Sensus Spiritualis ─ Studies in Medieval Significs and the Philology of Culture

Of the major figures in medieval studies, there are few whose influence is greater and for whom admiration is more widespread than Friedrich Ohly (1914-96). This book represents the long-awaited English-language edition of Ohly's most important writings.

Drawn from the entire career of this great medievalist, who, more clearly and in greater detail than anyone before him, articulated the singularly allegorical mentality of the Middle Ages, the essays in this collection show the tendency of medieval thinkers and writers to see nature as a diaphanous screen held against God's sacred mysteries, simultaneously illuminating and obscuring. Ohly's work on the hermeneutics of word and image, meanwhile, traces the way his thinking opened philology to new possibilities through the dual interpretation of textual and visual media.

Including penetrating essays on poetic inspiration, the nature of beauty, sacred and profane exegesis, history as typology, and art as both object and text, this volume will be of enormous value to scholars of comparative literature, the history of art, and religion during the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

Friedrich Ohly was a professor of German philology and director of the Institute for Studies of the Early Middle Ages at the Westphalian Wilhelm's University of Munster in the Federal Republic of Germany.