Medieval Theology Research Articles

The Doloriad by Missouri Williams

Reviewed by: The Doloriad by Missouri Williams Arthur Willemse MISSOURI WILLIAMS The Doloriad New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2022. 228 pages. "EVERYBODY WHO HAS read Wise Blood thinks I'm a hillbilly nihilist, whereas I would like to create the impression over the television that I'm a hillbilly Thomist." Anticipating a TV interview, in late May 1955, Flannery O'Connor wrote this provocative statement [End Page 69] in a letter to Robie Macauley, her friend from the celebrated Iowa Writers' Workshop. This southerly theological sensibility, apt as it is for O'Connor's writing, also allows us better to approach Missouri Williams's haunting debut novel, The Doloriad—a science fiction story about human life in a postapocalyptic Czechia. Dolores is one of the many daughters of the Matriarch, the leader of a large family living at the far end of what used to be a city. The family has been able to grow only by accepting incestuous relationships, yet Dolores, one of the older sisters, is now married off to a man who reportedly lives at the other end of the forest. However, only the Matriarch herself can claim to have any knowledge of this other clan or tribe. The reference to Thomas is embedded not just in the fabric of the book: his name is frequently invoked. The children watch, on VHS tapes, a sitcom about a medieval saint who time-travels to present day, or they are schooled in medieval theology by a mysterious teacher who is taken every day from his home in the outskirts of the city—apparently against his will. A hillbilly Thomist is someone stretched in two directions at once: there is on one hand a deep understanding of virtue and a Catholic sensibility, which, on the other hand, intersects with a strong sense of the macabre. Perhaps the recent turn in Nick Cave's music gives us another example of how a theological frame of mind is concerned almost exclusively with the devil. Perhaps the hillbilly Thomist regards the devil not as the paradigm of evil but rather as someone or something both twisted and completely natural (I take it that the movies of David Lynch belong to a different, more secular-minded literature). Indeed, nature as a force to be reckoned with is present in The Doloriad on every page, most often in the form of the sweltering heat and the wilderness that is always on the brink of overtaking the clan's encampment. That wilderness, indeed, is also on the brink of usurping this novel. It is not just that the plot of The Doloriad is eclipsed by it; it is that its literary mechanics, the thing that would make it work, its very idea, is also in hiding behind its luscious style. This may very well have been the aspiration for the writer, if this is a story of how humanity ultimately can only commit to life itself, which would warrant the inflated reliance on theology here: life, here, exceeds any eschatology, any knowledge of the last things. For this reason, I suppose that The Doloriad stakes the very significance of humanity, and beautifully too, yet it leaves the reader with little sense of direction. In Williams's novel, there is no narrative to connect dark with light; it is the eventual collapse of the story that brings relief. This is the burden of the hillbilly Thomist, who cannot be a Dantesque comedian, when we meet them per una selva obscura. Arthur Willemse Universities of Maastricht and Hasselt Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

“Washing their Hands in the Blood of Sinners:” Salvation by Murder in Medieval Bohemia

Abstract Crusade and religious war convulsed early fifteenth-century Bohemia resulting in appalling violence and loss of life. Both sides – heretical Czech Hussites and crusaders loyal to Church and empire – seemed to relish bloodshed and both believed there were salvific qualities in shed blood. This article examines this motif and discovers curious texts wherein washing in the blood of one’s enemies provided a pathway to holiness and salvation. Theological and biblical support are also evident in these texts. The question of violence was controversial in the Hussite period but appears less compelling than notions that unholy blood – whether crusader or heretic – could take on characteristics of holiness. Beyond this, the Hussite concentration on the Eucharist, especially the essentiality of the lay chalice, provides an important dimension to the preoccupation with blood. Visual depictions of blood and the wounds of Christ also frame the discussion. I suggest that the obsession with blood lies at the core of medieval theology generally and Hussite thought specifically.

