To his contemporaries, Odo of Tournai--master of the cathedral school of Tournai, first abbot of the restored monastery of St. Martin of Tournai, and, later, Bishop of Cambrai--was one of the most illustrious teachers and philosophers in Christendom. Yet only one of his works, a treatise on the Mass, has heretofore been translated into English. Irven M. Resnick here provides the first English-language translation of two of Odo's other works.The first, "On Original Sin," is at once an exposition of Christian doctrine and a philosophical investigation into the origin of the soul, the character of the sin that all human beings inherit from Adam, and the relationship of the individual to the species. The second translated text, "A Disputation with the Jew, Leo, Concerning the Advent of Christ, the Son of God," continues the discussion, in dialogue form, of original sin and its effects.

As well as being an important medieval theologian, Albertus Magnus (Albert the Great) also made significant contributions to the study of astronomy, geography and natural philosophy, and his studies of the natural world led Pope Pius XII to declare Albertus the patron saint of the natural sciences. Dante Alighieri acknowledged a substantial debt to Albertus's work, and in the Divine Comedy placed him equal with his celebrated student and brother Dominican Thomas Aquinas. In this, the first full, scholarly biography in English for nearly a century, Irven M. Resnick and Kenneth F. Kitchell Jr narrate Albertus's key contributions to natural philosophy and the history of science, while also revealing the insights into medieval life and customs that his writings provide.

This volume concludes the series of Peter Damian's Letters in English translation. Among Letters 151-180 readers will find some of Damian's most passionate exhortations on behalf of eremitic ideals. These include Letter 152, in which Damian defends as consistent with the spirit and the letter of Benedict's Rule his practice of receiving into the eremitic life monks who had abandoned their cenobitic communities. In Letter 153 Damian encourages monks at Pomposa to pass beyond the minimum standards established in the Rule of St. Benedict for the higher and more demanding eremitic vocation. In Letter 165, addressed to a hermit, Albizo, and a monk, Peter, Damian reveals as well the importance of monastic life to the world: because the integrity of the monastic profession has weakened, the world has fallen even deeper into an abyss of sin and corruption and is rushing headlong to destruction. Let monks and hermits take refuge within the walls of the monastery, he urges, while outside the advent of Antichrist seems imminent. Only from within their walls can they project proper examples of piety and sanctity that may transform the world as a whole. Damian was equally concerned to address the moral condition of the larger Church. Letter 162 represents the last of Damian's four tracts condemning clerical marriage (Nicolaitism). Damian's condemnation of Nicolaitism also informed his rejection of Cadalus, the antipope Honorius II (see Letters 154 and 156), who was said to support clerical marriage, and therefore cast him into the center of a storm of ecclesiastical (and imperial) politics from which Damian never completely extricated himself.

For medieval Latin Christendom, authoritative texts such as the Bible and the writings of the Fathers of the Church provided a skeleton that gave form to Christian perceptions of Jews and Judaism. Eye-witness testimony, hearsay, reports of converts from Judaism, and the testimony of dreams, visions, and miraculous events helped fill in the body with concrete detail. In this newest work, renowned author and scholar Irven Resnick explores the additional support drawn from medieval science. Resnick presents a captivating study of long-held medieval scientific theories that predisposed Jews to certain types of offensive behavior or even to communicate certain illnesses and disease. By arguing for a Jewish ""nature"" dictated by specific physical characteristics, medieval scientific authorities contributed to growing fears of a Jewish threat. Through the use of several illustrations from illuminated manuscripts and other media, Resnick engages readers in a discussion of the later medieval notion of Jewish difference. Externally, these differences were evidenced by marks that physically distinguished Jews-and especially Jewish males-from their Christian neighbors, for example the mark of circumcision. Internally, their melancholy humoral complexion, further weakened by the Jews' dietary restrictions, was thought to dictate their temperament and sexual mores, and to incline them toward leprosy, bleeding hemorrhoids, and other infirmities. These differences were viewed by some as ineradicable, even following religious conversion; or, at best, erasable with only the greatest difficulty over several generations.

Peter the Venerable (d. 1156), the powerful abbot of Cluny, left behind not only extensive letter collections, but also polemical treatises intended to refute contemporary challenges to Christianity. Perhaps the most important is Against the Inveterate Obduracy of the Jews (Adversus Judeorum inveteratam duritiem), written between Against the Saracens (ca. 1150) and Against the Petrobrusians (ca. 1139-41). Against the Inveterate Obduracy of the Jews represents a turning point in medieval anti-Jewish polemics. On the one hand, the polemic's intention-to bring about the conversion of the Jews-is predicated on an assumption that Jews are rational agents who may be persuaded of Christian truths by philosophical argument, empirical evidence, and proper biblical exegesis. On the other hand, Peter also introduced the notion that the Jews' enduring ""blindness"" stems from a persistent strain of bestial irrationality, for which they themselves are responsible. Peter traces this irrationality to the medieval Jews' commitment to the Talmud. Peter is the first medieval Christian author to name the Talmud explicitly. The Jewish convert to Christianity, Petrus Alfonsi, had ridiculed Talmudic folklore in his Dialogue Against the Jews. Peter the Venerable borrowed from but also surpassed Alfonsi's critique, as even his use of the name Talmud indicates. By emphasizing the irrationality of the Jews, Peter cast doubt upon their essential humanity and paved the way toward an increasingly violent treatment of the Jewish minority in medieval Christendom. Perhaps for this reason, Peter's Against the Inveterate Obduracy of the Jews has been popular among modern anti-Semites as well. With this translation, Irven M. Resnick makes the complete work available for the first time in English.