Explores the manifold manifestations of pleasure in medieval culture and the various rationales to its appearance and use.

Zachary B. Smith reads the Apophthegmata Patrum in the philosophical and political contexts of late antique Palestine. He explores how the compiler asserts monastic autonomy from ecclesiastics by incorporating classical and late antique philosophical categories, and by selectively presenting problematic interactions between monks and ecclesiastics.

Drawing on a wealth of new source material from the Low Countries, this book offers a new approach to the transition from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period by providing an alternative interpretation to the predominantly Italo-centric perspective of the current literature, and its concomitant focus on style and on Vitruvian theory.