BEYOND THE BODY AND BACK AGAIN: VISIONS OF OTHERWORLDLY JOURNEYS IN CAROLINGIAN THEOLOGY

This essay analyzes the mechanics of temporary journeys to the afterlife in Latin texts from the ninth century, the period typically associated with the birth of a medieval visionary genre. Sometimes framed as near-death experiences, sometimes as simple dreams, journeys to an otherworldly landscape were primarily intended as admonitions to the living, but in crossing the boundary between living and dead, the visionary's own soul and body experienced a problematic disjuncture. In contrast to previous scholarship, which has analyzed early medieval visions primarily as political texts, as contributions to a Christian belief in purgatory, or as forerunners to later medieval classics like Dante's Divine Comedy, this study uses visions as windows onto the theology of the soul-body union. The first part surveys important discussions that preceded and informed Carolingian visions of the afterlife (including Augustine's dialogues on the soul, the famous Merovingian Vision of Barontus, and various Insular texts with otherworldly encounters). The second part shows how, against these earlier models, Carolingian visionary authors broke with conventions in order to safeguard the stability of the soul's containment within its earthly body — the very same doctrinal issue that appears with mounting urgency in treatises on the soul produced in the middle decades of the ninth century. A key intervention of the essay is to argue for greater attention to the connections between Carolingian visionary texts and theological tracts, a point often overlooked in a field that has emphasized the imaginative narratives of visionary literature as fundamentally distinct from the ostensible conservativism of early medieval theology.

Kilka uzupełnień źródłowych do edycji Żywotu Pana Jezu Krysta Baltazara Opeca (w pięćsetlecie wydania z 1522 roku)

Some Supplementary Remarks on the Edition of Baltazar Opec’s Żywot Pana Jezu Krysta (on the Five Hundredth Anniversary of Its 1522 Edition) 500 years ago one of the most important Polish medieval works was published: Żywot Pana Jezu Krysta by Baltazar Opec (1522). It is the only complete Medieval apocryphal narrative written in Polish, describing Mary and Christ’s lives from the Annunciation till the Ascension and the Assumption of Mary. The first critical edition of this work was published in 2014, revealing multiple sources that may have been used by Opec. However, the primary sources of the last chapters dealing with the Dormition, Assumption and Coronation of the Mother of God were not identified. This paper presents these chapters together with fragments of a collection of Latin sermons by a Hungarian Franciscan Pelbartus Ladislaus de Temesvár, entitled Stellarium corone benedicte Marie Virginis (1498), which were previously used by the Polish translator and editor. The comparison of both texts makes it possible to observe how Baltazar Opec transformed Pelbartus’ erudite theological and Mariological treatise into the apocryphal narrative on the Dormition and Assumption of the Mother of God, preserving the style of the whole Żywot Pana Jezu Krysta. It is evident that Opec used Stellarium as model sermons but adapted them in a different way than the other sources of Żywot, such as Meditationes vitae Christi or Historia rythmica: he omitted the names and opinions of the Fathers of the Church and medieval theologians cited by the Hungarian Franciscan, as well as most of the references to ex Scriptura arguments.

From Error to Despair: Gerson’s Words of Caution about Conscience

Medieval theologians considered that it was a mortal sin to act against one’s conscience, even though they knew that conscience sometimes erred. This article inquires how they, as pastors, nevertheless engaged with the laity’s real-world experiences of conscience and with problems that this involved. In focus of the inquiry are pastoral tracts written by Jean Gerson (d. 1429). In these tracts, Gerson described troubling behaviour that he associated with malfunctions of conscience, and he observed how the precept that conscience obliged was a burden that some individuals could not handle. Gerson offered an analysis of these problems as well as alleviating pastoral advice. He agreed that one should obey one’s conscience, but this article argues that his analysis and advice went far towards circumscribing the force of this precept.

The Vase in Paintings of the Annunciation, a Polyvalent Symbol of the Virgin Mary

This article tries to highlight the deep doctrinal meanings underlying the vase that is often included in artistic depictions of the Annunciation. This apparently banal everyday object has been deliberately placed there in a prominent position to symbolize the Virgin Mary in her condition as the virginal mother of God the Son, and the bearer of all virtues to the highest degree. As methodological resources to justify our iconographic interpretations of that symbol in these images, our study is based on the analysis of texts by several Church Fathers and medieval theologians, as well as numerous liturgical hymns, which for more than a millennium agreed to designate the Virgin Mary as a “vase”, “vessel”, and other types of containers. Thus, this ancient patristic, theological and hymnographic tradition legitimizes our iconographic interpretation of the “vase” included in fifteen paintings of the Annunciation produced by artists from Italy, Flanders and Spain during the 14th and 15th centuries.

