern and Postmodern Perspectives deal with the topic of Shakespeare and religion from two points of view not always considered complementary--that of the historical approach to Shakespearean drama in its early modern contexts, and that of postmodern philosophy and theology. The first illuminates the culture-specific features of the plays, whereas the second emphasizes their transhistorical qualities and the relevance of the deep religious and philosophical issues surfacing in early modern culture to contemporary religious struggles and awareness.

In Ruling Women, Stacy S. Klein explores how queens functioned as imaginative figures in Anglo-Saxon texts. Focusing on pre-Conquest works ranging from Bede to Ælfric, Klein argues that Anglo-Saxon writers drew upon accounts of legendary royal wives to construct cultural ideals of queenship during a time when that institution was undergoing profound change. Also a study of gender, her book examines how Anglo-Saxon writers used women of the highest social rank to forge broader cultural ideals of femininity, even as they used female voices to articulate far less comfortable social truths. Capitalizing on queens' strong associations with intercession, Anglo-Saxon writers consistently looked to royal women as mediatory figures for negotiating sustained tensions, and sometimes overt antagonisms, among different peoples, institutions, and systems of belief. Yet as authors appropriated legendary queens and inserted them into contemporary Anglo-Saxon culture, these royal "peaceweavers" simultaneously threatened to destroy existing unities and to expose the fragility of seemingly entrenched social formations. Drawing on the strengths of historical, typological, and literary criticism, feminist theory, and cultural studies, Ruling Women offers us a way to understand Anglo-Saxon texts as both literary monuments and historical documents, and thus to illuminate the ideological fissures and cultural stakes of Anglo-Saxon literary practice.

This original volume proposes a novel way of reading Dante's Vita nova, exemplified in a rich diversity of scholarly approaches to the text. This groundbreaking volume represents the fruit of a two-year-long series of international seminars aimed at developing a fresh way of reading Dante's Vita nova. By analyzing each of its forty-two chapters individually, focus is concentrated on the Vita nova in its textual and historical context rather than on its relationship to the Divine Comedy. This decoupling has freed the contributors to draw attention to various important literary features of the text, including its rich and complex polysemy, as well as its structural fluidity. The volume likewise offers insights into Dante's social environment, his relationships with other poets, and Dante's evolving vision of his poetry's scope. Using a variety of critical methodologies and hermeneutical approaches, this volume offers scholars an opportunity to reread the Vita nova in a renewed context and from a diversity of literary, cultural, and ideological perspectives. Contributors: Zygmunt G. Baräski, Heather Webb, Claire E. Honess, Brian F. Richardson, Ruth Chester, Federica Pich, Matthew Treherne, Catherine Keen, Jennifer Rushworth, Daragh O'Connell, Sophie V. Fuller, Giulia Gaimari, Emily Kate Price, Manuele Gragnolati, Elena Lombardi, Francesca Southerden, Rebecca Bowen, Nicolò Crisafi, Lachlan Hughes, Franco Costantini, David Bowe, Tristan Kay, Filippo Gianferrari, Simon Gilson, Rebekah Locke, Luca Lombardo, Peter Dent, George Ferzoco, Paola Nasti, Marco Grimaldi, David G. Lummus, Helena Phillips-Robins, Aist¿ Kiltinavi¿i¿t¿, Alessia Carrai, Ryan Pepin, Valentina Mele, Katherine Powlesland, Federica Coluzzi, K. P. Clarke, Nicolò Maldina, Theodore J. Cachey Jr., Chiara Sbordoni, Lorenzo Dell'Oso, and Anne C. Leone.

The Roman Catholic Church in Latin America faces significant and unprecedented challenges. Most prominent among them are secularization, globalizing cultural trends, intensifying religious competition, and pluralism of many kinds within what were once hegemonic Catholic societies. The substantial and original essays in this volume assess the ways in which the Catholic Church in Latin America is dealing with these political, religious, and social changes. Most importantly, they explore how democracy has changed the Catholic Church and, in turn, how religious changes have influenced democratic politics in Latin America.Drawing on the experiences of several countries to illustrate broad themes and explain divergent religious responses to common challenges, the contributors advance the notion that the Catholic Church's effectiveness in the public sphere and even its long-term viability as a religious institution depend on the nature and extent of the relationship between the hierarchy and the faithful. The essays address the context of pluralist challenges, the ideational, institutional, and policy responses of the Catholic hierarchy, and the nature of both religious beliefs and democratic values at the individual level in Latin America today.Contributors: Frances Hagopian, Ronald Inglehart, Soledad Loaeza, Cristián Parker Gumucio, Patricia M. Rodríguez, Roberto J. Blancarte, Mala Htun, Catalina Romero, and Daniel H. Levine.

