Search results for ""Author K. Dekker""

Throughout the early Middle Ages, education and learning in Western Europe underwent a substantial development, from Italy across the Alps, from Latin to the vernacular and from secular to (although not exclusively) religious. With Latin as its prime medium, developments in education and learning were genuinely international and allowed for a steady exchange of teachers and texts across borders and institutions. Members of the fifth-century Gallo-Roman senatorial classes ' such as Eucherius of Lyons and Cassiodorus ' became bishops, abbots or founders of monasteries, and thereby catalysts in the transformation from secular to religious education. Then as now intellectuals travelled, taking both their learning and their books with them: Theodore of Tarsus travelled from the extreme end of the Mediterranean to Italy and across the Alps; John Scottus Eriugena migrated from Ireland to France; Boniface from England to Germany; while Abbo later made a journey from Fleury to Abingdon and back ' to name only a few examples. With the mobility of intellectuals comes the movement of texts and books: ranging from Pliny's Historia naturalis and Isidore's Etymologiae or the works of Bede to many of the smaller texts and fragments which have been the subject of study in the 'Storehouses' project. Although almost all of the precise details of classroom practice in the early Middle Ages remain hidden to the modern eye, and identifiable students' copy books or note-pads are rare, some of the texts and books that have survived still recall the monastic auditorium or schola because of their potential use in the classroom or in view of the texts found in these books. Often these texts and manuscripts testify to the international developments outlined above and to the international nature of the world of early medieval learning. The articles in this second volume of 'Storehouses of Wholesome Learning' emanate from the second workshop in the project, this time held at Leiden in June 2005. They focus on illuminating the multifaceted practice of learning by laying bare the exchanges of scholarship between the British Isles and the continent. From the Development of the Foetus, found in Bremmer's contribution, to the Fifteen Signs of Doomsday, the encyclopaedic knowledge that was disseminated all over Western Europe in written texts and, in all likelihood, through oral transmission, featured strongly in the practice of early medieval learning. The subject of that learning was nothing less than life itself, both in the physical and in the spiritual sense of the word.

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No period in the intellectual history of North-Western Europe has been so formative as the early Middle Ages, when missionaries transferred the learning accumulated for centuries in the Mediterranean basin to recently founded centres of religious scholarship in the ever expanding Christian world. The aim of this scholarship focused, first and foremost, on a proper understanding of the Bible as God's Word and Nature as God's Creation. During this period the foundations of medieval learning were laid in the monasteries and schools by men from distant shores who considered it their calling to entrust this precious knowledge to future generations of indigenous scholars. In this process, Syrians ended up in England, Irishmen in Italy, and Anglo-Saxons in Frisia and Bavaria and thus helped build a common intellectual culture in Europe. Even though the memories of these missionaries were fed with vast amounts of reproducible knowledge far beyond the capacity of modern man, the most important means of storing and conveying knowledge was the written word stored in what was then modern technology: the parchment codex. The composition of these books reflect the extent and diversity of early medieval learning. Sometimes they contain a single work, but often enough they contain compilations of diverse material which at first sight shows little coherence to the modern reader, and rightly so. In a way such miscellanies are mini-libraries. Nevertheless, they are storehouses of wholesome learning in their own right; further study reveals a rationale in such collections that leads us to a monastic learning environment, in some cases even to the classroom. The present volume demonstrates how the study of texts and manuscripts combined opens up windows on the early medieval world of learning as represented by glossaries, proto-encyclopedias, biblical companions, hagiographical guides, didactic verse, or descriptions of the world in word and image. The essays demonstrate that scholars have too often concentrated on the study of single texts, but especially that the compilations of manuscripts and libraries reflect the kind of knowledge that was required of monks, ministers and missionaries for the contemplation, celebration and promulgation of the Christian message.

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This volume contains twelve studies, all dealing with aspects of the literature and culture of Scotland during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Most of these contributions began life as papers delivered at an international conference on that subject, held at Rolduc Abbey, The Netherlands, in 2002. Much new light is shed on canonical Middle Scots writers: Alastair Fowler and David Parkinson, both on Gavin Douglas; David Moses on Robert Henryson; Ruben Valdes Miyares on William Dunbar. The essay by Rod Lyall, on the anonymous A"Three Prestis of Peblis, and that of Eleanor Commander, on the A"Originale ChronicleA" by Andrew Wyntoun, both illuminate unperceived aspects of well-known fifteenth-century texts. Both Janet Hadley Williams and Alan Swanson significantly advance our knowledge of the poet, Sir David Lyndsay. Women's contribution to culture is the subject of the essays by Marguerite Corporaal (on poetry by Queen Mary Stewart and by Mary Beaton) and of Marie-Claude Tucker (on the calligrapher Esther Inglis). In the area of Scottish Gaelic literature and culture, William Gillies explores the connections between a prose tale and poem on the topic of the land of the Little People. In the final study, Jamie Reid-Baxter contextualises and expounds a hitherto unknown Renaissance sonnet sequence, A"The Nyne MusesA", by John Dykes. In each of the contributions in this volume rhetoric and reality loom large; royalty, the third term of the title, is the ever-present final parameter of culture in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

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This book contains a wealth of new essays on many aspects of Germanic Philology, and the range reflects the scholarly activity of the dedicatee of this festschrift. Section I contains articles on historical philology as this relates to the Old Germanic languages and literatures; Section II contains essays on various aspects of Frisian and Frisian studies; Section III is devoted to the relationship between the Germanic and the Balto-Finnic languages; the articles in Section IV consist of applications of the methods and insights of modern linguistics to the study of the Germanic languages.

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