Church and Cosmos in Early Ottonian Germany

Description:

"Church and Cosmos in Early Ottonian Germany seeks to integrate the biography of Bruno, Archbishop of Cologne and Duke of Lotharingia (953-65), brother of Emperor Otto I and a central political figure of his time, written by the otherwise shadowy monk Ruotger, with the intellectual culture on mid-tenth-century Cologne. It is a study of actual politics and of Ottonian ruler ethic. Our knowledge of intellectual activity in Cologne in this period is based, apart from Ruotger, mainly on marginal annotations and glosses in surviving Cologne cathedral manuscripts. These show how and with what concerns some of the most important books of the Latin West were read in Bruno's and Ruotger's Cologne, such as the Letters of Pope Gregory the Great, Prudentius's Psychomachia, Boethius's Arithmetic, and Martianus Capella on The Marriage of Philology and Mercury. When the writing in the margins is compared with the outlook of Ruotger, these margins begin to seem drawn into the centre of Cologne thinking." "Henry Mayr-Harting shows up the strand of Platonism in tenth-century intellectual history, a history still too little known. He asks how distinctive Cologne was, compared with other intellectual centres. The book also contains a critical edition of probably the earliest surviving set of glosses, hitherto unpublished, to Boethius's Arithmetic, with an extensive study of their contents."--Jacket.

subjects: History,  Politics and government,  Intellectual life,  Germany, history, to 1517,  Germany, church history,  Germany, intellectual life

People: Bruno Saint, Archbishop of Cologne (925?-965)

Places: Cologne (Ecclesiastical principality),  Germany,  Holy Roman Empire,  Cologne (Electorate)

Times: Otto I, 936-973