Michael Longley and Seamus Heaney's lives and careers have been intertwined since the 1960s, when they participated in the Belfast Group of creative writers and later edited the literary journal Northern Review. In Poetry and Peace: Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, and Northern Ireland, Richard Rankin Russell explores Longley's and Heaney's poetic fidelity to the imagination in the midst of the war in Northern Ireland and their creation, through poetry, of a powerful cultural and sacred space. This space, Russell argues, has contributed to cultural and religious dialogue and thus helped enable reconciliation after the years of the Troubles. The first chapter examines the influence of the Belfast Group on Longley and Heaney's shared aesthetic of poetry. Successive chapters analyze major works by both poets. Russell offers close readings of poems in the context of the poets' cultural and political concerns for the province. He concludes by showing how thoroughly their poetic language has entered the cultural, educational, and political discourse of contemporary Northern Ireland as it pursues the process of peace.

No Messages, the 2001 winner of the Ernest Sandeen Prize, is Robert Hahn's second major collection of poetry. In commenting on Hahn's first collection, All Clear, Richard Howard called attention to Hahn's ability "to ground his perceptions, his discoveries in a specific circumstance . . . to reach the risen condition, the state beyond, which is the purpose of all his poems". Howard's analysis anticipates the poems of No MessagesNo Messages is an apt introduction to the new millennium. The "no messages" of the title reflects a basic tension in contemporary poetry, between its claim to exist in the realms of language and structure, and its sense of responsibility to render the world in its actuality, in a clarified or confronted state. A striking balance of this tension is found in the collection's central section, a suite of poems responding to the influence of James Merrill. While No Messages is devoted to re-visionings of the world in language, it remains grounded in circumstance and place and in the actions and convictions of historical figures. The book opens with John Knox on the beach at St. Andrews in Scotland and closes with John Brown on the bank of the Pottowatamie River in Kansas. Between these two shores, No Messages describes a series of luminous arcs connecting this world and the world beyond.

Love beneath the Napalm is James D. Redwood's collection of deeply affecting stories about the enduring effects of colonialism and the Vietnamese War over the course of a century on the Vietnamese and the American and French foreigners who became inextricably connected with their fate. These finely etched, powerful tales span a wide array of settings, from the former imperial capital of Hue at the end of the Nguyen Dynasty, to Hanoi after the American pullout from Vietnam, the Chinese invasion of Vietnam in 1979, contemporary San Francisco, and Schenectady, New York.Redwood reveals the inner lives of the Vietnamese characters and also shows how others appear through their eyes. Some of the images and characters in Love beneath the Napalm--the look that Mr. Tu's burned and scarred face always inflicts on strangers in the title story; attorney and American Vietnam War-veteran Carlton Griswold's complicated relationship with Mary Thuy in "The Summer Associate"; Phan Van Toan's grief and desire, caught between two worlds in "The Stamp Collector"--provide a haunting, vivid portrayal of lives uprooted by conflict. Throughout, readers will find moments that cut to the quick, exposing human resilience, sorrow, joy, and the traumatic impact of war on all those who are swept up in it.

The essays in Living Dangerously, written by some of the leading scholars in the fields of history and literature, examine the lives of those who lived on the margins of medieval and early modern European society. While some essays explore obvious marginalized classes, such as criminals, gypsies, and prostitutes, others challenge traditional understandings of the margin by showing that female mystics, speculators in the Dutch mercantile empire, and writers of satire, for example, could fall into the margins. These essays reveal the symbiotic relationship that exists between the marginalized and the social establishment: the dominant culture needs its margins. This well-written and lively collection covers a wide geographical area, including England, Spain, Germany, Italy, France, and the Netherlands, making it an ideal resource for a broad range of courses in European history and literature. Contributors: Barbara A. Hanawalt, Richard Firth Green, Vickie Ziegler, Dyan Elliott, Anne J. Cruz, Ian Frederick Moulton, and Mary Lindemann.

Thérèse of Lisieux died on 30 September 1897. Nine months later, the now classic Story of a Soul appeared and proved an immediate success. However, when historians had access fifty years later to manuscripts written by Thérèse they were surprised to discover enormous differences between these texts and the published version of Story of a Soul.Jean-François Six has written this new book with two purposes. First, he recalls the history of how Mother Agnés, Prioress of the Carmelite convent and sister of Thérèse altered and completed Thérèse's text so that it became a travesty of the original. Secondly he re-establishes the truth of the last months of Thérèse's life, her authentic spiritual message, and her contribution to the history of mysticism.Here is a key study and a crucial work of rehabilitation.

