Download or read book Francis of Assisi written by Chiara Frugoni and published by SCM Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography which brings out his quality of holiness against the background of his weaknesses, the defects of his character and his deep-rooted superstition.

Download or read book A Companion to Clare of Assisi written by Joan Mueller and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Clare of Assisi: Life, Writings and Spirituality examines Clare not merely as an obedient footnote to the friars, but as a Franciscan founder in her own right who kept primitive Franciscan ideals alive into the middle of the thirteenth century and transposed them into a woman s key. Bringing together the best of international research, the text examines Clare s importance within the early Franciscan milieu and her contribution to the thirteenth-century women's movement. It studies the radicalism of Clare's Franciscan choice, her life within the Monastery of San Damiano, her politicking with Agnes of Prague for the privilege of poverty," and her uniqueness among other women in Gregory IX's Damianite ordo. Following this historical study are critical translations and literary analyses of Clare's four letters to Agnes of Prague as well as a new translation and commentary on Clare s Forma Vitae."

Download or read book Creating Clare of Assisi written by Lezlie S. Knox and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2008 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing upon the writings of medieval women, this book distinguishes the historical figure of Clare of Assisi from the uses made of her spiritual legacy in debates over the role of women in the Franciscan Order in later medieval Italy.

Download or read book The Cult of St Clare of Assisi in Early Modern Italy written by NiritBen-Aryeh Debby and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Notwithstanding the wealth of material published about St Clare of Assisi (1193-1253) in the context of medieval scholarship, and the wealth of visual material regarding her, there is a dearth of published scholarship concerning her cult in the early modern period. This work examines the representations of St Clare in the Italian visual tradition from the thirteenth century on, but especially between the fifteenth and the mid-seventeenth centuries, in the context of mendicant activity. Through an examination of such diverse visual images as prints, drawings, panels, sculptures, minor arts, and frescoes in relation to sermons of Franciscan preachers, starting in the thirteenth century but focusing primarily on the later tradition of early modernity, the book highlights the cult of women saints and its role in the reform movements of the Osservanza and the Catholic Reformation and in the face of Muslim-Christian encounter of the early modern era. Debby?s analyses of the preaching of the times and iconographic examination of neglected artistic sources makes the book a significant contribution to research in art history, sermon studies, gender studies, and theology.

Download or read book The Privilege of Poverty written by Joan Mueller and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early in the thirteenth century a young woman named Clare was so moved by the teachings of Francis of Assisi that she renounced her possessions, vowing to live a life of radical poverty. Today Clare is remembered for her relationship with Francis, but her own dedication to poverty and her struggle to gain papal approval for a Franciscan Rule for women is a fascinating story that has not received the attention it deserves. In The Privilege of Poverty, Joan Mueller tells this story, and in so doing she reshapes our understanding of early Franciscan history. Clare knew, as did Francis, that she needed a Rule to preserve the &“privilege of poverty&”&—a papal exemption that gave monasteries of women permission not to rely on endowment income. Early Franciscan women gave their dowries to the poor and were as passionately holy and shrewdly political in this choice as were their male counterparts. Mueller shows the crucial role played in this by Agnes of Prague, one of Clare&’s closest collaborators. A Bohemian princess who declined an engagement to Emperor Frederick II in order to found a monastery of Poor Ladies in Prague, Agnes capitalized on the papal need for a political alliance with the kingdom of Bohemia to negotiate the privilege of poverty for her monastery and set up a hospital for the poor in Prague. The efforts of Clare and Agnes ultimately paid off, as Pope Innocent IV approved a Franciscan Rule for women with the privilege of poverty at its core on Clare&’s deathbed in 1253. Only two years later, Clare was canonized, and the Poor Clares&—as they came to be known&—continue today as contemplative and active communities devoted to the same ideals that inspired Francis and Clare. The Privilege of Poverty not only contributes new insight into Franciscan history but also redefines it. No longer can we view early Franciscanism as primarily a male story. Franciscan women were courted by their brothers and by the papacy for their essential contributions to the early Franciscan movement.

Download or read book Saint Clare of Assisi written by Chiara Augusta Lainati and published by Porziuncola. This book was released on 1994 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Women s Studies of the Christian and Islamic Traditions written by Kari Elisabeth Børresen and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this collection of articles, Kari Elisabeth Børresen and Kari Vogt point out the convergence of androcentric gender models in the Christian and Islamic traditions. They provide extensive surveys of recent research in women's studies, with bio-socio-cultural genderedness as their main analytical category. Matristic writers from late Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance are analysed in terms of a female God language, reshaping traditional theology. The persisting androcentrism of 20th-century Christianity and Islam, as displayed in institutional documents promoting women's specific functions, is critically exposed. This volume presents a pioneering investigation of correlated Christian and Islamic gender models which has hitherto remained uncompared by women's studies in religion. This work will serve scholars and students in the humanistic disciplines of theology, religious studies, Islamic studies, history of ideas, Medieval philosophy and women's history.