Editorial

Editorial

Non-Monotonic Reasoning in Medieval Theology: Problems and Assumptions

Abstract Some interesting cases of non-monotonic reasoning have already been identified in medieval theological texts. Jacob Archambault proved in 2015 that the argumentation presented by St Anselm of Canterbury in his Proslogion has non-monotonic “embeddings”. My own contribution from 2011 indicated that we can argue that a non-monotonic logic underlies some discussions provided by St Thomas Aquinas in his Summa theologiae, and showed that Boethius of Dacia used non-monotonic reasoning in his De aeternitate mundi. In this article, I would like to briefly present these examples and verify whether we can speak about similar cases in medieval Biblical exegesis. My aim is to outline particular problems connected with the identification of non- monotonicity which are specific to theology, as well as assumptions that should be adopted to successfully discuss this issue.

Haim Goren, “The loss of a minute is just so much loss of life”: Edward Robinson and Eli Smith in the Holy Land. Studia Traditionis Theologiae: Explorations in Early and Medieval Theology, 39, Turnhout, Brepols 2020, 339 p. + XX. ISBN: 9782503589138

Sciendo provides publishing services and solutions to academic and professional organizations and individual authors. We publish journals, books, conference proceedings and a variety of other publications.

The Iconographic Type of the Coronation of the Virgin in the Renaissance Italian Painting in the Light of the Medieval Theology

This article highlights the artistic and conceptual relevance of the iconographic type of the Coronation of Mary in Italy during the Late Middle Ages and Early Modernity. We have analyzed 14 Italian Renaissance paintings, aiming to discover the possible doctrinal sources that inspire them. From a conceptual perspective, we have specified that the iconography of The Coronation of the Virgin in Italy is directly inspired by the comments of some Church Fathers and medieval theologians and hymnographers. From the formal perspective, we discover that three different iconographyc types complement each other as progressively more complex variants of a similar basic structure.

Angels and Saints

Medieval theologians may not have agonized over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin—though the question does arise in the anonymous mystical dialogue Schwester Katrei—but on other matters angels provoked them to endless speculation. How many are there? Perhaps 34,720,000,000, but that was not the only calculation. Without bodies, how do they speak or sing? Do they have names, or even personal identities? How and why and when did some of them rebel? How do they flit back and forth between praising God in heaven and tending to people on earth? The Bible says much about angels, but they remain abstract and good to speculate about. They are ranked in a hierarchy of orders, but the theologians have different ways of organizing them. James Collins used to say that angels, rational beings like us, show what we would be without our bodies. Even disembodied, however, we would be less mysterious to ourselves than angels are. Saints, being less abstract than angels, lend themselves far more to storytelling—which is precisely what Weinberger does when he shifts from angels to saints. Having guided the reader through issue after speculative issue in the field of angelology, he tells story after story from the treasure trove of hagiography. Are there no issues to be explored? Might the reader be interested in the tug-of-war between action and contemplation, or the role of conversion and penitence, or the gender dynamics of sainthood, or for that matter the tendency of saints to wrestle with demons, bidden or unbidden? Saints are paradoxically both imitable and utterly beyond imitation: they feed the hungry, but they also (some of them) levitate, or starve themselves to death, or produce fire from their fingertips. Unlike angels, they are firmly grounded in history, which means they change over time: modern saints differ from ancient ones, at least in context. Weinberger gives ample material for reflection about saints—at one point, a catalog of ten Hyacinths and a Hyacintha. In approaching the angels, he gives questions with multiple answers; in dealing with saints, he gives answers and leaves it for us to ask the right questions.

