Ideas in the Medieval West: Texts and Their Contexts

Without denying the real importance of the more ’traditional’ tasks of a historian of ideas or scholar of literature - the edition of a text and research into its sources and influence - Professor Flint’s objective has been to look sideways from the texts, so into the society to which their authors belonged. Her conviction is that no text, and so no idea to which it gave flight, can be properly understood unless it is placed firmly within its immediate historical context, including, of cour...