Download or read book Clare of Assisi and the Thirteenth Century Church written by Catherine M. Mooney and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2016-08-10 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a work based on a meticulous analysis of sources, many of them previously unexplored, Catherine M. Mooney upends the received account of Clare of Assisi's founding of the Order of San Damiano, or Poor Clares. Mooney offers instead a stark counternarrative: Clare, her sisters of San Damiano, and their allies struggled against a papal program bent on regimenting, enriching, and enclosing religious women in the thirteenth century, a program that proved largely successful. Mooney demonstrates that Clare (1194-1253) established a single community that was soon cajoled, perhaps even coerced, into joining an order previously founded by the papacy. Artfully renaming it after Clare's San Damiano with Clare as its putative mother, Pope Gregory IX enhanced his order's cachet by associating it also with Clare's famous friend, Francis of Assisi. Mooney traces how Clare and her allies in other houses attempted to follow Francis's directives rather than the pope's, divested themselves of property against the pope's orders, and organized in an attempt to change papal rule; and she shows how, after Francis's death, the women's relationships with the Franciscans themselves grew similarly fraught. Clare's pursuit of her vision proved relentless: at the time of her death, she newly identified her community as the Order of Poor Sisters and allied it unambiguously with Francis and his friars. Overturning another myth, Mooney reveals how only in the late nineteenth century did Clare come to be known as the sole author of a rule she had written collaboratively with others. Throughout, the story of Clare and her sisters emerges as a chapter in the long history of women who tried to define their religious identities within a Church more committed to unity and conformity than to diversity and difference.

Download or read book Francis of Assisi written by Augustine Thompson and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-21 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among the most beloved saints in the Catholic tradition, Francis of Assisi (c. 1181-1226) is popularly remembered for his dedication to poverty, his love of animals and nature, and his desire to follow perfectly the teachings and example of Christ. During his lifetime and after his death, followers collected, for their own purposes, numerous stories, anecdotes, and reports about Francis. As a result, the man himself and his own concerns became lost in legend. In this authoritative and engaging new biography, Augustine Thompson, O.P., sifts through the surviving evidence for the life of Francis using modern historical methods. The result is a complex yet sympathetic portrait of the man and the saint. Francis emerges from this account as very much a typical thirteenth-century Italian layman, but one who, when faced with unexpected crises in his personal life, made decisions so radical that they challenge his own society-and ours. Unlike the saint of legend, this Francis never had a unique divine inspiration to provide him with rules for following the teachings of Jesus. Rather, he spent his life reacting to unexpected challenges, before which he often found himself unprepared and uncertain. The Francis who emerges here is both more complex and more conflicted than that of older biographies. His famed devotion to poverty is found to be more nuanced than expected, perhaps not even his principal spiritual concern. Thompson revisits events small and large in Francis's life, including his troubled relations with his father, his contacts with Clare of Assisi, his encounter with the Muslim sultan, and his receiving the Stigmata, to uncover the man behind the legends and popular images. A tour de force of historical research and biographical writing, Francis of Assisi: A New Biography is divided into two complementary parts-a stand alone biographical narrative and a close, annotated examination of the historical sources about Francis. Taken together, the narrative and the survey of the sources provide a much-needed fresh perspective on this iconic figure. "As I have worked on this biography," Thompson writes, "my respect for Francis and his vision has increased, and I hope that this book will speak to modern people, believers and unbelievers alike, and that the Francis I have come to know will have something to say to them today."

Download or read book Francis of Assisi The Saint Early Documents vol 1 written by Regis J. Armstrong and published by New City Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Saint begins this extraordinary series which brings together "the writings of Saint Francis and those of the early Franciscan witnesses" and it will "be of estimable value to scholars, students, and lovers of Il Poverello as well...a scholarly achievement done in the service of history, theology and spirituality." (Lawrence Cunningham)

Download or read book In Praise of Disobedience written by Dacia Maraini and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-13 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An author receives a mysterious e-mail begging her to tell the story of Clare of Assisi, the thirteenth-century Italian saint. At first annoyed by the request, the author begins to research Saint Clare and becomes captivated by her life. We too are transported into the strange and beautiful world of medieval Italy, witnessing the daily rituals of convent life. At the center of that life is Saint Clare, a subversive and compelling figure full of contradictions: a physically disabled woman who travels widely in her imagination, someone unforgivingly harsh to herself yet infinitely generous to the women she supervises, a practitioner of self-abnegation who nevertheless knows her own worth. A visionary who liberated herself from the chains of materialism and patriarchy, Saint Clare here becomes an inspirational figure for a new generation of readers.

