Product Description: This innovative study challenges the view that medieval thought was fundamentally abstract. He describes what medieval people 'thought' about population, studying the texts which contained their thought, and examining the medieval realities which shaped it, such as birth, birth-control, sex-ratio, marriage ages, length of life, and the population of the Holy Land...read more

Product Description: 'Did you see a heretic? When? Where? Who else was there?'. The inquisitor is questioning, and a suspect is replying; a notary is translating from the vernacular into Latin, and writing it down, abbreviating and omitting at will; later there is the reading out of a sentence in public and then, in a few cases, burning...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The Waldenses, like the Fransiscans, emerged from the apostolic movements within the Latin Church of the decades around 1200, but unlike the Fransiscans they were driven underground. Not a full counter-Church, like the Cathar heretics, they formed a clandestine religious order, preaching to and hearing the confessions of their secret followers, and surviviving until the reformation...read more

Product Description: The sheer extent of crossover - medics as religious men, religious men as medics, medical language at the service of preaching and moral-theological language deployed in medical writings - is the driving force behind these studies...read more

Product Description: The main subjects of enquiry in this volume focus upon the major areas in which the honorand, Gordon Leff, has himself made fundamental contributions. Among the topics discussed are learned and popular heresy (Cathars, Wyclif, Lollardy, and the concept of heresy itself); the history of medieval universities and thought (including the religious at Paris and Cambridge, Ockham, and Paris theologians' views on the Jews); and early modern views of the crusades...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Penance, confession and their texts (penitential and confessors' manuals) are important topics for an understanding of the middle ages, in relation to a wide range of issues, from medieval social thought to Chaucer's background. These essays treat a variety of different aspects of the topic: subjects include the frequency and character of early medieval penance; the summae and manuals for confessors, and the ways in which these texts (written by males for males) constructed women as sexual in nature; William of Auvergne's remarkable writing on penance; and the relevance of confessors' manuals for demographic history...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This is the first volume to be published by York Medieval Press, under the aegis of University of York's Centre for Medieval Studies in association with Boydell & Brewer, with the aim of promoting innovative scholarship and fresh criticism on medieval culture...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Did growing literacy in the later medieval period foster popular heresy, or did heresy provide a crucial stimulus to the spread of literacy? This collective volume, by established scholars from Britain, continental Europe and the United States, considers the importance of the written word in pre-Lutheran heresies, and explores the extent to which heretics' familiarity with books paralleled or exceeded that of their orthodox contemporaries...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)