Bøker av Peter Brown

From the rise of Christian monasticism in Egypt and Syria to present day, Christians have argued fiercely about whether monks should work to support themselves. Peter Brown shifts attention from Western to Eastern Christianity, introducing us to this smoldering debate that took place across the entire Middle East from the Euphrates to the Nile.

Monsters - and teachers - are not always what they seem!

The main aim of this text is to advance a method devised through experience of teaching Chaucer's poetry over many years. The method is explained in the introduction, and its underlying objective is a shared experience of reading, and of trying to understand the "Canterbury Tales".

The author links Chaucer¿s writings with the medieval optical tradition in its various forms (scholastic texts, encyclopedias, exempla, vernacular poetry) both in general cultural terms and through the discussion of specific examples. He shows how the science of optics, or perspectiva, provides an account of spatial perception, including visual error, and demonstrates how these aspects of optical theory impact on Chaucer¿s poetry. He provides detailed and sustained analysis of the spatial content of narratives across the range of Chaucer¿s works, relating them to optical ideas and making use of Lefebvre¿s theory of the production of space. The texts discussed include the Book of the Duchess, House of Fame, Knight¿s Tale, Miller¿s Tale, Reeve¿s Tale, Merchant¿s Tale, Squire¿s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde.

Challenges the long-held "two-tier" idea of religion that separated the religious practices of the sophisticated elites from those of the superstitious masses, instead arguing that the cult of the saints crossed boundaries and played a dynamic part in both the Christian faith and the larger world of late antiquity.

This volume contains ten essays, principally on Chaucer, but also on other English writers of the period such as John Gower, Ranulph Higden and Thomas Hoccleve. The Chaucerian focus includes the dream visions and Troilus and Criseyde as well as the Canterbury Tales. Reading Chaucer is divided into three sections, on Borderlands, Interiors and After-Images. The essays are representative of methods and approaches to Chaucer that are central to current scholarship: textual criticism, interdisciplinarity, manuscript study, cultural context, iconography, close reading and historicism. The book provides a coherent and authoritative introduction to some of the key frameworks - literary, political, social, scientific, aesthetic and religious - within which Chaucer's works are now read, while covering the full range of his writings and the defining genres of his creative moment, including the chronicle, romance, fabliau and petition.

Explores the slow shift from one form of public community to another - from the ancient city to the Christian Church. He explains how in the four centuries between Marcus Aurelius (161-180) and Justinian (527-565), the Mediterranean world passed through a series of profound transmutations.

Jesus taught his followers that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. Yet by the fall of Rome, the church was becoming rich beyond measure. Through the Eye of a Needle is a sweeping intellectual and social history of the vexing problem of wealth in Christianity in the waning days of the Roman Empire, written by the world's foremost scholar of late antiquity. Peter Brown examines the rise of the church through the lens of money and the challenges it posed to an institution that espoused the virtue of poverty and called avarice the root of all evil. Drawing on the writings of major Christian thinkers such as Augustine, Ambrose, and Jerome, Brown examines the controversies and changing attitudes toward money caused by the influx of new wealth into church coffers, and describes the spectacular acts of divestment by rich donors and their growing influence in an empire beset with crisis. He shows how the use of wealth for the care of the poor competed with older forms of philanthropy deeply rooted in the Roman world, and sheds light on the ordinary people who gave away their money in hopes of treasure in heaven. Through the Eye of a Needle challenges the widely held notion that Christianity's growing wealth sapped Rome of its ability to resist the barbarian invasions, and offers a fresh perspective on the social history of the church in late antiquity.

With the blend of art and learning that is the hallmark of his work, Peter Brown here examines how the sacred impinged upon the profane during the first Christian millennium.

Peter Brown presents a masterly history of Roman society in the second, third, and fourth centuries. Brown interprets the changes in social patterns and religious thought, breaking away from conventional modern images of the period.

Herpes Simplex Virus Protocols comprises a wide range of experimental protocols that should be especially useful to new workers in herpes virology. Obviously the range of topics covered cannot be comprehensive, but we have tried to provide protocols dealing with those procedures that are most widely used;

* Definitive, compelling, wildly entertaining account of Hollywood legend Howard Hughes - reissued to tie-in with release of Scorsese biopic THE AVIATOR starring Leonardo DiCaprio