From the time they first met as undergraduates at Columbia College in New York City in the mid-1930s, the noted editor Robert Giroux (1914-2008) and the Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton (1915-1968) became friends. The Letters of Robert Giroux and Thomas Merton capture their personal and professional relationship, extending from the time of the publication of Merton's 1948 best-selling spiritual autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, until a few months before Merton's untimely death in December 1968. As editor-in-chief at Harcourt, Brace & Company and then at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Giroux not only edited twenty-six of Merton's books but served as an adviser to Merton as he dealt with unexpected problems with his religious superiors at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky, as well as those in France and Italy.These letters, arranged chronologically, offer invaluable insights into the publishing process that brought some of Merton's most important writings to his readers. Patrick Samway, S.J., had unparalleled access not only to the materials assembled here but to Giroux's unpublished talks about Merton, which he uses to his advantage, especially in his beautifully crafted introduction that interweaves the stories of both men with a chronicle of their personal and collaborative relationship. The result is a rich and rewarding volume, which shows how Giroux helped Merton to become one of the greatest spiritual writers of the twentieth century.

As the only daughter of Blanche of Castile, one of France's most powerful queens, and as the sister of the Capetian saint Louis IX, Isabelle of France (1225-1270) was situated at the nexus of sanctity and power during a significant era of French culture and medieval history. In this ground-breaking examination of Isabelle's career, Sean Field uses a wealth of previously unstudied material to address significant issues in medieval religious history, including the possibilities for women's religious authority, the creation and impact of royal sanctity, and the relationship between men and women within the mendicant orders. Field reinterprets Isabelle's career as a Capetian princess. Isabelle was remarkable for choosing a life of holy virginity and for founding and co-authoring a rule for the Franciscan abbey of Longchamp. Isabelle did not become a nun there, but remained a powerful lay patron, living in a modest residence on the abbey grounds. Field maintains that Isabelle was a key actor in creating the aura of sanctity that surrounded the French royal family in the thirteenth century, underscoring the link between the growth of Capetian prestige and power and the idea of a divinely ordained, virtuous, and holy royal family. Her contemporary reputation for sanctity emerges from a careful analysis of the Life of Isabelle of France written by the third abbess of Longchamp, Agnes of Harcourt, and from papal bulls, letters, and other contemporary sources that have only recently come to light.Field also argues that Isabelle had a profound effect on the institutional history of Franciscan women. By remaining outside the official Franciscan and church hierarchies, Isabelle maintained an ambiguous position that allowed her to embrace Franciscan humility while retaining royal influence. Her new order of Sorores minores was eagerly adopted by a number of communities, and her rule for the order eventually spread from France to England, Italy, and Spain. An important study of a medieval woman's agency and power, Isabelle of France explores the life of a remarkable figure in French and Franciscan history.

Described by David Lodge as "the most gifted and innovative writer of her generation," Muriel Spark had a literary career that spanned from the late 1940s until her death in 2006, and included poems, stories, plays, essays, and, most notably, novels. The extensive bibliography of her works included in this collection reveals the astonishing output of a powerful and sustained creative spirit. Hidden Possibilities gathers a distinguished group of writers from both sides of the Atlantic to offer an informed overview of Muriel Spark's life and work. Critics have often read Spark in a somewhat narrow context--as a Catholic, a woman, or a Scottish writer. The essays in this volume, while making connections between these contexts, cumulatively situate her in a broader European tradition. The volume includes interviews with Spark that cast light both on the course of her professional life and on her notably distinctive personality. Contributors: Regina Barreca, Gerard Carruthers, Barbara Epler, John Glavin, Dan Gunn, Robert E. Hosmer Jr., Joseph Hynes, Gabriel Josipovici, Frank Kermode, John Lanchester, Doris Lessing, David Malcolm, John Mortimer, Alan Taylor, and John Updike.

Herbert Marcuse called the preface to Hegel's Phenomenology "one of the greatest philosophical undertakings of all times." This summary of Hegel's system of philosophy is now available in English translation with commentary on facing pages. While remaining faithful to the author's meaning, Walter Kaufmann has removed many encumbrances inherent in Hegel's style.

Margot E. Fassler's richly documented history--winner of the Otto Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society and the John Nicholas Brown Prize from the Medieval Academy of America--demonstrates how the Augustinians of St. Victor, Paris, used an art of memory to build sonic models of the church. This musical art developed over time, inspired by the religious ideals of Hugh and Richard of St. Victor and their understandings of image and the spiritual journey. Gothic Song: Victorine Sequences and Augustinian Reform in Twelfth-Century Paris demonstrates the centrality of sequences to western medieval Christian liturgical and artistic experience, and to our understanding of change and continuity in medieval culture. Fassler examines the figure of Adam of St. Victor and the possible layers within the repertories created at various churches in Paris, probes the ways the Victorine sequences worked musically and exegetically, and situates this repertory within the intellectual and spiritual ideals of the Augustinian canons regular, especially those of the Abbey of St. Victor. Originally published in hardover in 1993, this paperback edition includes a new introduction by Fassler, in which she reviews the state of scholarship on late sequences since the original publication of Gothic Song. Her notes to the introduction provide the bibliography necessary for situating the Victorine sequences, and the late sequences in general, in contemporary thought.

