Emotions and choice from Boethius to Descartes

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Henry Kamen

"In this completely updated edition of Henry Kamen's classic survey of the Spanish Inquisition, the author incorporates the latest research in multiple languages to offer a new-and thought-provoking-view of this fascinating period. Kamen sets the notorious Christian tribunal into the broader context of Islamic and Jewish culture in the Mediterranean, reassesses its consequences for Jewish culture, measures its impact on Spain's intellectual life, and firmly rebuts a variety of myths and exaggerations that have distorted understandings of the Inquisition. He concludes with disturbing reflections on the impact of state security organizations in our own time"--

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Philip Hughes

This second volume concentrates on the West from the time of Constantine's conversion, when the the Church was beginning to make a world of its own, and it pursues the Church's history in this world of its making to the end of the thirteenth century, when the high point was reached and a new secular order was already appearing.

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Angelo Mazzocco

"One of the burning issues of late medieval and early Renaissance Italy was the question of the language. The single most important figure to treat this subject in the late Middle Ages was Dante Alighieri. The Dantean argument on language with its implicit acknowledgment of a classical bilingualism and its faith in the efficacy of the vernacular stimulated and defined the debate on language among the humanists of the fifteenth century."--BOOK JACKET. "This book aims at a novel and open-ended reading of Dante's literature on language and at a systematic reconstruction of the whole body of humanistic literature on linguistic phenomena. In so doing, it recaptures the theoretical assumptions - philological empiricism, political ideology, stylistic imperatives, literary aspirations - that shaped the thinking of Bruni, Biondo, Alberti, Guarino, Poggio, Filelfo, Valla, Landino and Lorenzo de' Medici. The work, therefore, goes beyond the strict, technical periphery of linguistic enquiry, and it becomes a study of intellectual history."--BOOK JACKET.

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Pierre J. Payer

The later Middle Ages saw the emergence of an integral theory of human sexuality, a systematic account of its origins, role, and significance in the divine plan. Instead of simply dismissing medieval views of sex as misogynist and guilt-ridden, Pierre Payer urges a re-examination of medieval writers' understanding of sexuality within the context of their cosmological perspective. He traces the developing consensus about what was thought to be the nature, purpose, and morality of sex as conceived by writers and theologians during this period. Concentrating on the positive dimension of medieval thought on sexuality, Payer first examines views on Paradise, the Fall, and original sin and its transmission. There follows an extended discussion of marriage as the sole outlet for legitimate sexual intercourse. He then turns to the broader question of the control of sexual impulses and desires through the virtue of temperance. The book concludes with a description of the virtue of virginity, which was seen to be the apex of temperance and the ideal of Christian living. Payer has assembled a vast number of textual sources from the late medieval period, presenting to the reader a variety of opinions, their development, and underlying presuppositions.