1999 Ungar Prize The American Translators Association Awarded to Denise A. Kaiser for
Outstanding Translation
The
struggle over fundamental issues erupted with great fury in the eleventh
and twelfth centuries. In this book, preeminent medievalist Henry
Fichtenau turns his attention to a new attitude that emerged in Western
Europe around the year 1000. This new attitude was exhibited both
in the rise of heresy in the general population and in the self-confident
rationality of the nascent schools. With his characteristic learning
and insight, Fichtenau shows how these two separate intellectual phenomena
contributed to a medieval world that was never quite as uniform as
might appear from our modern perspective.
Fichtenau's panoramic survey opens with the new heretics with
popular appeal in the early eleventh century and ends with the new
heretics with scholarly appeal in the late twelfth. He presents
the whole spectrum of lay men and women, schoolmen, and members
of religious orders who labored to delve into the most basic questions
of reality with passion and conviction. While he recognizes some
fundamental conditions underpinning the rise both of heretical movements—particularly
the Cathars—as well as Scholastics, he is careful to distinguish
the fundamental differences among these groups. Central to these
differences is how myth and textuality played a role in their beliefs,
what tools they developed to analyze the language of myth (religious
or philosophical), and why their speculations were allied with doubt
about the mysteries inherent to medieval Christian faith.
First published in German in 1991, Heretics and Scholars in
the High Middle Ages continues a grand tradition of scholarship
on the intellectual history of the Middle Ages. |
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