Toleration and Tolerance in Medieval European Literature

Albrecht Classen is University Distinguished Professor of German Studies at the University of Arizona where he teaches and research medieval and early modern German and European literature and culture. In his by now ninety scholarly books he has examined many different aspects, most recently water (2017), the forest (2016), death (2016), multilingualism (2016), love, marriage, and sexuality (in several books over the last two decades), friendship, urban and rural space, crime and punishment, women’s voices, etc. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 1986. He has received major grants and awards for teaching, research, and service.

Table of Contents: History of Toleration and Tolerance:

I: Toleration and Tolerance: An Introduction

Historical, Religious, and Literary Reflections

II: History and Theory of Toleration and Tolerance:

Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Early Modern Ages:

Early Voices, Quiet and yet of Great Strength

III: Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Encounters with the Others

Emergence of Toleration and Tolerance in

the Early Thirteenth Century?

IV: A Brief Moment of Truce and Welcome:

Friendship Between the Muslim and the Christian

in Rudolf von Ems’s Der guote Gêrhart

V: Reaching out to the Other Side in Fourteenth-Century

Italian Literature: Literary Efforts to Establish Friendship

and Tolerant Relationships in Boccaccio’s Decameron

VI: The Foreign World and the Foreign Religion in Medieval Literature

Experiments in and Strategies with Toleration

A Pan-European Perspective on the ‘Good Heathen’

VII: Philosophical and Religious Outreaches to the Other Faiths

from the High to the Late Middle Ages: Peter Abelard,

Ramon Llull, and Nicholas of Cusa,

VIII: Tolerance in the Age of the Protestant Reformation

The Quest for Spiritual Truth Beyond the Church

Sebastian Franck and Valentin Weigel

IX: Epilogue

Bibliography

Index