The act of drawing a line or uttering a word is often seen as integral to the process of making art. This is especially obvious in music and the visual arts, but applies to literature, performance, and other arts as well. These collected essays, written by scholars from diverse fields, take a historical view of the richness of creation out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo) in order to draw out debates, sometimes implicit and sometimes formally stated, about the production and reproduction of cultural meaning in a period of great change and novelty, between the beginnings of the medieval intellectual tradition and the imprint of the Enlightenment. The authors pose the following questions: Do tradition and creativity conflict with one another, or are they complementary? What are the tensions between composition and live performance? What is the role of the audience in perceiving the object of art? Are such objects fixed or flexible? What about the status of the event? Is the event part of creation, in the sense that it disturbs the still waters of historical continuity? These and other questions build on the foundation of Roland Barthes' concept of Degree Zero, offering new insights into what it means to create.

This Companion to Twelfth-Century Schools provides a comprehensive update and new synthesis of the last three decades of research. The fruit of a contemporary renewal of cultural history among international scholars of medieval studies, this collection draws on the discovery of new texts, the progress made in critical attribution, the growing attention given to the conditions surrounding the oral and written dissemination of works, the use of the notion of a "community of learning", the reinterpretation of the relations between the cloister and the urban school, and links between institutional history and social history. Contributors are: Alexander Andree, Irene Caiazzo, Cedric Giraud, Frederic Goubier, Danielle Jacquart, Thierry Kouame, Constant J. Mews, Ken Pennington, Dominique Poirel, Irene Rosier-Catach, Sita Steckel, Jacques Verger, and Olga Weijers. See inside the book.

The history of medieval learning has traditionally been studied as a vertical transmission of knowledge from a master to one or several disciples. Horizontal Learning in the High Middle Ages: Peer-to-Peer Knowledge Transfer in Religious Communities centres on the ways in which cohabiting peers learned and taught one another in a dialectical process - how they acquired knowledge and skills, but also how they developed concepts, beliefs, and adapted their behaviour to suit the group: everything that could mold a person into an efficient member of the community. This process of 'horizontal learning' emerges as an important aspect of the medieval learning experience. Progressing beyond the view that high medieval religious communities were closed, homogeneous, and fairly stable social groups, the essays in this volume understand communities as the product of a continuous process of education and integration of new members. The authors explore how group members learned from one another, and what this teaches us about learning within the context of a high medieval community.