Mind Matters: Studies of Medieval and Early Modern Intellectual History in Honour of Marcia Colish, ed. Cary J. Nederman, Nancy van Deusen and E. Ann Matter

Abstract

Marcia Colish’s influential scholarship is well honoured by this collection of thirteen essays. Her The Mirror of Language (1968 and 1983; rev. ante, lxxxvi [1971], 161–2) profoundly influenced scholarship on medieval language theory, not only among historians but among students of medieval literatures and semiology. Her Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition, 400–1400 (1997; rev. ante, cxiv [1999], 664–5) presented a magisterial survey, both of individuals and topics, that looked ahead to early modern debates in ways that invited us to see them as continuities of late medieval ideas rather than as sharp breaks with the past. In between came her generous studies of the antique and early medieval Stoic tradition, of Peter Lombard, Abelard, Anselm, and other twelfth-century philosophers. These studies form the nucleus for all the essays collected in this volume, which reflects not only the intellectual foci of Colish’s publications but their broad chronological and geographical sweep as well.