This book illuminates the pervasive interplay of 'sacred' and 'secular' phenomena in the literature, history, politics, and religion of the Middle Ages and Early Modern periods. The essays gathered here constitute a new way of applying a classic dichotomy to major cultural phenomena of the pre-modern era.

Autorentext
LAWRENCE BESSERMAN is currently a Professor of English, specializing in Old and Middle English literature, especially Chaucer, at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

Inhalt
Introduction: Sacred and Secular in Medieval and Early-Modern Cultures: Issues and Approaches; L.Besserman PART I: MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN LITERATURE: LYRIC, NARRATIVE, AND DRAMA The Imitation of Hagiographic Formulas in Occitan Vidas (Lives of the Troubadours); C.Aslanov 'Quid Hinieldus cum Christo?': The Secular Expression of the Sacred in Old and Middle English Lyrics; C.Aslanov Reading Radical Metonymy in the Middle English Pearl; A.Fletcher Purchasing Pardon: Spiritual and Material Economies on the Canterbury Pilgrimage; A.Fletcher Story and History: Sacralizing the Genre of Romance; J.Whitman The Sacred and the Secular in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice; M.Roston PART II: MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN HISTORY: CHURCH AND STATE The Communal Body, The Corporate Body, and the Clerical Body: An Anthropological Reading of the Gregorian Reform; L.Barshack Sacred, Secular, and Impure: The Contextuality of Sensations; E.Cohen Religious Community and the History of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages; R.Copeland Sacred Authority and Secular Power in the Gesta Episcoporum Cameracensis; R.M.Stein From Innocent III to Martin Luther: Sacramental Space and it Discontents; M.Rubin