Sacred and Secular in Medieval and Early Modern Cultures - New Essays
This book illuminates the pervasive interplay of 'sacred' and 'secular' phenomena in the literature, history, politics, and religion of the Middle Ages and Early Modern periods. Following an introduction that examines methodological questions in the study of the sacred and the secular, the other essays treat (among other topics): Old English poetry, troubadour lyrics, twelfth-century romance, the Gregorian Reform, Middle English lyrics and the work of the Pearl-poet, Luther, and Shakespeare. The essays gathered here constitute a new way of applying a classic dichotomy to major cultural phenomena of the pre-modern era.
Jacques Le Goff is a prominent figure in the tradition of French medieval scholarship, profoundly influenced by the Annales school, notably, Bloch, Febvre, and Braudel, and by the ethnographers and anthropologists Mauss, Dumézil, and Lévi-Strauss. In building his argument for "another Middle Ages" (un autre moyen âge), Le Goff documents the emergence of the collective mentalité from many sources with scholarship both imaginative and exact.
The Axe and the Oath - Ordinary Life in the Middle Ages
In The Axe and the Oath, one of the world's leading medieval historians presents a compelling picture of daily life in the Middle Ages as it was experienced by ordinary people. Writing for general readers, Robert Fossier vividly describes how these vulnerable people confronted life, from birth to death, including childhood, marriage, work, sex, food, illness, religion, and the natural world. While most histories of the period focus on the ideas and actions of the few who wielded power and stress how different medieval people were from us, Fossier concentrates on the other nine-tenths of humanity in the period and concludes that "medieval man is us.
"Women in England in the Middle Ages" looks at 'all sorts and conditions' of women from "c."500 to "c."1500 A.D., concentrating on common experiences over their life-cycle, as daughters, wives and mothers, and the contrasts derived from their position in the social hierarchy. Most women lived out their lives in their own village or town, but queens and noblewomen exercised power and patronage locally and at the royal court. Religion played a significant part in women's lives; some became nuns and abbesses, while the majority were involved in their own parish and community.
