Barbara Newman

Some books​ can be judged by their covers, others by their titles. The American edition of Peter Jones’s Self-Help from the Middle Ages is subtitled ‘What the Seven Deadly Sins Can Teach Us about Living’. At some point, the British publisher changed it to the anodyne ‘A Journey into the Medieval Mind’. Did they think the seven deadly sins sounded too depressing...

Early​ modernists have long bragged, to the annoyance of medievalists, that their period invented such concepts as ‘the individual’ and ‘scientific rationality’. More recently, medievalists have laid claim to evils such as racism and xenophobia, less to vindicate their period than to place themselves where the academic action is. Entering the vigorous debate over the...

Histories​ of Italian literature begin with the Tre Corone or Three Crowns: Dante (1265-1321), Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-75) and Francesco Petrarca, or Petrarch (1304-74), Boccaccio’s intimate friend. All three exalted the Italian vernacular but, to the puzzlement of modern readers, entrusted their most important philosophical works to Latin. This bilingualism is a dominant theme in...

What makes​ a ruler a tyrant? Is it justifiable to depose or even kill one? Medieval political theorists devoted anguished thought to these questions. In the 12th century, John of Salisbury urged tyrannicide as a political duty. ‘Whoever does not prosecute’ a tyrant, he wrote in his Policraticus, ‘transgresses against himself and against the whole body’ of the...

When an innkeeper’s​ daughter accused the monk Marinos, a hardened ascetic, of fathering her child, his brethren were appalled. But Marinos, meekly confessing his sin, accepted the punishment of exile and even nursed the infant with milk supplied by shepherds. After several years, the monks readmitted him to the usual monastic routine, along with extra penitential labours. It was not...