The Secret in Medieval Literature by Albrecht Classen - 9781666917888

The Secret in Medieval LiteratureAlternative Worlds in the Middle Ages\nAuthor(s): Albrecht Classen\nFormat: Paperback\nPublisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, United States\nImprint: Lexington Books\nISBN-13: 9781666917888, 978-1666917888\nSynopsis\nThe Secret in Medieval Literature: Alternative Worlds in the Middle Ages explores the many strange phenomena, both in the Middle Ages and today, that do not find any good rational explanations. Those do not pertain to magic or to religion in the traditional sense of the word; they are secrets of an epistemological kind and tend to defy human rationality, without being marginal or irrelevant. At first sight, we might believe that we face elements from fairy tales, but the medieval cases discussed here go far beyond such a simplistic approach to the mysterious dimension of secrets. In fact, as this book argues, medieval poets commonly engaged with alternative forces and described their workings within the human context (both in the Latin Wes.