Dante put Muhammad in one of the lowest circles of Hell. At the same time, the medieval Christian poet placed several Islamic philosophers much more honorably in Limbo. Furthermore, it has long been suggested that for much of the basic framework of the Divine Comedy Dante was indebted to apocryphal traditions about a "night journey" taken by Muhammad.
Dante scholars have increasingly returned to the question of Islam to explore the often surprising encounters among religious traditions that the Middle Ages afforded. This collection of essays works through what was known of the Qur'an and of Islamic philosophy and science in Dante's day and explores the bases for Dante's images of Muhammad and Ali. It further compels us to look at key instances of engagement among Muslims, Jews, and Christians.

Dante put Muhammad in one of the lowest circles of Hell. At the same time, the medieval Christian poet placed several Islamic philosophers much more honorably in Limbo. Furthermore, it has long been suggested that for much of the basic framework of the Divine Comedy Dante was indebted to apocryphal traditions about a "night journey" taken by Muhammad.
Dante scholars have increasingly returned to the question of Islam to explore the often surprising encounters among religious traditions that the Middle Ages afforded. This collection of essays works through what was known of the Qur'an and of Islamic philosophy and science in Dante's day and explores the bases for Dante's images of Muhammad and Ali. It further compels us to look at key instances of engagement among Muslims, Jews, and Christians.

Nota Bene explores a little-known juxtaposition of verbal text and musical notation in the Middle Ages. This particular intersection deserves attention from those interested in music, the reception of classical Latin literature, the history of education, and the development of punctuation. Between the late tenth century and the late twelfth century, the musical notation known as neumes was provided in dozens of manuscripts for, among other texts, a number of Horace's Odes as well as for sections of epics by Lucan, Statius, and Vergil. These materials constitute a paradoxical corpus of "classical poems in plainchant" that complicates our views of both how students learned Latin and what was being sung in an era most often associated with Gregorian chant. The book wrestles first with the literary-historical puzzle of why certain passages and not others were "neumed" and later with the ethnomusicological riddles of how, where, when, and by whom the passages were sung.

The first English translation of the earliest Latin poems about miracles performed by the Virgin Mary, composed in twelfth-century Canterbury by a Benedictine monk who inspired Chaucer. Nigel (ca. 1135–1198), a Benedictine monk at Christ Church in Canterbury, is best known for The Mirror of Fools—a popular satire whose hero Burnellus the Ass is referenced in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Nigel’s oeuvre also includes other important poems and hagiography. The Miracles of the Virgin is the oldest Latin poem about miracles performed by Mary. This collection features seventeen lively tales in which the Virgin rescues a disappointed administrator from a pact with the devil, has a Roman emperor killed by a long-dead martyr, saves a Jewish boy from being burned alive, and shields an abbess from the shame of pregnancy. Each story illustrates the boundlessness of Mary’s mercy. In the Tract on Abuses, a letter that resembles a religious pamphlet, Nigel rails against ecclesiastical corruption and worldly entanglements. Alongside authoritative editions of the Latin texts, this volume offers the first translations of both works into English.

In antiquity and the Middle Ages, memory was a craft, and certain actions and tools were thought to be necessary for its creation and recollection. Until now, however, many of the most important visual and textual sources on the topic have remained untranslated or otherwise difficult to consult. Mary Carruthers and Jan M. Ziolkowski bring together the texts and visual images from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries that are central to an understanding of memory and memory technique. These sources are now made available for a wider audience of students of medieval and early modern history and culture and readers with an interest in memory, mnemonics, and the synergy of text and image.The art of memory was most importantly associated in the Middle Ages with composition, and those who practiced the craft used it to make new prayers, sermons, pictures, and music. The mixing of visual and verbal media was commonplace throughout medieval cultures: pictures contained visual puns, words were often verbal paintings, and both were used equally as tools for making thoughts. The ability to create pictures in one's own mind was essential to medieval cognitive technique and imagination, and the intensely pictorial and affective qualities of medieval art and literature were generative, creative devices in themselves.

Dag Norberg's analysis and interpretation of medieval Latin versification, which was published in French in 1958 and remains the standard work on the subject, appears in English with a detailed, scholarly introduction by Jan Ziolkowski that reviews developments since its initial publication. Norberg examines various themes of medieval Latin metrics and proposes his own empirical solutions. His interpretation attempts to bring much-needed clarification to a controversial and misunderstood subject. In the first four chapters of the book, Norberg analyses the sometimes perplexing technical elements of medieval Latin metrics: prosody; accentuation; synaeresis; diaresis; prosthesis; elision; acrostics; assonance; rhyme; and alliteration. He then turns to some of the metrical devices of the poetry: acrostics and carmina figurata (shaped songs). Two chapters unravel the problems of quantitative and rhythmic verses. Two chapters are devoted to the fractious disputes among scholars over rhythmic verses, which are based on the stress accents of the words. Norberg evaluates the various theories and judiciously examines this area of Latin scholarship. The final two chapters discuss the relationship between music and poetry, considering such questions as, which was written first, the melody or the words? How can we tell? What is the origin of rhythmic poetry? Beginning with the earliest hymns of Augustine and Ambrose, he considers syllabic melodies and then the development of non-syllabic melodies. In the last chapter Norberg deals with the ""poetry in liturgical prose"" of the Christian religious service, a ""poetry"" borrowed from the Bible or based on biblical models.

This volume includes: Olga Levaniouk, "The Dreams of Barcin and Penelope"; Paul Hosle, "Bacchylides' Theseus and Vergil's Aristaeus"; Vayos Liapis, "Arion and the Dolphin: Apollo Delphinios and Maritime Networks in Herodotus"; Nino Luraghi, "The Peloponnesian Peace: Herodotus, Thucydides and the Ideology of the Peace of Nicias"; Andrea Capra, "The Staging and Meaning of Aristophanes' Assemblywomen"; Konstantine Panegyres, "Moses, Pharaoh, and the Waters of the Nile (Artapanus, FGrHist 726 F 3)"; Roy D. Kotansky, "Underworld and Celestial Eschatologies in the 'Orphic' Gold Leaves"; Vittorio Remo Danovi, "New Fragments of the Libri Etruscorum and Varro in Vergilian Scholia"; T. H. M. Gellar-Goad, "Tears and Personified Nature in Juvenal 15.131-140 and Lucretius 3.931-962"; Tristan Power, "Textual Emendations to Catullus 55.9-12"; Francesco Rotiroti , "From Beneficent God to Maddened Bull: The Shepherd of Men in the Works of Virgil"; John S. Eidinow, "The Critic and the Farmer: Horace, Maecenas, and Virgil in Horace Odes 1.1"; Shirley Werner, "The Rules of the Game: Imitation and Mimesis in Horace Epistles 1.19"; Francis Newton, "Ovid Metamorphoses 1: Jupiter's Plebeians, Augustus' Titles, and the Poet's Exile"; Simona Martorana, "Omission and Allusion: When Statius' Hypsipyle Reads Ovid's Heroides 6"; Michael Zellmann-Rohrer, "The Chronokratores in Greek Astrology, in Light of a New Papyrus Text"; Konstantine Panegyres, " (Heliodorus Aethiopica 9.17.1)"; and Andrew C. Johnston, "Aemilius and the Crown: Rome and the Hellenistic World of the Alexander Romance."