The Middle Ages are remembered as an age of faith; but they were also an age of reason. This book concentrates on the 250 years between the late 11th and early 14th centuries and studies two key facets of the rationalistic tradition: mathematics, and the broader current represented by a literary education. The final section considers ascetic monasticism, a notably non-rationalistic tradition.

Alexander Murray has long had an intellectual interest in the history of religion - struggling between his inbuilt anti-clericism and his pronounced monastic leanings. The five essays in Conscience and Authority in the Medieval Church take on this dialectic, addressing the difficult relationship between private conscience and public authority in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In any organization, political, military, commercial, or religious, the relationship of conscience and authority is always potentially fraught, and can create dilemmas both for those in authority and those without. This volume records how our European predecessors approached and dealt with the same dilemmas as we face in the modern world.

The studies collected here cover a period of about 33 years, from 1986 to 2019, and represent a sustained effort to understand the institutions of the Merovingian kingdom and its history. There has long been a predisposition to cast the Merovingian period in the dark colours of barbarism or to treat it with reference to personal relationships and archaic institutions. The present volume, instead, recognizes the Merovingian world not as an archaic, primitive intrusion on the Mediterranean civilization of the Roman Empire but simply as a participant in the wider commonwealth that existed before and remained after the dissolution of the western imperial system; in so doing, it serves to refute the scholarly tendency to primitivize Merovingian governance, its underlying institutions, and the broader culture upon which these rested. The collection is divided into four parts. Part I considers the question of whether Merovingian kingship should be viewed as a species of archaic, 'sacral' kingship. Part II, on institutions, has chapters that deal with various offices (the grafio and centenarius), public institutions (especially immunity and public security), and the broader makeup of the Merovingian state system. Part III, on charters, procedure, and law, has chapters on the profile of the charter evidence as now presented in the new MGH edition of the Merovingian diplomas and one on particular procedures before the royal tribunal, mistakenly referred to in scholarship as 'fictitious' trials; a final chapter provides a reflection on, and basic guide to, the law in general of the successor kingdoms, with an eye to the evidence of Merovingian Gaul. Part IV, a slight change of pace, deals with historiography, both the modern variety (Reinhard Wenskus) and the Merovingian (Gregory of Tours). All chapters deal extensively with the historiography of their subjects. This book will appeal to students and scholars alike interested in Early Medieval European history, Merovingian history, Early Medieval law and society, Early Medieval historiography, and the influence of Merovingian law and governance on later centuries.

In The Curse on Self-Murder, the second volume of his three-part Suicide in the Middle Ages, Alexander Murray explores the origin of the condemnation of suicide, in a quest which leads along the most unexpected byways of medieval theology, law, mythology, and folklore.

Essays on medieval history inspired by, and engaging with, the work of Jacques Le Goff. The essays in this volume arise from the proceedings of a conference held in 1994 to celebrate the life and work of the eminent French medievalist Jacques Le Goff. Set within thematic sections -popular religion and heresy, the body, royalty andits mystique, intellectuals in medieval society, and others -many of the challenges raised by Le Goff are reassessed and reapproached. There is an explicit historiographical focus in a section on the reception and influence of Le Goff, with particular reference to the Annales school of history with which he is strongly identified; the volume also indicates the problems which animate current research in medieval studies, especially in certain areas of social and cultural history. MIRI RUBIN is Professor of History, Queen Mary, University of London. Contributors: ALEXANDER MURRAY, PETER BILLER, ANDRE VAUCHEZ, R.I. MOORE, OTTO GERHARD OEXLE,LESTER K. LITTLE, WALTER SIMONS, ADELINE RUCQUOI, ALAIN BOUREAU, JEAN DUBABIN, WILLIAM CHESTER JORDAN, PETER LINEHAN, MIRI RUBIN, GABOR KLANICZAY, AARON GUREVICH, ROBIN BRIGGS, STUART CLARK

Penance and confession were an integral part of medieval religious life; essays explore literary evidence. 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. JOHN BALDWIN's major study `From the Ordeal to Confession', delivered as a Quodlibet lecture, traces the appearance in French romances of the themes of a penitent's contrition, the priest's job in listening, and the application of the spiritual conseil and penitence. PETER BILLER is Professor of Medieval History at the University of York; A.J. MINNIS is Douglas Tracy Smith Professor of English, Yale University. Contributors: PETER BILLER, ROB MEENS, ALEXANDER MURRAY, JACQUELINE MURRAY, LESLEY SMITH, MICHAEL HAREN, JOHN BALDWIN

In this work, Christopher Dawson concludes that the period of the 4th to the 11th centuries, commonly known as the Dark Ages, was not a barren prelude to the creative energy of the mediaeval world. Instead, he argues that it is better described as ""ages of dawn"", for it was in this rich and confused period that the complex and creative interaction of the Roman Empire, the Christian Church, the classical tradition and barbarous societies provided the foundation for a vital, unified European culture. In an age of fragmentation and the emergence of new nationalist forces, Dawson argued that if ""our civilization is to survive, it is essential that it should develop a common European consciousness and sense of historic and organic unity"". But he was clear that this unity required sources deeper and more complex than the political and economic movements on which so many had come to depend, and he insisted, prophetically, that Europe would need to recover its Christian roots if it was to survive.

A group of men dig a tunnel under the threshold of a house. Then they go and fetch a heavy, sagging object from inside the house, pull it out through the tunnel, and put it on a cow-hide to be dragged off and thrown into the offal-pit. Why should the corpse of a suicide - for that is what it is - have earned this unusual treatment?
In The Curse on Self-Murder, Alexander Murray explores the origin of the condemnation of suicide, in a quest which leads along the most unexpected byways of medieval theology, law, mythology, and folklore -and, indeed, in some instances beyond them. At an epoch when there might be plenty of ostensible reasons for not wanting to live, the ways used to block the suicidal escape route give a unique perspective on medieval religion.

"Suicide" and "the Middle Ages" sounds like a contradiction. Was life not too short anyway, and the Church too disapproving, to admit suicide? And how is the historian supposed to find out?
In this first volume of his trilogy, Alexander Murray takes the methodological question first, as a key to the testing of all other assumptions. After answering it, he shows that there were indeed suicides, of types and configurations astonishingly modern, if not in numbers per capita. "The violent against themselves" included rich and poor, townsmen and peasants, men and women, married and unmarried, their motives all too familiar: physical and mental illness, chronic or sudden poverty, arrest, disgrace, heartbreak in love, even what modern doctors might call depression. Following the sources as close to the events as they will lead, the author calls on these fugitives to give an account of themselves. In doing so, they also shed new light on features of their world we thought we all understood.

Penance and confession were an integral part of medieval religious life; essays explore literary evidence. 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. JOHN BALDWIN's major study "From the Ordeal to Confession", delivered as a Quodlibet lecture, traces the appearance in French romances of the themes of a penitent's contrition, the priest's job in listening, and the application of the spiritual conseil and penitence. PETER BILLER is Professor of Medieval History at the University of York; A.J. MINNIS is Douglas Tracy Smith Professor of English, Yale University. Contributors: PETER BILLER, ROB MEENS, ALEXANDER MURRAY, JACQUELINE MURRAY, LESLEY SMITH, MICHAEL HAREN, JOHN BALDWIN