Medieval assumptions about the nature of the representation involved in literary and historical narratives were widely different from our own. Writers and readers worked with a complex understanding of the relations between truth and convention, in which accounts of presumed fact could be expanded, embellished, or translated in a variety of accepted ways.

Writing circa 731 CE, Bede professes in the introduction to his Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum that he will write his account of the past of the English following only vera lex historiae. Whether explicitly or (most often) implicitly, historians narrate the past according to a conception of what constitutes historical truth that emerges in the use of narrative strategies, of certain formulae or textual forms, in establishing one's own ideological authority or that of one's informants, in faithfulness to a cultural, narrative, or poetic tradition. If we extend the scope of what we understand by history (especially in a pre-modern setting) to include not just the writings of historians legitimated by their belonging to the Latinate matrix of christianized classical history writing, but also collective narratives, practices, rituals, oral poetry, liturgy, artistic representations, and acts of identity - all re-enacting the past as, or as representation of, the present, we find a plethora of modes of constructions of historical truth, narrative authority, and reliability. Vera Lex Historiae? will be constituted by contributions that reveal the variety of evental strategies by which historical truth was constructed in late antiquity and the earlier Middle Ages, and the range of procedures by which such narratives were established first as being historical and then as "true" histories. This is not only a matter of narrative strategies, but also habitus, ways of living and acting in the world that feed on and back into the commemoration and re-enactment of the past by communities and by individuals. In doing this, we hope to recover something of the plurality of modes of preserving and reenacting the past available in late antiquity and the earlier middle ages which we pass by because of preconceived notions of what constitutes history writing.

First published in 1996. Intertextuality the phenomenon is as old as literature itself. And to medievalists in particular, it was a critical commonplace long before the term was coined: we have routinely recognized that, during the Middle Ages, texts consistently borrowed from one another and from the traditions they all shared. Those borrowings can take the form of thematic echoes, of the appropriation of characters and situations, and even of direct citation. This volume is a collection of essays discussing the intertextual dimensions of Arthurian literature.

In Secrets: Humanism, Mysticism, and Evangelism in Erasmus of Rotterdam, Bishop Guillaume Briçonnet, and Marguerite de Navarre, Jacob Vance argues that Erasmus and French Evangelical humanists made secrecy central to their literary thought. They revived Scriptural, medieval, and early Renaissance notions of secrecy in their spiritual and profane literature to advance the reforms in church and society that they advocated. Erasmus, Briçonnet, and Marguerite expanded on Origenian, Augustinian, and pseudo-Dionysian concepts of divine mystery, as being secret, throughout their works. By developing the idea that the divine remains both transcendent and immanent in the world of creation, these humanists explored, through literature, how the human spirit can either accede, or fail to accede, to the secrets of Christian wisdom.

"Exploring the figure of the heretic in Catholic writings of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as well as the heretic's characterological counterpart in troubadour lyrics, Arthurian romance, and comic tales, Truth and the Heretic seeks to understand why French and Occitan literature of the period celebrated the very characters who were so persecuted in society at large. Karen Sullivan proposes that such literature allowed medieval culture a means by which to express truths about heretics and the epistemological anxieties they aroused." "The first book-length study of the figure of the heretic in medieval French and Occitan literature, Truth and the Heretic will fascinate historians of ideas and literature as well as scholars of religion, critical theory, and philosophy."--

A Stanford University Press classic.