Showing results by author "Mary Nicholas" in All Categories

Whose Middle Ages? is an interdisciplinary collection of short, accessible essays intended for the nonspecialist listener and ideal for teaching at an undergraduate level. Each of 22 essays takes up an area where digging for meaning in the medieval past has brought something distorted back into the present: in our popular entertainment; in our news, our politics, and our propaganda; and in subtler ways that inform how we think about our histories, our countries, and ourselves. Each author looks to a history that has refused to remain past and uses the tools of the academy to read and re-read familiar stories, objects, symbols, and myths.

“Step by step, I retreated from God and went forth to meet the world, the flesh, and the devil.... I’d join the devil himself.... There is no doubt that I traveled with him at my side and that he extorted a great price for his company.” This is how Bella Dodd (1904–69) described her long battle with atheistic communism, an ideology her Church calls a “satanic scourge.” She later described it as a “school of darkness,” a school of “hate,” a school for which she was a master organizer and infiltrator of every organization—public, private, and even ecclesiastical.