Reproduction of the original: Historia Calamitatum by Peter Abelard

The revealing autobiography of a famed mediaeval philosopher and theologian, worshipped by his students, adored by his teenage pupil Heloise, but feared - and, shockingly, violently emasculated - by his rivals and opponents. Heartbreaking, unflinching and inspiring, it unveils one of-the great love stories of the world.CALLENDER CLASSICAL AND MEDIAEVAL TEXTS / CALLENDER LOVE

First published in 1997. Most work in gender studies has focused on women. This volume brings together various forms of gender theory, especially feminist and queer theory, to explore how men made cultures and culture made men, in the Middle Ages.

This book explores the motif of the spiritual journey and its evolution in Western literature. A spiritual journey can be broadly defined as a search for the divine. Such a search can occur either internally as a psychological process or in some cases may involve an actual geographic journey. Spiritual journeys can be conducted by individuals or groups. In exploring this topic, various kinds of texts will be reviewed, including autobiographies, novels, and short stories, as well as myths, folktales, and mystical writings. The book classifies spiritual journey narratives into four categories: theological journeys, mystical journeys, mythopoetic journeys and allegorical journeys. Representative texts have been selected in the history of Western religious literature that illustrate the basic features of each of these four categories.

Beatrice's Last Smile is a sweeping narrative history of the medieval west from the beginning of the third century to the beginning of the sixteenth. This book focuses on slow formation of Latin Christendom over a millennium in the aftermath of the disintegration of the western Roman Empire. Beatrice's Last Smile is a sweeping narrative history of the medieval west from the beginning of the third century to the beginning of the sixteenth. The reader travels from the Mediterranean to the North Sea, from the Nile to the Volga, from north Africa to the central Asia, until finally ending in the Americas. Through a focus on slow formation of Latin Christendom over a millennium in the aftermath of the disintegration of the western Roman Empire, Beatrice's Last Smile is a history of holiness which includes Judaism and the revelations of Muhammad. The narrative moves from the violence within fifth-century Britain and Gaul to the Hundred Years War between England and France, from the plague of the sixth century to the Black Death of the fourteenth, from the first crusaders sacking Jerusalem to the Spanish capturing Tenochtitlán, from Viking raids to Mongol invasions, from the inquisitons into heresy to the trials of witches, from a third-century Christian mother dying in a Roman arena to the immolation of Joan of Arc in the fifteenth, from an ancient universe without heaven and hell to a medieval cosmos with a fiery inferno and a shimmering paradise. Over these centuries there is an emphasis on individual men and women and their stories woven together with the story of the emergence of a distinctive western culture.

These essays provide original reflections and new evidence for the lives and work of an outstanding medieval couple, Peter Abelard and Heloise. The main themes of the author's studies are the careers and the thought of Peter Abelard, his philosophy, theology and monastic teaching, his relationship in marriage and in religious life with Heloise and their correspondence. The essays, now brought together in a single volume, show how much is still to be learned from the presentation of new evidence and the opening of new enquiries about the lives and calamities of Peter Abelard and Heloise.

This study concerns the earliest English literature encouraging women not to marry, the Katherine Group. It is a set of five early thirteenth-century devotional texts, a sermon called "Hali Meidhad" ("Holy Virginity"), the lives of three early Christian virgin martyrs, Katherine, Margaret, and Juliana, and an allegory "Sawles Warde" ("Care of the Soul"). All of the texts celebrate virginity, but they do so in a novel way. Unlike other virginity literature, which focuses on the sacred benefits that come to women who do not marry, these texts argue that marriage harms women, and they focus on the material advantages of not marrying. They are profoundly non-mystical, articulating the values of self-sufficiency and self determination. Placing the Katherine Group within the male clerical tradition of Jerome and Peter Abelard, a tradition whose concerns about marriage and domesticity have not been much appreciated before, the author shows how the texts of the Katherine Group operate not as part of a female mystical tradition, but within the male clerical tradition of anti-matrimonial literature.

Comprehensive and learned translation of these texts affords insight into Abelard's thinking over a much longer sweep of time and offers snapshots of the great twelfth-century philosopher and theologian in a variety of contexts.

This collection is a notable example of how the cultural history of the middle ages can be written in terms that satisfy both the historian and the literary scholar. John Benton's knowledge of the personnel, structure and finance of medieval courts complemented his understanding of the literature they produced.

Constance Hoffman Berman presents an indispensable collection of the most influential and revisionist work to be done on religion in the Middle Ages in the last two decades. Bringing together an authoritative list of scholars from around the world, this book is a comprehensive compilation of the most important work in this field. Medieval Religion provides a valuable service for all those who study the Middle Ages, church history or religion.