How to Cure a Horse, or, the Experience of Knowledge and the Knowledge of Experience

How to Cure a Horse, or, the Experience of Knowledge and the Knowledge of Experience

Through Him All Things Were Made

The medieval theological worldview was a synthesis of grace and nature that allowed theology and science to act together in a sacred and salvific pursuit of knowledge. This synthesis is beautifully expressed in the Divine Ideas tradition. In this tradition, the tapestry upon which ancient and medieval theology was written, created things existed by reflecting God’s eternal ideas of them. This gave all natural knowledge a Trinitarian dimension because the generation of ideas in the Divine Mind and of created things in the world was isomorphic with the generation of the Son, the uncreated Logos. In my paper, I will argue that just as all things exist as a primordial sacrifice of the Creator offered and known outside Godself through the Son-Logos, so we participate in that primordial gift (in beatitude) when we, recognizing the divine profundity of nature, come to a knowing of God-in-things—to use Meister Eckhart’s phrase. In this tradition, humans, made in God’s image, are ordained to participate in God’s knowing of all things, and to offer creation back up into Divine life by knowing and worshiping God through theology, science, and liturgy. The Divine Ideas model, then, would restore to the sciences a contemplative, salvific power in recognizing the mystical depth of creatures. I will examine theologians like Maximus the Confessor, the Victorines, and modern theologian Mark McIntosh as they see both scientific and theological knowing as a deifying participation in Divine life. I will look at the poetry of St. John the Divine and Thomas Traherne as it lifts the human imagination, illumined by nature and consecrated through liturgy into the life of the world to come. I will close by saying that this tradition becomes especially important in a world confronting the climate crisis. By recognizing the Divine dimensions of creatures, we see how the waste and pollution of the integrity and beauty of the wilderness blemishes the sacrifice of knowing and love that humanity is called to offer to God through theology, the sciences, and the eucharist.

On the Issue of the State of the Study of the narrative of Azdi Vazar (1395-1460)

The article discusses the abstract compiled by the Jordanian military and researcher – Abd-ul-Ghani Hassan al-Shiishani (1924-2001) – to the manuscript of the medieval theologian and preacher Azdi Wazar, kept in the archive of Sheikh Bahal Tolmirzi az-Zandaki (1784-1884). The text of the Arabic-language document was sent in 1990 by letter to the Chechen ethnographer and writer A. S. Suleymanov, stored in the manuscript fund of the museum of the same name. According to the contents of the document, Azdi Vazar (1395-1460) was born in the family of the Tatar officer Vazar Andarbi, studied in the countries of the East and visited Chechnya with a preaching purpose. The text lists forty-eight sub-ethnonyms, declared as a list of tribes known to Azdi Vazar at the time of his arrival in his homeland. A number of toponyms are given, as well as brief background information on the religious picture and geographical boundaries of the region. The document is being introduced into scientific circulation for the first time. The article is divided into three parts and represents the history of the document, the comments of the author of the publication regarding certain points from the annotation and the actual text of the translation of the annotation by A.-G. H. Ash-Shiyshani. Some points reflect additional information gleaned from his own (Al-Shiishani) Chechen-language translation of the Arabic annotation.

Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography

Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography

Thinking with Faith, Thinking as Faith: What Comes After Onto-theo-logy?

Abstract Despite Heidegger’s constant claims to the contrary, thinking is not opposed to faith. Indeed, against his own intentions, Heidegger’s critique of onto-theo-logy, which breaks the grip of modernity, issues in a faith more radically conceived. This faith is the thinking, this thinking is the faith that becomes possible in the post-secular space which Heidegger’s critique of modernity opens. Although the great medieval theologians like Augustine and Aquinas are not onto-theo-logians in a strict sense, they, along with the whole history of metaphysics, fall under its wider sense of any centered and foundational discourse. But any discourse that eludes onto-theo-logy in the wider sense finds itself embracing a faith, not reducible to belief, where thinking is a form of faith and faith is a form of thinking. Derrida’s “Circumfession,” a paradigmatic post-ontotheological discourse, is a work of prayer and a confession of faith in the open-endedness of the event, an un-programmable future (à venir). This text communicates with Heidegger thinking the “open,” the “promise” of language, of the Zukunft embedded in the Herkunft, constituting the “piety of thinking.”

