Download or read book Cultures of Religious Reading in the Late Middle Ages written by Sabrina Corbellini and published by Brepols Publishers. This book was released on 2013 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Read often, learn all that you can. Let sleep overcome you, the roll still in your hands; when your head falls, let it be on the sacred page. - St Jerome, 384 AD With these words, the Church Father Jerome exhorted the young Eustochium to find on the sacred page the spiritual nourishment that would give her the strength to live a life of chastity and to keep her monastic vows. His call to read does not stand alone. Books and reading have always played a pivotal role in early and medieval Christianity, often defined as 'a religion of the book'. A second important stage in the development of the 'religion of the book' can be attested in the late Middle Ages, when religious reading was no longer the exclusive right of men and women living in solitude and concentrating on prayer and meditation. Changes in the religious landscape and the birth of new religious movements transformed the medieval town into a privileged area of religious activity. Increasing literacy opened the door to a new and wider public of lay readers. This seminal transformation in the late medieval cultural horizon saw the growing importance of the vernacular, the cultural and religious emancipation of the laity, and the increasing participation of lay people in religious life and activities. This volume presents a new, interdisciplinary approach to religious reading and reading techniques in a lay environment within late medieval textual, social, and cultural transformations.
Download or read book Cushions Kitchens and Christ written by Louise Campion and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2022-01-15 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book represents the first full-length study of the prevalence of domestic imagery in late medieval religious literature. It examines as yet understudied patterns of household imagery and allegory across four fifteenth-century spiritual texts, all of which are Middle English translations of earlier Latin works. These texts are drawn from a range of popular genres of medieval religious writing, including spiritual guidance texts, Lives of Christ and collections of revelations received by visionary women. All of the texts discussed in this book have identifiable late medieval readers, which further enables a discussion of the way in which these book users might have responded to the domestic images in each one. This is a hugely important area of enquiry, as the literal late medieval household was becoming increasingly culturally important during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and these texts’ frequent recourse to domestic imagery would have been especially pertinent.
Download or read book Discovering the Riches of the Word written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-02-24 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributions to Discovering the Riches of the Word. Religious Reading in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe offer an innovative approach to the study of religious reading from a long term and geographically broad perspective, covering the period from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century and with a specific focus on the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries. Challenging traditional research paradigms, the contributions argue that religious reading in this “long fifteenth century” should be described in terms of continuity. They make clear that in spite of confessional divides, numerous reading practices continued to exist among medieval and early modern readers, as well as among Catholics and Protestants, and that the two groups in certain cases even shared the same religious texts. Contributors include: Elise Boillet, Sabrina Corbellini, Suzan Folkerts, Éléonore Fournié, Wim François, Margriet Hoogvliet, Ian Johnson, Hubert Meeus, Matti Peikola, Bart Ramakers, Elisabeth Salter, Lucy Wooding, and Federico Zuliani.
Download or read book Medieval Popular Religion 1000 1500 written by John Raymond Shinners and published by Readings in Medieval Civilizat. This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new edition is a marvelous teaching tool and true feast for the intellectually curious. - Daniel Bornstein, Texas A&M University
Download or read book Solitudo written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-05-23 with total page 602 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the spatial, material, and affective dimensions of solitude in the late medieval and early modern periods, a hitherto largely neglected topic. Its focus is on the dynamic qualities of “space” and “place”, which are here understood as being shaped, structured, and imbued with meaning through both social and discursive solitary practices such as reading, writing, studying, meditating, and praying. Individual chapters investigate the imageries and imaginaries of outdoor and indoor spaces and places associated with solitude and its practices and examine the ways in which the space of solitude was conceived of, imagined, and represented in the arts and in literature, from about 1300 to about 1800. Contributors include Oskar Bätschmann, Carla Benzan, Mette Birkedal Bruun, Dominic E. Delarue, Karl A.E. Enenkel, Christine Göttler, Agnès Guiderdoni, Christiane J. Hessler, Walter S. Melion, Raphaèle Preisinger, Bernd Roling, Paul Smith, Marie Theres Stauffer, Arnold A. Witte, and Steffen Zierholz.
Download or read book Devotional Culture in Late Medieval England and Europe written by Stephen Kelly and published by Brepols Publishers. This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays focuses on how the climactic episode of Christian scripture and apocrypha, the life of Christ, was repeatedly adapted for a variety of audiences and devotional uses in the Middle Ages. The collection represents an important milestone in terms of mapping the meditative modes of piety that characterize a number of Christological traditions, including the 'Meditationes vitae Christi' and the numerous versions it spawned in both Latin and the vernacular.
