Medium Aevum articles

Recent articles from Medium Aevum

The tortoise and the snail: a lexical shellgame.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2008... In his second fable, the poet Avianus (c. AD 400) tells the story of a tortoise (testudo) which tired of its slowness and asked an eagle to carry it into the air in return for some precious sea-shells: (1) Pennatis avibus quondam testudo locuta est: si quis eam volucrum ...

Sight and sound in St Erkenwald: On theodicy and the senses.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2008... ... yea, this is now believed, afterward it shall be seen. (Augustine, The City of God, XVII.17) Bur such a vision is not of the present life. (Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs, 31.2) For we walk by faith, and not by sight. (II Corinthians v.7) Faith... cometh...

Poverty, dignity, and lay spirituality in Pore Caitif and Jacob's Well.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2008... This essay will demonstrate that Jacob's Well, the early fifteenth-century sermon cycle, derived the doctrinal material within its exposition of the Creed and Ten Commandments from the late fourteenth-century collection of treatises known as Pore Caitif. (1) This connection provides a...

'I shalle send word in writing': lexical choices and legal acumen in the letters of Margaret Paston.(Essay)
September 22, 2008... Margaret Paston's letters have been said to contain 'many obvious echoes of legal phraseology', (2) and both their tone and their content have led historians to surmise that she had a certain familiarity with the law, bur the extent of her legal knowledge has hitherto been largely ignored or...

An unpublished fifteenth-century Carol Collection: Oxford, Lincoln College MS Lat. 141.(Essay)
September 22, 2008... Medium Aevum Essay Prize 2008 The fifteenth century is the first period from which substantial numbers of vernacular English songs survive, in both notated and un-notated manuscripts, together testifying to a vigorous written tradition. Many of these texts are in carol form: regular...