Literature, Science & Religion

Writing and translation were two fundamental means that determined not only the transmission of knowledge, but also its own conceptual representation in medieval and early modern Europe. As a whole, knowledge was conceived as a precious legacy that brought together highly diverse traditions, such as the Greco-Latin antiquity or the thought of the three great monotheistic religions. Inspired by their predecessors, medieval writers developed a chain of cultural transmission which dated back to antiquity, but, at the same time, those writers became a decisive model and a source of inspiration during the early modern period. In fact, the influence of their mastery can still be traced today. All these currents can be seen reflected in the 25 chapters included in this volume, whose title revolves around three major thematic axes: literature, science and religion. Thus, philology and literary criticism can maintain an open interdisciplinary dialogue with other fields such as art, philosophy, religion, medicine or technology, thereby portraying a complex set of relations between linguistic and geographic traditions. In that sense, the 25 works included in this volume focus either on texts from the linguistic domain of Romance languages or the Anglo-Saxon family, not forgetting the role of other languages such as Latin, Greek, Hebrew or Arabic in Europe during this period of time.