Exploration of how medieval people categorized the world, concentrating on the division between the natural and the supernatural.

This book shows how the Age of Reason actually began during the late Middle Ages.

"This study looks at a wide range of medieval Englisih romance texts, including the works of Chaucer and Malory, from a broad cultural perspective, to show that while they employ magic in order to create exotic, escapist worlds, they are also grounded in a sense of possibility, and reflect a complex web of inherited and current ideas." --Book Jacket.

In this fascinating study, Schmitt examines the significance of the widespread belief in ghosts during the Middle Ages and traces the imaginative, political, and religious contexts of these everyday haunts. Ghosts were pitiful or terrifying, usually solitary, creatures who arose from their tombs to haunt their friends and relatives. Including numerous color illustrations of ghosts and their trappings, this book presents a unique and intriguing look at medieval culture. 28 color plates.

The essays in this collection were first delivered as presentations at the Sixteenth Annual ACMRS Conference on 'Humanity and the Natural World in the Middle Ages and Renaissance' in February, 2010, at Arizona State University. They reflect the current state of the critical discussion regarding the 'history of the human'.

Supernatural phenomena and causalities played an important role in medieval society. Religious practice was relying upon a set of cult images and the sacral status of these depictions of divine or supernatural persons became the object of heated debates and provoked iconoclastic reactions.The miraculous intervention of saints or other divine agents, the wondrous realities beyond understanding, or the manifestations of magic attributed to diabolic forces, were contained by a variety of discourses, described and discussed in religion, philosophy, chronicles, literature and fiction, and also in a large number of pictures and material objects. The nine essays in this collection discusses how supernatural phenomena – especially angels and devils – found visual manifestation in Latin and Eastern Christianity as well as Judaism in the late medieval, early renaissance period.

In A Remembrance of His Wonders, David I. Shyovitz uncovers the sophisticated ways in which medieval Ashkenazic Jews engaged with the workings and meaning of the natural world, and traces the porous boundaries between medieval science and mysticism, nature and the supernatural, and ultimately, Christians and Jews.