The fragments on the ancients and the moderns are continued. Arguments are presented for and against the role played by the ancients in establishing a modern culture of genius and taste. The effect of writing on oral poetry is discussed together with the invention of paper, printing, and copper engraving. These had an important effect on poetic expression and public culture, and the advantages and disadvantages are weighed. The Middle Ages ended with the Reformation, the discovery of new lands, changes in the financial system, in war, and class relationships. German literature is discussed in relation to other European traditions, and its shortcomings and merits are considered. In conclusion, it is argued that comparison of the national poetic traditions is difficult, perhaps futile, and that every nation should value its own tradition.

This chapter is concerned with the decline of Greek and Roman poetry and the rise of European culture in the Middle Ages. The decisive difference between the ancients and the moderns concerns poetry in the widest sense, that is, the culture of beauty. A number of fragments address this difference. The significance of Christian hymns and the Psalms for the European nations is discussed, with particular attention to national traditions in music, language, and the sciences. A distinction is made between the way the northern and southern European traditions use tone and alliteration. The culture of Arabic is seen as a strong influence on the culture of medieval Europe, passing through Spain by way of the troubadours. The difficulties in defining national character or national poetry are discussed, and the value of medieval poetic arts in Europe is described as an awakening of independent thinking and unencumbered judgement. This makes the medieval poetic arts of Europe a gay science, an expansion of the fields of science, and a general unification of the nations.

This chapter describes and analyzes the role that medicine has historically played in relation to broader cultural attachments to the idea of progress. It offers a historical overview of how the interest – or disinterest – in progress is entangled with contemporary understandings of what it means to be healthy or ill and the medical priorities of the time. Improved medical care had very different meanings depending on the respective value ascribed to individual and societal well-being, attitudes toward death, and the role of physicians. While contemporary ideas about medical progress rest on very different understandings of the human from other cultural and historical contexts, their emergence from a combination of scientific knowledge and ethical preoccupations recurs throughout history. Even as the capacity and desire to intervene in the human body with technological means has increased, both utopian and modest visions of progress in medicine have historical antecedents. The historical overview that follows is crucial for understanding how answers to the question “What is progress in medicine?” have always been contested and historically contingent.

The joint centre of this book is Europe and the Middle East, because the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries CE marked what I would call an era of global contact. It was during this time that a series of interlocking conflicts enmeshing the Christian and Islamic civilisations that started with the conquest of Iberia in the eighth century and continued through the Crusades to the Ottoman wars of the early modern period shaped and expanded both Europe and the Middle East. At the same time, Europe and the Middle East explored and expanded into Asia, Africa, and eventually North America. I combine Europe and the Middle East into one cultural entity because for all their differences, the longue durée stresses the shared logocentric tradition of the Abrahamic faiths, the common heritage in science and philosophy, and the centuries of interwoven experiences, often painful and violent, but just as often culturally enriching and mutually beneficial. And while the political entities of medieval Europe play a more significant role in structuring this book than other areas, there are attempts to balance this by foregrounding the role of literatures and writers from other parts of the world.

The brief coda reflects on how the model developed in this book can be applied to later premodern societies.

This chapter introduces the main themes and scope of the volume, including discussing the origin of the concept of ‘heresy’, as well as outlining what aspects of it will and will not form the focus of the following chapters. It then provides a summary of the division of the volume into two parts and the particular topics and case studies contained in each.

The peoples and cultures at Europe’s ‘unchristianised edge’ included the Sami, the Balts, the Estonians, and the Finno-Ugric peoples of the Volga-Ural region such as the Maris and Udmurts. This chapter situates those peoples in their geographical, cultural, and colonial contexts in the period leading up to the year 1387, when Lithuania formally converted to Christianity. The chapter introduces the characteristics of their diverse religious traditions and briefly traces the preceding history of the conversion of northern Europe by both violent and non-violent methods, including the Northern Crusades, paying particular attention to impasses in the Christianisation process when people rejected and resisted the imposition of the new faith. Drawing on the writings of Bartholomaeus Anglicus, the chapter portrays the state of Europe’s Christianisation on the eve of Lithuania’s formal conversion, drawing attention to the extent of pre-Christian Europe in this period and the challenge that Christianity still faced at the end of the fourteenth century.

