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The five senses of the body were imbued with moral significance in the high and late Middle Ages, and 13th- and 14th-century confession manuals afford ample evidence of this belief. Contained in these treatises were interrogatories that urged priests to examine penitents on their sins, using the five senses as the starting point for ways in which the laity might lapse.
Most of us become medievalists by accident. We fall under the spell of a charismatic teacher at school or university, or, having been introduced to the subject—sometimes as pressed men and women, by the dictates of our chosen university’s curriculum—we find that the study of the middle ages speaks to our inner psyche.
This is the first book in English to examine the reception, in both the west and the east of Germany between 1945 and 1955, of the returning POWs released from Soviet captivity. With commendable clarity, it seeks to understand this reception within the context of the political, social, and cultural discourses prevalent at the time.
Fearghal McGarry’s much anticipated biography of general Eoin O’Duffy is an impressive piece of research, and its illuminating detail traces O’Duffy’s rise from minor local government official to ruthless guerrilla fighter.
Back at the end of the 1980s, when I was a lowly teaching assistant at the Pennsylvania State University, I had the good fortune to work on an undergraduate course on the Vietnam War directed by the great Vietnam scholar William Duiker. Duiker’s course was very popular.
‘It happened once in Paris that a certain sorceress impeded a man who had left her so that he could not have intercourse with another woman whom he had married. So she made an incantation over a closed lock and threw the lock into a well, and the key into another well, and the man was made impotent.