Download or read book The Origin Development and Refinement of Medieval Religious Mendicancies written by Donald Prudlo and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-02-14 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nature of mendicancy as it developed among various religious orders during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is the subject of considerable debate. In spite of this, little in the way of a comprehensive review of the phenomenon as a whole has been undertaken. What has been done has either been order-specific (with an emphasis on the Friars Minor) or has focused on points of special conflict regarding the mendicant ideal (University debates, Spiritual Franciscans). Little work exists on the roots of mendicancy, or on the creative ways in which mendicancy was understood (and deprecated) in various quarters. Few studies try to bring together both the theory and practice of religious mendicancy. The effect that events had in molding and changing the mendicant ideal is also often neglected, as are the ways in which it was independently and creatively appropriated by individuals and groups. Needless to say, all of this is strange for a movement that most are content to label “Mendicant.” Perhaps it may even be the case that “mendicancy” is not useful as a descriptive concept. The purpose and intention of this handbook is to offer an analysis of the term and to present an up-to-date and comprehensive introduction to the phenomenon of religious mendicancy in the central and later middle ages. It provides a contextualized guide that will introduce the central issues in contemporary scholarship regarding the mendicant orders. This project approaches the controversies from a multitude of angles and unites in one volume the insights of different disciplines such as social and intellectual history, literary analysis, and theology. The present work is divided into three main sections, I) The origins and foundations of medieval mendicancy, II) The development and articulation of mendicant ideals, III) The reception and appropriation of mendicancy in the middle ages. The chapters herein serve as a solid point of departure for advanced students and scholars.

Download or read book Franciscan Organisation in the Mendicant Context written by Michael J. P. Robson and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2010 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emanating from the tradition of the Italian hermit communities the Franciscans developed organisational structures already early in their history, allowing them to offer pastoral care on a wide scale. This process of transition led firstly to constitutional structures as defined in the order's early legislation but it also occurred within relationship networks at different levels, in the context of Church and papacy, within the different European regions and before the background of the emerging Canon Law. The term "organisation" has been given a wide definition in the articles published in this volume. They offer a survey of general issues related to the structuring and running of religious orders as well as a number of case studies. Comparisons with other mendicant orders offer an analysis of the issues in a wider context.

Download or read book Order and Disorder The Poor Clares Between Foundation and Reform written by Bert Roest and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2013-01-09 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Order and Disorder: The Poor Clares between Foundation and Reform, Bert Roest provides an up-to-date and comprehensive history of the Poor Clares from their early beginnings until the sixteenth century.

Download or read book Saints Miracles and Social Problems in Italian Renaissance Art written by Diana Bullen Presciutti and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-03-31 with total page 730 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Diana Bullen Presciutti explores how images of miracles performed by mendicant saints-reviving dead children, redeeming the unjustly convicted, mending broken marriages, quelling factional violence, exorcising the demonically possessed-actively shaped Renaissance Italians' perceptions of pressing social problems related to gender, sexuality, and honor. She argues that depictions of these miracles by artists-both famous (Donatello, Titian) and anonymous-played a critical role in defining and conceptualizing threats to family honor and social stability. Drawing from art history, history, religious studies, gender studies, and sociology, Presciutti's interdisciplinary study reveals how miracle scenes-whether painted, sculpted, or printed-operated as active agents of 'lived religion' and social negotiation in the spaces of the Renaissance Italian city.

Download or read book Fictive Orders and Feminine Religious Identities 1200 1600 written by Alison More and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-02-17 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Any visitor to Belgium or the Netherlands is immediately struck by the number of convents and beguinages (begijnhoven) in both major cities and small towns. Their number and location in urban centres suggests that the women who inhabited them once held a prominent role. Despite leaving a visible mark on cities in Europe, much of the story of these women - known variously as beguines, tertiaries, klopjes, recluses, and anchoresses - remains to be told. Instead of aspiring to live as traditional religious, they transcended normative assumptions about religion and gender and had a very real impact on their religious and secular worlds. The sources for their tale are often fragmentary and difficult to interpret. However, careful scrutiny allows their voices to be heard. Drawing on an array of sources including religious rules, sermons, hagiographic vitae, and rapiaria, Fictive Orders and Feminine Religious Identities traces the story of pious laywomen between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. It both emphasizes the innovative roles of women who transcended established forms of institutional religious life and reveals the ways in which historiographical habits have obscured the dynamic and fluid nature of their histories. By highlighting the development of irregular and extraregular communities and tracing the threads of monasticisation that wove their way around pious laywomen, this book draws attention to the vibrant and dynamic culture of feminine lay piety that persisted from the later middle ages onwards.

Download or read book Reclaiming Catherine of Siena written by Jane Tylus and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-04 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Catherine of Siena (1347–1380) wrote almost four hundred epistles in her lifetime, effectively insinuating herself into the literary, political, and theological debates of her day. At the same time, as the daughter of a Sienese dyer, Catherine had no formal education, and her accomplishments were considered miracles rather than the work of her own hand. As a result, she has been largely excluded from accounts of the development of European humanism and the language and literature of Italy. Reclaiming Catherine ofSiena makes the case for considering Catherine alongside literary giants such as Dante and Petrarch, as it underscores Catherine's commitment to using the vernacular to manifest Christ's message—and her own. Jane Tylus charts here the contested struggles of scholars over the centuries to situate Catherine in the history of Italian culture in early modernity. But she mainly focuses on Catherine’s works, calling attention to the interplay between orality and textuality in the letters and demonstrating why it was so important for Catherine to envision herself as a writer. Tylus argues for a reevalution of Catherine as not just a medieval saint, but one of the major figures at the birth of the Italian literary canon.