In the Middle Ages kingdoms could nominally reach very far, although kings typically did not have more resources than the most powerful feudal lords. Their mystical, sacred power ensured their right to rule over vast lands. The king obtained these attributes during the coronation, during which he simultaneously had to subjugate himself to the pope and the emperor. The coronation was an anchoring representant that enacted the God-given hierarchy in the cathedral: the laity was in the nave, the king in between the laity and the clergy, and the archbishop as the representative of the pope performed the unction with the holy balm through which the sacred entered the ceremony. It was the universal monarchy on stage. To rid themselves of papal and imperial superiority, while simultaneously maintaining their standing above feudal lords, kings modified the coronation and adapted other representants. This fundamental struggle led to a change in the early modern European order. During the Reformation, iconoclasms destroyed Catholic representants that upheld the hierarchical order. Simultaneously, kings adapted and repurposed existing Catholic representants for their own needs. The resulting dynastic divine right absolutism resembled the authority of pope and emperor, but it was territorially constrained.

A committed student of vernacular literatures alongside classical ones, Shelley matured a deeply integrated vision of European literature as a transnational conversation including the English-language tradition. This conception informs his literary and theoretical writings, his reflections about and practice of translation, and his appropriations and recreations of foreign forms and modes, such as Dante’s terza rima or Petrarch’s Trionfi. His interests focused especially on the Renaissance (in France, Italy, and Spain) and the eighteenth century and Revolutionary period (especially in France) and on figures such as Michel de Montaigne, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, or Madame de Staël and the members of her salon at Coppet. Shelley’s engagements with modern European literatures confirm him as a poet and thinker poised between classical and post-classical cultures, harnessing them to support his revolutionary approaches to versification and poiesis, political and philosophical reflection, and cultural-social activism, against the backdrop of an incessantly evolving modernity.

The age of devotion is a descriptive designation for the period commonly labelled medieval, when the majority of literary texts were produced for devotional purposes. In the Russian context this extends roughly to the mid-seventeenth century. This chapter outlines and illustrates three approaches to the study of this literature: synchronic, diachronic, and dynamic. The synchronic approach emphasises features that are broadly characteristic of the age as a whole, such as the religious milieu (Orthodox Christianity), the language of high culture (Church Slavonic, in various interactions with East Slavonic), the medium of transmission (manuscript rather than print), and the problem of authorship (the prevalence of anonymity, the role of the scribe). The diachronic approach has produced various attempts to identify distinct periods in literary development. The dynamic approach emphasises the mutability of literary texts, such that it is necessary to view a work as a field of variously realised textual possibilities.

A discussion of where, why and how parchment material was preserved in the Middle Ages, distinguishing broadly between books kept in libraries and documents kept in archives. The distinction between outgoing and incoming archives and a case study of two documents of the emperor Frederick II.

This chapter examines elements of French-language culture in Britain between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries which reveal the cross-Channel ties fostered by a shared language. It focuses on the Anglo-Norman Prose Brut (ANPB), part of a medieval historiographical tradition charting British history from its origins to the contemporary era, considering it alongside related texts such as Wace’s Brut and the Roman des Franceis of André de Coutances. Surviving in over fifty manuscripts, along with more than 200 copies in English translation, the ANPB influenced the development of English historical consciousness up to and beyond the time of John Milton. The shifting of borders throughout the Middle Ages means that the terms ’England’ and ’France’ need to be understood as more mobile than the modern nation states they designate. From the Norman Conquest in particular, the Channel became as much a conduit as a barrier to cultural and political cohesion. Through the French-language Brut tradition, the chapter considers how Britain’s history was contextualized for literate English society within the wider cross-Channel environment of Anglo-French cultural and political entanglements.