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The legend of Theophilus is a widely disseminated medieval miracle story. A good man gives in to Vain Glory, sells his soul to the Devil, has a terrible crisis of conscience, and is saved by the Virgin. The story is translated into most European languages and appears in stained glass, sculpture, and manuscripts. Gautier de Coinci writes the longest version of the legend. Its colorful details reveal the medieval period's deep fear of hell and the Devil and its high hopes in the Virgin and the Church.

"Here is presented for the first time a medieval text, the first Old French Vie des Peres. The Vie des Peres is a collective text comprising three branches and, at its fullest, over seventy individually enclosed pious tales and miracles. The first Vie - the first forty-one or forty-two tales - dates from the first third of the thirteenth century. It is a vitally significant, but hitherto neglected, part of the Old French canon. The tales are well written and offer glimpses of thirteenth-century life and spirituality." "The Vie des Peres will interest scholars engaged in the study of vernacular literature, codicology, lexicography, art history, theology and philology. Tales of Vice and Virtue is the first sustained analysis of the entire first Vie des Peres. It is a book which provides readers new to the text with detailed commentaries, offers abundant intertextual information for romance philologists, and suggests many new areas for further research."--Page de 4

Gautier de Coinci (c. 1177-1236) was a Benedictine prior, a poet and composer, and the author of several very popular religious works, including a large collection of Miracles of the Virgin in French, which enjoyed a wide circulation during the Middle Ages. Gautier drew on multiple Latin sources for his work, embellishing and personalizing them as he adapted them to his poetic design. Conceiving of his collection of miracles as a complete work, Gautier carefully organized the tales into two books, framing each with authorial exordia and lyrics praising the Virgin. In addition to its obvious literary interest, the subsequent manuscript tradition offers a remarkable panorama of medieval manuscript production, in particular due to the fascinating combination of text, music and illustration. Bringing together a select group of scholars from multiple disciplines (including art history, musicology, and literary studies), this collection of essays explores complementary aspects of Gautier, his works, and his manuscripts. The volume offers both breadth and depth in its examination of Gautier de Coinci and his Miracles de Nostre Dame It promises to redefine Gautier studies through its interdisciplinary consideration of the varied facets of his work as it makes available to scholars and students the first interdisciplinary examination of this key figure in medieval vernacular religious culture.

The first published general study of an unduly neglected writer whose stylistic legacy remains unique in the Middle Ages. The well-connected, northern-French monk and musician Gautier de Coinci (1177/8-1236) occupies an unassailable position as one of the most exceptional vernacular writers of the Middle Ages, concerning whom there is nevertheless nofull length study in English. In a meticulously planned and supervised collection of miracles of Our Lady, which survive in a remarkable number of manuscripts, some beautifully illustrated, Gautier deploys his outstanding talentsas a composer of songs, an acerbic satirist, an audacious inventor of rich and equivocal rhymes (of a virtuosity unparalleled before the "Grands Rhetoriqueurs" on the eve of the Renaissance), a confident lexical innovator, an exuberant exponent of rhetorical wordplay, an incisive observer of contemporary society, and a man of profound personal piety. This study of word-patterning in Gautier seeks to compensate for the dearth of stylistic studies ofOld French and to examine in detail the relationship between rhetoric and religion, "courtoisie" and Mariolatry, aristocratic tastes and the way to spiritual renewal. Gautier's writing strategy is shown to be a means to rise beyond secular, aristocratic values by building on them and transcending them rather than opposing and rejecting them. TONY HUNT is a Fellow of St Peter's College, Oxford.

The meeting of East and West in the Crusader States was the theme of a symposium held at Hernen Castle in 1997. It was the continuation of a similar symposium which has been published in the Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 75. Various communities (Arabs, Armenians, Ethiopians, Greeks, Syrians and Latins) and various religions (the Church of Rome, the Orthodox Church of Constantinople, the Jacobites, the Muslims and others) play their part in the various Crusader States, sometimes in the effort to ecumenism, sometimes in the form of confrontations. Coins and seals in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem betray Eastern and Western influences. Daily life is reflected in historical texts, and in exempla and miracula. The fall of Edessa is described in the Lament of Edessa by Nerses Snorhali, which is here for the first time translated into English. Even icon-painting in Egypt reflects crusader influence.

