Cicero, it would seem, has refused to die, despite a tragic and ignominious assassination in 43 B.C., and the fact that today Latin is decreasing as a language that is commonly taught. This book offers a thorough study of why Cicero and his works have continued, through the centuries, to have an enormous influence, for example, on education, literature, legal training-an influence that brings the past into the present.

The topic of mobs has resonances in a remarkable number of disciplines and provides a link between past and present mobs are clearly of much importance today. The idea of mobs provides the context for all the essays and topics in this volume from Heraclitus to the writings of Elias Canetti to the notion of internet mobs. The essays here speak to the complex nature of the mob: its defining characteristics and the varying consequences of its behavior. Mobs as a book brings wide-ranging clarity to a topic that touches such disciplines as medieval studies, literature, musicology, theology and philosophy, history, social theory, the development of the early university, and theatre. Contributors are (in order within the volume): Leonard M. Koff, Ben Schomakers, Bernard S. Bachrach, Nancy van Deusen, Paul W. Knoll, Charlotte Bauer, Andrew Galloway, Robert W. Hanning, Terence Tunberg, Peter Howard, Cornelia Oefelein, Teofilo Ruiz, Richard Taruskin, David B. Rosen, Aino Paasonen and Richard Sogliuzzo.

At the climax of one of his most important and comprehensive works, "De cessatione legalium, the thirteenth-century theologian and natural philosopher, Robert Grosseteste, uses a musical example to make a point fundamental to the treatise. Music, using time as its material, located between the abstract and the concrete, served as an analogy, thus making a difficult philosophical concept perceptible. In using music as an analogy, Gorsseteste drew upon a long tradition established by Augustine, confirmed within the new Aristotelian reception, and a newly-translated Platonic dialogue. But the first rector of the University of Oxford was also demonstrating music's place within the curriculum of the early university, namely, as a "ministry discipline, efficiently and efficaciously exemplifying traditional Augustinian, as well as new Aristotelian principles.
This book unites the most important theological-philosophical subjects discussed by Robert Grosseteste throughout his prodigious output, with those exemplified by an anonymous contemporary English writer on music. The work shows how music collaborated with the other liberal arts, operating within the early university curriculum as a ministry discipline. Music made accessible through the "figurae of its notation, and through sound, otherwise nearly unapproachable, new Aristotelian concepts. The influence was reciprocal in that new Aristotelian tools and conceptualization greatly influenced music notation and style. Music theory has been studied in isolation, as pertaining only to music. This study is the first to relate music of the early thirteenth century to its intellectual context, overturning dogma, uncritically accepted since thebeginning of this century, concerning so-called "modal rhythm," and showing how "contrary motion," rather than forming a musical convention, demonstrated a key Aristotelian concept.

The essays in this volume explore the nature of time, our God-given medium of ascent, known, as Augustine puts it, through the ordered study of the "liberal disciplines that carry the mind to the divine (disciplinae liberales intellectum efferunt ad divina)": grammar and dialectic, for example, to promote thinking; geometry and astronomy to grasp the dimensions of our reality; music, an invisible substance like time itself, as an exemplary bridge to the unseen substance of thoughts, ideas, and the nature of God (theology). This ascending course of study rests on procedure, progress, and attainment - on before, following, and afterwards - whose goal is an ascending erudition that lets us finally contemplate, as Augustine says in De ordine, our invisible medium - time - within time itself: time is immaterial, but experienced as substantial. The essays here look at projects that chronicle time "from the beginning," that clarify ideas of creation "in time" and "simultaneous times," and the interrelationships between measured time and eternity, including "no-time." Essays also examine time as revealed in social and political contexts, as told by clocks, as notated in music and embodied in memorializing stone. In the final essays of this volume, time is understood as the subject and medium of consciousness. As Adrian Bardon says, "time is not so much a 'what' as a 'how'": a solution to "organizing experience and modeling events." Contributors are (in order within the volume) Jesse W. Torgerson, Ken A. Grant, Danielle B. Joyner, Nancy van Deusen, Peter Casarella, Aaron Canty, Jordan Kirk, Vera von der Osten-Sacken, Gerhard Jaritz, Jason Aleksander, Sara E. Melzer, Mark Howard, Andrew Eschelbacher, Hans J. Rindisbacher, James F. Knapp, Peggy A. Knapp, Raymond Knapp, Michael Cole, Ike Kamphof and Leonard Michael Koff.