The Medieval Imagination - Paperback

by Jacques Le Goff (Author), Arthur Goldhammer (Translator)

To write this history of the imagination, Le Goff has recreated the mental structures of medieval men and women by analyzing the images of man as microcosm and the Church as mystical body; the symbols of power such as flags and oriflammes; and the contradictory world of dreams, marvels, devils, and wild forests.

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The collection begins with an essay on 'the marvelous.' Le Goff highlights subtle changes in medieval attitudes and sensibilities by contrasting the marvelous (representing a 'secularization' of the supernatural after the thirteenth century) with the miraculous (depending solely on God's saving grace) and the magical (governed by Satan's destructive activity).