Böcker av Alastair Minnis

'Phantom limb pain' designates the sensations which seem to emanate from limbs that in reality are missing. The phrase was coined by the American Civil War surgeon, Weir Mitchell, in reference to his fictional amputee, George Dedlow. Contemporary neuroscience holds that the brain encloses a schema which covers the whole body, and asserts its unity even if certain parts are missing. Reading backwards from Dedlow's sufferings, Alastair Minnis traces the medieval precedents and parallels, focusing on Augustine and Dante, who subscribed to the notion of a 'body in the soul'. Dante's souls in purgatory self-prosthesize with aerial phantoms as they long for the full embodiment which only the resurrection can bring. Is a complete body necessary for personhood? And how can the gamut of human feelings be run if parts or the entirety of one's body does not exist? Combining medieval studies and contemporary neuroscience, this absorbing study explores the fascinating and surprising history of phantom pain.

In From Eden to Eternity, Alastair Minnis argues that Eden afforded an extraordinary amount of creative space to late medieval theologians, painters, and poets as they tried to understand the place that God had deemed worthy of the creature made in His image.

Alastair Minnis reveals Chaucer's Pardoner and Wife of Bath as interconnected aspects of a radical literary experiment, wherein the relationship between objective authority and subjective fallibility is confronted as never before.

Available again with a new preface, this classic work of medieval literary scholarship argues that discussion of late-medieval literary works has tended to derive its critical vocabulary from modern, not medieval, theory, and offers instead a conceptual equipment which is at once historically valid and theoretically illuminating.