Engineering Education and Practice: Embracing a Catholic Vision is a collection of essays exploring how major themes of Catholic social teaching--respect for the environment, sustainability, technological design, and service to the poor--all positively affect engineering curricula, students, and faculty. Many engineering programs at American universities focus solely on developing technological sophistication without promoting ethical and humanitarian priorities. The contributors to this collection argue, however, that undergraduate engineering education needs to be broadened beyond its current narrow restrictions. The authors of this unique collection, nearly all of whom are engineers themselves, show how some Christian universities in the United States have found creative ways of opening up their engineering curricula. They demonstrate how the professional education of engineers can be enriched not only by ethical and religious themes, which are typically isolated in humanities curricula, but also by special fieldwork courses that offer hands-on service-learning opportunities and embody a rich educational synthesis.

Historians and cultural critics face special challenges when treating the nonhuman natural world in the medieval and early modern periods. Their most daunting problem is that in both the visual and written records of the time, nature seems to be both everywhere and nowhere. In the broadest sense, nature was everywhere, for it was vital to human survival. Agriculture, animal husbandry, medicine, and the patterns of human settlement all have their basis in natural settings. Humans also marked personal, community, and seasonal events by natural occurrences and built their cultural explanations around the workings of nature, which formed the unspoken backdrop for every historical event and document of the time. Yet in spite of the ubiquity of nature's continual presence in the physical surroundings and the artistic and literary cultures of these periods, overt discussion of nature is often hard to find. Until the sixteenth century, responses to nature were quite often recorded only in the course of investigating other subjects. In a very real sense, nature went without saying. As a result, modern scholars analyzing the concept of nature in the history of medieval and early modern Europe must often work in deeply interdisciplinary ways. This challenge is deftly handled by the contributors to Engaging with Nature, whose essays provide insights into such topics as concepts of animal/human relationships; environmental and ecological history; medieval hunting; early modern collections of natural objects; the relationship of religion and nature; the rise of science; and the artistic representations of exotic plants and animals produced by Europeans encountering the New World.

Louis IX, king of France from 1226 to 1270 and twice crusader, was canonized in 1297. He was the last king canonized during the medieval period, and was both one of the most important saints and one of the most important kings of the later Middle Ages. In Blessed Louis, the Most Glorious of Kings: Texts Relating to the Cult of Saint Louis of France, M. Cecilia Gaposchkin presents six previously untranslated texts that informed medieval views of St. Louis IX: two little-known but early and important vitae of Saint Louis; two unedited sermons by the Parisian preacher Jacob of Lausanne (d. 1322); and a liturgical office and proper mass in his honor--the most commonly used liturgical texts composed for Louis' feast day--which were widely copied, read, and disseminated in the Middle Ages. Gaposchkin's aim is to present to a diverse readership the Louis as he was known and experienced in the Middle Ages: a saint celebrated by the faithful for his virtue and his deeds. She offers for the first time to English readers a typical hagiographical view of Saint Louis, one in counterbalance to that set forth in Jean of Joinville's Life of Saint Louis. Although Joinville's Life has dominated our views of Louis, Joinville's famous account was virtually unknown beyond the French royal court in the Middle Ages and was not printed until the sixteenth century. His portrayal of Louis as an individual and deeply charismatic personality is remarkable, but it is fundamentally unrepresentative of the medieval understanding of Louis. The texts that Gaposchkin translates give immediate access to the reasons why medieval Christians took Louis to be a saint; the texts, and the image of Saint Louis presented in them, she argues, must be understood within the context of the developing history of sanctity and sainthood at the end of the Middle Ages.

The central theme in any history of texts and books must be that of change and renewal: Parchment that is written on, in one set of circumstances in late antiquity, may in the Early Middle Ages be scraped clean and written on again, leaving evidence of a civilization in which blank parchment is more valuable than ancient literature. A manuscript can be regarded as an archeological artifact, but unlike pieces of pottery or chips of flint, a manuscript has a voice.The 12 essays gathered here vary in subject from the transmission of ancient authors to the invention of the subject index and range in time from the Gregorian reform of the eleventh century to the Protestant reformation of the early sixteenth century. Diverse in subject and period, these essays are unified by the questions they pose and the methodology they employ in seeking answers. A common thread is the desire to discover what information the manuscripts can yield about the society that created them: how the great concordance to the Bible was compiled, how book production at the medieval university was organized, how a vernacular poet carried his songs.Each surviving manuscript exists not only by the decision of the original maker but as a result of subsequent owners, who made notes, entered corrections, added an index composed a continuation. Changing times brought new uses for old texts changes that are reflected, like personal and cultural fingerprints, in glosses, marginalia, even the chain marks showing how the book was kept in the medieval library.