Download or read book The Viewer and the Printed Image in Late Medieval Europe written by DavidS. Areford and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 622 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Structured around in-depth and interconnected case studies and driven by a methodology of material, contextual, and iconographic analysis, this book argues that early European single-sheet prints, in both the north and south, are best understood as highly accessible objects shaped and framed by individual viewers. Author David Areford offers a synthetic historical narrative of early prints that stresses their unusual material nature, as well as their accessibility to a variety of viewers, both lay and monastic. This volume represents a shift in the study of the early printed image, one that mirrors the widespread movement in art history away from issues of production, style, and the artist toward issues of reception, function, and the viewer. Areford's approach is intensely grounded in the object, especially the unacknowledged material complexity of the print as a portable, malleable, and accessible image that depended on a response that was not only visual but often physical, emotional, and psychological. Recognizing that early prints were not primarily designed for aesthetic appreciation, the author analyzes how their meanings stemmed from specific functions involving private devotion, protection, indulgences, the cult of saints, pilgrimage, exorcism, the art of memory, and anti-Semitic propaganda. Although the medium's first century was clearly transitional and experimental, Areford explores how its potential to impact viewers in new ways?both positive and negative?was quickly realized.
Download or read book The Place of the Psalms in the Intellectual Culture of the Middle Ages written by Nancy Elizabeth Van Deusen and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Psalms were an important part of the education, daily life, and spiritual development of medieval clerics and monks, and they had a significant impact on lay culture as well. The Place of the Psalms in the Intellectual Culture of the Middle Ages surveys their influence, giving a unique window into the intellectual, spiritual, and emotional culture of the period.
Download or read book The Transformations of Magic written by Frank Klaassen and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Explores two principal genres of illicit learned magic in late Medieval manuscripts: image magic, which could be interpreted and justified in scholastic terms, and ritual magic, which could not"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Cultures of Piety written by Anne Clark Bartlett and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-05 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Devotional texts in late medieval England were notable for their flamboyant piety and their preoccupation with the tortured body of Christ and the grief of the Virgin Mary. Generations of readers internalized and shaped the "cultures of piety" represented by these works. Anne Clark Bartlett and Thomas H. Bestul here gather seven examples of this literature, all written in the period 1350–1450, one in Anglo-Norman, the remainder in Middle English. (The volume includes an appendix containing the original texts of the latter six pieces.) The collection illustrates the polyglottal, conflicting, and often polemical nature of devotional culture in the Middle Ages. It provides a valuable context for and interesting counterpoint to the Canterbury Tales and other classic works of late medieval England. The introduction and the translators' headnotes discuss crucial aspects of the texts' histories and thematics, including the importance of the body in spiritual practices, the development of female patronage and of a wide audience for this literature, and the indivisibility of the political and the religious in medieval times.
Download or read book Christian Materiality written by Caroline Walker Bynum and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Late Medieval Christianity's encounter with miraculous materials viewed in the context of changing conceptions of matter itself. In the period between 1150 and 1550, an increasing number of Christians in western Europe made pilgrimage to places where material objects--among them paintings, statues, relics, pieces of wood, earth, stones, and Eucharistic wafers--allegedly erupted into life through such activities as bleeding, weeping, and walking about. Challenging Christians both to seek ever more frequent encounters with miraculous matter and to turn to an inward piety that rejected material objects of devotion, such phenomena were by the fifteenth century at the heart of religious practice and polemic. In Christian Materiality, Caroline Walker Bynum describes the miracles themselves, discusses the problems they presented for both church authorities and the ordinary faithful, and probes the basic scientific and religious assumptions about matter that lay behind them. She also analyzes the proliferation of religious art in the later Middle Ages and argues that it called attention to its materiality in sophisticated ways that explain both the animation of images and the hostility to them on the part of iconoclasts. Seeing the Christian culture of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as a paradoxical affirmation of the glory and the threat of the natural world, Bynum's study suggests a new understanding of the background to the sixteenth-century reformations, both Protestant and Catholic. Moving beyond the cultural study of "the body"--a field she helped to establish--Bynum argues that Western attitudes toward body and person must be placed in the context of changing conceptions of matter itself. Her study has broad theoretical implications, suggesting a new approach to the study of material culture and religious practice.
