Eriugena Unbound
Edited by Paul Edward Dutton
Paperback (No longer our product)
(July 2026)
ISBN: 9786157058125
Price: $77.00
Out of stock
Hardback (Forthcoming)
(July 2026)
ISBN: 9786157058118
Price: $98.00
On back order
Why Eriugena? The Carolingian Empire was full of intriguing characters—disgruntled clerics, dreamers, plotters, and prophets—but one of the most remarkable of those was surely the Irish émigré Eriugena (also known as Iohannes Scottus), who served under King Charles the Bald, grandson of Charlemagne. So unusual was he that we have hardly known what to make of him, his life-story, philosophy, theology, poetry, and philology. But we should. For he offered his quarrelsome contemporaries a different understanding of their troubled times: that behind the many disruptions of the ninth century—Viking raiders, overweening aristocrats, pious and pompous bishops, starving peasants, and proud but distant royals—there was a divine idea or set of them behind all such existences and their ineluctable Return to and into God. In his own time Eriugena was famous as an expert on the Greek language and an influential master of the liberal arts, but he was also a controversial and engaged figure. One of the most striking features of his continental career is that his handwriting has been identified and survives in a number of manuscripts, which allow us a close-up view of how he worked, when, and where. In Eriugena Unbound in a set of twelve essays, new and old, Paul Edward Dutton explores that manuscript evidence to bring us closer to the mind, personality, and historical importance of the enigmatic Irishman. As the Historian says in the dialogue with a Student that opens the work, he does not believe it possible to understand the Carolingians without Eriugena or Eriugena without the Carolingians.
List of Figures
Preface
I. Why Eriugena Matters: A Dialogue
II. Why did Eriugena Write?
III. Eriugena’s Workshop: The Making of the Periphyseon in Rheims 875
IV. Eriugena and Virgil
V. Eriugena, the Royal Poet
VI. Evidence that Dubthach’s Priscian Codex Once Belonged to Eriugena
VII. Eriugena in Priscianum, with Anneli Luhtala
VIII. Filiolitas: The Short History of One of Eriugena’s Inventions
IX. Minding Irish Ps and Qs: Signs of the First Systematic Reading of Eriugena’s Periphyseon
X. Carolingian Invisibles and Eriugena’s Lost Vision of God
XI. Raoul Glaber’s De diuina quaternitate: An Unnoticed Reading of Eriugena’s Translation of the Ambigua of Maximus the Confessor
XII. ‘I Open at the Close’: What is Eriugena’s Ad Wulfadum (PL 122: 1021C-1022D)?
Corrigenda
Indices
General
Manuscripts
- Edited by Paul Edward Dutton
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