Peter Godman is Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Latin at the University of Tübingen. He is the author of From Poliziano to Machiavelli: Florentine Humanism in the High Renaissance (Princeton) and Poets and Emperors: Frankish Politics and Carolingian Poetry. He is the editor of Alcuin: The Bishops, Kings, and Saints of York; Latin Poetry and the Classical Tradition: Essays in Medieval and Renaissance Literature; Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance; and Charlemagne's Heir. His The Saint as Censor: Robert Bellarmine between Inquisition and Index and Censorship and Heresy will be published in 2000. In the tension between competing ideas of authority and the urge to literary experiment, writers of the High Middle Ages produced some of their most distinctive achievements. This book examines these themes in the high culture of Western Europe during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, showing how the intimate links between the writer and the censor, the inquisitor and the intellectual developed from metaphors, at the beginning of the period, to institutions at its end. All Latin texts--from Peter Abelard to Bernard of Clairvaux, from the Archpoet to John of Salisbury and Alan of Lille--are translated into English, and discussed both in terms of their literary qualities and in relation to the cultural history of the High Middle Ages. Not a proto-Renaissance but part of a continuity that reached into the Reformation, the eleventh and twelfth centuries witnessed a transformation of the writer's role. With a combination of literary, philological, and historical methods, Peter Godman sets the work of major intellectuals during this period in a new light. "This is an ambitious book about an impressive range of authors in an important period in the development of Western thought. It is full of sharp observations crisply presented."-David Howlett, Medieval Latin Dictionary, Bodleian Library, Oxford

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