The Cambridge Companion to Matthew Paris

James G Clark editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Publishing:30th Nov '25

£28.00

This title is due to be published on 30th November, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

This paperback is available in another edition too:

The Cambridge Companion to Matthew Paris cover

A new, interdisciplinary and cutting-edge account of Matthew Paris' life, writing, art and craftwork and their legacy in European culture.

The book offers students and general readers a new, interdisciplinary and cutting-edge account of Matthew Paris' life, writing, art and craftwork and their legacy in the Middle Ages and beyond; it provides established researchers with fresh perspectives from leading experts on Paris' place in the cultural history of medieval Europe.Matthew Paris is one of the most remarkable and renowned figures in the cultural history of medieval England. A career-monk at the influential Benedictine abbey of St Albans, Paris' creative work bears witness to the rich intellectual, artistic, social and political environment of the monasteries and their lasting impact on the wider world. His compelling accounts of recent history and the lives of legendary saints and churchmen are a distinctive and valuable guide to the emergence of the English kingdom and its place in European Christendom. His accomplished and vivid artwork brings into focus both the craft skill and visual sensibility stimulated by the medieval Church. This systematic survey, the first published for almost seventy years, brings together expert scholarship and offers fresh, interdisciplinary perspectives on Paris', his life's work as writer, artist, cartographer and maker of manuscript books, and its enduring legacy.

'A compelling collection of essays that brings together scholars to shed new light on the highly distinctive monk of St Albans: Matthew Paris, historian, chronicler, biographer, hagiographer, cartographer, scribe, and artist. There is an appealing freshness here, that enriches our understanding of the breadth and depth of Matthew's achievements, his abilities acutely to observe those with whom he came into contact, his understanding of his own environment and the world around him, and to convey the 'lived experience' of one of England's great Benedictine abbeys.' Janet Burton, Professor Emerita, University of Wales Trinity Saint David
'The Cambridge Companion to Matthew Paris is a wonderful compendium of studies summarizing the scholarship on an extraordinary monk, who was a hagiographer, chronicler, artist and commentator on the perils of the times in England and abroad. The editor has brought together a remarkable team of junior and senior scholars in assembling this collection, and his own contributions (as well as those of a number of others) are notable not merely for their erudition but for their engaging style.' William Chester Jordan, Princeton University

ISBN: 9781108461764

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

300 pages