The Gospel of Luke

Baker’s Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture series is an attempt to meet the need for “accessible yet substantive” commentaries on the books of the NT. In addition to exegetical insights, one of the series’s strengths is its intentional engagement with the history of interpretation (especially the Apostolic Fathers and Medieval theologians). Significant in this regard is the aim of the series to “draw on the interpretation of Protestant and Orthodox scholars” and not strictly Roman Catholic scholarship (p. 11).Fr. Pablo Gadenz’s commentary on Luke is an excellent fulfillment of the aims of the series. Gadenz begins with a short introduction in which he sets out some working assumptions about Luke, including: Luke was a historian who wrote in the biographical genre (p. 19), also wrote Acts (p. 16), accompanied Paul (p. 16), and wrote before AD 80. After the introduction, each section of the commentary follows a pattern of biblical text, exegetical comments, and “reflection and application.” Interspersed throughout are sidebars on various biblical backgrounds topics (e.g. the impact of Herod the Great and his sons) and reflections from various ancient commentators on the same biblical text (e.g., Origen on Jesus as a priest-figure in Luke 5).A selection of passages will provide a good overview of this commentary. In his section on the scholar of the law and the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10), Gadenz demonstrates his keen ability to identify OT allusions. In addition to providing familiar explanations about the intent of the law in Jesus’s conversation with the scholar of the law in 10:26–27, Gadenz also picks up on the sequence of travelers who pass by the injured man in the parable. He identifies an apparent Hebraic formula for introducing a group of people following the sequence of priest, Levites, and common Israelites as found in Ezra 2:70 and 6:16. However, when Jesus tells the parable, the final category is replaced by the Samaritan. Additionally, Gadenz suggests 2 Chr 28:15 as the basis for Jews having the category of Samaritans helping the “captives of Judah” (p. 211). The significant number of parallels makes this allusion striking (nakedness, anointing with oil, placing on an animal, and Jericho).In his interpretation of the parable of the Dishonest Steward (Luke 16), Gadenz exhibits a careful attention to detail by explaining that the focus on whether or not the dishonest manager’s actions can be justified misses the point (e.g., if he ultimately acted rightly by removing his over-charged interest from the amount owed by his clients). Instead, the focus should be on the contrast with children of the light, who ironically are instructed to behave like the dishonest manager. Gadenz argues that because the motivations of the children of light are inherently different than the dishonest manager, the actual instruction is focused on preparation for a “heavenly future” (p. 282).Another passage highlights a place where Gadenz’s commentary could have provided more with regard to the specific emphasis of Luke’s narrative. The “cleansing of the temple” in Luke 19:45–48 parallels Matthew and Mark almost identically but differs significantly from John’s Gospel even though this passage represents one of the rare instances where all four Gospels share content. Gadenz’s focus on the internal elements of Luke’s narrative and related background issues results in no discussion of the arrangement of the material. Luke’s placement of this material late in the narrative (leading up to Jesus’s trial) is consistent with the movement of Jesus’s ministry culminating in an arrival in Jerusalem. However, there are other significant moments in the temple earlier in Luke’s narrative (Jesus’s presentation in Luke 2:22–40 and presence with the teachers in Luke 2:41–52) that Fr. Gadenz does not connect to the meaning of Jesus’s return to, cleansing, and teaching in the temple. Comparison with John’s quotation of Ps 69:9 (“zeal for my father’s house will consume me”) seems to indicate a possible connection with Luke’s unique temple material from Jesus’s youth and could indicate more nuance in the placement and content of Luke’s material and Jesus’s relationship to the temple.Gadenz provides us with a great commentary that will give its readers insight not only into to the content of Luke’s Gospel, but also to the way in which Luke’s Gospel has been interpreted through the history of the church.

Saint Bonaventure and the future of Christian education

Four writings by the medieval theologian Bonaventure (c. 1221–1274) provide inspiration for the future of Christian education. His writings cast a vision for Christian education and provide insight into four key areas for hope in the future: a reclaiming of the purpose of Christian education; a recovery of the Great Tradition; a rediscovery of the liberal arts and their natural role in cultivating wisdom and virtue and leading us back to God; and a renewal of the cooperation between the church and the academy.

