Essays investigating the question of time, and how it was perceived, both in philosophical/religious terms, and in reality. How was time experienced in the Middle Ages? What attitudes informed people's awareness of its passing - especially when tensions between eternity and human time shaped perceptions in profound and often unexpected ways? Is it a human universal or culturally specific - or both? The essays here offer a range of perspectives on and approaches to personal, artistic, literary, ecclesiastical and visionary responses to time during this period. They cover a wide and diverse variety of material, from historical prose to lyrical verse, and from liturgical and visionary writing to textiles and images, both real and imagined, across the literary and devotional cultures of England, Italy, Germany and Russia. From anxieties about misspent time to moments of pure joy in the here and now, from concerns about worldly affairs to experiences of being freed from the trappings of time, the volume demonstrates how medieval cultures and societies engaged with and reflected on their own temporalities.

The volume assesses performative structures within a variety of medieval forms of textuality, from vernacular literature to records of parliamentary proceedings, from prayer books to musical composition. Three issues are central to the volume: the role of ritual speech acts; the way in which authorship can be seen as created within medieval texts rather than as a given category; finally, phenomena of voice, created and situated between citation and repetition, especially in forms which appropriate and transform literary tradition. The volume encompasses articles by historians and musicologists as well as literary scholars. It spans European literature from the West (French, German, Italian) to the East (Church Slavonic), vernacular and Latin; it contrasts modes of liturgical meditation in the Western and Eastern Church with secular plays and songs, and it brings together studies on the character of 'voice' in major medieval authors such as Dante with examples of Dante-reception in the early twentieth century.

If terms are associated with particular historical periods, then 'polemic' is firmly rooted within early modern print culture, the apparently inevitable result of religious controversy and the rise of print media. Taking a broad European approach, this collection brings together specialists on medieval as well as early modern culture in order to challenge stubborn assumptions that medieval culture was homogenous and characterized by consensus; and that literary discourse is by nature 'eirenic'. Instead, the volume shows more clearly the continuities and discontinuities, especially how medieval discourse on the sins of the tongue continued into early modern discussion; how popular and influential medieval genres such as sermons and hagiography dealt with potentially heterodox positions; and the role of literary, especially fictional, debate in developing modes of articulating discord, as well as demonstrating polemic in action in political and ecclesiastical debate. Within this historical context, the position of early modern debates as part of a more general culture of articulating discord becomes more clearly visible. The structure of the volume moves from an internal textual focus, where the nature of polemic can be debated, through a middle section where these concerns are also played out in social practice, to a more historical group investigating applied polemic. In this way a more nuanced view is provided of the meaning, role, and effect of 'polemic' both broadly across time and space, and more narrowly within specific circumstances.

This volume is the fruit of a symposium held in Roscrea (Ireland) in 1994 and concentrates on literature in praise of the Virgin Mary, chronicles, manuscripts, illustration and editing procedures. Also dealt with are Yiddish Bible translations, religious plays and various literary forms of veneration of the saints. The authors referred to range from famous names such as Mechthild von Magdeburg, Der Stricker and Priester Wernher to less familiar figures like Wilhelm MA1/4nchner (cleric in Engelmairszell near Pfaffenhausen on the Ilm). The collection also includes an edition of the text "Von der seligen Schererin" (early 15th century), which relates the visions and aural visitations experienced by a married woman in her normal family surroundings.

The focus on inner space unites two topical areas of cultural anthropology: space as a structural paradigm, and the focal differentiation between the categories of a oeinnera and a oeoutera . The literature of medieval Germany, in staging such interior space in a variety of ways, poses questions about difference, liminality, and transgression, and thus allows abstract concepts and processes to be articulated: in a culture otherwise dominated by that which is present and visible, inner space conveys notions of psychological, cosmological or textual order.

This book investigates how German-language texts from the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era helped to form collective and individual identities through their handling of social norms. Using case studies, the contributors analyze the shaping of norms for different text types, social groups, and genders. They also define the scope allowed by the literature for discussing, establishing, and questioning expectations regarding social action.