Download or read book Sensing the Sacred in Medieval and Early Modern Culture written by Robin Macdonald and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-20 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume traces transformations in attitudes toward, ideas about, and experiences of religion and the senses in the medieval and early modern period. Broad in temporal and geographical scope, it challenges traditional notions of periodisation, highlighting continuities as well as change. Rather than focusing on individual senses, the volume’s organisation emphasises the multisensoriality and embodied nature of religious practices and experiences, refusing easy distinctions between asceticism and excess. The senses were not passive, but rather active and reactive, res-ponding to and initiating change. As the contributions in this collection demonstrate, in the pre-modern era, sensing the sacred was a complex, vexed, and constantly evolving process, shaped by individuals, environment, and religious change. The volume will be essential reading not only for scholars of religion and the senses, but for anyone interested in histories of medieval and early modern bodies, material culture, affects, and affect theory.
Download or read book Looking in Holy Books written by Vincent Gillespie and published by . This book was released on 2006-10 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume suggests new ways of reading and thinking about the religious culture of late-medieval England. It explores an unusually wide spectrum of Latin and vernacular religious texts, from catechetic handbooks to descriptions of mystical experience, and pays particular attention to the transmission and reception of these texts. The book collects together some of Vincent Gillespie's most influential and important articles from the last twenty-five years. In addition, the author offers a substantial introduction and commentary, which looks at changes in the field, as well as suggesting further reading and areas for future research. The first section "What to Read" discusses lay access to devotional materials; the second, "How to Read," looks at vernacular texts and the modes of reading those texts facilitate and encourage, while section three, "Writing the Ineffable," considers mystical writing's affective and imaginative engagement with the ineffable.
Download or read book Medieval Christianity in Practice written by Miri Rubin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-08-16 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comprising forty-two selections from primary source materials, each translated with an introduction and commentary by a specialist in the field, this collection illustrates the religious cycles, rituals, and experiences that gave meaning to medieval Christian individuals and communities. The texts represent the practices through which Christians conducted their individual, family, and community lives and explore such life-cycle events as birth, confirmation, marriage, sickness, death, and burial. The texts also document religious practices related to themes of work, parish life, and devotions, as well as power and authority.--From publisher's description.
Download or read book Sanctifying Signs written by David Aers and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sanctifying Signs presents a critical study of Christian literature, theology, and culture in late medieval England.
Download or read book The Insight of Unbelievers written by Deeana Copeland Klepper and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the year 1309, Nicholas of Lyra, an important Franciscan Bible commentator, put forth a question at the University of Paris, asking whether it was possible to prove the advent of Christ from scriptures received by the Jews. This question reflects the challenges he faced as a Christian exegete determined to value Jewish literature during an era of increasing hostility toward Jews in western Europe. Nicholas's literal commentary on the Bible became one of the most widely copied and disseminated of all medieval Bible commentaries. Jewish commentary was, as a result, more widely read in Latin Christendom than ever before, while at the same moment Jews were being pushed farther and farther to the margins of European society. His writings depict Jews as stubborn unbelievers who also held indispensable keys to understanding Christian Scripture. In The Insight of Unbelievers, Deeana Copeland Klepper examines late medieval Christian use of the Hebrew Bible and Jewish interpretation of Scripture, focusing on Nicholas of Lyra as the most important mediator of Hebrew traditions. Klepper highlights the important impact of both Jewish literature and Jewish unbelief on Nicholas of Lyra and on Christian culture more generally. By carefully examining the place of Hebrew and rabbinic traditions in the Christian study of the Bible, The Insight of Unbelievers elaborates in new ways on the relationship between Christian and Jewish scholarship and polemic in late medieval Europe.
Download or read book Magic in the Cloister written by Sophie Page and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2013-10-21 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries a group of monks with occult interests donated what became a remarkable collection of more than thirty magic texts to the library of the Benedictine abbey of St. Augustine’s in Canterbury. The monks collected texts that provided positive justifications for the practice of magic and books in which works of magic were copied side by side with works of more licit genres. In Magic in the Cloister, Sophie Page uses this collection to explore the gradual shift toward more positive attitudes to magical texts and ideas in medieval Europe. She examines what attracted monks to magic texts, in spite of the dangers involved in studying condemned works, and how the monks combined magic with their intellectual interests and monastic life. By showing how it was possible for religious insiders to integrate magical studies with their orthodox worldview, Magic in the Cloister contributes to a broader understanding of the role of magical texts and ideas and their acceptance in the late Middle Ages.