Transfiguring Medievalism: Poetry, Attention, and the Mysteries of the Body by Cary Howie

Reviewed by: Transfiguring Medievalism: Poetry, Attention, and the Mysteries of the Body by Cary Howie Katharine Jager Cary Howie. Transfiguring Medievalism: Poetry, Attention, and the Mysteries of the Body. Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. 190 pp. $130.00. Cary Howie's Transfiguring Medievalism: Poetry, Attention, and the Mysteries of the Body is a series of comparative readings, or what he calls "an especially concentrated set of turns and returns" (53), that range across a wide selection of texts including contemporary American lyric poetry, Italian and French medieval poetry, medieval theology and hagiography, and twentieth-century continental philosophy. In a delicate, beautiful mash-up, Howie presses together seemingly disparate texts to marshal claims about meditation, theology, desire, and the bounds of the embodied self. Comprising nine brief chapters, the book is also framed by a series of Howie's original free-verse poems or "interludes" that reflect concerns with lyric [End Page 405] questions of praise, deixis, prayer, and belief, expressed in a diction that is simultaneously casual ("face down / ass up, that's the way we like"; xi) and theological (as expressed in the title on Interlude 2: "Puking Prayer"; 125). As he notes, "the poetic word is always an incarnate word, a tongue, a body spoken and speaking," and poetry itself "takes place in and as religious discourse, conceptual argument, God-talk, prayer" (9). Howie begins with an analysis of American poet Mary Szybist's poem "The Troubadours, Etc.," which he uses to ground his notion of "transfiguration," or an embodied, spiritual "light that makes something newly visible, even as it appears to disappear" (1). "Transfiguration" guides Howie's concept of "lyric medievalism," or the ways that the contemporary poets he reads "have started to sound like medieval theologians, or, in fact, like certain holistic modern readers of medieval theology, especially in their accounts of the human body in its limitations and at its limits" (147), and he presses twentieth-century anglophone poetry against medieval theological texts. For instance, Howie's first chapter, "Toward Transfiguration," reads Laura Kasischke, Matt Donovan, the account in Matthew's Gospel of the hemorrhaging woman reaching for Christ's hem, Linda Hull, Aquinas, Augustine, Marie Howe, and Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead, to argue that "to be transfigured is to undergo, at the surface of the body, an intensification of this body that does not leave it intact, if by 'intact' we understand all too literally, 'untouched'" (24). His second chapter, "Saints, Poets, and Other Crossover Artists," extends this concern for the body's edges and apertures. Using Barbara Newman's concept of the medieval crossover artist to weave readings of sci-fi; mid-century American fiction; Boccaccio; philosophy; theology; medieval studies; and the lyrics of Mary Karr, Kasischke, and Mary Oliver, Howie argues that these writers are able to express "something so fundamentally accommodating of the world—its ugliness, its beauty—that it challenges the very discursive and categorical prejudices of our critical language" (44). Chapter 3, "Monastic Poetics," is Howie's strongest chapter. In it, he considers discretio across and through readings of Jane Hirshfield, Foucault, the Conferences of John Cassian, Benedict's Rule, Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, Thomas Merton on Mark Van Doren, Guigo II the Carthusian's Ladder of Monks, Melissa Range's "Shell White," and Marilyn Hacker's "Annunciation, 8 A.M." Howie argues here that monastic poetics, in its use of discernment and discipline, is "not afraid to find occasions for prayer in situations of impurity" (68). His fourth chapter, "Waiting for the Middle Ages," considers Catherine Brown, Carla Freccero, and Carolyn Dinshaw's [End Page 406] recent claims about temporality and medievalism to wonder "how we, singularly and in common, are taken by the objects and the persons we attend to and how they, more often than not, if we wait for and with them, take us by surprise" (74–75). Howie reads Beroul's Tristan; Adam de la Halle's Le jeu de Robin et de Marion; Dante's Inferno, XVI; Bernard of Clairvaux; Caroline Bynum; Marie Howe's "The Gate"; theology; literary criticism; and philosophy; as well as Paul's letter to the Romans; to...

