Henry Mayr-Harting Knihy

Integrating the brilliant biography of Bruno, Archbishop of Cologne (953-65) and brother of Emperor Otto I, by the otherwise obscure monk Ruotger, with the intellectual culture of Cologne Cathedral, this is a study of actual politics in conjunction with Ottonian ruler ethic. Our knowledge of Cologne intellectual activity in the period, apart from Ruotger, must be pieced together mainly from marginal annotations and glosses in surviving Cologne manuscripts, showing how and with what concerns some of the most important books of the Latin West were read in Bruno's and Ruotger's Cologne. These include Pope Gregory the Great's Letters , Prudentius's Psychomachia , Boethius's Arithmetic , and Martianus Capella's Marriage of Philology and Mercury . The writing in the margins of the manuscripts, besides enlarging our picture of thinking in Cologne in itself, can be drawn into comparison with the outlook of Ruotger.Exploring how distinctive Cologne was, compared with other centres, Henry Mayr-Harting brings out an unexpectedly strong thread of Platonism in the tenth-century intellect. The book includes a critical edition of probably the earliest surviving, and hitherto unpublished, set of glosses to Boethius's Arithmetic , with an extensive study of their content.

The period from 1066 to 1272, from the Norman Conquest to the death of Henry III, was one of enormous political change in England and of innovation in the Church as a whole. Religion, Politics and Society 1066-1272 charts the many ways in which a constantly changing religious culture impacted on a social and political system which was itself dominated by clerics, from the parish to the kingdom. Examining the various ways in which churchmen saw their relation to secular power, Henry Mayr-Harting introduces many of the great personalities of the time, such as Thomas Becket and Robert Grosseteste. At the same time he shows how religion itself changed over the course of two centuries, in response to changing social conditions – how rising population fuelled the economic activities of the monasteries, and how parish reform demanded a more educated clergy and by this increased the social prestige of the Church. Written by an acknowledged master in the field, this magisterial account will be an unmissable read for all students of Norman and Plantagenet England and of the history of the medieval Church as a political, social and spiritual force.

This book brings to light an aesthetic passage of European history which has never before received full-scale treatment in English. It explains the origins and momentum of a magnificent movement of German art, and demonstrates how religion and political ideology were intertwined in Ottonianculture from about 950 to 1050. Besides dealing with the great imperial books (including the Gospel Book of Otto III and the Pericopes Book of Henry II), as well as other splendid liturgical manuscripts, the author writes with penetrating insight about the great art-loving bishops such as Egbert ofTrier and Bernward of Hildesheim, whose aims and personalities are expressed in the books they commissioned. The most important art centers of the Ottonian Empire are also discussed in detail.