The Medieval Imagination - Paperback

by Jacques Le Goff (Author), Arthur Goldhammer (Translator)

To write this history of the imagination, Le Goff has recreated the mental structures of medieval men and women by analyzing the images of man as microcosm and the Church as mystical body; the symbols of power such as flags and oriflammes; and the contradictory world of dreams, marvels, devils, and wild forests.

"Le Goff is one of the most distinguished of the French medieval historians of his generation . . . he has exercised immense influence."--Maurice Keen, New York Review of Books

"The whole book turns on a fascinating blend of the brutally materialistic and the generously imaginative."--Tom Shippey, London Review of Books

"The richness, imaginativeness and sheer learning of Le Goff's work . . . demand to be experienced."--M. T. Clanchy, Times Literary Supplement

Back Jacket

The collection begins with an essay on 'the marvelous.' Le Goff highlights subtle changes in medieval attitudes and sensibilities by contrasting the marvelous (representing a 'secularization' of the supernatural after the thirteenth century) with the miraculous (depending solely on God's saving grace) and the magical (governed by Satan's destructive activity).