Body and Spirit in the Middle Ages: Literature, Philosophy, Medicine ed. by Gaia Gubbini

Reviewed by: Body and Spirit in the Middle Ages: Literature, Philosophy, Medicine ed. by Gaia Gubbini Sarah Friedman Gaia Gubbini, ed., Body and Spirit in the Middle Ages: Literature, Philosophy, Medicine ( Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), 284 pp. Body and Spirit in the Middle Ages: Literature, Philosophy, Medicine, edited by Gaia Gubbini, consists of fourteen papers presented at a 2014 conference at the Freie Universität Berlin. The conference was funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for Gubbini's project "Breath, Sighs, and Spirits in Medieval Romance Literature." The essays in the volume, written in French, English, and Italian, examine how medieval philosophy, medicine, and literature theorized the "body and spirit question," and shed light on "the complex nature of the medieval Self" (11). While the essays are not grouped into themed sections, there are discernible thematic patterns that unite the contributions, which Gubbini helpfully highlights in her introduction. Gubbini, Danielle Jacquart, and Éric Palazzo analyze the multivalent concept of spiritus; Sarah Kay and Joachim Küpper analyze skin, senses, and emotions; Andreas Kablitz, Stephen G. Nichols, and Howard Bloch analyze the dynamics of mind and body through the lens of gender and sexuality; Aurélien Robert and Massimo Ciavolella analyze representations of illness and bodily imbalance; Irene Caiazzo and Nicolas Weill-Parot analyze the relationship between celestial and terrestrial; and, finally, Franco Suitner and Carla Casagrande analyze the representation of body and spirit in the mystic tradition. In addition to the unifying themes that Gubbini identifies, some of the essays connect in their disciplinary focus and methodological similarity. Multiple essays examine literary representations of bodily experience in light of medical, philosophical, and theological writings. Gubbini's contribution, "Corps et esprit: Les ohls espiritaus de Bernard de Ventadour et la maladie de Tristan," draws on the works of Patristic and medical writers to examine how body and spirit converge in representations of psychosomatic experience in the work of Bernard de Ventadour and in Anglo-Norman romances dedicated to the story of Tristan and Iseult. Also focusing on psychosomatic experience in medieval poetry, Ciavolella's "Melancholy and Creativity in Petrarch" examines Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (1330–74; later titled Il Canzoniere) and Secretum (1342–58) alongside classical and medieval philosophical theories of fantasy to underscore how Petrarch represents humoral imbalance and poetic creativity as intertwined. Kablitz's essay, "Petrarch and the Senses: Petrarch's Anthropology of Love and the Scholastic Transformation of Christian Ethics," performs a close reading of sonnets from Canzoniere alongside Aquinas's Quaestiones disputatae de malo (13th c.) to exemplify how scholastic philosophy's "dismissal of the self-evident superiority and power of reason and its consequences" manifests in Petrarch's [End Page 255] poetic corpus (210). Suitner's essay, "La poésie mystique: Iacopone de Todi et les contradictions de l'âme," demonstrates how the Franciscan poet Jacopone da Todi drew heavily on Franciscan mysticism's Christocentric presentation of the body as a vehicle for both sin and salvation. Instead of examining how nonliterary genres of texts influenced literary texts, Robert's essay, "Amour, imagination, et poésie dans l'oevre médicale de Gentile da Foligno," examines the presence of literary tropes within fourteenth-century Italian physician Gentile da Foligno's commentary on Avicenna's Canon. The essay compellingly demonstrates the link between Gentile da Foligno's analysis of Avicenna and poetic descriptions of lovesickness in works by Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Cavalcanti. Other essays, such as Küpper's "The Medical, the Philosophical, and the Theological Discourses on the Senses," Weill-Parot's "'Le contact virtuel' entre un esprit et un corps et l'action à distance," and Caiazzo's "Le philosophie, les astres, et la physiognomy au XIIIe siècle," connect in their examination of how the disciplines of medicine, philosophy, theology, and even astrology mutually influenced one another and, at times, diverged in their conceptualizations of the body and spirit. Küpper considers the differences and similarities between how medieval theologians and physicians conceived of "post-sensory processing mechanisms" (112). He highlights key differences in how these disciplines approached the question of how the mind converts "quantitative into qualitative data" (112), and compellingly argues that one observes "an acceptance of theoretical plurality" within "official" medieval...