For the Middle Ages and Renaissance, meaning and power were created and propagated through public performance. Processions, coronations, speeches, trials, and executions are all types of public performance that were both acts and texts: acts that originated in the texts that gave them their ideological grounding; texts that bring to us today a trace of their actual performance. Literature, as well, was for the pre-modern public a type of performance: throughout the medieval and early modern periods we see a constant tension and negotiation between the oral/aural delivery of the literary work and the eventual silent/read reception of its written text. The current volume of essays examines the plurality of forms and meanings given to performance in the Middle Ages and Renaissance through discussion of the essential performance/text relationship. The authors of the essays represent a variety of scholarly disciplines and subject matter: from the "performed" life of the Dominican preacher, to coronation processions, to book presentations; from satirical music speeches, to the rendering of widow portraits, to the performance of romance and pious narrative. Diverse in their objects of study, the essays in this volume all examine the links between the actual events of public performance and the textual origins and subsequent representation of those performances.

This collection presents-through the medium of translated sources-a comprehensive guide to the development of hagiography and the cult of the saints in western Christendom during the middle ages. It provides an unparalleled resource for the study of the ideals of sanctity and the practice of religion in the medieval west. Intended for the classroom, for the medieval scholar who wishes to explore sources in unfamiliar languages, and for the general reader fascinated by the saints, this collection provides the reader a chance to explore in depth a full range of writings about the saints (the term hagiography is derived from Greek roots: hagios=holy and graphe=writing). The thirty-six chapters contain sources either in their entirety or in selections of substantial length. The great majority of the texts have never previously appeared in English translation. Those which have appeared in earlier translation, are here presented in versions based on significant new textual and historical scholarship which makes them significant improvements on the earlier versions. All the translations are accompanied by introductions, notes, and suggestions for further reading in order to help guide the reader. The first selections date to the fourth century, when the ideals of Christian sanctity were evolving to meet the demands of a world in which Christianity was an accepted religion and when the public veneration of relics was growing greatly in scope. The last selections date to the period immediately prior to the Reformation, a period in which the traditional concept of sanctity and acceptability of de cult of relics was being questioned. In addition to numerous works from the clerical languages of Latin and Greek, the selections include translations from Romance, Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic vernacular languages, s well as Hebrew texts concerning the martyrdom of Jews at the hands of Christians. Originating in lands from Iceland to Hungary and from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, they are taken from a full range of the many genres which constituted hagiography: lives of the saints, collections of miracle stories, accounts of the discovery or movement of relics, liturgical books, visions, canonization inquests, and even heresy trials.

This ambitious and vivid study in six volumes explores the journey of a single, electrifying story, from its first incarnation in a medieval French poem through its prolific rebirth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Juggler of Notre Dame tells how an entertainer abandons the world to join a monastery, but is suspected of blasphemy after dancing his devotion before a statue of the Madonna in the crypt; he is saved when the statue, delighted by his skill, miraculously comes to life. Jan Ziolkowski tracks the poem from its medieval roots to its rediscovery in late nineteenth-century Paris, before its translation into English in Britain and the United States. The visual influence of the tale on Gothic revivalism and vice versa in America is carefully documented with lavish and inventive illustrations, and Ziolkowski concludes with an examination of the explosion of interest in The Juggler of Notre Dame in the twentieth century and its place in mass culture today. The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity is a rich case study for the reception of the Middle Ages in modernity. Spanning centuries and continents, the medieval period is understood through the lens of its (post)modern reception in Europe and America. Profound connections between the verbal and the visual are illustrated by a rich trove of images, including book illustrations, stained glass, postage stamps, architecture, and Christmas cards. Presented with great clarity and simplicity, Ziolkowski's work is accessible to the general reader, while its many new discoveries will be valuable to academics in such fields and disciplines as medieval studies, medievalism, philology, literary history, art history, folklore, performance studies, and reception studies.

This exquisite volume beautifully reproduces and insightfully examines the most important illuminations found in French history manuscripts.