Philippe de Mezieres and His Age ─ Piety and Politics in the Fourteenth Century

The 22 essays of this volume (six are in French) offer a new assessment of the remarkable 14th-century personality, a French noble who traveled widely, becoming chancellor of Cyprus for the Crusader king Peter I Lusignan. First offered at a symposium held in Nicosia, Cyprus in June, 2009, the papers develop the many phases of the life of Mezieres, with a focus on the larger context of his times. Among the topics are his correspondences with Petrarch, his activities in the peace movement and the military, and a comparative analysis of his mystical writings with those of Christine de Pizan and Jean Gerson. Several papers are devoted to Meziere's Le songe du vieil pelerin, including two devoted to aspects of chivalry and of the ideology of the Crusades. The volume concludes with an overview of the Great Schism. This is an outstanding resource, written by an international group of specialists, and elucidating multiple strands of thought, trade, literature, and politics across a wide geographic scope through the tumultuous 14th century. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Ph.D. (1980) in French Literature, Princeton, is Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Among her books are Reading Myth: Classical Mythology and its Interpretations in Medieval French Literature (1997) and Poets, Saints, and Visionaries of the Great Schism, 1378-1417 (2006).Kiril Petkov, Ph.D.(2002) in Medieval History, NYU, is Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. He is the author of Infidels, Turks, and Women: The South Slavs in the German Mind (1997); The Kiss of Peace: Ritual, Self, and Society in the High and Late Medieval West (2003), and The Voices of Medieval Bulgaria, Seventh-Fifteenth Century: The Records of a Bygone Culture (2008).